The Stairway to the Distant Past (遙かな時代の階段を, Kaizo Hayashi, 1995)

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If The Most Terrible Time in My Life was channeling Nikkatsu Noir, Stairway to the Distant Past (遙かな時代の階段を, Harukana Jidai no Kaidan wo) sees Hayashi channel Fukasaku for a full-on confrontation with the legacies of the post-war era just as PI Maiku (Masatoshi Nagase) is forced to confront and attempt to cure the corrupted legacies of his own origins all while trying to save the city of Yokohama from drifting off to “another hell.” This time shooting in colour, Hayashi conjures a sense of mythic dread in the purple haze that hangs over a hidden city and the eerie blue of the path to get there.

But before all that, Maiku has fallen on such hard times his beloved car’s been repossessed and he’s stuck finding lost dogs for wealthy yet eccentric clients. Meanwhile, leader of New Japs gang Kanno (Shiro Sano) is running for political office while two of his underlings decide to freelance in order to take over the lucrative river trade which no one, not even the Taiwanese gang otherwise apparently in the ascendent, has ever dared to touch in fear of the mythic “White Man” who’s controlled the area since the post-war era with a ruthless efficiency that has seen any man challenge him not live to tell the tale. In the midst of it all is bigoted, and apparently pretty corrupt, policeman Nakayama (Akaji Maro) who first blackmails Maiku into helping him investigate a theft and smuggling ring on the river then apparently makes a deal with the White Man’s underlings who in turn blackmail him over his gambling debts but also claim they can make him chief of police if he chooses to play along.

Nakayama is a symbol of the rot in the contemporary city though he is in fact merely spineless, greedy, unpleasant and prejudiced. He asks Maiku for help because he’s hamstrung by the rules of policing which prevent him from doing the nefarious things he asks Maiku to do all of which leads to some pretty tragic consequences and a pair of orphaned children. The New Japs are perhaps a sign of further corruption still to come as Kanno tries to go legit as a politician but only as a means of increasing his influence and earnings. 

The river becomes a kind of nexus, the shore line between contemporary Japan and the “distant past” of the post-war era. Nakayama discovers that no one is technically policing it because it’s outside of everyone’s jurisdiction, while the White Man seems to have been in a position of unassailed power for half a century. As he later says, he’s the only one “living in the past” and perhaps quite literally so as Maiku has to transcend a literal stairway while guided by some kind of local prophet in order to travel to his world and finally risk his life to confront him. At the same time, Maiku is threatened by his own point of origin in the unexpected return of his mother, a now middle-aged stripper known as Dynamite Sexy Lily (Haruko Wanibuchi), who abandoned him and his sister and when he was just a child. 

Her name, along Maiku’s own, are perhaps hangovers from the Occupation era now even more out of place in a changed Japan. Making full use of the colour palate, Hayashi repeatedly flashes back to a pair of Lily’s red shoes as if signalling the unreality of the hidden city and the superimposition of past and present. His flashbacks to the late 1940s echo the cinematography of Fukasaku’s jitsuroku epics with their frenetic chases through black markets, but towards the conclusion the canted angles make it through to our era too and most particularly in the White Man’s lair, a blue-tinged industrial labyrinth that recalls the post-apocalyptic visions of a city still in ruins.

“Yokohama’s changed a lot,” Lily is told on her return and in fact several times after that. She likes it a little better now, the White Man no so much complaining that this city no longer has a place for him as if foreseeing his own eclipse and the oncoming end of an era. But then again, perhaps only the names have changed. All we’re left with is new gangsters with no code, and the White Man did at least stick to the rules even if he did so with ruthless authority. As for Maiku, his passage to the underworld seems to have brought him new clarity. His outfit now a little more sophisticated and mature, less an affectation borne of watching too many movies than an expression of himself. Nevertheless, Yokohama remains a small-town city, a cosy place with a generally friendly and easy going population albeit one with darkness hovering around the edges.

The Stairway to the Distant Past screens 18th/19th October at Japan Society New York.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Most Terrible Time in My Life (我が人生最悪の時, Kaizo Hayashi, 1994)

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A Yokohama PI finds himself investigating a case of tragic brotherhood against the backdrop of a burgeoning gang war in Kaizo’s Hayashi’s retro crime movie The Most Terrible Time in my Life (我が人生最悪の時, Waga Jinsei Saiaku no Toki). In the first of three films featuring detective / cinema projectionist Maiku Hama (yes, that is his real name), Hayashi harks back to the Nikkatsu borderless action films of the 1960s along with classic noir while also exploring contemporary attitudes towards those not born in Japan. 

The force destabilising the local equilibrium is a gang that calls itself the “New Japs” and was founded by Zainichi Koreans who had acquired Japanese citizenship and now accepts members from other nations colonised by Japan who’ve also naturalised. The implication is that they’re agitating because the society still doesn’t fully accept them, something echoed by Maiku’s (Masatoshi Nagase) first client, a mister Kim, who says the police aren’t interested in his case because he’s a foreigner while when he actually encounters him Lieutenant Nakayama (Akaji Maro) does indeed make some quite prejudiced remarks. Hanging out in a mahjong parlour, Maiku comes to the aid of the waiter, Hai Ping (Yang Hai-Ping), newly arrived from Taiwan when he’s hassled by a racist customer noticing that the waiter’s actually carrying a knife under his shirt and might be about to ruin his life. 

Maiku loses a finger in the process (they sew it back on later), leaving Hai Ping to show up at his office with an improbably large amount of money Maiku refuses and then agrees to take when he hires him to find his brother De Jian (Hou Te-Chien) who came to Japan two years previously and has been missing ever since. Hai Ping’s relationship with De Jian speaks to Maiku because he’s also caring for his 16-year-old sister, their parents being absent from their lives just as Hai Ping and his brother were abandoned and then drifted into gang crime as a means of survival. He discovers that De Jian has married a Japanese woman of Chinese descent who like them was separated from her family which explains why she doesn’t speak any Chinese but was trotted out in a cheongsam as an exotic beauty when she was a sex worker which is how De Jian met her and got himself into trouble with gang when they ran away together. 

They are all in their way displaced people trying to get a foothold in Yokohama but finding varying degrees of success. A turf war is apparently about to break out between the Taiwanese and Hong Kong gangs, though we never actually see the one from Hong Kong only the New Japs and the Taiwanese who don’t actually fight but engage in vendettas with Hai Ping who is actually ordered to kill his own brother to prove his loyalty and atone for his crime. Maiku figures this out quite quickly and again tries to stop new his friend from making a huge mistake but not even he can prevent the fatalistic inevitability of the collision of all these competing honour codes and the implosion of a more literal kind of brotherhood in the face of that represented by the gang. 

Despite the film’s title, which in a meta touch flips around on the marquee of the cinema where Maiku has his office which is currently screening The Best Years of Our Lives, Maiku will have some far worse times in his life in subsequent films but the Yokohama we encounter here is a lived-in neighbourhood with its collection of quirky characters and strange goings on. The tone is humorous and ironic as Maiku’s friends have to chase a dog to get his finger back or Maiku’s taxi driver friend reads magazines while driving and changes hats in line with his role, but it has an underlying noirish sense of sadness for the world’s cruelty in the unfolding tragedies Maiku is powerless to prevent. Shooting in a crisp black and white, Hayashi pays tribute to Borderless action with a cameo from Jo Shishido as Maiku’s father figure while allowing Maiku to inhabit a world slightly out of time or existing only in the movies in which detectives are always hardboiled and the only way to be happy is to abandon all your hopes and dreams before the world can destroy them.

The Most Terrible Time in My Life screens 12th/18th October at Japan Society New York.

Original trailer (No subtitles)

Circus Boys (二十世紀少年読本, Kaizo Hayashi, 1989)

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“There’s bad cheating and good cheating,” according to a little boy who will later become “a magician of words and juggler of lies,” in Kaizo Hayashi’s ethereal fable, Circus Boys (二十世紀少年読本, Nijisseiki shonen Dokuhon). Set in early showa, though the early showa of memory in which many other times intertwine, the film positions the transient site of a circus tent as a roving home for all who need it or are seeking escape from the increasingly heightened atmosphere of the early 1930s. Yet where one of the titular boys chooses to stay and earnestly protect this embattled utopia, his brother chooses to leave and seek his fortune in the outside world.

In fact, it’s Jinta (Hiroshi Mikami) who first becomes preoccupied with their precarious position realising that they’ve been hired to look cute riding the elephant, Hanako, but will soon age out of their allotted role and if they can’t master some other kind of circus trick there may no be a place for them in the big tent. For this reason he’s been training in secret with the idea that he can pass off the skills he’s perfected as innate “talent” so the circus will want to keep him on. Wataru (Jian Xiu), his brother, doesn’t quite approve of his plan. After all, aren’t they essentially tricking the people at the circus into thinking they’re something they’re not? But Jinta assures him it’s like “magic,” the kind that will allow them to stay in their circus home which later comes to seem a place of mysticism or perhaps make-believe on its own.

Thus Wataru walks a fine line. His name means “to cross over,” but he never does. He tries to walk the tightrope before he’s ready and is unbalanced by a storm. Jinta breaks his fall, but also in the process his own ankle. Along with it go his dreams. His foot never heals, and he’ll never fly the trapeze with Wataru like he planned though he keeps his injury a secret from his brother. While Wataru flies with new girl Maria (Michiru Akiyoshi), Jinta becomes a clown, a position he’d previously looked down on and later leaves the circus altogether using his talent for magic and performance to become a snake oil salesman tricking what appear largely to be poor farming communities into buying things like miracle soap and coal that burns for a whole month. This is clearly bad cheating, though he tries to convince himself it’s not while essentially remaking the world around him through his lies. 

But he retains his integrity in other ways. After being press-ganged into a yakuza-like guild of street pedlars, he gently excuses himself when invited to dine with a boss and confronted by an odd situation in which his wife has purchased another young woman to be his “plaything.” In a comment on contemporary patriarchal norms, the young woman is referred to as “Omocha,” which literally means “toy,” but also sounds a like a woman’s name because it begins with the character “O” which was used as a polite prefix for female names until the practice faded out after the war. The boss of course treats her like a doll, and even the wife refers to her as an “erotic instrument” she got as a way of managing her husband’s sexual appetites fearing he’d otherwise be seeing sex workers and bring a sexually transmitted disease into their home (and also possibly because she simply doesn’t want to sleep with herself any more than she has to). Referred to only as Omocha the woman has almost no agency and finds a kindred spirit in Jinta (whose name contains the character for “humanity”) because like him she also escapes the hardships of the world through lies and fantasy. “Can two lies make one big truth?” Jinta muses, breaking the codes of Guild as he prepares to rescue another man’s plaything, only it may be more like she rescues him. 

Meanwhile, Wataru tries to save the circus even after their ringmaster dies with visions of Jinta on his mind. They plan a wall of death to bring back the crowds, but Wataru’s plan backfires with tragic consequences and it becomes clear he can’t protect their circus family even if it brings back veteran trapeze artists Koji (Yukio Yamato) and Yoshiko (Maki Ishikawa) who agree there’s no other place for them out in the big wide world. The sense of the circus as a safe space was echoed on Maria’s arrival when Jinta had cruelly said she looked a little foreign with the ringmaster assuring her that in here they’re all artists and do not classify people in terms of their race, appearance or nationality. Its unreality, however, is reinforced by the constant backing of Wataru’s shadowplay which sometimes shows things the way people wish they were rather than the way they are. Omocha is later seen holding one of these puppets just as she and Jinta decide to die to free themselves of this hellish existence before Jinta’s surrogate brother figure Hiroshi (Shiro Sano) is forced to kill them for breaking the rules of the guild.

In the ambiguities of the final sequence, we might ask ourselves if they are actually dead and the glowing circus tent they see on the horizon is a path to the afterlife or a kind of heaven represented by the utopia to be found inside it. Then again, perhaps Jinta is merely rediscovering the way home, a prodigal son who now understands he already had a place to belong and there is a place to which he can return. The Great Crescent Circus is now the Sun & Crescent Circus, reflecting the way the two boys inhabit the world like and dark, idealism and cynicism, but comprise two parts of one complete whole. Hayashi waxes self-referential, playfully including a reference to his first film in that the movie playing at the cinema Jinta passes is The Eternal Mystery with Black Mask on his way to rescue Bellflower while indulging in an intense nostalgia for a lost world of travelling shows and hidden magic. Shooting in a beautifully balanced monochrome, he lights on scenes of heart-stopping beauty that are somehow poignant and filled with melancholy but ends with a moment of resolution in which, one way or another, Jinta reaches the promised land as he said with magic.

Circus Boys screens 12th October at Japan Society New York.

Hoodlum Soldier (兵隊やくざ, Yasuzo Masumura, 1965)

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The opening voiceover of Yasuzo Masumura’s Hoodlum Soldier (兵隊やくざ, Heitai Yakuza) explains to us that the settlement we’re looking at is effectively a huge prison in the desert inhabited only the Japanese military from which there is no escape. To ram the point home, the camera lingers on the decomposed skeleton of Japanese infantrymen half-buried in the mud only a short distance from the fort’s borders. This is the fate of the soldier, it seems to tell us with nihilistic futility as if in effect all of these men are already dead while imprisoned inside the death cult that is militarism. 

Yet, our heroes will eventually escape. At least that’s how it seems at the end of the film though there are a further eight instalments in this series. A mismatched pair who develop something akin to a sadomasochistic relationship, they each resist this system in opposing ways. “College boy” Arita (Takahiro Tamura) is just waiting out the end of his contract, continually refusing promotions so that he will be discharged at the end of his three-year term and allowed to return to Tokyo a free man. Omiya (Shintaro Katsu), by contrast, is a man who has no real concept of hierarchy or authority. As he later says, he doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want to do and it’s not so much that he resists authority but is simply indifferent to it.

As Arita explains, the the army is a hierarchy that’s founded on violence. The mildest infraction is dealt with through a process of slapping in which those of higher status assert their authority by inflicting violence on those below. We’re told that laws have recently been put in place to regulate the violence implemented as disciple with excessive force now apparently frowned upon leaving this culture of slapping as the only accepted form of judging an action right or wrong though it’s also clear that these rules are not always respected even by those who made them. The very system is then itself corrupt and unfair, which Arita knows and therefore contrives to live outside of it in so much as he does not participate in this chain of violence.

Neither does Omiya but in an opposing way. On joining the unit, he simply does not react to being slapped by his superior officer and in that way makes it clear that he cannot be controlled by violence. He does not fight back, but only uses to violence to oppose what he sees as injustice and it’s this refusal to just accept the unfairness of army life that makes him a thorn in the side to army command. They assign a reluctant Arita as his mentor, much to his chagrin because he fears that Omiya will get him into trouble and damage his chances of making it to his discharge without incident. But the funny thing is that Omiya does submit himself to Arita’s authority precisely because he does not brutalise him and never uses violence as a means of control. Omiya respects Arita, and therefore listens to him when he explains why a particular course of action is disadvantageous to himself and will only result in further violence. 

To Arita, Omiya at times seems like a bullheaded brawler who thinks a fight is over when someone is knocked out or surrenders and is unable to see the potential for reprisals, but he’s smarter than he gives him credit for and the bond between them is quite genuine even at times homoerotic as they each declare they don’t want to be parted from each other seemingly the only two sane men marooned amid the folly of war in Manchuria. Omiya respects Arita because he does not use violence against him, but in other senses perhaps craves it and is willing to inflict violence on himself in order to save Arita from being forced to do so by the system under which they live which would obviously cause him mental anguish. The power dynamics between them shift as the fortunes of the war decline with Arita eventually declaring that Omiya is now his superior and may issue him orders which he will then obey.

The statement may however be ironic in that they are in the process of escaping the hierarchal society by hijacking its most potent symbol, a train. Omiya declares themselves free of it in pointing out that China stretches to the borders of Russia and Europe as if the whole world were now open to them that they are no longer bound by the walls of the literal prison that is the army camp and the symbolic ones of the militarist society ruled by violence. As Arita had pointed out, the camp ran itself like a prison and was akin to a yakuza society with the different factions often at war with each other. Goverened by macho posturing, every transgression must be solved through violence to approve each man’s status with Omiya’s perpetually high in part because he doesn’t really care very much for the hierarchy only for what he sees as righteousness. 

The two men bond with a Japanese sex worker who they realise is just as trapped as they are by the force that underpins militarism, violent patriarchy. She also feels her situation to be futile, that even if she should return to Japan there will no future for her because of her past in sex work while she currently has no more control than they do and is simply pulled around by her employers to wherever the army goes now that the frontlines are in constant flux and the retreat south has begun. Arita and Omiya free themselves by decoupling from the train leaving the sleeping soldiers yet to awake from the cruel spell of militarism inside while they seek freer futures. Our heroes are men who in effect simply choose to remove themselves from an absurd and destructive social order which speaks just as well to the contemporary society of docile salarymen living in a different kind of prison but perhaps no more free than previous generations while tied to a feudalistic, patriarchal social hierarchy. 

Hoodlum Soldier screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

BFI London Film Festival Confirms Complete Programme for 2024

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The BFI London Film Festival returns to cinemas across the city 9th to 20th October. East Asian highlights this year include the latest from Jia Zhangke, Hong Sang-soo, and Tsai Ming-Liang along with the long-awaited return of Mipo O eight years on from Being Good, and Hong Kong LGBTQ+ drama All Shall Be Well.

China

  • Caught by the Tides – Jia Zhangke looks back at the last few decades of Chinese history through the prism of his own work.
  • Youth (Homecoming) – the final instalment in Wang Bing’s documentary series focusing on textile factories in Zhili.

Hong Kong

  • All Shall Be Well – an older woman finds herself in a precarious position when her partner dies suddenly without a will in Ray Yeung’s poignant drama. Review.
  • The Way We Talk – drama from Adam Wong Sau-Ping focussing on three young deaf people navigating contemporary Hong Kong society.

Indonesia

  • Crocodile Tears – intense drama in which the close bond between mother and son operators of a crocodile zoo is disrupted when the son meets a girl.

Japan

  • Black Box Diaries – documentary focussing on Shiori Ito’s quest for justice after being sexually assaulted by a powerful political journalist.
  • The Cats of Gokogu Shrine – latest documentary from Kazuhiro Soda focusing on a shrine in Ushimado that is home to a large number of cats.
  • The Colours Within – latest from Naoko Yamada in which a high school student sees others as colours.
  • Happyend – teenage rebels pursue a passion for electronic music in a near future society.
  • Living in Two Worlds – drama from Mipo O following a child of deaf parents.
  • Manji – new restoration of Yasuzo Masumura’s adaptation of the Tanizaki novel Quicksand.

Singapore

  • Small Hours of the Night – experimental drama drawing on the historic case of a “subversive” tombstone.
  • Stranger Eyes – a couple begin receiving strange videos of themselves after their child is kidnapped in the latest from Yeo Siew Hua (A Land Imagined)

South Korea

  • A Traveler’s Needs – latest from Hong Sang-soo starring Isabelle Huppert as an eccentric French teacher.

Taiwan

  • Abiding Nowhere – 10th instalment in the Walker series in which Lee Kang-sheng relives Xuanzang’s pilgrimage.

Vietnam

  • Don’t Cry, Butterfly – drama in which a woman resorts to witchcraft on learning her husband is having an affair.
  • Viet and Nam – etherial queer romance focussing on two young miners.

The BFI London Film Festival takes place at various venues across the city from 9th to 20th October 2024. Full details for all the films as well as screening times and ticketing information are available via the official website. You can also keep up to date with all the latest news via the festival’s Facebook page, X (formerly Twitter) account,  Instagram, and YouTube channels.

Stuntman (武替道, Herbert Leung & Albert Leung, 2024)

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No matter how good a film is, it’s never worth risking someone’s life. Intellectually, “heartless” action choreographer Sam knows that, but once the camera’s rolling all he seems to see is the take and it’s win at all costs. An homage to the glory days of Hong Kong cinema when no one had ever heard the words health and safety, Herbert Leung & Albert Leung’s Stuntman (武替道) is in its way a paean for those who risked their lives for our entertainment but also for a fading Hong Kong which has the film seems to argue lost it’s bite and become rather defeatist if not docile. 

Those around Sam, played by real life action choreographer Tung Wai, seem to be convinced that “Hong Kong cinema is dead,” largely because, for very good reason, it’s no longer possible to make the kind of films they did back then with crazy, death-defying stunts and visceral action sequences. The opening scenes of the film, set in the mid-1990s, find Sam filming what appears to be a Police Story-style chase through a shopping mall that is supposed to end with a stuntman stand-in jumping from a bridge onto a moving car to catch the bad guy. The stuntman, Wai, is young and experienced so he doesn’t make the jump at which point Sam yells at him and asks his assistant, Kam, to to do it instead. But everything that could go wrong does and Kam is seriously injured because of Sam’s singleminded stubbornness in refusing to film the sequence with a cut which would obviously make it safer even if he argues less exciting. 

Sam evidently does feel a degree of guilt for this, especially as it later has other consequences for his personal life, and retreats from the film industry to run a bone setting clinic with posters for classic Hong Kong films on the wall. It’s a reverence for this bygone era that enables him to bond with Long (Terrance Lau Chun-him), a younger and more modern kind of stuntman who isn’t necessarily afraid of taking risks but understands the importance of on-set safety. Long can’t catch a break with demand for stuntmen falling rapidly precisely because of the concurrent decline of action cinema while his brother keeps pressuring him to give up his dreams and join his logistics company instead. It’s Kit’s delivery firm that becomes an accidental villain representing a Hong Kong that’s lost it’s nerve and is determined to play it safe while Sam’s recklessness perhaps represents the opposite, a dangerous desire to risk it all without considering the consequences for those around him.

But as he’s fond of saying, there’s always a way. It doesn’t have to be either or. The film seems to say, Hong Kong cinema isn’t dead, but now it belongs to those like Long to lead in new directions, modernising rather than fading away and taking the best of the past with it while leaving the more problematic elements behind. Originally swayed by Sam’s charisma, Long is somewhat horrified when he’s confronted with the consequences of his old school approach to filmmaking which includes going guerrilla style in the street without paying for permits with the consequence not only of police with real guns getting involved but innocent civilians trying to go about their day getting caught up in their fake robbery, becoming frightened and even injured in the ensuing panic. 

Meanwhile, he teaches old dog Sam a few new tricks in that being deliberately unpleasant is no longer the way to exert authority on set while ordering takeaway for everyone is a nice gesture that reminds them you’re all part of a team. As much as Long is a kind of surrogate son for Sam, he’s also reminded that there are some relationships that can’t ever really be fully repaired even if it’s not too late to try to remake them. His pain on seeing his soon-to-be-married daughter’s (Cecilia Choi Sze-wan) step-father taking pride of place at the wedding is palpable, but in the end he realises he’ll never really change because he’s a relic of an older Hong Kong unable to move forward into this new era. “No matter how strong the wind, keep the flame alive,” he tells Long talking both about the Spirit of Hong Kong and its cinema while in a flashback sequence reminding his young daughter that the fireworks will forever glow in her heart. Lent a degree of pathos by Tung Wai’s impassioned performance, the film is a true homage to classic Hong Kong action while also insisting that there’s always a way and it’s never too late to reclaim something of what’s been lost.

Stuntman opens in UK cinemas 11th October courtesy of CineAsia

UK trailer (English subtitles)

Gifts from the Kitchen (キッチンから花束を, Hisashi Kikuchi, 2024)

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One of the few places offering Chinese-style home cooking, Fumin had become a home from for many during the 50 years its founder worked her kitchen herself. Fumi Sai has now retired, though welcoming one set of guests a day to her home, but there are many who continue to visit the restaurant under the management of her nephew Kazuyoshi and reminisce over their long years of enjoying not just the cooking but a familial relationship with Fumi herself. 

Collaboration with the clientele is cited by many as a reason Fumi’s restaurant became so popular. After a few years of working as a hairdresser, she decided to open a cafe after a friend remarked it was a shame more people didn’t have the opportunity to taste her cooking. Her first location was a tiny bar-style place with a handful of seats at the counter which of course meant that she was able to build up close relationships through talking directly to her customers. Others describe her cooking style as spontaneous, that she would come up with new dishes just by adding something or other to see how it would taste but she also took hints from customers as well sometimes adding their successful requests to the main menu and allowing them to feel as if they were fully involved in the restaurant. It’s this sense of connection brokered by an exchange of tastes that seems to be integral to the degree of warm feeling many have for the place and for Fumi herself.

Director Kikuchi frequently switches between testimonials from regular customers some going back decades and many remarking on the incongruous sight of Fumi herself, a small woman battling a giant wok in the centre of the kitchen. All these years later and despite the expanded capacity there are always queues to get in while customers claim that there are dishes they might not otherwise care for or actively dislike but that Fumi alone can make appetising. She attributes her skill to her upbringing in a Taiwanese family where her sisters joke their father had a gambling problem and didn’t work but did do most of the family cooking. She picks up new ideas on trips to the island nation and on one occasion visits a Taiwanese woman to experience more home cooking who also points out that cooking is imbued with emotion. Fumi’s own enthusiasm and love of the craft finds its way in, delivering care and attention to her customers who just as often may be looking for somewhere to belong as much as a good meal.

The film otherwise does not pry too much into Fumi’s personal life, never stepping too far outside the restaurant save for exploring her relationship with nephew Kazuyoshi and three younger sisters as well as her soon to be 100-year-old mother who was responsible for the restaurant’s constant supply of Taiwanese sausages. Food is a family affair, the now elderly women recalling the dishes they remember from their childhood and putting on a large spread for New Year. Yet the restaurant is also a kind of home for Fumi, one she admits she was reluctant to leave. She’d never considered a successor, but later came round to the idea of entrusting it to her nephew and head chef. 

As other guests remark, food a means of building body and soul. The nourishing wholesomeness of Fumi’s cooking seems to have a positive effect on those who visit the restaurant which was often home to various celebrities from the illustrators and designers of the surrounding area to the top stars of the day such as Tora-san himself, not to mention sustaining her mother to the ripe old age of almost a century. Guests describe her as a radiant character, like someone in an animation, an improbably small woman filled with a warmth that draws others to her offering comfort and connection through food but also an artist whose medium was cooking creating a series of unique dishes that couldn’t be found anywhere else yet quickly offering to teach anyone who wanted to know how to make them. A tribute to a bygone era, Kikuchi captures a sense of nostalgia for simple pleasures but equally of pleasure in the moment for as Fumi says to eat is to live.

Gifts from the Kitchen screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Till the Day I Can Laugh about My Blues (ブルーを笑えるその日まで, Karin Takeda, 2023)

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A lonely, isolated young woman finds refuge in a new friendship only to worry it won’t survive summer’s end in Karin Takeda’s gentle adolescent drama, Till the Day I can Laugh About My Blues (ブルーを笑えるその日まで, Blue Wo Waraeru Sono Hi Made). Opening with a title card reading “to you and me back in the days,” the film has an autobiographical sensibility and boundless empathy for the kids who feel they don’t fit in, that no one notices them, and their lives will never we worth living.

You can tell that Ayako (Miyu Watanabe) is depressed by her opening dialogue, “I don’t like this weather,” said to perfectly blue skies. She says everything in her life is blue, and is so shy that she literally can’t speak. Her class are reading Night on the Galactic Railroad, and though she spends the entire time reading the line that she’s figured out is hers is put off when another student heckles her because of her quiet voice and just stands there gripping the paper while her teacher prompts her with the previous line. He then just moves on to the next student, but more out exasperation than empathy, doing nothing much else to help her. 

It’s not clear if Ayako was always this way or if something led to her becoming withdrawn but the other kids evidently regard her as weird while her former best friend Yuri (Rin Marumoto) has joined up with two popular girls who appear to be bullying her. Ayoko’s parents aren’t much help either, unfairly comparing her to her sister who wants to be a doctor all of which only makes Ayako feel even more useless and inadequate. It’s only when a mysterious old lady gifts her a kaleidoscope that Ayako’s outlook starts to improve and she befriends a another young girl she meets on the rooftop of the school who has a kaleidoscope too.

In discussing the passage of Night on the Galactic Railroad, which is about a friendship between two boys which ends abruptly in tragedy, a teacher asks what the milky way is made of before explaining that if you look at it through a microscope it’s full of tiny stars. Ayako too begins to see tiny stars while looking through the kaleidoscope, refracting her world and beginning to see the beauty of the light between the trees even if she’s cautioned that the patterns are pretty because you never see the same one twice. In any case, Ayako finds a kindred spirit in Aina (Sumi Kokona) but also suspects she may actually be the ghost of a girl who took her own life by jumping off the roof of the school, so their friendship can’t last past the start of the new term.

Like Giovanni in the story, Ayako has to figure out how to go on alone not just without Aina but in her complicated relationship with Yuri too who tells her she doesn’t like and hanging out with mean girls Natsumi and Nao but still joins in when they make fun of her. Some gentle words from a librarian who knows what’s she going through all too well remind her of the point of the story, that the boys still go on travelling together as Campanella still exists in Giovanni’s heart. But before all that she still ponders blowing it all to hell, saving the school goldfish but otherwise letting the place burn while wondering if she’ll ever be able to grow up. 

Shot with an etherial whimsicality, Takeda shoots Ayako’s world in shades of loneliness in which her literal inability to speak is almost a reaction to the fact no one listens. Pondering the fate of a goldfish that died because of another student’s neglect she laments that no one’s kind to you until die, a comment that later seems ironic but echoes her sense of alienation. She thinks her friendship with Aina is like a dream, but like she says not necessarily one they need to wake up from because whichever way you look at it their friendship is “real”, saving each of them and giving them strength to survive until the day they can laugh about their blues smiling at a memory rather than feeling sad and alone while looking for the tiny stars hidden in the fabric of the universe.

Till the Day I Can Laugh about My Blues screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Tatsumi (辰巳, Hiroshi Shoji, 2023)

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The titular Tatsumi (辰巳) laments that there used to be a line. They used to be better than this. But his incredibly duplicitous boss just laughs at him and says they can’t live on honour and humanity anymore. In any case, there didn’t seem to be much honour or humanity in Tatsumi’s decidedly unglamorous life of petty gangsterdom even before everything went to hell but despite his cynicism and seeming indifference he is the last holdout for some kind of gangster nobility.

Though he has a cover job as a fisherman, Tatsumi’s (Yuya Endo) main hustle is as a cleanup agent getting rid of inconvenient bodies for various gangs. He finds himself mixed up in local drama when a pair of crazed, sadistic gangsters become aware someone’s been skimming their meth supply. They torture and kill a suspect who leads them to another, garage owner Yamaoka (Ryuhei Watabe) who is married to an old flame of Tatsumi’s, Kyoko (Nanami Kameda), while her younger sister, Aoi (Kokoro Morita), is also in trouble with another rival ganger, Goto (Takenori Goto), on the suspicion of having pinched some of his meth supply. Tatsumi ends up agreeing to mediate for Aoi, gets much more than he bargained for when the crazed Ryuji (Tomoyuki Kuramoto) murders Yamaoka and Kyoko and Aoi becomes a secondary target after catching him in the act.

Ryuji doesn’t seem to care about tying up loose ends, but just wants Aoi dead for reasons of total vengeance. It’s his uncontrolled violence that has disrupted the equilibrium of the local gangster society though the proposed solution is simply more violence in allowing him to kill the people he wanted to kill in the hope he’ll then calm down and stop which seems unlikely. Like many similarly themed yakuza dramas, Ryuji’s violence appears to have a sexually charged quality and there is also a hint of a potential relationship between Ryuji and Tatsumi’s boss whom he calls “Skipper.” 

Ryuji also has a slightly less crazy sibling in an echo of the relationship Tatsumi once had with his own brother who died of a drugs overdose having become involved in petty crime. The implication is that Tatsumi gave up on his brother and was relieved when he died but also that he harbours a degree of guilt for preventing him ending up the way he did and not trying harder to save him. That may partly be why he decides to help Aoi, seeing echoes of the brother he couldn’t save while she is also friendless alone having unwisely made enemies of almost everyone because of her outrageous behaviour and reckless disregard for authority. Aoi has an unpleasant habit of spitting at people who upset her while otherwise adopting a devil-may-care attitude with those minded to kill her. If she did skim from Goto’s stash, it cost the life of another falsely accused underling. 

Despite himself, Tatsumi becomes increasingly determined to help Aoi even though or perhaps because he assumes neither of them is likely to survive this crisis. Desperately trying to stay one step ahead he plays one side against the other and tries to find the best angle for escape while knowing there probably isn’t one. Shoji sets the tale across a series of moribund jetties and shacks laying bare the busy emptiness of this world with only the sea beyond. “Emotion will make you fail,” Tatsumi tells Aoi while describing dead bodies as just things and trying to keep his cool when needled by Ryuji or another dangerous and violent gangster. 

Death and life by extension appear to be meaningless and of little value. Tatsumi does perhaps close a circle, or maybe more than one, as the last principled gangster who thought there ought to be a line between what they do and greedy thuggery only to find there never was one and his determination not to cross it is the kind of sentimentality that can get a man killed. Making good use of slow dissolves, Shoji revels in a retro aesthetic in a tale of moral compromise and redemption as Tatsumi determines to safeguard Aoi not only from her own reckless impulses but the meaningless emptiness of the gangster life and the toxic legacy of violence and fallacy of vengeance as a salve for the wounds of the soul.

Tatsumi screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Promised Land (プロミスト・ランド, Masashi Iijima, 2024)

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An avalanche approaches a small town in Japan, a harbinger of change in which the centuries old practice of bear hunting has finally been put to rest by government directive. The buried question at the centre of Masashi Iijima’s Promised Land (プロミスト・ランド) is who exactly that land has been promised to and what the rights and responsibilities surrounding it are in the midst of a changing society in which there may longer be a place for the hunter.

Some might argue that there shouldn’t be, and it has to be said this is one ancient tradition that’s increasingly hard to defend. Set in 1983, the film finds the “Matagi”, or traditional hunter, already all but extinct even before the head of the local association (which appears to only have five members) calls them all together and tells them the hunt is off for that year due to a preservation order by local government. One of the younger members, Rei (Kanichiro), immediately objects sensing that if the hunt is canceled this year it will never be held again. He says he thinks it’s unfair as it’s industry encroaching on the forests that has led to a decrease in the bear population rather than overhunting while another of the men takes constant pops at rich men from the city who come in and treat hunting like a hobby failing to abide by any of their rules such as not shooting mothers with their cubs.

The hunters seem to think of themselves as keeping nature in check, “culling” the bears to keep the mountain safe though there’s no sign that they are any real danger to humans and anyway their numbers are now depleted. There doesn’t seem to be any other way to defend this practice outside of tradition, but it’s evidently something very important to Rei, important enough to constitute a large part of his identity. Thus he alone is determined to defy the order and kill a bear anyway even though he knows there’s a good chance of going to prison for illegal hunting and being branded a poacher. 

Rei ropes in Nobu (Rairu Sugita), a childhood friend who apparently owes a debt to him having received a blood transfusion from him when he was four and now deeply resents having that fact wielded against him all these years later. Unlike Rei, Nobu is a much more modern young man whose father makes fun of him for wearing fashionable clothes and perfume. He hates working on his father’s farm and longs to escape the moribund small town and its brutal traditions such as the bear hunt he’s been roped into since birth just because like many things his ancestors always did it. While hunting for a bear, the pair have an opportunity to talk, Rei admitting that hunting and the gun represent for him the essence of the man he once was while reeling from the breakdown of his marriage to a woman he failed to support when she failed to fit in to village life. He recounts the story of a banker he did some work for who says that he envies the freedom of his life as a landscape gardener while he sits in a prison all day counting other people’s money but when he asks him why he does’t give it a try the man just backtracks and starts making excuses.

Rei seems to be wondering what true freedom means and perhaps feels he doesn’t really have it, asserting dominance over the mountain by killing the bear to regain control over his life. He calls the bears a gift from the mountain god as if they existed only for him to kill, though it’s difficult to see why his tradition or need for raw masculinity is worth more than a living creature’s life. When he eventually kills a bear, the film hovers on the ritualistic quality of the act as Nobu and Rei bend over the body, wafting it with leaves, and skinning its pelt before drinking its blood. This is an act of cruelty more of necessity. They have no need of the pelt or meat, do not make a major part of their income from selling them, and the bear did not threaten them. This is in short a tradition that can safely be left by the wayside, but by the film’s conclusion the two men seem to have switched positions Rei now pondering leaving the village while Nobu seemingly has a renewed desire to stay and preserve these old traditions. Perhaps it is his promised land after all, or else was intended to exist for the bears as creatures of nature free from the destructive forces of humanity.

Promised Land screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)