Tag: Atsuhiro Nabeshima

In the Wake (護られなかった者たちへ, Takahisa Zeze, 2021)

Posted on by

According to a young woman at the centre of Takahisa Zeze’s In the Wake (護られなかった者たちへ, Mamorarenakatta Monotachi he), natural disasters are monsters that devour humans with no rhyme or reason, but people close to her have died by human hands while left at the mercy of a hypocritical social welfare system. Though the social workers insist that benefits are something everyone is entitled to when they need support, others go to great lengths to stop anyone getting them. “That’s the country we live in,” one explains with a tone that implies he thinks this is exactly as it should be.

That social worker is the second to be found dead in suspicious circumstances nine years after the devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The police obviously suspect a grudge, that someone who was turned down for benefits got fed up and killed him in revenge. But as assistant Mikiko (Kaya Kiyohara) says, it’s unlikely to be any of them because they are all “too busy trying to survive,” so they don’t have time to waste on things like vengeance. Zeze then switches to the welfare office where a social worker is trying to explain to an elderly applicant all of the different forms and documentation he’ll need to prepare for his claim. These people already have to jump through hoops to prove their “neediness,” while most of them feel defeated and humiliated in even having to ask and would prefer not to have to depend on the government. 

But a lot of Mikiko’s work involves challenging those suspected of committing benefits fraud. The first of two people she talks to is a single mother with mental health issues (Chika Uchida) who’s had to start working full-time and consequently gone over her allowance meaning her benefits should stop and she should pay back what was “wrongfully” claimed. The woman insists she needs the extra money because her daughter was being bullied for being on benefits so she wants to send her to cram school and be able to buy educational supplies, but Mikiko remains unsympathetic. The second is a man who it’s admittedly harder to sympathise with as he appears to have bought quite a fancy car which again takes him over the limit as a car is classed as a luxury item rather than a necessity. Mikiko doesn’t think they should pay out when he could easily sell the car. Of course, it’s not that simple. The man may need the car in order to work and without it would have no choice but to rely on benefits to a greater extent. In any case, he gets on Mikiko’s nerves because to her it’s people like him that prevent them helping more “genuinely” needy cases. 

But on the other hand, when they could and should have helped they refused and effectively blackmailed an old lady into revoking her application even though she had only 6000 yen (£30) left in the bank and was on the brink of starvation with no one else to turn to. Another of the social workers insists that good neighbours are the most effective way of tackling poverty which is equal parts unreasonable and unrealistic. Then again, there was a kind of solidarity that arose in the wake of the earthquake in which an old woman’s kindness saved a young man and little girl from being dragged away by the weight of their despair, giving them a new home and surrogate family along with proof of the fact that there is always someone there to help and that kind of compassion can be a kind of salvation. 

Even so, Mikiko’s insistence that you have to ask to receive, along with the welfare officer’s almost vampiric obsession with getting the applicant themselves to clearly state they need help, seems contrary to her philosophy in which it should just be provided with no questions asked. They know how difficult asking for help can be and deliberately leverage the social stigma of being on benefits to discourage people from applying for them. Citing increased demand and government cut backs in the wake of the earthquake, the social worker confusingly suggests that by declining more cases they can help more people in the long run which doesn’t make a tremendous amount of sense while his eerie grinning hints that he has begun to enjoying sadistically humiliating these vulnerable people who’ve been brave enough to come forward and ask for that to which they are otherwise entitled. 

They are all living in the wake of this disaster, something of which aloof yet empathetic detective Tomashino (Hiroshi Abe) is all too aware having lost his wife and son in the disaster. As his son’s body was never found, he too lives in a state of limbo but through investigating the killings begins to find a kind of closure along with an unexpected sense of understanding with a gloomy young man, Yasuhisa (Takeru Satoh), himself a suspect and struggling to make sense of the past, his survival, and the ongoing injustice of the world around him. The film takes its Japanese title, “those who were not protected”, from a note Mikiko writes about the importance of empathy in social work encouraging her colleagues to rebel even if their bosses tell them not to, but also hints at the grief and guilt felt by those left behind that in the end there were those they were not able to save but they can perhaps make their peace with that by continuing to help those around them even if their society largely refuses to do so.

In the Wake screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (English subtitles)

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)

Orange (orange-オレンジ, Kojiro Hashimoto, 2015)

Posted on by 2 Comments

Orange posterPerhaps it isn’t possible (or even desirable) to live a life without regrets, but given the opportunity who wouldn’t want a second chance to tackle some of those thorny adolescent moments where you said something you shouldn’t have or didn’t say something that perhaps should have been said. The heroine of Kojiro Hashimoto’s Orange (orange-オレンジ) gets exactly this opportunity when she receives a letter from her future self asking for her help in “erasing” some of her teenage regrets by using the information in the letter to save a friend she hasn’t yet met. Though the letter contains little information about the life she is leading ten years from now, it is clear that something happened all those years ago which has profoundly affected the lives of a tight group of high school friends.

16-year-old Naho (Tao Tsuchiya) receives the letter at the beginning of her second year of high school, reading it under the vibrant pink cherry blossoms. A little creeped out, she doesn’t read it fully but is surprised when, just as the letter said, a new student, Kakeru (Kento Yamazaki), transfers into her class and occupies the previously empty desk next to hers. A shy and quiet girl Naho is nevertheless part of a group of five friends which includes sportsman Suwa (Ryo Ryusei), geek Hagita (Dori Sakurada), and two other girls Takako (Hirona Yamazaki) and Azusa (Kurumi Shimizu). For reasons unexplained, the group quickly takes Kakeru into their fold only for him to suddenly disappear for a couple of weeks. On closer inspection of the letter, Naho is disturbed by the news that Kakeru is “no longer around” at the time of her future self’s writing.

Orange fits neatly into the popular tragic high school romance genre in which an older version of the protagonist looks back on a traumatic event and tries to come to terms with their own action or inaction in order to move forward with their adult lives. 26-year-old Naho, as we quickly find out, has moved on – she is married to Suwa and has a young son she has named Kakeru but she and the others are still finding it difficult to come to terms with what happened to their friend and the possibility that they could have done something more to help him if they’d only known then what they know now.

So far so “junai”, but Orange tries to have things both ways by introducing a slightly clumsy time travel/parallel universe theory in which the protagonists realise that they won’t be able to change the past but are hoping that their friend is happy in an alternate timeline created by their efforts to influence their younger selves with more mature thinking coupled with the benefit of hindsight. Unlike other examples of the genre, Orange undercuts the usual need to deal with the past and find closure through a mild fantasy of denial in which the older protagonists can believe in an alternate future in which they were able to do things differently and save their friend from his unhappy destiny.

Saving their friend is, however, only a secondary goal – the first being to ease their own sense of guilt in not having seen that Kakeru was in trouble and needed their help. All this emphasis on personal “regret” cannot help but seem somewhat solipsistic – everyone is very sorry about what happened in the past and wishes that they could have acted differently but is also somewhat preoccupied with their own role in events rather than a true desire to have in someway eased their friend’s suffering. Though there is the true selflessness of real, grown up love such as that displayed by Suwa who has always loved Naho but supports her love of Kakeru despite his own feelings, the actions of the group remain childishly goal orientated as Kakeru’s survival becomes an end mission flag rather than an expression of love and care for a friend in trouble.

The teenagers are, despite advice from their older selves, still teenagers and so it is only to be expected that they respond to a very grown up problem with a degree of immaturity, but it is also true that Kakeru’s ongoing, mostly well hidden, depression plays second fiddle to the various romantic subplots currently in action. Though the friends rally round with fairly trite phrases about helping to carry Kakeru’s burden and always being there him, Orange almost tries to argue that kind words are enough to pull a strained mind back from the brink – not that kind words ever hurt, but some problems are bigger than superficial pledges of friendship can handle especially when you’ve half a mind on who loves who and who is trying to get in the way of someone else’s romantic destiny. In spending so much time worrying about their friend, they have, in a sense, left him to deal with all his problems on his own while revelling in their own “concern”.

Superficial and melodramatic, Orange’s insistence on the power of teenage friendship can’t help but ring a little false and the parallel universe solution an overly convenient narrative device which allows for two differing resolutions both of which essentially frustrate the attempts of the older protagonists to accept their own sense of guilt and responsibility for their friend’s death in order to move on with their lives. Kakeru, in a sense, gets forgotten in his friends’ need to absolve themselves of his fate – a particularly ironic development in a cautionary tale about the enduring legacy of regret and the necessity of communicating one’s true feelings fully in the knowledge that there may not always be another opportunity to do so.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Miracles of the Namiya General Store (ナミヤ雑貨店の奇蹟, Ryuichi Hiroki, 2017)

Posted on by 1 Comment

Miracles of the Namiya General Store posterKeigo Higashino is probably best known for his murder mysteries, most particularly the international best seller The Devotion of Suspect X. His literary output is however a little broader than one might assume and fantastical hypotheticals are very much a part of his work as in the bizarre The Secret in which a mother wakes up in her daughter’s body after a fatal accident. Miracles of the Namiya General Store (ナミヤ雑貨店の奇蹟, Namiya Zakkaten no Kiseki) is indeed one of his warmer stories even if it occasionally veers towards the author’s usual taste for moral conservatism in its yearning for a more innocent, pre-bubble Japan that is rapidly being forgotten.

Back in 1980, Mr. Namiya (Toshiyuki Nishida) runs the local store and is a much loved member of the community. As an older man with plenty of life experience, he also offers an agony uncle service. People with problems can simply write him a letter and drop it through his box. He’ll have a bit of a think about it and then either paste up a response on the village noticeboard outside or, if the question is a little more delicate, place his reply in an envelope in the milk box.

32 years later, a trio of delinquent boys end up taking refuge in the disused store after committing some kind of crime. While they’re poking around, what should pop through the letter box but a letter, direct from 1980. Freaked out the boys try to leave but find themselves trapped in some kind of timeslip town. Eventually they decide to answer the letter just to pass the time and then quickly find themselves conversing with an earlier generation by means of some strange magic.

At the end of his life, what Mr. Namiya is keen to know is if his advice really mattered, and if it did, did it help or hinder? His introspection is caused in part by a news report that someone he advised on a particularly tricky issue may have committed suicide. Mr. Namiya isn’t now so sure he gave them the right advice and worries what he told them may have contributed to the way they died. This itself is a difficult question and if it sounds like a moral justification to point out that no one was forced to follow Mr. Namiya’s “advice” and everyone is ultimately responsible for their own decisions, that’s because it is but then it doesn’t make it any less true. Then again, Mr. Namiya’s advice, by his own admission, was not really about telling people what to do – most have already made a decision, they just want someone to help them feel better about it. What he tries to do is read between the lines and then tell them what they want to hear – the decision was always theirs he just helped them find a way to accommodate it.

The boys have quite different attitudes. Kohei (Kanichiro), who takes the initial decision to write back, is compassionate but pragmatic. As we later find out, the three boys are all orphans and Kohei counsels a melancholy musician who wants to know if he should give up on his Tokyo music career and come home to run the family fish shop that he should count himself lucky to have a place to come back to and that if he was going to get anywhere in music he’d have got there already. Mr. Namiya’s philosophy proves apt – the musician writes back and argues his case, he wants to carry on with music but feels guilty and hopes Mr. Namiya will tell him it’s OK to follow his dreams. For the boys however, “dreams” are an unaffordable luxury and like a trio of cynical old men they tell the musician to grow up and get a real job. That is, until he decides to play them a tune and they realise it’s all too familiar.

Similarly, a conflicted young woman drops them a letter wanting advice on whether to become the mistress of a wealthy man who claims he will help her set up in business. The boys say no, do not debase yourself, work hard and be honest – that’s the best way to repay a debt to the people that raised you. Again she writes back, she wants her shot but it is a high price. That’s where hindsight comes in, as does advance knowledge about Japan’s impending economic boom and subsequent bust.

As expected, everything is connected. Higashino maybe romanticising an earlier time in which community still mattered and the wisest man you knew ran the corner store, but then there’s a mild inconsistency between the idealised picture of small town life and the orphanage which links it all together – these kids are after all removed, even perhaps exiled, from that same idea of “community” even if they are able to create their own familial bonds thanks to the place that has raised them. The most cynical of the boys once wanted to be a doctor, but as another boy points out it takes more than just brains to get there. While it’s a nice message to say that there are no limits and nothing is impossible, it is rather optimistic and perhaps glosses over many of the issues the kids face after “graduating” from the group home and having nowhere else to go. Nevertheless, seeing everything come together in the end through the power of human goodness and the resurgence of personal agency is an inspirational sight indeed. The world could use a few more miracles, but as long as there are kind hearted people with a desire for understanding, there will perhaps be hope.

Original trailer (English/simplified Chinese subtitles)