Tag: Akira Emoto

The Final Piece (盤上の向日葵, Naoto Kumazawa, 2025)

Posted on by

When a body is discovered buried with a priceless set of shogi tiles, it unearths old truths in life of an aspiring player in Naoto Kumazawa’s sprawling mystery, The Final Piece (盤上の向日葵, Banjo no Himawari). In Japanese films about shogi, the game is often a maddening obsession that is forever out of reach. Hopefuls begin learning as children, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, but there’s age cut off to turn pro and if you don’t make the grade by 26, you’re permanently relegated to the ranks of the amateur. 

Junior policeman Sano (Mahiro Takasugi) was one such child and in some ways solving the crime is his final match. The thing is, he loves the game and admires Kamijo’s (Kentaro Sakaguchi) playing style along with the aspirational quality of his rise from nowhere not having trained at the shogi school and turning pro at the last minute to win a prestigious newcomer tournament. He’s hoping Kamijo will win his game against prodigious player Mibu (Ukon Onoe) with whom Kamijo’s fortunes are forever compared. Which is all to say, Sano really doesn’t want Kamijo to be the killer and is wary of accusing him prematurely knowing that to do so means he’ll be kicked out of professional shogi circles whether he turns out to be guilty or not.

Nevertheless, the more they dig into Kamijo’s past, a sad story begins to emerge that strongly contrasts with his present persona, a slightly cocky young man with a silly beard and smarmy manner. While Mibu seems to have been indulged and given every opportunity to hone his skills, Kamijo was a poor boy whose father had drink and gambling problems and was physically abusive towards him. His mother took her own life, leaving Kamijo to fend for himself with a paper round while his father occasionally threw coins at him and railed against anyone who questioned his parenting style. Good intentions can have negative consequences, the landlady at his father’s favourite bar remarks recalling how he went out and beat Kamijo for embarrassing him after another man told him he should be nicer to his son.

Toxic parental influence is the wall Kamijo’s trying to break in shogi. Aside from the man raising him, Kamijo finds another, more positive, paternal figure in a retired school teacher (Fumiyo Kohinata) who notices his interest in shogi and trains him in the game while he and his wife also give him clean clothes and a place to find refuge. But Kamijo can’t quite break free of his father’s hold much as he tries to force himself to be more like the school teacher. As an impoverished student he meets another man, the cool as ice yakuza-adjacent shogi gambler Tomyo (Ken Watanabe), who insists he’s going to show him the “real” shogi, but in reality is little different from his father if more supportive of his talent.

Kamijo finds himself torn between these three men in looking for his true self. Though he may tell himself he wants to be like the schoolteacher being good and helping people in need, he’s pulled towards the dark side by Tomyo and a desperate need for shogi which tries to suppress by living a nice, quiet life on a sunflower farm that reminds him of the happier parts of his childhood. There’s a cruel irony in the fact that the police case threatens to ruin to his shogi success at the moment of its fruition, even if it accompanies Kamijo’s own acceptance of his internal darkness and the way it interacts with his addiction to the game. 

Tomyo’s own obsession may have ruined his life as he looks back over the town where he spent his happiest months with a woman he presumably lost because of his gambling and need for shogi glory even though he never turned professional and remained a forever marginalised presence as a gambler in shogi society. Unlocking the secrets of his past seems to give Kamijo permission to accept Tomyo’s paternal influence and along with it the darker side of shogi, but there’s something a little uncomfortable in the implication that he was always doomed on account of his “bad blood” aside from the toxic influences of his some of his father figures from the man who raised him and exploits him for money well into adulthood, and the ice cool gangster who taught him all the best moves the devil has to play along with a newfound desire for life that may soon be snuffed out.

The Final Piece screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Wandering (流浪の月, Lee Sang-il, 2022)

Posted on by

The fact that “people only see what they want to see”, as one character puts in Wandering (流浪の月, Rurou no Tsuki), has a been a minor theme in the work of Lee Sang-il for whom nothing is ever really as black and white as it might seem. Adapted from a novel by Yu Nagira, the film asks some characteristically difficult and necessarily uncomfortable questions while otherwise contemplating the toxic legacy of parental abandonment and the cycle of abuse.

On a rainy day in 2007, a 19-year-old student, Fumi (Tori Matsuzaka), extended an umbrella to a lonely nine-year-old girl, Sarasa (Tamaki Shiratori), sitting out in the rain because she didn’t want to go home. He invites her to come back to his place and she agrees, later asking him if she can stay which she does for a couple of months until the police tear her away from Fumi’s side after tracking them down to a local lake. Fifteen years later, Sarasa (Suzu Hirose) has a job at a diner and is engaged to successful salaryman Ryo (Ryusei Yokohama) but though her life may look superficially perfect there are deep-seated cracks in the foundations. Ryo is a brittle and volatile man who is controlling and possessive, though Sarasa can’t seem to decide if she ought be “grateful” for the life she has or find away to break of Ryo before it’s too late.  

Many of Ryo’s problems are apparently a result of latent trauma caused by his mother’s abandonment. Shortly before paying a visit to his family, Ryo had become violent with Sarasa and though his family notice the bruises they choose to say nothing until his sister, less out of compassion than a kind of spiteful gloating, explains that he’s done this sort of thing before and often picks vulnerable young women with disordered familial histories in the knowledge that it will make it much more difficult for them to leave. Sarasa had herself been abandoned by her mother who palmed her off on an aunt after her father’s death from cancer to run off with another man. The irony is that Fumi is accused of kidnapping her but is the only person to have shown her kindness while giving her the confidence to reassert her autonomy. Nevertheless he is branded a paedophile, while the relative who had sexually molested her while she was living with her aunt is allowed to go free.

Then again, it seems that Fumi does, in fact, have an attraction to young girls though he never behaved in a harmful way towards Sarasa and appears to have taken her in for otherwise altruistic reasons. The film asks the uncomfortable question of how we should respond to a person who identifies themselves as a paedophile but knows that to act on it would be wrong and therefore does not do so. Lee often frames Fumi in Christ-like fashion, cutting to his bare feet on the water of the wooden pier and later in the closing scenes catching him in a crucifixion pose with his legs slightly bent and his arms outstretched all of which emphasises his suffering and mental anguish in being afflicted with these unwelcome desires which after all he did not ask to be burdened with. 

But this framing is further complicated by a final revelation that Fumi is suffering with a medical condition that prevented him from passing through puberty. His body is therefore not sexually mature and he feels himself to be, in this sense, a “child”. Most often what he says is that he is someone who cannot love an adult woman, which is most obviously a way of articulating that he cannot fulfil the sexual dimensions of an “adult” romantic relationship. Sarasa, meanwhile, comes to feel something much the same, explaining that she does not enjoy physical intimacy because of the trauma of her abuse which is recalled to her in Ryo’s aggressive and one-sided love making. 

These are not distinctions which occur either to the police or the gutter tabloid press. The young Fumi had tried to explain to the detectives that Fumi had not harmed her, but they didn’t listen, while the pair later become fodder for malicious gossip when they re-encounter each other by chance and it is salaciously suggested there is something unseemly in their relationship. The gossip ends up costing Sarasa her job, while the notoriety of her past as a kidnapping victim had also been used against her by Ryo not to mention the casually biting remarks of some of her workplace friends. As she says though more of her hopes for her relationship with Ryo, people only see what they want to see and are often unable to look past their biases and preconceived notions.

As it turns out, Sarasa did have other people around her who cared for and supported her such as the sympathetic boss who tried to protect her both from her increasingly paranoid boyfriend and the judgemental guys from HR. She’d forgotten what Fumi had told her in that she was the only person who could own herself and she shouldn’t allow other people to bend her to her will, restoring to her the confidence and independence which had been taken from her by toxic familial history. Sarasa in a sense returns the favour, Fumi also burdened by a sense of rejection likening himself to a weak sapling his mother ripped from the soil before it had a chance to mature, as reflected in the poignant scene of Fumi fast asleep mirroring that of herself when she first arrived at the cafe. Poetically lensed by Hong Kyung-pyo, Lee lends the melancholy tale a poetic quality as the heroes eventually find a home in each other if only to be condemned to a perpetual wandering.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Maru (まる, Naoko Ogigami, 2024)

Posted on by

Taken to task by a coworker (Riho Yoshioka) for allowing himself to be exploited as an assistant to an internationally famous artist who views them as little more than tools and takes all the credit for their work, Sawada (Tsuyoshi Domoto) asks if she knows who built Horyu Temple. He has to supply the answer himself, Prince Shotoku. But of course, he didn’t. It wasn’t  as If he drew up the plans or cut the wood with his own hands. 1300 carpenters built it, but no one thinks about them. Only about Prince Shotoku, because he commissioned the work and paid for it. Sawada doesn’t think what he’s doing is all that different, and that times haven’t really changed all that much. Not many people get to make a living doing what they love, so perhaps that’s enough for him. 

But his colleague asks if he sees himself more as a worker than an artist, as if she were unintentionally making a value judgement on the nature of art. The line between artist and artisan maybe so thin as to not exist, but why is it that we think of art which is perceived to have a practical application differently from that which we assume is intended only as a means of self-expression? “What about your own art?” she asks Sawada, but he doesn’t really have a notion of it because he’s been so focussed on earning a living as part of a wider capitalist superstructure in which art too is a commodity. Akimoto (Kotaro Yoshida) is basically running an art sweatshop mass-producing pieces for an international market and operating it like a brand in which everything is released under his own name. When Sawada falls off his bike and breaks his dominant arm, Akimoto simply fires him.

But then, things begin to get strange. Sawada draws some circles with his left hand and includes them with a few things he plans to sell to a second-hand shop where they’re picked up by a strange man who describes himself as a “magician who can’t do magic” and offers him fantastic amounts of money for his work even though all he did was draw a circle. Sawada discovers what he drew is called an “enso” and represents “serene emptiness”, but at the same time others seem to project whatever they want to see in the hole inside while Sawada himself is uncertain what should be there. The magician tells him that his follow-up work is no good because his enso are full of desire in his newfound lust for fame and riches, but at the same time he and his art have also become a commodity and like Akimoto he’s locked into producing more of what people want rather than expressing himself or finding artistic fulfilment. 

His colleague returns to attack him again. Now she criticises him for exploiting art to make money. “Art that’s expensive and just for a few wealthy people isn’t real art,” she says. She sticks to her message that the labour of those like her is being exploited and the world is set up for a few wealthy elites. Their chant of “we want sushi too” might seem flippant, but it represents the world that they’re locked out of. Sawada’s incredibly intense, struggling mangaka neighbour is obsessed with getting sushi too, though there’s plenty of it on the buffet at Sawada’s show which Sawada eyes hungrily. Eventually he’s reduced to grabbing some to eat on his own in a stairwell, signalling his liminal presence within this space. He’s the artist and it’s his show, but he isn’t really part of this world and no one’s really interested in him except when he’s giving mystical quotes as part of his marketing brand. 

The conclusion that he comes to that his art at least should exist for art’s sake. That all he ever wanted to do was paint as a means of being true to himself, only that simple desire has got lost amid the complications of modern life. It’s very hard to draw circles of serenity when you’re living in a rundown apartment block with a worrying subsidence problem and your neighbour screams all night in despair before punching a hole in your wall which you’ll probably have to pay to have fixed. Nevertheless, through Ogigami’s elliptical tale, Sawada does perhaps begin to find a path back to his own art or at least what art means to him which is after all what’s in the middle circle even if all anyone looks at is the edges. 

Maru screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (no subtitles)

BON-UTA, A Song from Home (盆唄, Yuji Nakae, 2019)

Posted on by

Exiled from their homes, the residents of Futaba lost more than just their material possessions when the area was declared uninhabitable following the Fukushima nuclear disaster. With former residents scattered all over the country never knowing when or if they will be able to return, a community has been ruptured and its history is in danger of dying out. Yuji Nakae’s poignant documentary Bon-Uta (盆唄) explores this sense of loss through the prism of the Bon dance while meditating on the notion of exile in comparing the experiences of migrants and Hawaii and their descendants. 

A photographer, Ai, has been photographing Bon dances in Japan and Hawaii and was struck by the Hawaiian response to the 2011 earthquake, seeing as many of the Japanese-Americans living in Hawaii traced their ancestry back to the Fukushima area. Hisakatsu and Haruo, childhood friends from Futaba, travel to Hawaii and observe the Bon dance, reflecting that it is different from that in Japan but perhaps in some ways better. Seeing how they have incorporated many different styles of Bon dance gives them the idea that they could save the Futaba dance by teaching it to the Hawaiian dancers, placing it in a kind of depository so that in 50 or a 100 years if Futaba becomes habitable again, their descendants could relearn it. But what they quickly discover is that it’s difficult to teach something that each of them has spent their whole lives learning in a matter of days, while the fact is that the community itself is central to the dance which loses its meaning when performed by those who’ve never been there. 

Nakae begins to meditate on insiders and outsiders as an older woman returns to her family home in the exclusion zone and uncovers papers from the 19th century which recount the discrimination her own family faced on being encouraged to move to the village following a massive famine which had reduced its population by two thirds. Now outsiders in the areas in which they have resettled, the former Futaba residents lament that they can no longer practise their art because their homes are in much more urbanised locations where neighbours are in close proximity and they fear disturbing them with the noise. The film equates their yearning for their lost community to that felt by those who emigrated to Hawaii in the 19th century hoping to escape rural poverty but often found themselves trapped, unable to return because of the low pay and exploitative conditions of the island’s sugar plantations. 

The Hawaiian migrants sang songs of exile, of how they missed their homes and families and how hopeless felt in the false promises that had been made to them of better lives abroad. Even in this, their culture survived while another, now elderly, woman recounts singing for a Japanese orchestra during the war when such songs were technically forbidden as other young men keen to claim their identity as Japanese-Americans enlisted in the military. The former Futaba residents begin to see new hope that they too could find a way to preserve a sense of their hometown even if they can’t return to it, deciding to organise a Bon dance of their own in another town bringing together the unique dances of each district while honouring the spirits of those who have passed away. 

Hisakatsu writes a new Bon song of his own from the point of view of a cherry tree in Futaba to ward off the “ogres” which stand in for radiation as the tree looks forward to blossoming once again, hoping the people will eventually return. Featuring a lengthy animated sequence recalling the experiences of the 19th migrants to Futaba who found themselves rejected as outsiders while reflecting on the contemporary exile of the former residents, the film eventually discovers a note of positivity and hope that even now scattered and unable to return to their homes the community can survive through the practice of its culture in passing on the unique local Bon dance to successive generations just as the migrants in Hawaii passed theirs on to their children in the hope they too might one day be able to return home.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Iwane: Sword of Serenity (居眠り磐音, Katsuhide Motoki, 2019)

Posted on by

The contradictions of the samurai code conspire against one noble-hearted young man in Katsuhide Motoki’s adaptation of the long running series of historical novels by Saeki Yasuhide, Iwane: Sword of Serenity (居眠り磐音, Inemuri Iwane). Yet this truly serene samurai is a stoical sort, learning to bear his pain with fortitude while standing up for justice in an increasingly corrupt Edo where money rules all while an ascendent merchant class continues to challenge the fiercely hierarchical social order. 

Beginning in 1772 which turned out to be a disastrous year, the tale opens as hero Iwane (Tori Matsuzaka) prepares to return home after completing his three year rotation in Edo in the company of childhood friends Kinpei (Tasuku Emoto) and Shinnosuke (Yosuke Sugino). Shinnosuke is in fact married to Kinpei’s sister Mai, while Iwane will himself be married to Kinpei’s other sister Nao immediately on his return so close are they. As Iwane’s father tells him, there are great hopes for these young men that they can “turn our outdated clan around”, but events will conspire against them. Spoiling the happy homecoming, Shinnosuke is accosted by a drunken uncle who convinces him Mai has been unfaithful in his absence with the consequence that he kills her immediately on his return home. Unable to understand this turn of events, Kinpei confronts his friend but eventually kills him, while Iwane is then forced to kill Kinpei after he goes on murderous rampage in revenge for the wrong done to his sister. 

In trying to mediate the case, the argument is put forward that Shinnosuke acted rashly and should have brought his suspicion to the authorities rather than opting for summary execution. The lord however disagrees, condoning Shinnosuke’s actions under the rationale that to do so would have been considered “weak minded” while as Shinnosuke himself had claimed he acted in accordance with the samurai code in which female adultery is illegal and punishable by death. By contrast, he finds Kinpei’s rashness offensive, insisting that he also should have recognised the legitimacy of his sister’s murder and simply left quietly with her body. Having learned the truth in which his childhood friends became victims of clan intrigue, romantic jealousy, and tragic misunderstandings in this Othello-like plot, Shinnosuke and childhood sweetheart Nao are also consumed by the rashness of samurai law each exiled from their clan and cast adrift in Edo-era society. 

Edo-era society is however also itself corrupt. Some months later, Iwane has returned to Edo as a lowly ronin lodging with a kindly old man, Kinbei, who helps him find a job firstly gutting eel then as a bodyguard at a money exchange which has been receiving anonymous threats they assume are from rival broker Awaya who has hatched a nefarious plan to manipulate the currency market to stop the current Shogun introducing a new unit which can be used in both Edo and Kyoto which would understandably cut into his already corrupt business model. Luckily, Imazuya is an honourable man who backs the new currency plan and wants to do the right thing which makes him a perfect fit for Iwane’s innate sense of justice. “You don’t know the way of the merchant” Awaya snaps at him, suggesting both that the samurai are already on their way down as the merchants rise and that his unwillingness to play dirty will be his downfall. Nevertheless, Iwane is the type to adapt quickly, instantly coming up with a way to play Awaya at his own game and kick his destructive amoral capitalism to the curb. 

Meanwhile, he continues to pine for Nao while drawing closer to Kinbei’s earnest daughter Okon (Fumino Kimura). As we discover Nao is also a victim of an intensely patriarchal social order but through the tragedy that befalls them also finds strength and agency making a life changing decision that allows her to become independent while looking after her family if in the knowledge that the childhood romance she shared with Iwane is a thing of the past. Iwane too agrees that he is trapped in a living hell of guilt and grief, yet choosing to go on living anyway as calm and cheerful as he’d ever been while standing up to Edo-era corruption though uncomfortably enough this time against the destabilising influence of the rising merchant class and therefore in contrast to most jidaigeki reinforcing the legitimacy of the samurai order which has paradoxically also ruined his life with its rigid and implacable social codes. In any case, Motoki’s classic chanbara melodrama has a serenity of its own as the cheerfully laidback hero resolves to live his life by a code of his own free of samurai constraint. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

September 1923 (福田村事件, Tatsuya Mori, 2023)

Posted on by

After the devastating Great Kanto Earthquake struck in 1923, it led to a period of hysteria in which in the natural disaster somehow became equated with the Korean Independence Movement, foreigners, and socialists and who were after all thorns in the side of rising nationalism. Documentarian Tatsuya Mori makes his narrative film debut with September, 1923 (福田村事件, Fukudamura Jiken) released to mark the 100th anniversary of the incident and focussing on a little known episode in which villagers turned on a small group of itinerant medicine pedlars they were convinced were not Japanese. 

In this case, at least, they were Burakumin. An oppressed underclass of their own, they too are divided in their views about Koreans some finding solidarity with them as another minority who is bullied and discriminated against while others are quick assert themselves as at least being above them on the pecking order cheerfully using slur words as they go. Shinsuke (Eita Nagayama), the leader of the troupe, laments that they have to live this way, tricking those worse off than themselves into buying their snake oil cures while explaining that though people will often help each other out when times are good, if survival’s on the line they’ll turn against each other. 

Perhaps that’s difficult to imagine in a small village of genial farmers, but militarism has already corrupted its gentle rhythms. Men from the village are fond of telling war stories from their time as conscripts in China or Russia, though one has a particular bee in his bonnet about wives being left lonely with husbands away overseas and is convinced that his father has slept with his wife. Another local woman was indeed having an affair shortly before her husband was killed in action and is then ostracised by the village for her transgressive behaviour becoming yet another oppressed minority. The village chief is keen on democracy and progressive in his way yet soon finds himself powerless against the local militia mostly comprised of old men with a lust for blood and glory. It’s this militarist hysteria that eventually proves tragedy as they find themselves desperate to identify “spies” and protect the village only to murder children and a pregnant woman who were just passing through. 

The absurdity extends to asking those suspected of being Non-Japanese to repeat a particular phrase difficult for Koreans in particular to pronounce, only those from other areas of Japan also pronounce it in a way that might seem “foreign” in Tokyo. Cornered by the militia, Shinsuke asks if it would be alright to kill him even if he were Korean, taking issue with the militia’s absurdist and racist rationale that decides someone must die because of the way they pronounced a certain word or seemed uncomfortable shouting “banzai” at the point of a sword. But one of the villagers unwittingly uncovers a since of guilt felt even by a man in a village miles away from anything that the Koreans have been bullied for years, this the understandable result of their rage boiling over and a moment of retribution. 

The film seems to suggest that the buck doesn’t really stop, except perhaps with the bystander who merely watches this horrifying violence and does nothing. Tomokazu (Arata Iura) has recently returned to the village after many years living in Korea bringing back with him a Korean wife but his marriage is falling apart due to his own guilt and trauma having been complicit in a Japanese atrocity. Watching the massacre unfold, his wife, Shizuko (Rena Tanaka), asks him if he’s just going to watch this time again but his attempt to intervene makes no difference. An idealistic news reporter meanwhile takes her boss to task for publishing propaganda headlines associating Koreans with crime and terrorism rather than real truth of what’s happening on the ground, asking him what the point of the press is if it won’t speak truth to power. But militarists do not listen to reason, and as the headman points out they will have to keep living with those who’ve committed these heinous acts. Sometimes a little on the nose with its symbolism such as a literal murder of hope in the killing of an unborn child, Mori’s otherwise poignant drama lacks the impact it strives for but nevertheless addresses a shocking moment of mass hysteria that is not quite as historical as we’d like to think.

September 1923 screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Legend of the Cat Monster (麗猫伝説, Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1983)

Posted on by

Produced as a special marking the 100th episode of the Tuesday Night Suspense Theatre TV drama series, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Legend of the Cat Monster (麗猫伝説, Reibyo densetsu) is preceded by a title card reading “Elegy for a Faraway Film”. Scripted by Chiho Katsura, the film is indeed in its way a lament for dying world albeit one which owes a heavy debt to Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard with a little Fedora thrown in. Repurposing the classic ghost cat film it casts cinema itself as dangerous illusion, a vampiric compulsion that drowns all who encounter it in irresolvable longing. 

This sense of irrecoverable nostalgia is palpable from the opening sequence which, aside from the melancholy voiceover, introduces us to the world of Setouchi Cinema apparently a moribund studio complex once dubbed the Hollywood of Japan. The new arrival, Ryohei (Akira Emoto), is dressed in noticeably anachronistic fashion as if he were a 1930s newsboy rather than a young man living in the Japan of the early 1980s. His girlfriend, Ryoko (Jun Fubuki), who works as a stage hand dresses in a similarly old-fashioned style and in fact carries an oversize watch that was a heirloom from her late father, an unsuccessful film director. Ryoko remarks that she’s been hoping someone would come and rescue her from this half-dead island but she doubts Ryohei will be the one to do it because he has also come here in search of a dream. 

That dream is, however, already dead at least according to some. The film director working at the studio is berated by a woman of around the same age working as a manager for an idol star for still getting an allowance from his mother at 60 because he has failed to make it as a film director at least in financial terms. There is a poignant, largely unexplored subplot between that suggests the inability to reconcile the dream of cinema with the economic “reality” has kept them apart all these years and that their dream of love may now be over too. 

It seems that the reclusive actress at the film’s centre, Akiko (Wakaba Irie), is also living on a frustrated dream of love withdrawing from the world around her believing that her lover will someday return from “Hollywood” which seems to be another word for paradise or perhaps the world beyond on the other side of the silver screen. To her, film is but a dream with in a dream. A window or screen is a portal to the burdens of the heart, memories of days gone by, and the illusions we once saw that cannot be seen again.  She herself is trapped within her own dream of love, but it is not so much a dream of her that bewitches Ryohei but the impossibility of cinema.

When passing photographer, Tachihara (Toru Minegishi), who lost his own wife to the unobtainable magic of the movies, snaps a picture of Akiko at her window holding a cat and looking exactly as she did the day she abruptly walked out on an incomplete film, it spurs a cynical producer to get the idea of convincing her to make a comeback and in a ghost cat movie, no less. Obayashi’s casting coup is getting mother and daughter Takako and Wakaba Irie to play aged and youthful versions of the famous actress, Takako herself having been a huge star of the 1930s performing most notably for Kenji Mizoguchi in the The Water Magician. There is an undeniable poignancy in her reflection that is only her aging body which is dying, as if she were merely becoming an embodiment of her image migrating to silver screen which exists between this world and next. It’s this screen that is later ruptured by Ryoko as she makes her escape after failing to save Ryohei from the curse of cinema. 

As Akiko laments, he’s writing his script more for himself than for her and it’s the quest for art which has begun to drain and make him mad. When he, pale and zombie-like, attempts to proffer his scripts it appears to be nothing more than his own name written over and over again. Like the Max-esque butler Mizumori (Akira Oizumi) says, film is an eternal dream which by its definition can never realised and exists only a state of longing somewhere beyond the veil. Drawing inspiration from Nobuo Nakagawa in particular and harnessing the sense of gothic dread found in Sunset Boulevard, Obayashi captures the eternal nightmares of artistic creation with the maddening obsessions of unrequited love and the image of the ideal which exists eternally out of reach somewhere on the other side of the screen.

Heaven’s Story (ヘヴンズ ストーリー, Takahisa Zeze, 2010)

Posted on by

“When your family’s murdered, aren’t you entitled to happiness?” remarks a bereaved husband trying to move on from tragedy to a similarly bereaved little girl who is determined not to. “I don’t think so”, she coldly replies, dragging him back into a dark world of hate and vengeance. At that time perhaps best known for his career in pink film, Takahisa Zeze’s 4.5-hour epic Heaven’s Story (ヘヴンズ ストーリー) weaves a tale of interconnected hurts born of violence and its legacy, parental betrayals, and irreconcilable loss. The only victory is survival, but it’s a prize none of us will win. The best we can hope for is continuity, and perhaps leaving something more behind us than fear or rage. 

Our heroine, Sato (Moeki Tsuruoka), is orphaned when her parents and older sister are brutally murdered by a disgruntled employee exacting some kind of petty revenge on her father. The killer is later found dead in a hotel room, presumed to have taken his own life. The tragedy is however just one of many. Passing by a TV screen, Sato catches a report detailing the death of her family members and their murderer which is immediately followed by a press conference with a very angry young man whose wife and infant daughter were killed in random attack by a passing drifter who has been given an indeterminate sentence on account of the fact that he was underage and suffered greatly during his childhood. Tomoki (Tomoharu Hasegawa), the bereaved husband and father, vows revenge angrily insisting he won’t ask for the death penalty because he wants the killer, Mitsuo Aikawa (Shugo Oshinari), released as soon as possible so he can kill him with his own hands. Only eight years old, Sato identifies with his rage. The man she wants to kill is already dead and she’s been robbed of the chance of closure through vengeance so vicariously latches on to Tomoki’s quest for retribution, making him something of a personal hero. 

Tomoki’s words were offered in the raw pain of his loss. His reaction is understandable, but as he later says, people started to lose sympathy for him once he called for the killer’s death. As time moves on, he perhaps starts heal, marrying again and having another little girl, starting a new life in a new place which of course does not overwrite his past loss but is a new start. That’s something Sato can’t allow or understand. She feels irrationally betrayed by Tomoki’s decision to leave his loss in the past and move on to a new life. Rocking up at his tranquil island home, she accuses him of forgetting the dead, guilting him into thinking he’s betrayed the memories of his wife and child by not knowing that Mitsuo has been released from prison let alone not having taken his revenge. 

Mitsuo, however, has also attempted to move on. It can’t be denied that he committed a heinous, unforgivable crime, but he is also, in a sense, a victim himself. His mother took her own life when he was 13 because his father was abusive and he carries that abuse with him, which of course does not excuse his crime but might help to explain it. Kyoko (’70s folk singer Hako Yamasaki), a lonely doll maker, is taken by his enigmatic statement that he wants to be remembered by the unborn and begins writing to him in prison, eventually agreeing to adopt him as her son though she is already suffering with the early stages Alzheimer’s. Later in a tense conversation with Tomoki, Mitsuo describes Kyoko as a woman of great warmth and if it were not for her he might perhaps have killed again. Her positive maternal presence gives Mitsuo the sense of anchoring through parental love that he had never had, restoring him towards a more normal kind of existence as he diligently cares for her while her condition continues to deteriorate. 

Time swindles them all. Kyoko desperately tries to remember something she’s forgotten, while Sato is locked into a pleasant childhood memory of walking with her parents to see a newly completed housing estate which seems to be the very embodiment of a post-war utopia, a large green space surrounded by neatly arranged, identical blocks with well appointed family homes piled one on top of the other. The conclusion takes us somewhere similar, only inverted, in the empty shell of a disused danchi, once a home to a bustling mining community now abandoned by the modern era. In the monologue which opens the film, Sato recounts a folktale about a monster who lived in the hills and attacked people, but did so only accidentally in his loneliness and longing to be a part of the world around him, but the people were afraid and so they rejected him and his monstrousness intensified. Tomoki destroys his second family in an internecine need to avenge the first driven by Sato’s demonic need for vicarious retribution, while Mitsuo’s attempt to move into the light is frustrated by an inability to escape his past. All the fear, and hate, and suffering, breeds only more of the same. “Heaven’s Story” may be in many ways the story of violence, but violence is not its resolution. Sato makes a kind of peace with the past, but will also carry that legacy of pain back into the complicated urban world as far from the heavenly vistas of tranquility which exist now only in her memory as it’s possible to be. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Ripples (波紋, Naoko Ogigami, 2023)

Posted on by

Sometimes it’s useful to feel like a rock in the stream and let it all flow past us, but our actions affect others in ways we barely understand reverberating and rebounding until ripples become waves and in their time small tsunamis. In Naoko Ogigami’s Ripples (波紋, Hamon), the effects of the 2011 earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster continue to radiate while some find themselves reeling unable to reorient themselves in a world which has become somehow threatening. 

Middle-aged salaryman Osamu (Ken Mitsuishi) suddenly disappears on his wife and teenage son after becoming intensely afraid of radiation only to return years later claiming that he has cancer. In his absence his wife, Yoriko (Mariko Tsutsui), has become a devotee of a strange cult, Green New Life, which peddles special purifying water and preaches otherwise wholesome virtues of solidarity and sacrifice. But even if Yoriko superficially agrees that it’s better to affect tolerance and put others before herself she’s secretly seething with frustration and resentment. She clearly does not want to take Osamu back, remembering how he left her to care for his bedridden father who knowingly or not made inappropriate sexual advances towards her. 

The cult’s anthem preaches that there is no fear if you have faith which might explain Yoriko’s devotion along with that of many others who similarly find themselves attracted to new religions in the wake of unsettling events such as natural disaster or global pandemic. But then can we really say that what the cult promises is any different to that of other organisations which at least portray themselves as scientific authorities. It transpires that the real reason Osamu has returned is that his doctor has recommended an experimental new treatment that is not covered by medical insurance and costs a significant amount of money but all Osamu has to go on is desperation and his faith in the medical establishment that the supposed cure is any more effective than Yoriko’s holy water (it turns out not to be). There is after all a lot of money in fear and people’s desire to be free of it. 

But Yoriko is afraid of many things. Her petty prejudices are exposed when her now grownup son returns home on a business trip with a hitherto undisclosed fiancée in tow who happens to be deaf. Yoriko probably would not have liked it anyway whoever Takuya (Hayato Isomura) had brought but resolutely fails to hide her disgust that he chosen a woman with a disability. She remarks that people at the church find inspiration in seeing disabled people “suffer and endure”, which is a fairly offensive thing to say in any case even if she later confesses his prejudice outright to a colleague at the supermarket where she works claiming that it’s different because it’s her son and she doesn’t see why he had to choose a woman “like that”. While the cult leader pushes her towards what are superficially at least more wholesome values of love and acceptance, Mizuki (Hana Kino) pulls her back towards her darker impulses but also a kind of liberation in her desire not to be bound by the old-fashioned conservative values that encourage her to fulfil the stereotype of the perfect wife over and above her own happiness or fulfilment. 

The dryness of her life is echoed in the zen sand garden she meticulously rakes into the shape of waves each morning while the water many feared contaminated after the earthquake is really a symbol of the life and vitality she continues to deny herself. Yet in an odd way, it’s human connection that perhaps begins to awaken her in her devotion to Mizuki who reveals that she was so overwhelmed with despair that she became unable to fix the damage in her apartment after the quake struck and has been living amid the ruins ever since. Ogigami turns her quirky gaze to life’s absurdities, the ridiculous things we cling to in order not to be afraid, but eventually allows Yoriko to find the courage to dance in the rain rather than fear its arrival having blown straight through her various “faiths” to become something that is at least more resolutely herself. 

Ripples screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Egoist (エゴイスト, Daishi Matsunaga, 2022)

Posted on by

If love is unselfish, is it really love at all? Based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Makoto Takayama, Daishi Matsunaga’s deeply moving romantic drama Egoist (エゴイスト) asks if all love is in the end transactional and if to deny its “selfishness” is akin to denying love itself because it would mean denying a basic human need for connection and reciprocity. In the end, perhaps selfish is what we should be with love because we are always running out of time and if we aren’t careful it will slip away from us unnoticed.

An “extreme realist”, fashion editor Kosuke (Ryohei Suzuki) is already full of regrets and many of them linking back to the early death of his mother from illness when he was only 14. It’s clear that his financial wealth helps to fill an emotional void but also that he’s lonely and longs for a sense of family that’s long been absent from his life. He rarely visits the conservative hometown where he was bullied for being different, and seems to have a strained relationship with his widowed father (Akira Emoto) who doesn’t know that Kosuke is gay and continues to ask him about getting married and settling down. Early on in his courtship with Ryuta (Hio Miyazawa), a personal trainer he met through a friend, Kosuke remarks that he’s never met a lover’s mother before hinting at the landmarks of a relationship such as marriage that LGBTQ+ people often miss out on in a conservative culture in which such things cannot always be discussed openly.

Later, Ryuta’s mother Taeko (Sawako Agawa) tells Kosuke that knew from that first meeting that they were more than just friends and was happy that her son had someone he loved who loved him regardless if they were a man or a woman. But just when the relationship had seemed to be blossoming, Ryuta had abruptly tried to break up with Kosuke explaining that he had been involved in sex work since his early teens in order to support his mother who was unable to work due to illness. Now that he’s experienced real romantic love he finds sex work “painful” but has no other means of supporting himself and so gives up love for economic necessity. “I’ll buy you,” Kosuke unironically counters adding a note of literal transactionality to their relationship which is already fraught with disparity in the respective differences in their ages along with Kosuke’s wealth and Ryuta’s poverty. 

Kosuke later describes his gesture as “pure”, something he’d previously called Ryuta while also remarking that he found him too “polite” in bed and would rather he be a little more “selfish”. In a way it’s altruistic, he isn’t really trying to trap Ryuta into a compensated relationship only to help him while simultaneously ensuring that he stays in his life. His wealth fills a void, but it’s by giving pieces of it away that he feels that void decreasing. Kosuke first gives Ryuta gifts for his mother, knowing that it’s easier for him to accept them because doing so is unselfish when the gift is for someone else. Even so as he later acknowledges sometimes the gift is more for himself than the recipient, a means not of manipulation but of healing. Kosuke claims not to know what love is and largely mediates it through money along with additional acts of care, but as Taeko later tells him it doesn’t really matter if he doesn’t know because they felt his love anyway. 

Matsunaga frequently cuts backs to visual motifs such as door numbers, envelopes, and dropped coins to hint at the transactionality of love but eventually reflects that love is an act of exchange in which the desire to be loved is an essential component. Kosuke eventually asks his father how it was for him when his mother was dying and he recalls a conversation in which she said she wanted to leave him because she couldn’t bear to see him suffering for her, a request which could in itself be read as “selfish” even in its “selflessness” with his reply implying that it’s alright to be selfish in love because in way it might be its ultimate expression. Filming with handheld realism, Matsunaga captures the rhythms of contemporary gay life along with the easy giddiness of burgeoning romance and the poignancy of profound loss tempered only by a fleeting feeling of warmth and the jealous memory of a “selfish” love. 

Egoist screens in Frankfurt 9th June as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

International trailer (English subtitles)