Tag: Hiroshi Yamamoto

Sato and Sato (佐藤さんと佐藤さん, Chihiro Amano, 2025)

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Aged 37 and recently divorced herself, lawyer Sachi (Yukino Kishii) listens to a man whose wife has evidently left him complain that what really soured him on her was that there was a dead bug in their living room that remained in the same spot for months on end, which indicated to him that his wife only ever swept the room as if it were round, literally cutting corners in their married life. He also complains that she only ever fed the children ready meals for dinner and they only ever had toast for breakfast. “I mean, would anyone call that a woman?” he rolls his eyes and sighs, expecting instant support from his legal team. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that he could simply have swept up himself or sorted breakfast and dinner, though he now brands his wife an unfit mother and seeks full custody, perhaps only as a means of hurting her or vindicating himself.

It’s this patriarchal take on the division labour that comes under the microscope in Chihiro Amano’s profoundly moving marital drama, Sato and Sato (佐藤さんと佐藤さん, Sato-san to Santo-san). Following the gradual disintegration of a relationship under the pressures of contemporary married life along with changing notions of gender roles, toxic masculinity, and the ways in which men and women navigate the domestic environment, the film seems to ask why it is that there isn’t more equality across the board, with practical and emotional responsibilities for the home still disproportionately falling on one partner.

This is all is more obvious when Tamotsu (Hio Miyazawa) ends up becoming an accidental househusband after repeated failures to pass the bar exam. He and Sachi, who share a surname which is also the most common in Japan making them a pair of everypersons, met as members of the university coffee club and, in truth, seemed somewhat mismatched from the start. She just bought the deal of the day and had the beans ground there. He’s carefully researched the best on offer and had the beans roasted to perfection with the intention of grading them on the day for the best flavour. Depending on how you see it, perhaps they complement each other and round out the corners to become one whole, but, on the other hand, maybe they aspire to different things. Nevertheless, they become a happy young couple full of hope and expectation for the future. But their relationship is soured by Tamotsu’s failures, and only more so when Sachi says she’ll study for the bar with him only to end up passing herself when he again yet fails.

Of course, it’s embarrassing for Tamotsu on a personal level that he can’t pass the exam, especially when he’s so told so many people that he’s going to be a lawyer. He’s been putting everything else on hold, including his relationship with Sachi having put off meeting her parents until he’s passed out of fear he’ll disappoint them. The sense of inadequacy begins to eat away at him, especially after Sachi begins working as a lawyer and is taking care of most of their bills. The other men we meet in the film, especially Sugai who is being divorced by his wife of 50 years, stress their position as a provider, as if that were all they needed to do in order to fulfil their role and buy their wife’s devotion. But Mrs Sugai, who now refuses to see him, states only in a letter that living with him is unbearable and he all he ever did was shout at her so there’s no prospect of communication. Tamotsu too is further driven into despair by the thought that others see him as “unmanly” because he’s being supported by his partner, though in reality masculinity is a performance for other men and not really something most women care about. What begins to bother Sachi is not his failure, but that she feels as if he’s given up and is not really contributing to their relationship or seriously studying to pass the exam. 

On a visit back to his hometown due his grandmother’s health crisis, starts to bond with a local woman and almost forgotten childhood friend who has herself escaped an abusive marriage but lost her children to her in-laws. He sees in her a more idealised kind of traditional wife, but after conplimenting him that his wife must be very lucky as he helps clear up at the bar where she works while all his friends doze off drunkenly, she gives him a rude awakening. He’s just like the others after all. He wants comfort, which is to say emotional labour from her, a woman he doesn’t really know, and the absolution sought by every man who says his wife doesn’t understand him. He wants to be told that he’s right and good, even while he blames Sachi and his domestic responsibilities for his inability to pass the bar. While talking with his old friends and hearing that his ageing father is planning to close their family farm, he starts to think about moving back and starting some sort of non-profit but as Sachi says when he puts it to her rather abruptly, he’s not really serious. Even if this sort of life might really suit him better, it’s not a decision he’s made after coming to the realisation that the bar exam is beyond him, but an attempt to run away not only from his failure but his domestic responsibilities. 

But by the same token, even while the roles are reversed Sachi falls into many of the same traps as an insensitive husband. So busy with her own working life, she doesn’t really see things from Tamotsu’s perspective and is only irritated by what she sees as his failure to commit to one thing or another. He is annoyed when she does things like point out there’s no toilet paper or contemplates buying a washing machine to make his life easier, because really he doesn’t think these things should be his responsibility and suggesting they are makes him feel like less of a man. They can’t orient themselves around the idea of a marriage as a domestic partnership in which they split both domestic and external labour equally and are each responsible for the whole. 

But then again, perhaps society isn’t ready for that either. Though Tamotsu does actually take care of the home environment and is the main caregiver for their son, Fuku, others still look to Sachi where a child is concerned. When they’re called into school because Fuku has apparently seriously injured another child in a squabble over building blocks, Tamotsu wants to ask more questions about how this happened, but Sachi immediately takes over and reassures the teachers she’ll make the necessary apologies to the other family, whispering in private that they’re all too busy to string this out which may not, of course, be very helpful in terms of Fuku’s further development. Conversely, when the pair are picked up by police after a violent argument in the street, the officer insists he has to write down “unemployed” even if Tamotsu says he’s a househusband, while when Sachi replies “lawyer” he assumes she’s trying to assert her right to legal representation and chuckles that she’s not under arrest so it isn’t necessary. She has to show him her lawyer’s pin to explain, and even then he just stares at them dumbfounded by their usual family setup. 

Sachi’s friend Shino who consults her for divorce advice when her husband cheats on her, reflects that Sachi might have had it easy in one sense because she never needed to change her name and accommodate herself with the loss of identity that comes with being called “Mrs Hasegawa” or “Miki’s mum” rather than by her birth name which admittedly was passed down from a father rather than a husband. For Shino taking back her maiden name was more important than a divorce in allowing her to reclaim herself as an individual who has choices and agency and isn’t someone who exists only in relation to a man in her social role as wife and mother. The film suggests the reason the marriage is unsustainable is precisely because society doesn’t accept it as a partnership of equals, so even when Tamotsu finally passes the bar, they end up with what’s perceived as two husbands and no one taking care of the domestic space to which the only solution is two households. With profound empathy for each, the film takes care not to apportion any blame, except perhaps on the parade of useless husbands being sued for divorce while unable to understand why their wives have left them or accept any responsibility for the failure of the marriage, but sees only the sadness of romantic failure and the impossibility of an uncompromised happiness in an otherwise oppressive society.

Sato and Sato screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Linda Linda Linda (リンダ リンダ リンダ, Nobuhiro Yamashita, 2005)

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“We’ve only got a little more time to be the real us,” according to a young woman making a promo video for the upcoming school festival, but who really is the “real us”? Now celebrating its 20th anniversary, Nobuhiro Yamashita’s wistful high school dramedy Linda, Linda, Linda (リンダ リンダ リンダ) is in many ways about the process of coming into being along with the anxieties of what comes next. “We won’t end here,” the girl later adds, “We won’t let our high school days become a memory,” yet they already are in a kind of contemporaneous nostalgia and elegy for idealised youth.

Or at least, there’s already a kind of reaching back taking place as the tracks the girls pick for a replacement act are by The Blue Hearts, a 1980s punk band that has become a kind of cultural touchstone echoing a sense of youthful alienation and rebellion. “Linda Linda” is the kind of song everyone knows, and even if for some reason they don’t or don’t even speak Japanese, can at least join in with the riotous chorus. It’s this sense of universality that eventually gives it its power as torrential rain brings the entire school inside just in time to see the girls’ belated act and find themselves captivated by its infectious energy and an identification with their own sense of insecure anxiety.

It’s also the serendipitous rain that allows lonely songstress Takako an opportunity to perform having previously declined to do because it’s no fun playing on your own and all her former bandmates graduated the previous year. Moe, the girl who broke her fingers playing basketball in PE leaving the original band members unable to take the to the stage, also gets an opportunity to sing having otherwise been denied a moment of closure in being prevented from taking part in her final school festival. While Moe feels intensely guilty about rendering all their time spent rehearsing somewhat pointless, it’s really the drama between founding members Kei and Rinko that leads to the band’s demise in Rinko’s conviction that it’s “meaningless” to continue while the others decide to go ahead anyway asking Korean exchange student Son (Bae Doona) to be their vocalist because she just happened to come down the stairs at the right moment and said yes because she didn’t really understand what they were saying.

Prior to her involvement with the band, Son had been a rather isolated figure trapped in the “Japan-Korea Culture Exchange Exhibit” which seems to have been more her teacher’s idea than her own and in any case gets no actual visitors. Her Japanese is a bit limited and most of her interactions are with a little girl who lends her manga to help her learn quickly, but becoming part of the band allows her to find her voice both literally and figuratively in taking the lead as the vocalist. A boy who claims to have fallen in love with her (Kenichi Matsuyama) goes to the trouble of learning a long speech in Korean to convey his feelings, yet a bemused Son replies to him in Japanese that she’s pretty indifferent to his existence before switching to Korean to explain that she’s leaving because she’d rather be hanging out with her friends with an expression that implies she’s only just realised that’s what they are. By contrast, she has a bilingual conversation with guitarist Kei (Yu Kashii) in which they seem to understand each other perfectly and each express how glad they are that they got to be in the band together. 

Similarly, it’s the concert itself that seems to heal rifts with a simple “Are you alright?” from Rinko (Takayo Mimura) to Kei whose friendship might, as someone says, essentially be too close for them to really get along. Drummer Kyoko (Aki Maeda) decides to declare her feelings for a longstanding crush before the concert. In the end she doesn’t manage it, but it doesn’t quite matter somehow because their performance is itself a kind of coming into being in which “the real us” comes into focus if also in a moment that itself becomes romanticised or idealised as an encapsulation of youth. Yamashita travels through the school festival as if it were a passage from one state of being to another, from the noodle stalls and crepe stands to haunted houses and the boy creating his own moment through encapsulating them on film, before ending with an unending song “so we can laugh tomorrow,” and the “real us” lives on.

Linda Linda Linda opens in US cinemas 5th September courtesy of GKIDS.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Sweet Rain: Accuracy of Death (Sweet Rain: 死神の精度, Masaya Kakehi, 2008)

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“What do you think about death?” a charming grim reaper awkwardly asks, seemingly taking into account the answers given when deciding whether his “subject” should survive or if the untimely death they’re about to meet should be final. Adapted from the novel by Kotaro Isaka, Masaya Kakehi’s Sweet Rain: Accuracy of Death (Sweet Rain: 死神の精度, Sweet Rain: Shinigami no Seido) contemplates what it means to live well, how to go on living in the midst of pain and suffering, and finally how to know when it’s time to accept the finality of death. 

Chiba (Takeshi Kaneshiro) is a grim reaper and it’s his job to decide whether those involved in unexpected deaths, those not due to old age, illness, or suicide, should be allowed to live. According to his partner, who appears alternately as a black dog or raven, Chiba always chooses to “proceed” but something is obviously a little different with his latest job monitoring customer services representative Kazue (Manami Konishi) in the seven days leading up to her demise. Kazue is currently being harassed by a repeat caller who keeps calling the helpline asking for her personally and has recently graduated to pestering her about meeting up in person. It’s easy to see which way this could go, though luckily for her she ends up meeting Chiba who acts as a kind of protector when she’s hassled yet again by a different set of creeps in a park. As he gets to know her, Chiba learns of Kazue’s loneliness and sense of despair having endured more than her fair share of loss which has convinced her that everyone around her dies and she’s destined to be alone. But whether down to Chiba’s interference or otherwise, a surprising twist sees her offered a gig as a top idol star, leading Chiba to conclude that she has not yet fulfilled her purpose and should be granted more time. 

The expected romance does not quite take place, though Chiba is indeed becoming more interested in human life along with death while fascinated by music which he describes as humanity’s greatest invention. As we gradually gather, Chiba’s three jobs occur at lengthy temporal intervals, though the music store he frequents appears to be a constant and almost unchanged. Bar a hyper-realistic humanoid robot appearing in the final section in which Chiba is sent to assess an elderly hairdresser (Sumiko Fuji), these different temporal spaces are in another sense an extension of the present in which technology does not otherwise change substantially. Chiba picks up an iPod belonging to a petty yakuza on job two but continues to listen to CDs while the hairdresser seems to be doing her job the old-fashioned way and the kids that come to her store all collect Pokémon/Top Trumps-style paper cards. 

Yet Chiba is also a fish out of water, constantly confused by contemporary slang and with a strong tendency towards taking things literally. His discombobulation with language and custom is perhaps enhanced by the casting of Takeshi Kaneshiro who is half-Taiwanese and grew up in Taiwan speaking Mandarin as his first language, later working predominantly in Chinese-language cinema. In the audience perception he carries with him a quality of otherness that adds to the ethereality of his existence as a grim reaper. His appearance changes with each of his subjects, firstly appearing as a handsome young man, then as a grizzled yakuza complete with sunshades, and finally as a slacker student with each of his portals mirroring his destination from telephone booths to emergency exits and shopfront doors. As a grim reaper he has long unruly hair and wears a suit a loosened tie, but perhaps has little identity of his own and laments that he has never seen a blue sky because it is always raining whenever he is in the mortal world.  

The rain might well symbolise the pain and suffering around him as he lives among those who are about to die, but he himself feels that death is nothing special. As the old lady points out, that might be because it’s all he sees, he never visits people while they’re alive and knows nothing of life nor what it is to leave it. The old lady too experienced a lot of loss in her life and came to the conclusion that she was in some way cursed, severing her connection with those she truly loved believing she could only bring them harm and choosing to live all alone. “The sun in the sky’s nothing unusual but it’s important that it be there,” she adds, “death’s like that, maybe”. In any case she seems to have lived a long life that was happy enough even if it was “nothing special” and she can die with no regrets while Chiba too begins to learn something of the world’s ordinary beauty in his first glimpse of a sunny sky even if one overshadowed by the spectre of death. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

Sunset Sunrise (サンセット・サンライズ, Yoshiyuki Kishi, 2024)

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In a way, the 2020 coronavirus pandemic presented a kind of turning point in which it became possible to envision a different kind of future brokered by technological advance in which society was no longer ruled by the dominance of the cities. If people could work remotely from anywhere, then they could easily improve their standard of living by moving to more rural areas for cheaper rents and healthier environments. Assuming the infrastructure was in place to allow them to do so, they could also support and reinvigorate communities struggling with depopulation in which the young have all left for the cities leaving the elderly behind to fend for themselves.

It’s an elegant solution that solves many of the problems of the contemporary society, but change isn’t always as straightforward as it seems as the hero of Yoshiyuki Kishi’s Sunset Sunrise (サンセット・サンライズ) finds out after he jumps at the chance to move into an abandoned house in Tohoku for a fraction of the rent he’d have to pay for a flat in Tokyo if he didn’t still live with his parents. The catch is, however, that houses have souls too and are more than just places to live for those that own or inherit them. Momoka (Mao Inoue), who decides to put her own empty house on the market, has her reasons for not wanting to live there herself nor for selling it completely but renting it out is also emotionally difficult. In the end, she only really does it after being put in charge of the town’s empty house problem at her job working for the council and thinking she should probably start with her own. Not knowing what to charge, it hadn’t really occurred to her someone would be as interested as Shinsaku (Masaki Suda), a fishing enthusiast longing to escape his salaryman life in the city for something a little more traditional in a peaceful rural area. 

Then again, that’s not to say that Shinsaku is a traditionalist and his decision quickly sparks controversy but also attracts the attention of his boss who senses a promising business opportunity. Momoka’s is a slightly special case, but Japan is filled with these so-called “akiya” which might, amid the work from home revolution of the pandemic, now be attractive to young professionals looking for a better environment to start a family. Houses generally start to deteriorate quite quickly when no one lives in them, and it’s true a lot of them need some work doing but it’s an idea that could work out well for everyone. Younger people who can’t find decent living space in the cities would be able to afford larger homes in the country where they would also then be contributing and integrating into the local community to provide support for its elderly residents.

Shinsaku becomes a part of the local community quite quickly and strikes up a friendship with an elderly woman whose children have all moved to Tokyo and rarely visit now that their own children are getting older. They’ve asked her to move to Tokyo with them, but as she points out, it would be the same as them moving back. There’s nothing for her to do there, and she’d have no friends. She’d only feel in the way and that she was getting under her daughter-in-law’s feet. Nevertheless, they fear for her especially as the area is still dealing with the scars of the 2011 earthquake which have left many clinging to a now bygone past. Once Momoka and Shinsaku start working with his boss on the akiya project, they find it hard to convince the inheritors of the houses to agree. Though they won’t live there, they might want to pop back a few times a year just for the memories and somehow can’t bear to part with their childhood or relative’s homes. But Shinsaku points out, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a case of either or and the renovation projects they undertake modernise the houses in a sympathetic way that brings them up to date with modern living yet honours the past even sometimes incorporating some of the previous resident’s furniture and belongings while issuing a caveat that the owners are welcome to visit should they wish to.

Essentially, the idea is a kind of co-existence with the past but also with unresolved trauma such as that presented by the earthquake and the ongoing pandemic. Momoka too is struggling to move on and while a gradual romance seems to arise between herself and Shinsaku, she isn’t sure she can ever let the past go though he makes it clear it’s okay to bring it with her. For his part, despite the initial fears of the early pandemic period and the suspicion of him as an outsider, Shinsaku’s quickly taken in by the community and adapts to a more rural way of life with relative ease though his boss’ big plan is rather undermined by his later insistence that he come back to Tokyo to run the project from the office like a many a contemporary CEO rolling back promises of flexible working environments that make this kind of utopian ideal much harder to materialise. In any case, there’s something quite refreshening in the eventual resolution just to do their own thing, not particularly paying attention to labels or what other people might think, but just doing what makes them happy right now. As an old fisherman’s song says, the sun sets but then it rises again. Scripted by Kankuro Kudo and adapted from a novel by Shuhei Nire, the film has kind of wholesome optimism that is rooted in a sense of continuity but also the potential to start again and make a new life inside the old that is less bound by outdated social norms than brokered by the gentle solidarity between people and a generosity of spirit that allows all to seek happiness in whatever way they choose.

Sunset Sunrise screens in Chicago 22nd March as part of the 19th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Iwane: Sword of Serenity (居眠り磐音, Katsuhide Motoki, 2019)

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The contradictions of the samurai code conspire against one noble-hearted young man in Katsuhide Motoki’s adaptation of the long running series of historical novels by Saeki Yasuhide, Iwane: Sword of Serenity (居眠り磐音, Inemuri Iwane). Yet this truly serene samurai is a stoical sort, learning to bear his pain with fortitude while standing up for justice in an increasingly corrupt Edo where money rules all while an ascendent merchant class continues to challenge the fiercely hierarchical social order. 

Beginning in 1772 which turned out to be a disastrous year, the tale opens as hero Iwane (Tori Matsuzaka) prepares to return home after completing his three year rotation in Edo in the company of childhood friends Kinpei (Tasuku Emoto) and Shinnosuke (Yosuke Sugino). Shinnosuke is in fact married to Kinpei’s sister Mai, while Iwane will himself be married to Kinpei’s other sister Nao immediately on his return so close are they. As Iwane’s father tells him, there are great hopes for these young men that they can “turn our outdated clan around”, but events will conspire against them. Spoiling the happy homecoming, Shinnosuke is accosted by a drunken uncle who convinces him Mai has been unfaithful in his absence with the consequence that he kills her immediately on his return home. Unable to understand this turn of events, Kinpei confronts his friend but eventually kills him, while Iwane is then forced to kill Kinpei after he goes on murderous rampage in revenge for the wrong done to his sister. 

In trying to mediate the case, the argument is put forward that Shinnosuke acted rashly and should have brought his suspicion to the authorities rather than opting for summary execution. The lord however disagrees, condoning Shinnosuke’s actions under the rationale that to do so would have been considered “weak minded” while as Shinnosuke himself had claimed he acted in accordance with the samurai code in which female adultery is illegal and punishable by death. By contrast, he finds Kinpei’s rashness offensive, insisting that he also should have recognised the legitimacy of his sister’s murder and simply left quietly with her body. Having learned the truth in which his childhood friends became victims of clan intrigue, romantic jealousy, and tragic misunderstandings in this Othello-like plot, Shinnosuke and childhood sweetheart Nao are also consumed by the rashness of samurai law each exiled from their clan and cast adrift in Edo-era society. 

Edo-era society is however also itself corrupt. Some months later, Iwane has returned to Edo as a lowly ronin lodging with a kindly old man, Kinbei, who helps him find a job firstly gutting eel then as a bodyguard at a money exchange which has been receiving anonymous threats they assume are from rival broker Awaya who has hatched a nefarious plan to manipulate the currency market to stop the current Shogun introducing a new unit which can be used in both Edo and Kyoto which would understandably cut into his already corrupt business model. Luckily, Imazuya is an honourable man who backs the new currency plan and wants to do the right thing which makes him a perfect fit for Iwane’s innate sense of justice. “You don’t know the way of the merchant” Awaya snaps at him, suggesting both that the samurai are already on their way down as the merchants rise and that his unwillingness to play dirty will be his downfall. Nevertheless, Iwane is the type to adapt quickly, instantly coming up with a way to play Awaya at his own game and kick his destructive amoral capitalism to the curb. 

Meanwhile, he continues to pine for Nao while drawing closer to Kinbei’s earnest daughter Okon (Fumino Kimura). As we discover Nao is also a victim of an intensely patriarchal social order but through the tragedy that befalls them also finds strength and agency making a life changing decision that allows her to become independent while looking after her family if in the knowledge that the childhood romance she shared with Iwane is a thing of the past. Iwane too agrees that he is trapped in a living hell of guilt and grief, yet choosing to go on living anyway as calm and cheerful as he’d ever been while standing up to Edo-era corruption though uncomfortably enough this time against the destabilising influence of the rising merchant class and therefore in contrast to most jidaigeki reinforcing the legitimacy of the samurai order which has paradoxically also ruined his life with its rigid and implacable social codes. In any case, Motoki’s classic chanbara melodrama has a serenity of its own as the cheerfully laidback hero resolves to live his life by a code of his own free of samurai constraint. 

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)

Village of Eight Gravestones (八つ墓村, Yoshitaro Nomura, 1977)

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Can a curse end up being “real” just because people believe in it? Unlike many of his other crime films which were adapted from the novels of Seicho Matsumoto, Yoshitaro Nomura’s The Village of the Eight Gravestones (八つ墓村, Yatsuhaka-mura) edges towards the idea that the curse at its centre is real in a more literal sense with grimly grinning samurai standing on their hilltop and rejoicing in the fulfilment of the 400-year campaign of vengeance, but also hints at a toxic legacy of enmity and warfare along with a karmic sensibility found in many of Seishi Yokomizo’s other mysteries in which a noble family must account for the way it gained its riches. 

In this case, the Tajimi family which now owns most of the village became prosperous after betraying a band of eight displaced samurai during the Sengoku era. Fleeing the battlefield in defeat, the samurai had originally frightened the villagers when they came down off the mountain but were in actuality non-threatening, simply settling down to a life of farming and peaceful co-existence. But some members of the community became greedy and accepted the promises of riches from a rival clan for the service of eliminating the eight samurai. Cruelly inviting them to the local festival in what seemed like a moment of acceptance as members of the village, they betrayed them killing some by poison and others by the sword. 

Now, hundreds of years later, the Tajimi family is on the verge of extinction with the eldest daughter unable to bear children and the oldest son bedridden and soon to die which explains why they’re keen to track down long lost grandson Tatsuya Terada (Kenichi Hagiwara) who was presumably adopted by his stepfather and bears his name after his now deceased mother Teruko left the family to escape her abusive relationship with half-mad husband Yozo (Tsutomu Yamazaki). Surprisingly, it’s his maternal grandfather Ushimatsu Igawa (Yoshi Kato), who comes looking for him only to drop dead as soon as they meet of apparently strychnine poisoning in the first of several murders that all echo the ancestral curse placed upon the Tajimi family by samurai leader Yoshitaka Amako (Isao Natsuyagi) as he died. 

Like many of Nomura’s films this too features a journey only this one is in a sense into the past as Tatsuya ventures to the rural heart of Japan hoping to see his mother’s birthplace and satiate his curiosity about his birth father. What he discovers there is obviously a lot of what seems like unfounded local superstition along with a degree of unpleasant stigmatisation as he’s immediately accosted by a shamaness who calls him a murderer to his face for his connections with the Tajimis to whom he feels himself a stranger, and then is later blamed for all the weird goings on which only began after he arrived. The film uproots itself from the original 1948 setting to the present day which perhaps lessens the impact of its central theme about the legacy of violence and betrayal that is stoked by war and enmity along with the destructive capacity of human greed that encourages some to betray others for their own advancement only to discover that success founded on human sacrifice will never get you very far. 

Ironically in a more real world sense, it turns out to be greed that motivates these present crimes with the villain hoping to usurp the Tajimi family fortune and utilising the curse as a means to do so. Much of the action takes place in a network of underground caves filled with glowing green lakes where the villain eventually takes on demonic proportions, face ghostly white with yellowish eyes and a crazed expression that echoes those of the samurai as they died. Nomura hints at the sense of ancient dread in this very old place while also surprisingly bloody in his flashbacks which feature scenes of shocking violence including severed heads one of which seems to lick its lips and stare intently even while on display. This being a Kindaichi (Kiyoshi Atsumi) mystery, the famous detective does indeed appear though remains a background presence quietly solving the crime behind the scenes while Tatsuya searches for the key to his own history and an escape from this legacy of violence and destruction in reclaiming his own identity.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Unlock Your Heart (ひらいて, Rin Shuto, 2021)

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A straight-A student and popular girl enters a self-destructive tailspin on discovering her longterm crush has a secret girlfriend in Rin Shuto’s adaptation of the novel by Risa Wataya, Unlock Your Heart (ひらいて, Hirate). Wataya also penned the source material for Akiko Ohku’s Tremble All You Want and Hold Me Back, and while Shuto may shift away from Ohku’s quirky style she maintains and intensifies an underlying sense of unease in what has the potential to develop into an incredibly messy situation. 

As the film opens, popular girl Ai (Anna Yamada) walks away from a dance rehearsal and discovers fellow student Miyuki (Haruka Imo) collapsed by a tree next to a pouch containing her insulin. Barely conscious, Miyuki asks her for something sweet and Ai soon returns with some sugary juice. Unable to find to an efficient way of getting her to drink it, Ai passes the liquid from her own mouth in a literal kiss of life that seems have an unexpected effect on her. Meanwhile, after sneaking into the school late at night with some friends halfheartedly joking about stealing the exam papers, Ai raids the locker of her crush, Tatoe (Ryuto Sakuma), and discovers a series of love letters which turn out to be from Miyuki. 

For some reason this revelation turns Ai’s life upside-down even though she later reveals that she had been enduring the silent crush on Tatoe for some years without ever acting on it. It may partly be that Ai is popular and attractive and so the idea that someone may not find her desirable is destabilising, cutting to the quick of her teenage insecurity while pulling the rug out from under her if she had indeed thought of Tatoe as a kind of comfortable backstop or easy plan B. Enraged, she befriends Miyuki yet for unclear reasons, perhaps hoping to get some insider info on Tatoe, find out what it is Miyuki has and she doesn’t, or somehow break them up, but finally settles on seduction unexpectedly kissing her again in an echo of their awkward meet cute.  

At heart, Ai does not understand herself and is operating with no real plan. Each escalation seems to come as a surprise even to herself leaving her with moments of internal conflict gazing into a mirror wondering what it is she’s doing. On separate occasions, both Miyuki and Tatoe accuse her of lying and indeed she is, most particularly to herself in a wholesale denial of her own desires which fuels her impulsive and self-destructive behaviour. Others accuse her of being selfish and self-absorbed, unable to look beyond herself and indifferent to the feelings of others which is also in its way a reflection of the degree to which she is consumed by internal confusion, driven slowly out of her mind while taking out her frustration on those around her not least in her increasingly dark manipulation of Miyuki and Tatoe. In the end, as Tatoe points out, she’s little different from his abusive father in her need to possess and control but it’s the extreme control that she’s trying to exercise over herself and the desires she can not accept that is causing her self-destructive behaviour. 

Only Miyuki seems to be able to see through her, at least to an extent, yet it’s not entirely clear at first if she responds to Ai’s advances willingly or simply goes along with them because she has no other friends and is afraid Ai will reject her if she refuses. Ostracised by the students because of her diabetes which is of course a very visible condition in that it requires her to inject herself while at school, Miyuki is shy and lonely while required to keep her relationship with Tatoe a secret because of his abusive father. But as Miyuki later puts it in her letter, Ai isn’t quite as aloof as she’d like to pretend and acts with an unexpected tenderness and consideration, even a kind of vulnerability, in moments of intimacy that betray the true self otherwise stifled by anxiety and internalised shame. With a persistent air of danger and unease spurred by Ai’s impulsive and chaotic nature, Shuto’s intense drama reaches its climax in its deliberately abrupt conclusion perfectly capturing the heroine’s moment of realisation imbued with all of her idiosyncratic messiness. 

Unlock Your Heart screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

International trailer (English subtitles)

My Brother, the Android and Me (弟とアンドロイドと僕, Junji Sakamoto, 2022)

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“You’re a real weirdo, aren’t you?” the lonely hero of Junji Sakamoto’s existential psychodrama My Brother, the Android and Me (弟とアンドロイドと僕, Ototo to Android to Boku) is constantly told not least by his exasperated and unsympathetic boss but on another level may be the most human of them all longing for a sense of connection in a world which seems to have rejected him to the point that he is no longer sure whether or not he actually exists. Quite clearly drawing inspiration from Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, the Modern Prometheus as well as its many film adaptations though most obviously the 1931 Universal Horror classic, Sakamoto’s oblique chronicle of crippling loneliness presents a man estranged from himself but looking for comfort in his reflected image. 

Sakamoto opens the film in true gothic fashion, his hero Kaoru (Etsushi Toyokawa) a dark and mysterious figure obscured by an oilskin coat amid the ever falling rain illuminated only by the light of an ominous moon. As we discover he works as a university professor but says nothing to his students other than making an apology for his poor handwriting, sometimes writing with both hands at once as he recreates complex algorithms on an old-fashioned chalkboard. The students all mock him, not least because of a curious neurological condition which prevents him from fully controlling his right leg with the consequence that he is often compelled into strange, jerking movements or else to hop on one foot from place to place. In truth, his errant right leg is a symptom of Kaoru’s sense of displacement in that he does not quite feel it to be his own and experiences only pain when his right heel is in contact with the floor. 

It’s this problem with his leg that seems to most irk his boss who later invasively barges in to the gothic western-style mansion/disused hospital where he lives in the company of his nephew, a psychiatrist, who probably means well but offers little more than platitudes in insisting that Kaoru’s leg has simply been left off his internal schematics so all they need to do is mentally reconnect it. His boss meanwhile bizarrely states that Kaoru needs to get well “so that cracked roads can be fixed”, ironically treating his body like a machine that needs to be repaired so that it is optimised for work rather than out of care for another human being who may be in pain. Having barged into Kaoru’s office, he’d discovered his secret project in a highly complex, lifelike robotic arm which was a problem for him because he was supposed to be working on a robot that fixes potholes which seems almost ironic in its banality. In any case, Kaoru also has the rather unfortunate habit of entirely ignoring the person talking to him as if they weren’t even there which is in itself an ironic inversion of the way others see, or more to the point don’t see, him. Kaoru’s boss describes him as creepy because he has no presence, you’re never sure if he’s there or not, but can immediately sense the “giant” presence of his other self, the lifelike android he’s building in his spare time. 

The android is in its way his Frankenstein’s monster, an ironic attempt to rebirth himself constructed in the ruins of his family’s abandoned obstetrics hospital. By chance, he meets a young woman (Yuki Katayama) who closely resembles himself and carries her into his laboratory like the Bride of Frankenstein but treats her only with tenderness and sympathy while attempting to fend off his estranged half-brother (Masanobu Ando) constantly hassling him for money to pay for medical care for the father who abandoned him. His mother had instructed him to find his other self which is perhaps what he’s been doing if caught between the Id and Superego of his brother and father. Constant fire imagery including the repeated motif of a burning body in a conventional fireplace keys us in to Kaoru’s positioning as a “modern Prometheus” whose duty it is to keep the fire in while giving birth to himself as manifested in a perfect manmade creation that others may find frightening or uncanny though the android itself has done nothing wrong because it is in essence the embodiment of Kaoru’s frustrated humanity. Featuring sumptuous gothic production design with sci-fi sheen, Sakamoto’s steely, fragmentary drama finds a man in search of himself while also a perpetual exile but discovering a sense of warmth in the uncanniness of a reflected image. 

My Brother, the Android and Me streams in the US until March 27 as part of the 14th season of Asian Pop-up Cinema

International trailer (English subtitles)

Funuke Show Some Love, You Losers! (腑抜けども、悲しみの愛を見せろ, Daihachi Yoshida, 2007)

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“We’re family, I’m sure we’ll understand each other” a conciliatory big brother tries to console, but family is it seems a much more complicated matter than one might assume it to be in Daihachi Yoshida’s debut feature, Funuke Show Some Love, You Losers! (腑抜けども、悲しみの愛を見せろ Funukedomo, Kanashimi no Ai wo Misero), adapted from the novel by Yukiko Motoya. Released in 2007, Yoshida’s film is one among a series of cynical reevaluations of the meaning of “family” in the contemporary society but eventually skews towards the uncomfortably conservative in its implicit suggestion that a family which is not bound by blood cannot succeed while even blood connection may prove inherently toxic. 

Fittingly the film opens with a freak yet largely offscreen accident as Mrs & Mrs Wago are killed by a runaway bus while attempting to save a stray cat, an event witnessed by their 18-year-old daughter Kiyomi (Aimi Satsukawa). The Wagos were a blended household, Kazuko and Shutaro having married later in life and bringing with them their children from previous marriages in Kazuko’s daughters Sumika (Eriko Sato) and Kiyomi, and Shutaro’s son Shinji (Masatoshi Nagase). Four years previously, Sumika left home after a traumatic family incident with the aim of becoming an actress in Tokyo, while her place has perhaps been taken by Shinji’s new wife Machiko (Hiromi Nagasaku) whom he has only recently married. Yet Kiyomi seems more perturbed by the possibility of her sister’s return than she is grief-stricken by her parents’ death, while Sumika barely glances at the altar on her arrival immediately treating Machiko as a servant sent out to pay the taxi and collect her bags. 

As we quickly gather, Sumika is an intensely narcissistic, self-absorbed sociopath intent on manipulating everyone around her in order to assume a position of dominance yet her resentment is perhaps the only thing glueing the family together. Her grudge against Kiyomi apparently stems back to her having used her for inspiration for a manga about a young woman driven to psychotic violence in her ambition to become an actress which later won a prize and was printed under her real name with the consequence that everyone in town quickly realised it was about her. Sumika repeatedly uses this excuse as to why she hasn’t been successful, that the manga forced her into a moment of introspection that destroyed her self-confidence, later saying something similar to an unresponsive audition panel bearing out her tendency to blame her failures on others. Yet Kiyomi apparently feels intensely guilty. “I never thought of myself as the kind of person who’d turn her family into manga for money” she laments shortly after Sumika attempted to boil her to death in the bath, “I want to transform into the kind of person who can sympathise with family members’ pain”. 

“Family means supporting each other at times like this” the relentlessly cheerful Machiko had tried to comfort Kiyomi at the funeral, yet she is constantly reminded that she is not quite included as a family member. Shinji tells her to keep out of family business and later to avoid getting between the sisters, denying her an equal status within the home despite the reality of their marriage. Ironically enough, Machiko was abandoned at birth and raised in an orphanage apparently so desperate to belong to a family that she willingly puts up with Shinji’s abusive treatment while making creepy dolls as a hobby. Yet at the end of the film it’s she who is left on her own, inheriting the family home, while the two blood sisters are eventually forced out but bound to each other if only in unresolved and continual resentment. 

Nevertheless there is also a degree of pathos in the series of frustrated dreams which prevent each of the siblings from escaping the otherwise perfectly nice if dull rural hometown where they were born. Sumika’s tragedy is her refusal to accept she has no talent and is unlikely to find career success because she is an unpleasant person, a meta plot strand seeing her writing letters to a director whose new movie is apparently about whether you can love someone you’ve only communicated with remotely and never met. Sumika seeks only dominance, manipulating her siblings through guilt and shame in order to encourage a sense of dependence while also dependent on them for financial support. Her need prevents either Kiyomi or Shinji finding happiness, their attempts to escape her control eventually leading in very different directions. 

Unlike similarly themed familial dramas, Funuke situates the fault line in its dysfunctional family not in the changing society but in its lack of blood relation while eventually suggesting that even the blood bond between the two sisters is more grimly toxic than it is supportive. In an odd way, it leaves Machiko as the winner while uncomfortably implying that her orphanhood prevents her from becoming part of a conventional family, literally left home alone. A more literal translation of the title might be “show some miserable love, you cowards”, suggesting that these anxious siblings are too afraid of themselves and each other to embrace familial affection Kiyomi eventually affirming “In the end I couldn’t change either, sorry”. While the limitations of early digital photography may not stand up a decade and change later, Yoshida’s occasionally experimental flair including an entire sequence playing out as manga panels helps to overcome the unfortunate lifelessness of a typically 2000s low budget aesthetic while the universally strong performances do their best to gain our sympathy in an otherwise cruelly cynical, if darkly humorous, take on post-millennial family dynamics. 

Funuke Show Some Love, You Losers! is available on blu-ray in the UK from Third Window Films.

Trailer (English subtitles)