Tag: 1990s

A New Love in Tokyo (愛の新世界, Banmei Takahashi, 1994)

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Life is theatre in Banmei Takahashi’s A New Love in Tokyo (愛の新世界, Ai no Shinsekai). Strangely marketed in some quarters as a kind of sequel to Ryu Murakami’s Tokyo Decadence though it is entirely unconnected to it, Banmei Takahashi’s after hours drama is a breezy riot that runs in direct contrast to other post-Bubble era movies which saw only despair and disillusionment in economic stagnation. For Rei (Sawa Suzuki) and Ayumi (Reiko Kataoka), however, life is one long party that they live on their own terms hoping to ride the wave all the way to the sea.

That said, it’s true that Rei, at least, is doing her dominatrix job because it’s impossible to support oneself as an artist in this economy. She is, in fact, basically subsidising her whole theatre troupe through sex work as a means of keeping it going. Her relationship to the men in the group is almost like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves while, for unexplained reasons, she sleeps with each of her dopey castmates on a rota system. It’s not until crunch time that they realise they should probably get jobs too, while the only other woman in the group (Yoko Nakajima) takes a job as a receptionist answering the phone at the call girl agency where Ayumi works.

Rei often runs into Ayumi leaving hotels and the pair soon become fast friends, though unlike Rei, Ayumi is a regular sex worker who sleeps with her clients. Nevertheless, Rei seems to like her precisely because, as she puts it, she’s a good liar, which is perhaps what you need to be to be successful at this business. She manipulates her clients by pretending to be a shy virgin so they pay her more for basic services, while lying to her boyfriend that she’s an office lady. The fact he takes it at face value suggests he might not be all that bright, which is why he’s struggling to finish his exams to become a doctor. Later, she’s thrown him over for a lad training to be a lawyer but just with as much success. Both the men she ends up with seem to be feckless and dim, though she fluffs their egos by pretending to be stupid. She says that her end goal is to become the wife of a professional lawyer or doctor, which is to say she’s looking for class status and respectability, though she’s probably earning more than they are by herself already. Ayumi has a host of savings pots and sometimes transfers large sums of money into one telling her boyfriend it’s from her father to help pay for a wedding.

Which is to say, everyone here is playing a kind of role. Both Rei and Ayumi seem to be using their real names for their work, but as Rei says the dominatrix gig is good for her acting career in allowing her to take on multiple personas. She too writes frequent letters home to her mother which bear little relation to reality in which she claims to be a therapist’s receptionist. But the clients are acting too, because this is, after all, all about role play. One of Rei’s most devoted customers is a yakuza who bosses his men around all day then comes to her to be punished. He is scrupulously polite and really rather sweet, buying up all the tickets to Rei’s play to make sure she’s not embarrassed on the opening night. Generally speaking, the streams shouldn’t cross between Rei the actress and Rei the dominatrix, so the yakuza is crossing a line by intruding on her personal life at the play, though he does so in an otherwise respectful way, apologising for his presence and making it clear that he doesn’t mean to expose her to those who might not know nor does he intend to encroach any further on her personal life.

Another of the women’s clients seems to be a fed up salaryman ranting about his boss and company lay-offs, hinting at the stressfulness of the economic situation for those working outside of the sex industry as well as the emasculating nature of corporate life in which the salaryman can only vent his frustrations through BDSM role-play rather than by actually taking it up with his boss. Rei and Ayumi are, by contrast, free from any such concerns. That is not to say, however, that their lives are easy or without danger. When a sex worker is found dead in a love hotel bathroom, a gloom falls over the industry. Rei asks Ayumi if she’s feeling alright, but as it turns out her agency has spotted a business opportunity seeing as most of the others will have decided to close for the sake for safety and as a gesture of respect. Ayumi too is threatened by a customer with a knife and is only saved by the arrival of a yakuza, in an unexpected cameo from ice cool V-Cinema star Show Aikawa, who intimidates the customer into backing off by eating his own sunglasses. Nevertheless, Ayumi goes straight back to work to meet the next customer, unwilling to let herself be cowed by male violence.

That’s something she has in common with Rei who similarly treats the attempts of men to ruin her night with similar disdain. When one customer proves rebellious, she keeps him waiting for hours while tied up and bound in the dark. She and Ayumi try turning the tables by visiting a host club, but are instantly put off by their poor quality patter. They go on a kind of date with two guys who tried to pick them up, but dump them when they’ve had enough. Rei, in particular, has several boyfriends who think they have some sort of claim on her body and her time, but she only ever does as she pleases. There’s something unexpectedly joyful about the two women running hand in hand through the midnight city, as if this were only ever their playground. The juxtaposition of the erotic photographs taken of actress Sawa Suzuki by Nobuyoshi Araki and those of her childhood hint at this quality of playfulness, as if her life were one of fun games in which she’s never quite grown up. They also remind us, however, of her ordinariness. She had a childhood too, and is, in fact, just like everyone else. Her job is just a job, no different from those of the guys at her theatre troupe who work in restaurants and video stores. She and Ayumi even exchange business cards. This festival might be over now, but that only means it’s time to start preparing for the next in the company of her friends as she and Ayumi enjoy their lives in the permanent dawn of a city that seems to exist only for them.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Kokkuri (こっくりさん, Takahisa Zeze, 1997)

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The tensions between a trio of young women are brought to the fore by an ill-advised consultation with Kokkuri-san in Takahisa Zeze’s atmospheric horror movie. Some more than others, these girls are all haunted if only by adolescent confusion and suppressed desire. Looking for answers with no one turn to in the absence of parental authority, they rely doubly on a late-night radio show, Midnight Blue Bird,  hosted by a girl their age calling herself “Michiru”.

“Michiru” is the heroine of the Japanese version of Blue Bird fairytale about a brother and sister who leave in search of the blue bird of happiness only to return and realise that it was waiting for them at home all along. While the moral of the fairytale might be that happiness is all around us if only you know how to look, there is precious little surrounding the girls outside of their friendship which is already beginning to fracture under the weight of adolescence, not to mention a series of overlapping love triangles.

What neither of the other girls know, is that Michiru is actually a persona constructed by Mio (Ayumi Yamatsu) who is actually the host of the radio show. As Michiru she claims to be sexually experienced and rebellious, answering the questions that come from other young women though, in reality, a regular high schooler and romantically naive. As we gradually become aware, she is in love with her friend Hiroko (Hiroko Shimada), but Hiroko has a crush on Masami’s fickle boyfriend Akira. It was Mio who suggested the Kokkuri-san game on her radio show, a Ouija board style means of divination, but it quickly turns dark with Masami (Moe Ishikawa) manipulating the board to needle Hiroko after realising she’s after her boyfriend.

The resulting fallout pushes Hiroko and Mio towards a confrontation with their shared traumas as survivors of a drowning. Hiroko is haunted by a little girl in red, ironically named “Midori” which means “green”, and struggles to get over the guilt she feels over a childhood friend who drowned in a public bath. Mio, meanwhile, gives contradictory biographical information on her show, but it seems that Mio’s mother intended to take her own life with Mio in tow after she caught her with her new husband to be following the death of Mio’s father. Echoing the central motivation of the film, Mio’s mother suggests the “go together” to where her father is, but later saves Mio alone.

But while Hiroko becomes preoccupied with the notion of sex, vowing to become more like Michiru, she tells Michiro that thanks losing her virginity will change her though she later laments that it’s changed nothing at all. Mio, meanwhile seems to have a hangup having caught her mother with another man. In disgust, she rubs at her libs in the same way that the older Mio later does after finally finding the courage to kiss Hiroko who lips have, by then, been coated in striking red lipstick. The colour red seems to represent the curse of Kokkuri-san and with it repressed guilt, regret, and forbidden desire. Though it seems that by learning to accept herself, publicly unmasking herself on her radio show and confessing her love for Hiroko live on air, Mio alone is able to overcome the curse. The kiss she gives Hiroko is one of life that seems to break the spell and free them both from Kokkuri-san’s trap, though all may not be as it first seems. 

Nevertheless, the fact that Hiroko does not remember makes this something of a private evolution for Mio even as voices from the past resurface and encourage them “go together” toward whatever fate awaits them in the film’s ambiguous conclusion that echoes that of Zeze’s earlier pink tale of frustrated same-sex desire, Angel of September, which shares many of the same themes. Even so, in finally accepting her sister, who is impressed and supportive of her coming out live on air even if she cynically adds it can be her new gimmick, Mio has undergone a transformation into adulthood and symbolically been reborn, emerging from the cleansing waters with greater clarity and self-assurance if perhaps no more certain of what the future may hold.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Angel in September (本番レズ　恥ずかしい体位, Takahisa Zeze, 1994)

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According to Hitomi, she and Eriko were once lovers in a past life in which they were angels battling a demon army. She claims that she recognised Eriko at once, though never had the courage to talk to her at school and has only connected with her now after witnessing her transgressive act of stealing a lipstick from a convenience store. Aside from bristling slightly that in her past life she was apparently a man, Eriko goes along with Hitomi’s bizarre story until their relationship intensifies and it begins to annoy her. 

It’s not really clear if Hitomi actually believes what she’s saying or is making the whole thing up. It may be a way for her to try and articulate her feelings, framing the love she feels for Eriko as a cosmically fated romance that began with an apparently heterosexual union, though perhaps after all angels have no gender. On the other hand, perhaps these demons that they’re battling represent those who would stand in the way of their love. Though it’s plain that Hitomi looks at her with an obvious longing, she asks Eriko if it’s alright that she’s not a boy. When Eriko replies that it doesn’t matter, Hitomi sadly asks if anyone would do while doubting her own worthiness. Eriko laughs and kisses her again, maintaining dominance by assuring Hitomi that she will teach her as she gently removes her clothes. 

But it’s also clear that Eriko has other things going on and, in some ways, represents the demon to Hitomi’s angel. She messes around with men via the telephone club, essentially a hookup line, getting Hitomi to come with her as they go on a date with a middle-aged man they plan to extort. After she and Hitomi run away together, she sleeps with the truck driver they hitched a lift with in the next room as if deliberately torturing Hitomi who writhes in agony while being subjected to her moans. Unable to bear the torment she calls her mother and asks to be picked up. Which causes a rift between herself and Eriko in what Eriko sees as an act of betrayal. After dropping out of school, Eriko takes up with another girl and rejects Hitomi’s pleas to come back, telling her that she doesn’t want to be railroaded onto a conventional life of marriage and children that believes is all that school leads to. Hitomi may, in that sense, be more conventional. Her innocence is reflected in the fact that she’d never drunk alcohol and disliked it when Eriko made her try. She dresses in a subdued manner and is fearful of Eriko’s reckless behaviour.

Nevertheless, she too tries on Eriko’s persona by going on an awkward arcade date with a boy from the telephone club who takes her to a hotel where she sleeps with him, but evidently loathes the experience and tries to regain control of the situation by becoming violent and demanding money. Resenting Eriko’s assertion that she couldn’t be an angel because she doesn’t have a scar, Hitomi burns herself by heating a metal fork to mimic the Orion’s Belt motif of moles Eriko has on her breast. Despite accusing Hitomi of only caring about herself, it seems that Eriko too is using the fantasy as an excuse to reject emotional intimacy. The other girl she’s with accuses her of thinking of Hitomi while they make they love with which she appears to be unsatisfied and there is something in her that seems fearful of genuine connection.

When they finally reunite, the final time they make love mirrors the first with roles reversed as Hitomi gently removes Eriko’s shirt and Eriko reaches out to touch the brand on Hitomi’s breast in shyness and wonder. The Orion’s Belt motif echoes the cosmic nature of their connection, as if they had finally completed their journey home to each other. But the ominous undertones remain as Hitomi returns to her story in which she romantically sacrificed herself for Eriko by jumping into the water to quell the demons’ storm. In releasing the apparently resurrected goldfish that she flushed away in pettiness and anger, she lets herself go as, like the butterfly lovers, she and Eriko seem to be transformed into fish free to swim in the ocean. Delicately shot with the yellow hues of nostalgia, Zeze’s poetic tale of toxic, frustrated love ends on a melancholy note that suggests the lovers are bound only for a loop of eternal heartbreak in every possible reincarnation.

Fusa (その木戸を通って, Kon Ichikawa, 1993)

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Kon Ichikawa’s Fusa (その木戸を通って, Sono Kido wo Totte) opens on a note of artifice. Misty rain and the verdant green of the forest give way to total darkness in which leaves appear, followed by the hero, Seishiro (Kiichi Nakai) tending a bonsai tree. As light brightens the scene, we see that he is seated beyond the veranda of his home which has taken on the appearance of a proscenium arch framed by the open shoji. It’s almost as if this space, in which Seishiro will enter his own reverie, is one of unreality as distinct from the interior which is busy with the preparations for the marriage of Seishiro’s only daughter, Yuka.

17 years previously, however, it was his own marriage he was preoccupied with when a mysterious woman arrived at his home claiming to have lost her memory and knowing only his name while he was away doing the annual audit. This is a little ironic, because “Seishiro Hiramatsu” hadn’t  been his name for very long and, in fact, he struggled to remember it or answer when called. The second son of an Edo lord, Seishiro had been adopted into the Hiramatsu clan and has made an advantageous match with the daughter of a lord, Tomoe. The presence of the mysterious woman threatens Seishiro’s position and path to advancement when Tomoe happens to catch sight of her, assuming she’s an old flame from Edo trying to rekindle things with Seishiro.

He, meanwhile, assumes the woman’s arrival is part of a plot to discredit him and ruin his engagement, presumably perpetrated by a jealous rival. For those reasons, he instructs his retainer Yoshizuka to have the girl sent away, but he and his wife (Kyoko Kishida) feel sorry for her and wish to take her into the household. Seishiro comes up with the ingenious plan of throwing her out and following her to see if she meets up with whoever sent her, but becomes protective when she is nearly assaulted by a pair of local louts. Despite himself, he becomes absorbed in the mystery, but at the same time both he and the woman, whom they name “Fusa” (Yuko Asano), become worried that if she did in fact regain her memory, she would have to leave.

Fusa sometimes enters a kind of trance state, staring at the mystical forest behind the house in way that gives her a supernatural air. That she arrives so suddenly aligns her with a tradition of ghost story and folklore, suggesting that she may be some kind of forest spirit that like the Snow Woman would have to leave once the spell was broken. She describes herself as feeling as if he had been possessed or were trapped within a dream. As Seishiro learns later, she may not have known his name at all, but only taken it from one of his servants, while her past remains opaque. Nevertheless, they are blissfully happy and conceive a daughter together before Fusa suddenly disappears with the same suddenness as she arrived. She had often had visions of a bamboo path and a wooden door beyond which seem to lurk the secrets of her past, but it may not be possible to return after passing through.

Seishiro continues to believe she will one day remember them and return, but at the same time knows to treasure the small bubble of happiness they once had no matter how long it lasted. The truth is only that she was here and then gone, which isn’t so much of an unusual story and requires little explanation, though Seishiro never really solves the mystery as he had vowed to do. Perhaps like Fusa, he didn’t really want to risk breaking the spell. Based on a story by Shugoro Yamamoto, the film was produced by Fuji TV as a test feature for NHK’s “Hi-Vision” high-definition television channel with the consequence that it was shot on hi-def video tape and later transferred to 35mm for international festival screenings. For those reasons, it’s not a particularly handsome film and obviously low budget, but even so Ichikawa makes the most of the medium, leaning into its soft focus to create an ethereal and mysterious atmosphere. Playing with colour and light, he often frames Fusa as the only one in colour in an otherwise monochrome scene as if perhaps suggesting that it’s Seishiro’s world that lacks reality rather than hers. An ominous violet light seems to emanate from the misty forest, but in truth perhaps all here are ghosts looking for a way to go beyond the wooden door but, at the same time, hoping they won’t find it.

The King of Minami: Ginjiro Manda (難波金融伝 ミナミの帝王1 トイチの萬田銀次郎, Sadaaki Haginiwa, 1992)

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“The one holding the money calls the shots,” according to a particularly sticky debtor in Sadaaki Haginiwa’s The King of Minami, though that turns out not quite to be the case. After all, though the money may be in his possession, technically it belongs to Ginjiro (Riki Takeuchi) and when they don’t return it to him, he begins to feel offended. Reflective of a kind of post-bubble malaise, the film has a rather cynical take on money and finance, but at the same time a weird kind of wholesomeness.

Ginjiro may be the King of Minami, but he sees himself as a saviour of the poor. Questioned by new underling Ryuichi, he brushes off concerns that people can be driven to suicide over debt by claiming that the loans he offers may save their lives. But though Ginjiro may claim to be somehow better than his yakuza counterparts in refusing to resort to violence, he’s ruthless in other ways and certain that debts must be repaid. Once he’s cheated by an old man, Tokugawa, who refuses to pay the interest on his loan, Ginjiro knows theres’s no point pressing him and decides to go after his daughter instead. She, however, has already maxed out all her card trying to save her dad’s business. 

For his righteousness, explaining that he’ll never end up with sometime love interest Asako because a loan shark has no room for relationships, Ginjiro’s world is essentially misogynistic. Sent after a runaway bar hostess, Ginjiro tells Ryuichi that women always have ways of making money with a note of envy in his voice as if he resented this essential unfairness on behalf of impoverished men. Of course, this way of making money is open to them too, though they wouldn’t consider it and no one would put it forward as an option or view their body as a commodity that should be traded away when one has debts. He says something similar to Tokunaga’s schoolteacher daughter Machiko too, agreeing that night work is the way to make a lot of money relatively quickly. Machiko has, however, already been forced into sexual slavery by Narita, a rival yakuza loanshark, who extorts sexual favours in lieu of money. 

Young Ryuichi is quite touched by her story and even falls in love with her a little bot despite Ginjiro’s warnings that a loanshark can’t afford to let his emotions overcome his reason. Even if he remains willing to make Machiko pay for her father’s transgressions, Ginjiro is equally angry with Tokunaga for rejecting this essential law that money should always find its way to its point of origin. Taking him to task for his immoral vices such as a gambling addiction that’s ruined his business, finances, and relationships, Ginjiro tells him that he ought to pay his debts himself rather than push them on his daughter. He seems to have contempt for people who do this to themselves through what he sees as their own poor choices, but less so for those like Machiko who end up needing his services through no fault of their own or an ironic sense of indebtedness to someone else.

In any case, he stands a kind of counter to those like Narita who only want to exploit people’s weaknesses and use violence to get their way. The two of them end up in a financial sparring match as Narita sets Girjio up with a deliberately bad debt, while he, in turn, masterminds a counter scam under the tutelage of his “financial teacher” who knows all sorts of underhanded ways to make money like selling land that doesn’t belong to you. One could say that he’s teaching Ryuichi all the wrong lessons, but then his behaviour is more roguish than dangerous and he’s obviously more morally righteous than the sneering Narita who seems to feed off human pain so it’s satisfying to see him win and humiliate the predatory yakuza. Ginjiro agrees that it’s a sad world in which people die over money, but, at the same time, has a healthy disregard for it. He tells Ryuichi that he should think of money in the same as a greengrocer thinks of vegetables and that he needs to lose his reverence for it if he’s to make it as a loanshark. That might, after all, be how he became the king of Minami, laughing at the ridiculousness of a world in which those with money call the shots while simultaneously holding all the cards himself.

XX: Beautiful Weapon (XX ダブルエックス 美しき凶器, Kazuo Komizu, 1993)

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Though the title may suggest something more in line of exploitation cinema, Kazuo “Gaira” Komizu’s XX: Beautiful Weapon (XX ダブルエックス 美しき凶器, XX: Utsukushiki Kyoki) is more of a mood piece that harks back to classic noir coupled with the erotic thrillers of the 1980s. Though inspired by a short story by hard-boiled master Arimasa Osawa, the film nevertheless adds some political subtext and gives its heroine a much happier ending echoing the underlying themes of fairytale romance.

Indeed, wisecracking hitman/piano player Sakagami (Masao Kusakari) paints himself as a lovelorn prince come to awaken Sleeping Beauty from her slumber and free her from her imprisonment in a dead-end cottage in the middle of nowhere. He begins, however, as a clueless but intrigued hitman on his way out thanks to an apparent inability to keep his mouth shut or lay off the booze. Middle man Yoshizawa (Ren Osugi) drops into his bar, he says just to kill time, though perhaps changing his mind and deciding not to send Sakagami on this particular job. 

A homoerotic frisson colours their interaction, as it does it with the other assassin, a man who runs a coffee shop and has apparently supplanted Sakagami as the hitman of choice. Yoshizawa, however, also has forbidden desires for his charge whom he raised like a daughter and trained in her trade. Nevertheless, he is fairly powerless as the underling of an increasingly paranoid political fixer, Kokubu (Takeshi Kato), who orders him to take care of a bank manager about to blow the whistle on his dodgy dealings and then to take out the assassin too just to be on the safe side. He’s installed the woman (Masumi Miyazaki) in the cottage for just this reason, a conveyor belt killing system in which she knocks off her targets in the middle of coitus and Yoshizawa burns the bodies to make them disappear. Now she knows too much, it’s time to get rid of her too. 

Yoshizawa isn’t onboard with his plan, but find it’s difficult to defy his boss while otherwise worried about the woman’s mental state as she has evidently taken to drink to escape the emotional toll of her unusual line of work. Yet it’s her crying herself to sleep that causes Sakagami to fall in love with her as he peeks in from outside, again like a fairytale figure, observing how she kills the coffee shop guy and making mental notes for when his turn comes around. He quickly realises that she is blind, but pretends not to be, which gives her an advantage in the dark denied to her targets. Her blindness is also, in its way, a symbol of her innocence in that she does not see the darkness of the world all around her and only continues in her work because she doesn’t want anyone else to be forced to do it while, in other ways, hoping to show her love and loyalty to those who raised her. 

Even when Sakagami offers to rescue her, she refuses in fear of what the outside world holds for her. She fears that the dead-end cottage is the only place where she can be “normal”, while outside it she’d be a blind woman unable to navigate the seeing world. Though Sakagami offers to be her guide dog, the surprisingly upbeat ending suggests that she only returns for him once she has achieved independence along with her revenge on those who imprisoned her in the cottage. It is indeed a dead-end place, a liminal space where people only go to die and from which there is no other escape. The woman would most likely have met her own end there, if it were not for Sakagami. The city meanwhile has its own sense of melancholy as a kind of lost paradise filled with the radiating darkness of the corruption of men like Kokubu pulling strings in the shadows. Even so, the woman and Sakagami eventually find a kind of escape in their fairytale romance guided by his gentle piano music and the vague hope of a quiet life free of death and killing having successfully bounced back from their mutual dead ends into an open-ended future.

Screened as part of the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Focus on V-Cinema.

Anxious Virgin: One More Time, I Love You (Doki Doki ヴァージン　もういちど I LOVE YOU, Shun Nakahara, 1990)

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A cocky young man gets hit by a truck on his way to lose his virginity, but manages to get a heavenly civil servant to give him a second chance in Shun Nakahara’s surprisingly nuanced teen sex comedy, Anxious Virgin: One More Time I Love You (Doki Doki ヴァージン　もういちど I LOVE YOU, Doki Doki Virgin Mo Ichido I Love You). The second in Nikkatsu’s entry in the straight-to-video market, the title might hark back to their Roman Porno days and conjure an image of something salacious and exploitative, yet what the hero Hideki (Yasufumi Hayashi) eventually comes to realise is that there’s no rush when it comes to something like physical intimacy and that it’s important to consider the other person’s feelings along with your own emotional readiness. 

He learns this mainly because he’s abruptly forced into a female body, that of Mari who is the best friend of the innocent Sachiko (Shinobu Nakayama). Much to Hideki’s annoyance, Sachiko has a crush on his old school rival, Kakinuma. Good-looking and successful, Kakinuma is a bit of a cad but also envied by the other boys because he lives in a private annex and has a reputation for bringing girls back there to have sex. Neither Hideki nor any of his friends think much about the girls as people with thoughts and emotions of their own, but fixate solely on the action of sexual intercourse. One of the boys has a weird sexual fantasy about his sister whom he saw naked in the shower. While looking at her, her physical form became divorced from her personhood so that he forgot the taboo of incest and appreciated only the presence of a naked woman in close proximity.

The boys do something similar on coming across a girl from another school who is about to engage in outdoor sexual activity with a boy they know. After he blindfolds her as an ironic way of mitigating her embarrassment, the boys cart him off and begin digitally penetrating the girl themselves without any real thought for her personhood let alone her consent. They hear the boy repeating the phrase “I love you” and come to see it almost as a spell that makes a girl let someone have sex with her. Masao, the most lovelorn, tries this again later in trying to get Hideki in Mari’s body to kiss him, though Hideki is obviously not at all interested. 

By this point, Hideki is interested in Sachiko on an emotional as well as purely sexual level but is hampered by his female body. “Mari” appears to the audience as Hideki throughout, amusingly dressed in old-fashioned prison clothes, though the film only sort of flirts with the idea of same-sex desire. In reality, the conflict that caused Mari to lose her consciousness was that she too was in love with Kakinuma, though the problem now is that Hideki can’t support Sachiko in her romance not only because he has a rivalry with Kakinuma and knows him to be a poor romantic prospect, but because he desires her himself. When he eventually kisses Sachiko, she doesn’t quite know what to make of it. She evidently gives it some thought, but decides two girls dating each other doesn’t seem quite right to her and sets “Mari” up with a date with Masao, which is still accidentally a gay date that Hideki isn’t interested in. 

Thus the film defaults to heteronormativity, if in a sensitive and empathetic fashion. Nevertheless, through his experiences in a female body Hideki begins to come to a greater appreciation of what it’s like for girls. Despite having spent the entire film trying to lose his virginity, he tells Mari’s younger sister Riko that she won’t die if she doesn’t have sex and that he disapproves of her whirlwind romance. He understands both that Sachiko is naive and that Kakinuma is no hero but a destructive predator who just wants to have sex whether the girl wants to or not. Giving up his chance to lose his virginity and risking being dragged to hell, Hideki decides to save Sachiko from being pressured into sex and then engages with her in a conversation about the importance of consent and emotional readiness in which they both agree that “rules and timing” are important when it comes to physical intimacy. What began as a rather raucous teen sex comedy has morphed into a sweet and sensitive coming-of-age drama in which rather than obsessing over the physical act, the hero falls in love and is content to end his life having given voice to his feelings.

Screened as part of the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Focus on V-Cinema.

Female Teacher: Forbidden Sex (女教師日記 禁じられた性, Hideo Nakata, 1995)

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Hideo Nakata maybe best known for his films in the horror genre, but he made his feature directorial debut for Toei’s V-Cinema with a tale of forbidden love between a besotted high school boy and his Japanese teacher. Though with a title like Female Teacher: Forbidden Sex (女教師日記 禁じられた性, Jokyoshi Nikki: Kinjirareta Sei), one might expect something fiercely erotic or sensationalist, the film is really a sensitive melodrama in which a young man who feels suffocated by his doting single mother and a female teacher who feels constrained by patriarchal social codes fall into an impossible love. 

Then again, it does have its troubling themes. Lovelorn Mitsuru (Kosuke Kawana) has been leaving mildly ominous messages on Noriko’s (Hitoe Ohtake) answerphone declaring his love and pleading with her to notice him. Noriko knows that the messages are from one of her students, but she doesn’t know which. In any case, the messages make her uncomfortable on several levels given her position as a teacher. Meanwhile, she’s in a relationship with another teacher at the school, Morimoto (Hiroyuki Okita), who is popular with female students. Noriko obviously thinks the relationship is serious as she asks Morimoto to meet her parents, but he appears reluctant in part because Noriko wants to continue her teaching career after marriage and Morimoto is presumably after more of a traditional housewife.

In fact, despite his status as an alpha male PE teacher, Morimoto is rather insecure and actively threatened by Mitsuru when he catches him having dinner with Noriko. This is right after a rumour has begun to spread around the school that he’s slept with a female student, Yumi (Asami Sawaki), who faked a story about being raped to get him to take her to a hotel where she tried to seduce him. It seems that he did not actually sleep with her, but took things father than he should have in an attempt to scare her off doing the same thing again. As such, his conduct is extremely questionable, but he is never questioned about it in the same way that Noriko is even though she only took Mitsuru for dinner even if Yumi’s friends might have a point in suggesting she’s getting back at Morimoto. She did, however, give him alcohol which is not an appropriate thing for a teacher to do, though nothing about this entire situation is really appropriate. The legal drinking age in Japan is 20 and Mitsuru could have been suspended from school just for underage drinking if his teachers found out. 

The real mystery might be why Noriko suddenly takes to Mitsuru, who was after all stalking her. But the reasoning seems to be that he’s the opposite of Morimoto. He treats her with kindness and respect and never tries to constrain her in the same way that Morimoto does even if the natural consequence of their affair is that she will lose her teaching career which had been her dream since high school. She seems to know on some level that their affair is wrong, but gets swept up in the moment and the false hope of escaping the pressures of her life such as the patriarchal expectations of marriage. While Morimoto drags his feet, her friends call inviting her to mixers and her parents try to set her up for arranged marriage meetings to hurry her along to a seemingly inevitable rite of passage. 

Mitsuru, meanwhile, feels hemmed in. He’s on track for a place at the prestigious Tokyo University and under immense pressure while resentful of his mother whom he finds overbearing though mainly just appears caring and interested in his future if a little possessive while chasing after the fugitive Mitsuru and Noriko. What he might paradoxically be looking for is an escape from adulthood, as is Noriko in a way, though his reasons for loving her are otherwise superficial and only to do with her physical beauty. Nevertheless, he resents Morimoto for his boorish, ultra-masculine attempts to dominate Noriko and thinks he’s rescuing her while unaware that in other ways he’s ruining her life. He too railroads her into staying with him, insisting that he’ll look after her by getting a job which only bears out his naivety and makes him little better than Morimoto.

Perhaps with a little male wish fulfilment, the film treats the love story as if it were pure and innocent and it’s only society that’s in the way as reflected in Noriko’s wish for time to run faster but only for Mitsuru. Nevertheless, it too acknowledges that the love is impossible because it is inappropriate given Mitsuru’s youth and Noriko’s position as his teacher, so they can only really be together in death. As such, the film ends on a melancholy note and is filled more with romantic tragedy than the purely erotic content suggested by the misleading title.

Screened as part of the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Focus on V-Cinema.

Many Happy Returns (教祖誕生, Toshihiro Tenma, 1993)

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Cults, or “new religion” organisations as they’re euphemistically known, proliferated in Japan after the war. Though people may have joined them out of loneliness in search of new families or communities, the numbers only seemed to increase in the era of high prosperity as a sense of spiritual emptiness countered the age of consumerism. Coming in 1993 and based on Takeshi Kitano’s own novel, Many Happy Returns Toshihiro Tenma’s (教祖誕生, Kyoso Tanjo) approaches the issue with a genial humour that likely became impossible two years later with the involvement of Aum in the Tokyo subway attack.

Kazuo (Masato Hagiwara), a wandering young man, asks himself why people join join cults while insisting that all looks so fake but later becomes fascinated with them himself. He can tell that the elderly woman who can suddenly walk again after an encounter with the leader (Masami Shimojo) is probably a plant, but is intrigued rather than outraged. Shiba (Takeshi Kitano), the actual “leader” of the group, tells him that it doesn’t matter. The leader healed the lady before at some point in the past, and they’re just reenacting it to show the power of god, which doesn’t really make sense, but it seems to satisfy Kazuo for the moment. 

Of course, Shiba and Go (Ittoku Kishibe) are just a pair of yakuza types running a religious cult as a business to fleece money out of vulnerable people in the countryside by making them think their leader can make all their problems better. The only thing is, Shiba and Go seem to be the only ones who know it’s all fake while current leader has started to believe that he actually has real healing powers despite using an electricity generator to create the sparks of energy flying from his hands during his healing sessions. Though the old lady in a wheelchair is a plant, the leader sometimes agrees to heal other people who request it, which could end up backfiring if Shiba can’t find a way to fake the miracle.

After becoming alarmed that the Leader is too into his religious speeches and has fallen victim to his own patter despite obviously knowing that it’s all made up, Shiba and Go pay him to leave the cult but are then left with a dilemma over how to appoint a successor. Komamura (Koji Tamaki), who’d tried to undermine Shiba’s leadership, is a religious zealot who joined the cult to be closer to god. He objects to Shiba’s godless ways, and while Shiba briefly considers making him the leader to keep him quiet, ends up appointing Kazuo who only recently started tagging along with the cult.

Though Kazuo was originally only interested in the cult precisely because it was fake, once he becomes the leader he starts to think it’s real too. He takes his responsibilities seriously, which means of course that he threatens Shiba’s position and is torn between the real nature of cult which he knows to be a cynical way of making money by exploiting vulnerable people, and the genuine religiosity of Komamura. To look the part and boost his confidence, he starts undertaking ascetic practices such as bathing in waterfalls and going on long, isolated retreats during which he also fasts. Shiba and Go, meanwhile, stuff their faces at a local Chinese restaurant in an orgy of consumerism.

Kazuo asks Shiba if the believes in god, but Shiba counters him by asking what his idea of “god” is. Kazuo believes that “god” heals the sick and helps those in trouble, but Shiba points out that that’s never actually happened, while at least their made-up religion helped some people, so in a way it’s more godlike than actual god. In any case, Shiba’s god is probably consumerism, but unlike Go it seems he has a degree of uncertainty and entertains the possibility that some kind of god really exists and will punish him for his wrongdoing and lack of faith. When he is attacked and ends up killing someone, Kazuo tells him that it’s his punishment for denying god and chasing after money which Shiba eventually concedes to be true. Nevertheless, the closing scenes find him starting again by reuniting with the previous leader, now dressed as a catholic priest, to offer the same patter about healing miracles while warning about false cults and fake religions. Kazuo, meanwhile, has fully accepted the role of an emissary of god by kicking out Go for not taking the religion seriously while preparing to meet his own apotheosis in a sold out show attended by people who, like he once was, are spiritually lost and ironically looking for something that means more than money in this increasingly empty society.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Video Girl Ai (電影少女, Ryu Kaneda, 1991)

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The thing about video is that it is essentially one-sided. Though it might be possible to achieve the effect of interactivity, the video itself is obviously not responding to the viewer but proceeding along its preordained path. Then again, in the new AI age, interactivity can also be dangerous as chatbots are programmed to say whatever the user wants to hear, even if it ends up encouraging them to do something harmful to themselves or others.

Video Girl Ai (電影少女, Denei Shojo), whose name means “love”, is definitely not artificial intelligence but a sort of video fairy that the hero discovers after encountering the “paradise” video store which is only visible to the pure of heart. The extremely odd proprietor gives Yota (Ken Ohsawa) a videotape he says will heal him following a moment of heartbreak on learning that the girl he fancied, Moemi (Hiromi Hiraguchi), actually has a crush on his best friend Takashi (Naoki Hosaka). Takashi acts cool, but is actually just as diffident as Yota and also has a crush on Moemi. He can’t say anything either, less because he feels bad for Yota than he just can’t muster up the courage.

Nevertheless, he keeps encouraging Yota even if it may be partly to assuage his own fear in not having to deal with his feelings for Moemi. Everyone seems to think Yota is a bit a of a loser and the kids at school have created a pun on his surname to make it sound like he’s called “Yota no luck with girls.” He is indeed awkward. His first date with Moemi goes incredibly badly. Not only is he late because he went to the wrong place, but is overly obsessed with his carefully constructed itinerary which he keeps checking on his electronic day planner. Unable to adapt to the moment, he irritates his date and is finally unable to say how he feels.

Queue Video Girl AI (Kaori Sakagami) who has been sent to comfort him. Thanks to a malfunctioning VHS player, Ai emerges from the TV set a little differently to how she was described on the back of the case. Though she was said to be kind and graceful, Ai is feisty and immediately starts giving Yota what for. After getting to know him a little, Ai begins to develop human feelings and fall for Yota herself, even though she’s supposed to be comforting his broken heart and supporting his romance with Moemi. At this point, she basically finds herself at the centre of a love square as she flirts with Takashi to get him to back off from Moemi so Yota’s romantic fantasy can come true.

Yota, meanwhile, is a classic nice guy but struggles with interpersonal communication and pales in comparison with his ultra-cool friend Takashi. In this case, the TV really can talk back and interact like a real person. Ai is not, however, very familiar with human customs and asks inappropriate questions in public, such as the nature of marriage and sex which she awkwardly says she wants to try out for herself later without knowing what it is. That he has to sort of train Ai opens up a dialogue and gives Yota a means of teaching himself, but despite the fact that Ai has corporeality, there is still a question mark over whether or not she is “real”. Looking at Ai’s imitation flowers, Yota says they’re still pretty even if they’re just pretend, just the like ready meals that Ai starts buying after realising her cooking’s gone to pot because of the damaged VCR. 

Nevertheless Yota struggles with himself. His love is a pure-hearted kind, so he’s firmly rooting for Moemi and Takashi rather than resentful or trying to keep her to himself despite knowing she likes someone else. He’s torn between his growing feelings for Ai and those he had for Moemi while also uncertain how long Ai can stay before her tape runs out. Ironically enough, she’s eventually told that she can’t voice her feelings or risk erasure because her role is supposed to be purely supportive. Erasure is in a way what Yota and Takashi fear. They’re too afraid to voice their feelings in case the girl rejects them. The first ever girl Yota asked out turned him down, which left him vowing never to tell another girl he liked her again. As he describes it, love is conflicting emotions, but thanks to his friendship with Ai, Yota is beginning to find the courage to face his feelings. There’s a minor irony, then, that he may be destined to forget her in the same way as the memories of an old girlfriend inevitably fade, leaving him clinging on to a forgotten ghost of love rather than risk romantic heartbreak pursuing connection in the real world.