Category: Japan

Last Days of the Samurai (琴の爪, Hiromichi Horikawa, 1957)

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Adapted from the final part of Mayama Seika’s cycle of kabuki plays recounting the story of the 47 ronin, Hiromichi Horikawa’s Last Days of the Samurai (琴の爪, Koto no Tsume) follows the avengers in the days after the Ako raid as they await their fate knowing that they will likely be condemned to die. Essentially a romantic tragedy, the tale focuses on Jurozaemon Isogai (Senjaku Nakamura) whose samurai resolve seems a little too solid to the men’s leader, Kuronosuke Oishi (Matsumoto Hakuo I), who worries that it may be an all too vulnerable artifice. 

Jurozaemon is the most dispassionate or perhaps pessimistic of the men. Though the ronin are held in high regard by the people, the opening scenes see street vendors cashing in by renaming their products such things as “Loyal Retainer Rice Cakes” along with a young man being arrested for committing a similar act of revenge, and the men are assured that the shogunate is urgently searching for an excuse to pardon or exile them, Jurozaemon is certain they will die. He thinks their jailor, a kind man named Den’emon, was only trying to boost their morale and that the fact they have been sent flowers by the powers that be is coded message designed to let them know that their death sentences have already been issued.

While the other men express their anxieties, Jurozaemon alone remains stoic, which is what worries Oishi. He fears this may be an act of bravado on Jurozaemon’s part designed to mask his internal conflict and that, therefore, if they are called on to commit ritual suicide, his resolve may crumble and embarrass them all in death. It’s the question of Jurozaemon’s resolve that is at the heart of the play as it faces a challenge from a young woman, Omino (Chikage Ogi), to whom he had once been engaged. Jurozaemon laughs off the affair and tells Oishi that Omino means nothing to him. He says that he only agreed to marry her for strategic reasons in service of their revenge plot and points out that Oishi did the same with several women himself. Oishi does not deny this, but does admit that even if his primary reason for associating with them was not romance, he did enjoy their company. He wonders if Jurozaemon is playing down his feelings for this woman and if they will eventually cause him to waver in reluctance to leave this mortal life behind.

In one sense, neither Oishi nor Jurozaemon express regret for using women in this way, but, at the same time, the almost crazed devotion of koto-player Omino forces them to reckon with the ethical dimensions of their actions. Unable to understand why Jurozaemon suddenly walked out on her, she demands to be let into the compound to see him. It’s imperative to her that she find out what his true feelings really were, if he ever really loved her or was only using her for his mission of revenge. Unable to gain entry, she eventually convinces her father’s friend Den’emon (Ganjiro Nakamura) to sneak her in dressed as a boy, but unfortunately, her disguise fools no one. Nevertheless, on learning that they are to die, Oishi relents and has Jurozaemon brought to her, perhaps hoping to answer the question for himself. Jurozaemon, however, treats her coldly and says that he was only using her. It seems that he does this as a means of protecting her, hoping that she will go on to lead a long and happy life with someone else rather than join him in his ritual suicide. 

The question is therefore answered to the point of perfection in that Jurozaemon is unshaken in his samurai resolve while allowed the poetic expression of his human feelings in having kept one of Omino’s koto picks on his person until the moment of his death. Horikawa keeps the deaths off screen with only a retainer calling out the names of those who are to die, lending them an elegiac quality that restores their righteousness rather than condemning the absurdity of their deaths. One of Toho’s 60-minute “Diamond” B-movie series, the film mixes an ironic humour in the men’s consternation realising they don’t actually know how to commit seppuku because none of them have ever seen it, to the sudden emergence of 47 ronin merchandise, with the gentle melancholy of tragic romance and the effects of these men’s obsessive revenge on those they’ve left behind.

Tokyo Nightfall (トーキョーナイトフォール, Yuto Shimizu, 2026)

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Struggling to deal with his feelings of grief and guilt following his younger sister’s suicide, a young man finds himself at an end of the world party for those who want to end their lives in Yuto Shimizu’s melancholy urban drama Tokyo Nightfall (トーキョーナイトフォール). The Tokyo these young people inhabit is one of loneliness and futility in which there is no real hope for future and the past holds only painful memories. 

The bleakness might best be demonstrated by Anna’s (Utano Aoi) reply that her happiest moment in life was her parents’ divorce. The pair hint at a childhood marked by domestic violence, but any hope they might have had for a better future was cut short when Anna witnessed the suicide of a friend of her brother Amenashi (Iori Abe) who jumped from their eighth floor flat. This even seems to have changed Anna who relates that it wasn’t so much the horror or the blood but the fact that she saw a person turn into an object in real time. It made her feel as if being alive wasn’t all that important. 

Working a soulless job as a delivery driver where his clients are often similarly withdrawn or hostile, Amenashi blames himself for Anna’s death and wonders if there was something more he could have done to prevent it while drawn into the same kind of darkness she was. Amenashi’s friend, Hattori (Taiga Hironaka), even states that he is worried about him because his erratic behaviour reminds him of that of Anna shortly before she died. It seems that the party he goes to a gathering for those planning to end their lives where they can have one last night of fun before they go.

Amenashi goes to the party, but is followed by his friends Hattori and Nozu (Kosuke Tanaka) who don’t quite know what the party is, but just want to find their friend. While Nozu, otherwise a comic relief character giving lewd and disgusting answers to the questions put to him, Nozu too sets out to enjoy the night even bonding with a young woman, but is also drawn into the darkness of the evening and reconsiders his own life. Others in the club react with irritation, telling Hattori he should respect his friend’s decision and has no business being here. Haunted by visions of Anna, Amenashi remains uncertain not quite knowing whether to live or die. Another guest at the club tells him that he should forget about this cold world and stay with them, dragging him over to the side of death, while Hattori does him best to encourage him to live.

The video camera sequences play out as a kind of will as Anna, Hattori, and Nozu look back over their lives. Shimizu sometimes replays the same video only to let the conversation run to add more information that changes our impressions of what’s gone before. Speaking about their happiest and saddest moments, the friends paint a bleak picture of familial disconnection and loneliness but are saved only by their bond with each other as Hattori names his happiest moment as spending time on the roof with them.

The irony is that may not be enough. The ghost of Anna tells Amenashi that neither choice is wrong and the film is non-judgemental about the idea of suicide, perhaps feeling that those who make the deacon to leave should be allowed to do so while Amenishi wrestles with himself about the right thing to do. Others may have the decision taken away from them, but he does at least have the power to decide his own future. Hattori had told him that there may be no point in thinking. People are full of contradictions and don’t even understand themselves. “We are here for each other,” Nozu adds, offering the only possible source of salvation in a world that otherwise seems hopeless and devoid of possibility. As Amenashi cycles around the city, he looks on at young couples and is struck by a sense of urban disconnection and loneliness, but does perhaps begin to rediscover something of the will to live in the power of friendship and the memories of those he’s lost, if perhaps only too late.

Tokyo Nightfall screened as part of this year’s Raindance Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Unluckiest Girl in the World (Ryosuke Hayazaka, 2026)

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Sachiko Yamanoura feels herself to be the unluckiest person in the world. Her unluckiness may tens towards the superficial in that she has terrible luck with men and is the sort of person who always manages to step in gum and pick the tako-less takoyaki, but her perception of it seems to be impacting her quality of life This is partly because she has an odd conception of the world in which she believes that fate is decided by gacha capsule toys and therefore exercises very little agency over her life to the extent that she is continually unable to break up with her financially exploitative boyfriend who not only forgets her birthday, but chooses that particular day to bring another woman back to their flat.

It’s this romantic dimension that occupies most of Ryosuke Hayazaka 50-minute drama as Sachiko is abruptly hit by car and wakes up in an afterlife where a smartly suited version of herself invites her to choose a new lover for her next life from the Gacha Life machine. It apparently contains only men she is compatible with and therefore allows her to experience what it would actually be like to date them as a sort of advanced mental fantasy. What quickly becomes clear, however, is that none of these men are very good options for her and even the ones who looked good on the surface had hidden issues. She briefly considers dating her 45-year-old boss who did actually remember her birthday and otherwise appears to be kind and considerate, but it turns out that he is already married and fleeing domestic responsibility after his wife has given birth to their first child.

The real issue is that she’s still dealing with the fallout from the abrupt disappearance of her fiancé three years previously who left alone to travel the world the morning after proposing to her. When he suddenly reappears, she considers picking up where they left off but is continually insecure that he will suddenly disappear again. A popular influencer host, meanwhile, offers the opposite sort of comfort in making it his business to tell her what she wants to hear in soft and non-threatening tones while all the while planning to exploit her by recruiting her as a member of his cult-like pyramid scheme selling lucky water. A student she interviews at her company similarly claims that luck is his special skill, but when she considers dating him, she finds out that he’s overtly close with his mother and she’d need to pass an interview with her first if she wanted to be his girlfriend.

A series of speed dates provide a little more real life detail as Sachiko is subjected to the obviously married guy, the bully who insists no one else is going to want to date her, the guy who wants an open relationship, and the evangelistic polygamist who wants her join him in a new era. She certainly does seem to be unlucky in drawing all these men none of whom seem to be very viable prospects for a long-term relationship or even genuine romantic connection. But at the same time, it’s entrusting her life to luck that put Sachiko in this position. If she accepted that luck was something she could make for herself rather than continually accepting an unsatisfying status quo and basically allowing all these men to treat her badly, she might be able to find a degree of satisfaction in her life that may or may not include romance. 

Each of the rounds included the option to “pass”, but really Sachiko had that all along without really realising. Eventually she realises she doesn’t really need to pick any of these men and is free to stop drawing gacha rather than constantly waiting for the machine to spit out the winning ball. Shot in a 1:1 frame to mimic an Instagram reel, the film has a youthful, contemporary vibe informed by current dating mores and though it may present a rather bleak view of the prospect of romantic fulfilment in a chauvinistic society does at least allow the heroine to recover herself esteem and finally break up with her no-good boyfriend, refusing to let luck rule her life and finally taking control of her own destiny. 

The Unluckiest Girl in the World screened as part of this year’s Raindance Film Festival.

Heaven Sent (神様のくれた赤ん坊, Yoichi Maeda, 1979)

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A young couple facing a relationship crisis due to differing views about a potential pregnancy find their connection further strained when a stranger arrives with a little boy who may be the man’s biological son in Yoichi Maeda’s lighthearted road trip dramedy, Heaven Sent (神様のくれた赤ん坊, Kamisama no Kureta Akanbo). A remake of the 1957 film Shukin Ryoko directed by Noboru Nakamura, the film explores both the changing social dynamics of the era of high prosperity and a lack of resolution with the post-war past as the heroine searches for the lost hometown of her early childhood along with the realities of her late mother’s life that had remained unknown to her.

In an arrangement that was still a little unusual in the late 1970s, Sayoko (Kaori Momoi) and Shinsaku (Tsunehiko Watase) are a cohabiting couple who are not legally married. Sayoko is an aspiring actress, while Shinsaku has a part-time job as part of a cheer squad for public events as he tries to kickstart a career as a manga artist. A mini crisis has presented itself in the fact that Sayoko thinks she may be pregnant and wants to have the baby while Shinsaku very much does not, largely it seems because he is immature and irresponsible so does not want to be burdened with the expense and labour of caring for a child. All of which adds to the irony when a woman arrives at their door with a small boy, Shinichi, explaining that his mother has abandoned him to go abroad with another man leaving instructions that he should be delivered to his father who might be any one of the five men she has listed on her goodbye note. Shinsaku is only one who lives in Tokyo, so the woman has decided to leave the boy with him and have done with it.

There is something quite sad about the fact that no one really wants this little boy while seemingly trying to avoid the reality that he ultimately end up going into care if no one accepts responsibility for him. All of these men admit they slept with his mother, Akemi, who was a bar hostess, and therefore theoretically could have fathered her child, but all reject any sense of obligation or that the fact of their sleeping with her could have any kind of consequences. All of them seem to have reasons why now would be a particularly bad time for an illegitimate child to surface from being in the middle of a political election campaign to the news being broken on the day of their wedding to another woman. The soon to be married man even makes a series of misogynistic excuses within earshot of Shinichi to the effect that “no one would take a woman like that seriously,” and that as Akemi slept with pretty much everyone there’s no way to know if the child his. 

These misogynistic views are reflected in Sayoko’s simultaneous quest to rediscover her childhood hometown as she chases a memory she has of a shining pagoda, only to be told that her mother worked in a place called “Ono Castle” which turns out to have been a brothel. This is presumably how her mother saved the money to open the hair salon Sayoko grew up in and the reason that they moved away from that first hometown so that her mother could move on to a new life having escaped the stigma of being a former sex worker. Finding this out has quite a profound effect on Sayoko, not that she disapproves or is ashamed but comes to a new appreciation of her mother’s suffering that she knew nothing of before. While Shinsaku considers hiring a sex worker, the couple having temporarily broken up, Sayoko too is propositioned as a sex worker and ends up having a very strange experience with a young man desperate to lose his virginity. 

For much of the journey as they take Shinichi to visit each of his prospective fathers, the couple are on parallel paths only later coming together again when Shinsaku gives in and says Sayoko should have the baby even though by that point she has discovered is not pregnant after all. Part of the reason she wanted the baby was that her career had not been going well and a part of her wanted to try the traditional route of finding fulfilment within the domestic space as a wife and mother, reflecting the way these attitudes are still current, though Shinsaku is not in a position to support a wife and child financially and shows no signs of being willing to take on the responsibility of being the sole bread winner. Sayoko does, however, suggest she would rather leave him and raise the baby alone if he objects so strongly. Her mother made it work, after all, and the Japanese economy is at least in a much better place even if women’s rights have not improved all that much.  

Despite physically resembling the child and sharing some of the same mannerisms along with left-handedness (which he tries to correct), Shinsaku too rejects the idea of his paternity and is desperate to push the responsibility onto someone else while simultaneously extorting “child support” hush money from the potential fathers. Demonstrating once again how women are expected to deal with men’s irresponsibility, the last potential father has passed away and his widow has already adopted several children whom he may have fathered with other women. Yet as they travel together, the pair being to bond with Shinichi and go off the idea of parting with him, experiencing a moment of growing up themselves in envisioning a different kind of future and coming to a mutual decision about the idea of expanding their family.

The Lightning Sword (抜打ち鴉, Bin Kato, 1962)

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A wandering samurai comes to the rescue of a young boy in search of his father in a jidaigeki adventure from Bin Kato, The Lightning Sword (抜打ち鴉, Nukiuchi Garasu). Starring Tomisaburo Wakayama in an early leading role still billed as Kenzaburo Jo, the film takes place in a slightly liminal space following those who have already fallen from the samurai world, some of whom may be able to return and others not. They are all, however, in search of something from absent fathers to runaway sisters and lost loves.

Shinjiro is on the road looking for the man for ran off with his younger sister Fumie with whom he has now lost touch, Tokunosuke (Shigeru Amachi). Unbeknownst to him, they cross paths at a roadside food stall, but Shinjiro is distracted by the presence of a little boy no more than seven or eight apparently travelling alone in search of his father now that his mother has died. On hearing this story, another man, Takuro, gets up so abruptly he leaves his sweets behind. Fearing that this man plans to rob the boy, Shinjiro goes after him and the three of them ending up going in search of Takichi’s father together.

Takuro’s intention to rob a small boy of all the money he has in the world, which admittedly seems to be quite a lot as his mother sewed koban into his kimono before she died, bears out the venality and cruelty of this rather cut-throat world. Nevertheless, Takuro is not all bad despite swiping Shinjiro’s (empty) wallet instead and is motivated to try helping a young woman escape from a brothel though he had no relationship with her and ends up losing a finger for his pains. The antagonist Tokunosuke, meanwhile, has apparently sold Shinjiro’s sister into sexual slavery and used the money for his own amusement such as drink and other women. Nevertheless, he appears to regret his decision and is filled with self-loathing as if his poor conduct were a kind of self-harm. He is minded to redeem Fumie and sells his own life to yakuza boss Tokusaburo to get the considerably large sum of 25 ryo to do so.

Even Tokusaburo is not completely heartless though ruled by greed and ambition. When Shinjiro arrives and shows him the letter from Takichi’s mother, Tokusaburo admits that he is the man named in it but denies that he ever knew her and insists he is not the boy’s father. He does this in part because he has married the daughter of his current boss and is planning not only to take over the gang but knock out their rivals and assume control over the area. To do this, he goes so far as to kill another woman he had been in a relationship with but betrayed to marry the boss’ daughter because she threatens his path to success.

But, on the other hand, denying his son seems to be something painful for him. As he says after killing Oharu, if he has denied his son to take over the gang, killing her is no big deal. He does finally acknowledge Takichi, but only when dying as a final means of making amends when it’s clear that he has failed in his ambitions. Shinjiro, meanwhile, is kindhearted and compassionate. Even on meeting Tokunosuke, he realises that he does not want to kill him because it would bring his sister pain. He protects the boy though it does not benefit him in any way, and also rescues the brother of a woman he seems to have fallen in love with but had to leave due his important revenge business. Having rescued his sister, he leaves her with Oryo and resists the cruelty of this world by forming a new family outside it. Though the events it depicts may be bleak, the film is lighthearted rather than nihilistic and allows simple human kindness and decency to triumph over venal usurpers like Tokusaburo. Elegantly lensed as one would expect of a Daiei production, the fight scenes are also impressive in terms of scale and choreography, though its real power lies in its essential good-heartedness and compassion even for its villains.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Memorizu (メモリィズ, Miiku Sakanishi, 2026)

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Trying to calm a nervous groom, ageing photographer Makoto (Issei Ogata) tells him that he also took his grandfather’s wedding pictures in a moment that speaks of several kinds of continuity all at once. Yet why is that we take photos? Is it for ourselves, as a kind of proof of existence “to remember we were here,” or so that we can share these moments with others and create shared memories to paper over the rift of absence?

The weight of nostalgia hangs heavy over Makoto’s photography studio, but the irony is that it’s son-in-law, Yuta (Tasuku Emoto), who’s come to look after him while he recuperates after breaking a leg, and therefore has no particular attachment to this place or the landscape given that it is not the place where he grew up. Nevertheless, this sense of distance is perhaps why Yuta finds himself taking photos on his smartphone and documenting his daily live in the peaceful rural environment as a means of keeping in touch with his wife, Yuki (Moeka Hoshi), and daughter, Hana, who were supposed to be coming with him but had to cancel at the last moment.

These photos are often spontaneous and sparked by the desire to share a moment or re-experience it later, whereas the photographs taken at Makoto’s studio are more deliberate. Someone has made a decision to have their photo taken either for a prosaic reason such as an application form, or because they too want to mark an important event like a wedding or the birth of a child. These are not events that anyone is likely to forget, but the physical object of the photograph becomes a repository for the emotions the subjects and photographer were feeling at that moment which might otherwise me transitory but can now be re-accessed through film.

The same can be true of the photos and videos Yuta takes on his phone which enable a kind of time lapse communication between himself and his family in which one can be both present and absent at the same time. Yet there’s an implication that the ease with which we take photos in the present day has diluted has their potency. Yuki calls up the photo app on her phone is ad plunged into a sea of images, mainly of her young daughter, so many that she will likely never open most of them again while the vastness of the archive might discourage looking at any of them at all beyond the already visible thumbnail. 

Even so, there’s a degree of poignancy in Makoto getting out the slide projector to show Yuta old pictures of his later wife and Yuki as a child as we see the same images recreated by the adult Yuki and Hana making exactly the same trip with the images appearing in Yuta’s mind like photographs. As Shiori and the young Yuki move further and further away from the camera, there’s a sense of continuing in these repeated images like a film negative running through a projector as one generation slowly replaces another. Though Shiori is already gone, her presence is felt through its absence in the empty seat next to Makoto as he remembers the time they saw a burning field, or her coat still hanging on the wall now on its own as Makoto has given his jacket to Yuta.

The gift of the jacket furthers Yuta’s identification with Makoto, though as one might expect the situation is a little awkward to begin with. Nevertheless, as he settles into the relaxed pace of rural life, the pair begin to bond and develop a familial relationship of their own. Sakanishi bookends the film with scenes of open windows, the first that of a ferry looking out onto the sea. Its rounded corners give it the aesthetic of film while the scene constantly changes to explore how various people react to it. Some look out on the sea as they eat, others more or less ignore it or get on with their work. The closing shot, meanwhile, is a timelapse photo through Makoto’s bedroom window capturing the changing seasons. The lesson is perhaps that the human eye is also a camera and that our lives our made up of these small, barely memorable moments that can nevertheless amount to something greater than ourselves. 

Trailer (English subtitles)

Nameless (名無し, Hideo Jojo, 2026)

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A man who can kill with a seemingly invisible weapon goes on the rampage after being harangued by a religious woman in a cafe, leaving police and witnesses baffled in Hideo Jojo’s adaptation of the manga by actor and comedian Jiro Sato who also stars in the title role. The nameless hero, given the generic moniker “Taro Yamada” by the well-meaning policeman who discovered him in childhood, has a mysterious supernatural ability that causes things he touches with his right hand to temporarily disappear. They return when he takes his hand away, but living creatures appear to have been changed as if they existed in a state between life and death and then generally pass away soon after.

Taro (Jiro Sato) seems to have lived well into his 40s deliberately refusing to use his right hand, so what prompted this sudden turn toward nihilistic and indiscriminate violence? The answers may not be entirely clear, just as there is no concrete explanation of where Taro might have come from or how he acquired these strange powers. But it seems to be a reaction against a society that he feels does not accept him, or at least his failure to connect with it. After experiencing a betrayal by someone close to him, he vows that he’s going to stop trying to connect with people and this murderous rampage seems to be an expression of his loneliness and frustration. 

Then again, society did attempt to reach out to him in some ways even if it does not appear to have made much of an effort to understand his condition or to help him to live with it. Despite the Christianising religious overtones that hang over the film, Taro never seems to consider cutting off his hand or making it unusable. As a child, he bound it with wire, presumably to prevent himself lashing out with it instinctively or accidentally causing harm to other people. His only companion, an equally nameless little girl of unknown origin given the generic moniker “Hanako”, begs him not use it even to protect them, which suggests that he may have done so previously with negative consequences. Perhaps there is some benefit to it which is why he doesn’t try to neutralise his arm, but it’s never clear where things go when he touches them or why they comeback changed or depleted. 

The main issue is that he has a choice about using it. Originally, he didn’t want to, and perhaps didn’t want to kill all those people in the cafe either but ended up doing so. The irony is that he wants to connect, but is literally prevented from reaching out. He has these almost Nosferatu-like ticks and grimaces and is largely mute. He can hear and understand, but barely speaks and when he does, it’s with great effort. His voice his horse and the words come out awkwardly in a strange order. Yet the elliptical quality of the tale seems to hint at a desire to reconnect with his childhood self thereby closing the circle and making himself disappear.

Others may in a way be trying to do the same, such as lead investigator Kunieda (Kuranosuke Sasaki) who suspects the case may be linked to something in his own past but has it taken away from him by the National Police Agency who question the team’s competency while themselves failing to make much of an effort to understand the reality of a man like Taro. Some joke that perhaps he is a ghost, and in a way he does seem to be a supernatural entity. His invisible weapons are visible in a reflected surface such as a mirror, but apparently not captured on camera. His tragedy, though, maybe that he doesn’t understand himself beyond the fact of his difference and is too afraid to open himself to potential rejection by those who might be able to help him if they wanted to, with the potential for exploitation by those with darker motivations. In that sense, his violence, depicted with bloody absurdity by Jojo, does seem to be an attempt at connection or to feel himself a part of this world. Nevertheless, the conclusion seems to suggest that in the end acceptance comes from within and in giving in to his basest instincts the adult Taro may only have disappointed his more innocent childhood self.

Nameless screens as part of this year’s Raindance Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Vicissitude (郷, Takuro Ijichi, 2024)

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A dejected young man finds himself pondering lost wonder amid the vicissitudes of life in Takuro Ijichi’s poetic debut feature. Drawing inspiration from Terence Malik, the film finds a sense of awe and serenity in the natural landscape that contrasts with the demands of a modern, more urban way of life with its resulting pressures that leave the hero, Gaku, floundering without direction in the wake of the implosion of his baseball playing dreams.

Indeed, baseball becomes a kind of metaphor as Gaku finds himself running in an endless loop. This first chapter titled competition itself at first seems to be a lost paradise from which Gaku is unexpectedly expelled. After showing some potential as a high school baseball player, Gaku’s determination to turn pro is ridiculed by teachers as childish and unrealistic. While he devotes himself to perfecting his craft at the expense of human relationships such as his connection with female classmate Saki, his less than friendly rivalry with another boy spills over into spite and resentment. When he is deliberately injured, Gaku at first tries to hide it, but then faces both disappointment and humiliation in being kicked off the team ending his baseball playing dreams for good.

It’s at this point that Gaku begins to idealise his rural childhood and friendship with another local boy, Ryu. Largely left to their own devices the pair play in the fields and forests and bask in a sense of wonder for the natural world. At first they float paper boats, then take to a real one to ride the waves of a local lake. Conversations with his elderly grandmother about the war lend the place a sense of history and continuity as Gaku finally turns back to nature to ask himself where it is that he belongs. He tries to find his way back and reclaim something that he’s lost while battling uncertainty. Yet this bygone world seems slightly outside of his reach, lent an elegiac quality by Ijichi’s wistful cinematography and melancholic score.

The early death of a fellow baseball team player in an accident similarly reinforces the themes of transience and impermanence, reminding Gaku that his life is short and fleeting. Yet his constant circling of the baseball field is not a futile effort so much as a training ground for life in which he figures out what it is he’s running towards and eventually discovers the courage to chase it. He reflects that the people around him and the town may have changed, yet his homeland remains the same lending him the sense of certainty he’d been missing in a solid foundation to his life. 

These realisations are echoed in the film’s non-linear structure in which Gaku is thrown back to his childhood memories while contemplating his current sense of confusion and emptiness in the present. He asks himself if having all the answers is really necessary in life while actively looking for them inside his past. The conclusion he may come to is that it isn’t, really. Life is an ongoing process or a kind of evolution that doesn’t so much lead towards a kind of solution as being one in and of itself. What becomes important is accepting its vicissitudes and learning to savour each moment while reassessing what’s important, such as human relationships and the sense of joy and wonder to be found in the natural world.

Playing out more as a tone poem, Ijichi is content to let the narrative drift on the waves of time, as he puts it, focusing more on images of transience such as flowing water, rolling waves, and floating clouds that reflect a sense of perpetual loss echoing Gaku’s inner turmoil. Nevertheless, it’s within the natural environment that Gaku begins to find the answers he’s looking for that give him a sense of direction in his life and the courage to embrace it in all of its tragedy, absurdity, joy and sorrow. 

Vicissitude screens as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Climbing for Life (てっぺんの向こうにあなたがいる, Junji Sakamoto, 2025)

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A world-famous, record-breaking mountain climber faces the final ascent in Junji Sakamoto’s fictionalised biopic of Junko Tabei, the first Japanese woman to reach the summit of Everest. Here named Tabe, the highest mountain Junko (Sayuri Yoshinaga / Non) has to climb seems to be the patriarchal nature of Japanese society in the 1970s. The film does, however, mistakenly imply that sexism is an issue that has now been solved in the film’s contemporary setting of 2010-16 in which women hold positions of authority and are free to fulfil themselves outside the home on an equal footing with men.

Of course, this is not really the reality even if, in some ways, the situation may be much better than during the high prosperity era during which Junko was a trailblazer in more ways than one. When she decides to mount an all-female expedition team to conquer Everest, she’s mainly met with derision and scorn. While she and female reporter Etsuko (Yuki Amami / Mizuki Kayashima) do the rounds of various companies looking for sponsorship, the elderly male CEOs are incredibly confused and accuse them of being traitors to their sex. They questions whether it’s safe for women to do something like this without any men around (though in the interests of clarity, all the Sherpas appear to me male), and also what wonder what their husbands are supposed to do for the six months they’ll be away shirking their domestic responsibilities. Even when they encounter a man who is closer to their own generation and sounds supportive, stating that the era of gender equality has arrived, it turns out to be all talk. He does not take their proposal seriously and even asks which part of it he should read as if it wasn’t really important. In the end, his “support” doesn’t transfer into any investment.

In the present day, Etsuko remarks that there were a lot of useless men around back then, as if men are universally different now. She herself has become a senior reporter and is in a position of authority over younger male reporters in the newsroom. Likewise, Junko’s main physician in the later stages of her treatment following a cancer diagnosis is also female and makes a point of listening to her patient’s wishes and concerns. It does not appear that Etsuko ever married or had children, but no one of is critical of them for “abandoning” their domestic responsibilities to pursue a career in the way they were of Junko when she left her daughter behind to climb Everest. To that extent the film paints a rosier picture of the contemporary society than might actually be the case given the still persistent levels of sexism and gender bias that still present barriers to woman’s ability to find fulfilment whether within the domestic environment or outside of it.

Nevertheless, Junko’s husband Masaaki (Kôichi Sato) is depicted as a shining example of confident masculinity in his support for his wife’s endeavours. A sister-in-law looks after daughter Noriko during the day with Masaaki on parental duties outside of his shifts as a mechanic. Even so, Junko’s success is seen to have a negative effect on her children who do feel a degree of resentment towards her. Noriko has largely taken it in her stride, but also feels a sense of regret that Junko is not just her mother but someone she has to share with the world. When this spurs her on to deepen their relationship in adulthood, younger son Shintaro (Ryuya Wakaba) who was born after Everest is hugely resentful and struggles to emerge from his mother’s shadow or the pressure of being the child of a famous person. He doesn’t like it that people have expectations of him because of who his mother is and feels as if he is held to a different standard because of it, causing him to become rebellious at school. The situation becomes so bad that he eventually moves in with relatives and transfers to the relatively more anonymous Fukushima where his teacher gives him some harsh lessons in humility, reminding him that he is not “Junko’s Tabe’s son”, but that Junko Tabe just happens to be his mother.

Shintaro’s views also seem to be more patriarchal than those of his father whom he verbally attacks insisting that he must also be resentful of Junko and that if it were not for losing his big toes to frostbite it would have been him conquering Everest, not her. While Shintaro appears to feel emasculated by his mother and looks down on his father for what he sees as weakness, Shintaro is able to put his personal frustrations aside and devote himself wholeheartedly to supporting Junko. It’s not until Junko’s illness becomes serious that Shintaro is able to reconcile with her and find a more stable path in life through helping with her programme to bring high school students displaced by the 2011 earthquake to climb Mount Fuji.

Mountains take on an almost sacred presence for Junko with Mount Fuji in particular becoming a constant motif. The film depicts her final battle with cancer as being yet another mountain to climb, though knowing your limitations is also part of the art of climbing and so when she comes to the realisation that she can no longer reach the summit, she decides to plan her descent. The poignant closing moments have her looking at a photo of the women’s team and insisting they will all go together, expressing a degree of sadness that the group fell apart after Everest with some resentful that Junko had progressed to the summit alone rather than postpone to regroup to call off the ascent to try again another time. All of the press attention fell on her alone forgetting the efforts of those who’d stayed at base camp and without whom Junko’s success would not have been possible. Female solidarity is also vulnerable to these kinds of pressures, the film implies, though Junko’s friendship with Etsuko endures right to the end. Though the conclusion is bittersweet, the closing moments at least focus more on a life well lived amid the majesty of the mountains rather than dwelling on its inevitable tragedy.

Climbing for Life screens as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Tokyo Strayers (東京逃避行, Ren Akiba, 2026)

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Amid increasing gentrification of urban centres, where are the kids supposed to go? Ren Akiba’s Tokyo Strayers (東京逃避行, Tokyo Tohiko) seems to suggest efforts to clean up Kabukicho haven’t actually been all that successful, while young and impressionable people for whom home is not or safe place or who feel themselves to be out of place in their hometown continue to flock to the city in search of a kind of grimy glamour that promises freedom in a conformist society.

At least, that’s why Asuka ends up in Shinjuku while in flight from a policeman father she resents for leaving their family for a younger woman. In truth, Asuka’s problems are more of the normal teenage variety and otherwise she appears to come from a more stable, financially comfortable home with parents that are invested in her welfare even if she finds them to be overbearing. The same is not true for many of the other runaways including Hiyori left home away after experiencing physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her father. It’s Hiyori who is currently writing the Tokyo Strayers blog that’s attracted Asuka and countless other young women to this hip and happening place, though it soon becomes clear that the diary is an idealised vision of Shinjuku life that doesn’t really exist.

The film seems to present two young men, Edo and Merio, as the angel and demon of Shinjuku. Edo runs a kind of shelter for runaway teens that provides a safe space for them where they can find food and start to rebuild their lives. Merio, meanwhile, gets young women hooked on drugs in order to sexually exploit them. The distinction between them would seem to be black and white, but in reality the two were once a team and Merio apparently only started working with a local drug dealer in order to get money to fund Edo’s sanctuary, which Edo eventually accepted, if unwillingly. In any case, Edo started the sanctuary with money he made as a host working in Kabukicho which means that it still arises from the sleazy underbelly of the red light district which is built upon the exploitation of women. 

Nevertheless, Edo is committed to keeping runaway kids safe, which is why he tells Hiyori to make sure Asuka gets home safely knowing that she likely means to sell her to Merio in exchange for drugs. Hiyori is only really doing this because she feels she has no other means of survival and the implication is that she began doing sex work as a kind of self-harm intended to wipe out the abuse she received at the hands of her father. Edo warns his runaways to avoid going out because of the increased police presence given that they will just send anyone they catch back home without considering whether that might be a safe environment for them. A policewoman later confesses her regrets about sending a girl back to her family thinking it was for the best and they’d patch things up over time only for the girl to take her own life shortly afterward. The film is then implicitly critical of an unthinking adult world that is failing to protect these children. Even if they try to report what’s happening to them, they are not believed or no action is taken because of a reluctance to interfere in domestic matters and an unshakeable belief in the sanctity of family. 

But this environment is obviously no good for them either, leaving them open to exploitation or falling into criminal activity as a means of supporting themselves. Edo’s initiative is one way of fighting back through youth solidarity, but it’s also rooted in the dark side of Kabukicho given the impossibility of running such an establishment without any kind of funding. Akiba seems to want to show the two sides of Kabuki, one seemingly glamorous and alluring, and the other seedy and depressing, while suggesting that the only real source of solidarity exists among the young people themselves if only they can find the strength to look after each other while simultaneously striving to escape the traumatic circumstances that have forced them onto the streets.

Tokyo Strayers screened as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)