Tag: Hayato Isomura

The Young Strangers (若き見知らぬ者たち, Takuya Uchiyama, 2024)

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You have to protect your space from the violence of this world, a compromised father advises his sons, yet it’s something that neither he nor they are fully capable of doing. Billed as the “commercial debut” from the director of the equally emotionally devastating Sasaki in my Mind, Takuya Uchiyama, The Young Strangers (若き見知らぬ者たち, Wakaki Mishiranu Monotachi) paints a somewhat bleak portrait of contemporary Japan as place of desolation and abandonment, but at the same time is melancholy more than miserable in the earnestness with which they all dream of a better life somewhere beyond all of unfairness and injustice.

But Ayato (Hayato Isomura) seems to know that he’s burdened with some kind of karmic fate. His life oddly echoes that of his former policeman father and takes on an ironic symmetry even as he was unfairly left to pick up the pieces as a teenager adrift in the wake of parental betrayal. Now his late 20s, Ayato is a worn out and dejected figure who barely speaks after years of doing multiple jobs, in addition to running the snack bar his parents opened as a new start, to pay off the debts his father left behind. Now his mother has early onset dementia and her care is also something else he must manage as best he can with support from his girlfriend Hinata (Yukino Kishii), a nurse, and less so from his conflicted brother, Sohei (Shodai Fukuyama), who has a path out of here as an MMA champion if only he can stick to the plan and keep up with his training. 

As his best friend Yamato (Shota Sometani) points out, he’s hung onto everything his father left him but is equally in danger of losing his future. He seems wary of his relationship with Hinata, afraid to drag her into his life of poverty and hardship, while he watches friends get married and start families. He once had a promising future too, as the star of the school football team, but like everything else that came to an abrupt end in the wake of family tragedy. There are hints of trouble with law in his younger years that may have made it even more difficult for him to earn a living wage, along with giving him an unfavourable view of authority figures. Seeing another young man hassled by the police, he steps in to inverse but ends up in trouble himself. The policemen, take against him and when he’s beaten up by thugs who drag him out of the bar, they arrest him instead and let the others go. Time and again, bad actors seem to prosper and get away with their crimes, while good people like Ayato continue to suffer. When Yamato tries to come to his defence and questions the police, they lie and tell him Ayato’s just a waster as if the world were better off without him.

The boys have this game they play where put two fingers up against the back of a friend’s head and shout “bang”. It’s like there’s a bullet that always coming for them, and Ayato too fantasises about shooting himself in the head to escape this misery. Sohei, meanwhile, makes violence his weapon in taking the martial arts his father left him to forge a new path for himself while vowing not to be intimidated by violence. But violence is all around them from the literal kinds to that of an uncaring and oppressive society, and as much as Ayato fights in his own way to protect his family he can’t keep them all together nor the darkness at bay. He badly needs Sohei’s help, but also knows he can’t ask him to give up his way out or take away his future while Sohei is already pulling away. He thinks it’s time to look into a more permanent solution for their mother, and that they should let the past go, but Ayato wants to hold on to all of it as a means of giving his life meaning. “It’s not your fault, but it will be if it carries on,” a sympathetic neighbour tells Ayato after finding his mother in his cabbage patch again and leaving him to one again clear up the mess. Haunted by images of the past that in Uchiyama’s masterful staging segue into and out of the present, Ayato desperately searches for a way out of his suffocating existence, but encounters only betrayal and injustice amid the constant violence of an indifferent society.

The Young Strangers screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Hakkenden (八犬伝, Fumihiko Sori, 2024)

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Kyokutei Bakin thinks he’s a hack who writes inconsequential pulp that will be forgotten faster than yesterday’s headlines. He’d never believe that people hundreds of years later would still be talking about his work. Yet he may have a point in his conviction that people crave simple stories where good triumphs over evil specifically because the real world is not really like that and a lot of the time the bad guys end up winning. But does that mean then that all his stories are “lies” and he’s irresponsible for depicting the world not the way that it is but the way he wants it to be? 

Fumihiko Sori’s Hakkenden (八犬伝) is on one level an adaptation of the famous tale probably most familiar to international audiences as The Legend of the Eight Samurai, and also a story of its writing and the private doubts and fears of its author. In dramatising the tale, Sori plays fantasy to the max and revels in Bakin’s outlandishness. An unusually picky Hokusai (Seiyo Uchino), Bakin’s best and he claims only friend and unwilling collaborator, points out that his use of guns is anachronistic because they didn’t come to Japan until 60 or 70 years after the story takes place but Bakin doesn’t care. He says people don’t notice things like that and all they really care about is that good triumphs in the end, so he’ll throw in whatever he feels like to make a better story. In any case, the tale revolves around magical orbs, evil witches, dog gods and good fairies, so if you’re worrying about there being guns before there should be, this isn’t the story for you. 

Hokusai is also shocked that Bakin has never been to the place where the story is set, but as he tells him it all happened long ago and far away so going there now would be pointless. Even so, Hokusai needs to see what he draws which is why he spends half his life on the road costing him relationships with his family. Whatever else anyone might say about him, and he admits himself to being a “difficult” person, Bakin is very close to his family even if his wife yells at him all the time for being rude to influential people and not making any money when he could have just taken over her family’s clog-making business rather than carry on with this writing malarkey. His biggest ambition is that his son become a doctor to a feudal lord and thereby restore their samurai status which on one level points to a kind of conservatism that doesn’t matter to Hokusai and singles Bakin out as a tragic figure because the age of the samurai is nearing its end anyway. 

In his fantasy, however, he hints at and undoes, up to a point, injustices inflicted on women in the romance between Shino (Keisuke Watanabe) and Hamaji (Yuumi Kawai) who is almost forced into a marriage with a wealthy man because of her adoptive parents’ greed but is finally revealed to be a displaced princess and returned to her father who is thereby redeemed for having accidentally killing his other daughter in a mistaken attempt to control her after accidentally promising her in marriage to a dog god without really thinking about what he was saying. A neat parallel is drawn in a brief mention of Hokusai’s artist daughter Oi and Bakin’s daughter-in-law Omichi (Haru Kuroki) who did not receive an education and is almost illiterate but finally helps him to complete the story by transcribing it in Chinese characters he teaches her as they go after he loses his sight.

As his literary success increases, Bakin’s own fortunes both improve and decline. He becomes wealthier and moves to nicer houses in samurai neighbourhoods, but his son Shizugoro’s (Hayato Isomura) health declines and he never opens his own clinic like he planned while remaining committed to the idea that his father is actually a great, unappreciated artist. In a way, completing the story gives Bakin a way to say the world could be kind and just even if it has not always been so to him. He needs to maintain the belief in a better world in order to go living even if he feels it to be inauthentic while his life itself is a kind of fiction. On a trip to the theatre, he ends up seeing Yotsuya Kaidan and is at once hugely impressed and incredibly angry. The world that Nanboku sees is the opposite of his own. People are selfish and greedy. The bad are rewarded and the innocent are punished. Yet perhaps this is the “reality” of the way the world really is, where as his work is a wishful fantasy. All he’s doing is running away from the truth. But then, as his son’s friend tells him, if a man devotes himself to the ideal of justice and believes in it all his life, then it becomes a reality and ceases to be fiction. There is something quite poignant about the dog soldiers coming to take Bakin to the better world he dreamed of where bad things happen but good always triumphs in the end, which has now indeed become a reality if only for him.

Hakkenden screens 13th June as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Solitary Gourmet (劇映画 孤独のグルメ, Yutaka Matsushige, 2024)

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Isn’t it funny how a good bowl of soup can make everything better? Based on the manga written by Masayuki Qusumi and illustrated by Jiro Taniguchi, the feature-length edition of the long-running series has a distinctly soupy feel as salaryman Goro (Yutaka Matsushige) finds himself travelling Japan and abroad in search for the ingredients of a soup an old man ate as a child. Airing since 2012, The Solitary Gourmet TV series was a trendsetter for Japanese comfort foodie cinema and has given rise to several other similarly themed shows in which the protagonist visits a real life establishment and enjoys whatever they have to offer from food to sake, sweets, and even traditional bathhouses.

In fact, there’s even a meta joke towards the end of Solitary Gourmet (劇映画 孤独のグルメ, Geki Eiga: Kodoku no Gourmet) in which one of the restaurants Goro goes to is featured in a show about a foodie salaryman while he plays a fellow customer. The newly international setting reflects the increased budget of a theatrical feature and also helps to expand the series’ episodic format in leading Goro on a crazy chase that begins with the daughter of an old friend in Paris (Anne Watanabe) who enlists him to hunt down the ingredients for her grandfather’s cherished soup. Of course, this provides an excuse for Goro to go to the remote Goto Islands and learn about the local cuisine while running around collecting random samples like he’s on a side quest in an RPG. 

Then again, it also offers him the chance for some surreal adventures, including getting cast away on an uninhabited island before being rescued by the Korean-speaking residents of a food research institute. It’s there that he meets Shiho (Yuki Uchida), a Japanese woman living on “an island for women who are fed up with men,” and a former restaurant worker retreating from a marriage fracturing under the pressures of trying to run a restaurant in the post-COVID society. When Goro later catches up with her husband (Joe Odagiri), he too is a depressed, broken figure who now only serves fried rice in his incredibly unwelcoming restaurant. But being talked into helping Goro recreate the old man’s beloved soup seems to reactivate his creative juices and give him the desire to get back on his feet. 

Star Yutaka Matsushige directing for the first time throws in a brief homage to Tampopo but what the film is most interested in is the universality and healing power of a tasty broth from the onion soup Goro eats in Paris to the Haejangguk, or hangover soup, that he orders in Korea while being watched over by an exasperated immigration officer (Yoo Jae-myung). That Goro’s quest takes him so far hints at the shared history of the two nations and the various culinary influences and universalities running between them with soup a means of healing and friendship. Exchanging a few words of Korean, Goro tries to ask what the name of the fish in his soup is, only to come to an understanding when the immigration officer writes it down for him in Chinese characters. 

All this food really does bring people together, as Goro gets pretty much everyone he meets roped into his quest to recreate the old man’s childhood dish as his deathbed request. Matsushige recreates the zany humour of the TV series including his familiar “I’m hungry” catchphrase, followed by the camera taking three steps back and picturing Goro in front of some notable landmark. He also doesn’t seem to be getting much work done while running around trying to figure out this soup even he’s never actually tasted it and is reliant on the old man’s fragile recollections. Goro had been in Paris to deliver a painting of somewhere he once lived and the old man remarked that photographs are records of time but painting turns them into memories. Food, or more specifically soup, might do something similar, at least according to the old man who is desperately trying to reclaim something of the home comforts of his youth. Of course, the old man is the only one who knows what the soup tastes like, so perhaps Goro is on a fool’s errand, but as he later says, soup does seem to be the water of life and thanks to its healing qualities a universal symbol of peace and harmony not to mention friendship and kindness.

The Solitary Gourmet screens 29th May as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Images: ©2025 “Solitary Gourmet” Film Partners

The Moon (月, Yuya Ishii, 2023)

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If you can judge a society by the way it cares for its most vulnerable, then at least according to Yuya Ishii’s The Moon (月, Tsuki), adapted from the novel by Yo Hemmi, Japan is not doing very well. Inspired by a real life incident in which a disaffected young man went on a rampage murdering patients at a facility for the disabled claiming they were a drain on national resources, the film probes into some dark areas of the human psyche asking what people really think deep down and who we do and don’t see as being human just like us.

Blocked writer Yoko (Rie Miyazawa) only takes the job at a care facility because her literary career has stalled and her husband (Joe Odagiri) is out of work. Each of them is still reeling from the death of their three-year-old son who was born with a heart defect and suffered brain damage during an operation that meant he never spoke and was fed through a feeding tube. Working at the care facility brings up painful memories and directly confronts Yoko with realities of her son’s life and death while she later discovers that she is pregnant again and isn’t sure whether or not to have the baby fearing it may have the same condition and knowing that as a woman over 40 there is an increased chance she may give birth to a child who has complex needs.

In many ways it’s Yoko’s own reaction to her pregnancy which underlines the film, the lunar imagery intensely linked with that of her ultrasounds while she reckons with her own feeling of perhaps not wanting to bear an “abnormal” child, as someone puts it. Of course, this very personal sentiment is informed by the loss of her son and the experience of living and caring for him for the three years he was alive, but it also informs her perspective on the care, or lack of it, sees at the facility where patients are sometimes confined to their rooms indefinitely, left covered in their own excrement, or allowed to harm themselves through lack of stimulation. Like Yoko most of the other orderlies seem to have no medical training and two in particular mistreat the people in their care for their own amusement. On witnessing an orderly strike a patient for no reason while frogmarching him back to his room, she asks him if that’s really okay but he just replies that okay or not it’s the way they do things here. She tries to take her concerns to the facility’s director, but he basically tells her the same thing and even threatens her employment if she continues to make a fuss. 

Yoko closely identifies with another woman who happened to be born on exactly the same day she was yet has been confined to bed for 10 years and is assumed to be unable to communicate. According to another orderly, also called Yoko (Fumi Nikaido), Ki-chan could walk and was partially sighted when she arrived but someone decided that it would be easier to care for her if she stayed in her room so now her muscles are too wasted to walk while they also covered up her windows because they thought dim lighting would keep her more docile. Essentially, they further disabled her for their own convenience and concluded that because she could not communicate with them in a way they considered usual that she had nothing to communicate. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that biting the other Yoko’s arm, for instance, is also communication as are some of the behaviours exhibited by the other patients which the orderlies respond to with force or violence.

Shoko, the girlfriend of another orderly Sato (Hayato Isomura), is deaf and remarks to the other Yoko that she doesn’t need to hear to be able to understand yet a value judgement seems to have been placed on these people’s lives based solely on their ability to communicate through conventional means. Yoko is accused of romanticising notions of disability, while many people may outwardly say they believe those with physical or intellectual disabilities are equal to themselves and deserve the same levels of respect and dignity they are also unwilling to deal directly with the unpleasant side of their care such as cleaning up bodily fluids which may have strong and penetrating odours. Both the other Yoko, who has literary aspirations of her own, and Sato make frequent reference the stench of reality, something which often left out or not spoken of. The other Yoko accuses Yoko of leaving the smell of decay out of her award-winning book on the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 which she later reveals was something urged by her editor who instructed her to soften the edges to create a story that readers would find uplifting and inspirational.

One of the unpleasant things glossed over about 1923 earthquake was the pogrom against Koreans which took place in its wake, something that is tacitly referenced during the attack on the care facility as the killer determines to ask each of the victims if they have a soul despite having already decided that those who cannot speak do not. During the pogrom, those suspected of being Korean were often asked to pronounce certain words to see if they had a Korean accent, only many people from other areas of Japan also pronounce them in the same way so the test proved nothing. The killer wants to see themselves as “normal”, that their way of thinking is just the same as everyone else’s only they don’t have the courage to speak and that their course of action is one most people tacitly support because they also do not believe that the people at the care facility are human or that they have a soul.

Raising her concerns, Yoko has a long philosophical conversation with Sato which doubles as a self-interrogation while it is also in some senses true that the people at the care facility are each refractions of herself. In any case, the conditions and contradictions of the facility appear to place a strain on the mental health of those who work there who are encouraged to simply get used to the way the system works rather than attempt to change it. Sato complains that he struggles to discern dream from reality, while reality itself is often distorted by a lack of desire to talk about anything that might be unpleasant or inconvenient.

Even a discussion that might have been unpleasant or inconvenient to have is interrupted in the closing moments, though the most important things are indeed said while Yoko and her husband are able to sit face to face and begin rebuilding their relationship in the wake of the loss of their son. Ishii conjures an atmosphere of true dread as events slowly creep towards an inevitable conclusion, but also peppers Yoko’s life with small moments of joy if underscored by a searing horror that many are prepared to unsee until brought to a violent confrontation with the contradictions and hypocrisies that dwell deep within their own hearts.

The Moon screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (English subtitles)

A Family (ヤクザと家族 The Family, Michihito Fujii, 2020)

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“No one can survive as a yakuza in this world” according to another orphaned son playing the long game of a crime adjacent existence in Michihito Fujii’s melancholy gangster drama, A Family (ヤクザと家族 The Family, Yakuza to Kazoku The Family). The yakuza, or at least yakuza in the movies, has long been a relic of the Showa era rendered increasingly irrelevant in a society no longer in need of its dubious claims of protection. In truth, it’s hard to mourn the passing of organised crime, but Fujii at least finds a kind of pathos and infinite sympathy for these men for whom the gangster brotherhood took the place of a family even if one with a self-destructive legacy. 

To begin with, petty street punk “Li’l Ken” (Go Ayano) wants nothing to do with the yakuza, seemingly the only guest at the funeral of the drug dealer father he resented other than a corrupt cop from the organised crime squad, Osako (Ryo Iwamatsu), who expresses regret that had he simply arrested him perhaps Ken’s father would be still be alive. Visiting another “familial” environment, a Korean barbecue run by the maternal Aiko (Shinobu Terajima) herself the widow of a gangster currently with a baby on her back, Ken gets himself noticed by local mobster Shibasaki (Hiroshi Tachi) by taking on some punks who stormed into the restaurant and attacked his guys. Explaining that his guys don’t associate with drugs, Shibasaki offers him a job which he refuses but having his card in his pocket literally saves his life when he’s pickup by rival gang leader Kato (Kosuke Toyohara) after having stolen and then destroyed some of their stash after stumbling across a drug deal. The course of Ken’s life is set, he joins the Shibasaki gang along with his two delinquent friends and accepts Shibasaki as his “oyabun” or “father”. 

In Shibasaki, Ken finds a father figure more palatable than the one he lost. As in many a yakuza movie, the Shibasaki clan is positioned as “good yakuza” of the old school kind who believe in things like duty and honour and are apparently pursuing the path towards becoming “true men”. The rival Kyoyo, by contrast, are “bad” new yakuza who no longer play by the old rules and make their money through destructive vices such as drugs. The expected turf war does exactly materialise though the uneasy truce between the rival gangs becomes increasingly strained as the economic situation of millennial Japan begins to shift, the local town council apparently set on demolishing the red light district as part of their plans for redeveloping the city. Kyoyo would rather take over its entirety, pushing Shibasaki to retreat in exchange for a small amount of monetary compensation while shady cop Osako tries to play the situation to his own advantage. 

Yet it’s also clear that the yakuza as an institution is on its way out. After a 14-year prison term, Ken emerges into a very different world in which organised crime has been hounded further into the margins thanks to effective, though the film would also argue inherently vindictive, legislation. No one can make any money anymore, and the slightest slip up can lead to arrest. The Shibasaki gang is now a handful of old men, most of the guys having moved on only moving on from the yakuza life is not easy as Ken’s old friend Hosono (Hayato Ichihara) explains. In order to rejoin regular society, a former yakuza must endure five years in the wilderness unable to open a bank account or get a regular job leaving them with few possibilities for basic survival that enable them to leave a life of crime. Now with a young daughter and job in waste disposal, Hosono is nervous and reticent, reluctant to be seen in public with Ken lest he be tarred with the criminal brush and lose access to the new life he’s managed to build for himself as a responsible husband and father. 

Urged by Shibasaki, Ken eventually leaves one family for another in reuniting with a woman he loved before prison who has since made a respectable life for herself as a low level civil servant but once his life of crime is exposed by a thoughtless colleague at his new job in deconstruction, he discovers that there is no place for a “reformed” yakuza in the contemporary society because in a sense there can be no such thing. Once gangster always a gangster, there is no path forward. Complaining that Osako has stolen his right to life, Ken is told only that the yakuza lost human rights long ago. 

“They’re my family. No reasons are needed” Ken replied when asked why he became a yakuza, but he continues to find himself torn between the various concepts of family and the inheritances of his two very different father figures. “Your time is over old man”, Aiko’s fatherless son Tsubasa (Hayato Isomura) tells an unrepentant Kato attempting to hang on to his territory in the face of a younger generation operating on an entirely different level, rejecting the codification of gangsterdom but seemingly embracing its romance. Tsubasa too is later sucked in by the hyper masculine revenge drama of the yakuza way, seeking vengeance for the death of his father and apparently prepared to ruin his life in order to gain it. It’s for this surrogate son, now a kind of father figure himself, that Ken will eventually make a sacrifice. A sad tale of dubious paternal legacies, frustrated fatherhood, life’s persistent unfairness, and a perhaps uncomfortable lament for a bygone Japan defined by giri/ninjo conflict ruled by manly men, the ironically titled A Family has only sympathy for those trapped by an inescapable spiral of manly violence but also reserves its respect for those who know their time has passed and elect to end the cycle in order to set their “sons” free. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

(Ab)normal Desire (正欲, Yoshiyuki Kishi, 2023)

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There’s a pun embedded in the Japanese title of Yoshiyuki Kishi’s heartfelt drama (Ab)normal Desire in that first character in the word for “sexual desire” (seiyoku, 性欲) has been replaced by one that can be read the same but has the meaning of “correct”, or “proper”. But “normal” is also relative construct that implies conformance with the majority even if that may not actually be the case. As one of the protagonists later remarks “everyone is pervy” though they themselves feel such a degree of shame and otherness that it’s largely prevented them from living any kind of life at all.

In that sense it may be hard to understand why a fetish for water would invite such severe self-loathing in that it causes no harm to others if admittedly resulting in ridicule if exposed. Then again, society can be a fierce watchdog. Department store shop assistant Natsuki (Yui Aragaki) is taken to task by her pregnant colleague who refuses to take her seriously when she says she’s not really interested in getting a boyfriend before giving her a lecture about her biological clock. Though Natsuki appears uninterested in her vacant prattling, the woman later becomes upset and harshly tells her that she was only trying to be “nice” because she felt “sorry” for her and that making people be nice to you in this way is actually a form of harassment which, whichever way you look at it, is some particularly twisted logic.

Her alienation seems to stem from the fact that she feels “abnormal” and that her fetish for water is a part of herself she must be careful to hide. Her parents watch a news report on Tokyo Rainbow Pride and marvel at the idea that there are now choices other than marriage and children but even among the young there remains confusion and shame amid an inability to reconcile the seemingly opposing concepts of “normality” and “diversity” as they struggle to define themselves. A plan to have a male dancer who usually dances in a masculine style dance in a more feminine way backfires when he points out that asking someone to dance in a way they don’t want to doesn’t really do much to advance “diversity”.

But diversity isn’t considered an ideal by all and parents of young children find themselves confused and conflicted when their kids begin to reject conventionality at an early age by asking to withdraw themselves from school and instead focus on other kinds of education that align with their interests. Challenged by his wife about why he never listens to their son’s concerns, prosecutor Hiroki (Goro Inagaki) replies that he should “just be normal” and later describes people who are “unable to live normal lives” as bugs in the system which must eradicated. A symbol of lingering authoritarianism, Hiroki is an intensely conservative man obsessed with properness who thinks it’s his job to decide which crimes everyone is guilty of rather than make any attempt to understand the world around him outside of binary terms like right and wrong or normal and abnormal. When his assistant passes him information on fetishes as a potential explanation for the case of a man who repeatedly steals taps, he simply rolls his eyes and dismisses it.

Yet he perhaps has his own fears and internalised shame as evidenced by his outrage on discovering that another man has been coming to the house to help his wife with tech setup for their son’s new outlet in livestreaming and not only that, he was able to blow up the balloons that Hiroki himself failed to inflate. It’s his rigid authoritarianism that eventually alienates his wife and son who come to see him only as an oppressive bully unable to accept anything that differs from his own definition of “normal”. Finally, he’s the one who is isolated, imprisoned by his own repression and lack of understanding or unwillingness to accept those around him.

Even so, despite its positive messages that no one should feel themselves alone or that society has no place for them the film muddies the waters by introducing fetishes that are necessarily problematic in that they cause harm to others who do not or cannot consent and could not and should not be accepted by mainstream society though oddly those that have them seem to feel less shame only fearing being caught because acting on their desires is against both moral and judicial laws. In any case, in discovering togetherness, that they are not alone, those who feel their desires to be “abnormal” can begin to ease their loneliness and find a place for themselves in an often judgemental world.

(Ab)normal Desire screened as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Ripples (波紋, Naoko Ogigami, 2023)

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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)

The Dry Spell (渇水, Masaya Takahashi, 2023)

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A literal drought becomes a metaphor for bureaucratic heartlessness in Masaya Takahashi’s empathetic social drama The Dry Spell (渇水, Kassui). Inspired by Mitsuru Kawabayashi’s 1990 novel, the film puts a contemporary spin on prejudice and poverty as a collection of officials from the waterboard point at airconditioners and mobile phones while asking why the residents have fallen into arrears with their water payments only to reflect that yes, water like air and sunlight should be free.

The argument that one of Iwakiri’s (Toma Ikuta) colleagues makes, is that they have a right and a duty to charge for the water supply to support the nation’s infrustructure along with their advanced purifcation system which keeps people safe. Iwakiri isn’t so sure about that, but as others later say of him he’s a man who’s made of water himself. He doesn’t like his job but he doesn’t really dislike it either and justifies himself that it’s not him turning people’s water off so much as it’s a natural consequence of them not paying their bills and all they need to do to get it turned back on is settle them. But then as another colleague who eventually refuses to continue cutting people off suggests, every time you do it you lose a little piece of your soul. 

Iwakiri may not have had much of a soul to begin with. He’s as dried up as the town in the middle of a recordbreaking drought and heatwave. Having endured a difficult childhood, he’s become alienated from his wife and son who have decamped to her hometown with no clear indication of when or if they’ll return. That may be one reason he finds himself empathsithig with a pair of sisters who have been abandoned by both parents and are living alone in a house that has already had its gas and electricity supplies cut off. Iwakiri turns off their water supply because it’s the rules, but begins to hate himself for doing it and develops a desire to go against the flow for the first time in his life.

Keiko (Nanami Yamazaki) and Kumiko (Yuzuho) are a pair of water babies who have a yearning for the sea and the father who was apparently once a sailor but seemingly disappeared a year previously while their disappointed mother does her best to support the family through sex work which is as she points out the only line of work open to a single mother with limited qualifications. Iwakiri advises her to apply for benefits but she refuses on the grounds that she doesn’t want them poking around in what she describes as a complicated family situation which makes plain her predicament. But even as Iwakiri begins to meditate on his own paternal failures, his partner Kida (Hayato Isomura) flows in the opposite direction keener to hold onto his job after he learns he’s a baby on the way and unwilling to rock the boat despite how much he may also feel that water should be free. 

In any case, Iwakiri is trying to un-dam himself, waiting for the great big rain that Kumiko says will make everything go back to normal. Except it won’t, at least not literally  though it will in some senses open the flood gates liberating Iwakiri from his emotional repression and the girls from their illusions accepting that they are now alone but will always have each other. As he points out, they are just watermen and there’s not much they can do for the struggling people whose supplies they’ve cut off. It wouldn’t help to pay their bills for them even if they could, and in a better world water should indeed be free though it becomes much harder for them to justify their complicity with a heartless system that can arbitrarily remove access to something so essential for life. Takahashi flits between cheerful scenes of ice lollies in the sun to the cruel realities of the lives of Keiko and Kumiko who continue to long for the sea as does Iwakiri in struggling to repair his relationships with his wife and son while trying to escape the legacies of own traumatic upbringing. The film doesn’t offer any easy answers, but does perhaps suggest that the rain will bring change and the promise of a better future.

The Dry Spell screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Plan 75 (Chie Hayakawa, 2022)

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In 2016, a 26-year-old man went on a violent rampage murdering 19 people at a care home for the disabled claiming that he had done it “for the sake of society”. Prior to his crime, the killer had written an open letter in which he stated that he dreamed of a world in which those with severe disabilities could be peacefully euthanised, while claiming that those with no ability to communicate had no right to life and were nothing more than a drain on society. An expansion of her earlier short featured in the anthology film Ten Years Japan, Chie Hayakawa’s Plan 75 opens with a sequence which appears to directly reference the 2016 mass killing but in place of the widespread outrage and reconsideration of a social stigma towards disability that followed in its wake, the government decides to implement a “voluntary” euthanasia program for those aged 75 and over in response to the “concerns” of the young in an ageing society. 

Intergenerational resentment does indeed seem to be a motivating factory, the killer in this incident feeling himself oppressed by the responsibility of caring for the elderly while simultaneously hemmed in by a stangnant economy and heirarchical society. He points out that Japanese people have always praised self-sacrifice on behalf of the nation and alludes to the archaic tradition of ubasute or throwing out the old in which elderly people were abandoned on mountainsides to die in time of famine. There is no denying that the Plan 75 initiative has its insidious qualities in placing undue pressure on elderly people to give up their lives in order not to “burden” the young, an elderly woman attending a cancer screening remarking that she feels a little awkward as if she’s “clinging on to life”, being somehow greedy in the simple desire to continue living. 

Meanwhile, their society has already abandoned them. 78-year-old Michiko (Chieko Baisho) had no children and lives alone supporting herself with a job as a hotel maid where all of her colleagues are also elderly women. When one of them has a fall at work, they are all laid off. The hotel claims that they’ve received complaints from guests about exploiting elderly people, but Michiko suspects it’s more like they don’t want one of them to drop dead in someone’s room. Not wanting to be a “burden”, Michiko is reluctant to apply for social security but even when she accepts she has few other options the desk at city hall is closed. Her building, like her now old, is set for demolition but no one is willing to rent to an unemployed 78-year-old woman nor is anyone willing to employ one. More and more Michiko is pushed towards Plan 75 if only to escape her loneliness. Being robbed of the opportunity to work also removes the opportunity for socialising especially as the other old ladies decide to move in with family and leave the area. 

This is in fact an integral part of the Plan 75 business plan with case workers specifically instructed to keep the applicants happy through regular phone calls while prohibited from meeting them in person to prevent the older person changing their minds having made new social connections that make their lives more bearable. In the quietly harrowing scenes at the processing centre, for want of a better term, it becomes obvious that the majority of those submitting to Plan 75 are women as staff members empty out their handbags, dumping their possessions into a large bin while setting aside anything of value such as watches or bracelets which are perhaps another valuable revenue stream for a callous government that sees the programme as a cost cutting exercise.  

Case worker Hiromu (Hayato Isomura) only becomes conflicted about Plan 75 after recognising an applicant as his estranged uncle and eventually discovering that despite sales claims of dignified funerals remains are often sent to landfill care of an industrial waste company. His uncle’s plight perhaps highlights the pitfalls of life in post-war Japan. Living hand to mouth working construction jobs all across the country he never had an opportunity to put down roots or save for his old age and is now living a lonely life of desperate poverty. Heartbreakingly he put his application in on his 75th birthday, an act Hiromu’s boss describes as almost heroic as if he couldn’t wait to sacrifice himself for the common good. Later a sign goes up that fixed addresses are no longer needed to apply, while the Plan 75 stand in a local park where they are in the process of putting bars on the benches so that homeless people can’t sleep there doubles as a soup kitchen. 

One has to ask, if there was money available for all of these resources to help people die why is it not available to help them live? A young woman assigned as Michiko’s handler appears to have second thoughts while bonding with her over the phone, tearfully reminding her she still has the right to withdraw (though it’s never mentioned if that means repaying the $1000 signing bonus) while Michiko’s life too has been brightened by this little bit of intergenerational friendship, itself cruelly commodified in the allotted 15-minute sessions included in the plan. Told with quiet restraint, Hayakawa’s vision of an eerily dystopian future in which human life is defined by productivity and all human relationships transactional, where loneliness is the natural condition and society itself has become little more than a death cult, is painfully resonant in our increasingly disconnected world. 

Plan 75 screens at Japan Society New York on Nov. 20 as part of The Female Gaze: Women Filmmakers from JAPAN CUTS and Beyond.

Festival trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © 2022 KimStim

Prior Convictions (前科者, Yoshiyuki Kishi, 2022)

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An earnest young woman finds herself questioning her way of life after one of her charges is implicated in a spate of murders in Yoshiyuki Kishi’s social drama Prior Convictions (前科者, Zenkamono). As the double meaning of the English title implies, the issue is as much about preconceived notions and unfair judgements as it is about “crime”, its causes and legacies, while ultimately arguing for a more compassionate approach to law enforcement which prizes healing and rehabilitation over meaningless punishment. 

Kayo (Kasumi Arimura) is what’s known as a volunteer probation officer which is to say that she assists those who’ve recently been released from prison to reintegrate into mainstream society so that they can live comfortable lives within the law. She is not however a civil servant and though making regular reports to an official probation officer has very little power and no pay for her work which can at times be difficult and emotionally draining especially considering that she also needs to work a regular job in a convenience store to support herself. In what seems like a very poor safeguarding decision, she meets most of her clients in her own home where she lives alone one of them even breaking in while she’s not there for an impromptu hotpot party. 

While she is exasperated by some of her charges such as a woman who can’t seem to stick to a regular job no matter how many she finds her, Kayo is incredibly proud of her work with Kudo (Go Morita), a quiet and soulful middle-aged man who was convicted of murder after stabbing a co-worker who had been bullying him so badly that he lost the hearing in one ear. Kudo had been struggling to reconcile himself to his crime, intensely worried that while unable to understand why he did it he might end up doing it again. When Kudo suddenly disappears after being linked to a series of suspicious deaths most assume the worst, but Kayo alone refuses to believe that Kudo could be the killer and is determined to find out what’s really going on if only to vindicate her conviction that her work is good and useful rather than naive and misguided as some including intense police officer Takimoto (Hayato Isomura) seem to see it. 

As Kayo later reveals she’s carrying some baggage herself which contributed to her decision to begin working with those who’ve been convicted of crimes, but is doing it with the aim of reducing suffering and ending the cycle so that there are no more victims or victimisers. Also wounded, Takimoto tells her that murderers aren’t human and can never be rehabilitated, while she’s forced to consider the problem from all angles meeting with a lawyer (Tae Kimura) who defended an abusive husband who murdered his wife and learning that she did so for similar reasons to herself certain that he too deserved a second chance and could perhaps be reformed if given the proper treatment. Kayo sees that many of the people she meets ended up committing crimes because of traumatic personal circumstances and if someone had helped them earlier they may not have offended in the first place. She can’t change the past but at least in helping them now she might prevent further crimes in the future while giving them a source of stability as they attempt to root themselves more firmly in mainstream society. 

Inspired by Masahito Kagawa’s manga, Prior Convictions was previously adapted into six-part WOWWOW TV drama to which the film is technically a sequel though fairly stand alone in its gentle unpacking of Kayo’s own unresolved trauma and subsequent epiphanies as regards her relationships with those she’s trying to help. As one young woman puts it, they find her vulnerability reassuring in contrast to the often authoritarian, didactic approaches taken by law enforcement and social services who only talk down to them from a condescending place of superiority rather than trying to meet them on a more human level. In the end it’s about healing, trying to find an accommodation with the traumatic past and limiting its legacy to break the cycle of pain and violence. The prior convictions which most need addressing are those of a judgemental society that all too often contributes to the mechanisms of violence in seeking to punish rather than to help.

Prior Convictions screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

International trailer (English subtitles)