The Box Man (箱男, Gakuryu Ishii, 2024)

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Those who obsess over the Box Man, become the Box Man, in Gakuryu Ishii’s adaptation of the Kobo Abe novel. Yet the unnamed hero’s problem is that he feels himself unable to become “the real thing” and is thereafter trapped inside a labyrinth while forever seeking an exit. It’s never clear to him, or to us, if the cardboard box he wears is really just that or something imbued with a supernatural power that actively masks his identity even from himself.

Tellingly, the only named character is a woman, Yoko (Ayana Shiramoto), who seems to exist outside of the box. She appears to be free, confident, aware of all she is and apparently certain of her identity. The Box Man, or perhaps “a” Box Man, meanwhile, is known only as “myself,” a former photographer (Masatoshi Nagase) who almost pities those who target him in memory of the Box Man who once infected and cursed him to the same fate. Watching the city through the tiny letterbox slit, he remains a step away from our world and later refers to the box as the entrance to some other place suggesting that it’s really we who are trapped on the other side of the cardboard.

He advances something similar when he in effect turns the box inside out, walling himself inside a single room by covering the windows and doors to box out the world but not really finding escape. Still, others seem to covet the title of Box Man, those also without concrete identities but going by names such as Fake Doctor (Tadanobu Asano) and the General (Koichi Sato), both of whom are apparently interested in the Box Man and tracking his every move. It seems they believe there can only be one real, authentic Box Man allowed, but become increasingly uncertain which of them is “real”. The notes the Box Man is keeping become key to his identity, but like a metaphor for the unseen hand of fate, one points out that perhaps someone else has written them out for them, Myself lamenting that the author has written a better version of himself than he ever could. 

There is something undeniably absurd about the way the Box Men scuttle around, occasionally sticking their ams out of the box’ flaps while arguing over the true identify of the Box Man despite having described the mystery as boring. The Fake Doctor seems to want to destroy the box, as if he wanted to obliterate it perhaps in an attempt to destroy the image of a mask to avoid the suggestion that he has one himself, while it remains unclear if this would free the other Box Man or trap him further while Fake Doctor would take his place. When Myself killed the Box Man before him, a mask may have been what he wanted. A photographer sick of seeing the world and longing to be free of it, to shed himself of an identity he no longer wanted only to search for it once again even as others try to crush it from without. 

The Box Man comes to the conclusion that it’s the world that should be boxed away, but of course it’s all the same. When he remarks that Yoko, after leaving their sanctuary, did not really escape but has simply gone to a deeper level, it’s reflective if his own desire to find meaning in a meaningless world. He claims that he dreams of a world yet to begin but is finally confronted perhaps by anonymity in witnessing a row full of Box Men apparently all also devoid of personality which might in an ironic sense tell him who is if only in reflection. 

Strange and surreal, Ishii lends an edge of absurdity to the strange existence of the Box Man while perhaps aligning the letterbox frame of his open window to that of the cinema screen and the artificial reality that surrounds us. In any case, it seems the other world the Box Man longed to enter was that of the self, his interior life expanding inside the box as a small galaxy he has somehow become lost inside, no longer able to see beyond himself but trapped inside an “exitless black hole” looking for a path to authenticity away from this “fantasy” in which everything is “fake” save the potential salvation of a distant guiding light.

The Box Man screens in New York July 13 as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Six Singing Women (唄う六人の女, Yoshimasa Ishibashi, 2023)

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“Don’t take any detours,” the hero of Yoshimasa Ishibashi’s Six Singing Women (唄う六人の女, Utau Rokunin no Onna) is warned by his partner though it’s advice he’ll end up not taking if not entirely of his own volition. Even so, it may be that it’s the society that has gone off track, poisoning the environment and losing respect for the land that has always nurtured and protected us. Part eco-drama, Ishibashi’s surreal odyssey into an etherial realm of nature and spirits has its share of eeriness but also a kind of comfort in the embrace of the natural world.

Only that’s not how it first seems to Shin (Yutaka Takenouchi). After receiving a phone call to inform him his estranged father has passed away, he leaves his partner Kasumi (Rena Takeda) at home in Tokyo and travels into the mountains with the intention of selling his father’s house. But when he arrives, he finds himself in a place stranger than your average remote country hamlet and after signing a contract with the slimy Uwajima (Takayuki Yamada) is kidnapped by a band of mysterious, apparently mute women. While he is looked after in the house. Uwajima is tied up in the shed and tortured.

As we later discover Shin and Uwajima are embodiments of light and dark, a protector of nature and its destroyer. When Shin had asked him what Uwajima’s company, which has also bought up all the neighbours’ land, plans to do with his father’s house he tells him they just want to protect nature but his answer is of course ironic. He represents a corporate entity that cares nothing at all for the mountain but is simply looking to make some money by dumping potentially harmful stuff where no one will find it. Realising that his father had been on some kind of quest to stop the corporate take over, Shin begins to investigate his death and the wider fate of the mountain taking him ever deeper into the woods. 

What he finds there is a another realm, a place of spirits that seems somehow sacred if dangerous. Unable to speak, the women appear to have a message a for him but it’s only after reconnecting with his father and accepting his legacy that Shin finally begins to understand. His mother had told him that his father had been “possessed by the mountains,” and there may be something in Shin’s mania as if the spirits had indeed taken him over aside from merely captivating him. Yet despite his newfound desire to protect these women as embodiments of a natural order, he is powerless to do so alone and especially against the destructive corporatism of Uwajima.

Ishibashi strays into folk horror territory in that the strange place Shin finds himself in has the trappings of a cult. He witnesses strange rituals and is prevented from leaving a place he cannot understand by the women who cannot speak to him nor explain themselves. Bees, spiders, frogs and snakes surround him with an air of malice but are perhaps trying to protect, both him and themselves or else realising Shin is no threat to them but a prodigal son returning to accept and claim the legacy he sought to reject from a misunderstood father like him possessed by the mountains. Finally he finds the answer to the question his father asked him, in the woods exactly where he said it would be. 

His solution runs contrary to that of the estate agent who encouraged him to sell his father’s home, that the world is what it is as if it could not be changed and resisting destructive capitalism is merely foolish when it would be better to take the money and run. Ishibashi rams him message home with his haunting capture of the woods as a dreamlike idyll though not without its sense of darkness while lending an air of surreality to Shin’s ethereal quest with all its owl women and inscrutable ritual that somehow hint at a natural order of things that is deeper and older than our society and with which we tussle at our peril for nature is never quite as passive as we thought for all the compassion it may otherwise hold for its prodigal sons and daughters yet to return to the fold.

Six Singing Women screens in New York July 12 as part of of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Between the White Key and the Black Key (白鍵と黒鍵の間に, Masanori Tominaga, 2023)

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The hero of Masanori Tominaga’s Between the White Key and the Black Key (白鍵と黒鍵の間に, Hakken to Kokken no Aida ni) looks up and declares that it’s not Jazz if you can’t the stars, quoting Charlie Parker but mired in artistic compromise amid the heady air of Bubble-era Ginza. Adapted from the 2008 memoir of jazz pianist Hiroshi Minami, the film’s surrealist conceit sees two eras overlap confronting a jaded bandman with his naive, earnest younger self while looking for a path back towards “real” jazz.

The intentionally confusing opening sequences introduces us to Hiroshi (Sosuke Ikematsu), dressed in white, a young man with romantic jazz dreams slumming it in a moribund cabaret bar, and Minami dressed in a smooth black and wearing sunshades now the top pianist at the area’s most prestigious bar. Chaos ensues when Hiroshi, intimidated by a recently released yakuza, innocently plays his request of the Godfather Waltz without realising that the song is prohibited, only the local yakuza chairman is allowed to request it. Minami is, meanwhile, the only musician apparently allowed to play the boss’ favourite tune, but it’s a double-edged sword. He’s come to hate his life of soulless playing and feels trapped as the chairman’s favourite while secretly plotting his escape to study real jazz in America.

Irritated by the attitude of American guest singer Lisa, Minami explains that the musicians are really just decoration. At the height of the Bubble-era the bars are full of people with too much money looking to show it off. No one really cares about jazz or even about music so no one pays them any attention. Minami has long since got used to this, but is also crushed by his sense of artistic inauthenticity and declares himself sick of making music that doesn’t come from his soul.

Perhaps the rest is mere fever dream, but in the cyclical turn of events Hiroshi’s godfather faux pas comes back to haunt him, stalked by the recently released yakuza who follows him like a ghost while simultaneously dealing with the chairman’s apparent crisis which may send him abroad and change the local hierarchy forever. In the increasing surreality, the two periods overlap and influence each other as Minami is confronted by artistic compromise and forced to quite literally confront himself in a dirty alleyway while his opposite number claims that they already are in America and have been for some time.

To that extent it’s Minami who is caught between the black and white keys, looking for the sweet spot between the ability to play real jazz and the economic and social realities of his life as a Ginza bandman suffering with what he calls “bar musician disease”. His former mentor had told him that he needed to learn to play more “nonchalantly” which is advice somewhat difficult to understand but perhaps implies that Hiroshi Minami needs to learn to let himself go, to struggle less with anxiety and just play as if it were as easy as breathing. To that extent, what Minami has discovered is the wrong kind of nonchalance. Told that his job is only really to sit there and add to the false sense jazzland sophistication, he’s lost himself between the gangsters and the high rollers and is at a crossroads of an artistic crisis that maybe about to fracture his mind.

Tominaga does his best to capture an anarchic sense of a world bent out of shape and filled with surrealistic absurdity as Minami seems to see events replay with different outcomes and encounters various bizarre incidents around the back alleys of Ginza clubland themselves an incongruous mix of high class sophistication and sleaziness in which gangsters still rule the roost. Consequently the other players in Minami’s psycho drama remain largely cyphers, themselves part of the furniture in this weird mental landscape in which violence appears cartoonishly and in silence, never really connecting and irony rules in the petty gangsters who see the the Godfather Waltz as their song. In any case, Minami seems to recover himself, partly thanks to a vision of his oblivious mother retuning to him something that was lost, in the simple act of sitting down to play as if it were the beginning once again, or perhaps it really is, more acquainted with the music of his soul.

Between the White Key and the Black Key screens in New York July 10 as the opening night of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Radio Queen (ラヂオの女王, Shigeo Yagura, 1935)

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The conflict between warring neighbours of differing dispositions deepens when their children want to get married in Shigeo Yagura’s modernising comedy, Radio Queen (ラヂオの女王, Radio no Oujo). Against a backdrop of rising militarism, the film explores a generational shift in a new world increasingly dominated by mass media that quite literally speaks to the young not only through the newly established ubiquity of wireless radio but the talkie too leaving the old somewhat left behind confused by the rapid motion of progress.

In fact, the film opens with Kawamura, owner of a factory that makes aeroplanes that can’t fly, being woken up by his neighbours performing radio taiso callisthenics exercises. Kawamura dislikes radio on a conceptual level, though his dislike of it may also have a slightly subversive quality given the underlying element of coercive conformity that sees the nation performatively warm up for another day of national unity and hard work towards the growth of the empire. Then again, Kawamura is the film’s most ridiculous character finally giving a speech that he would be proud to sacrifice his son’s life for the nation by getting him to fly one of their biplanes to China as a kind of publicity stunt.

Publicity stunts are, however, a particular talent for Kingo who has very modern ideas about how to make not only his business but that of his father’s neighbour and frenemy Misome a success. Soon to finish university, Kingo plans to marry Misome’s daughter, Kimiko (Sachiko Chiba), who is currently working as a primary school teacher though both father fiercely object to the union. Kingo puts the kibosh on the idea of eloping mainly for practical reasons that they will be unable to support themselves financially on a running start but also for reasons of filial piety which probably do correspond with the censorship demands of the time. One of his ideas for winning over Misobe is to help him make his business of selling cough sweets for stage performers more successful through modern advertising and publicity techniques. Though originally rejecting his ideas, Misobe often takes his advice but pretends it was all his own idea further souring their relationship.

In any case, he wants to Kimiko to marry his chosen suitor, Kyuichi, who is training to become a pharmacist but also struggles with maths and has secretly been embezzling money in contrast to Kingo who is much more organised than his own father and has real business talent. Misome describes Kimiko’s job as a “hobby” and regards it as something she’s doing to keep busy until she gets married, a notion perhaps encouraged by social expectation given that it involves taking care of children which places her in a quasi-maternal position. She could presumably support herself, but the option is never given to her as even she tries to chivvy Kingo along by warning him that if he fails to win her father over she’ll end up married to the pharmacist as if she had no say in it at all. 

In any case, in a rather strange turn of events her singing in the school is heard by a film crew who’ve just had their lead actress pinched by a rival studio. They cast her in the part of a Christian nun who is also a schoolmistress but in contradictory fashion is involved in a romance which scandalises Kimiko and leads her to walk off set refusing to be exploited by the unscrupulous directors insisting that no such thing had been mentioned to her when she agreed to take the job. But it’s this that finally propels her to become the “Radio Queen,” taking a much more wholesome role singing nursery rhymes and reading fairytales for children across the nation through the new medium of the wireless. Kingo does not object to her fame and sees it as a positive sign that may cause his father’s opinion of her to change for the better despite his dislike of the device, though he does later become put out that the demands of her career leave her less time to spend with him.

In that sense, it’s also “modernity” that disrupts their relationship along with changing gender and social roles while there is also a necessarily problematic element of then largely unregulated mass media. An unscrupulous consumerism seems to have taken hold with the foolish Kawamura also addicted to collecting “antiques” many of which are akin to religious relics of an age of modernity. We see a man drop a piece of wood on the floor outside which is later picked up by dealers and sold as a piece of the propeller of the first of ever plane which Misome jokingly offers to buy for Kawamura in the hope his aircraft might actually fly one day. On entering an antiques fair, they’re confronted by an object claimed to be the clasp from Rockerfeller’s wallet echoing some of Misome’s frequent allusions to his success as a self-made man while Kawamura conversely frequently alludes to Mussolini as if making plain his own slightly priggish attachment to militarism. 

Misome concedes that Kingo is a bright and promising young man and objects to him only on the grounds that he is Kawamura’s son and he prefers the pharmacist because he thinks it more advantageous to himself before realising what sort of a man Kyuichi is really is. In the end, they’re both bamboozled by mass media when Kimiko rushes to the airfield where Kingo is about to take off having petulantly agreed to the test flight after arguing with her. As she petitions the already in motion plane, he manages to pull her up into the passenger seat while the radio announcer announces their engagement live on air granting it a new legitimacy neither of the fathers can really argue with. The film ends with them flying off into a blue sky which suggests a victory for youth and freedom even if it seems a little too simple leaving the older generation behind on the ground with only the wireless for comfort.

Homunculus (ホムンクルス, Takashi Shimizu, 2021)

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Is the world we see merely a self-created illusion, or do we each share a concrete, objective “reality”? It’s a question which seems to obsess the antagonist of Takashi Shimizu’s manga adaptation Homunculus (ホムンクルス), though in the end he’ll perhaps find the answer is less clear cut than he’d been willing to believe. “When you look at the other person you can create the world” is the lesson he’s eventually given by his test subject, echoing the film’s somewhat trite message that it’s connection which gives life meaning, a willingness to see and be seen having moved past unresolved trauma in pursuit of the true self. 

This is something the hero, Susumu Nokoshi (Go Ayano), has apparently been unwilling to do. Formerly a high flying actuary peddling life insurance, literally putting a price on the lives of others, Susumu now claims to have lost his memory and is living in his car next to a park which is home to the local homeless population. One night, a weird young man with strange, staring, goldfish-like eyes knocks on his window and makes him a bizarre job offer. For whatever reason, Susumu allows himself to be convinced by this decidedly odd young man he’s only just met to let him drill a hole in his head which he claims will unlock untold abilities and perhaps even return some of his missing memories. 

Manabu Ito (Ryo Narita), a medical student and the wealthy son of a successful doctor, claims he wants to use the trepanation experiment in order to prove that the world does not exist but is merely a self-created illusion of the human brain. As a result of the operation, Susumu does indeed develop special powers in that he suddenly starts seeing strange things in the middle of Kabukicho. According to Manabu, he’s developed the ability to see the “homunculus” of others, seeing their inner self-image as a reflection of their deeply buried trauma. 

Despite himself, Susumu begins attempting heal the various traumas of the troubled souls he sees but at the same time perhaps oversteps his right to intervene, acting in instinct and compulsion never considering whether not not they actually want their traumas resolved. His first case is that of a violent yakuza whose inner self is a wounded child encased in robot armour, the implication being that he has buried himself in a life of merciless violence in an attempt to mask unresolved childhood guilt. Yet his eventual “freedom” in having faced his younger self entirely ignores the weight of his later years of violent cruelty, as if all of his subsequent “stress” were wiped out in an instant. Susumu’s second case, however, is still more worrying in that is sees him apparently “fix” a young woman’s control and self-esteem issues effectively by raping her while in some kind of trance. 

His own issues meanwhile lead back into his refusal to deal with the painful past, implying his unusual lifestyle is in fact a fugue state born of trauma response. We learn that he was once wealthy and successful but also deeply empty inside, apparently saved from the soul destroying delusion of consumerist fulfilment by a young woman who saw him for what he really was. He resents his new abilities because he is still unwilling to extend the same courtesy to others, trapped in self obsession desperately wanting to be seen but all the while refusing look even as the hole in his head takes the lid off his emotional repression. 

Nevertheless, there’s a curiously homoerotic subtext between the patient and his mad scientist friend whose eventual descent into machiavellian levels of manipulation is never quite convincing even if it perhaps comes from a place of spurned hurt. Manabu’s unresolved traumas are indeed given short shrift and perhaps in themselves fairly banal, failing to live up to his air of strangeness or prove equal to the darkness inherent in his odd obsession with the art of trepanation coupled with his doubts as to the nature of reality. Neither outlandish enough in its surreality nor, ironically enough, willing to engage with its own unpleasantness in its latent misogyny, Homunculus’ central messages of the essentiality of mutual recognition ring somewhat hollow while its heroes remain mired in their own quests for true selfhood in looking for themselves reflected in the eyes of others. 

Trailer (English subtitles)

A Good Lawyer’s Wife (바람난 가족, Im Sang-soo, 2003)

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Sexual repression and rigid patriarchal social codes slowly dissolve a “normal middle class” family in Im Sang-soo’s extremely frank treatise on contemporary gender roles, A Good Lawyer’s Wife (바람난 가족, Baramnan Kajok). The Korean title translating as “adulterous family” perhaps hints at Im’s winder intentions focussed not only on the role of “wife” but each of those within the family unit which is it seems resistant to change even as the society changes around it, the widowed mother-in-law ironically emerging as the most liberated and progressive of them all. 

Hojung (Moon So-ri) may be a good lawyer’s wife, but she’s also quietly dissatisfied eventually drifting into a relationship with a strange teenage neighbour she caught peeping at her in the nude. Her husband Youngjak (Hwang Jung-min), the lawyer, is a poor lover unable to satisfy her sexually while conducting a secret affair with a bohemian artist with whom he is able to have transgressively kinky sex. The couple have a young son, Soo-in, who is adopted and a little insecure worried that his grandmother doesn’t really like him because they aren’t related by blood while the other kids sometimes pick on him at school. Grandma Byunghan (Youn Yuh-jung) meanwhile is also having an affair, contemptuous of Youngjak’s father Changgeun (Kim In-mun) who has just been told he has only a month to live. 

Yet to everyone else the Joos lead “normal middle class life”, words Youngjak later uses unsuccessfully to help a woman get off on charges she otherwise admits. It might be taboo to speak of it, but sexual repression seems to be at the root of all their problems or at least an incompatibility between leading a what is conceived as “normal middle class life” and embracing one’s sexuality. As good lawyer’s wife Hojung remarks to a friend, once you get married “you’re not a woman anymore, you’re really nothing”. As his wife, and as a mother to Sooin, Hojung is no longer perceived as a sexual being by her husband, though as we later discover he remains somewhat passive both with his wife and with his mistress by whom he is penetrated from behind. Hojung meanwhile achieves her only orgasm when positioning herself on top of her inexperienced teenage lover, symbolically if also problematically reclaiming her sexual agency.

Hojung’s rebellion also has an ironic quality in that finally restores her maternity as she experiences what she describes as a miracle pregnancy, pointing at the couple’s sexual incompatibility as the primary reason they were not able to conceive a child. Even so, the film heavily suggests the cruel and unexpected tragedy which later befalls the family is a kind of punishment for the mutual transgressions of husband and wife as they sought the fulfilment denied to them by the constraints of a “normal middle class life” within the confines of a patriarchal marriage. “If your body wants it, give it what it wants” Byunghan eventually offers when meeting with her lover, declaring herself too old to feel guilty or embarrassed for satisfying her sexual desire while openly contemptuous of her husband with whom it seems she had an unhappy life. “Life’s about being truthful to yourself” she explains to her son, finally taking control now freed from marital constraints if ironically immediately considering re-marriage. 

Changgeun meanwhile sings North Korean military songs in the operating theatre and as we eventually realise, has no siblings because his mother and six sisters were all abandoned in North Korea where they died. His father escaped with him alone though it appears they are now estranged and it can be assumed that Changgeun’s drinking habit which eventually leads to the illness which kills him and destroys his marriage is born of a desire to overcome his guilt and trauma. Changgeun’s past too is something which must be repressed, he cannot easily speak of it because of the stigma surrounding his North Korean roots neatly linking back to Youngjak’s work with the families of those still looking for loved ones executed during the war quite literally falling into a mass grave in the film’s opening. All of these buried truths erode the foundations of the traditional family, yet Im seems to suggest perhaps the family in this form at least isn’t worth saving if it only causes people to hurt each other while forced to conform to a series of socially defined roles unable to be their most authentic selves even within a bubble of supposedly unconditional “love”.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Zero (零戦燃ゆ, Toshio Masuda, 1984)

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The Zero Fighter has taken on a kind of mythic existence in a romanticised vision of warfare, yet as Toshio Masuda’s Zero (零戦燃ゆ零戦燃ゆ, Zerosen moyu) implies its time in the spotlight was in fact comparatively short. Soon eclipsed by sleeker planes flown by foreign pilots, the Zero’s glory faded until these once unbeatable fighters were relegated to suicide missions. On one level, the film uses the Zero as a metaphor for national hubris, a plane that ironically flew too close to the sun, but on another can never overcome the simple fact that this marvel of engineering was also a tool of war and destruction. 

The film is loosely framed around two members of Japan’s Imperial Navy, Hamada (Daijiro Tsutsumi) and Mizushima (Kunio Mizushima), who as cadets consider deserting to escape the brutality of Navy discipline. Having left the base they’re accosted by an inspirational captain who talks them out of leaving by showing them a prototype model of the Zero and convincing them they only need to stick it out for a few more years in order to get the opportunity to fly one. Mizushima, the film’s narrator, doesn’t qualify as a pilot and is related to the ground crew while Hamada does indeed get to pilot a Zero fighter and becomes one of the top pilots in the service. 

The viewpoint is is then split between the view from the ground and that from the clouds. Mizushima makes occasionally surprising statements such as candidly telling love interest Shizuko (Yû Hayami) that they are unlikely to win the war, while becoming ever more concerned for Hamada at one point telling him there’s a problem with his plane in the hope that he won’t take off that day. Hamada meanwhile is completely taken over by the spirit of the Zero and even when given a chance to escape the war after being badly injured, chooses to return because he does not know what else to do. When he visits home after leaving hospital, no one is there. His mother eventually arrives and explains that the family has become scattered with his siblings seconded to the war effort in various places throughout the country. 

Hamada’s dedication and personal sacrifice are in some senses held up as the embodiment of the Zero. The reason for its success is revealed to lie in the decision to remove the armouring for the cockpit leaving the pilot’s life unprotected, something which the American engineers describe as unthinkable. In an early meeting, a superior officer complains that they’re losing too many pilots and need to reinstall some of the armouring, but finds little support. Not only this is a cold and inhuman decision, but it’s poor economic sense given that skilled pilots are incredibly valuable and in short supply. After all, you can’t just make more. If you start from scratch you’ll need to wait 20 years and then teach them fly, but it’s a lesson the Navy never learns that is only exacerbated with the expansion of the kamikaze squads which squander both men and pilots for comparatively little gain. 

These “philosophical differences” are embodied in the nature of the Zero which is configured to be nimble and outmanoeuvre the enemy but is quickly eclipsed not least when foreign powers figure out the way to beat it lies in numbers in which they have the advantage. There is something of a post-Meiji spirit in the feeling that Japan is lagging behind Western powers and desperately needs to develop its own military tech in order to defend itself. On hearing rumours of the Zero fighter, MacArthur scoffs and says that Japan can’t even build cars so he doesn’t believe they could design a plane that could fly such large distances while others suggest that they will still need the element of surprise if they ever go to war with America because its technology is still superior. 

Walking a fine line, the film tries to avoid glorifying “war”, but it cannot always help indulging in nationalist fantasy such as in its statement that thanks to the Zero “the Japanese flag covered a vast area of the Pacific” in the wake of Pearl Harbour. These may be fantastically well designed machines that were incredibly good at what they were created to do, only what they were created to do was kill and destroy. The plane’s fortunes and Japan’s are intrinsically linked, the sense of superiority in the air lasts only a short time before Western technological advances over take it and the war continues to go badly. The film dramatises the tragedy of war through the friendship between the two men which eventually causes Mizushima to sacrifice his love for Shizuko by convincing her marry Hamada hoping that his priorities would change and he’d decide to take a position as an instructor rather than heading back to the front. 

For her part, it seems that Shizuko was also in love with Mizushima, but also caught in a moment of confusion between love and patriotism that encourages her to think she should do as Mizushima says and embrace this man who has dedicated his life to his country. In the end, it buys them each loss and misery, but also a moment of transcendent hope even if it was based on a falsehood in the pleasant memory that Mizushima gives Hamada of the life he is giving up by rejecting it to return to the front. For Mizushima, Hamada and the Zero may become one and the same. At the end of the war he can’t bear to see the remaining Zero’s sold for scrap and asked to be “gifted” one as the Captain who’d first shown one to him said he would be, so that he can give it a proper a “funeral”, or perhaps send it to Hamada in the afterlife after he is killed mere days before the surrender. Masuda cannot help romanticising the wartime conflict with his dashing pilots and their thrilling dogfights, often depicting it more as a kind of game than an ugly struggle of death and destruction, but does lend a note of poignancy to his tale of lives thwarted by the folly of war.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Soul (失魂, Chung Mong-Hong, 2013)

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“Sometimes the things you see aren’t what they seem” the stoical father at the centre of Chung Mong-Hong’s supernatural psycho-drama Soul (失魂, Shī hún) later advises, for the moment creating a new, more convenient reality but also hinting at the mutability of memory and perception. Distinctly eerie and beautifully shot amidst the gothic atmosphere of the misty Taiwan mountain forests, Chung’s ethereal drama is at heart a tale of fathers and sons and the griefs and traumas which exist between them. 

When sushi chef Ah-Chuan (Joseph Chang) collapses at work, no one can figure out what’s wrong with him, finally suggesting perhaps it may be depression. His boss instructs three of his colleagues to take him back to his apparently estranged family to recuperate for reasons perhaps not altogether altruistic. In a near catatonic state, Ah-chuan is barely present offering no response to his name and staring vacantly in no particular direction. When he finally does begin talking, it’s to insist he’s no longer Ah-Chuan explaining that this body happened to be vacant and so he’s moved in while Ah-Chuan will apparently be off wandering for some time. Ah-Chuan, however, then abruptly stabs his sister Yun (Chen Shiang-chyi), who had travelled from Taipei to look after him, to death and is discovered covered in blood sitting calmly over her body offering only the justification that she was intending to harm him. 

Wang (Jimmy Wang), Ah-Chuan’s father barely reacts to finding his daughter’s corpse, merely rolling her under a bench and attempting to mop up the blood when a family friend, Wu (Chen Yu-hsun), who happens to be a policeman suddenly comes calling. Wang is either infinitely pragmatic instantly deciding there’s nothing he can do for his daughter so he’ll try his best to save his son, or else near sociopathic appearing to care nothing at all that Yun is dead. Nevertheless, realising that Ah-Chuan may be dangerous he takes him up to his remote cabin near the orchid garden and locks him inside while trying to figure out what or who this presence that has his son’s appearance might or might not be. As he later says, this brief time together is the most he’s spoken to his “son” if that’s who he is in years even if acknowledging that this Ah-Chuan is quite different from the old. Yet if it were not for the obvious fact that others see and interact with him we might wonder if Wang had simply conjured Ah-Chuan, projecting his own latent violence, guilt, and regret onto the figure of his son who is also in a way himself. 

Yet whatever Ah-Chuan now is he finds himself growing closer to the old man, feeling a filial responsibility towards him that he otherwise would not own. He contacts a “messenger” from “across the woods” to help his find Ah-Chuan’s wandering soul to tell him that his dad’s not doing so well, entering a space of dream and memory that reveals the trauma at the heart of their relationship that might in part help explain Wang’s apparent coldness. Just as the two Ah-Chuans begin to blur into each other, so perhaps to father and son, Wang prepared to go to great lengths to protect his only remaining child while, ironically, offering some harsh words to his son-in-law for not better protecting “the only daughter I have”. 

Chung hints at a kind fluidity of consciousness, each episode of “death” or “possession” accompanied by that of another creature, fish gasping and flapping around, a tired bug trying desperately to cling onto a leaf but failing, or a pair of snakes twisting themselves into a knot. Is Ah-Chuan merely experiencing a protracted dissociative episode under the delusion he is “possessed” while his essential selves “wander” the recesses of his consciousness or has someone else, a second soul, taken up residence in a body left vacant by a man who was in a way already “dead”. Wang in fact hints at this, telling the doctor that he had sometimes thought of Ah-Chuan as dead, or at least wondered if he might be seeing as they had long been estranged, suggesting that the Ah-Chuan of his heart and memory was already gone Wang believing himself to have killed something in him through his own violence when he was only a child. 

The two men mirror each other, growing closer yet also further apart as they make their way back towards the truth that might set them, metaphorically at least, free. Often viscerally violent not least in its jagged, abrupt cuts to black that feel almost like dropping out of consciousness or else waking fitfully with brief flickers of other realities, Chung’s eerie, ethereal drama ventures into the metaphysical but in its strangely surreal final scenes returns us to a more concrete “reality” in which the way home is found it seems only in dreams. 

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

JAPAN CUTS Announces 2024 Lineup

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 JAPAN CUTS returns for 2024 once again presenting a selection of the best of recent Japanese cinema at Japan Society New York from July 10 to 21. This year’s Cut Above award goes to the actor Mirai Moriyama while his Great Absence co-star Tatsuya Fuji will receive a lifetime achievement award.

Opening Film: Between the White Key and the Black Key

Opening Night Film with Director Masanori Tominaga Q&A and Reception

Surreal adaptation of the memoirs of jazz musician Hiroshi Minami starring Sosuke Ikematsu and taking place over a single night of overlapping eras in ’80s Ginza.

Centerpiece Film: Shadow of Fire

Followed by Mirai Moriyama CUT ABOVE Award presentation, Q&A with Shinya Tsukamoto and Mirai Moriyama, and Reception

The ruins of a firebombed city become a purgatorial space haunted by the tortured souls who cannot escape the traumatic wartime past in Shinya Tsukamoto’s eerie voyage through post-war Japan. Review.

Lifetime Achievement Award: Great Absence

Followed by Lifetime Achievement Award Presentation for Tatsuya Fuji, Q&A with Kei Chika-ura and Tatsuya Fuji, and Reception

A forced reconnection with his estranged father forces a young man to contemplate the great absences of life in Kei Chikaura’s poetic drama. Review.

All the Long Nights

Mismatched colleagues struggling amid contemporary corporate culture find unexpected solidarity in Sho Miyake’s gentle human drama. Review.

Blue Period

Adaptation of the manga by Tsubasa Yamaguchi in which a lost young man discovers the power of art and embarks on a quest to enter one of Japan’s most prestigious art schools.

The Box Man

Surreal adaptation of the Kobo Abe novel starring Masatoshi Nagase as a photographer living his life inside a box and Tadanobu Asano as a scientist who becomes obsessed with him.

Cha-Cha

Quirky comedy that turns unexpectedly dark as a free-spirited young woman develops a crush on a taciturn chef while simultaneously the subject of office gossip due to her ambiguous relationship with the boss.

Following the Sound

Following the sound on her cassette recorder, a young woman interacts with two troubled souls in a gentle drama from Kyoshi Sugita.

ICE CREAM FEVER

Featuring Director Tetsuya Chihara In-Person.

Adaptation of a short story by Mieko Kawakami following four young women who come together at a local ice cream shop.

KUBI

Takeshi Kitano directs and stars as Toyotomi Hideyoshi in an ironic retelling of the Honnoji Incident in which Oda Nobunaga (Ryo Kase) is betrayed by his retainers.

Kyrie

Musical drama from Shunji Iwai told over 10 years and starring AiNA THE END as a street musician who can only communicate through song.

Look Back

Adaptation of an award-winning manga in which a manga artist looks back and recalls a childhood friendship asking themselves if they would still make the same choices despite knowing the outcome.

SHIN GODZILLA: ORTHOchromatic

Black and white version of Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi’s landmark take on the classic kaiju franchise.

Six Singing Women

Long-awaited feature from Milocrorze: A Love Story’s Yoshimasa Ishibashi in which a Tokyo-based photographer is called back to his mountain home on the death of his estranged father.

Whale Bones

An office worker joins a dating app after his fiancée abruptly breaks up with him but the date doesn’t exactly to plan leaving to follow cryptic clues from an augmented reality influencer.

Blue Imagine

A young woman finds the strength to fight back against her mistreatment thanks to a sense of female solidarity in Urara Matsubayashi’s timely drama. Review.

Motion Picture: Choke


Dialogue-free indie drama set in a post-apocalyptic society in which one woman’s days of self-sufficiency are disrupted by the arrival of a young vagabond.

Performing KAORU’s Funeral

Darkly comic drama in which a failed actor is summoned to play the part of the chief mourner at his former wife’s funeral. Review.

Rei

Unhappy in the city, a young woman embarks on a love affair with a photographer from Hokkaido .

RETAKE

Looping summer holiday drama as a teenager working on a film with his crush gets the opportunity to “retake” some of his mistakes.

Sayonara, Girls.

A collection of teens contemplate the ghosts of youth in facing graduation from a school soon to be demolished in Shun Nakagawa’s poignant drama. Review.

August in the Water

Imported 35mm Print – Featuring Director Gakuryu Ishii In-Person. 

Sogo Ishii’s ’90s masterpiece in which a female transfer student enters a higher plane of consciousness after undergoing a diving accident.

Mermaid Legend

Elegiac horror from Toshiharu Ikeda in which an ama diver plots revenge when her husband is killed after witnessing a murder.

Moving

A young girl struggles to come to terms with her parents’ impending divorce in Shinji Somai’s ethereal coming-of-age drama.

Kadono Eiko’s Colorful Life: Finding the Magic Within

Documentary focussing on the renowned author best known for Kiki’s Delivery Service.

The Making of a Japanese

Featuring Director Ema Ryan Yamazaki In-Person

Documentary focussing on Japan’s elementary school system and shot over the course of a single year.

Shunga: The Lost Japanese Erotica

Documentary focussing on the erotic artwork of the Edo era.

JAPAN CUTS 2024 runs at Japan Society New York July 10 to 21. Tickets are on sale now. Full details for all the films are available via the official website and you can also keep up with all the latest details by following the festival’s official Letterboxd, Instagram, Facebook page and X (formerly) account.

Every Trick In The Book (鳩の撃退法, Hideta Takahata, 2021)

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A down on his luck writer finds himself at the centre of a mystery only how much is truth and how much “fiction”? Based on the novel by Shogo Sato, Hideta Takahata’s Every Trick in the Book (鳩の撃退法, Hato no gekitai-ho) ponders the possibilities of literature as the hero seems to create a fictional world around him in which it is largely unclear whether he is solving a real world mystery or simply imagining one based on his impressions of the strange characters he encounters through the course of his everyday life.

That everyday life is however eventful just in itself. Tsuda (Tatsuya Fujiwara) once won a prestigious literary prize and was destined to become a popular author but hasn’t written anything of note for some time and in fact now largely works as a driver ferrying sex workers around on behalf of his shady boss. The mystery begins when he approaches a man, a rare solo reader in an overnight cafe, and promises to lend him a copy of Peter and Wendy by JM Barrie only to later discover that the man went missing along with his wife and the daughter he had explained was fathered by another man. 

Like many of his subsequent encounters it isn’t entirely clear if this meeting really took place or at least as Tsuda said it did or is only part of the novel he is beginning to write. The man, Hideyoshi (Shunsuke Kazama), asks him if it’s a novelist’s habit to begin imagining backstories for everyone he sets eyes on and there may well be some of that even as Tsuda is fond of claiming that amazing things happen around us every day to which we are mostly oblivious. Still, Tsuda probably didn’t expect to be pulled into the orbit of local gangster Kurata (Etsushi Toyokawa) after accidentally passing on counterfeit currency he found by chance. It’s true that most of what’s happening to him is the result of a series of bizarre coincidences or cosmic confluence which has accidentally united this collection of people in an unintended mystery which Tsuda intends to solve in either literal or literary terms. 

“It’s all a novelist can do” he later claims in trying to write a better ending for “characters” he has come to like than the one he assumes they “actually” met. But then his editor Nahomi (Tao Tsuchiya) chief worry is that, like his previous novel, Tsuda’s story will contain too much of the “literal” truth which could cause his publishers some legal problems. Part of the reason Tsuda left the industry is apparently because his last book was inspired by a real life affair which was then considered somewhat hurtful and defamatory. For that reason it comes as quite a blow to Nahomi as she begins to investigate and discovers that much of Tsuda’s story lines up with “real” places and events, but then again as he says if you can draw connections between known facts then you begin to see a “hidden” truth which may in its own way be merely his invention. 

The film’s Japanese title translates more literally as something like “how to fend off a dove” which does indeed have its share of irony especially considering the meaning the dove symbolism turns out to have in the film but perhaps also hints at the essential absurdity of trying to fight back against something that is otherwise harmless and in fact represents peace. Tsuda may be onto something and nothing, embracing the bizarre serendipity of a writer’s life while trying to recover his creative mojo but embellishing it with more danger and strangeness than it actually has to offer. Then again as his editor discovers, there really is an incinerator it seems anyone can just walk up and use to burn whatever they want including dead bodies, while people in general are full of duplicities all of which keeps the “fake” money circulating as people use it to try to buy things that can’t really be bought. Hideyoshi calls them “miracles”, embracing the strange serendipity of his life as an orphan longing for a family to call his own and unexpectedly finding one which is “real” in someways and “fiction” and in others. Then again, if you believe in something does it really matter if it’s “real” or not? Hideyoshi and Tsuda might say it doesn’t, the publishing company’s lawyers might feel differently, but it seems there really are amazing things going on around us every day if only you stop to look. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)