“What do you think about death?” a charming grim reaper awkwardly asks, seemingly taking into account the answers given when deciding whether his “subject” should survive or if the untimely death they’re about to meet should be final. Adapted from the novel by Kotaro Isaka, Masaya Kakehi’s Sweet Rain: Accuracy of Death (Sweet Rain: 死神の精度, Sweet Rain: Shinigami no Seido) contemplates what it means to live well, how to go on living in the midst of pain and suffering, and finally how to know when it’s time to accept the finality of death.
Chiba (Takeshi Kaneshiro) is a grim reaper and it’s his job to decide whether those involved in unexpected deaths, those not due to old age, illness, or suicide, should be allowed to live. According to his partner, who appears alternately as a black dog or raven, Chiba always chooses to “proceed” but something is obviously a little different with his latest job monitoring customer services representative Kazue (Manami Konishi) in the seven days leading up to her demise. Kazue is currently being harassed by a repeat caller who keeps calling the helpline asking for her personally and has recently graduated to pestering her about meeting up in person. It’s easy to see which way this could go, though luckily for her she ends up meeting Chiba who acts as a kind of protector when she’s hassled yet again by a different set of creeps in a park. As he gets to know her, Chiba learns of Kazue’s loneliness and sense of despair having endured more than her fair share of loss which has convinced her that everyone around her dies and she’s destined to be alone. But whether down to Chiba’s interference or otherwise, a surprising twist sees her offered a gig as a top idol star, leading Chiba to conclude that she has not yet fulfilled her purpose and should be granted more time.
The expected romance does not quite take place, though Chiba is indeed becoming more interested in human life along with death while fascinated by music which he describes as humanity’s greatest invention. As we gradually gather, Chiba’s three jobs occur at lengthy temporal intervals, though the music store he frequents appears to be a constant and almost unchanged. Bar a hyper-realistic humanoid robot appearing in the final section in which Chiba is sent to assess an elderly hairdresser (Sumiko Fuji), these different temporal spaces are in another sense an extension of the present in which technology does not otherwise change substantially. Chiba picks up an iPod belonging to a petty yakuza on job two but continues to listen to CDs while the hairdresser seems to be doing her job the old-fashioned way and the kids that come to her store all collect Pokémon/Top Trumps-style paper cards.
Yet Chiba is also a fish out of water, constantly confused by contemporary slang and with a strong tendency towards taking things literally. His discombobulation with language and custom is perhaps enhanced by the casting of Takeshi Kaneshiro who is half-Taiwanese and grew up in Taiwan speaking Mandarin as his first language, later working predominantly in Chinese-language cinema. In the audience perception he carries with him a quality of otherness that adds to the ethereality of his existence as a grim reaper. His appearance changes with each of his subjects, firstly appearing as a handsome young man, then as a grizzled yakuza complete with sunshades, and finally as a slacker student with each of his portals mirroring his destination from telephone booths to emergency exits and shopfront doors. As a grim reaper he has long unruly hair and wears a suit a loosened tie, but perhaps has little identity of his own and laments that he has never seen a blue sky because it is always raining whenever he is in the mortal world.
The rain might well symbolise the pain and suffering around him as he lives among those who are about to die, but he himself feels that death is nothing special. As the old lady points out, that might be because it’s all he sees, he never visits people while they’re alive and knows nothing of life nor what it is to leave it. The old lady too experienced a lot of loss in her life and came to the conclusion that she was in some way cursed, severing her connection with those she truly loved believing she could only bring them harm and choosing to live all alone. “The sun in the sky’s nothing unusual but it’s important that it be there,” she adds, “death’s like that, maybe”. In any case she seems to have lived a long life that was happy enough even if it was “nothing special” and she can die with no regrets while Chiba too begins to learn something of the world’s ordinary beauty in his first glimpse of a sunny sky even if one overshadowed by the spectre of death.
Trailer (no subtitles)
“Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they’re also what tear you apart” runs the often quoted aphorism from Haruki Murakami. SABU seems to see things the same way and indulges an equally surreal side of himself in the sci-fi tinged Happiness (ハピネス). Memory, as the film would have it, both sustains and ruins – there are terrible things which cannot be forgotten, no matter how hard one tries, while the happiest moments of one’s life get lost among the myriad everyday occurrences. Happiness is the one thing everyone craves even if they don’t quite know what it is, little knowing that they had it once if only for a few seconds, but if the desire to attain “happiness” is itself a reason for living could simply obtaining it by technological means do more harm than good?
Following the surreal horror film 
Koji Wakamtasu had a long and somewhat strange career, untimely ended by his death in a road traffic accident at the age of 76 with projects still in the pipeline destined never to be finished. 2008’s United Red Army (実録・連合赤軍 あさま山荘への道程, Jitsuroku Rengosekigun Asama-Sanso e no Michi) was far from his final film either in conception or actuality, but it does serve as a fitting epitaph for his oeuvre in its unflinching determination to tell the sad story of Japan’s leftist protest movement. Having been a member of the movement himself (though the extent to which he participated directly is unclear), Wakamatsu was perfectly placed to offer a subjective view of the scene, why and how it developed as it did and took the route it went on to take. This is not a story of revolution frustrated by the inevitability of defeat, there is no romance here – only the tragedy of young lives cut short by a war every bit as pointless as the one which they claimed to be in protest of. Young men and women who only wanted to create a better, fairer world found themselves indoctrinated into a fundamentalist political cult, misused by power hungry ideologues whose sole aims amounted to a war on their own souls, and finally martyred in an ongoing campaign of senseless death and violence.
2009 marked the centenary year of Osamu Dazai, a hugely important figure in the history of Japanese literature who is known for his melancholic stories of depressed, suicidal and drunken young men in contemporary post-war Japan. Villon’s Wife (ヴィヨンの妻 〜桜桃とタンポポ, Villon no Tsuma: Oto to Tampopo) is a semi-autobiographical look at a wife’s devotion to her husband who causes her nothing but suffering thanks to his intense insecurity and seeming desire for death coupled with an inability to successfully commit suicide.
Windows on Worlds 