Tag: 2010s

The Vancouver Asahi (バンクーバーの朝日, Yuya Ishii, 2014)

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Second generation Japanese-Canadians stake their hopes on baseball in Yuya Ishii’s historical drama The Vancouver Asahi (バンクーバーの朝日, Vancouver no Asahi), inspired by the story of the Vancouver Asahi baseball team which was belatedly granted a place in the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in 2003. In many ways a conventional sporting movie in which the underdogs eventually triumph, Ishii does not shy away from the dark shadows of the 1930s even while framing the Asahi’s path to glory as a symbolic punch back against discrimination and oppression. 

As the hero, Reggie (Satoshi Tsumabuki), relates, many like his parents came to Canada at the beginning of the 20th century planning to work for three years and then return to a more comfortable life in Japan only to find themselves trapped in low-paid and exploitative work. Reggie’s main concern is that his drunken and dejected father Seiji (Koichi Sato) still sends the majority of his pay back relatives in Japan meaning their family live like paupers while as he never meant to stay he hasn’t bothered to learn the language or attempt to integrate into the local community. In fact, Reggie is their major breadwinner with his job at the sawmill but the only thing that makes his life worth living is playing baseball with the Vancouver Asahi baseball team even though they are regarded as something of a joke, always at the bottom of the league tables and never actually winning a game. 

The plight of Asahi is closely aligned with that of the immigrant community, divided as it is in its approach to integration with some feeling they should abandon their Japaneseness in order to better get along with Canadians and others fiercely determined to hang on to their traditions. When Reggie admits that they can’t win against the power of the Canadians it feels as if he’s talking about more than just baseball though his solutions are perhaps apt for both in realising that to beat strength you need to be smart. What he comes up with is essentially a bunt and run strategy that plays to their advantages of speed and lightness but also at times feels to him like a trick or a gimmick, an admission that they can’t compete in the normal way. “Why are you always apologising?” Reggie is repeatedly asked, his shyness and mumbling speech always seeking to keep the peace while his desire to offer justification is less as one Japanese old lady puts it “a bad habit of their culture” but a defence mechanism in an environment of potentially violent oppression. 

As Japanese migrants the family faces constant xenophobic micro aggressions, a woman at the hotel refusing to let Reggie’s bellboy friend Frank (Sosuke Ikematsu) carry her bags while they are also suspected as thieves or harassed by the local Canadians. Reggie’s hothead friend Kei (Ryo Katsuji) finds it increasingly difficult to keep his cool, not least as it turns out because his father was killed fighting for the Canadians in the last war and yet he is still treated as a dangerous outsider. Meanwhile, they are paid only half the wages of the Canadian workers, expected to work unreasonable hours, and can be fired without warning. Now an ageing man, Seiji is still a casual labourer fighting for a place on a truck to work at a quarry or construction site often in other towns away from his family in order to get more money. The team is constantly losing players because men lose their jobs and focus on finding new ones or moving away. As one old man laments, there’s no job security and even if you go to a Canadian university it won’t make any difference to your job prospects. Reggie’s sister Emi (Mitsuki Takahata) was on track for a scholarship only to have it pulled at the last minute when parents of the other kids complained it wasn’t right it was going to a Japanese girl. 

After the hotel fires all of its Japanese staff, Frank decides to go “back” to Japan where relatives will help him find work but pointing out to Reggie that he’ll still be seen as an outsider even there and there’s no guarantee anything will be any better in Japan. Poignantly the guys later catch sight of him in a newsreel as a soldier having been sent to the Machurian front. Once war breaks out they are discriminated against again, forced out of their homes and interned leaving all their property behind and destroying their small community, the Asahi included. The team’s unexpected success had forged a bridge between the Japanese and Canadian communities but it was not strong enough to survive the war. Stepping away from the sports movie, Ishii concentrates more on the ways they were betrayed, the team’s success later buried and forgotten while they find the advances they’d made washed away on the shore as if to suggest their strike back against an oppressive society could never be more than superficial while their position remains so precarious. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

Leaving on the 15th Spring (旅立ちの島唄～十五の春～, Yasuhiro Yoshida, 2013)

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“How many of them will come back?” a man on the shore ominously asks as he watches the young people of his island ship out to pursue their education in the comparatively better equipped capital. Rural depopulation has become a minor theme in recent Japanese cinema, but the situation is arguably all the worse in the outlying islands of Okinawa. As the title of Yasuhiro Yoshida’s Leaving on the 15th Spring (旅立ちの島唄～十五の春～, Tabidachi no Shima Uta: Jugo no Haru) suggests, teens from the small island of Minami Daito (South Daito) must leave at 15 if they want to attend high school because there isn’t one on the island.

That said, there are more kids than you’d expect in young Yuna’s (Ayaka Miyoshi) middle school and it’s more than just a handful who leave the island each spring, many of them choosing to make lives for themselves in the wider world rather than return to their childhood home. On Minami Daito, the main industry is sugarcane but the prospect of Japan joining the TPP trade agreement has many worried that it will soon no longer be viable and with even fewer economic opportunities available many will have no choice other than to abandon the island for good. 

We’re often reminded just how far the island is from the Okinawan capital Naha and how difficult it is to get to. To leave, the kids are placed in a kind of cage and lifted onto a larger boat moored by a small jetty. Even to get to the next island Kita Daito (North Daito) it’s some time on a ferry which might not run if the weather is bad. Distance becomes a persistent theme, not just in Yuna’s impending exit but the scattering of her family. When kids leave for high school, a parent often goes with them as Yuna’s mother Akemi (Shinobu Otake) did when it was time for her sister Mina (Saori) to depart. But Mina is now a grown woman married with a child of her own and Akemi has not been back to the island for two years. This forcible separation continues to disrupt familial bonds as couples necessarily grow apart and children begin to choose their own paths in life which often take them away from their parents. 

It’s this sense of distance which plays on Yuna’s mind, a kind of countdown starting inside her as she witnesses another girl sing the Okinawa folk song “Abayoi” which means “goodbye” in the local dialect and recounts a young person’s sorrow as they must leave their family and childhood home behind on coming of age. Reminded that she’s next in only a year’s time, Yuna meditates on her past and future while reconsidering her relationships. Abandonment often occurs through a simple lapse in contact. Akemi now rarely phones home while Yuna’s nascent first love with a boy from Kita Daito falters when he abruptly stops calling or returning her letters. Eventually she finds out that despite their pledge to attend the same high school on Naha, he has decided to stay and take over his father’s fishing boat because of his dad’s ill health. 

Kenta has realised that his place is Kita Daito and he will remain there the rest of his life while harbouring a degree of resentment that he couldn’t go to high school or pursue his romance with Yuna. He feels their relationship is doomed simply from the fact that they’re from different islands. He won’t leave his, and she likely would not settle on Kita Daito preferring, either a life in the cities or her childhood home. It’s the same for her parents, Akemi deciding that she prefers life in the city and the degree of independence she has there while her father Toshiharu (Kaoru Kobayashi) would not survive off the island. Both of her siblings have already left, Mina returning with her infant daughter apparently on the verge of separating with her husband partly it seems because of the insecurity the separation of her family has left her with, while Yuna’s brother seems to be a harried workaholic with no family life to speak of. 

Rather childishly she thinks she can reunite her family and dreams of buying a big house on Naha for them all to live together, adult siblings included, without fully accepting that the relationship between her parents has been gradually worn away leaving them strangers to each other and each desiring different kinds of futures. What she comes to is perhaps an acceptance of the distance in her life, the longing for her island home where she says everyone is one big family, as she finds herself choosing independence. A picturesque vision of Minami Daito and its idyllic landscape along with the traditions of the island including its rich musical culture and Okinawan Sanshin, Yoshida’s gentle drama discovers that “abayoi” is a part of life that can’t be avoided but can be sweet as well as bitter once you’ve learned to accept it.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Young Black Jack (ヤング ブラック・ジャック, Kentaro Otani, 2011)

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The Black Jack of Osamu Tezuka’s classic manga is a morally ambiguous figure who cultivates an image of callousness through asking for exorbitant sums to cure often desperate people, but in reality will usually treat seriously ill patients if touched by their plight or is content to collect the money from another source ensuring a kind of social justice is done. A spin-off manga written by Yoshiaki Tabata and illustrated by Yugo Okuma, Young Black Jack (ヤング ブラック・ジャック), was published from 2011 to 2019 and was set in the 1960s when Black Jack was gifted young medical student living through a politically turbulent era. 

Broadcast in 2011, this television special meanwhile updates the action to the present day while acting as a kind of double origin story if one set in a more realistic world. As a nine-year-old boy, Black Jack asks his mother to meet him by the Christmas display in a local shopping mall. Not having had enough money to buy his mother a red rose, he patiently sits and draws one under the tree while otherwise oblivious to the news being broadcast on a large screen explaining that there has been a series of bombings in the city and the next target is this very mall. Black Jack’s mother has become mute after a traumatic incident but tries to call out to him only for the pair to be caught in the blast. Touched by their story, the genius doctor Honma (Masachika Ichimura) manages to save Black Jack by transplanting his organs and giving him a skin graft while his mother remains in a coma.

The story then jumps to the present day with Black Jack (Masaki Okada) a medical student with an underground lair where he keeps his comatose mother (who hasn’t aged at all in 15 years) and operates as a backstreet doctor treating undocumented migrants and yakuza. Aside from emphasising his contradictory nature as someone who both treats anyone who requires treatment no matter of their social status yet simultaneously demands incredible sums of money for doing so, associating with these kinds of people also places Black Jack among the lower ranks of society which is something that niggles at snooty doctor Naoki (Yukiyoshi Ozawa). Naoki is sort of betrothed to Yuna (Riisa Naka), the daughter of the chief doctor at a prestigious university hospital who is herself in the middle of taking her final exams to become a doctor. 

Familiar to fans of the manga, Naoki is Black Jack’s opposite number. As he tells Yuna, there are two kinds of doctors. Those who save lives and those who kill. In the manga, Naoki was a doctor traumatised by his wartime experiences who often wants to euthanise the patients that Black Jack is trying to save believing that there is no way to save them. Having encountered Black Jack cooly saving a patient who collapsed in the street, Yuna asks Naoki what he thinks makes a good doctor and he tells her it’s the belief that medical science has no limits and the doctor is omnipotent. Yet he later says just the opposite, telling Yuna that she is being childish and of course there are limits to what medical science can achieve so in effect he’s giving up. Black Jack meanwhile does believe in his own omnipotence, even if that’s not always such a good thing, and is confident he can save any patient even if in the end he cannot save the one most close to him (perhaps because she wanted him to stop trying). 

The film does not however go into very much detail and only gives brief snippets of backstory such as Black Jack’s mother going mute after a shadowy man enters and leaves their home while hinting at potential future stories in his opposition to Naoki who objects to him partly out of snobbishness, and a potential romance with Yuna who has now shifted away from the elitism that coloured her family towards a more altruistic kind of medicine represented by Black Jack even in his aloofness. Nevertheless, the film makes no real attempt to transcend its origins as a television movie, not that it has to, and is hampered by an uninspired script and low production values which contribute to its relatively more naturalistic setting yet sit awkwardly with the more outlandish parts of the narrative such as Black Jack’s keeping his mother in cryogenic status for 15 years or being able to transplant all of someone’s organs at once and in under 10 minutes. Still, as a minor outing for the iconic character it’s entertaining enough for fans of the franchise. 

Mechanical Telepathy (メカニカル・テレパシー, Akiko Igarashi, 2018)

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Many, though not all, people have an interior monologue but what if you could converse directly with an image of yourself, a mental avatar who could talk and move around and might have opinions you would not expect to hear yourself say out loud? The scientists at the centre of Akiko Igarashi’s Mechanical Telepathy (メカニカル・テレパシー), a re-edited version of her 2017 feature Visualized Hearts, are working on a machine that can create a physical simulacrum of a mental image. No concrete reason is given for their research save that of one assistant who suggests its capacity to help those who can no longer communicate physically have a voice, but what quickly becomes apparent is that a self-created image may not be entirely reliable while the images of it held in other minds may differ in interesting ways. 

Each of these philosophical questions begin to occur to scientist Mazaki (Ryuichi Yoshida) when he’s seconded to a research project as a kind of corporate spy on behalf of the business-minded boss who wants to put the product on the market as soon as possible despite the reservations of lead researcher Dr. Midori Mishima (Nanami Shirakawa) whose husband Soichi was injured in a previous experiment and is currently in a coma. Midori’s interest in the machine is then in its capacity to save her husband either by retrieving his bodily consciousness or preserving the image of him captured inside, improving and enhancing it until the point of communication. 

But then as Mazaki comes to realise, perhaps the image of Soichi (Yoshio Shin) in the machine isn’t coming from his mind at all but from Midori’s in which case he doesn’t know anything she doesn’t know already and is in a sense inaccurate, composed only of her memories of him and necessarily limited in possessing the information she does not have even of this man whom she obviously knew intimately. Meanwhile, Mazaki also begins seeing an avatar of Midori, but is unsure if it originates from her mind, that of the comatose Soichi, or indeed his own as a means of confronting him with the desire he may feel for her. His image of himself meanwhile is scathing and self-loathing, challenging him over his various acts of moral cowardice in his essential inability to communicate his true feelings. Only assistant Asumi (Ibuki Aoi), harbouring a decidedly obvious crush on him, is brave enough to take him to task looking her own avatar in the eye and explaining that she has nothing to fear from herself. “If you don’t say it out loud no one will hear you” she explains though it’s a lesson that Mazaki in particular finds difficult to learn. 

As for the avatars themselves, are they representations of particular people or indeed something new and different subject to influence and interference? The mind is supposedly free of time and space but that may not be an entirely good thing. What the machine posits is the separation between mind and body as if a soul could be sheared while it becomes difficult to say if the loss of corporality is liberation or imprisonment while Mazaki wonders if it’s right for a mind to exist without a body. If we can’t trust these images we have of others can we really trust those we have of ourselves which may be largely created through the way that others see us and we them? Complaining he can no longer distinguish whose mind he’s looking at, Mazaki finds himself caught in a moment of existential confusion amid several differing realities his own mind can no longer order. 

This sense of dissociation is perhaps replicated in Igarashi’s detached camerawork set amid the clinical glass and steal environments of the Kobe research institute where the experiments take place, the muted colour palette reflecting a sense of emptiness in the hearts and minds of the scientists who ironically remain incapable of direct communication. The near future production design similarly lends an air of sleek modernity to the otherwise vacant space while perhaps creating a sense of the supernatural in the lightning crackle inside the machine, its tangling wires a digital recreation of an analogue nerve system. A philosophical examination of the representation of the self, its projections literal and metaphorical, and the impossibility of knowing oneself or others Igarashi’s sci-fi drama eventually suggests that perhaps we are all in an empty room talking to ourselves incapable of understanding let alone expressing our true feelings. 

The Housemaid (하녀, Im Sang-soo, 2010)

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Kim Ki-young’s landmark 1960 film The Housemaid (하녀, Hanyeo) was a gothic tale positioning the source of its horror in the temptations of an increasingly consumerist society as a moderately wealthy man acquires the means to hire a domestic servant only to give in to sexual temptation which brings about his ruin. Kim’s moralising drama may cast a young woman as a salacious femme fatale, but it also ends with a perhaps surprising coda that reminds the male members of the audience that rules exist for them too and they can’t expect to escape unscathed should they break them. 

Im Sang-soo’s 2010 “remake”, perhaps more accurately described as a re-imagining, updates the tale for the modern day in which a class of super elites has become almost entirely detached from regular society and with it any sense of conventional morality. The heroine, Eun-yi (Jeon Do-yeon), is not a naive schoolgirl but a mature woman once divorced, while the head of the household, Hoon (Lee Jung-jae), is in fact absent for most of the picture which otherwise features only women engaged in accidental class warfare and desperate, internecine fights for survival. 

Im opens, however, with a tense and prophetic scene roving around the night market where Eun-yi is temporarily working alongside a friend while waiting for another opportunity. A young woman hovers over a rooftop railing, eventually falling to her death. Eun-yi is oddly fascinated, asking her friend to come with her to check out the scene on their way home. This odd reaction may fit with later characterisations of her as “childlike”, though otherwise in conflict with constant reminders that Eun-yi is a “good person” despite the potential for corruption offered by the Goh mansion. While Mrs Goh, Hae-ra (Seo Woo), is heavily pregnant with twins and unable to satisfy her husband sexually, he turns to the maid who is much older than she is but also more experienced, earthier, and freer in spirit. Eun-yi is a willing participant in their affair, but is surprised when Hoon leaves her a cheque the next morning as if he were paying her an overtime bonus or merely trying to justify his sexual transgression as a transaction sealed off from his family life. 

Nevertheless, the situation reaches a crisis point when veteran housekeeper Mrs Cho (Youn Yuh-jung ) discovers the affair and suspects that Eun-yi may be pregnant. While as Hae-ra’s mother Mi-hee (Park Ji-young) puts it, affairs are part of the package with a rich husband, a child is an existential threat yet for all her plotting Mi-hee may be overplaying her hand pushing Eun-yi from a second floor ladder in full view of her daughter and granddaughter hoping to engineer if not a death then at least a miscarriage. Victims of this same system of class and patriarchy, Hae-ra and her mother believe they must destroy another woman to ensure they hang on to their position which they only occupy in their relationship to Hoon. 

Mrs Cho, meanwhile, once felt something similar, in essence a turncoat believing that her only possibility lies in toadying for the super rich but now that her son has been made a prosecutor she’s beginning to tire of a life of constant degradation. “R.U.N.S.” is her favourite acronym for describing her existence, “Revolting, ugly, nauseating, and shameless”. Fearing for her safety, she advises Eun-yi not to linger too long in the house, but is finally forced to admit that she feels ashamed in her complicity with the shady machinations of her employers whom she describes as “scary people” willing to act with absolute impunity when it comes to protecting their wealth and position. “Why’d you just stand still and let her slap you like that?” she asks of Eun-yi confronted by the jealous wife, indigent on her behalf but also unable to deny that it’s an apt metaphor for the way she has lived her life trapped in the house of Goh. 

As for the house itself, its fierce modernity makes for a cold home along with its sense of spotless sterility in which everything, and everyone, must have a place. The only source of heat provided is by a raging fire in front of which Hae-ra and her mother plot their “revenge” behind the back of an otherwise emasculated Hoon who is later forced to confront the reality that he is largely without power in this matriarchal household. Im’s camera tilts at these destabilising moments, a degree of unease lurking in the house’s shadowy interiors. Eun-yi wanders around in her white nighty like a living ghost now defined by her complicated status straddling a class divide. Yet she really is a “good person” with a “pure heart”, her desire for revenge largely turning inward but also doomed to fail in that you cannot shame the shameless into recognising their own immorality. Eun-yi never considers digging in and taking over the house herself, while her opposing numbers operate under a misplaced terror of her potential to unseat them. Their ongoing oppression is both modus vivendi and ingrained defence mechanism. 

Yet they are all victims of the same systems of entrenched class privilege and patriarchy that set one person against another driven by fear and desperation. Only Mrs Cho finally has the courage to reject the system altogether by removing herself from it, no longer willing to be complicit with her own degradation. “That’s what these people are like,” Hoon sneers, almost offended but perhaps shaken by Mrs Cho’s quiet revolution in realising he holds no power over those who’ve decided to be free. 

International trailer (English subtitles)

Laughing Under the Clouds (曇天に笑う, Katsuyuki Motohiro, 2018)

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A cheerful former samurai chooses laughter as the best weapon against existential anxiety in Katsuyuki Motohiro’s big budget adaptation of the manga by Karakara-Kemuri, Laughing Under the Clouds (曇天に笑う, Donten ni Warau). Set amid the chaos of the late Meiji social revolution in which the samurai are no more, Motohiro’s supernatural drama is in some ways uncomfortably reactionary even as it takes as its heroes the defenders of a burgeoning new democracy who, our hero aside, seem to have a tendency towards authoritarianism in their insistence on the kind of order only they can bring. 

Indeed, prisoners brought to “prison island” are coldly informed that “hope, freedom and peace. These are things of the past” because “once you’re in here you’ll never get out”, “you have no rights in here”. Most of the prisoners are here it seems because of their opposition to the new regime including the mysterious Fuma Kotaro former leader of a ninja clan wiped out by imperial forces now held in solitary confinement. The man we first see dragged in is apparently a former samurai struggling to adjust to his loss of privilege and unable to find new ways of living in a world of superficial equality. 

Yet it’s not this destabilisation of the social order which presents the moment of chaos so much as a prophecy that Orochi, a vengeful snake spirit, is due to make his return to Earth and wreak even more havoc. As the legend goes, Orochi brought clouds and rain which provided humanity with a bountiful harvest yet humanity resented him for his ugliness and so Orochi took revenge for their ingratitude by creating chaos. Tenka (Sota Fukushi), a former member of the Nile imperial Wild Hound squad, sees his familial legacy as the duty to combat the vicious cycle of hate through the power of laughter. His decision to leave the Wild Hounds after his parents were murdered by ninjas in order to care for his orphaned brothers is another indication of his essential humanity as is his determination that he will protect not only his town but whoever it is that has been selected as a vessel for Orochi’s return. 

These humanitarian concerns stand in direct contrast with the unfeeling authoritarianism of the Wild Hounds or the innate cruelty of the existence of a place like prison island where those who threaten the new regime are exploited as slave labour. On the other hand, the anger of the disempowered ninja clans is perhaps understandable even if their opposition to the regime, intending to harness the power of Orochi to overthrow the government, is an attempt to hang on to their privilege as a path back to the way things used to be. As such it’s they rather than Orochi who become the central villain though one could also read Orochi as an expression of the intense anxiety of the age especially as it invades the body of a young man himself feeling resentful and confused while looking for a sense of direction in a rapidly changing society. 

Tenka’s opposition is rooted in cheerfulness, in learning to laugh even under the clouds and becoming stronger for it though his otherwise openhearted nature stands in direct contrast with his oft repeated catchphrase “I am the law” as he enforces order in his small provincial town willingly delivering criminals and fugitives to prison island but also making a point of befriending a former ninja, Shirasu (Ren Kiriyama), he rescued after the raid which killed his parents in acknowledging that Shirasu himself was not responsible for their deaths only the chaotic world in which they live. 

Boasting some impressive special effects as Tenka and the forces of order team up for some spiritual magic to send Orochi back where he came from, Laughing Under the Clouds ultimately sells a positive message casting Tenka’s revolution as an ideal world of love, laughter, and happiness while simultaneously ignoring the oppressive qualities of new social model such as its shady prisons, lack of tolerance for opposing political views, and failure to make good on the promises of a classless society. Nevertheless with its fantastical production design and inherent cheerfulness it does perhaps suggest that laughter may be the only real salve for internal darkness.  

Original trailer (no subtitles)

When I Get Home, My Wife Always Pretends to be Dead (家に帰ると妻が必ず死んだふりをしています。, Toshio Lee, 2018)

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“If you give it some time it becomes just right,” according to the eccentric wife in Toshio Lee’s quirky contemplation of the modern marriage, When I Get Home, My Wife Always Pretends to be Dead (家に帰ると妻が必ず死んだふりをしています。Ie ni kaeru to tsuma ga kanarazu shinda furi wo shite imasu.). A more cheerful take on Harold and Maude, Lee’s not quite newlywed couple are heading out of their honeymoon phase and perhaps harbouring twin anxieties as they face the three year itch and start to wonder what marriage is all about and if they have what it takes to go the distance. 

Regular salaryman Jun (Ken Yasuda) is particularly preoccupied with the “three year wall” because he was married once before and the relationship failed at the three year level which is, coincidentally, when many small businesses and restaurants fail. Perhaps unusually he has a friend at work, Sano (Ryohei Ohtani), with whom he discusses his marriage who ironically points out that Jun is essentially thinking of his marital status in the same way as a “contract renewal” as if worried he’s about to be let go. Around this time, however, he gets a nasty shock on returning home discovering his wife Chie (Nana Eikura) lying on the living room floor covered in blood. Distraught, he struggles to remember the number to call an ambulance only for Chie to suddenly burst out laughing. The same thing begins happening to him every time he goes home with the scenarios becoming increasingly elaborate such as being eaten by an alligator, for example, or being abducted by aliens. All things considered, Jun is quite a dull man, too embarrassed even to let his wife kiss him goodbye on the doorstep lest it scandalise the neighbours, so all of this fantasy is doing his head in but his rather blunt hinting that he’d prefer it Chie stop with the playing dead stuff only seems to hurt her feelings while she shows no signs of abandoning her strange hobby. 

Part of the problem is that Jun is also intensely self-involved and perhaps the product of a conformist, patriarchal society. He never reveals the reasons why his first marriage failed, only that his wife abruptly left him without much of an explanation. It never seems to occur to him that Chie may be fixating on death because she lost her mother young, possibly around the same age she is now, and is in a sense role playing demise to ease her anxiety probably grateful each time he returns home and “saves” her. For his part he insists he doesn’t “need excitement” and wants “a normal wife”, desperate to appear conventional and paranoid that Chie is going out of her mind. Rather than fully see her he keeps trying to “fix” the problem by encouraging her to take a part-time job and make new friends, worried she’s bored at home and lonely after moving away from her family home in Shizuoka.  

His friend Sano, seemingly happily married for five years, has a much more relaxed attitude to the mysteries of marriage but as the two wives begin to bond the cracks in their respective relationships are gradually revealed. Like Jun, Sano is also a conventional salaryman with traditional ideas about marriage which he somewhat rudely exposes in thinking he’s doing Jun a favour by “explaining” to Chie that her hobby is offensive to Jun because men work hard all day and want to sit down quietly without any bother when they come home. His quiet word provokes an outburst in his own wife Yumiko (Sumika Nono) who can no longer bear the irony, asking him why it is that she’s supposed to tiptoe around because he’s “tired” as if she does nothing at all day just waiting for him to come home. It’s as if they think their wives go back in the box until they ring the doorbell in the evening and wake them up again, as if the only value in their existence lies in supporting their husbands. Sano is mildly shocked on witnessing Yumiko suddenly brighten and embark on a mini lecture of crocodile facts after catching sight of Chie’s prop (bought on sale, making the most of her thrifty housewife skills), totally unaware she was into reptiles and equally stunned to learn she’s also a karate master. Five years, and it’s like they’re strangers. 

“Thinking won’t give you answers, when you don’t know, ask,” advises Jun’s boss, constantly carping about his ungrateful wife but later revealing that his deep love for her is what’s kept him going all these years. Miscommunication lies at the root of all their problems, Jun even failing to identify the most common if poetic of cliched idioms in his wife’s tendency to remark on the beauty of the moon seemingly at random. Clued in a little by Chie’s patient father, Jun begins to wake up himself, finally seeing his wife and understanding that she’s been trying to tell him something all this time only he was too self-involved to notice. “You can always find me if you look,” Chie was fond of saying, indirectly hinting that marital bliss is a matter of mutual recognition aided by empathy and a willingness to be foolish in the pursuit of happiness. 

When I Get Home, My Wife Always Pretends to be Dead is available to stream in the UK via Terracotta

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Kalanchoe (カランコエの花, Shun Nakagawa, 2017)

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The truth is, most people genuinely mean well but they often make mistakes. They make them because they don’t think things through, fail to consider perspectives outside of their own, or act on assumptions that they later realise were incorrect (or tragically do not). Most people will come to understand where they went wrong and resolve to do better in future, but you don’t always get a second chance and a momentary lapse in judgement can do untold and sometimes irreparable harm.

Perhaps that’s just a lesson you learn as a part of growing up, but it doesn’t make it any less painful or indeed shocking at least for the heroine of Shun Nakagawa’s 40-minute mid-length film Kalanchoe (カランコエの花, Kalanchoe no Hana). The film’s title refers to a bright red plant that in the language of flowers means “I will protect you.” But protection can be a double-edged sword, and Tsuki’s (Mio Imada) later attempt to do just that for her friend seriously backfires well meaning though it may have been. The same is true of an ill thought out decision by the school nurse to give a mini lecture on LGBTQ+ issues to Tsuki’s class when their English teacher’s off sick. Because it was only their class that received this talk, some of the students assume it must mean that one of them is gay and begin a kind of witch-hunt trying to figure out who it might be which is completely the opposite of the reaction the talk was supposed to provoke.

Of course, the nurse meant well but it probably should have occurred to her to make sure the class wasn’t singled out and support was available for any students who might be experiencing anxiety surrounding their sexuality or gender identity rather than doing something essentially superficial to make herself feel better. Though most of the students are indifferent to the talk, the class clown bears out the latent homophobia of the current society in badgering the nurse to find out if there are any gay people “or other creeps” in their class while vowing to root them out and making it a kind of game to catch one. The girls, meanwhile, engage in some aggressive heteronormativity talking about boys and pretty much making it impossible for any of them to declare themselves for whatever reason uninterested. 

As it turns out, one student overheard the conversation in the nurse’s office that provoked the talk and knows that one of the students is indeed gay, perhaps inappropriately telling Tsuki who it is in an effort to relieve the burden on herself of carrying this explosive information. When Sakura (Arisa), the student in question, begins to tell Tsuki that she’s gay, Tsuki firstly reacts well patiently waiting rather than admit she already knows though in the end Sakura cannot go through with it despite having said that Tsuki was the person she most wanted to understand. Sakura had admired Tsuki’s red scrunchie that she herself had worried was too bold, prompting her to turn over in her hands and consider it as if thinking over how she intends to react to this information and how she herself may or may not feel.

But on her second opportunity she missteps. Fearing Sakura has been outed, she loudly and clearly says it isn’t true even though she knows it is in a mistaken attempt at “protection” as if she were clearing her name which is also an expression of her own latent belief that it being true is in someway bad. In its way, it echoes the fateful moment in William Wyler’s The Children’s Hour in which Shirley MacLaine tells Audrey Hepburn there’s some truth in the rumour, but Audrey Hepburn tells her she’s lost her mind and though the outcome may not be quite as devastating it’s still a crushing blow with the brutal conclusion implying nothing more than Tsuki will have to live with her bad decision and the pain it caused for the rest of her life. Nakagawa skips between idyllic scenes of the girls on a bike, head gently resting on a shoulder, and scenes of regular high school life but ends on a note of quiet tragedy that feels somehow casually cruel.

Kalanchoe is available to stream via SAKKA from 20th September.

Ajin: Demi-Human (亜人, Katsuyuki Motohiro, 2017)

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Katsuyuki Motohiro’s 2001social drama Transparent: Tribute to a Sad Genius had attempted to show the government acting with compassion having discovered humans with a potentially dangerous power, in that case the unfortunate ability to broadcast their every thought. Rather than locking them up in labs, the government had allowed the Transparents to live in the community under the caveat that they must never be told of their ability while continuing to monitor them secretly and in fact micromanaging their lives with less than ethical attention. 2017’s Ajin (亜人), adapted from the manga by Gamon Sakurai, is in many ways Transparent’s flip side in which the government has discovered the existence of a series of people known as Demi-Humans with super fast healing ability meaning that they cannot die from injury and has been conducting what is essentially vivisection on them justifying themselves that “the Ajin are the precious key to the evolution of mankind”. 

Nevertheless, they are mindful that the public would not accept it if they knew the government’s claims of “protecting” Ajins was a smokescreen to disguise the fact they’ve been experimenting on them, let alone selling the results to commercial companies for the production of chemical weapons among other things. Previously a regular medical student, Kei Nagano (Takeru Satoh) is the third Ajin to be unmasked in Japan after being hit by a bus only to heal rapidly and stumble away. After a brief period of torture, Kei is “rescued” by crazed terrorist revolutionary leader Sato (Go Ayano) and his underling Tanaka (Yu Shirota), escaped Ajins 1 and 2, but becomes their enemy after he refuses to turn against the scientists who had been torturing him pointing out that killing them would only make him feel worse and is therefore counterproductive. 

The implication is that 20 years of brutal torture at the hands of mad scientists has turned Sato into a crazed fascist hellbent on the extinction of the human race, seeking an “autonomous” space for Ajin along with full civil rights for Demi-Humans. Though we are told that only three Ajin have been unmasked so far in Japan, the implication is that there are many more living quietly some of whom Sato recruits after putting out a call for all disenfranchised Demi-Humans to join his revolution not for equality but domination. It’s this movement Kei can’t support, the classically “good” Ajin who disapproves of Sato’s actions and wants to leave peacefully alongside humanity. As such, there’s something a little uncomfortable in his inevitable decision to team up with the people who were just vivisecting him in order to stop Sato achieving his goal of guaranteed civil rights for people like him asking for nothing more than that his family be protected and he be left alone and given a new ID to live quietly in somewhere in Japan when all of this over. 

The unpalatable implication seems to be that minorities are only worthy of respect if they serve those in power, both Kei and another closeted Ajin benefiting directly and individually by siding with humanity though humanity may not honour the various promises it makes while they are partially complicit in the torture and exploitation of other Ajins. Sato’s basic request is only to given his full rights in the freedom from torture, but even this cannot be granted because of the threat he presents to humanity in that the inability to die means that he cannot be controlled through violence. Ironically enough Sato does seem to believe himself to be the next step in human evolution, after 20 years of brutal torture believing that humanity is a lesser being which those like him are intended to replace. 

Kei meanwhile encounters kind humans such as Mrs. Yamanaka (Kazuko Yoshiyuki) who kindly offers him a place to hideout because when you see someone is in trouble you just help them even if a baying mob later turn up at your door to ask why. There may be a minor allegory in the way the Ajins are treated, feared by and excluded from regular society, forced to keep their true natures secret in order to live a “quiet” life but than again Sato and his cohort of equally crazed young Demi-Humans who presumably have never been tortured are depicted as quasi-fascist radicals selling their own organs on the medical black market and eventually prepared to unleash a chemical weapon on Tokyo to make it unliveable for regular humans in order to claim their own space. Nevertheless, Motohiro’s drama is at its best during its high impact, well choreographed action sequences displaying some top quality visual effects as the Ajins produce their ghostly avatars or reassemble themselves after catastrophic injury even if the discomfort of the underlying messages cannot be entirely escaped. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Round Trip Heart (ロマンス, Yuki Tanada, 2015)

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“Somewhere in Japan, there’s someone waiting for me” sing the heroes of Yuki Tanada’s Round Trip Heart (ロマンス, Romance), each a little lost and unwilling to go home looking for something but also afraid to find it. In any case, they can only begin by stepping off the rails and taking a detour through their shared sense of loneliness bonding as they look for new directions and an accommodation with a disappointing reality. 

Ironically enough, Hachiko (Yuko Oshima) is a top operator of the refreshment cart aboard the Romance Car heading from Tokyo to the country by train. Hachiko claims to love trains because of their sense of certainty. After all they travel on rails, have a clear destination, and will definitely return after reaching the end of their journeys. She meanwhile feels a little lost and empty in her life of forced politeness with a feckless boyfriend who asks her for money before she heads off to work. An unexpected letter from her estranged mother, Yoriko (Megumi Nishimuta), and a strange encounter with a weird old man who tries to steal a packet of biscuits however force her change course, getting off the train and heading back into the past. 

Sakuraba (Koji Ookura), the biscuit pilferer, is a 45-year-old failed film producer on the run from the police and myriad loansharks. His sense of loneliness mirrors Hachiko’s own in that he is divorced with a 9-year-old daughter he hasn’t seen in two years and lifetime’s worth of regrets. Hachiko becomes for him a kind of surrogate daughter as he inappropriately reassembles the torn up letter and convinces Hachiko that it implies her mother may attempt to take her own life suggesting that they journey to the place it mentions, Hakone, where the family once spent a pleasant holiday. 

Familial breakdown is reason for their shared sense of displacement yet Hachiko has projected all of her resentment onto her mother who never got over her father’s decision to leave while Sakuraba fears that his daughter has grown to hate him and harbours a secret desire to restore his family but is too consumed with shame to approach them. By going to Hakone in search of her mother, Hachiko begins to reevaluate her childhood memories perhaps understanding a little more of her mother from the perspective of a grown woman rather than that of a small child who had sometimes felt left out by her parents’ closeness while they were together and rejected by her mother’s need for romantic validation once her father had left. In one particular scene we see Yoriko wearing dark glasses with what looks like a bruise over her eye while taking Hachiko to a restaurant where she orders steak only for her daughter presumably because she cannot afford two meals explaining that her boyfriend has broken up with her because of her lingering attachment to Hachiko’s father. 

The memory forces her back into a moment of resentment feeling as if her mother was only ever nice to her when men let her down, poignantly recalling her neediness in lamenting that everyone always leaves her while asking Hachiko to promise she never would. Sakuraba too complains that everybody leaves him though in his case in the wake of his repeated failures as a film producer and subsequent dealing with loansharks and other shady characters. Just as Yoriko had continued to dream of romantic fulfilment, Sakuraba continues to dream of success in film but crucially as a path back towards his family as perhaps finding a man might have been for Yoriko though she was never able to let go of the idealised image of her husband pining for the familial closeness of their Hakone trip. 

Even so the force that governs their lives is fatalistic passivity, Hachiko riding the rails to their certain destinations and back again, while Sakuraba makes every decision by tossing a coin, an action rendered meaningless by his inability to tell heads from tales. Only by rejecting their passivity in getting off the train and giving up the coin tricks can they begin to face themselves, deciding to set out and look for those who may be waiting for them rather than just sitting around waiting for something to happen. Then again perhaps if you sit in the same place long enough, what you’re looking for will eventually find you so long as you’re on the right track. 

Trailer (English subtitles)