Tag: Hikari Mitsushima

The Last Blossom (ホウセンカ, Baku Kinoshita, 2025)

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Seen from above, balsam flowers look like an arrangement of leaves, yet when viewed from the side, the pretty flower within becomes visible. It’s an apt metaphor for the “pathetic” life of Minoru (voiced by Junki Tozuka / Kaoru Kobayashi), an elderly gangster apparently drawing close to death all alone in a prison cell except for a talking plant whose voice he is only now able to hear. Created by the team behind the charmingly surreal Odd Taxi, The Last Blossom (ホウセンカ, Honsenka) is an oddly affecting tale in which the hero remains convinced that he can still turn it all around, if only with his final move.

Back in 1986, Minoru had taken in a bar hostess, Nana (Hikari Mitsushima / Yoshiko Miyazaki), who was already pregnant with another man’s child. Emotionally insecure, he could never quite find it within him to tell her that he loved her and their family, and instead began to push her and her son Kensuke away in fear of losing them. Though Nana suggested getting married, he refused saying that he did not wish to bring her into his yakuza life and was worried that it would only cause problems for her if his name was in the papers or he had to go to prison. When he was eventually sentenced to life behind bars, not being married ironically meant that she couldn’t get access to see him, while his applications for parole were always turned down given that he had no one to vouch for him on the outside.

Nevertheless, there are moments of blissful domesticity such as the pair noticing that the ping on the microwave sounds exactly like the bell in the song Stand By Me, which becomes sort of their tune. Yet Minoru’s life is intertwined that of the bubble era, as if his brief years of happiness were a just a bubble that was always destined to burst. During the 1980s, the yakuza was also in a moment of transition and as an underling who feels he owes a debt to his sworn brother Tsutsumi (Hiroki Yasumoto), Minoru is also trapped in another era. Tsutsumi is wary of a young recruit, Wakamatsu (Soma Saito), who is a new yakuza of the corporate age in which the street thugs of the post-war era are slowly becoming legitimate businessmen. Wakamatsu has a good nose for business and has realised that land will be the money spinner of the age, prompting Minoru to engage in a spot of property speculation of his own.

But Tsutsumi is increasingly resentful, knowing that Wakamatsu has supplanted him in the boss’ affections. Old-school yakuza are no longer welcome in a world of boardroom gangsters. It’s clear that Wakamatsu doesn’t like Tsutsumi either, but seems well disposed to Minoru. Ironically all his mannerisms are reminiscent of those of the balsam flower, even down to his slightly sarcastic way of speaking. Nevertheless, Minoru begins to lose himself amid bubble era excess, spending all his time and money on clubs and rarely coming home to Nana and Kensuke. Only when he learns that Kensuke has incurable heart disease and needs a transplant does he begin to step up and assert himself as a father, willing to do whatever it takes to get the money for Kensuke to go to the US for a new heart as the surgery isn’t legally permitted in Japan. 

Minoru has a deep-seated sense of himself as a loser and is always saying that he’s going to turn things around. The irony is that he leaves it so late, but it is indeed with his final move that he gives his life meaning in making clear his feelings for Nana and Kensuke. Maybe it looks like a “pathetic” life when seen from above, but when you look from the side you can the beautiful flower blossoming underneath, a sentiment that could equally stand for Minoru’s quiet nature and buried feelings. Though he allowed himself to be corrupted, starting to drink when he never had before not because he wanted to but because Tsutsumi did, becoming obsessed with work and losing sight of what really mattered to him, he really did manage to turn it around in the end. With a gentle sense of magical realism in the talking plants and occasional moments of surreality, The Last Blossom is a poignant tale of regret and redemption beautifully expressed by the stillness broken by brief explosions of fireworks to be found in Baku Kinoshita’s beautifully simplistic aesthetics. 

The Last Blossom opens in UK cinemas 27th March courtesy of Anime Limited.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Images: ©Kazuya Konomoto /The Last Blossom Production Committee

Last Mile (ラストマイル, Ayuko Tsukahara, 2024)

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“Customer-centric”, what does that actually mean? The Amazon-like US-based conglomerate at the centre of Ayako Tsukahara’s Last Mile (ラストマイル) prides itself on its customer-centric philosophy, but at the end of the day, what that really means is that they give us what we tell them we want through our purchasing patterns and browsing history. That would be that we want everything as cheap and fast as it’s possible to be and don’t really think about the wider implications or what a world of infinite convenience might be doing to the society around us.

At least from the perspective of corporate lackey Elena (Hikari Mitsushima), recently returned from the US, the reason Daily Fast pressures its delivery staff to lower costs isn’t to maximise their profits, it’s so they can go on providing lower prices to customers which to her is all part of their customer-centric approach. This doesn’t really gel with her off-the-cuff remark about the warehouse not having a safety net to protect the workers from accidental falls or, she ominously adds, prevent people from jumping. That she brought it up at all might signal that she knows something’s not quite with the way this company treats its employees, though as it turns out she may have something else on her mind. In any case, when she arrives on her very first day the entrance to the complex is little better than a cattle market with a man on loud speaker barking instructions about were to go to the 800 members of staff some of whom have only been brought in to bulk up for the upcoming Black Friday sale. 

Which is all to say, it wouldn’t be all that surprising if the fact that some of their parcels have been exploding on delivery were a concerted attack against their ultra-capitalist philosophy, though actively delivering bombs to people who didn’t order them is not very “customer-centric” in any case. Obviously, Elena isn’t keen on this either but is also convinced that it can’t really be their fault because they have strict and dehumanising security measures in place preventing the workers from bringing in anything inessential. Even after she works out that the bomber has actually warned them that there are 12 bombs out there, she wilfully withholds the evidence from law enforcement to avoid damaging their share prices while trying to minimise business interruption rather than do anything sensible like stop delivering people parcels until they’ve figured out what’s going on with the bombs, though the real mystery is why the police don’t really seem to have the power to do that and, in fact, end up working with the warehouse to check each parcel individually to keep the conveyor belts going.

From the aerial view, the city itself resembles the warehouse with the roads taking the place of the belts as delivery vans shuttle along them. Seventy-something delivery driver subcontractor Sano (Shohei Hino) once had a friend who used to say that they were the ones who kept the country running. Yacchan became the number one driver largely because he took 10 minutes to eat his lunch and worked every hour god sent for dwindling pay with the implication that his gruelling schedule contributed to his early death. Sano’s son Wataru (Shôhei Uno) has just started working with him on the van after being laid off from an electronics job. They made quality washing machines that were designed to be efficient and to last, but of course they couldn’t compete with cheaper brands so they went bust.

Elena berates herself for being “too Japanese” for the American company which is to say that she takes pride in her work. That’s not to say that everything about the American business culture is bad as she encourages her assistant, Ko (Hikari Mitsushima), to call her Elena and to feel free to speak his mind rather than equivocate to avoid causing offence. But despite their “customer-centric” approach, it’s clear that the company puts profits above all else and treats its workers, who are not actually employees, poorly, without concern for their wellbeing. Yagi (Sadao Abe), the boss of logistics first Sheep Express which is the prime courier for Daily Fast, laments that he’d love to hire more drivers to help them through this crisis but he can’t because they’re always squeezing his budget and no one will work for their terrible rates except for those who, like Sheep Express itself, have no other options and will have put up with it because they’re dependent on Daily Fast. And because they’re dependent on Daily Fast, it means we all have to keep buying stuff we don’t really want or need just keep the belts going because we’re terrified about what will happen if they stop.

There is a direct comparison between Wataru’s well-made washing machines and the cheap and fast consumerist model that’s gradually taken over that suggests things like craftsmanship and integrity have gone out the window in a world where no one really bothers to go the last mile anymore, though it’s his steadfast engineering that eventually saves the day while even Elena comes to rethink her career trajectory and advises the drivers to strike and end this culture of exploitation because it turns out Daily Fast needs them more than they need Daily Fast. But maybe we don’t really need Daily Fast either, and we’re as much to blame for letting them give us what we think we want without really considering what that actually means. Perhaps a “customer-centric” society’s not all it’s cracked up to be, especially when workers and consumers are often the same people stuck on conveyor belts knowing there’s only one way to stop them.

Last Mile screens 19th June as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Hello! Junichi (ハロー!純一,  Katsuhito Ishii, Kanoko Kawaguchi, Atsushi Yoshioka, 2014)

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A collection of confused nine-year-olds decides the best way to solve all their problems is to start a band in charming kids ensemble movie, Hello! Junichi (ハロー!純一). Co-directed by Katsuhito Ishii, Kanoko Kawaguchi, and Atsushi Yoshioka, the film is more linear and less surreal than most of Ishii’s other work but has a refreshing take on the childhood adventure movie as the kids each deal with their various problems many of which still plague the adults around them. 

After all as kindhearted rocker Takao (Ryu Morioka) admits, the children aren’t really all that different from us. Shy and a little on the timid side, Junichi (Amon Kabe) is a peripheral member of his friendship group and perpetual fall guy who lists his only talent as the ability to carry everybody’s bags. His main problem is that he borrowed a rabbit-shaped eraser from his crush, Maeda, about a month ago and is too shy to return it. Now all he can think about is whether he should pluck up the courage or pretend to have forgotten. Things get more complicated when a new student teacher, the beautiful Miss Anna (Hikari Mitsushima), joins his school and confiscates the eraser as part of a cruel power game before agreeing to give it back if he helps her find out who scratched an offensive word into the side of her flashy car. 

Miss Anna is either the best teacher in the world or the absolute worst. She arrives dressed for a night out and puts on a cutie pie act for her dejected middle-aged boss Achikita (Yoshiyuki Morishita) which she immediately drops as soon as he leaves the room inappropriately giving the children far too much information about her personal life but they do at least get some maths out of it. She also smokes by an oil can round the back of the building and talks like an aggressive high school girl when her boss’ back is turned, but eventually comes round to her responsibility as a teacher after bonding with the kids. 

In comparison to some, Junichi’s problems aren’t really all that big except that his parents have to work late so he often has to prepare dinner for himself and his philosophising grandpa (Tatsuya Gashuin). Kuramoto (Yohei Hotta) meanwhile is beginning to act out at school because he’s got problems at home caused by his father’s gambling addiction which forces his mother (Chizuru Ikewaki) to run herself ragged just to stay afloat. With Miss Anna’s help, the kids decide to put on a concert for Mrs Kuramoto’s birthday which might on one level be charmingly naive but does in the end seem to cheer her up while allowing them to bond over their shared issues many of which are romantic in nature. 

During the opening sequence in the park, child actor Machida (Shoma Suginomori) had given the other boys some grown up love advice he picked up on set which amounted to getting girls to like you by giving them cliched compliments such as remarking on the beauty of their smile. It’s not terribly good advice and a little a bit patronising not mention insincere, but amusingly enough is the same approach eventually taken by Takao when he and Miss Anna awkwardly try to address their mutual attraction. In the end, she has to concede that she doesn’t know what to say either and they end up having a rather childish conversation about favourite foods which is all to say it doesn’t get any easier and the adults don’t necessarily know much more than the kids. 

Then again, there are some distinctly bad examples in Achikita’s thankfully ineffective attempt at workplace harassment and stalking of Miss Anna even if he eventually gives the most important life lesson in dressing down a trio of teenage bullies by telling them they have to learn love and appreciation or they’ll be weak men incapable of protecting anyone. Protecting people is something Junichi’s been worried about too, especially after failing to act when he spotted female classmate Tanaka (Rio Sasaki) duct taped to a pole by the bullies though she thankfully managed to save herself while uttering some particularly choice language for a nine-year-old. Still as his grandfather tells him he’s an unpolished stone. He has a weak side and a strong side and is still in the process of settling though the real business of growing up may be knowing which to be when. Charmingly quirky and infinitely warmhearted, Ishii, Kawaguchi, and Yoshioka masterfully capture an authentic sense of childhood anxiety while suggesting that none us is really so different after all. 

Hello! Junichi is out now the UK on blu-ray as part of Third Window Films’ Katsuhito Ishii Collection.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Riverside Mukolitta (川っぺりムコリッタ, Naoko Ogigami, 2021)

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The spectre of death hangs over the protagonists of Naoko Ogigami’s adaptation of her own novel Riverside Mukolitta (川っぺりムコリッタ, Kawapperi Mukolitta) despite the sunniness and serenity of the riverside community where they live. They are each, in their own way, grieving and sometimes even for themselves in fear of a far off lonely death or else wondering what it’s all for and if this persistent suffering is really worth it, but eventually find a kind of solidarity in togetherness that can at least make the unbearable bearable. 

Recently released from prison, Yamada (Kenichi Matsuyama) has been sent to a remote rural village to start again with a job in a fermented squid factory and an apartment in a small row of houses by the river. His landlady Shiori (Hikari Mitsushima), an eccentric young woman with a little girl, assures him that though the building is 50 years old and many have passed through during that time no one has yet died in his unit. His neighbours Mizoguchi (Hidetaka Yoshioka) and his small besuited son Yoichi traipse the local area selling discounted tombstones reminding potential customers that no one lives forever and it might remove some of the burden of living to have your affairs in order for when you die. If all that weren’t enough, the last house in the row is thought to be haunted by an old lady whose ghost sometimes appears to water the flowers so they don’t turn to weed. Arriving home one day, Yamada discovers a letter from the local council letting him know that his estranged father has passed away in a lonely death and his remains are ready to collect at the town hall at his earliest convenience. 

Yamada is a man who keeps himself to himself, clearly ambivalent in trying to adjust to his new life wondering if he really deserves the opportunity to start again and if there’s any point in doing so. Seeing as his parents divorced when he was four and he had no further contact with his father, he is unsure if he wants the responsibility of his ashes which will of course contain additional expense for some kind of funeral. He meditates on the fates of “those who are not thought to exist”, such as the many homeless people who live by the river and are swept away by typhoons, and the elderly who die nameless and alone. When he ventures to the town hall, he discovers an entire room filled unclaimed remains some of which remain anonymous while the sympathetic civil servant (Tasuku Emoto) explains that in general they keep them for a year and then bury them together if no one comes forward to claim them. Aside from the staff members at the crematorium, the civil servant was the only person present at his father’s cremation which at any rate must be quite an emotional burden for him though he is familiar with the case and willing to talk Yamada through his father’s final days. 

Meanwhile, he’s bamboozled into an awkward friendship with the strange man from next-door (Tsuyoshi Muro) who brands himself a “minimalist” and claims to be self-sufficient in the summer at least with the veg he grows in the garden behind their apartments but insists on using Yamada’s bath because his is broken and he doesn’t have the means to fix it. Giving in to Shimada’s rather aggressive attempts at connection, Yamada comes to feel the power of community in finding acceptance from the other residents in the small row of apartments along with the paternal influence of his boss at the factory and the kindness of an older woman who works there. Yoichi, the tombstone seller’s son, is fond of playing on a junk heap which is in its way a graveyard of forgotten and discarded things from rotary telephones to CRT TVs and broken air conditioners, while he and Shiori’s daughter Kayo try to contact aliens from a purgatorial space where the living and the dead almost co-exist. Taking place at the height of summer during the Bon festival when the mortal world and the other are at their closet, Ogigami’s laidback style gives way to a gentle profundity in the transient nature of existence but also in the small joys and accidental connections that give it meaning. 

Riverside Mukolitta screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Spaghetti Code Love (スパゲティコード・ラブ, Takeshi Maruyama, 2021)

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“Tokyo is where everyone comes to make their dreams come true, right?” a naive young woman exclaims having just abandoned her life in the country to chase freedom and independence in the capital. “You’re wrong” her reluctant, infinitely jaded host tries to correct her, “Tokyo is where everyone gets killed by their dreams”.  Tokyo is indeed the place dreams come to die in the debut feature from music video director Takeshi Maruyama, Spaghetti Code Love (スパゲティコード・ラブ). As one dejected Tokyoite puts it in her slightly pretentious opening monologue, what they’re chasing isn’t love, or money, or success but “approval” wanting desperately to find acceptance but more often than not encountering only defeat and despair. 

At least, that’s according to intense artist Kurosu (Rikako Yagi) who has become moderately successful but remains somewhat insecure knowing that her success is partially built on that of her famous parents. She insists that there are two kinds of people in the world, those who meekly put up with a disappointing reality and those who defiantly “create their own world”. She of course claims to be the latter, a highly individualist artist who takes no shit from anyone but that doesn’t excuse her tendency to behave like a total diva in an effort to assert he superiority over others, humiliating aspiring photographer Tsubasa (Nino Furuhata) by likening his set up to an ad placed by a rural supermarket. 

Tsubasa meanwhile is himself conflicted having come to Tokyo to further his career as a photographer but desperate for work and afraid of selling out. He came because he thought it was better to regret the things you’ve done rather than those you haven’t and that he’d always wonder if he stayed at home, but now he’s wondering if it’s better not to try, that the possibility of what might have been is easier to bear than knowing you tried and didn’t work out. Painting a slightly rosier version of his Tokyo life on social media he offers a Twitter friend the opportunity to visit him in the capital out of politeness only for her turn up, insist on staying with him in his tiny apartment, and make him feel even worse with her childish idealism which has a kind of poignancy in its unrealistic hopefulness.  

Like Tsubasa, aspiring singer-songwriter Cocoro (Toko Miura) is beginning to wonder if her dreams are worth pursuing as she meditates on the success of prettier rivals in both her work and romantic lives, spotting ex Shingo (Hiroya Shimizu) with his new squeeze and irritated when he smirks at her from across the courtyard. A cold and aloof young man fond of giving overly scientific explanations for philosophical questions, Shingo has decided that unhappiness is the result of broken attachment and so he’s decided to have no attachments at all even going so far as to have no fixed address living by apartment hopping every 10 days. As he discovers to his cost, living life with no connections may be fine on the day to day but you’ll be in a fix if you wind up in trouble and have no one to ask for help. His new girlfriend Natsu (Saya Kagawa), by contrast, has the opposite problem working as a sex worker in part as a means of protecting herself from romantic heartbreak by avoiding emotional intimacy. While Cocoro wonders what her life would be if she were as pretty as Natsu, Natsu meditates on the pretty girl paradox admitting that some things come easy but others slip through her fingers. She claims to love lonely people because lonely people don’t up and leave without warning. 

But loneliness manifests in many forms such as that exhibited by Shizuku (Kaho Tsuchimura), a part-time waitress with extreme low self-esteem who’s staked her existence being on the perfect partner for her boyfriend while terrified he’ll leave her an anxiety later borne out by the fact he’s married to someone else and apparently only using her as a “fun” break from his presumably less patriarchal domestic life. And then there’s Uber Eats driver Amane (Kura Yuki) and his unwise attachment to a low level idol star who’s since retired. Obsessing over her rather banal favourite aphorism about whether a falling tree in the forest makes a sound if no one’s around to hear it he vows to forget her once he’s made 1000 deliveries but realises that a romantic attachment is hard to break even if it’s entirely one sided. 

On the flip side, broken hearts eventually bring two next-door neighbours together as they mutually abandon their unhealthy coping mechanisms of online psychics and compulsive peanut butter eating while bonding in a shared sense of romantic disappointment realising the terrible men who dumped them aren’t worth all this aggro. A pair of emo high school students suddenly realise growing old isn’t so bad after all, and a kid struggling with his life plan survey suddenly realises that “no plan” is also a plan before careering off on a borrowed skateboard. Tokyo can be cruel and unforgiving, but so can everywhere else. Shot with true visual flair, Maruyama’s ethereal, floating camera follows this interconnected yet isolated band of young people all over the city as they search for love, chase their dreams, and yearn for connection allowing them each at least if not fulfilment then possibility as they learn to accentuate the positive in a sometimes hostile environment.

Spaghetti Code Love streamed as part of this year’s Japan Cuts.

Mary and the Witch’s Flower (メアリと魔女の花, Hiromasa Yonebayashi, 2017)

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Mary and the witch's flower posterWhen Studio Ghibli announced that it would be ceasing production, it couldn’t help but feel like the end of an era. The studio which had made Japanese animation an internationally beloved art form was no more. Into the void stepped a brand new animation studio which vowed to pick up the Ghibli gauntlet – Studio Ponoc was formed by former Ghibli producer Yoshiaki Nishimura who enlisted a host of other ex-Ghibli talent including Arrietty director, Hiromasa Yonebayashi. 

Mary and the Witch’s Flower (メアリと魔女の花, Mary to Majo no Hana), Ponoc’s first feature is, like Yonebayashi’s When Marnie was There, an adaptation of a classic British children’s novel. Part of the ‘70s children’s literature boom, Mary Stewart’s The Little Broomstick was more or less forgotten until the film, paradoxically, brought it back into print. Like many post-war children’s novels, The Little Broomstick is the story of a clever and kind little girl who thinks she doesn’t quite fit in. Mary and the Witch’s Flower is no different in this regard, even in updating the tale (seemingly) to the present day as its spiky heroine finds herself taking on mad scientists and crazed witches in a strange fantasy realm all while trying to get used to the comparatively gentle rhythms of country life.

Mary Smith (Hana Sugisaki) is bored. She hates her frizzy red hair which a horrible local boy, Peter (Ryunosuke Kamiki), uses as justification to describe her as a “red haired monkey”, and fears that the rest of her life will merely be a dull exercise in killing time until its inevitable conclusion. Mary has just moved in with her Great-Aunt Charlotte (Shinobu Otake) in the country while her parents are apparently working away and, as she still has a week left of summer holidays until school starts, she’s desperate for something to do. Unwisely following two cats into a misty forest, she chances upon a mysterious flower – the “Fly By Night” which blooms only once every seven years. With no respect for nature, Mary picks herself some of the pretty bulbs to take back to the gardener but unwittingly opens up a portal to another world. Taking hold of an abandoned broomstick, she finds herself swooped off to Endor College – an elite institution of witchcraft and wizardry where she dazzles all with her magical skills. Thinking she’s finally found her place, Mary is content to go along with everyone’s assumption that she is the new student they’ve been waiting for but on closer inspection, Endor College is not quite all it seems.

Mary’s initial dissatisfaction with herself is somewhat sidelined by the narrative but there’s something particularly poignant about her loathing of her red hair. In British culture at least, those with red hair often face a strange kind of “acceptable” prejudice, bullied and ostracised even into adulthood. Thus when Peter calls Mary a “red haired monkey” it isn’t cute or funny it’s just mean and she’s probably heard something similar every day of her life. When she rocks up at Endor and they tell her that her red hair makes her special and is the sign of high magic potential, it’s music to her ears but it’s also, perhaps, reinforcing the idea that simply having red hair makes her different from everyone else.

Feeling different from everyone else perhaps allows her to look a little deeper into the world of Endor than she might otherwise have done. Despite her conviction that she doesn’t fit in and is of no use to anyone, Mary is never seriously tempted by the promises of Endor which include untold power as well as a clear offer of acceptance and even respect. When she realises that the couple who run the school – a witch and a scientist, have been abusing their powers by committing heinous acts of experimentation on innocent “test subjects”, Mary learns to stand up for those who can’t stand up for themselves even if she couldn’t have done it for herself.

Messages about the seductive power of authoritarian regimes exploiting feelings of disconnection, the scant difference between magic and science, and the need for respect of scientific ethics in the pursuit of knowledge, all get somewhat lost amid Mary’s meandering adventures, as does Mary herself as her gradual progress towards realising that she possessed her own “magic” all along ticks away quietly in the background. Yet the biggest problem Mary and the Witch’s Flower faces is also its greatest strength – its ties to Studio Ghibli. With echoes of Yonebayashi’s previous adaptations of classic British literature, Mary and the Witch’s Flower also indulges in a number of obvious Ghibli homages from the Ponyo-esque flying fish and Laputa influenced design of Endor to the overt shot of Mary riding a deer on a rocky path, and the unavoidable girl+broomstick echoes of Kiki’s Delivery Service. Even if Mary and the Witch’s Flower cannot free itself from the burden of its legacy, it does perhaps fill the void it was intended to, if in unspectacular fashion.

Mary and the Witch’s Flower will be released in UK cinemas courtesy of Altitude Films in May 2018.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Gukoroku – Traces of Sin (愚行録, Kei Ishikawa, 2017)

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gukoroku posterGenerally speaking, murder mysteries progress along a clearly defined path at the end of which stands the killer. The path to reach him is his motive, a rational explanation for an irrational act. Yet, looking deeper there’s usually something else going on. It’s easy to blame society, or politics, or the economy but all of these things can be mitigating factors when it comes to considering the motives for a crime. Gukoroku – Traces of Sin (愚行録), the debut feature from Kei Ishikawa and an adaptation of a novel by Tokuro Nukui, shows us a world defined by unfairness and injustice, in which there are no good people, only the embittered, the jealous, and the hopelessly broken. Less about the murder of a family than the murder of the family, Gukoroku’s social prognosis is a bleak one which leaves little room for hope in an increasingly unfair society.

When we first meet Tanaka (Satoshi Tsumabuki) he’s riding a bus. Ominous music plays as a happy family gets off but the real drama starts when another passenger irritatedly instructs Tanaka to give up his seat so an elderly lady can sit down. He snorts a little but gets up only to fall down next to the steps to the doors and subsequently walk off with a heavy limp. The man who told him to move looks sheepish and embarrassed, but as soon as the bus passes from view Tanaka starts walking normally, an odd kind of smirk on his face in thought of his petty revenge.

In one sense the fact that Tanaka faked a disability is irrelevant, the man did not consider that Tanaka may himself have needed a seat despite looking like a healthy man approaching early middle age. Perhaps, he’ll think twice about making such assumptions next time – then again appearances and assumptions are the lifeblood of this mysteriously complicated case.

Tanaka has a lot on his plate – his younger sister, Mitsuko (Hikari Mitsushima), has been arrested for neglecting her daughter who remains in intensive care dangerously underweight from starvation. In between meeting with her lawyer and checking on his niece, he’s also working on an in-depth piece of investigative reporting centring on a year old still unsolved case of a brutal family murder. Tanaka begins by interviewing friends of the husband before moving onto the wife who proves much more interesting. Made for each other in many ways, this husband and wife duo had made their share of enemies any of whom might have had good reason for taking bloody vengeance.

The killer’s identity, however, is less important than the light the crime shines on pervasive social inequality. As one character points out, Japan is a hierarchical society, not necessarily a class based one, meaning it is possible to climb the ladder. This proves true in some senses as each of our protagonists manipulates the others, trying to get the best possible outcome for themselves. These are cold and calculating people, always keeping one eye on the way they present themselves and the other on their next move – genuine emotion is a weakness or worse still, a tool to be exploited.

The key lies all the way back in university where rich kids rule the roost and poor ones work themselves to the bone just trying to keep up. There are “insiders” and “outsiders” and whatever anyone might say about it, they all secretly want in to the elite group. Here is where class comes in, no matter how hard you try for acceptance, the snobby rich kids will always look down on those they feel justified in regarding as inferior. They may let you come to their parties, take you out for fancy meals, or invite you to stay over but you’ll never be friends. The irony is that the system only endures because everyone permits it, the elites keep themselves on top by dangling the empty promise that someday you could be an elite too safe in the knowledge that they only hire in-house candidates.

Gradually Tanaka’s twin concerns begin to overlap. The traces of sin extend to his own door as he’s forced to examine the legacy of his own traumatic childhood and fractured family background. The reason the killer targeted the “happy” family is partly vengeance for a series of life ruining wrongs, but also a symbolic gesture stabbing right at the heart of society itself which repeatedly failed to protect them from harm. Betrayed at every turn, there’s only so much someone can take before their rage, pain, and disillusionment send them over the edge.

Despite the predictability of the film’s final twist, Ishikawa maintains tension and intrigue, drip feeding information as Tanaka obtains it though that early bus incident reminds us that even he is not a particularly reliable narrator. Ishikawa breaks with his grim naturalism for a series of expressionistic dream sequences in which hands paw over a woman’s body until they entirely eclipse her, a manifestation of her lifelong misuse which has all but erased her sense of self-worth. There are no good people here, only users and manipulators – even the abused eventually pass their torment on to the next victim whether they mean to or not. Later, Tanaka gets on another bus and gives up his seat willingly in what seems to be the film’s first and only instance of altruism but even this small gesture of resistance can’t shake the all-pervading sense of hopeless loneliness.

Gukoroku – Traces of Sin was screened at the 17th Nippon Connection Japanese film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

A Chorus of Angels (北のカナリアたち, Junji Sakamoto, 2012)

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chorus of angelsAs you read the words “adapted from the novel by Kanae Minato” you know that however cute and cuddly the blurb on the back may make it sound, there will be pain and suffering at its foundation. So it is with A Chorus of Angels (北のカナリアたち, Kita no Kanariatachi) which sells itself as a kind of mini-take on Twenty-Four Eyes (“Twelve Eyes” – if you will) as a middle aged former school mistress meets up with her six former charges only to discover that her own actions have cast an irrevocable shadow over the very sunlight she was determined to shine on their otherwise troubled young lives.

Haru has been working as a librarian in the city for the last twenty years and has finally reached retirement age but before that she was a school teacher in Japan’s frozen north. Before she can even think about enjoying her new found freedom, a pair of policeman turn up at her door to ask her a few questions about one of her former pupils, Nobuto, who is a suspect in a murder case. It seems that they found Haru’s address amongst Nobuto’s possessions and are keen to find out what kind of relationship she had with him and anything she might know about his current whereabouts. Haru is shocked to the core but remembers that she always gets a New Year card from one of Nobuto’s classmates, Manami, and decides to return home at long last to try and put to rest some wandering ghosts.

Like much of Kanae Minato’s work, A Chorus of Angels is a perfectly constructed mystery only this time much more of the heart than of the head. Consequently, it would be wrong to reveal too much of the plot but suffice to say that a traumatic incident twenty years ago left a profound effect not only on each of the children but also on their teacher and others in the surrounding area. Re-encountering each of her six pupils again, Haru discovers that each of them has been harbouring a deeply buried sense of guilt and shame, believing themselves to have been responsible for what happened that day. That sense of unresolved trauma has prevented each of them from fully getting on with their lives, as if some part of each of them was frozen in time when they were just primary school children singing in a choir and feeling proud of themselves for the first time in their lives.

Their teacher, Haru, also left a part of herself behind in that snowy northern landscape. Having committed something which some would regard as a sin, she’s hounded off the island – or perhaps allows herself to be, giving in to a punishment that she sees as befitting her own sense of guilt. However, as is customary for Minato, Haru’s “crime” is not such a black and white affair. If she betrayed someone, that person understood and, ultimately, only wanted the best for her. That she sacrificed the things that might have allowed her to go on living a happy life is the kind of tragic irony Minato is known for and the lonely, cold and shut off appearance of Haru’s twenty years of librarianing exile is another perfect example. She didn’t really do anything wrong except for try to live, and yet she’s paid for that with the next twenty years of her life and not only that, in robbing the young children who’d come to see her as something of a guardian angel of her very presence, she’s left them to pay too. Guilt grows like a mountain until it eclipses even the brightest of suns.

Despite its unfeasibly starry cast which radiates around veteran actress Sayuri Yoshinga and includes such young talents as Hikari Mitsushima, Mirai Moriyama, Ryuhei Matsuda, Ryo Katsuji, Aoi Miyazaki and Eiko Koike, A Chorus of Angles is actually fairly ordinary in terms of its directorial style and though it manages to stay on the right side of saccharine, never quite manages to make its tear-jerking set-up quite as moving as it seems to want to be. That said, it does boast some extraordinarily beautiful scenes of the Hokkaido snowscape which is a perfect setting for this chilling, frozen ghost story in which no actual ghosts appear. The children’s childhoods are all blissful blue skies and sunny summer days but in the future there’s only snow and cold winter sunshine. Just stay alive, it would be enough – to live is to suffer, but you have to go on. The important thing to learn is that it’s one thing to forgive everyone else, but there comes a time when you have to forgive yourself, too.

The Hong Kong release of A Chorus of Angels includes English subtitles!

Unsubtitled trailer:

Kakekomi (駆込み女と駆出し男, Masato Harada, 2015)

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166028_02The world of the classical “jidaigeki” or period film often paints an idealised portrait of Japan’s historical Edo era with its brave samurai who live for nothing outside of their lord and their code. Even when examining something as traumatic as forbidden love and double suicide, the jidaigeki generally presents them in terms of theatrical tragedy rather than naturalistic drama. Whatever the cinematic case may be, life in Edo era Japan could be harsh – especially if you’re a woman. Enjoying relatively few individual rights, a woman was legally the property of her husband or his clan and could not petition for divorce on her own behalf (though a man could simply divorce his wife with little more than words). The Tokeiji Temple exists for just this reason, as a refuge for women who need to escape a dangerous situation and have nowhere else to go.

Kakekomi (駆込み女と駆出し男, Kakekomi Onna to Kakedashi Otoko) places this important institution at its centre as it focuses on the stories of a number of women who’ve each ended up at the temple after a series of difficult circumstances. Jogo (Erika Toda) is married to a womanising drunkard who forces her to run his iron smelting business from the front lines (hence the painful looking blisters on her face) while he enjoys his life of debauchery. When the staff complains about his attitude and their subsequent fears for their jobs and Jogo raises their concerns with him he simply beats her before returning to his mistress. She then faces a decision – Tokeiji, death, or endurance. During her flight, she runs into O-Gin (Hikari Mitsushima), a mysterious wealthy woman who’s sprained her ankle after fighting off bandits in the woods. The pair bond on their quest to reach Tokeiji where they hope to find refuge from their turbulent home lives.

Before you can enter Tokeiji you’re held at one of the receiving inns where they hear your story, assess the possibility of being able to reconcile with a husband and, if deemed necessary, allowed to travel to the temple where you’ll live as a Buddhist nun for two years at which time your husband must legally sign the divorce papers. The inn adheres to strict Buddhist principles – no men are allowed near the temple (even the outside helpers wear bells so the ladies can hear them coming), you eat only temple cuisine (no meat or stimulants like garlic and onions), and have to abide by the word of the head nun. There are also three different classes of resident starting with the most expensive court lady lifestyle, then one of sewing and making repairs, and finally the lowest class which does all the day to day cooking, cleaning and other menial tasks.

The other pivot around which the film turns is the one time medical student Shinjiro (Yo Oizumi) who has literary dreams but has had to beat a quick retreat from Edo after defiantly breaking its ridiculous “no singing in the streets” law (amongst other things). At this period Edo and the surrounding area is undergoing its own mini cultural revolution as the current authorities advocate a period of austerity which sees things like literature, music and even sushi outlawed. Perceiving threats everywhere, the powers at be are also looking for a way to close down Tokeiji by any underhanded means necessary.

Shinjiro is a fast talking wise guy who can generally talk his way out of anything though he is also a keen student and a promising young doctor. As a relative of the Tokeiji inn owners, he’s seeking refuge too but also hoping to make use of their extensive archives for his writing career. As a doctor he’s immediately fascinated by the burns on Jogo’s face which he believes he can treat though in her frightened state she’s alarmed by his direct manner and refuses. After hearing his more reasoned arguments she finally submits and in turn becomes interested in his medical knowledge assisting him to gather herbs in the forest before starting her own herb garden in the temple.

Of course, the two develop a growing romantic attachment though frustrated by Jogo’s position as a married woman and the temple’s prohibition against male contact. Their romance is never played for melodrama, more as a simple and natural course of events though it’s well played by both Toda and Oizumi. At heart, Kakekomi is an ensemble drama which encompasses the often sad stories of its female cast who are each at the mercy of the cruel and rigid Edo era social system. O-Gin’s reasons for fleeing to Tokeiji turn out to be a little different from everyone else’s though she too is still suffering for love.

A humorous look at this untold story, Kakekomi proves an engaging ensemble drama anchored by the committed performances of its cast. Toda takes Jogo from a frightened and abused woman to a confident and learned scholar who is perfectly capable of taking charge of things on her own and her transformation is the true heart of the film. Apparently, director Masato Harada shot nearly four hours of footage before cutting the film down to the more manageable two and a half which may explain why it sometimes feels a little abrupt but nevertheless Kakekomi proves one of the most enjoyable mainstream Japanese movies of recent times.

The Japanese blu-ray/DVD of Kakekomi includes English subtitles.

Sawako Decides – Review

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Sawako (Hikari Mitsushima) has been living in Tokyo for five years. She has a part time job at a toy company as an assistant, mostly making tea but doing any other slightly unpleasant menial tasks her petulant boss decides to throw her. She has a quite useless boyfriend who once worked at the toy company as a designer but has resigned (or was asked to leave following a total flop of his newest toy with a toddler focus group) in order to lead an ‘eco life’. His main hobbies appear to be knitting and recycling. A divorcée he has a daughter who he looks after, but isn’t terribly interested in and keeps referring to Sawako as her ‘new mother’.  Into this fairly dismal life is thrown the bombshell that Sawako’s father is seriously ill in hospital and it’s thought she ought to return home. Despite her protestations that she hasn’t been home for five years for a good reason and has no intention of going now, the boyfriend somehow convinces her to go as part of a naive plan to live on the land in an ‘eco’ way. As it turns out there are a few good reasons Sawako didn’t want to go home, it seems she’s none too popular there. Eventually ending up running her father’s clam packing business in his stead, these are the problems she will have to overcome if she’s to lead a more satisfying life.

Sawako Decides (kawa no soko kara konichiwa) is a decidedly bittersweet comedy about learning to accept yourself for what you are and doing your best with it. The humour is quirky and off the wall as might be expected, but mostly very true to life and the film is very funny. Unlike a most light comedies this one manages to be quite emotionally engaging and the audience quickly empathises with Sawako and her situation and is eager to see her move away from her disappointment. It’s a very charming film with an usual message delivered in an usual way, well worth looking at.