Category: Japan

In Her Room (ひとりぼっちじゃない, Chihiro Ito, 2022)

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The hero of Chihiro Ito’s debut feature In Her Room ( ひとりぼっちじゃない, Hitori Bocchi ja nai) is so pathologically shy that he has become almost invisible, a ghost-like presence not fully of this world. Colleagues ignore him, taxis never stop, and restaurant staff continue their conversations as if he wasn’t even there. At one point he’s run over by a car and tells the police that the person probably didn’t see him or realise they’d hit someone. Only a mysterious woman he later describes as showing him a side of himself that even to him was unfamiliar pays him any attention but then there’s something a little bit sinister in her otherworldliness that causes us to wonder what it is she wants from him. 

Dr. Susume (Satoru Iguchi) is so awkward that he’s taken to practicing small talk with the skull he uses as a training tool at the dentist surgery where he works. He seems almost abstracted from himself, unable to relate to others because his emotions are distant from him. His mother keeps calling and asking him to come visit her because there’s something she wants to talk to him about but he brushes her off, telling her she should do whatever she likes as if disinterested in whatever it might be that she wants to say. In fact, she is the only person who seems to be able to see him, calling out to him from a car to offer him some homemade bread, but he still doesn’t really engage with her. We start to wonder if he has a problem with the other person in the car, Tomoko, a middle-aged woman who may be his mother’s partner though she too greets him warmly and is understanding of his reluctance to spend time with them.

Miyako (Fumika Baba), the mysterious woman who lives in a fantastic flat entirely covered in indoor greenery, asks Susume if he loves his mother but he deflects her question and simply says that he wants her to be happy for the rest of her life. For a time, we can’t be sure if Miyako and her wonderful apartment actually exist or are simply the manifestation of Susume’s headspace as he tries to talk through his loneliness and lack of self, only it later seems that other people see her too and in fact frequent her home much in the same way Susume does which causes him a degree of obsessive jealousy. He is particularly bothered by the presence of Yuko (Yuumi Kawai), a woman who works in a nearby grocery store and is also friendly with Miyako and similarly possessive. He later tells her that Miyako is guiding him towards the person he’s supposed to be, though Yuko isn’t so sure and suggests her existence is a little more sinister. Apparently she keeps a giant ball of hair taken from everyone she’s ever known in a hidden drawer, and then a man apparently took his own life in her apartment though Yuko refuses to share the contents of his note with him. 

Yuko’s words contribute to a growing sense of unease exacerbated by a video Susume watches from a man who sounds like a cult leader who suggests that misfortune may be caused by magic or sorcery, leading credence to the idea that Miyako is some kind of forest-dwelling witch gently luring Susume into her trap. Soon after their relationship becomes physical, a praying mantis is seen climbing on her plants. Susume’s uncertainty is reflected in the carving he is making of Miyako’s face which gradually starts to take shape though is also in its way a self-reflection in much the same way he said that Miyako was showing him a side of himself that only she could see. When he finally delivers it to her, it’s just as blank as her expression, a smooth sphere with a vague outline of personality. She places it quietly in a shed where her various friends sometimes hide to spy on each other. 

The trio attend a weird play together in which a giraffe-man allows his community to eat him because he is a terminal people pleaser of the kind we might assume Susume to be only the play seems to arouse a flash of resentment. He tells Miyako that he thought the giraffe-man’s actions were duplicitous, that he must have been secretly confident that he would taste good and was in a sense showing off. He isn’t sure who he’s most angry with, the people that decided to satiate not their hunger but their curiosity by eating him or the giraffe-man himself for letting them do it. But Miyako replies that to her it’s quite the opposite. The giraffe-man simply wanted to be of use to those around him. A grim image of the dismembered giraffe is later echoed in that of a squashed bug, suggesting that this is what Miyako is doing to her various callers, feeding on their insecurities and leaving nothing more than a bloody carcass behind. 

Even so, Susume begins to realise that he’s being presented with a choice and decides on change, finally facing his mother and embracing her happiness along with Tomoko while expressing a desire to uproot himself to see if he’s capable of change in a different place. Adapting her own novel, Ito allows an eerie sense of mystery to remain never quite explaining the true nature of Miyako or the surreal nightmare sequence in which Susume is chased by a glowing orange entity, but instead ends on an ambivalent note at once hopeful and maybe not as Miyako carefully stores her effigy perhaps just one more trophy in a treasure trove of lost souls. 

In Her Room screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

J005311 (Hiroki Kono, 2022)

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If a stranger offers you a large amount of money to drive to an undisclosed location, what would you say? Hiroki Kono’s J005311 is so named for a bright new star born when two stars already dead collided which goes some way to explaining the central relationship between the two men at the film’s centre. Though they rarely speak, a kind of connection arises between them that changes them both in unexpected and unexplained ways but perhaps gives each a new sense of hope and possibility. 

After some kind of alarming phone call, Kanzaki (Kazuaki Nomura) throws away various things in his apartment and leaves as if not expecting to return. He goes out and tries to hail a cab, but it seems as if the driver refuses to take him where he wants to go. Kanzaki slowly walks away and sits down wondering what to do next before catching sight of a young man running furiously across the road after snatching a woman’s handbag. Kanzaki wouldn’t usually be the sort to chase a thief, but tears off after the man and makes him a rather unexpected offer. He will pay him a million yen if only he’ll agree to drive him to a location near Mount Fuji around two hours away. The man is understandably suspicious and in fact tries to snatch the bag Kanzaki had the money in but is ultimately unsuccessful and agrees to the drive.

No real explanation is given for why Kanzaki is prepared to pay this large sum of money to get someone to drive him rather than taking public transport at least part of the way or booking a car through some kind of chauffeuring firm where long fares are more usual. It may be because he’s afraid whoever called him will find him on a train or bus, which would also explain why he leaves his phone behind at a service station, or perhaps he just wants company and companionship on what is looking increasingly like a final journey. Kanzaki tells the man, Yamamoto (Hiroki Kono), that he’s going to meet “a friend” which is a fairly unimaginative lie he doesn’t believe for a second though he for the moment he lets it go. Later Yamamoto notices he has a rope in his bag while we also see Kanzaki loop its strap around his neck and try to strangle himself all of which adds grim import to his final destination. 

For his part, Yamamoto is wary of the arrangement and also of Kanzaki who is awkward in the extreme. He tells Kanzaki that he can buy whatever he likes with the million yen yet when he asks what he’ll use it for he says he doesn’t know. He says he likes work that’s “easy” like construction or deliveries while evidently supplementing his income with the purse snatching which he remarks gets easier each time you do it. Several times it seems as if Yamamoto may run off with the money, or just run off leaving Kanzaki stranded, but eventually comes back if for unclear reasons that nevertheless suggest he’s begun to care Kanzaki and feels to an extent responsible for him while fearing what awaits him at his destination. 

Kanzaki too feels responsible for Yamamoto, eventually asking him to give up bag snatching as if implying that he’s better than that and ought to respect himself more. After tipping copious amounts of sugar onto his food at a rest stop, Kanzaki shoves a whole pastry into his mouth and seems as if he’s about to cry perhaps feeling rejected or that he overstepped the mark with Yamamoto before suggesting that he might want to walk the last part alone only for Yamamoto to once again return and follow him. In a sense they begin to save each other, bonding in a shared sense of despair if exchanging few words and emerging with a new sense of possibility forged by their unexpected sense of connection. Kono follows the two men with restless intensity, the camera swooping POV style or clinging tightly to them in the confines of the rented car while eventually seeming to vibrate in the poignant closing scenes. At times obscure, the film nevertheless has a wintery poetry and melancholic soul and ends on a note of silent serenity as the two men prepare to move on though who knows where to. 

J005311 screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Wind, Woman and Road (風と女と旅鴉, Tai Kato, 1958)

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Tai Kato joined Toei’s Kyoto studio in 1956 having made his directorial debut at the independent production house Takara Productions in 1951 shortly after being letting go from Daiei in 1950 during the Red Purge (he had been chief secretary for studio’s the labour union). Heavily influenced by and a great admirer of Daisuke Ito, Kato had a passion for chanbara and jidaigeki which were Toei’s mainstays at the time, but even while making what were essentially programme pictures his approach was anything but conventional. With 1958’s Wind, Woman, and Road (風と女と旅鴉, Kaze to Onna to Tabigarasu), Kato embarked on what would become a signature style of “realistic” period drama otherwise at odds with the formulaic nature of the genre. 

As he would continue to do, Kato instructed his cast not to wear makeup and while casting kabuki actor/chanbara megastar Kinnosuke Nakamura insisted on a more modern performance style than the sometimes mannered theatricality of the traditional samurai film. Ginji is cocksure young man living on the road after being kicked out of the hometown he is now travelling towards because of a crime supposedly committed by his long absent father. On the way, he runs into Sentaro (Rentaro Mikuni), a middle-aged man recently released from prison who is struck by his appearance and immediately asks how old he is realising that Ginji is about the same age as his own son who died as a result of a fight. 

The two begin walking together and Ginji tells Sentaro that his village sends gold to the governor around this time every year as a bribe to get lower taxes which doesn’t make a lot of economic sense but evidently works for them. Last year, the gold was stolen by notorious bandit Hanzo the Shark (Eitaro Shindo) and two villagers were killed during the robbery. Ginji half jokes about teaming up to steal it, and then playfully attacks Sentaro leading the entourage escorting this year’s payment to flee in terror leaving the gold behind. Sentaro encourages Ginji to take the money back to the village, but he is later shot by the returning villagers who think they must be Hanzo’s henchmen pulling the same stunt as last year. 

Unlike the typical chanbara hero, Ginji is petulant and resentful. He has a very modern way of speaking and is rebellious in character as you might well expect him to be given his life experiences. The other villagers are not happy to see him and continue tar him with his father’s brush, sure that the son of a thief can’t be any better while Ginji pines for his late mother claiming that the villagers’ harassment along with the inability to support herself economically led her to take her own life. Once a member of Hanzo’s gang he vacillates between a desire to be accepted by the village and that to take his revenge on it. Sentaro meanwhile is determined to save him, regretful that he could not save his own son from the life that he had led as a yazkuza and petty criminal. 

There is a persistent sense that everyone here is at heart a wanderer. The doctor’s daughter Ochika (Yumiko Hasegawa) who develops a fondness for both men relates that she was lured away from the village by an itinerant actor and fell into a life of ruin before returning to discover that her mother had passed away. The headman’s adopted daughter Oyuki (Satomi Oka) with whom Ginji falls in love tells him that she too is an orphan, her father was a medicine pedlar who dropped dead in the village which then took her in. Echoing a sense of rootlessness in the post-war world, they are all in someway displaced and looking to restore connections which have previously been broken but largely failing or unable to do so. Ginji is torn between his criminal past and the reformed future offered to him by the more positive paternal relationship he develops with Sentaro who, unlike his own father, is readily accepted by the village which is unaware that he previously spent time in prison. 

The final showdown takes place in a windswept clearing filled with Kato’s trademark mist as Ginji finally picks a side only to realise that that in the end he will always be a wanderer, a rootless figure whose only home is the road. Kato shoots a little higher than he would subsequently but still rests a little lower than the norm, emphasising a sense of destabilisation in Ginji’s volatility along with a painful longing that keeps him a lonely soul lost in the fog and on perpetual journey towards a long forgotten home. 

Plastic (Daisuke Miyazaki, 2023)

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A young couple bond over their shared love of an obscure 70s glam rock band, but soon find their youthful romance eroded by the realities of impending adulthood in Daisuke Miyazaki’s warmhearted coming-of-age tale, Plastic. Emotional distance becomes a persistent theme as mediated through a message into space that might take light years to arrive not to mention the reply, which seems to echo the couple’s inability to communicate despite their star-crossed connection.

Jun (Takuma Fujie) and Ibuki (An Ogawa) bond after realising they are both fans of 70s band Exne Kedy, talking for hours at a small cafe only leaving when the place closes. Having recently relocated to Nagoya from Tokyo, Jun enrols at Ibuki’s high school and joins her after school club much to the chagrin of her two friends. The pair eventually become a couple going on a series of wholesome dates including a trip to watch Sad Vacation in a cinema and are apparently very much in love but a year later the novelty has begun to wear off. Ibuki is studying for university exams and bound for a top institution in Tokyo while Jun is planning to drop out and pursue music full-time. 

Perhaps slightly more conventional, Ibuki berates Jun for his impracticality asking how likely it is he’ll be able to support himself with the kind of music he makes. Later she has some kind of flash forward in which she imagines herself supporting him financially while he’s not even playing guitar anymore and they’re arguing about responsibilities for rent and living costs. She breaks up with him in the carpark of a convenience store but perhaps regrets it, keeping up a half-hearted friendship while he remains lost and lovelorn pursuing music on the side while working part-time. “Plastic” becomes a kind of metaphor for their relationship, something which should have lasted forever but has been subtly undermined by the microorganisms of conventionality and contemporary capitalism until it eventually broke apart. 

The distance between them is likened to that of the space radio broadcast which might not reach its target for 25,000 light years. The message was sent the same year that Exne Kedy broke up, and may well be delivered a little more than 50 years later at their reunion concert only as the narratorial voice over explains, that’s largely up to chance. Swapping notes on studying in the same way Jun’s mother and grandfather had talked about seeing Exne Kedy in concert, Ibuki’s parents had compared their flashcards to modern apps and joked that maybe someday education would all be online as in fact happened during the pandemic. Having swapped her rural home for the bright lights of Tokyo, all her classes are online which ironically gives her more time to spend with her friends but also leaves her exhausted and distant. 

When Jun wonders if his music is like the broadcast, destined not to arrive for thousands of years so he’ll never know who got it. Another school friend, Ayumu, asks him if he’s sure he hasn’t just missed a reply 25,000 years in the making which is sort of ironic because he’s clearly missed that she’s been trying to answer his message only he’s too hung up on his ex to notice. Later she asks him to move in with her, pointing out that she’s right there not 25,000 light years away like Ibuki who is now living with a DJ who doesn’t even know who Exne Kedy are. The two of them are far apart but somehow still connected, not least by their love for the band which may eventually reunite them. 

Exne Kedy is modern day creation by Ide Kensuke who had previously released the album Kensuke Ide With His Mothership ― Contact From Exne Kedy and the Poltergeists and makes a self-cameo in the film in a surreal scene featuring the band whom Ibuki and Jun unexpectedly run into doing an impromptu performance in the middle of a forest singing a song that echoes the state of the couple’s relationship in which a lighthouse no longer illuminates and cannot light the way. Yet there is always a sense of the couple as a pair of flashing beacons waiting to pass close enough to each other to be able to convey a message. Featuring cameo appearances from (former pop star) Kyoko Koizumi and Machiko Ono, Miyazaki’s strangely charming youth movie is surprisingly sincere in its romanticism but equally in its critique of the world that frustrates it while suggesting that music may once again save the day.

Plastic screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

As Long As We Both Shall Live (わたしの幸せな結婚, Ayuko Tsukahara, 2023) [Fantasia 2023]

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A young woman with chronically low self-esteem learns to love herself after bonding with a taciturn nobleman in Ayuko Tsukahara’s adaptation of the fantasy romance light novel series by Akumi Agitogi, As Long As We Both Shall Live (わたしの幸せな結婚, Watashi no Shiawasena Kekkon). Set in an alternate version of the late 19th/early 20th century in which the nation is ruled by an emperor who has the ability to foresee the future and leads a series of prominent clans of superpowered soldiers against “aberrations” who wreak havoc in the lives ordinary people, the film is effectively a kind of Cinderella story only the fairy godmothers are a kindly housekeeper a shady underground sect with the power to manipulate people’s minds. 

In any case, Miyo (Mio Imada) was born into a noble house the members of which have the ability to manipulate the wind though sadly she appears to have been born “powerless” and is bullied by her step-mother and step-sister who treat her as a servant. At 19, she learns she’s to be married off and is excited about finally escaping her abusive family home but also wary that it might not make much difference because her potential husband, Kiyoka Kudo (Ren Meguro), is said to be cruel and violent. All three of his matches have fled the house in under three days though being so used to mistreatment Miyo is sure that it will just be a matter of adjusting to her new circumstances. 

What she discovers is that Kiyoka doesn’t seem all that bad just a bit aloof and direct in his manner of speech. Nevertheless, she continues to believe that she isn’t good enough to marry him because she doesn’t have any magical powers and is convinced he will call off the engagement when he finds out. Meanwhile, she bonds with housekeeper Yurie (Mirai Yamamoto) after breaking protocol by helping out around the house for something to do though it is perhaps a bit odd that someone from such an apparently wealthy family has only one servant and seems to lead an incredibly simple life devoted to his role as a soldier helping to keep the aberrations in check especially now that the emperor is dying and someone has apparently released the pent up souls of fellow aberration fighters who died horribly and are filled with dangerous resentment.

Many of Miyo’s self-esteem issues are down to the way she was treated by her family and having lost her mother at two years old though there is obviously parallel in her literal “powerlessness” and the lack of agency that is afforded to her in having been kept a prisoner in the family estate only to be traded off in marriage by a father apparently out for whatever he can get for such a “mistake” of a daughter. It’s perhaps a slight failing in the narrative that she turns out to have powers after all rather than simply beginning to accept herself in the comparatively warmer environment of Kiyoka’s home even if it might also be a little awkward that her self-love is born of feeling loved by Kiyoka and to a lesser extent Yurie and immediately has her pledging to give her life for him if only he should ask it. 

For his part, Kiyoka is also undergoing something of a transformation in that it turns out he also felt estranged from his mother and is actually kind at heart just incredibly awkward and taciturn. The reason he didn’t bond with any of his previous suitors seems to be that he objected to their insincerity and the nonsense that goes along with being a member of the aristocracy like the concept of arranged marriage in itself, later taking Miyo’s family to task for their treatment of her claiming that he doesn’t really care about her social status or whether or not she has any powers. In any case, it’s love that helps her overcome her “powerlessness” even if she uses her newfound inner strength for someone else rather than herself, taking control over and her life regaining self-confidence as someone worthy of love, respect, and basic human decency not to mention happiness. A post-credits trail hints at a potential sequel or even series expanding on the franchise’s rich world building but for now at least it seems as if Miyo has found her happy ending, finally able to embrace life on her own terms rather than feeling as if she needs to make a mends for her existence.

As Long As We Both Shall Live screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Like a Savage (野蛮人のように, Toru Kawashima, 1985)

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Hiroko Yakushimaru had been the breakout star of Haruki Kadokawa’s idol cinema in the early 1980s, but as she approached her 20th birthday had developed an increasing desire to retire and leave the showbiz world behind. Having won the prestigious Blue Ribbon Best Actress award for her role in W’s Tragedy, she ended her contract with the studio but following the outcry over news of her intention to retire ultimately set up on her own as an independent performer with her own management company. 

Like a Savage (野蛮人のように, Yabanjin no Youni) was her first project after moving on from Kadokawa and was intended to signal a new phase in her career though incorporating many of the elements that had made her teen idol films so successful. This time around, she plays a character seemingly a few years above her actual age though in other ways childlike and something of a fantasist. Tamako is a blocked novelist in her mid-20s who had tremendous success with her first work published when she was only 15. Ostensibly, she leads an incredibly aspirational life living in a beautiful cabin on the beach where she tries to write sitting out in the sun on her terrace. In the opening sequences, we see her taking a break by reading a novel in English while she also shows a knowledge of French which adds to her intellectual credentials and sense of contemporary sophistication. 

But it seems that she may be bored with this seemingly charmed life and is having trouble gaining inspiration because she’s become too comfortable. She also has a capricious selfish streak, randomly abandoning her friends who’ve come for a fireworks party by driving her open-topped jeep all the way into the centre of Roppongi “to find adventure in the night”. Adventure ends up finding her when she’s unwittingly drawn into underworld intrigue after being mistaken for a sex worker who was with a yakuza boss immediately before he was assassinated, as it turns out by one of his own men intent on succession but trying to disguise his ham-fisted bid for power as turf war. Teaming up with yakuza-adjacent fixer Eiji (Kyohei Shibata) she finds herself on the run before eventually taking him back to the cabin to hide out and recuperate from a stab wound. 

Yakushimaru had played similar roles as a teen star, but adds an adult edge as Tamako chain smokes and is almost always drinking, in fact being seven sheets to the wind while driving the jeep to the city. In other ways, however, she retains a childlike quality most obviously in the film’s repeated to references to Alice in Wonderland which paint the contemporary capital as a fantastical place coloured by her own literary imagination. In her flight through the city, she passes what seems to be a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, while there’s also a neon sign featuring what looks like the Cheshire Cat grinning wildly in the Cabaret-influenced drag bar where Eiji works in which a performer dressed as Sally Bowles sings in French and many of the waiters are implied to be trans or gay. When the gangsters finally surround the beach house in the final act, a pottery figurine of a rabbit with a stopwatch is obliterated by their bullets as if to remind her that she’s not in Wonderland anymore and all of this is “real” rather than the romanticised fantasy she may have bought into while nursing a handsome yakuza back to health by the sea. 

Even so, the city has its darkness. The girl who really was with the yakuza boss when he died twice gives her age as only 15, one of many Eiji shepherded around as part of his yakuza-adjacent job. The head yakuza has an eerie presence deepened by the use of a strange voice effect whenever he speaks, while Kawashima captures a fantastical side of Bubble-era Tokyo lit by the warm glow of hazy neon. In a moment of irony, a large sign on the building where the yakuza boss met his end reads “Desire” with its letters finally flickering out to leave just “Die” as if to tell us this rampantly consumerist city of darkness will eventually consume all those who cannot escape its allure. 

In any case, Tamako finds herself literally blowing up her world to cure her existential crisis reflecting that life is like a firework destined to burn out bright. What she experiences is another kind of rebirth, the climactic shootout occurring on her birthday which Eiji, who does not know his date of birth presumably having been abandoned as a baby, later adopts as his own. Surprisingly stylish and generally upbeat despite the darkness around its edges, Kawashima’s zeitgeisty action drama captures something of an age of ennui in which fantasy is the only escape from the emptiness of a neon-lit Tokyo. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Sanka: Nomads of the Mountain (山歌, Ryohei Sasatani, 2022)

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A young man finds himself caught between the new Japan and the old while befriending the last remnants of a nomadic people in Ryohei Sasatani’s poetic drama, Sanka: Nomads of the Mountain (山歌, Sanka). Set in the mid-1960s the film harks back to something older and more mystical that seems at odds with the Japan of the bullet train and economic miracle but equally sees its hero reckon with the more recent past in his father’s authoritarianism born of his militarist upbringing and wartime service.

Norio (Rairu Sugita) does seem to be a more sensitive boy. Bullied at school he comes home with a bruised face and is berated by his father Sakaguchi (Kisuke Iida) for his lack of manliness while struggling to come to terms with the death of his mother on the mountain two years previously. That’s one reason he ends up bonding with Shozo (Kiyohiko Shibakawa), one of the last remaining members of the Kenshi people who live a nomadic lifestyle migrating across the mountain throughout the year to take advantage of the terrain. Becoming a kind of father figure, Shozo teaches him how to fish and live on the mountain while Norio also develops a fondness for his daughter Hana (Naru Komukai) who appears to be around the same age as he is. 

The contrast between the two men could not be more stark. People in the town still refer to Sakaguchi as “the sergeant” and fiercely respect him for his wartime service. Norio finds a picture of his father in uniform along with a gun wrapped up in the back of drawer as if reminding him of the oppressive authority that hangs over the house. The townspeople are also grateful to Sakaguchi because he’s planning to build a golf course, a symbol of a newly prosperous society with a growing middle class, that will bring a lot of jobs to the area which is struggling economically with the decline of the agricultural industry. To build the golf course, Sakaguchi plans to get to rid of the mountain which will force Shozo and his family off the land and sever their connections with the forest and earth. 

To the townspeople the presence of the Kenshi is something taboo that embarrasses them. People accuse them of thievery and try to shoo them away. A policeman even stops Shozo and forces him to throw the fish he was trying to sell back to the river claiming that he’s frightening people just in his presence. Norio experiences an additional layer of shunning solely because of his association with the Kenshi and is later berated by his father for causing him embarrassment by associating with them. He reminds him to be mindful of his “status” and describes the Kenshi as “trespassers” as if denying them the right to exist. 

Norio obviously disagrees and is quickly seduced by the mountain’s serenity explaining that it helps him forget about the troubles of his life. But for Hana the situation is more complicated. Her friend Yoshi and her family went town from the mountain two years previously and she enviously looks on as she gossips with her school friends torn between her loyalty to her Kenshi roots and the desire for modernity in which she could live a comfortable life and get an education. If she stays on the mountain, she’ll be the last of her kind yet she struggles to reconcile herself with the idea of moving on just as Norio struggles with his own future in a rapidly changing Japan and seeks refuge in the mountains and a world beyond invisible to humans. 

Filled with a gentle poetry as Hana dances amid a rainstorm and voices echo through woods along with the sound of feet clad in woven sandals, the film is a kind of lament for an older, mystical Japan eventually eroded by a quickening modernity along with a critique of the lingering militarist authoritarianism which has simply transformed into corporate capitalism as symbolised by Norio’s cruelly conservative father. Yet as Hana had said, they’ll be Kenshi wherever they go, implying perhaps that her culture will not necessarily disappear so much as be carried forward even as the mountain itself becomes a casualty of a society in danger of forgetting its roots in a headlong dash towards a prosperous modernity.

Sanka: Nomads of the Mountain screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Yellow Crow (黄色いからす, Heinosuke Gosho, 1957)

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A small family struggles to repair itself after eight years of wartime separation in Heinosuke Gosho’s post-war melodrama, The Yellow Crow (黄色いからす, Kiiroi Karasu). Rather than focus directly on the legacy of the traumatic past, Gosho takes aim at war itself in making plain that the family’s problem is the time that was stolen from them each in a way forced to address the gulf between the idealised family life they may otherwise have had and the post-war reality. 

As the film opens, nine-year-old Kiyoshi (Koji Shitara) is sketching with his class at a temple. His teacher Miss Ashiwara (Yoshiko Kuga) is a little worried about the strange picture he’s drawing, noting that where once he had been a happy child painting cheerful pictures in vibrant colours now he only uses black and yellow and there’s unsettling quality in his composition. Still, trying to comfort him she tells Kiyoshi not to worry and that he’s free to draw whatever he likes, only later showing the paintings to a child psychologist who advises that these colours are often used by children who are anxious and lonely usually because they’ve lost a parent in the war. Only, Kiyoshi is lucky because he has both a mother and a father, his dad having been recently repatriated from China after being interned as a prisoner of war. 

In a sense it’s Miss Ashiwara’s misconception that the family must be happy because they’ve been so fortunate that lies at the centre of the conflict. Mother Machiko (Chikage Awashima) and father Ichiro (Yunosuke Ito) are so keen to get back to “normal” that no one really tries to address the obvious problems of their situation merely to reassume the lives they led before the war. For little Kiyoshi who wasn’t even born when his father left that sense of normality is very different and necessarily disrupted by his father’s return in what can only seem like an intrusion into closeness he had previously shared with his mother. 

Where another director or screenwriter may have told the entirety of the story from Kiyoshi’s point of view, Gosho pulls back to show us the way the adults struggle and suffer in their confusion and disappointment. On the surface, it does not seem that Ichiro has been particularly affected by his wartime service, rather the problem is in his frustrated attempts to reintegrate into a society which is entirely different from the one he left. He himself is older, and is perhaps acutely aware that he is a stranger to his son at first hurt by his shyness and reluctance to acknowledge him but then consumed by a sense of failure in a working life that leaves him little time to bond with his son leaving Kiyoshi with yet another sense of rejection. Meanwhile though his job was kept open for him, the nature of the business has changed. His boss is much younger than he is and has no interest in training an old timer he thinks is only really there as a goodwill gesture. As his friend points out, had it not been for the war he’d be a manager by now but as the boss puts it he’s returned to Japan “too late”. 

All of this adds to his sense of displacement and contributes to his increasingly harsh treatment of Kiyoshi, constantly discouraging all of his interests such as his fascination with animals and talent for drawing telling him only that he should be studying useful things like maths and science. His parenting style is evidently much more authoritarian than Machiko’s had been, often taking the view that Kiyoshi has been spoiled and needs some discipline instilling in him. But Kiyoshi reads his father’s treatment of him only as rejection, that must think he’s a bad boy and not want him. The resentment he feels only grows when the parents have another child, Mitsuko. It’s obviously much easier for Ichiro to bond with her than the already grown Kiyoshi while Machiko is both weak from the birth and mindful of a new responsibility all of which leaves Kiyoshi feeling pushed out and unwanted. He often takes refuge at the home of the kindly woman next-door, Yukiko (Kinuyo Tanaka), and her adopted daughter Haruko with whom he rescues animals, including a wounded crow, much to his father’s consternation. 

Always the wise observer, it’s Yukiko who finally tries to coax Machiko towards a resolution to challenge her husband’s authoritarianism. After his father accuses him of being a threat to Mitsuko and tries to shut him in the shed overnight, finally releasing his pet crow, Kiyoshi tries to run away and later returns to Yukiko’s house where he asks her to adopt him. Listening in secret, Machiko is heartbroken realising that they’ve been going about this all wrong, too busy trying blindly reassume the lives they had before when they should have met each other with more compassion and understanding trying to listen to Kiyoshi, who can admittedly at times be difficult and unreasonable unwilling to recognise when he is in the wrong, rather than instantly scolding him. Machiko’s story perhaps fades into the background, but she too is struggling having realised that her hopes that everything would finally be alright now that Ichiro has returned were misplaced while caught between her husband and her son with a baby daughter to care for trying to keep the peace if nothing else.   

Gosho apparently chose yellow after consulting with child psychologists* and filmed in full colour to make the most of Kiyoshi’s attempts at artistic expression while capturing his youthful sense of loneliness and displacement, but equally treats his parents with a degree of sympathy for their own confusion and disappointment. Ichiro is not a bad man and often trying his best but frustrated, admitting that he would have liked to simply forgive Kiyoshi and get closer to him as his father but for whatever reason found himself lashing out in misplaced anger. The message for the post-war society is then one of generalised compassion, that there’s no point blindly trying to reassume one’s life as if nothing had happened and patience and mutual understanding will be necessary to repair the bonds that war has corrupted. Thus it is Ichiro who has to change, dropping his authoritarian distance in deciding to be kinder to his son finally going out to look for him when he tries to run away in the middle of a storm returning the colours to Kiyoshi’s world as he begins to feel more secure in his familial connections in the knowledge that he is loved and wanted as a child of the new post-war generation. 

*Arthur Nolletti Jr., The Cinema of Heinosuke Gosho: Laughter Through Tears, pg. 185

Saga Saga (緑のざわめき-Saga Saga-, Aimi Natsuto, 2023)

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Three women contending with a legacy of patriarchal failure and male violence circle around each other in the picturesque hot springs resort of Ureshino in Aimi Natsuto’s etherial drama, Saga Saga (緑のざわめき, Midori no Zawameki – Saga Saga –). Less playful than Natsuto’s previous film Jeux de plage, the oscillating action takes on a poetic, mystical direction as the forces which bind the three women together eventually become clear while each in their own way tries to overcome a lingering sense of displacement and loneliness. 

The first of them, Kyoko (Rena Matsui), left Ureshino to become an actress in Tokyo but has given up performing and resettled in nearby Fukuoka where she runs into an old hometown boyfriend, Sotaro, who is currently sort of dating Eri, a woman he met on a dating app. Despite telling Kyoko he can’t stay long after reconnecting because he has a date with someone who is “not quite” his girlfriend, Sotaro ends up going to a love hotel with another woman, Naoko (Sae Okazaki), who frequents the bookstore where he works. Though it originally appears that Naoko is jealous of Kyoko and fears she’s missed her chance with Sotaro, we soon realise that she is in fact semi-stalking her for unclear reasons but actually wants to get in touch with someone else and eventually forms a telephone connection with Anna (Sara Kurashima), a high school girl currently living in Ureshino with her aunt, Fumiko (Asuka Kurosawa). 

In a way, they are all looking for something that seems to be missing in their lives. For Kyoko it seems to be something like the concept of home as she struggles with a series of sudden changes from the death of her mother two years previously to a brush with cancer in the form of an ovarian tumour she has recently had removed. Fumiko, who was a friend of her mother’s, tells her that she’s on a journey of self-reconciliation and there is indeed something in that as she works over the mysteries of her past while looking for new directions in her future. 

Meanwhile, she is plagued by strange dreams of being lost in a forest later telling a friend that she was once sexually assaulted in the woods when she was in high school and has the feeling the person who is chasing in her in her dream may be her father who left the family when she was a child. When she was receiving treatment for the tumour on her ovary, she began to ask herself why she had been born a woman forever subject to threat and patriarchal oppression. On her return to Fukuoka, she undergoes a very strange job interview in which she’s repeatedly assured that “being a woman” she won’t be asked to do anything “difficult” while it seems that being “attractive” is enough to get by in the beginning. Also they warn her that they don’t offer “great maternity leave or anything like that”. 

The lives of each of the women have been in one way or another overshadowed by male violence, but it’s Anna’s would-be-boyfriend Toru who is eventually victimised when he’s assaulted by a woman who wanted to bring back a problematic local festival cancelled because of a sexual assault. Toru had been in the forest to consult with some kind of mystic man trying to get him to conduct a ritual to get Anna to like him only to be told it doesn’t really work like that and you wouldn’t want it to anyway. After the assault it’s Toru’s life which spirals out of control when he’s blackmailed into acts of petty crime by the witch-like woman who forced herself on him, while Fumiko too is later forced to pay the price for having kept her secrets and for compassionate reasons attempted to hide the truth from those who most wanted to know.

Finally brought together on solving their individual mysteries, the three women settle on creating a home they can each return to, anchoring themselves as a family as a means of finding stability in a world which is so often in flux in defiance of the destructive forces which connect them. Even Eri admits that in reality she may have been looking for self-affirmation in her desire to find a dating app soulmate as her friends reflect on their terrible romantic experiences which, ironically, include being stalked. In the depths of its mysticism and eeriness, the film nevertheless ends on a note of serenity and the promise of moving forward if paradoxically by making a return. 

Saga Saga screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

River (リバー、流れないでよ, Junta Yamaguchi, 2023) [Fantasia 2023]

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Some might say time stands still in the “peaceful” hot springs town of Kibune, but on this particular day it’s more than usually true in Junta Yamaguchi’s followup to the cult hit Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, River (リバー、流れないでよ, River, Nagarenai de yo). This time around, the staff of a hotel along with its guests find themselves trapped in an infinite two minute loop in which they retain all their memories but are constantly returned to where they were two minutes previously no matter what they do. 

Depending on the situation, two minutes can be an eternity or an instant (or perhaps it’s always both) and in this case there isn’t much you can do in such a short time. The hotel staff find themselves constantly running up stairs and through corridors trying to coordinate their actions while accepting that nothing is permanent and any changes they try to make to their situation will be wiped out in the next loop. A chef who is also apparently a science enthusiast cautions them against taking any rash actions seeing as they can’t know when time will start flowing normally again, though for some the opportunity to embrace guilty pleasures such as poking a hole in the shoji is too good to pass up. 

As for what’s causing it, no one really knows but as it turns out everyone has a reason they might want to stop time. For maid Mikoto (Riko Fujitani) it’s that she fears her boyfriend plans to move abroad to study French cooking while another pair of guests secretly wanted to ask each other favours but are having trouble plucking up the courage and a blocked writer consumed with guilt for having killed off a key character is glad he can finally take some time out only to be slowly bored out of his mind when faced with an eternity of nothingness. The irony is that people come to places like these precisely because they’re “boring”, free from the chaos and stress of their ordinary lives. Mikoto says as much while wondering if that’s why her boyfriend wants to leave, that he feels as if he’s stagnating in a place where nothing changes and time doesn’t flow and that while he could be “happy” here with her living an ordinary life there’d always be a part of him wanting more.

Still, having this additional time helps each of them find clarity and begin to resolve some of their worries and anxieties. Even if they had “more time” in the more conventional sense, they may never have been able to speak plainly but given the enforced constraints of the time loop in which they quickly run out of other things to do and are more or less forced to talk to each other, they are all able to come to some kind of accommodation with what’s been bothering them. The two male guests are able to clear the air after an argument, the writer comes to a new appreciation of his characters thanks to his own sense of despair being trapped in the loop, and Mikoto realises she’ll have to let her boyfriend go in the hope that he’ll circle back around to her in time. 

The complexities involved are unlike those in Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes given that time constantly resets so the only point of consistency is the initial position of each person though the infinite quality of the looping provokes an additional layer of existential questioning as each of the various protagonists is forced to ask if they’re really moving on with their lives or even notice that time is indeed flowing. The clue that something is continuing to move lies in the differing levels of snowfall in each of the loops hinting at the increasing depths of their despair as they realise that not even death might free them from the maddening cycle of repetition while accepting they’ll have to work together to figure out what’s going on and how to escape the loop. The farcical humour soon gives way to a more poignant sense of reflection but also to a renewed joy and excitement that the future might actually be fun too and maybe it’s less scary to go there than be quite literally stuck in the present for all of eternity.

River screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)