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)

A Wife’s Heart (妻の心, Mikio Naruse, 1956)

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“We’re too late for everything these days,” mutters an overly cheerful geisha whose behaviour is becoming ever more erratic. A sense of fatalism, that everything has already been decided and there is no real escape from the misery of life, hangs over much of Naruse’s filmmaking even if his heroines often do their best to rail against it and on occasion succeed. Kiyoko (Hideko Takamine), the heroine of A Wife’s Heart (妻の心, Tsuma no Kokoro), finds herself faced with just this dilemma while considering which side of a generational divide she might be on and whether she has the power to escape from her disappointing life to chase emotional fulfilment. 

We can see the literal distance between herself and her husband Shinji (Keiju Kobayashi) in the opening sequence as he stands in a vacant lot at the back of their property and she firmly within the domestic space hanging washing. Yet for all that she seems excited, perhaps even a little giddy as they plot their escape together through planning to turn that vacant space into a cafe in an attempt to fend off the economic changes ravaging their town and wider society of Japan in the mid-1950s. Out and about on his bike, Shinji looks anxiously at the construction of a new pharmacy much larger than his own and with flashy modern signage. Their business is failing and they don’t know how to save it so the cafe is their way out and also a break with the depressing past represented by Shinji’s grumpy mother, Ko (Eiko Miyoshi), who is predictably dead against the cafe idea. 

The new business, in its way, is also a stand-in for the child they don’t have and a means for Kiyoko to find domestic fulfilment in a society ruled by motherhood. This one reason that the sudden arrival of her sister-in-law Kaoru (Chieko Nakakita) with her small daughter Rumiko causes so much disruption. Kaoru has fulfilled the social obligations which Kiyoko has not and quickly insinuates herself within the house, taking over the domestic space as symbolised by her otherwise trivial action of putting back a pair of nail clippers in the place she sees fit rather than their usual home. Yet she does this in part because her husband, Zenichi (Minoru Chiaki) who left the family to become a salaryman in Tokyo, is so obviously unreliable and appears to have not for the first time lost his job while employed at a company possibly involved in something untoward. On getting wind of Shinji’s plans to open a cafe, Zenichi announces he’s thinking of opening one himself and gets his mother to put pressure on the couple to give him the money they borrowed for their dream project.

It’s the loan that in part allowed Kiyoko to consider life beyond her marriage in reuniting with the still unmarried brother of her best friend Yumiko (Yoko Sugi). Kenkichi (Toshiro Mifune) is everything Shinji is not, handsome, well dressed, and with a good, middle-class job working at a bank. On a visit to her relatives, Kiyoko’s aunt remarks that everyone wanted to marry her provoking a slight twinge of pain in Kiyoko’s face. Mother-in-law Ko arranges marriages and it’s likely she arranged the one between Kiyoko and her son and that Kiyoko likely agreed out to of social obligation under the rationale that Shinji was a good catch as the proprietor of a successful business. The implication is that if, like Yumiko, she had held out a little longer she probably would have fallen in love and married Kenkichi. As the atmosphere in the family home grows ever more toxic, she grows closer to him yet at least in part as a symbol of the path not taken, what her life may have been like if only she had resisted and claimed a little more freedom for herself. 

Ko has also arranged a marriage for youngest daughter Sumiko (Akemi Negishi) who asks her if all of her matches were happy. An indignant Ko replies that only one or two have split up, but as Sumiko points out just because a couple stays together does not mean they are happy. “Women don’t have the courage, they just give up,” she remarks implying that she, as a representative of the younger generation, might be less minded to simply accept a disappointing situation in the same way as someone of Kiyoko’s age may feel she had to. For these reasons Kiyoko is torn. Yumiko remarks that she and Shinji didn’t even particularly like each other when they married and perhaps remain indifferent to each other now. The cafe may have brought them closer as a couple, but now it’s causing a rift in the wider family while also offering Kiyoko the faintest glimmer of an escape route. When she returns to the cafe where she was learning the ropes as a part-time employee, much to Ko’s chagrin at losing a domestic helper, it’s clear that she’s doing so in part to have a means of supporting herself as she leans closer to the idea of leaving Shinji. 

But for all that it seems unlikely that she has the courage, as Sumiko put it, to break with the traditional social codes of feminity by leaving a husband who was not really bad but that she did not love and made her unhappy. In rebellion, Shinji has an indiscretion with a local geisha who goes missing on the way home from a hot springs and is later found dead having taken her own life because she was trapped in a bad relationship with her husband. The implication is that this is the only way many women find to escape from their dismal circumstances and may soon present itself to Kiyoko if she cannot find a way to reconcile herself to her life with Shinji or find the confidence to leave it. The enemy is the increasingly outdated institution of arranged marriages as advocated by the austere Ko who refuses to hire maids while believing herself entitled to the free labour of her daughters-in-law, and the patriarchal social codes of a modernising nation in which Shinji can have his dalliance with a geisha and his wife is expected to put up with it, but merely being seen walking with a man not one’s husband provokes gossip and jealousy. 

When Shinji implies he suspects her of having an affair with Kenkichi, he tells her that she’s free to follow her heart and he understands if she chooses to leave him but of course by telling her this he seals her fate by making it almost impossible for her to do so. The couple repairs itself, but the resolution is far from comfortable as it becomes clear that each is essentially resigning themselves to misery because of social convention vowing that they’ll build their cafe in the next season though it seems like a dream destined to go unfulfilled while the institution of Rumiko left behind in the family superficially fills the void it was designed to fill. The fades to black between scenes seem to echo an exhalation of bleakness as the interrupted thought of Kenkichi’s dangerous “Kiyoko…” as an admission that the prospect of escape is only ever a torturous fantasy and a heart is something that must be sacrificed in the name of conventional success. 

Yaksha: Ruthless Operations (야차, Na Hyeon, 2022)

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“Justice is preserved by being just” according to the idealistic hero at the centre of Na Hyeon’s Yaksha: Ruthless Operations (야차, Yacha) , though he’ll eventually come round to his sometime mentor’s belief that “Justice must be preserved by any means necessary”. Any means necessary is indeed the motto of the titular hero named for the unpredictable Buddhist deity and regarded by his superiors as a dangerous maverick though as it turns out he does indeed have justice in mind even if his idea of justice might not fully align with those whom he is intended to serve. 

The failure of the regular justice system is signalled in the film’s opening as idealistic prosecutor Ji-hoon (Park Hae-soo) finds his case against a corrupt CEO falling apart because of procedural mistakes by his own rookie team. Humiliated on the courthouse steps, Ji-hoon is given a punitive transfer to the NIS where he is kept out of trouble, told to draw a salary but given very little work. He and his jaded colleague who was once known as the “bulldozer of justice” but has been ruined by this bizarre form of punishment and no longer has the will do to anything much at all mostly spend their time doing jigsaw puzzles stave off boredom. When his colleague admits there’s no more hope for him and turns down an offer of reinstatement, Ji-hoon agrees to travel to Shengyang, a hotbed of international spies in China, to find out what’s going on with a series of false reports from their agents on the ground led by maverick black ops officer Yakska. 

What he soon discovers is that he’s been dragged into some murky geopolitical shenanigans between North Korean spies, his target’s possibly corrupt team, and the Japanese who are once again up to no good trying to prevent a possible alliance between North and South believing such a union would present too much of a threat to their economic position in North East Asia. His problem is that Yaksha’s field craft does not measure up to what he regards as appropriate conduct. He engages in firefights and commits what seem to be summary executions while later threatening to torture a hostage to force her to reveal the location of their missing asset, a North Korean financial kingpin, Moon (Nam Kyung-eup), who had been acting as a double agent for the Japanese but had become disillusioned with their imperialist outlook and decided to defect to the South bringing valuable information with him. 

It has to be said that however uncountable it may be to see a Japanese spy who behaves like a gangster committing acts of torture in a well appointed lab on a Chinese woman in China, Yaksha cannot exactly claim the moral high ground having attempted to do something similar only in his filthy hideout in an abandoned mine. Ji-hoon’s dilemma is that he doesn’t know whose side, if any, Yaksha is on or if he’s after the North Korean trillions Moon had been managing rather than a hugely beneficial national asset. Exposed to this morally grey world, however, Ji-hoon’s idealist edges begin to soften as shifts towards Yaksa’s “by any means possible” philosophy while trying to stop evil Japanese spy turned lobbyist from recovering the valuable data Moon had to sell and going on to do even more nefarious deeds undermining the possibilities for reunification along with the Koreas’ economic potential. 

Somewhat uncomfortably, the film does then more or less condone torture, betrayal, and summary execution if conducted in the pursuit of “justice” even while simultaneously approving of Ji-hoon’s idealistic pursuit of the rich and powerful who continue to misuse their position and cause pain to ordinary people. It comes to something when the safest ally is a gang of human organ traffickers with whom Yaksha seems to be suspiciously familiar. Nevertheless, what Yaksha eventually asks Ji-hoon to do is to “clean things up” hinting at the duo’s complementary qualities as they pursue “justice” in both the legal and more immediate senses. Filled with some quite literally explosive action sequences along with some admittedly broad comic book antics as the guys face off against Hideki Ikeuchi’s Japanese arch villain Yaksha is certainly a good looking film if one with a dark heart beating at its centre. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Summer Vacation 1999 (1999年の夏休み, Shusuke Kaneko, 1988)

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The curious thing, or perhaps a curious thing among many, about Shusuke Kaneko’s loose adaptation of Moto Hagio’s The Heart of Thomas Summer Vacation 1999 (1999年の夏休み, 1999 Toshi no Natsuyasumi) is that it takes place in a theoretical future that is also quite clearly an imaginary past. In a second introductory sequence, the voice of an adult man tells us that his is his memory, a fragment of the past kept alive by the clarity with which he remembers it. We don’t know who this voice belongs to, though the images encourage to think it must be the man the boy on screen, like the others played by a girl, will one day become but in another sense this boy doesn’t really exist either or at least is the bearer of several different identities.

The fact he travels to this remote mansion in the countryside on an otherwise empty train signal’s the place’s unreality and detachment from the regular world. We’re told it’s 1999, a year that was still to come on the film’s release in 1988, and inevitably hints at a millennial dread along with the new dawn the writer describes himself having in experienced in what is otherwise a summer holiday movie. However, in the opening sequence we witnessed a boy who looked very like this one slip what is later assumed to be a suicide note under another boy’s door before walking through the gothic space of the country mansion and out to a rugged cliff where he takes his own life by jumping into a nearby lake. The name of the boy who died, apparently brokenhearted and filled with despair after his romantic overtures to another boy were rebuffed, was named Yu (Eri Miyajima). This one claims his name is Kaoru (also Eri Miyajima) and is different in temperament in character to the boy who may have died, his body has not been found, though to the others staying at the school over the summer holiday he seems somehow like a vengeful ghost arriving to take them to task for Yu’s death. 

Kaneko specifically frames the school as haunted through the gothic photography of its billowing curtains and 19th century European aesthetics but also through its emptiness. The sound of children laughing, the boys who have left and returned somewhere else, echo through empty corridors further framing it as a place of memory and it seems true enough that the other boys who remain are trapped here in the same way they are trapped within themselves in their inability to express their emotions. The youngest of the boys, the sensitive Norio, (Eri Fukatsu) intensely resents Kazuhiko (Tomoko Otakara) who is as he describes beloved by all but himself cannot bear to be loved and may have contributed to Yu’s suicide through the abruptness of his romantic rejection. 

Later Kazuhiko recalls a memory of himself watching the sunset as a child in which he felt so terribly alone, as if he were the only person left on earth and there was no one with whom he could share this beauty. This sense of loneliness and isolation is further symbolised by the remote nature of the boarding school which seems to exist outside of time itself. Inspired by the setting of the novel, the boys dress in a fashion more associated with 19th century aristocracy than the late 1980s yet they are surrounded by machines and makeshift, retro futuristic technology in which they spend their days programming some kind of computer system. The leap into the lake is also into memory, but otherwise a kind of rebirth or rebaptism which allows Kazuhiko to make sense of himself and the other boys to come to an acceptance of Yu, Kaoru, and everything he embodies in relation to themselves. 

Even so, the elliptical nature of the film’s ending hints that this is a continually looping story replaying endlessly in the memory of a now much older man recalling the journey into adolescence in which he ruptured the shell of his ignorance much as the caterpillar becomes a butterfly even if that butterfly was something that Kaoru wanted to kill without harming its beauty. Perhaps in away that’s what the man has done in preserving this memory with its all of its gothic shades of billowing curtains and shadowy corridors amid the ethereality of the twilight of youth.

Summer Vacation 1999 screened as part of this year’s Queer East.

Techno Brothers (テクノブラザーズ, Hirobumi Watanabe, 2023)

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Hirobumi Watanabe has sometimes cast himself in his films as a misunderstood, struggling filmmaker at the mercy of his own thwarted ambitions and the vagaries of the Japanese indie movie scene. With Techno Brothers (テクノブラザーズ) he shifts his perspective a little in delivering an absurdist satire on the relationship between an artist and the oppressive managerial forces by which they are exploited but are otherwise largely unable to escape.

In his previous films, the characters that Watanabe plays have often stood out for their motormouth quality often going on lengthy rants to a largely silent straight man but the total powerlessness of the titular Techno Brothers is signalled by the fact that they are never permitted to speak except through their music. The film contains several scenes of them standing in identical red shirts with black ties and sun glasses, each with an identical impassive expression as they play their 80s style synth techno music inspired alternately by that of Yellow Magic Orchestra and Kraftwerk. They’ve been picked by manager Hiromu who also dresses in a red shirt and sunshades but wears a leopard-print jacket over the top as if to make clear that she is the one in control. 

Hiromu repeatedly makes clear that she believes Techno Brothers are musical geniuses destined to echo through time like Bach and Mozart but in the end she is only really interested in exploiting them financially rather than supporting the art she claims to have so much faith in. In a running gag, she takes them to several restaurants and orders enough food for four people but seemingly doesn’t let them eat any of it and tells the wait staff just to bring them tap water. Why the Techno Brothers allow themselves to be treated this way is a mystery with only the implication that they must really believe that Hiromu can get them career success and are too afraid of ruining their chances to stand up to her. 

Hiromu tries to get them a gig with a local fixer who for some reason is a little girl (played once again by Watanabe’s niece Riko Hisatsugu) who only speaks through her assistant, played by Watanabe in one of several sides roles he assumed throughout the film. She tells Hiromu that Techno Brothers stink and they aren’t marketable locally because their music is out of touch with the times and people won’t understand it (echoing a description of his filmmaking Watanabe has given in his previous films). Boss Riko advises them to seek their fortunes in Tokyo, but though they may briefly leave Otawara they never get out of Tochigi and stuck playing a series of low rent gigs like busking in parks or entering what turns out to be a competition mainly for local children and other unsuccessful adult musicians as in the wonderful folksinger parody once again performed by Watanabe. On one occasion they’re hired by an eccentric orchid grower who wants to see if the kind of music he plays has an effect on the way his flowers grow.

For all its absurdity the film skews surprisingly dark in Hiromu’s indifference the safety of the band, wilfully starving them which apart from anything else would seem to be counterproductive in preventing them from being able to perform not that their performances require much in the way of animation anyway. She books herself fancy hotel rooms and sends them out on the street, keeping the money for herself, while denying them any form of individuality or autonomy. Even if at one point they begin to rebel or make a run for it, they are unable to escape her grasp entirely and are once again rendered mute tools of her own success. 

Then again, it seems Hiromu has bosses of her own to placate and is also on the search for a missing sister though if she treated her like she treated the Techno Brothers maybe she requires no rescue. A brief post-credits coda hints at a wider world of dark corporate finagling the Techno Brothers may have no clue they’re a part of though a title screen assures us that they will return even if currently they seem to have landed right back where they started with little to show for their pains. In this perhaps Watanabe signals his position as an independent filmmaker locked onto a circular path of frustration and appeasement but also a determination to continue making art that people might not understand no matter what the cost.