Tag: Japanese

The Extremists’ Opera (過激派オペラ, Junko Emoto, 2016)

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Junko Emoto ironically explores Tokyo’s fringe theatre scene in adapting her semi-biographical novel. Shot with a roving, handheld camera, The Extremists’ Opera (過激派オペラ, Kagekiha Opera) situates itself within an all female, avant-garde experimental theatre company but quickly makes plain that even those with high-minded artistic intentions are not free of the usual human flaws as the borderline abusive, womanising female director finds herself sabotaging everything she’s built through a mix of hubris and wandering desire. 

Blanket Cult are a popular company on the fringe theatre scene with a small following devoted to their art. Former banker Ayako bursts into their office determined on an audition and subsequent career change precisely because she can’t get enough of director/playwright Nao’s experimental plays which, she explains, she believes can stop wars. Nevertheless, it’s not Ayako the team are struck by, but the intense young woman who came in behind her, Haru, who more or less demands to be taken on. Nao is captivated, hiring both women on the spot and vowing to write a new piece with Haru in the lead. Of course, she does this partly for not altogether altruistic reasons. Immediately after the first script meeting she asks Haru to stay behind and then propositions her, directly declaring her love with the justification that she’d rather be upfront rather than waste time during the rehearsal process. Haru tells her that she’s not into women, but Nao doesn’t take no for an answer seemingly oblivious to the fact that what she’s doing is harassment and really she’s no better than any other sleazy male director handing out parts to women she wants to sleep with. 

Nevertheless, her persistence even with its undignified pleading eventually pays off. Haru relents, either because she’s fed up of fending off Nao’s advances or discovering that she is on some level receptive, finding that she does in fact enjoy sex with another woman. She agrees to start dating Nao who declares Haru her muse and the pair move in together but their relationship is threatened by their working environment with its petty jealousies and temptations. Emoto opens the film with a graphic sex scene of two naked women 69-ing, rolling around in the empty environment of the garage the troupe uses to rehearse. The two women are Nao and her previous squeeze, a former leading lady she throws over because of her attraction to Haru whose own desire is perhaps signposted after she walks in on them going for a second round and makes a passive aggressive scene that leads the other woman to warn her that Nao is a heartless womaniser with a habit of bedding her leading ladies, sometimes in the wings. 

Yet it’s not only Nao’s misplaced desire that endangers the troupe but her arrogance and abusive directing style. After their play proves a success, she unwisely gives in to ambition and sells out by allowing a mainstream professional actress, Yurie, to join the troupe, a move which disrupts their dynamic while also inflaming Haru’s jealousy as she begins to wonder if she’s already being replaced. Nao snaps at her team and stops giving them proper direction in favour thinly veiled insults. She repeatedly instructs an actress to lose weight while increasingly allowing Yurie to dominate the rehearsals, accepting all of her ideas even while the other members sceptical. She even goes so far as to abandon her usual thriftiness, purchasing elaborate props such as a large vertical tank which leads her into another possibly inappropriate relationship with an older woman who had been pursuing her. Needless to say, the whole thing blows up in her face, ruining not just her relationship with Haru but that with her theatre company who are now all thoroughly fed up with her mistreatment and have entirely lost respect for her as a person and an artist. 

“If you want to pick a fight with society live in it first,” her benefactor irritatedly tells Nao after she’s thoughtlessly caused offence, reminding her that she lives in a kind of bubble that is the fringe theatre scene. Her only real interaction with someone outside of it is with the estate agent who finds her and Haru a flat and is extremely confused as to why they only need one room if they’ll be living together, concerned that female roommates are a liability because sooner or later one gets a boyfriend and leaves the other in the lurch unable to make the rent alone. Unable to learn her lesson, Nao has furiously energetic sex with an apparently wealthy starstruck fan and then immediately asks for money, perhaps getting a taste of her own medicine when she assures her there’s plenty more where that came from as long as she sees her again and also gives her a part in a play. Playfully ironic with its whimsical score and slightly detached gaze, Emoto’s refreshingly explicit drama is both a mild satire of the avant-garde fringe theatre scene and a takedown of its self-involved director whose inability to separate the creative from the carnal proves her downfall both artistic and emotional. 

Trailer (English subtitles)

She Taught Me Serendipity (今日の空が一番好きとまだ言えない僕は, Akiko Ohku, 2024)

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Akiko Ohku’s quirky dramedies have so far mostly focused on an introverted woman’s quest for love, but with She Taught Me Serendipity (今日の空が一番好きとまだ言えない僕は, Kyo no Sora ga Ichiban Suki to Mada Ienai Boku ha) she moves into new territory in adapting the novel by Shusuke Fukutoku in which an alienated college student is unwittingly caught between two women. Set in the picturesque city of Kyoto, the film echoes the work of Tomihiko Morimi and revels in the power of serendipitous connection but equally the melancholy loneliness that underpins it in the legacy of grief and regret.

Returning after a six-month absence following the death of his grandmother, Konishi (Riku Hagiwara) is indeed at odds with his environment. He walks as if in a fog and is slightly out of tune with the world around him while often carrying an umbrella, or parasol depending on the weather, as a bulwark to protect him from prying eyes. Unlike his classmates, he speaks in the standard dialect rather than with an Eastern-inflection which his only friend Yamane (Kodai Kurosaki) has taken to extremes, describing his manner of speech as “Yamane Dialect”. It’s on campus that he begins catching sight of a young woman Yamane has dubbed the “solo soba” diner who seems to be just as solitary as he is, though the pair later strike up a connection precisely because of their shared sense of alienation.

To that extent, it’s not unreasonable that Konishi might doubt his new friendship with his young woman, Hana (Yuumi Kawai), who seems to be tailor-made for him and appeared seemingly from nowhere during his absence. Meanwhile, he’s resumed his old job at a local bathhouse where he cleans after hours with a girl-named Sacchan (Aoi Ito) who, judging by the looks she exchanges with the owner’s daughter Kaho, is secretly in love with him though he hasn’t noticed. While Hana is like him quiet and mysterious, Sacchan is a live wire, a young woman full of life who can’t stop talking and makes each of their cleaning sessions a riot of fun and silliness. 

But in keeping with these kinds of stories, Konishi suffers from extreme main character syndrome and never really sees either woman as a whole person rather than as an extension of himself. As Sacchan says in a poignant monologue movingly delivered by Aoi Ito, he never even bothered to ask her full name. He promised to buy her dinner to make up for missing shifts and needing extra help, but most likely never planned to follow through, nor did he ever listen to the song she recommended to him, though he went and read the short story Hana referenced right away. On the one level, there was nothing he could do to avoid hurting her feelings when he couldn’t return them, but at the very least he’s been self-involved and insensitive, just as he is when Hana suddenly drops out of contact and he convinces himself she was only hanging out with him as a joke. Rather than process his pain, he lashes out at Yamane instead and almost loses his only remaining friend before finally growing up a bit and making the effort to say sorry. 

The Japanese title translates as something like “I, who still can’t say, ‘Today’s sky is my favourite’,” echoing a common phrase repeated by Hana’s late father and Konishi’s grandmother, and hinting at Konishi’s inability to embrace whatever life gives him and find joy within it. Nevertheless, he does perhaps learn the importance of saying how he feels before it’s too late while taking into account the feelings of others even if his final confession comes at an awkward and insensitive moment, though it’s true enough that he’s really talking to himself. On one of their surreal adventures, he and Hana visit an unusual restaurant where all the dishes have quirky codenames except for one. It turns out the proprietor used to have someone to help him, but for whatever reason they’re not around anymore. Playing with aspect ratios and split screen, Ohku often fills the frame with a sense of absence in which characters simply disappear quite abruptly, echoing the fragility of these connections and, in fact, of everything, but makes plain that the main thing is to embrace them when they come rather than live in the shadow of loss or let the chance for love pass you by in fear of its failure.

She Taught Me Serendipity screened as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Aimitagai (アイミタガイ, Shogo Kusano, 2024)

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When we say, “what goes around comes around”, we usually mean it in a bad way that someone is only getting what they deserve after behaving badly themselves. But the reverse is also true. The smallest acts of kindness people do without thinking can have quite profound effects on the world around them because, in the end, we are all connected. A bereaved father remarks that he thought novels that only had kind-hearted characters were unrealistic, but now he wants to believe that kind of world could exist after realising the impact his late daughter’s kindness had on those around her.

It was Kanami (Sawako Fujima) who saved Azusa (Haru Kuroki) in middle school when she was being bullied for coming from a single-parent family and the pair remained firm friends ever after until Kanami was suddenly killed in an accident while working overseas. Kanami’s loss leaves Azusa struggling to move forward with her life while mired in grief and uncertainty. Having lost her mother some years previously, she has never really dealt with the trauma of her parent’s acrimonious divorce and has a rather cynical view of marriage despite working as a wedding planner where her unmarried status sometimes causes her clients anxiety though it obviously has very little do with her ability to do her job. She’s always been clear with her long-time boyfriend Sumito (Aoi Nakamura) that marriage isn’t something she sees in her future, though he seems to want more commitment, while she repeatedly describes him as “unreliable” and is hesitant to take the next step with their relationship whether it involves getting married or not.

In that sense it’s really Azusa’s inability to surrender herself to the concept of what her grandmother (Jun Fubuki) calls “amai-tagai”, or mutual solidarity, which they experience first-hand while visiting her as another old lady nearby comes rushing in saying her house is on fire. It’s not so much reciprocity as a generalised idea of having each other’s backs, that people help each other as needed without keeping score in much the same way as Azusa was saved by Kanami and as she later realises by Komichi (Mitsuko Kusabue) whose piano-playing soothed her spirit though Komichi intended to play in secret, allowing her music to blend in with the six o’clock chimes as a daily act of atonement for having played the piano for boys who were going off to war many of whom never returned. It is then Azusa who saves Komichi in turn by telling her that she felt comforted by her music and that she does not believe that she has no right to play it simply because of the ways it was misused in the past. 

What Azusa fears is that by getting married she would essentially be cutting herself off from her paternal grandmother who, aside from her aunt (Tamae Ando) who is also Komichi’s housekeeper, is the only other family member she seems to have a meaningful connection with. Unable to let go Kanami, she keeps sending her messages little knowing that her mother is actually reading them and feeling both sorry and grateful that her daughter had such a good friend who like her is also struggling to continue on without her. She and Kanami’s father (Tomorowo Taguchi) find solace in the letters they receive from children at an orphanage where Kanami used to donate cakes and sweets after visiting there on a job. The photos she took are on display at their bathrooms, Azusa said because Kanami wanted them to be in a place where the children felt free to embrace their feelings privately without fear of embarrassment. 

The photographs, letters, and belated gifts are all examples of the ways in which what Kanami sent around is still going around and will continue to do so long after she herself is gone. Through realising the reality of “aimi-tagai”, Azusa learns that the world can also be a kind place, Sumito might be more “reliable” than she thought, and it might not be such a bad idea to trust people after all. Based on the novel by Tei Chujo, the film’s interwoven threads of serendipitous connections and the unexpected results of momentary acts of kindness prove oddly life-affirming if only in the ways in which each realise that Kanami is always with them even if physically absent.

Aimitagai screened as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Kakashi (案山子, Norio Tsuruta, 2001)

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There’s a village in Japan that’s mostly inhabited by scarecrows. One of the last remaining residents began creating them to replace something that had been lost, fashioning effigies of those who had passed away and immortalising them as if clinging to a distant past long before the shadows of rural depopulation were cast over the village. In a way, it’s an expression of grief or at least a lament for a loss of community and a sense of increasing loneliness and isolation. 

Adapted from Junji Ito’s manga, Norio Tsuruta’s Kakashi is also in its way about grief and the way in which it can consume those left behind so that they too have no more desire to live. Dr Miyamori (Kenzo Kawarasaki) later explains that in the village they co-exist with death and he returned to his home town in the hope that he could save his daughter, Izumi (Ko Shibasaki), through its peculiar magic of resurrecting the deceased as human scarecrows. As he freely admits, he could not accept his daughter’s death and so has chosen to stay here in the village though alive himself rather than attempt to remake his life without her.

The village itself appears to exist slightly outside of the mortal realm as Kaoru (Maho Nonami) discovers on encountering the long tunnel that leads to its entrance. Her car breaks down half-way through signalling her liminal status as one who does not yet belong on either side. It’s not quite grief that’s brought her here but still a nagging sense of foreboding in that she’s come in search of her missing brother, Tsuyoshi, after discovering a letter from an old school friend, Izumi, next to his telephone. Kaoru appears confused as to why the letter should be there and travels to the village hoping for answers, assuming that Tsuyoshi (Shunsuke Matsuoka) may have travelled there in search of Izumi.

As the landlady lets her into his empty flat, Kaoru explains that she is his only family and there’s a suggestion that her attachment to him is unnatural, bordering on the incestuous. A policeman taking a look at the photo Kaoru hands him remarks that they look like a couple, which they do, leading her to stuff the photo back in her pocket as if she were embarrassed. To that extent, she’s come to reclaim Tsuyoshi, not just from death, loneliness, grief, and depression, but from Izumi or at least the spectre of her. In life, she feared that Izumi would take him away from her and at least in Izumi’s mind frustrated their romance out of romantic jealously. Dr Miyamori implies it was this sense of despair that contributed to her death and it’s clear that Izumi’s mother also blames Kaoru while Izumi accuses Kaoru of being forever in her way.

But then again, she did not bring Kaoru to the village and is not targeting her personally out of vengeance. Rather, she has moved beyond that as she finally’s about to become “herself” thanks to the village’s dark magic and the following day’s scarecrow festival, and therefore no longer needs to care about the resentments of her mortal life even if her father says that her evil spirit has empowered the town. There is definitely something quite creepy in this weird village with its shades of the Wicker Man in its strange ritual and humanoid effigies where improbable numbers of children softly blow pinwheels under a large windmill that seems to be moving time itself. Tsuruta even borrows a particularly eerie shot from Don’t Look Now and emphasises the liminal qualities of the village in Dr Miyamori’s advice that Kaoru leave as soon as her car is fixed otherwise she may no longer wish to.

The village is apparently full of those like him who are trapped but wilfully so because they no longer desire to leave. Kaoru attempts to help one of them, a young living woman from Hong Kong unable to let go of the memory of her late father whose scarecrow eventually tells her to go. It’s a place for those who have no other place to go to because they cannot let go of their grief and despair. Thus Kaoru is pulled towards the edge of the tunnel, not so much to free her brother as, in a way, herself by allowing her grief to consume her and consenting to live this empty life alongside death rather than allow herself to accept her loss.

Trailer (no subtitles)

The Invisible Half (インビジブルハーフ, Masaki Nishiyama, 2025)

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Most people don’t mean to, but in thinking they’re being nice all they do is make someone feel bad. Like they don’t belong, or there’s something wrong with them. Since returning to Japan from the UK after her parents’ divorce, Elena (Lisa Siera) can’t help thinking everyone’s staring at her. They call her the “gaijin” girl, a derogatory term for someone who is not considered to be Japanese, but Elena isn’t a “foreigner”, not that it matters. On her first day at her new school after leaving the last one due to relentless bullying, the teacher asks her what kind of mixed-ethnicity she is and then asks her to tell her all about England, though she’s been living in Japan for over 10 years and can’t really remember it. Nor can she remember much English, or perhaps simply doesn’t want to talk about it, though there’s no reason why she should anyway. 

Maybe not bringing it up would be worse, but the teacher’s ham-fisted attempts at inclusion only leave Elena feeling othered. These are just a few of the microaggressions she experiences in her daily life and even another girl who tries to make friends with her, Akari (Miyu Okuno), makes a few insensitive remarks like how she’d like to have “a gaijin’s face,” and that it’s not fair because she is Japanese. She also goes straight to using Elena’s first name, which could just be friendliness or possibility circumventing the usual rules of Japanese politeness because they don’t really apply to non-Japanese people implying Akari may not think of her as one. Elena says she just wants “a normal Japanese name”, so her new friend starts calling her “Rena” which Elena seems to like because it feels like acceptance, but is it, really?

In many ways, it’s the Elena/Rena dichotomy that’s at the heart of Masaki Nishiyama’s incredibly accomplished debut as she struggles to accept the “invisible” half of herself that is nevertheless what she thinks everyone is always staring at to the extent that they don’t even really see her. There’s another girl in her class, Ito (Runa Hirasawa), who appears to be a figure of fun who everyone, including Elena, avoids and considers “weird”. It’s after the class bullies take Ito’s phone and put it in Elena’s bag to kill two birds with one stone that Elena begins to feel especially haunted. A monster with a bandaged face she can only see when she’s holding her phone begins stalking her, leaving her in a permanent state of agitation.

The phone is otherwise a source of anxiety as it’s many through group chats, text messages, and social media that bullying takes place. Elena firmly believes that the monster is real, though in other ways it reflects her own sense of internal discomfort in being unable to accept what she perceives as two sides of herself as an integrated whole. Her not altogether sympathetic mother can’t begin to imagine what she’s going through, and there’s another part of her that wonders if she should have stayed with her father, though the situation may not have been much different in the UK. Her well-meaning teacher tells her she should learn to trust adults more, and asks why Elena is keeping things from her in a way that makes it sound like a personal slight or in someway a malicious act on Elena’s part. Elena replies it’s because she also Japanese, which is to say not someone Elena currently feels she can trust while also implying that Elena also does not quite consider herself to be “Japanese”.

The lumbering, bandaged monster reflects the way in which she is pursued by her own uncertain identity while craving acceptance from others but at the same time afraid to accept it. She doubts Akari’s sincerity and worries that her overtures of friendship are a prelude to a long-form pattern of bullying, but it’s finally Akari who is prepared to help her face her monster in accepting that it actually exists. Faced with another bandaged face, Elena comes to accept it as a friend along with embracing her whole self including her full name. Filled with a genuine sense of unease, Nishiyama’s eerie debut is both an exploration of societal prejudice and a coming-of-age ghost story in which a young woman learns to make her own place to belong regardless of the gaze of others.

The Invisible Half screened as part of this year’s Raindance Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Whole Family Works (はたらく一家, Mikio Naruse, 1939)

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A young man becomes fed up with the constraints placed on his life and asks for the opportunity to improve his circumstances, but knows that to do so will leave his family at a disadvantage, at least in the short term. Is his request selfish, or are his parents selfish for exploiting the labour of their children and thereby impeding their progress in the world? As in many of Naruse’s films, the great enemy is poverty, but as the wise teacher Mr Washio says, the solution would be easy if Ishimura had a drinking problem or Kiichi were lazy but the situation is too complicated for such a simple adjudication.

Ishimura (Musei Tokugawa) has a job, but his wages are low and he has nine children to support along with elderly parents who are also still working. Fourth son Eisaku (Takeshi Hirata) tells his mother (Noriko Honma) that he doesn’t want to go to the factory and would like to carry on to middle school with his friends, but she tells him he’s being selfish and childish and that all his brothers began working after primary school. Perhaps because the burden disproportionally falls on her, it’s the mother who is most acutely obsessed with money and the most controlling of her children. Ishimura is more of a soft touch and genuinely sorry that he can’t really agree to oldest son Kiichi’s (Akira Ubukata) request to take five years off to study because the family can’t survive without his wages.

But Kiichi’s problem is that he’s trapped in a dead-end job. There’s no possibility of advancement and his wages won’t ever change. He could work there 50 years and never be able to support a family of his own. His idea is that he wants to become an electrician which he believes will be a steady occupation that will pay enough to allow him to take care of his parents when they’re old and also get married. He thinks if he doesn’t do something now, he’ll be trapped in this life forever and never escape his parents’ yoke. Nevertheless, he worries about whether his desire is “filial” or not and feels a tremendous amount of guilt and frustration that sends him to drink.

Ishimura also knows that if he agrees to Kiichi’s request, he’ll have to say yes to the others too. All the boys have dreams of their own with young Noboru (Seikichi Minami) even hoping to become a lawyer, while Genji (Kaoru Ito) and his younger brother Kokichi (Seiichiro Bando) are intent on joining the armed forces which is perhaps a nod to the rising militarism of the age. Scenes of imagined warfare leave a less aspirational vision of the military, though there hints of it throughout the boys’ lives through magazines and children’s literature such as the book Mr Washio gives to Eisaku. The household becomes a kind of microcosm of a totalitarian regime that controls the boys’ lives and futures, causing them to form a conspiratorial faction talking over their mutual dissatisfaction in the coffeehouse opposite run by Genji’s old school friend Mitsuko (Sumie Tsubaki) who has a crush on Kiichi. Eisaku has been patiently saving his allowance, but his mother finds out and so he blows the whole lot taking his brothers out for dinner rather than allow her to “borrow” any more of his money to which she feels herself entitled.

It’s the entitlement that’s the point. The parents expect the children to work without giving them any choice and thereby deny them the opportunity of working towards their own futures. Kiichi sees the big picture and wants to improve his circumstances, but does so because he wants to work for his family. He doesn’t intend to abandon them and chase his own success, he just wants to be able to provide for himself and at least have enough to eat. Mr Washio says he won’t tell him what to do, but also that there’s no rush, which seems like an intrusion from the censor’s board to reinforce the importance of filial piety over individualistic desire but also doesn’t deny that Kiichi has a point and as a grown man a right to freedom and independence. Nevertheless, there’s a subversive tension in the confrontation scene as the family sits in silence as the clock ticks away on the wall and the rain beats down outside. The brothers roll around in exuberance upstairs, while their defeated parents can only look up in resignation to their broken authority as the children’s revolution begins to take hold.

The Whole Family Works screened at Metrograph as part of Mikio Naruse: The World Betrays Us – Part II.

Morning’s Tree-Lined Street (朝の並木路, Mikio Naruse, 1936)

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A country girl comes to the city in search of a more glamorous life but largely finds only disillusionment and disappointment in Naruse’s 1936 drama Morning’s Tree-lined Street (朝の並木路, Ashita no Namikimichi). Naruse depicts Chiyo’s (Sachiko Chiba) spiritual journey literally as she takes the bus from her rural hometown all wide-eyed wonder and then arrives in the city to be bothered by a homeless man and then walk into a less salubrious area of the city with only her friend’s address to go on. 

In her hometown, everyone thinks Hisako (Ranko Akagi) works in a big office in Marunouchi, but in reality she’s now working in a hostess bar under the name “Shigeko.” Nevertheless, despite a degree of shame in her circumstances, Hisako doesn’t reject Chiyo and isn’t angry that she’s come and found out her secret. She talks her landlady, Okada, into letting her stay but discourages her from working in the bar. The current economic depression is evident in the fact that the bar isn’t doing so well and never has many customers, yet the “help wanted’ sign keeps going up and down outside. There’s even a running gag that the cook makes a permanent version so they won’t waste so much paper, only he spells “hostess” wrong, so they have to take it down anyway. 

The help wanted sign is a harbinger of doom for Chiyo who, it seems, is being drawn towards this kind of life. As Hisako had told her, it’s impossible for a country girl to find a job when there are already so many “desperate” people in Tokyo, and at the grand old age of 22 Chiyo is worried that she’s simply too old to find employment. By the standards of the time, she may be considered on the older side not to be married, and indeed Hisako tells her she’d be better off to go home and find a husband, but Chiyo wants both more and to find a grand romance. She romanticises an idea of poverty believing that she could be happy with a man she truly loved even if they had no money. Hisako doesn’t disillusion her, but may be inwardly rolling her eyes at her naivety. She has a boyfriend already, but he’s no good. He keeps turning up and pestering her for money which might be one reason Hisako can’t escape the life of a bar girl.

It is indeed money that gets in the way everyone’s relationships. Hisako reads in the paper about a salaryman who embezzled money to spend at a hostess bar and then died in a double suicide with one of the women who worked there. The dark fantasy the bar represents echoes the wider despair in the society coloured by economic depression and broken dreams in which the fantasy version of Ogawa admits that his life was without hope or joy. Chiyo gets close to a nice young man who comes into the bar who tries but fails to find her a legit job in an office in attempt to save her from becoming a bar girl. In the end, she gives in and becomes one. Ogawa says he thinks no less of her, but begins coming to the bar more often and appears to be spending beyond his means even while Chiyo warns him not to waste his money. 

What happens next turns out to be a cinematic fantasy informed by Chiyo’s naive desires in which Ogawa agrees to marry her but has already ruined himself by embezzling public funds and later asks her to die with him while she pleads that as long as they have love poverty is nothing to fear. In many ways, the dream shatters her illusions and confronts her with the stark reality of her life in playing out a best/worst scenario in which Ogawa is so deeply in love with her that willingly walks to his destruction, which is at least preferable to the truth, which is as Hisako says that a man may seem honest and sincere but will turn out to be a coward or else he’ll cheat on you.

Unable to find employment nor rely on men, the women have only each other and the solidarity of those like Mrs Okada her running a small bar in this rundown corner of the city where dreams go to die. Chiyo takes to her new life a little more than to her liking. She turns to Hisako and asks if she looks like a bad girl, fearful that it’s already changed her and it’s no longer possible to go back to being the innocent country girl who wanted a bigger life in the city. Her conviction might be brought home to her by the fact that Ogawa is promoted and sent out of Tokyo but doesn’t ask her to come with him, only leave his address in case she ever feels like writing. But at the same time it spurs her into a flurry of false positivity, committing herself to the job search despite knowing that it’s almost certainly futile. Throwing his note into the river and letting it flow away, she both sees through the naivety of her dream of escape through romance and also resigns herself to the life of a bar girl, like Hisako with nowhere else to go and no possibility of return only the vague and far off hope of salvation through employment.

Morning’s Tree-Lined Street screens 21st June at New York’s Metrograph as part of Mikio Naruse: The World Betrays Us – Part II.

Images: Collection of National Film Archive of Japan.

Love Song from Hiroshima (惑星ラブソング, Hideyuki Tokigawa, 2024)

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Just because we are far apart, it doesn’t mean we aren’t important to each other, according to an interplanetary messenger hoping to avoid the Earth’s apparently imminent destruction in Hideyuki Tokigawa’s gentle ode for world peace, Love Song From Hiroshima (惑星ラブソング, Wakusei Love Song). Twenty-something Mocchi (Ryosuke Sota) says he’s sick of hearing about the legacy of the atomic bomb, but is himself stuck in the past just as the city is frozen in time.

According to his friend Ayaka (Shiori Akita) who is thinking about studying abroad in the US, Mocchi gives up on things too easily and can’t decide on his path in life. Of course, he doesn’t really want her to go to America because he’s in love with her and too shy to say, but agrees to help her with a social media campaign to get over 100,000 likes and impress her boss so he’ll fund her travel. That’s how they end up meeting “John” (Chase Ziegler), a very weird “American” tourist whom they decide to escort around Hiroshima showing him typically touristic things like getting okonomiyaki which they then post on her social media channels. 

Meanwhile, a shady American agency is on a UFO alert in Japan which links back to a little boy’s fascination with aliens even though his friends keep making fun of him because of it despite spreading their own kinds of urban legends. Yuya is obsessed with the idea of extraterrestrial life while also uncomfortable with the scarred city around him. At his school there are a pair of burnt but surviving trees that have become symbols of resilience and survival, though Yuya hates going to the Peace Park and talking about the bomb because it’s scary. According to his mother, his great-grandmother never liked to talk about the war, though it seems she has told the man looking after her at the care home about her carefree childhood of roller skating in the car-free streets. In a brief moment of lucidity, she turns to Yuya and asks him if his aliens can travel in time, why can’t they go back and stop the bomb from falling. 

The irony is that Mocchi’s sick of everyone talking about the bomb all the time, but it’s still a painful subject for many including the taxi driver who drives Yuya and his mother home. As soon as she starts talking about what she does know about her grandmother in the war, she can feel him looking back at her in the rearview mirror and changes the subject, promising to tell Yuya the rest later when they’re on their own. In his dreams, Yuya ends up chasing after his great-grandmother as a school girl as she tells him that there used to be sweet shops, a barber’s, and a cinema where the Peace Park is now. 

The aliens say that the bomb twisted the fabric of time and space, creating a barrier which they cannot move beyond, while there is another fixed point in the future with seemingly nothing beyond it. We cannot change the past, the aliens admit, but we can change the future. The film’s Japanese title is more like “interplanetary love song”, and it turns out that a universe without the Earth in it is like the world without George Bailey. All the planets that the Earth would have helped will also be lost along with countless other possibilities throughout the universe. 

Mocchi still thinks it’s pointless to “pray” for peace, and that as all anyone in Hiroshima ever seems to talk about is the bomb, he doesn’t see how raising awareness could make much difference. Nevertheless, even he can’t help being moved by the aliens’ opening manoeuvre which cures his cynicism by fulfilling the childhood dream he’d more or less forgotten. Mocchi and Ayaka argue about the realities of nuclear deterrents and geopolitical manoeuvring even if they each agree on the horror of war. Ayaka says she loves her city because it represents peace,  and it is indeed a kind of love song from Hiroshima that they send around the world as a plea for a world without war. Telling Mochi to come up with ways to enact world peace on his own might seem a little unfair, but then it’s true enough it’s something we all have to think about to save the future from the mistakes of the past.

Love Song from Hiroshima screens 24th June as part of this year’s Raindance Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

90 Years Old – So What? (九十歳。何がめでたい, Tetsu Maeda, 2024)

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Everyone keeps congratulating Aiko Sato (Mitsuko Kusabue) on reaching 90, but she can’t see what’s so special about it. Having retired from writing after publishing her last novel at 88, she’s really feeling her age and has little desire to anything but sit around waiting to die. That is, until she’s badgered into picking up her pen by a down on his luck, “dinosaur” editor certain that her words of wisdom will strike a chord with the young people of today.

Marking the 90th birthday of its leading lady Mitsuko Kusabue and directed by comedy master Tetsu Maeda, the film takes its name from a collection of essays published under the title “90 Years Old, So What?” which largely deal with what it’s like to be old in the contemporary society along with the way things have changed or not in Japan over the last 90 years. It does not, however, shy away from the physical toll of ageing despite Kusabue’s sprightliness or the undimmed acuity of Aiko whose only barrier to writing is that she fears she’s run out of things to say and the energy to write them. During her retirement, she remarks on the fact that her legs and back hurt while she also has a heart condition and everything just feels like too much bother. Her daughter Kyoko (Miki Maya), who lives with her along with her twenty-something daughter Momoko (Sawako Fujima), asks her why she doesn’t go out to meet a friend, but as Aiko says, most of her friends have already passed on or like her don’t really have the energy to leave the house. 

In many ways, her age isolates her as she finds herself slightly at odds with the contemporary society. She turns the television up louder because she finds it difficult to understand what younger people are saying and doesn’t get why they stare at their phones all the time. Though she manages most things for herself, she has to call repair people, which costs money, if something breaks down while her daughter’s not around to fix it, even if it’s something as simple as a paper jam in a fax machine or pushing the off button on the TV too hard so it won’t turn back on again. Nevertheless, so intent is she on “enjoying” her retirement that she repeatedly turns down the entreaties of a young man from her publisher’s who wants her to write a column and always turns up with fancy sweets which are, as she says, well-considered gifts, but also a little soulless and superficial being driven by fashionable trends of which Aiko knows nothing and by which she is not really impressed.

There is something quite interesting about the contrast between herself and fifty-something Yoshikawa (Toshiaki Karasawa) who is also a man behind the times and a relic of the patriarchal culture she railed against in her writing and rejected in her personal life, divorcing two husbands and going on to raise her daughter alone. In the opening scenes, she reads an entry from an advice column about a woman who’s sick of her husband of 20 years because he’s a chauvinist who dumps all of the domestic responsibilities onto her while looking down on her because of it. Aiko tuts and contradicts the advice of the columnist, remarking that the answer is simple. She should just tell him to his face that she hates him and then leave. Nevertheless, the fact remains that not all that much has changed since she was young. The husband’s behaviour is considered “normal”, while the woman’s desire to be treated with respect or leave her marriage is not. Yoshikawa is effectively demoted because he has no idea that his treatment of a female employee amounts to workplace bullying and sexual harassment even if he didn’t intend that way because he’s trapped within this old-fashioned patriarchal ideal and is unable to see that his behaviour is not acceptable nor that he’s been taking his family for granted while considering only his own needs and positioning himself as the provider. 

Yet it’s 90-year-old Aiko rather than his humiliating demotion or the failure of his marriage who begins to show him the error of his ways by accepting him into her own family like a lonely stray. Aiko’s essays don’t really say that everything was better in the past, even if she’s confused by modern people who are annoyed by the cheerful sounds of children playing and a city alive with life because she remembers how everything went quiet during the war and how depressing that could be. But she does sometimes think that progress has gone far enough and things were better when people had more time for patience with each other. That said, patience is one of the things Aiko has no time for, advising Yoshikawa to charge forward like a wild boar because one of the benefits of age is that you just don’t care anymore what anyone thinks so get ready to annoy people or exasperate them but carry on living life to the full. Ironically, that might be a gift that he gave her by convincing her to write again which returned purpose to her life and gave her a reason to engage again with the world around her lifting her depression and making her feel as if she still mattered. The real Aiko turned 100 in 2023 and carried on writing, while 90-year-old Kusakabe is herself undergoing something of a career resurgence in recent years proving that even if you’re 90 years old, so what? There’s still a lot of life left to be lived and you might as well carry on living it doing what you love for as long as you can.

90 Years Old – So What? screens 21st June as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Ravens (レイブンズ, Mark Gill, 2024)

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“All I see are self portraits”, the hero’s by then former wife cuttingly remarks on visiting his comeback exhibition in the company of her new husband, seemingly a much more conventional businessman. Japanese films about photographers are similar to those other countries make about writers in that their protagonists are often very flawed people, tortured artists consumed by their own trauma and often turning to drink at the expense of their personal relationships. Tadanobo Asano has in fact played similar roles a few times before. In Yoichi Higashi’s Wandering Home, he played real life war correspondent Yasuyuki Tsukahara who passed away from kidney cancer at the age of 42 after years of alcohol dependency, while in 1999’s One Step on a Mine, It’s All Over he played Taizo Ichinose whose obsession with getting a photograph of Angkor Wat eventually results in his death.

Masahisa Fukase was one of the key photographers of the post-war era and also an incredibly troubled soul. The conceit of Mark Gill’s Ravens (レイブンズ) is that Fukase is accompanied by a giant, anthropomorphised, English-speaking raven (José Luis Ferrer) who gives voice to his darkest thoughts and impulses. A magazine profile describes Fuksase’s work as having dark and occult influences, which the film attributes to the fact that his incredibly conservative father (Kanji Furutachi) used to lock him inside a more literal dark room as a punishment when he was a child. 

Like many of his contemporaries, Fukase’s photographs often express the widening gap between the traditional and the modern in the changing post-war society and the film also uses many of his motifs such as his family photographs to express the changing dynamics between them. Fukase himself is caught in the nexus of this continuing battle in inheriting the legacy of his father’s war trauma. A heavy drinking, violent man, Sukezo insists that as the oldest son Fukase must take over their family photography studio and that taking photogaps is a commercial activity not an artististic one. Fukase’s wife and muse Yoko (Kumi Takiuchi) often says the same thing, undercutting Fukase’s sense of purpose in his work even while he also denies Yoko’s role as a collaborator rather than simply as a subject. “Any woman will do,” the Raven tells him though that turns out not quite to be the case. 

Yoko complains that that Fukase never really looks at her but sees the world abstractedly through the lens of his camera which is really just another way of avoiding reality. She thinks she begins to understand him after belatedly meeting Fukase’s family years after their marriage and witnessing one of his father’s drunken rages first-hand, but it only seems to push them further apart. Despite his claims of artistry, Fukase quickly becomes jealous of the attention Yoko attracts as the star of his photographs as if she has eclipsed him, the artist, and can no longer be controlled by his camera. He clearly wanted the fame and acclaim through his success only seems to deepen his self-loathing and desire for death. His father had told that a man who failed to achieve success by 40 should kill himself, though when Fukase does eventually attempt to take his own life he does so by hanging, hoping that his assistant will photograph it, rather than by using the sword his father shoved at him.

Though Fukase describes Yoko as a very modern woman she too is caught by this cycle in that her mother tells her it’s a wife’s duty to forgive her husband even after he wounds with a knife during a drug-fuelled psychotic episode. Despite separating from him, Yoko continues to visit Fukase in the hospital where he remains after suffering a traumatic brain injury until his eventual death in 2012. In its way, it’s a frustrated love story in which the relationship between them is disrupted by the intrusion of outdated social codes, generational trauma, and Fukase’s own demons which appear to have been with him since childhood. The conviction that Yoko comes to is that all his pictures are actually reflections of himself and that he is incapable of seeing the world through any other lens even as he tells her that the sky is just the sky and ravens are just ravens, nothing means anything. He tells his assistant that he thought he was in search of death the whole time, but maybe it was death that was looking for him. Dreamlike and ethereal, Gill weaves back and fore throughout Fukase’s life from his conservative upbringing to the heady 1970s and gradual comedown of his later years before finally discovering a melancholy sense of serenity as Fukase, finally, dares to gaze back into the lens.

Ravens screens 20th June as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

International trailer (dialogue free)