Hi’Spec – Windows on Worlds

The latest in a recent series of films critical of Japan’s contemporary employment culture, Sho Miyake’s All the Long Nights (夜明けのすべて, Yoake no Subete) presents a more compassionate working environment as key to a happy and fulling life brokered by small acts of attentive kindness in the knowledge that we are all carrying heavy burdens. Based on a novel by Maiko Seo, the film captures a sense of serenity that can be found in the wonder of life itself and the discovery of the “infinite vastness beyond the darkness” that a starry sky presents.

A lack of compassion in the generalised society is signalled early on in the fact that the heroine, Misa (Mone Kamishiraishi), struggles with a condition that is little understood and belittled by those around her. On bonding with workplace colleague Takatoshi (Hokuto Matsumura) who is experiencing panic disorder, he dismisses her issues as “that female thing” and suggests it doesn’t compare to the effects his condition is having on his life. She counters him that she didn’t know there was a ranking, but is obviously rankled by the refusal of the world around her to take her PMS seriously even though it causes her to lash out at others and often ruins employment opportunities because it’s impossible for her to regulate her emotions in the way that is generally expected in contemporary working culture.

Each of them have ended up working at a small company that manufactures scientific instruments for children after originally working in larger corporate structures with very clear hierarchical systems and rigid modes of behaviour. Yet we can see right away that Misa’s colleagues are aware of her condition and seem to have accepted it. When she blows up at Takatoshi over his habit of drinking carbonated water the sound of which gets on her nerves, they gently steer her away while explaining to him not to pay it any mind. In any case, Misa is still embarrassed by her behaviour and regularly buys pastries at a nearby bakery in an act of continual atonement even though her boss tells her not to get into the habit of it.

Takatoshi’s rather rude refusal of her pastries, clumsily explaining that he dislikes raw cream, is another symptom of his aloofness and unwillingness to be a part of the office community. He is continually looking to get his old job back and looks down on this kind of work as being lower in status than a regular office job at a big company, something perhaps reinforced by his well-meaning girlfriend who seems to want him not only to get better but to reassume his former position despite the implication that it’s what made him ill in the first place. Tsujimoto (Kiyohiko Shibukawa), his former boss, however remains compassionate and supportive perhaps in part because his older sister took her own life due to workplace pressures which has made him more sensitive to the troubles of those around him. That’s also true of the boss of the science company, Kurita (Ken Mitsuishi), whose younger brother also took his own life for unclear reasons leaving him acutely aware of the importance of paying attention to the feelings of others.

It’s in this compassionate environment that Misa and Takatoshi each begin to rediscover a new sense of confidence in their mutual solidarity regarding their personal struggles along with a better idea of what kind of life suits them rather than focusing on how they’re seen by others or living up to a societal notion of what defines conventional success. As they’re tasked with creating a voiceover script for the company’s mobile planetarium, they come to an appreciation of the beauty found in darkness along with the light that shines within it in. As Misa reflects, there is nothing in life that does not change, not even the stars, but amid all that anxiety we can still help each other and live peaceful, quietly profound lives finding fulfilment in the mundane. Shot in a hazy, slightly detached naturalism the film eventually finds a joy in life’s simplicity and the warmth of human connection that exists outside of the corporate superstructures that have come to define most of our lives while otherwise robbing us of the ability to fully embrace it or ourselves.

All the Long Nights screened as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Yasushi Sato, an author closely associated with the port town of Hakodate who took his own life in 1990, has been enjoying something of a cinematic renaissance in the last few years with adaptations of some of his best known works in The Light Shines Only There, Over the Fence, and Sketches of Kaitan City. And Your Bird Can Sing (きみの鳥はうたえる, Kimi no Tori wa Utaeru), taking its title from the classic Beatles song, was his literary debut and won him a nomination for the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1981. Unlike the majority of his output, And Your Bird Can Sing was set in pre-bubble Tokyo but perhaps signals something of a recurring theme in its positioning of awkward romance as a potential way out of urban ennui and existential confusion.

Sho Miyake’s adaptation shifts the action back to Hakodate and the into present day but maintains the awkward triangularity of Sato’s book. The unnamed narrator (Tasuku Emoto), the “Boku” of this “I Novel”, is an apathetic slacker with a part-time job in a book store he can’t really be bothered to go to. After not showing up all day, he wanders past the store at closing time which brings him into contact with co-worker Sachiko (Shizuka Ishibashi) who appears to be leaving with the boss (Masato Hagiwara) but blows him off to come back and flirt with Boku who makes a date with her at a cute bar but falls asleep after getting home and (accidentally) stands her up, drinking all night with his unemployed roommate Shizuo (Shota Sometani) instead. Luckily for Boku, Sachiko forgives him and an awkward romance develops but their relationship becomes still more complicated when Boku introduces Sachiko to Shizuo with whom she proves an instant hit.

This is not, however, the story of an awkward love triangle but the easy fluidity of youth in which unselfishness can prove accidentally destructive. Boku, for all his rejection of conventionality, is more smitten with Sachiko than he’s willing to admit. He counts to 120 waiting for her return, refusing to make a move himself but somehow believing she is choosing him with an odd kind of synchronised telepathy. She pushes forward, he holds back. Boku encourages Shizuo to pursue Sachiko, insisting that she is free to make her choices, and if jealous does his best to hide it. Shizuo, meanwhile, is uncertain. Attracted to Sachiko he sees she prefers Boku but weighs the positivities of being second choice to a man dressing up his fear of intimacy as egalitarianism.

Boku tells us that he wanted the summer to last forever, but in truth his youth is fading. Like Sachiko and Shizuo, he is drifting aimlessly without direction – much to the annoyance of an earnest employee at the store (Tomomitsu Adachi) who prizes rules and order above all else and finds the existence of a man like Boku extremely offensive. Sachiko, meanwhile, has drifted into an affair with her boss who, against the odds, actually seems like a decent guy if one who is perhaps just as lost as our trio and living with no more clarity despite his greater experience. Like Boku, Shizuo too is largely living on alienation as he strenuously resists the fierce love of his admittedly problematic mother (Makiko Watanabe).

“What is love?” one of Sachiko’s seemingly less complicated friends (Ai Yamamoto) asks, “why does everybody lie?”. Everybody is indeed lying, but more to themselves than to others. Fearing rejection they deny their true feelings and bury themselves in temporary, hedonistic pleasures. Boku reveals that he hoped Sachiko and Shizuo would fall in love so that he would get to know a different side to Sachiko through his friend, as if he could hover around them like transparent air. The problem is Boku doesn’t quite want to exist, and what is loving and being loved other than a proof of existence? Sachiko prompts, and she waits, and then she wonders if she should take Boku at his word and settle for Shizuo only for Boku to reach his sudden moment of clarity at summer’s end. A melancholy exploration of youthful ennui and existential anxiety, And Your Bird Can Sing is a beautifully pitched evocation of the eternal summer and the awkward, tentative bonds which finally give it meaning.

And Your Bird Can Sing was screened as part of the 2019 Nippon Connection Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Tag: Hi’Spec

All the Long Nights (夜明けのすべて, Sho Miyake, 2024)

And Your Bird Can Sing (きみの鳥はうたえる, Sho Miyake, 2018)