Tag: Hakobu Okubo

My Father’s Tracks (僕と彼女とラリーと, Renpei Tsukamoto, 2021)

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A struggling Tokyo actor begins to re-appreciate small-town wholesomeness after returning home for the first time in many years on learning of his semi-estranged father’s death in Renpei Tsukamoto’s heartwarming drama My Father’s Tracks (僕と彼女とラリーと, Boku to Kanojo to Rally to). As much a celebration of the idyllic countryside villages around the city of Toyota in Aichi, obviously closely associated with the automobile industry, Tsukamoto’s gentle coming-of-age tale sees its hero find his purpose in returning to his roots while gaining a new perspective on his parents’ relationship and the father he’d always resented who became a local hero but was never around when his family needed him. 

At 29 Taiga (Win Morisaki) is still trying to make his mark as an actor in Tokyo, his dejected manager complaining his trouble is that though he’s quick and clever he’s essentially soulless which is why he’s failing to captivate the audition panel. He repeatedly ignores calls from his semi-estranged father Toshio (Masahiko Nishimura) and then answers one on the urging of a friend only to utter some very unkind words before unceremoniously hanging up. The next time he answers his phone, however, the call is from an old friend and neighbour, Miho (Mai Fukagawa), letting him know that his father has passed away suddenly of a heart attack. Though they had not been on good terms, Taiga cannot help feeling guilty that his final words to his father were so harsh especially as he’d called to invite him to visit the following November. 

Though everyone in the town seems to have held Toshio in high regard, he was a frequent fixture on the local TV channel for which Miho works, both Taiga and his older brother Hiroyuki (Ryuta Sato) who has become a cynical and heartless businessman feel only contempt for him for having selfishly neglected his family while travelling all around the world as a mechanic with a champion rally team not even making it home in time to see their mother before she passed away of a longterm illness. Taiga can’t forgive him for leaving his mother lonely, but later comes to reflect that perhaps he wasn’t best placed to fully understand the relationship between his parents and may have misinterpreted something which as he later puts it only a husband and wife can know. Meanwhile, it seems his father had also been a supportive force in the community having given jobs to those who might not ordinarily find them in a mechanic with a criminal record, an old man past retirement age, and a young woman so shy she is largely unable to speak. Taiga can see how important his father was to these people and worries what will happen to them now whereas his coldhearted brother is deaf to their pleas planning to close the business and have it and the family home bulldozed as soon as possible to settle the estate without undue delay. 

Hurt even more deeply that Taiga, Hiroyuki has become cruel and cynical often running his brother down rolling his eyes that no one makes a living from a “hobby” while insisting this isn’t one of his “namby-pamby” plays. He claims that he needs the money to protect his family, something that he feels his father failed to do in spending all his time on a “hobby” of his own even shutting down his own small son’s curiosity and desire to join in with the other kids’ fun. Even so after repeatedly telling him to “man up” and get a real job, Hiroyuki is less than impressed by Taiga’s desire to take over the family business which he admittedly knows nothing about having acquired a driving license solely for a role, only relenting when threatened by a flamboyant human rights lawyer with the name of a legendary samurai (Riki Takeuchi).  

Nevertheless, marshalling the skills he picked up in Tokyo and working alongside the locals Taiga begins to rediscover the sense of purpose he’d been missing while gaining a new understanding of his father and greater sense of future possibility. Despite complaining that there is “nothing here” in comparison to Tokyo only for Miho to remind him of all the things Tokyo doesn’t have or that are freely given in Toyota but need to be paid for in the city, he quickly settles back in to small town rhythms and begins to accept his father’s legacy finally finding his sense of direction and taking his place in the driving seat of his own life. A heartwarming tale of familial reconnection and the power of community, not to mention a celebration of rural small-town Toyota, My Father’s Tracks insists life is a rally, all about the going there and coming back, walking on blazing a trail and never giving up no matter the sharp corners and unexpected turns a life may take. 

My Father’s Tracks streams in the US until March 27 as part of the 14th season of Asian Pop-up Cinema

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Seven Weeks (野のなななのか, Nobuhiko Obayashi, 2014)

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“A death is a history” runs an opening title card in Nobuhiko Obayashi’s poignant existential drama, Seven Weeks (野のなななのか, No no Nanananoka). Returning to some of the director’s key themes, Obayashi’s adaptation of the novel by Koji Hasegawa takes its name from the traditional Buddhist period of mourning reminding us that life and death is a continuous cycle in which all lives are necessarily tied to one another. Some may later ask if those connections are also constraints, thinking perhaps of the sometimes onerous burdens of family, but even they later reflect on the necessity of human ties while contemplating the confluence of the eternal and the transient. 

The death we’re being asked to witness is that of 92-year-old Mitsuo Suzuki (Toru Shinagawa), a former doctor and owner of what some view as a junk shop, who is discovered collapsed by his granddaughter Kanna (Saki Terashima) only to die a few days later at the time shown on his permanently broken wristwatch which also happens to be the time the Great East Japan Earthquake struck in 2011. Soon his extended family begin to arrive beginning with long widowed sister Eiko (Tokie Hidari), grandson Fuyuki (Takehiro Murata) and his daughter Kasane (Hirona Yamazaki), and Kanna’s brother Akito (Shunsuke Kubozuka) while Fuyuki’s brother Haruhiko (Yutaka Matsushige) and his wife Setsuko (Tomoka Shibayama) will make it only in time for the wake. Throwing all into confusion is the unexpected arrival of a mysterious young woman, Nobuko (Takako Tokiwa), later revealed to be a nurse who once lived with the family and fulfilled the role of mother for Kanna and Akito whose parents were killed in a car accident while they were still young. 

Nobuko is in many ways the key to a mystery yet also a cypher, more than one woman at the same time as if in a sense resurrected from Mitsuo’s traumatic memories of love and war in the time of his youth. At his wake, men of a similar age spin their own war stories, Eiko reminding the young that their youth was war and perhaps they’ve a right to romanticise it for all of its terrible cruelty. Mitsuo didn’t go to the front but found himself a victim of shifting borders, ironically a descendent of settler colonisers as a native of Hokkaido travelling to the disputed island of Sakhalin in search of a friend and in the company of the young woman who was engaged to him but with whom he was himself in love believing the war was over only to discover no one had told the Russians and that wars do not end at the same time for everyone, or for some at all. 

In an ironic touch, great-granddaughter Kasane participates in an excavation of an old mine once staffed largely by forced Korean labour, an elderly woman plaintively singing Arirang over the dig site, only to later visit a similar location which has become the “Canada World” tourist attraction including a replica of the house from Anne of Green Gables. As she, Eiko, and Kanna reflect on the changes in the town there’s a minor sadness that the mine has closed which seems somewhat incongruous, even as the wholesomeness of coal from the ground is favourably compared with the dangerously intangible qualities of nuclear energy. Nevertheless, conflicted nuclear engineer Haruhiko later stakes his future on renewable energy, neatly echoing the sense of circularity in a continuous cycle of death and rebirth in which one life is necessarily tied to another and therefore to all lives. 

“We got along with the Russians in Sakhalin before the war” Mitsuo’s friend Ono (Takao Ito) laments, musing on the senselessness of conflict in its propensity to draw lines between people which divide rather than connect. Mitsuo’s death is indeed “a history tying the past and future”, a minor allegory for that of his nation as he contemplates lost love and the end to wandering that is death which leads in turn to new beginnings. “You want to look away. You want to forget about it”, Mitsuo confesses, “but you can’t. You have to remember so that it’s never repeated”. Through their 49-day odyssey, the family members begin to edge their way towards a less anxious if still uncertain future. “We might lose people but not hope” Kanna expounds, recommitting herself to the hometown spirit while opening up to the possibility of romance, while her brother does something much the same, as does her uncle Fuyuki even as his daughter conversely gives up on a possibly inappropriate crush to shift into a more mature adulthood. “We will go on peacefully” runs the final title card, a mission statement for the foundation of a better world. 

Seven Weeks streams in the US July 9 – Aug. 6 as part of Japan Society New York’s Tragedies of Youth: Nobuhiko Obayashi’s War Trilogy season in collaboration with KimStim.

Original trailer (English subtitles)