Tag: Akaji Maro

Kaiju Guy! (怪獣ヤロウ！, Junichiro Yagi, 2025)

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“This is my grand revenge against the world,” a frustrated civil servant insists while watching a giant avatar of himself destroying the town. Yamada (Gumpy) always wanted to make Kaiju movies, but now approaching middle age he’s given up most of his dreams and aspirations and lives a dull life working in the tourism division of the local council. An opportunity presents itself when he’s put in charge of a PR video for the town at the behest of its ultra-conservative mayor.

Junichiro Yagi’s Kaiju Guy! (怪獣ヤロウ！Kaiju Yaro!) has a meta quality given that it’s about a film designed to promote the local area, but there are many other parallels in play. The first would be Yamada’s unsatisfying life standing in for that of a corporate drone, while the mayor (Michiko Shimizu) is later cast as the villain precisely because of her reverence for “tradition” and is under the impression that changing anything would be a betrayal of her ancestors in a nod to the rigidity of local government. Yamada’s teacher had told him to smash through the constraints, though that’s something he’s only just beginning to find the strength to do. 

Though Yamada immediately suggests making a kaiju movie, he’s quickly shot down and reminded the mayor wants a conventional puff piece they can use to promote the town. Back in middle school, everyone had laughed at him for his DIY kaiju movie except his teacher who told him not to worry about what other people think and that those who challenge the status quo will always come in for attack or ridicule. Back then, the town of Seki had been the monster, though this time it’s supposed to be the victim that will eventually be saved. The mayor’s script had ironically been for a particular brand of hometown movie that’s become common in Japanese cinema in recent years in which a young person has their dreams crushed in Tokyo and rediscovers the charms of the place where they grew up after returning home in defeat. But there is something quite sad about the juxtaposition of Yamada thinking through the themes of the movie while riding his moped along empty streets which are flanked by rows closed shops.

The economic possibilities of the town becoming a tourist hotspot if the movie does its job might be one reason why many of the local businesses immediately pitch in to help besides a desire to display their hometown pride. Of course, most of them pull out when Yamada reimagines it as a kaiju movie even if he has a few supporters who think a kaiju movie might be fun and interesting way to sell the positives of Seki. In the course of making his movie, with the help of a grumpy, retired kaiju movie master by the name of Honda (Akaji Maro), Yamada discovers a way to use various local assets, such as filming sparks at the factory to create the fire-breathing effect and capturing the strange sound of a local bird for its roar. The heroes of the film become the local businesses supporting it who appear as a mini squad teaming up to fight the monster, while Yamada himself plays the marauding beast and “saviour” of the town going after the mayor and city hall to challenge their conservative insistence on tradition. 

What he eventually discovers is that even the mayor herself is oppressed by “tradition supremacy” and once had to give up her own hopes and dreams to conform to her family’s insistence on the way things should be done. Her abrupt decision to make the film may have been a reflection of her latent desire for change, both for herself and for Seki even as she constantly harps on about cormorant fishing and sword making which are apparently the two biggest draws. Ironically, the film completely fulfils its role as a PR movie for Seki capturing the small-town charms of the area along with its warm community spirit. Smashing through barriers with his kaiju movie, Yamada’s dull and grey existence is suddenly brightened through accessing his creativity and having his artistic desires validated by those around him. Not only are kaiju movies not naff or nerdy, but a source of fun that can bring the community together as well encourage visitors from outside if only to explore the kind of place that could have produced something so wonderfully unconventional.

Kaiju Guy! screens 30th May as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © 2024 Team KAIJU GUY!

The Trap (罠 THE TRAP, Kaizo Hayashi, 1996)

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At the beginning of the final instalment of the Maiku Hama trilogy The Trap (罠, Wana), a strange-looking man dressed in a long overcoat and wearing a mask to hide a facial deformity tries to hire Maiku (Masatoshi Nagase) to look for himself. It’s a decidedly odd moment, and it seems that Maiku, who takes every job that comes, turns the man down because it’s just too weird though in a way his refusal to grant his request may contribute to the unfolding tragedy. If previous instalments saw Hayashi in Nikkatsu Noir and Fukasaku territory, this time around he seems to be channeling Seijun Suzuki in his intensifying surrealism and bold use of colour.

Indeed, in one sense, this is a tale of doppelgängers. We first see the strange man lurking outside the cinema standing so still that until he slowly turns his head we assume he is a statue. What we later realise is that he wanted Maiku to look for someone who was making use of his identity along with perhaps returning to him his own. Nagase too is playing a double role and Maiku is also searching for himself eventually confronted by the fact the man he’s been looking for has his own face. 

Nevertheless, as the film opens Maiku is riding high. He’s doing very well financially after making a name for himself saving a child from a burning building. His sister Akane has got into a prestigious college, and he’s fallen in love with a woman from the post office, Yuriko (Yui Natsukawa), who is mute but can hear. By contrast, box office lady Asa remarks that nothing good’s happened since Maiku got his police commendation for saving the child adding to the sense that things are going far too well for Maiku and probably quite likely to plunge the other way. There’s currently a serial killer on the loose who’s abducting young women, drugging them, and posing their bodies in public places. Unfortunately, Yuriko becomes a target for the killer(s) after a moment of kindness to someone who was being bullied in a park. 

An orphan raised in the church, Yuriko seems to be the embodiment of an otherwise absent purity. She tells Maiku off for gambling and generally tries to improve him as a person while he later acknowledges her willingness to sacrifice herself for others perhaps even at the cost of her own life. Her forgiving nature might help her overcome the fact that Maiku and the detectives effectively use her as bait on two separate occasions swooping in to save her only in the nick of time. This moral dichotomy reinforces a sense of tension in the city in which good and evil co-exist on different planes just as past and present had in the previous film and further transforms Yokohama into a mystical, haunted place of ever present dangers. 

The sense of surreality is further heightened by the casting of actor Tetta Sugimoto who starred in Stairway to the Distant Past as the man in red but here seems to be playing an idealistic rookie cop, again countering the cynicism of detective Nakayama (Akaji Maro) who just wants to cut corners and get the job done rather than get it done right. Thus when Maiku is framed as the killer, Nakayama indulges in his long standing grudge against him and is determined to nail Maiku despite rookie Kozu’s insistence that he couldn’t have done it because they were together at the time. When even fingerprints can be faked, there is no such thing as reliable evidence.

Hayashi once again makes fantastic use of colour from the expressionistic storm to the eerie, dreamlike closing sequence in which Maiku must face himself and battle his demons before being saved by the angelic Yuriko. Taking place in an atmospheric sewer tunnel, the climax has an oneiric atmosphere and surrealist edge as Miku confronts this man who has his own face only to lose the image of him at the critical moment and thereafter seemingly disappear himself. The moments after also have an unreal quality, a poster for the film we’re watching, The Trap, positioned behind Asa at the counter and Hai-Ping’s letter from the first film seemingly playing as part of the film screening in the cinema causing us to wonder if this too is a dream or fabricated future for one who will not return. Dark and disturbing in its implications, coloured by the real terror of living of Japan in the mid-90s which had just experienced a devastating earthquake and unprecedented terror attack, the film nevertheless displays the warmth of the Yokohama we’ve come to love with its cast of charming characters and cheerful atmosphere despite the eerie emanations at its centre.

The Trap screens 19th October at Japan Society New York.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Original trailer (no subtitles)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Original trailer (No subtitles)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All Under the Moon (月はどっちに出ている, Yoichi Sai, 1993)

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Throughout Yoichi Sai’s All Under the Moon (月はどっちに出ている, Tsuki wa Dotchi ni Dete iru), an earnest taxi driver, Anbo (Akio Kaneda), repeatedly calls in to despatch to inform them that he’s become lost and has no idea where he is despite rocking up next to such prominent landmarks as Tokyo Tower and Mount Fuji. His confusion reflects that of the changing post-Bubble society in which those like him struggle to reorient themselves and find new direction just as the nation appears slow to recognise itself and adjust to a new reality. 

It does seem that many of the drivers at Kaneda Taxi have themselves lost direction in their lives and are living very much on their margins while their rather deluded boss Sell is behaving like it’s still the Bubble dreaming of building a golf course and then a hotel to accommodate 2000 people. The Korean loan shark working with him alternately tells fellow Zainichi taxi driver Chun (Goro Kishitani) that he’s acquiring wealth to use for the reunification of Korea, and Sell that they are all children of capitalism, “Damn Reunification!”. At the wedding Chun attends, the guests take phone calls to deal with business and each remark on the precarious economic situation while one suggests that the North Korean association he represents is probably on the brink of failure joking that he fears they may sell their school and pocket the money. 

Yet despite the economic turbulence, the country has been slow to accept the presence of workers from outside Japan and many, including those at the taxi firm, still face discrimination as does Chun himself by virtue of his Korean heritage. One Japanese employee also seems to face a good deal of stigmatisation simply because he has a speech impediment, while an older mechanic with a limp insists on calling an Iranian colleague by a similar sounding Japanese name while baselessly accusing him of theft. Hoso (Yoshiki Arizono), a man with mental health issues provoked by his previous career as a professional boxer in which he accidentally killed an opponent during a bout, is fond of saying “I hate Koreans, but I like you” while otherwise fixating on Chun as a dependable big brother figure and resentful enough when he starts dating a Filipina hostess, Connie (Ruby Moreno), who works at his mother’s bar to pound down the door of her flat and demand to be let in. 

Chun himself is at least problematic and especially by the standards of today as he tries a series of crass pickup lines on Korean women at the wedding and then eventually forces a kiss on Connie not to mention physically striking her during a heated argument. He also insensitively tells her about his family’s tragic history in the war emphasising that citizens of Korea were abused for slave labour while seemingly unaware of the history of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines. Meanwhile, he also lies that his father was killed by the Japanese and that all his brothers died of malnutrition whereas they are (presumably) alive if possibly not so well in North Korea. His hard as nails mother (Moeko Ezawa) points out that she came to Japan at 10, while Connie counters that she came at 15, though their experiences have perhaps been very different leaving them somewhat at odds rather than sharing a kind of solidarity as otherwise echoed in the marginal status of each of the migrants who are similarly othered as merely not Japanese yet largely left to fend for themselves while facing possible exploitation and deportation. 

Divisions exist even within the Korean population with guests at the wedding complaining that there have been too many long and boring speeches along with North Korean propaganda songs, claiming that it is discriminatory against South Koreans and finally being allowed to sing a South Korean folksong instead which is at least a good deal more lively. The gangsters leverage the idea of reuinifaction to carry out their scams while later claiming that they have been scammed by their Japanese backer who turned out to be more racist than they had first assumed. Yet as Chun says during one of his cheesy pickup attempts, what really has reunification got to do with them, the younger post-war generation who know no other homeland than Japan? He too flounders, caught between a series of names from “Tadao Kanda” to “Chun”, to the name which appears on his taxi license “Kang” the Korean pronunciation of character read “ga” Japanese which is only otherwise used in the word for ginger as pointed out by a slightly racist fare who goes on to remark that he doesn’t see the point of the “comfort women issue”. Chun has to grin and bear it while technically powerless despite being in the driver’s seat. Predictably, the prejudiced passenger also attempted to make a run for it rather than actually pay Chun his money. “I was born after the war too” Chun reminds him, “but we say after the liberation.”

Sai introduces us to the world of Kanda Taxis through a roving long shot around the carpark travelling from one employee to another before drifting up to management on the second floor. He returns to a similar scene near the film’s conclusion as the remaining workers playfully hose each other with water while literally watching their world burn. Yet for some at least it may be liberating experience, Chun finally gaining the courage to choose his own destination and go after something that he wants, even if it he does it in a characteristically problematic way, seemingly no longer worrying about where it might be taking him but content to simply drive in the direction of the moon. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Love Will Tear Us Apart (ラヴ・ウィル・テア・アス・アパート, Kenichi Ugana, 2023)

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“This film depicts a pure and genuine love between an awkward boy and a girl with a pure heart,” according to a pop idol starring in a film called “garbage love”, but it’s a true enough description of Kenichi Ugana’s genre-crossing slasher romance, Love Will Tear Us Apart (ラヴ・ウィル・テア・アス・アパート). Co-scripted by Hirobumi Watanabe, the film has a deadpan, surreal sensibility but has a lot to say about entrenched patriarchy and a bullying culture. 

As the film begins, Wakaba is a cheerful little girl who has an all encompassing obsession with a handsome pop idol, but is secretly enduring an oppressive atmosphere of domestic violence in her family home at the hands of her cruel and violent father. In this she might have found a kindred spirit in classmate Koki who is enduring physical abuse at the hands of his mother who openly tells him how much happier she’d be if only he’d never been born. Koki is also being bullied by a pair of mean kids at school and meekly takes it, unable to stand up for himself. When Wakaba steps up and tries to help him, the bullies turn on her too and their teacher (Atsuko Maeda) seemingly does nothing. After the pair bond through a screaming session at a local river, the bullies mysteriously fall out of a window which Koki is then seen ominously staring out of. 

The film jumps on seven years to a teenage Wakaba (Sayu Kubota) who discovers the world is not a safe place for women, repeatedly encountering a series of skeevy guys beginning with her favourite pop band who lure her to a cabin in the woods where they openly talk about getting her drunk to take advantage of her or spiking her drinks. One of the chief victimisers is another woman, Moeka, whose apparent “job” it is to recruit girls for the guys to have fun with. Wakaba’s friend Kanna (Riko) wants to leave, sensing that there’s something not quite right but Wakaba is naive and unable to see the danger. A similar thing happens when she visits Tokyo alone and has a meet cute with a guy who spills coffee on her shirt and offers to buy her a new one, then to show her around, takes her for sushi, declares his love and makes a proposal of marriage. 

As might be expected, many of these men end up dead at the hands of a vicious, chainsaw-wielding serial killer in a white hazmat suit, gas mask, and goggles. You can’t quite blame him for his crimes because everyone he kills is so irrediambly awful while it really does seem that he might be trying to protect Wakaba in some way from the hidden dangers she remains unable to see because of her pure heartedness. While her own father had been cruel and violent, she discovers that Moeka’s, police detective Kamiyama (Mitsuru Fukikoshi), is the opposite but worse in his unsettling obsession with his daughter, whom he believed to “pure and earnest” little knowing that she had been procuring young girls to serve up to the sleazy band members.

In a strange way, the serial killer turns out to be Wakaba’s healthiest relationship even if he’s basically stalking her not to mention murdering people with chainsaws because they threatened her happiness. The film runs through a series of genres from the cute childhood romance that soon turns ominous and the cabin in the woods slasher movie complete with creepy monkey and trainset, to martial arts epic as Wakaba abandons her life to train with a YouTube serial killer catching guru in a tropical resort town but retains its sense of anarchic innocence and internal integrity. As the pop star had implied, it really is a tale of genuine love between an awkward boy and a pure hearted girl in which they gradually realise that they each have a right to be happy and can be so together despite all violence and mayhem around them which includes killing a guy by shoving a grapefruit blender on his head. Strange and absurd the film nevertheless has a heartwarming romantic sensibility along with a desire for a less destructive world defined more by kindness and compassion than bullying and violence. 

Love Will Tear Us Apart screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Under the Turquoise Sky (ターコイズの空の下で, KENTARO, 2021)

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An aimless young man unexpectedly embarks on a spiritual journey after being sent to Mongolia to look for the daughter his grandfather left behind 70 years previously when he was a prisoner of war in the dreamlike debut feature from actor KENTARO, Under the Turquoise Sky (ターコイズの空の下で, Turquoise no Sora no Shita de). A circular tale of longing and abandonment, the film is both a charmingly surreal road movie and a poetic meditation on time and memory amid the infinite expanses of the Mongolian Steppe. 

Our guide is “horse thief” Amaraa (Amarsaikhan Baljinnyam) who cheerfully rides off on a stallion owned by the ageing Saburo (Akaji Maro) only to be chased down by police officers in much the same way he will be again on his return to Mongolia. Saburo jokingly asks him if he meant to ride all the way home and perhaps he did, in a way. Falling asleep in the van he later shares with Saburo’s grandson Takeshi (Yuya Yagira) he dreams of stealing an old lover away from her wedding to another man replying only that he’s been “busy” when she asks why he made no attempt to contact her during the previous three years. One might also ask why Saburo never returned to Mongolia and the woman and child he left behind, but perhaps there is no real reason save life and then it was too late. Now close to the end of his days, Saburo charges Amaraa with the mission of tracking his now 70-year-old daughter down taking the spoilt and selfish Takeshi with him in the hope that he will spontaneously discover purpose in his life. 

There is something quite poignant in the melancholy strains of My Dear Companion accompanying the van’s passage along a lonely Mongolian road, a song that at least in its more modern version is a lament for lost love and a yearning for one who seems to have disappeared to a distant land no longer caring for those they once loved. The other frequent refrain is that of Beautiful Dreamer which similarly hints at the impossibility of romantic resolution particularly as it plays over Amaraa’s fantasy of reclaiming a love he once left behind. On arrival in Mongolia, Amaraa quickly reverts to traditional dress, dismissing the driver Saburo has hired for them along with his fancy car to take off in a much more ordinary van stopping every so often to ask everyone they run into if they’ve ever heard of a woman named “Japanese Tsermaa” until getting some helpful directions from a traditional shaman with a surprisingly familiar face. 

Unable to speak the language, Takeshi mostly looks on amused but soon discovers that words are often superfluous. Amaraa even at one point has a totally wordless negotiation with a fellow nomad over borrowing his motorbike and sidecar when the van inevitably breaks down. Suddenly left alone in the expanses of the Mongolian Steppe, Takeshi enters a kind of dreamscape and almost lives his grandfather’s life over again after being taken in by a pregnant woman who gives him Mongolian clothing and shares with him the local food, but the outside world soon comes calling and just like his grandfather he leaves behind a woman and child along with the sea and the sky having experienced some kind of enlightenment that shakes him out of his hedonistic aimlessness. 

But then it’s almost as if it never happened at all. He simply takes his grandfather’s place while the wheel keeps on turning. Workers in his grey office block shuttle about like ants in an ant farm even if, as we gradually realise, united under the turquoise sky that stretches from Mongolia though fading as if goes. Unexpectedly moving in its moments of reunion, the film makes the most of the beautiful Mongolian landscape shot a stunning 8K while exploring the warmth and hospitality of the local people who share their culture with a bemused stranger who finally gives himself over to their dance. “What’s important is that we’re together now” Amaraa tells the woman in his dream, hinting at the impossibility of his circular journey and the poetic yearning that underlies these various stories of lost love some eventually recovered at least in part but others left to echo on the breeze as faint memories of other lives painfully unlived.

Under the Turquoise Sky screens in New York Aug. 4 as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

International trailer (dialogue free)

Ox-Head Village (牛首村, Takashi Shimizu, 2022)

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“A story about nothing” is how one middle-aged man jokingly dismisses a local legend about an ox-headed woman. Are urban legends just one big dad joke? Everybody who hears this story dies, so they say, which is obviously true whichever way you look at it though if it really were a curse it would have to move quickly or there’d be no-one to pass it on. As the heroine of Takashi Shimizu’s summer adventure horror movie Ox-Head Village (牛首村, Ushikubi Mura) discovers, however, there may be something to it after all in uncovering the dark history behind the local folklore. 

In her last year of high school, teenager Kanon (Koki) is beginning to experience strange events such as a series of mysterious scratches on her arm, odd bangs and noises at home, and her phone constantly playing a message about bad pennies and their tendency to keep turning up. Her friend Ren (Riku Hagiwara), who has a crush on her, shows her a viral video of some girls on paranormal live stream that goes wrong leading one, who looks exactly like her, to fall down a lift shaft and then mysteriously disappear. To find out what’s going on the pair head out into the country to the abandoned hotel where the shoot took place but end up battling supernatural malevolence born of the cruelty of previous eras. 

Like the previous two films in the “Village” trilogy, Ox-Head Village revolves around rural folkloric beliefs this time focussing on the suspicion cast against twins which in this village at least seems to have continued until the late 1960s. The root of the curse is the unnatural act of dividing something that should be one into two in attempting to separate pairs of twins leaving the one left behind, lonely, burdened with the residual stigma of being one of multiple births, and perhaps experiencing a little survivor’s guilt. In the film’s second sequence, bathed in yellow and shot with a 70s-style soft focus, two little girls kill a butterfly and bury it with its friends because it would just be lonely on its own. The resolution is that that which has been divided must be reunited in life or in death in order to end the curse, though as we later see that may not quite be the end of it. 

Meanwhile, though a supernatural horror film, Ox-Head Village is also part of a grand tradition of teen summer adventure movies. Kanon and Ren are about to embark on the last summer as high schoolers, the trip they take together as so many are is also about self-discovery as Kanon answers a few lingering questions about her past while searching for her doppelgänger. Her quest is also in its way about rescuing herself and laying to rest the sense of loneliness which has always plagued her. Along for the ride, Ren is perhaps more curious while obviously smitten hoping to cement his romance through a romantic road trip only to be blindsided by supernatural intrigue and country superstition. 

Nevertheless, there is something truly creepy about the innocent flowers the little girls draw along with the pre-modern superstition that informs life in the village. Though the sinister presence may in this case be firmly rooted in the past, they are able to mediate their curse through modern technology such as manipulating Kanon’s phone as a means of communication while using lift shafts to mimic the well which becomes the repository for the darkness of the village. As an old man puts it, a prejudice against twins might have been intellectually understandable in a time of famine, though morally indefensible and obviously absurd and out of place in the modern society. Even so, old beliefs have a way of persisting even if they are no longer clearly understood. 

Along with all the folk horror of ox-headed women, headless buddhist statues and “stories about nothing” there is the lingering dread of the lonely incompleteness visited on the little girls in yellow because of the outdated superstitions of an earlier era. Overcoming the curse requires both self-knowledge and self-sacrifice in order to heal the unnatural act of division which has been carried out but even this may not be enough to repair the damage of centuries of cruelty and prejudice. 

Ox-Head Village screens at Lincoln Center 19th July as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © 2022 OX-HEAD VILLAGE Production Committee

Dreams on Fire (ドリームズ・オン・ファイア, Philippe McKie, 2021)

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“A dancer must always be careful” the heroine of Philippe McKie’s Tokyo odyssey Dreams on Fire (ドリームズ・オン・ファイア) is warned, though her passage may prove smoother than that of many small town girls coming to the big city in search of fame and fortune. Nevertheless, her progress will take her through the unseemly underbelly of the entertainment industry rife with exploitation and duplicity to the relatively comforting world of fringe subcultures where mutual support is a way of life and failure merely another kind of opportunity. 

As a young girl, Yume (dancer and model Bambi Naka in her first leading role), whose name literally means “dream”, is captivated by an avant-garde dance performance and determines to become a dancer herself though her authoritarian father (legendary butoh dancer Akaji Maro) does not approve of her artistic ambitions and attempts to forbid her from leaving for Tokyo but she defies him and leaves anyway. Once there, however, she finds herself struggling to survive living in tiny cubical rooms and able to support herself only by working on the fringes of the sex trade in a cosplay hostess bar dressed as a schoolgirl. She pursues her dancing dream by visiting underground hip hop clubs but receives the first of many setbacks when she’s voted out of a dance off in the first round in favour of a talented child in an improbably snazzy outfit. 

Nevertheless, as the first of her teachers, who happened to see and admire her performance, tells her the humiliation of losing only smarts so much because you care which is the kind of pain you can easily repurpose for motivation. This is a motif which will be repeated in Yume’s life which proves nowhere near as dark or depressing as one might assume though it’s true she continues to experience setbacks and disappointments while occasionally doubting her vocation as a dancer in the face of seemingly constant failure but always rescued by another hopeful who saw and liked her performance even if the judges might have preferred someone else. 

Yet as she finds out, dance talent isn’t all it takes in the contemporary arts scene. An audition she might otherwise have booked is lost at the last moment when she confesses she’s not got many followers on social media, the interviewer patiently explaining that she might be a better dancer than anyone in their current troupe but their business is built on “image” and dependent on their online reach so someone with no profile is of not much use to them though they’d love to see her again once she’s successfully built her “brand”. Conversely, a client at another job working the floor show at an S&M-themed bar gets her a job coaching an aspiring underground idol who apparently can’t dance for toffee, but once she gets there Yume quickly realises the young woman’s lack of aptitude is a result of her exploitative treatment at the hands of the idol industry. Apparently not allowed to change her outfit even if it smells she’s been instructed not to eat to keep her weight down which of course leaves her lightheaded and low in energy, an unhelpful combination for learning complicated dance routines. On the way out, Yume hears the other members of the band bullying her though there’s nothing she can do to help. 

Meanwhile, she finds it increasingly difficult to weigh up the degrees of exploitation she’s willing to accept from her increasingly manipulative boss at the hostess bar (Masahiro Takashima). Her first friend, Sakura (AV actress Okuda Saki), had taught her the ropes cautioning her never to let anyone touch her in ways that make her uncomfortable but herself quits abruptly in embarrassment after a customer brings up her past as an AV star thereafter disappearing without trace. Sakura had explained in an ironic paradox that she wasn’t in hostessing for the money but was essentially lonely, introducing Yume to the first of her experiences of the more unusual aspects of the Tokyo subculture scene in a metal bar where she fondles a lizard over drinks but is herself perhaps slightly lost in an internalised and unwarranted shame because of her past in the porn industry. This seems to be a fate Yume is keen to avoid, eventually telling her exploitative manager where to go rather than consent to his control after narrowly escaping a dangerous encounter with “important” yakuza clients. 

Going by “Asuka” at the club and eventually assuming the dancer name of “Karasu” (crow), Yume searches for an identity while continuing to pursue her dream but perhaps unrealistically meets only good and supportive people outside of the exploitative Kabukicho bar world discovering in her various subcultures from fetish clubs to the dance studio only dreamers like herself eager to see others succeed. Capturing the neon night life of the contemporary city, McKie’s camera perhaps leans too far towards the ethnographic in its slight exoticisation of the underground Tokyo scene even if admittedly seen through the eyes of country girl Yume but also allows her to find within it freedom and self-actualisation while her talent takes her in new, sometimes unexpected directions, as she continues to pursue her dream in an atmosphere of positivity and mutual support.

Dreams on Fire streams from 6th March as part of the Glasgow Film Festival.