Tag: Japan

Mermaid Legend (人魚伝説, Toshiharu Ikeda, 1984)

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“Even if someone kills you, you wouldn’t die,” a drunken husband somewhat sarcastically replies having pledged to come back and haunt his wife if he died and she married a man who didn’t drink. His words take on a prophetic quality given that the heroine of Toshiharu Ikeda’s Mermaid Legend (人魚伝説, Ningyo Densetsu) takes on a quasi-supernatural quality as an embodiment of nature’s revenge after someone tries, and fails, to kill her having already killed her husband for witnessing their murder of another man who’d tried to resist their plans of buying up half the town to build a nuclear plant. 

By the mid-1980s, Japan’s economy had fully recovered from post-war privation and was heading into an era of unprecedented prosperity which is to say that the coming of a power plant was not welcomed with the same degree of hope and excitement as it may have been in the 1950s when it was sold not only as a new source of employment for moribund small towns but an engine that would fuel the new post-war society. Several industrial scandals such as the Minamata disease had indeed left those in rural areas fearful of the consequences of entering a faustian pact with big business, which is one reason why the guys from Kinki Electric Power sell it as an amusement park project though even this has the locals wary not just of the disruption it will bring to their lives and potential ruin of their livelihoods which are dependent on the protection of the natural environment but that what is promised simply won’t be delivered. Fisherman Keisuke (Jun Eto) says as much when lamenting a previous aquaculture programme which didn’t pan out and caused lasting damage to marine life. 

In any case, as others say there’s no money in going out to sea anymore and its clear that the old-fashioned, traditional way of life practiced by Keisuke and his newlywed wife Migiwa (Mari Shirato) is no longer sustainable. Migiwa is an abalone diver working without modern equipment but using heavy weights to dive deep enough to reach the shells. As such she’s dependent on her husband to pull her back up to the boat when she tugs the rope. She must put her life entirely in his hands though in truth, he does not seem to take his responsibility all that seriously. The couple bicker relentlessly and not even she really believes him when he says he witnessed a murder which might be understandable given the extent of his drinking. All of which is further evidence against her when she manages to escape from the assassination plot and runs straight to the nearest policeman who thanks her for turning herself in implying he believes she is responsible for Keisuke’s death. 

The possible collusion of the policeman hints as a further sense of distrust in authority which has become far too close to corporate interests. Shady industrialist Miyamoto (Yoshiro Aoki) ropes in both the mayor and the head of the fishing association in his talks with Kinki Electric Power along with Shimogawa from the local tourist board who evidently opposes the plans as he is the man Keisuke witnesses being murdered. As Miyamoto says “sometimes your hands get a little dirty” though he never “directly” involves himself matters such as these. The situation is complicated by an unresolved love triangle between Miyamoto’s spineless son Shohei (Kentaro Shimizu), a sometime photographer, who is resentful of Keisuke and in love with Migiwa complaining that Keisuke always outdrinks him and gets the girl too hinting at his sense of wounded masculinity. Isolated by his class difference, he appears not to approve of his father’s actions but later does little to stop them and eventually sides with corporate interest over his feelings for Migiwa who in any case seems to have become more attached to Keisuke following his death which she vows to avenge. 

There is there is something quite strange in the prophetical quality of Keisuke’s words also predicting the “black sweat” of the Jizo on the beach and the mystical storm which does eventually sweep everything clean destroying the signs for the new nuclear power plant already installed on the beach. In this way, Migiwa becomes a vengeful force of nature taking up arms against those who wilfully ravage and pollute the natural environment while damaging the lives of those who lived on its shores such as herself and Keisuke. She takes revenge not only for the murder of her husband by corrupt capitalists but against that corruption itself even as she laments that “no matter how many I kill, they just keep coming.” “Don’t worry, maybe all this was just a dream,” Keisuke once again prophetically intones though it’s difficult to know if it’s defeating the capitalist order that is a fantasy or the maintenance of the idealised rural life to which Migiwa seemingly finds her way back swimming into an unpolluted sea surrounded by the floating barrels of ama divers and clear blue skies, a creature of nature once again.

Mermaid Legend screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Motion Picture: Choke (映画（窒息）, Gen Nagao, 2023)

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Humans place themselves above animals precisely because of their ability to communicate and work together to create complex plans that allow them to overcome their circumstances. Robbed of our speech, would we still say the same? Gen Nagao’s dialogue-free drama Choke (映画（窒息）, Eiga Chissoku) takes place in a world in which language appears to have disappeared. Humans communicate only through gesture and are therefore prevented from explaining themselves fully, able to rely only on the vagueness of feeling to convey their thoughts and intentions. 

Yet we might not quite grasp this at first, because the heroine (Misa Wada) lives a solitary life in which she rarely needs to talk to anyone anyway. Shot in a crisp black and white, this appears to be some kind of near future, post-apocalyptic world in which even ancient technologies have largely been forgotten. The woman lives in a concrete structure, presumably a disused factory which is dotted with broken machinery that the woman largely ignores as she lives her simple and repetitive life of waking, fetching water, hunting, cooking and eating. We have no reason to think that she is unhappy for besides the occasional sigh, she simply gets on with her daily tasks and then goes to sleep seemingly unafraid of external threats.

But it is indeed male violence that punctures her world when she’s set upon by three men, seemingly an older man and his grown-up sons one of whom holds her still while the middle-aged man rapes her after breaking the magnifying glass she’d bought off a cheerful pedlar enraptured by the wonder of instant fire (well, while the sun shines at least). Her world becomes darker and she finds herself haunted by a shadowy figure that hovers over her as she sleeps. But then, her trap catches a young man (Daiki Hiba) whom she at first seems as if she’s going to kill and eat but later reconsiders and lets him go presumably calculating he poses no threat to her. The young man has a goofy grin and cheerful disposition, returning to bring the woman gifts and follow her around doing odd jobs before the pair develop a relationship and start living as a couple. The young man even devises a system of bamboo pipes to bring water from the brook so the woman won’t need to carry buckets back and forth anymore in a seeming rediscovery of technology born of his desire to make her life easier.

This more nurturing, protective kind of masculinity brings a new a dimension to her life but their harmonious days do not last long before male violence intrudes once again and proves a corrupting influence for the young man who seemingly becomes cruel and vengeful, though not toward the woman even as she begins to reconsider her relationship with him and if this kind of inhumanity is something she can tolerate in the idyll she’d crafted for herself before he arrived. Then again, in trying to deal with it is there something that becomes cruel or violent in herself in that wasn’t that way before even if doing so also makes her sad and leaves her lonely?

Until then she’d found only wonder in the natural world, repurposing the disused, man-made structures of the factory to make music in the rain and more problematically filled with childish glee when something wanders into her trap. But nature holds its dangers too even if there don’t appear to be any predators here besides man in the form of poisonous mushrooms easily mistaken for the edible kind. Even so, it’s violence that finally poisons her world. A senseless kind of violence that doesn’t seem to be about competition for resources, but only an animal lust and craving for dominance. If only they could communicate in a more concrete way perhaps it could be avoided, but then that doesn’t seem to have worked out that way for us who face such threats every day with words often ignored. 

In any case, Nagao finally heads into a more abstract space as the woman seems to react to the abrupt halt of the film’s soundtrack followed by the removal not only of speech but sound from her world as is if she had lost her hearing. Her reality fractures and we can’t be sure she hasn’t just imagined anything that went before or that she has been targeted by some unseen supernatural or spiritual force for her transgressions leading to her exile from a disintegrating paradise. Obscure and haunting, the film nevertheless has a kind of cheerfulness in its innate absurdity captured in the lunking physicality of the actors who move with a cartoonish strangeness and exaggerate their facial expressions in a strenuous attempt to communicate in the absence of words. The message seems to be that in the end we ruin things for ourselves, either through violence or simply doing what we think is right but in the end may really be no different nor any better.

Motion Picture: Choke screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Original trailer (dialogue free)

Brave: Gunjo Senki (ブレイブ -群青戦記-, Katsuyuki Motohiro, 2021)

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A young man with a total lack of confidence in himself begins discover his inner strength after being sent back to the Sengoku era in Katsuyuki Motohiro’s timeslip drama adapted from the manga by Masaki Kasahara, Brave: Gunjo Senki (ブレイブ -群青戦記-). Fighting a battle for the future, the kids finds themselves at a moment of historical change and caught between the titanic forces of clashing armies but paradoxically discover that they want the same thing, something the kids have always taken for granted, an age of peace in which all are free to live together happily. 

For all those reasons it’s a just as well that Aoi (Mackenyu), a diffident member of the archery club, is a keen history buff even if he declares himself uninterested in winning competitions or becoming a champion. When warriors in 16th century armour begin assaulting the school, he’s well placed to guess what might be going on inferring from some of the names involved that they must have been thrown back to the year 1560 which was something of a turning point in Japanese history marked by the battle of Okehazama in which the outnumbered forces of Oda Nobunaga (Kenichi Matsuyama) scored a significant victory against those of Imagawa Yoshimoto setting Nobunaga on a path towards the unification of Japan. 

Though armed with foreknowledge, the kids are obviously ill-equipped to cope with the demands of life in the Sengoku era having no combat experience yet this institution happens to be one of the most prominent sporting schools in the nation boasting a host of national champions all of whom discover that their athletic skills can easily be repurposed for warfare from the archers and kendo enthusiasts to the baseball and American football players while those in the various science clubs set about investigating how they got here and how they might get back. 

Despite being thrust into a leadership role after impressing warlord Motoyasu (Haruma Miura) who will one day become Tokugawa Ieyasu and oust Nobunaga as ruler of a unified Japan, Aoi remains diffident and fearful unable to fire his bow often walking away from the fight despite his friends’ encouragement. His problem, as is repeatedly pointed out, is that he has no self-confidence and cannot believe in himself sufficiently to act when the occasion calls. Yet through his gentle mentoring at the hands of Motoyasu, he begins to come into his own as a Sengoku era strategist realising that he has something to spur him on in the desire to protect those close to him.

This is not, however, a wholly positive thing. Despite introducing Aoi’s childhood friend Haruka (Hirona Yamazaki) as a talented archer who is much more willing to step up to the fight, the film quickly relegates her to the role of damsel in distress as it does the majority of female students many of whom are also top athletes with useful skills while the assault squad venturing to rescue students taken hostage by evil retainer Yanada Matsuna is, aside from Haruka, exclusively male. Conversely, the guys are given an opportunity to express their fear and sadness each thinking of their mothers as they prepare to risk their lives to save their friends. 

For Aoi, his friends become the light that show him the way while he remains preoccupied with history realising that nefarious forces are trying to manipulate it so that their age of peace will never arrive and Japan will exist in a state of darkness for all eternity. Though often depicted as cruel dictator this Nobunaga seems to want end the darkness by bringing about an age of peace through the unification of Japan taking solace in the idea that these strange people in their weird castle wearing bizarre clothes are from an age in which war is a distant memory meaning at least that his dream came to pass. At heart, it’s a battle between an emo teen who wants to paint the world with the darkness inside him, and a diffident young man turning away from hate and violence while finding strength in the presence and support of his friends. Boasting some impressive effects and high octane battle sequences imbued with a quirky humour as the kids use their sport skills, kicking footballs armed with bombs or throwing fiery baseballs at the confused retainers, Brave: Gunjo Senki sees its diffident hero not only taking charge of his personal destiny but the national in believing that the best way to support his friends is to make sure the world of peace they’ve always enjoyed will again come to pass. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Good Morning (お早よう, Yasujiro Ozu, 1959)

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Even the most casual viewer of Japanese cinema will be aware that something as simple as “lovely weather today” can mean quite a lot more than it at first seems. Small talk isn’t really so small after all and without it, as one quite perceptive yet perennially tongue-tied translator points out midway through Yasujiro Ozu’s charming late career comedy Good Morning (お早よう, Ohayo), our lives would be quite boring. Boring it is not, however, when two young boys decide to rebel against the pointless politeness of the adult world by taking a vow of silence after being told off for going on in their constant tantrums over the unfairness of being denied a TV set. 

As he often did, Ozu repurposes the plot of an earlier film, in this case I Was Born But… and subverts it. The two boys at the centre of the 1932 silent film ended up going on a hunger strike out of humiliation and despair on realising that their dad, who they’d idolised, was also a soulless corporate lackey forced to debase himself in deference to his boss. The father is ashamed, he doesn’t want his boys to end up living a meaningless worker drone existence, but the boys’ decision not to eat also carries much more weight considering they are in living in a time of economic depression during which many do not have the luxury of choice. 

The Hayashi boys, Minoru (Koji Shitara) and Isamu (Masahiko Shimazu), by contrast are also rebelling against the meaningless adult world but for the opposite reasons. They don’t seem to have a lot of respect for their father and probably don’t really care if he humiliates himself on a daily basis so long as they can watch sumo on TV without needing to go next door. These are consumerist kids, they want what they want and they want it now. Minoru is really too old for screaming tantrums, but still rolls around on the floor kicking his legs in frustration because it’s all just so unfair that mum and dad won’t get him a TV even though it’s not a matter of money. The parents, for their part, are trying their best to resist the onset of consumerism. Mr Hayashi (Chishu Ryu) is against the TV because he fears the boys will stop studying and hours of vacant staring will ruin their young minds. He might have a point, but you can’t hold back the tides forever. 

It’s his scolding of the boys which eventually leads to all the subsequent problems as his insistence that they are being far too noisy and talk much more than children have a right to leads them to declare an ironic vow of silence in protest against the “meaningless” chatter of adults filled with random pleasantries such as “good morning”, “where are you off to today?”, “what lovely weather we’re having!”, etc. Their decision, however, comes at a bad moment. There has recently been some unpleasantness over misplaced money for a local community group and gossip about Mrs Haraguchi’s (Haruko Sugimura) new washing machine. The other housewives on the block also seem to be resistant to consumerist desires and do not approve of the purchase, channeling their resentment into assuming that Mrs Haraguchi may have embezzled the money. Grown up chatter isn’t always meaningless and the frivolous local gossip has a profound bearing on the social politics of the block. So when the boys don’t reply to Mrs Haraguchi’s good morning, she assumes they are deliberately snubbing her on their mother’s instruction because of a petty grudge over harsh words exchanged on account of the misunderstanding surrounding the missing club dues.

Meanwhile, we can see the shadows of a lingering economic instability. These are all modest homes where families make an effort to appear frugal, hence the outrage over the washing machine, but the family friend who teaches the boys English and has a crush on their aunt, Heiichiro (Keiji Sada), has been laid off after his company went bust. He’s supported by his older sister who remains unmarried and works at a car dealership (more consumerism) while doing translation on the side for extra money. The neighbour across the way is technically “retired” but looking for work partly because his pension’s not enough to live on and partly because what’s a man supposed to do all day in a society which expects everyone to be productive? The new neighbours next-door to the Hayashis who’ve caused all this trouble because of their TV set are viewed as scandalous because they live in their pyjamas and she used to be a cabaret bar girl. The middle-aged gossips don’t think they’re respectable while she eventually decides to move because the neighbours are too “annoying”. 

Ironically enough, it’s sumo the boys most want to watch, about as traditionally Japanese a pastime as is possible even as they yearn for colourful consumerist modernity. They communicate by refusing to communicate. As Heiichiro points out, small talk is a social lubricant but meaningless things are easy to say while important things are not. Which is not to say you can’t communicate something important by saying something seemingly as meaningless as “that cloud has an interesting shape”, but that you won’t get anywhere unless you listen to what people are actually saying even when they’re saying nothing at all. They boys can’t win against the inherent meaninglessness of adult life with its superficial conformities, petty resentments, and wilful misunderstandings but perhaps we can all learn something from their straightforward earnestness in their refusal to submit themselves to empty pleasantries. 

Kizumonogatari -Koyomi Vamp- (傷物語 -こよみヴァンプ-, Tatsuya Oishi, 2023) [Fantasia 2024]

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A young man walks into an empty subway station already ominously strewn with blood and finds there the corpse of a woman shorn of her limbs. The corpse rises and begs him to have her life by sacrificing his own in allowing her to suck his blood and surprisingly the young man agrees. He does not, however, die but is brought back as something else, not quite human and definitely subservient to the creature he has saved. 

Running 2.5 hours, Tatsuya Oishi’s Kizumonogatari -Koyomi Vamp- (傷物語 -こよみヴァンプ-) is in fact a compilation of three films released in 2016 and a part of the long running Kizumonogatari series which originated with Nisio Isin’s light novels and has gone to spawn an expansive universe of interconnecting spin-offs. This is technically a prequel, and in that sense begins with a black slate but also deliberately drops us into confusion with breakneck pace through the hero’s quest to recover himself and his place in the world after this rude awakening to the supernatural. 

Rude is in many ways a defining characteristic of Kiss-shot, the 500-year old vampire Araragi finds bleeding in the subway station at that point a blonde and alluring figure of forbidden desire. Araragi is drawn to her in an unconscious death wish linked with the sexual desire he struggles to understand, running into the subway minutes after buying a pornographic magazine from a convenience store after striking up a friendship with fellow student Hanekawa. But once he saves her life, Kiss-shot is transformed into a cheeky little girl who now tells him that he is her minion and he must recover her severed limbs from a trio of vampire in order to be restored to humanity even as the power dynamic between them becomes confused and distorted.

In his vampire state, Araragi becomes immortal, powerful and free of mortal jeopardy yet he remains uncertain and insecure while reliant on the support of Hanekawa who encourages him to reject his desire for death and remain alive. But this also presents a problem to Araragi who sees himself as self-sacrificing and is unwilling to accept the what he sees as a self-sacrifice from Hanekawa for whom he feels unworthy and inadequate. In some senses it’s a typically self-centred, adolescent male perspective that rejects any idea of her own agency and assumes Hanekawa performs these actions for him rather than considering that she performs them for herself and is simply doing what she wants to do which in the end is not really about him at all. He declares it a burden he’s too weak to carry, which might in some senses be fair but also again a mischaracterisation that is further evidence of his lack of self-worth.

It’s this sense of inadequacy that lies behind his desire to reclaim his humanity along with the concurrent disgust he feels in the degradations of vampirism. It genuinely comes as a surprise to him that Kiss-shot feeds on human beings and lost her own humanity so long ago that she no longer gives it a second thought. She is after all only being what she is, but like Araragi is drawn to death partly out of frustrated longing and lingering boredom with a relentless yet apparently uneventful 500 years behind her in which the only other highlight was her previous minion who rejected this life much more quickly than she ever expected.

Even so, Oishi lends their mutual dilemma a degree of absurdity in the expectedly comic sight of severed heads littering a sports filed or launching themselves in toothy attacks. Heavily inspired by the French New Wave, he breaks the action with sometimes barely legible title cards often reading a single world while his composition has a kind of jauntiness that is also bleak and melancholy. The world surrounding Araragi veers between the pristine entrance to the high school, and post apocalyptic devastation littered with crows emblematised by the depilated cram school in which Kiss-shot keeps him. Backgrounds often have a photo realistic quality that further sets the world at a kilter when matched with the more conventional character designs of the central players. The conclusion that Araragi is presented with amounts a sharing of the misery which is also akin the burden he didn’t want to carry but also perhaps symbolic of his path towards adulthood in acceptance of compromise and selflessness in being willing to carry a small part of others’ pain and despair and allowing them to carry a part of his own.

Kizumonogatari -Koyomi Vamp- screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

A Samurai in Time (侍タイムスリッパー, Junichi Yasuda, 2024) [Fantasia 2024]

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Is there something a little sad about being forced to reenact your reality as theatre, or is it something to be proud of in adapting to the times and bringing the essence of what you once were with you? Junichi Yasuda’s A Samurai in Time (侍タイムスリッパー, Samurai Time Slip) like A Boy and His Samurai sees an Edo-era retainer transported to the present day but is less about contrast with the feudal past than how to carry on or start again when your time has ended.

At least that’s how it is for Kosaka Shinzaemon (Makiya Yamaguchi), a member of the Aizu Clan loyal to the Tokugawa Shogunate in the twilight of the feudal era. In arriving in our present, he’s forced to admit that days of the samurai are long over, and finds himself a man with out a place, adrift in a classless society in which the only skill he possesses, swordsmanship, is all but obsolete. The irony is that, after being transported by a Terminator-style lightening strike, Shin arrives on the set of a jidaigeki, or samurai-themed television drama which is to say an artificial recreation of his reality. Thus he’s confused when he tries to ask passers-by for directions and they seem alarmed and ignore him while his attempt to intervene when a young lady is bullied by rogue samurai earns him a dressing down from a man in strange dress we obviously know is the director. When he’s knocked out from a bump on the head, everyone assumes he’s got amnesia and has become confused between his role as an extra on a samurai drama in which he may have overinvested and his “real” life, which in a way maybe true.

Just as he’d come from the end of the feudal era, so he’s arrived in the dying days of the jidaigeki. Once a mainstay of the entertainment industry in its heyday of the ’50s and ‘60s when historical dramas ruled the airwaves, the genre has long been in decline and somewhat out of favour with both filmmakers, seeing as they’re much more expensive to make, and audiences. In fact, the place where Shin arrives is a former shooting set that’s been turned into a theme park recreating the reality of the jidaigeki serial rather than that of the feudal era.

In an analogy which might prove slightly awkward, Shin’s fate is aligned with that of the jidageki itself but by accident of birth he is also on the wrong side of history both literally and metaphorically. As he later learns, his Aizu clan and the shogunate it served would not prevail. Yet ultimately he likes this new Japan, a place of prosperity where anyone and everyone is free to eat what to him seems like the food of the elite. Embarking on a career as a jidaigeki stuntman, a kiriyaku or extra who dies on screen, he becomes committed to protecting the jidaigeki in the same way he protected the shogunate even as everyone around him says he must be mad to take up this sort of work now when jobs are few and far between. 

To that extent, it’s really about learning to adapt to another reality preserving what you can (and wish to) about the past but continuing to move forward like a samurai living life fully in service of an ideal. In a sense, this is something the Aizu could not do for they were defeated during in the Boshin War which solidified the victory of progressive revolutionaries who believed that modernisation and Westernisation were the only ways to save Japan bringing the age of the samurai to a close. In strange ways, Shin finds himself re-enacting this internal dilemma through his meta performance, bringing a note of authenticity to the jidaigeki genre which as we can see from that being filmed is not always terribly serious or earnest about historical accuracy. 

There is though an earnest desire to preserve it, if also to modernise for a contemporary era accepting that the days of classic jidaigeki are over but the genre may live again if in different ways. Through roleplaying his internal conflict, Shin is able to overcome his lingering feelings of guilt towards the clan and attachment to the more destructive sides of the samurai code, rejecting his opportunity for revenge and deciding to live well instead in this brave new world seemingly filled with potential for reinvention and recreation in which the past need not be cast away or overwritten but carried forward into new futures of its own.

A Samurai in Time screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Yin Yang Master Zero (陰陽師ゼロ, Shimako Sato, 2024)

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In the Heian era, who was it that kept the social order in check if not the onmyoji or “Yin Yang Master”? Shimako Sato’s big budget fantasy drama is technically a kind of prequel origin story adapted from Baku Yumemakura’s series of novels which were previously adapted as pair of movies in the early 2000s, and introducing the young Abe no Seimei (Kento Yamazaki), a Detective Dee-esque exorcist working as a state magician to protect the nation from supernatural threats such as demons and curses in an era in which ordinary people lived side-by-side with goblins and monsters.

That said, Seimei doesn’t really believe in that sort of thing, though in an ironic twist knows it to have a kind of truth at least, and is sick of being called out to look at a potential goblin infestation that turns out to be nothing more than a creaky old house settling amid the changeable weather. Which is all to say, he is both an earnest scientist looking for rational explanations to strange phenomena and an excellent diviner who can catch a dragon spirit in a bottle. In a touch of the Sherlock Holmes, he’s also gruff and aloof, distinctly uninterested in achieving high position and makes no secret of his contempt for his fellow alchemists insisting the Ying Yang Masters merely perpetuate superstitions to keep people frightened and themselves in employment.

When one of the other alchemists turns up dead of a suspected curse, the cat is set amongst the pigeons as the young apprentices respond to the offer of his higher status spot of they can solve the crime. This of course exposes their own greed and vanity as they each fall over each other desperate for a chance to get another foot on the ladder in a hierarchal system, a step that must be taken if they’re to make it all the way to the position of the emperor’s advisor on spiritual matters. Seimei’s disinterest further arouses suspicion against him with a fellow alchemist already 45 years old and stuck at the bottom rank directly accusing him of the crime perhaps less out of a genuine conviction than a desire to advance himself. 

In any case, Seimei investigates in a more modern, scientific way gaining access to crime scene and corpse ironically through a connection he’s made at court to an influential musician, Hiromasa (Shota Sometani), who hired him to sort out a problem the princess, Yoshiko (Nao Honda), was having with snapping strings on her harp. That turned out to be caused by a giant golden dragon spirit which Seimei later claims represented her feelings for Hiromasa, who is also quietly in love with her, which are somewhat forbidden because of the class difference between them. In this way, the spirits are merely a manifestation of the conflict between personal feelings and the social order as Yoshiko finds herself all but powerless, a princess in a golden cage to be sent wherever she is called with no real say over her fate. 

Fittingly, these feelings are resolved in a kind of artificial reality that Seimei believes to be a space of shared consciousness though he’s also fond of remarking on the malleability of “reality” and the ways in which vision and perspective can be manipulated. Then again, he also says all that matters is what they are seeing and experiencing in that very moment which is as good a benchmark for objective reality as anything else. There is something quite poignant about his developing relationship with Hiromasa which has its homoerotic qualities even as he becomes the “idiot” stand in for the audience, a kind of Watson figure that Seimei can explain everything to so that he can explain it to us. Even we can see the restrictions of the court and the irony in the eventual victory of “order” rather than personal freedom as volatile emotional forces must be put back in their bottles lest they create problems for everyone. Such conditions will doubtless create a series of cases of Seimei and Hiromasa to solve in a potential series starring the ace exorcist and his flautist friend in a Heian society beautifully brought to life by Sato’s sumptuous production design and flair for fantasy action.

The Yin Yang Master Zero screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival

Original trailer (English subtitles)

House of Sayuri (サユリ, Koji Shiraishi, 2024) [Fantasia 2024]

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An excited family discover the perils of buying a “used” home in Koji Shiraishi anarchic haunted house horror House of Sayuri (サユリ, Sayuri). Unlike many other nations, Japan does not really have a comparable housing market as, given changing building regulations etc, it’s common to demolish the original structure and build a bespoke home in its place rather than move into one someone else has vacated. That obviously means that opting for an existing property can be a little bit cheaper, which is presumably how the Kakimis have finally managed to move into what they describe as the dream home, escaping a cramped city apartment for a spacious rural mansion with room enough for grandma and grandpa too.

Of course, this particular home is probably cheaper because something untoward once happened there, though the Kamikis probably don’t know that, and everyone who’s lived there since has moved out a short time later. In a way referencing Shiraishi’s previous work, we can’t really tell whether the malevolent spirit wants the family out or is merely trapped in a loop of revenge on the family that badly betrayed them. In any case, it makes its way through the Kamiki family unit starting with daughter Keiko and causing all manner of strange events in the house. Sensibly, older son Norio begins to ask why they don’t just move but the parents are so committed to their dream of homeownership that they can’t bear the thought and remain determined to hang on to it at whatever cost. 

In any case, some wise words from grandma advance a more positive way of battling the ghost, that they should fight it with the force of their lives. They laugh in its face and shout vulgar phrases that send it scuttling away in outrage. The best way to fight the darkness, grandma says, is to live well. Like the house itself, it seems grandma has a well hidden secret that makes her the film’s key asset, a hilarious force of nature and eternal wise woman otherwise ignored because her dementia undermines her credibility. Meanwhile, Norio makes an unexpected friend at school who just happens to be a psychic and is keen to warn that a little girl ghost has latched on to him and it would obviously be better if he could just move out on account of all the evil emanations that appear to be coming from his home.

But as grandma says, it’s the grudges of the living they ought to be afraid of. The house of course holds its secrets and its labyrinthine, multilevel structure is perfect for concealing them. Unfortunately the Kamikis have bought into this poisoned legacy and slowly start seeing their familial bonds fracturing while the ghost takes advantage of their vulnerabilities, their negative emotions and insecurities. In a sense it becomes a question of whether they can endure a place of trauma to maintain their dreams of homeownership or are prepared to make the more sensible decision of ceding ground and moving somewhere less toxic while Norio tries to reclaim his place in his family and protect what remains of it. 

Truly heading in some unexpected directions particularly in its unpredictable send half, the film takes on an absurdist quality but also returns to classic genre tropes of the legacy of child abuse and the betrayal of a parent who saw and did nothing perhaps because, like the Kamikis, they were prepared to accept this this kind of toxicity to maintain a happy family home and be seen as a model upper-middle class family living in a country mansion. It turns out, the only way to exorcise this much more literal ghost is by directly confronting the traumatic past and attempting to find accommodation with it be that through violence or forgiveness. But as grandma had said, the best weapon is love and life, throwing back at the ghost what it no longer has in a defiant expression of being alive and that joy contains which is also of course as grandpa had said a way of honouring the dead resolving to make the most of one’s remaining time in their memory. In any case, Norio discovers that you do not have to continue living in a haunted house but unlike a ghost are in fact free to leave the scene of trauma and seek new happiness in a less upsetting place.

House of Sayuri screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs (０課の女　赤い手錠, Yukio Noda, 1974)

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“Your sense of duty is too strong! The world isn’t a pretty place,” barks an irate policeman, scolding a female officer with a tendency to take things, in his view at least, too far. Yukio Noda’s kidnap drama Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs (０課の女　赤い手錠, Zeroka no onna: Akai Tejo) is on the extreme end of pinky violence and soaked in the political concerns of the 1970s along with all their concurrent paranoia but nevertheless positions its fearless avenger as a lone arbiter of justice in an incredibly unjust world. 

We know this from the start as we see Zero (Miki Sugimoto) almost date raped by an apparent serial killer who has his own torture suitcase and apparently killed her friend. Knowing that he is a diplomat and therefore has diplomatic immunity, she simply shoots him in the balls in the film’s extraordinary opening sequence. But even though it could be argued what she did was self-defence, Zero is kicked off the force and thrown into a woman’s prison for an indefinite period of detention to keep the lid on any possible scandal. Zero is only reprieved when the daughter of a politician is kidnapped by thugs and, wanting to keep things quiet, they need someone to rescue her and also wipe out all of the kidnappers to ensure no one ever finds out.

Kyoko (Hiromi Kishi), the politician’s daughter, claims that her father will do “anything” to ingratiate himself with the prime minister and has in fact already arranged her marriage to his son. Kyoko, however, already has a boyfriend who, inconveniently, is quite obviously a student protestor given his yellow construction hat and other paraphernalia. The pair are accosted while sitting in a car near an old American base, and as Kyoko is gang raped, firstly by the gang leader Nakahara (Eiji Go) who is wearing a hoodie with the words US Navy printed on the back, US planes fly over her as if she were being raped by America in an obvious metaphor for the legacy of the occupation. 

Indeed, the flashbacks later experienced by Nakahara are of his mother whom he describes as a sex worker who worked at the base suggesting a very literal allusion to the corrupting influence of American servicemen. The gang operate out of a bar called “Manhattan” which is surrounded by other similar bars with Western names in a neon-lit area, while they constantly run across various signs written in English in fact peeing directly on a no peeing sign outside a largely disused residential area on the edge of the base where they later take hostage some kind of amateur dramatics / English-language class currently in the middle of a production of Romeo and Juliet. 

Yet the big bad turns out to be essentially homegrown in the form of the corrupt lackey policeman Osaka, and the politician Nagumo (Tetsuro Tanba), who is more concerned with his political capital than his daughter’s safety keen that the police keep everything out of the papers otherwise the wedding will be called off and he’ll have a problem with the prime minister. Seeing a very pale Kyoko, her clothes torn, barely conscious having been drugged by the gang, he says he no longer cares to think of her as his daughter and perhaps it would be better if she simply passed away in an “accident”, instructing Osaka to care of loose ends like Zero too. 

It’s very clear that women’s lives have little currency in this very patriarchal world, something Zero seems to know all too well even if at the beginning of the film she was content to work for the oppressive organisation of the police force though she later tears up her warrant card in disgust. The fact that division zero, operating like a secret police force on the behalf of an authoritarian government, exists at all is a clear indication that this is already a police state though one subverted by Zero who uses her red handcuffs to deliver ironic justice to all those who deserve it. Then again, unlike other pinky violence films there’s precious little solidarity that arises between herself and Kyoko whom she later describes as nothing more her mission objective seemingly caring little for her as a fellow human being. Noda cuts back between the Diet building and police HQ as if actively critiquing the latent authoritarianism of the early 70s society but even if Nagumo gets a kind of comeuppance it’s abundantly clear that nothing really will change and Zero stands alone wilfully freeing herself of the handcuffs of a controlling society. 

A Quiet Life (静かな生活, Juzo Itami, 1995)

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“One person is not a tool for another” the heroine of Juzo Itami’s 1995 melodrama A Quiet Life (静かな生活, Shizukana Seikatsu) eventually writes in her diary quoting her novelist father but also reflecting on herself and her life in which some have indeed attempted to use others for their own ends. Outside of international mega hit Tampopo, Itami is best known for a series of anarchic comedies each starring his wife Nobuko Miyamoto as forthright woman tackling the ills of contemporary Japan from tax evasion and increasingly amoral capitalism to the yakuza and shady cults. Based on a novel by his brother-in-law Kenzaburo Oe, A Quiet Life is therefore something of an outlier yet once again addresses a number of social issues from treatment of disability in the contemporary society to the relationships between parents and children and the dangers of a rapidly modernising society. 

Middle daughter Ma (Hinako Saeki) lives in a large Western-style in the country with her father, internationally renowned author K (Tsutomu Yamazaki), mother and two brothers the oldest of which, Eeyore, has some learning difficulties but is largely independent. Nevertheless, when K, who is experiencing a moment of crisis that leads him to consider suicide when he is unable to fix a problem with the drains and has to resort to a plumber, is offered a job at a university in Australia Ma is left in charge at home and therefore responsible for her brother. Though the family fully accepts Eeyore, it’s clear the world around them is not always so kind. As they approach a centre for the disabled on a walk, others around them openly express disgust, suggesting they are a “bad influence” and wanting to leave the area entirely. 

Meanwhile as the film opens two children are locked together in a game of magnets, a collection of adults attempting to pull them apart by force. The shot is later repeated as Eeyore holds his sister in the rain following a traumatic and unexpected incident and demonstrating the close and affectionate bond between the siblings. Yet there is an uncomfortable suggestion from some that Ma is being asked to sacrifice her life to look after her brother who after all is unlikely to marry and will require additional care as long he lives, while she is perhaps slightly overprotective and wilfully self-sacrificing. “Don’t expect another human to sacrifice their life for you” goes another of her father’s lines, “to expect such a thing is the worst kind of depravity”, the family otherwise committed to the insistence that Eeyore has his own life and interiority which must neither be sacrificed, nor sacrificed for, for to do so would be to deny his personhood. Eeyore is not a tool for Ma’s charity nor is she a tool for the family’s duty towards him. 

Nevertheless even she is not immune to negative stereotyping becoming increasingly concerned that her now adult brother may pose a threat to the local community in his lack of understanding and inability to control his impulses. When a child molester is on the loose in the village, she is terrified Eeyore may be involved having read a newspaper report about a similar crime committed by someone with learning difficulties uncomfortably echoing the prejudice of the walkers by the disabled centre not to mention to middle-aged women who openly gossip about it in front of their house. Meanwhile, her own naivety becomes a threat when she allows a smarmy young man, Arai, to give her brother swimming lessons later learning that he has a grudge against her father who he feels “used” him to facilitate his art having bought and drawn inspiration from his experiences of being accused of a crime but leaving readers with the impression that he was a sex offender. 

Arai may indeed be trying to use her for revenge and at any rate is not all he seems even if the implication of her father’s story is that he wanted to sacrifice himself to save the young man. While K works through his artistic block offscreen aided by his wife (whom he soon forgets once he’s well), Ma has a series of epiphanies of her own over an eventful summer you couldn’t really call “quiet” even if there’s a strange tranquility in its anarchy. Going to some dark and unexpected places, Itami’s gentle dramedy veers away from the zany comedies of his earlier career but discovers a kind of serenity in the quiet of life of the siblings getting on with business of living in the sometimes hostile Japanese countryside. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)