Tag: Aoi Nakamura

Brand New Landscape (見はらし世代, Yuiga Danzuka, 2025)

Posted on by

Do we inhabit spaces, or do the spaces inhabit us? Yuiga Danzuka’s autobiographically inspired Brand New Landscape (見はらし世代, Miwarashi Sedai) situates itself in a haunted Tokyo which is forever remaking itself around its inhabitants like a constantly retreating cliff edge that leaves them all rootless and in search of a home that no longer exists. Some long for a return to the past and wander endlessly, while others defiantly refuse to look back and are content to let history eclipse itself in a journey towards an ineffable “new”.

These imprinted spaces come to represent the disintegration of a family torn apart by their shifting foundations. Ten years previously, Ren (Kodai Kurosaki) and Emi’s (Mai Kiryu) mother, Yumi (Haruka Igawa), took her own life during a family holiday after their father Hajime (Kenichi Endo) told her that, despite his promises, he would be returning to Tokyo to pursue a work opportunity. “It’s pointless to go back and forth like this,” he remarks with exasperation, making it clear that he’ll be going no matter what she says. Rather than simply being a workaholic, Hajime is a deeply selfish person who doesn’t much care how other people are affected by the decisions that he makes. He wants this opportunity to prove himself and acts out of a mixture of vanity and a desire for external validation through professional acclaim rather than the love of his family. He claims he’s doing this for them, that the opportunity will provide additional financial security and a better quality of life for his children, but Yumi replies that they don’t need any more money. All she wanted was family time, albeit within this artificial domestic space of a rented holiday villa by the sea.

Three years after their mother’s death, Hajime left the children to chase opportunities abroad and they haven’t seen him in years. Younger son Ren is now working as a floral delivery driver for a company selling expensive moth orchids. It’s on a job that he first learns that Hajime has returned and is holding an exbitiion of his work that includes the controversial Miyashita Park redevelopment project designed to fuse the natural space of the park with a commercial centre the exhibition’s copy describes as a symbol of the “new” Tokyo. It also, however, required the displacement of a number of unhoused people who were living in the park in order to provide space for upscale outlets such as Louis Vuitton and Gucci. When Hajime accepts the opportunity to work on another such project, a young woman on his team voices her concern. She asks him where these unhoused people are supposed to go, but Hajime says it’s not his problem. It’s for the authorities to decide. She asks him if he’s considered the effect taking on such a large project will have on their team when the company is already working beyond its limit, but he gives her all the same excuses he gave Yumi that make it clear he’s not interested in the needs and well-being of his employees just as he wasn’t interested in those of his family. “It’s pointless going back and forth,” he tells her while trying to sound sympathetic but really emphasising that his decision is made and nothing she could say would sway him from his course.

Maybe, to that extent, oldest daughter Emi is much the same in that she’s decided she doesn’t want to see her father and resents Ren’s attempts to force her into doing so. She’s about to move in with her boyfriend and looking ahead towards marriage, but also prone to “low energy” days like her mother and anxious in her relationships, fearful that like that of her parents’ they can only end in failure. Ren, meanwhile, struggles with authority figures like his ridiculous boss who tries to assert dominance by giving him a public telling off about the non-standard colour of his hip pack, and then yells at him that he’s fired only to chase him out of the building throwing punches when Ren calmly replies that shouting only makes him look silly. In the midst of the drama, another young woman states her own intention to quit, politely bowing to everyone except one particular man before walking out the other door towards freedom as if to remind us that there are countlessly other stories going on in this city at the same time.

There’s a moment when Ren is delivery the orchids that he just stands there holding them, like he doesn’t know where to go or what to do. He’s lost within this space and is unable to find his way back within a Tokyo that’s always changing. In an attempt to find some sort of resolution, he drives Emi back to the service station where they had their final meal as a family, only their mother’s chair remains painfully empty. A perpetually falling ceiling light hints at the unreliability of these spaces. It isn’t and can’t ever be the same place it was before and has taken on new meanings for all concerned. Ren stares up at the Miyashita Park development as if caught between admiring his father’s achievement, wondering if it was worth it, and mourning the loss of everything it eclipsed in building over the past with a “new” that will quickly become the “old” and then be rebuilt and replaced. Nevertheless, he has perhaps begun a process of moving on even if for him moving forward lies in looking back.

Brand New Landscape screens as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Samurai Fury (室町無頼, Yu Irie, 2025)

Posted on by

Retitled Samurai Fury (室町無頼, Muromachi Burai) for it’s US release, Yu Irie’s Muromachi Outsiders is indeed a tale of righteous anger though like many jidaigeki the rage is directed towards the corrupt samurai class and wielded by a ronin with a noble heart. Based on a novel by Ryosuke Kakine, it recounts a rebellion that took place five years before the Onin War that would lead to the end the Ashikaga Shogunate and initiate the Sengoku or warring states period that lasted until the Tokugawa era began. 

The cause is, really, the incompetent government of shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa (Aoi Nakamura) who is largely seen here gazing out at his view from the palace in Kyoto which he is obsessed with rebuilding. Meanwhile, famine has taken hold following a period of drought that ended with a typhoon and flooding of the river Kamo, and the starvation has also led to a plague. Between the lack of food and disease, 82,000 people will die, but the government doesn’t really do anything because they don’t think the lives of peasants are all that important. This is of course very shortsighted because someone has to plant all that rice that gets delivered to the palace and they can’t do that if they’re too busy starving to death. In the opening sequences, peasants are whipped and beaten as they transport a giant rock for the shogun’s new garden, though when it gets there he doesn’t like it. Meanwhile, a giant pile of bodies in approximately the same shape is dumped at the edge of the river where they’re burning the dead.

The farmers are forced to take such onerous jobs for extra money because they can’t produce enough to pay their taxes which the samurai keep putting up. To make up the shortfall, they have to take out loans from usurious monks who seize their property or take their wives and daughters when they can’t pay. A young man pressed into working for debt collectors from the temple is told to kill a man who owed them money but hits the barrel beside him instead and exposes him for keeping his seed grain without which he won’t be able to plant more rice but they’re going to take that anyway which means that in the end everyone is going to starve. A village favoured by the hero, Hyoe (Yo Oizumi), is also subject raids from disenfranchised ronin who’ve taken to banditry to survive. 

Hyoe is also a ronin, but in his life of wandering he’s found a kind of freedom even as he straddles an awkward line, sometimes working with an old friend from the same clan, Doken (Shinichi Tsutsumi), who has turned the other way and is now the security chief for the government in Kyoto with his own gang of bandit dent collectors. Hyoe’s role is, ostensibly, to stop peasant uprisings, which he does, but mostly because he knows they’re pointless and the farmers armed with little more than hoes and stolen armour will simply be massacred, but he’s also secretly plotting a giant rebellion of his own, harnassing the forces of the ronin and the fed up peasants to storm the capital, burn the debt agreements, and rescue the women taken in lieu of payment. 

But to do so means he’ll have to betray his oldest friend and that he likely won’t survive. Still he thinks someone’s got to do something about this rotten world and sees a better one beyond it if only they can throw off the yoke of the samurai class that thinks peasants are the same bugs to squeezed dry under their boots. That’s perhaps why he trains a young successor, knowing that can’t remake the world with just this one assault on the mechanisms of government and that even if they get rid of the drunken fool Lord Nawa (Kazuki Kitamura), someone not all that different will pop up in his place. “Tax is supposed to improve people lives,” one of the revolters screams at a young soldier, not pay for a new wing at the palace, though it’s a lesson the young shogun seems incapable of learning even as the city burns all around him. 

Taking a leaf out of The Betrayal’s book, the climax is a lengthy action sequence in which Hyoe’s apprentice Saizo (Kento Nagao) takes on half the Kyoto garrison single-handed armed only with his staff. Though the themes are common enough for jidaigeki, though in truth jidaigeki mainly refers to films set in the Edo era under the Tokugawa peace, Irie modernises the way battle is depicted to incorporate wuxia-style wirework and rooftop chases along with martial arts training sequences for the young Saizo who learns the way of the warrior from a cackling old man with a long white beard (Akira Emoto) who has also taken in a young Korean woman (Rina Takeda) who was sold to a brothel by her father in just another one of the injustices of the era but has now become a badass archer and another of Hyoe’s righteous avengers. Solidarity is it seems the best weapon, along with biding your time and knowing when to retreat because this is a war that’s never really won but only held back while the powers that be never really learn.

Samurai Fury is released Digitally in the US Oct. 7 courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Aimitagai (アイミタガイ, Shogo Kusano, 2024)

Posted on by

When we say, “what goes around comes around”, we usually mean it in a bad way that someone is only getting what they deserve after behaving badly themselves. But the reverse is also true. The smallest acts of kindness people do without thinking can have quite profound effects on the world around them because, in the end, we are all connected. A bereaved father remarks that he thought novels that only had kind-hearted characters were unrealistic, but now he wants to believe that kind of world could exist after realising the impact his late daughter’s kindness had on those around her.

It was Kanami (Sawako Fujima) who saved Azusa (Haru Kuroki) in middle school when she was being bullied for coming from a single-parent family and the pair remained firm friends ever after until Kanami was suddenly killed in an accident while working overseas. Kanami’s loss leaves Azusa struggling to move forward with her life while mired in grief and uncertainty. Having lost her mother some years previously, she has never really dealt with the trauma of her parent’s acrimonious divorce and has a rather cynical view of marriage despite working as a wedding planner where her unmarried status sometimes causes her clients anxiety though it obviously has very little do with her ability to do her job. She’s always been clear with her long-time boyfriend Sumito (Aoi Nakamura) that marriage isn’t something she sees in her future, though he seems to want more commitment, while she repeatedly describes him as “unreliable” and is hesitant to take the next step with their relationship whether it involves getting married or not.

In that sense it’s really Azusa’s inability to surrender herself to the concept of what her grandmother (Jun Fubuki) calls “amai-tagai”, or mutual solidarity, which they experience first-hand while visiting her as another old lady nearby comes rushing in saying her house is on fire. It’s not so much reciprocity as a generalised idea of having each other’s backs, that people help each other as needed without keeping score in much the same way as Azusa was saved by Kanami and as she later realises by Komichi (Mitsuko Kusabue) whose piano-playing soothed her spirit though Komichi intended to play in secret, allowing her music to blend in with the six o’clock chimes as a daily act of atonement for having played the piano for boys who were going off to war many of whom never returned. It is then Azusa who saves Komichi in turn by telling her that she felt comforted by her music and that she does not believe that she has no right to play it simply because of the ways it was misused in the past. 

What Azusa fears is that by getting married she would essentially be cutting herself off from her paternal grandmother who, aside from her aunt (Tamae Ando) who is also Komichi’s housekeeper, is the only other family member she seems to have a meaningful connection with. Unable to let go Kanami, she keeps sending her messages little knowing that her mother is actually reading them and feeling both sorry and grateful that her daughter had such a good friend who like her is also struggling to continue on without her. She and Kanami’s father (Tomorowo Taguchi) find solace in the letters they receive from children at an orphanage where Kanami used to donate cakes and sweets after visiting there on a job. The photos she took are on display at their bathrooms, Azusa said because Kanami wanted them to be in a place where the children felt free to embrace their feelings privately without fear of embarrassment. 

The photographs, letters, and belated gifts are all examples of the ways in which what Kanami sent around is still going around and will continue to do so long after she herself is gone. Through realising the reality of “aimi-tagai”, Azusa learns that the world can also be a kind place, Sumito might be more “reliable” than she thought, and it might not be such a bad idea to trust people after all. Based on the novel by Tei Chujo, the film’s interwoven threads of serendipitous connections and the unexpected results of momentary acts of kindness prove oddly life-affirming if only in the ways in which each realise that Kanami is always with them even if physically absent.

Aimitagai screened as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Dawn Wind in My Poncho (ポンチョに夜明けの風はらませて, Satoru Hirohara, 2017)

Posted on by Leave a comment

Dawn Wind in My Poncho posterThe end of high school might signal impending doom for some, but it also provides a valuable opportunity for one last hurrah before surrendering to the demands of the adult world. That’s more or less how the heroes of Satoru Hirohara’s Dawn Wind in My Poncho (ポンチョに夜明けの風はらませて, Poncho ni Yoake no Kaze Haramasete) feel about it as they set off on an impromptu road trip to track down a Peruvian folksinger making his first visit to Japan in 18 years. Youthful irresponsibility and an openness to all things send our boys on a strange odyssey of self discovery in flight of a future that is almost certain to be disappointing.

Right before graduation, Janbo (Yuma Yamoto) and Matahachi (Taiga) are preparing to celebrate their friend Jin (Aoi Nakamura) getting into Uni. Only, Jin didn’t make the grade which has rather put a damper on the occasion. To make matters worse, new driver Matahatchi seems to have scratched the car belonging to Janbo’s dad which they weren’t supposed to be driving in the first place. Trying to fix the problem, they run into dejected idol Ai (Aimi Satsukawa) who dreams of chart success but is being pressured into a gravure career by her agency. Ai manages to upset some delinquents in a convenience store car park, leaving our guys wondering if they should step in but coming to the conclusion it’s not worth it unless the girl is pretty. Nevertheless, they end up driving off with Ai in the back of the car anyway with the delinquents in hot pursuit.

That’s only the beginning of the boys’ adventure, but they can’t go home yet anyway because by the end of the chase they’ve completely destroyed the car and will be extremely dead when Janbo’s dad finds out. Lovingly showing off a picture of his beloved new (secondhand) car, Janbo’s dad tells a young man coming into the bar owned by Matahachi’s single mother that if he works really hard for a very long time, he too could have a car like this. It’s a fairly depressing prospect, but it does seem like there might not be much more out there for these small town guys as they prepare to leave high school behind. Jin was the guys’ bright hope with his university dreams. Janbo is going to work for his dad and Matahachi is looking for a job. All there is to look forward to now is constraint. A boring low pay job with no prospects, followed by marriage, fatherhood, and death.

You can’t blame them for cutting loose, though in essence our guys are mild-mannered sorts well and truly outrun by Ai’s anarchic flight from her own disappointment with her faltering career. Of course, the boys are all interested in her nevertheless only Janbo is facing an embarrassing problem of his own which has him wondering if he’ll ever be able to have a “normal” sex life, marriage, or family. The problem eventually takes him to the “Banana Clinic” which is actually a front very specific sex services but does introduce him to a nice young lady (Junko Abe) who might be able to cure his sense of insecurity if in a roundabout way.

Meanwhile, the guys have blown off the fourth member of their “band” (Shhota Sometani) who is still hanging around waiting for them to turn up for practice ahead of their graduation show. A poignant radio message attached to a song request in which he reveals how lonely he was until some guys invited him to join their band goes unheard by the gang leaving him to gatecrash graduation all alone with an impromptu performance in which he sings about how school was pointless and no one cares about the future, starting a mini riot among the other kids in the process. The trio are still busy with a series of zany adventures as Matahachi tries to convince the guys to come with him on strange quest to hear the elusive folk singer, only latterly explaining to them why exactly this means so much to him. A typically teenage road trip ends up going nowhere in particular, leaving the guys in limbo as they run from their depressing futures towards the last traces freedom far in the distance. Silly, if endearing, Dawn Wind in My Poncho is a strangely sympathetic tale of youthful rebellion towards impending adulthood which ultimately places its faith in the strength of male friendship as the last refuge from a relentlessly conformist society.

Dawn Wind in My Poncho was screened as part of the 2019 Nippon Connection Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Haruko’s Paranormal Laboratory (春子超常現象研究所, Lisa Takeba, 2015)

Posted on by 8 Comments

haruko's paranormal laboratory posterIn the brave new Netflix era, perhaps it’s not unusual to hear someone exclaim that their most significant relationship is with their television, but most people do not mean it as literally as Haruko, the heroine of the self titled Haruko’s Paranormal Laboratory (春子超常現象研究所, Haruko Chojogensho Kenkyujo). Lisa Takeba returns with her second film which proves to be just as strange and quirky as the first and all the better for it. Haruko’s world is a surreal one in which a TV coming to life is perfectly natural, as is the widespread plague of “artistic” behaviour which involves robbing the local 100 yen store for loose change and randomly setting fire to things. Yet Haruko’s problems are the normal ones at heart – namely, loneliness and disconnection. Takeba’s setting may be a strange fever dream filled with fiendishly clever, zany humour but the fear and anxiety are all too real.

As a teenager, Haruko (Moeka Nozaki) was something of a loner. Being the daughter of a teacher and having a strong interest in UFOs and other supernatural entities, she had few friends and longed for something “exciting” to happen. Sadly, something quite exciting did happen, but it involved a suicide and her brother apparently being abducted by aliens. Ten or fifteen years later, Haruko still maintains her “Paranormal Laboratory” and intense interest in aliens with a view to maybe finding out what happened to her brother, but her external life is less satisfying. Her main hobby is lying around watching her 1950s black and white CRT TV and swearing loudly at the ridiculous images it projects. Her TV, however, has finally had enough and upon hearing 1000 dirty words from Haruko, springs into life as a handsome young man with telebox for a head.

An usual genesis for a relationship, but then when you spend all of your spare time googling paranormal events and harping on your teenage failures, beggars can’t be choosers. Haruko’s growing relationship with TV (Aoi Nakamura) follows the classic amnesiac mould as the two begin living together and eventually become an odd kind of couple. TV’s central operating system is pulled together from what he’s observed over the airwaves which means he has a slightly less realistic view point than your average guy. Though originally content to fall into the stereotypically “female” role, staying home cooking meals and tidying up while Haruko goes to work, he soon becomes depressed out of boredom and loneliness before eventually being made to feel inadequate when someone refers to him as a “freeloader”. Like many a spouse whose decision to stay home has not been entirely their own, TV has a lot of skills including the ability to speak 12 languages fluently, but what finally gets him a job as a TV star (yes, a TV on TV!), is his sex appeal and exotic appearance.

TV also thinks he can remember his “family” which lends a bittersweet dimension to his relationship with Haruko as she helps him look for the wife and child that might be waiting for him. Haruko’s relationship with her own family is strained. Complaining that her family are “annoying” she leaves her well meaning father standing on the doorstep when he’s come out of his way to deliver some of her favourite cup cakes which he’s baked for her himself. Haruko’s mother has since passed on but her feeling of familial disconnection stems right back into her childhood and one strange UFO hunting night during which she discovered something about her brother which may explain his long term absence. This potentially rich seam is merely background to Haruko’s life (something which she later realises as she figures out that her brother may have been watching over her in disguise all these years), but that her brother has felt the need to hide himself away following a traumatic childhood incident is certainly a sad mirror for Haruko’s own ongoing psychological isolation.

Takeba piles jokes on top of jokes in this strange world where ‘50s “Videodrome” TVs with Yubari Film Festival tags still work and play adverts in which cheap whiskey “for the needy” is advanced as a good father’s day present, and an idol retires from the top band KKK48 live on air. Freak shows, extreme cosplay, marital disconnect, “artistic” robbery and arson, and a very dedicated NHK man, pepper the scene but the outcome is a young woman stepping away from her romantic fantasies towards something more real, realising she doesn’t really need to meet aliens so much as she needs to pay more attention to the “normal” world. Quirky to the max and riffing off just about every aspect of Japanese pop culture from Sailor Moon to J-horror, Haruko’s Paranormal Laboratory is a charming, if surreal, take on an early life crisis which must be seen to be believed.

Currently available to stream in the UK from Filmdoo.

Original teaser trailer (dialogue free)

Twilight: Saya in Sasara (トワイライト ささらさや, Yoshihiro Fukagawa, 2014)

Posted on by Leave a comment

Japanese cinema has its fare share of ghosts. From Ugetsu to Ringu, scorned women have emerged from wells and creepy, fog hidden mansions bearing grudges since time immemorial but departed spirits have generally had very little positive to offer in their post-mortal lives. Twilight: Saga in Sasara (トワイライト ささらさや,  Twilight Sasara Saya) is an oddity in more ways than one – firstly in its recently deceased narrator’s comic approach to his sad life story, and secondly in its partial rejection of the tearjerking melodrama usually common to its genre.

Unsuccessful Rakugo performer Yutaro (Yo Oizumi) met the love of his life during one of his sparsely attended recitations. Saya (Yui Aragaki) was the only one laughing but even she didn’t think he was very funny, she just liked him because he was trying so hard. Eventually, he married her and they had a lovely baby boy but before little Yusuke was even a year old, Yutaro got himself killed in a random traffic accident. Such is life. Still, knowing that Saya had no family of her own and having grown up without a father himself Yutaro feels even worse about leaving his wife and son all alone in such a stupid way. Therefore he decides to delay going to heaven so that he can stick around to help Saya in whatever way he can.

A crisis occurs when Yutaro’s estranged father (Ryo Ishibashi) suddenly turns up at the funeral laying claim to little Yusuke with no thought to the additional emotional ramifications of trying to snatch a baby from a grieving mother right over the coffin of her husband. Possessing the body of another guest, Yutaro manages to convince Saya to run leading her to retreat to her late aunt’s house in the peaceful rural village of Sasara.

Though the premise is a familiar one, Fukagawa neatly sidesteps the more maudlin aspects for a broadly comic approach in which Yutaro recounts the story of his death as if it were a rakugo tale. Possessing various people along the way, Yutaro does indeed help Saya adjust to her new life but eventually discovers that perhaps the reason he hasn’t passed over was one of the past rather than one of the future.

Saya’s arrival in Sasara gets off to a bad start – essentially forced out of the city to escape Yutaro’s father Saya causes unexpected trouble when it emerges that the corrupt local estate agent has been letting out her aunt’s house without telling her. If that weren’t enough, some of her valuables are almost stolen by a local delivery boy but, this being an ageing village, children are a rarity and so little Yusuke quickly captures the hearts of the neighbourhood grannies who eventually become Saya’s friends and staunch supporters. Familial problems are the name of the day from childlessness to children (hopefully) writing down possible signs of dementia or just leaving town and not coming back. Yutaro also helps Saya improve the life of another young woman with a son who doesn’t speak by allowing him to finally voice what he really feels, adding to the circle of female help and support which becomes the family Saya had always longed for.

Orphaned at a young age, raised by her grandmother until she died and having lost her only living relative in her aunt a few years previously, Saya had always wondered what it felt like to have a real family of her own. Yutaro had also lost his mother at a young age through illness and was estranged from his father who refused to visit her even on her deathbed. Yutaro’s untimely death adds to Saya’s ongoing sorrows but also ends the beginnings of the happy family they’d begun to build with each other. As it turns out, Yotaro’s limbo is less about his son and more about his father as he gets a last opportunity to bond with his outwardly harsh and cruel dad and come to a kind of understanding about fatherhood in hearing his side of the story. Life is too short for grudges, and even spirits sometimes need to give up the ghost so that the air can rest a little lighter.

Though there are the expected moments of sadness as Yotaro realises the number of people he can possess is dwindling and his time with Saya will be limited, Fukagawa keeps things light and whimsical with a kind of small town quirkiness aided by Oizumi’s spirited delivery. Adding in frequent rakugo references complete with painted backdrops and sound effects as well as a repeated motif which sees the little town remade as a diorama model, Twilight: Saya in Sarasa has a pleasantly old fashioned feeling which only adds to its wholesome emphasis on an extended family of community coupled with the continuing presence of Yutaro watching from somewhere on high. Warm and funny if a little lacking in impact, Twilight: Saya in Sasara is a rare instance of a ghost bringing people together in love and harmony through helping them get closer to their true emotions but one that is also keen to emphasise that we’re all only here for an unspecified time – better not to waste it with silly things like grudges.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Library Wars: The Last Mission (図書館戦争-THE LAST MISSION-, Shinsuke Sato, 2015)

Posted on by Leave a comment

library-wars-last-missionWhen Library Wars, the original live action adaptation of Hiro Arikawa’s light novel series, hit cinema screens back in 2013 it did so with a degree of commercial, rather than critical, success. Though critics were quick to point out the great gaping plot holes in the franchise’s world building and a slight imbalance in its split romantic comedy/sci-fi political thriller genre mix, the film was in many ways a finely crafted mainstream blockbuster supported by committed performances from its cast and impressive cinematography from its creative team. Library Wars: The Last Mission (図書館戦争-THE LAST MISSION-, Toshokan Senso -The Last Mission-) is the sequel that those who enjoyed the first film have been waiting for given the very obvious plot developments left unresolved at the previous instalment’s conclusion.

18 months later, Kasahara (Nana Eikura) is a fully fledged member of the Library Defence Force, but still hasn’t found the courage to confess her love to her long term crush and embittered commanding officer, Dojo (Junichi Okada). As in the first film, The Media Betterment Force maintains a strict censorship system intended to prevent “harmful” literature reaching “vulnerable” people through burning all suspect books before they can cause any damage. Luckily, the libraries system is there to rescue books before they meet such an unfortunate fate and operates the LDF to defend the right to read, by force if necessary.

Kasahara is an idealist, fully committed to the defence of literature. It is, therefore, a surprise when she is accused of being an accomplice to a spate of book burning within the library in which books criticising the libraries system are destroyed. Needless to say, Kasahara has been framed as part of a villainous plan orchestrated by fellow LDF officer Tezuka’s (Sota Fukushi) rogue older brother, Satoshi (Tori Matsuzaka). There is a conspiracy at foot, but it’s not quite the one everyone had assumed it to be.

In comparison with the first film, The Last Mission is much more action orientated with military matters taking up the vast majority of the run time. A large scale battle in which the LDF is tasked with guarding an extremely important book containing their own charter (i.e. a symbol of everything they stand for) but quickly discovers the Media Betterment Force is not going to pass up this opportunity to humiliate their rival, forms the action packed centrepiece of the film.

The theme this time round leans less towards combating censorship in itself, but stops to ask whether it’s worth continuing to fight even if you feel little progress is being made. The traitorous officer who helps to frame Kasahara does so because he’s disillusioned with the LDF and its constant water treading. The LDF is doing what it can, but it’s fighting to protect books – not change the system. This is a weakness Satoshi Tezuka is often able to exploit as the constant warfare and tit for tat exchanges have begun to wear heavy on many LDF officers who are half way to giving up and switching sides. Even a zealot like Kasahara is thrown into a moment of existential despair when prodded by Satoshi’s convincing arguments about her own obsolescence.

Satoshi rails against a world filled with evil words, but as the head of the LDF points out in quoting Heinrich Heine, the society that burns books will one day burn men. The LDF may not be able to break the system, but in providing access to information it can spread enlightenment and create a thirst for knowledge among the young which will one day produce the kind of social change that will lead to a better, fairer world.

As in Library Wars all of these ideas are background rather than the focus of the film which is, in essence, the ongoing non-romance between Kasahara and Dojo. Remaining firmly within the innocent shojo realm, the romantic resolution may seem overly subtle to some given the extended build up over both films but is ultimately satisfying in its cuteness. Library Wars: The Last Mission masks its absurd premise with a degree of silliness, always entirely self aware, but gets away with it through sincerity and good humour. Shinsuke Sato once again proves himself among the best directors of mainstream blockbusters in Japan improving on some of the faults of the first film whilst bringing the franchise to a suitably just conclusion.

Original trailer (No subtitles)

https://youtu.be/8Bqgn4icG5M