Tag: Japanese

Back To That Day (幕が下りたら会いましょう, Seira Maeda, 2021)

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A young woman facing a life crisis is forced to reevaluate her relationships with art, friends, and family after learning that her estranged younger sister has suddenly passed away in Seira Maeda’s indie drama, Back to that Day (幕が下りたら会いましょう, Maku ga Oritara Aimasho). Facing a patriarchal society, the young women at the film’s centre wonder if it’s better to chase your dreams even if they won’t come true or contend with the unfair demands of contemporary salaryman culture in the hope of achieving conventional success and a comfortable life. 

At around thirty, Manami (Rena Matsui) is beginning to lose patience with herself feeling that she’s achieved little in her career as a theatre director in the last 10 years while continuing to work part time at her mother’s hair salon. Her younger sister, Nao (Miwako Kakei), left abruptly for the city some time previously and the pair have hardly spoken since partly as we discover because of a high school falling out that continues to play on Masami’s mind in undermining her sense of confidence in her art. 

The two women have in many ways chosen different paths, Nao striking out by heading to the city and getting a regular office job and Manami staying at home trying to make it work in theatre but finding herself treading water. On the night that Nao dies, the sisters mirror each other each black out drunk collapsed in the street but only one of them is alone which in the end perhaps makes all the difference. Out to dinner with members of her theatre troupe celebrating an engagement, Manami has far too much to drink, much more than than anyone else or than is really appropriate becoming embarrassing in her belligerence as she lays into even her closest friends while others wonder why they bother with the troupe at all now that most of them are ageing out of their carefree days, have full-time paying jobs and growing familial responsibilities to take of. 

Nao, meanwhile as we discover, was pressured into drinking more than was wise by her boss at a semi-compulsory work do, an all too common form of power play in the contemporary working culture. Carrying her own share of guilt, Manami is alerted to this hidden source of her sister’s suffering by one of Nao’s colleagues, Mihashi (Manami Enosawa), who alone attended the funeral. Facing the same continued harassment, Mihashi is determined to confront her boss with the help of Niiyama (Kenta Kiguchi), an activist working on behalf of employees experiencing workplace bullying, but is later blamed herself with the implication that Nao drank on her behalf while she perhaps should have stayed to make sure she was alright before leaving for the last train. Her colleagues insist that Nao seemed cheerful and engaged with the party, while Manami and her actress friend Sanae (Nanami Hidaka) wonder if she wasn’t just playing the part, that in feeling disconnected from her family she wanted to feel accepted by those around her. 

In an unexpected turn of events, however, Manami decides to not to take Nao’s employer to task or attempt to change a dangerous and outdated workplace culture but to try and make peace with difficult relationship they had through restaging the high school play that set them apart which as it turns out was actually written by Nao but for which Manami had taken credit. Along the way she’s led towards a more commercial path by the duplicitous Niiyama who turns out to be a bit of a sleaze and not much better than those he claimed to be challenging. What she discovers is that restaging Nao’s play may not be the best way to honour her, gradually working through her grief and guilt by writing an original piece inspired by their relationship while reconsidering herself and her life up to that point. Of course, in one sense, she reduces Nao to a plot device in the mere motivation for her own creative rejuvenation while partially letting herself off the hook in discovering a family secret that explains a lot about her difficult relationship with her mother but does at least allow her come to terms with her sister’s death in letting her burn out bright just as in the alternate ending she’d crafted for Anna Karenina as a woman driven to extremes by the strictures of her society. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Hotel Iris (艾莉絲旅館, Hiroshi Okuhara, 2021)

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You can check out any time you like, but you can never really leave the titular Hotel Iris (艾莉絲旅館) at the centre of centre of Hiroshi Okuhara’s Taiwan-set erotic mystery drama adapted from the novel by Yoko Ogawa. At least, so it seems to be for heroine Mari (Lucia), a youngish woman stultified by a dull existence and controlling, possessive mother while haunted by the memory of her late father murdered when she was still a child. The goddess Iris, so we’re told, could fly to any place she wanted on her rainbow wings as perhaps does Mari, in a sense, in her circular, sado-masochistic, and largely epistolary romance with a middle-aged Japanese translator of Russian literature (Masatoshi Nagase). 

On an otherwise dull if stormy night, Mari is alerted by the sound of a woman screaming while manning the front desk. On investigation she finds an older gentleman violently beating a sex worker who manages to escape down the stairs while he calmly walks his way out. Despite this violent, dangerous episode Mari is intrigued rather than frightened, handed a crumpled note and drawn to the malevolent presence. Spotting him in the town she follows him to the beach where he explains he lives on a near by island across a makeshift bridge cut off at high tide which he likens to that of Iris’ rainbow connecting the worlds of the living and the dead. 

Mari may in a sense be chasing death in the figure of the middle-aged man who also obviously recalls the image of her absent father, she taking him on a kind of date to ice cream (which he does not appear to enjoy) by the sea as her father had done when she was a child. Yet the relationship that develops between them is erotic rather than romantic, Mari discovering a sense of empowerment in submission to the older man’s sexualised violence as he strips and binds her, tearing her clothes while watching himself in the mirror.

The presence of mirrors is central to their relationship, or perhaps to Mari’s fantasy as she reflects on the multiplicities of self it offers her along with a sense of endlessness as if she and the middle-aged man had begun to inhabit a world of two behind the glass. When she questions his true identity he replies only “I am You” which she later returns to him, “You are me”, signalling the selflessness which now exists between them if also leading us to question how much of this is happening merely in Mari’s mind bored behind the counter of the Iris and longing for escape. She borrows the name of an absent childhood friend, “Mary”, for her correspondence with the middle-aged man in order to keep her relationship with him secret from her mother while the main character in his book is also co-incidentally named “Mari” giving her at least three mirrored personas in this already complicated relationship one of which actively controlled by the middle-aged man and another by her mother. 

Meanwhile Mari begins to doubt him, witnessing a display of irrational violence and later hearing that the body of another sex worker has been discovered in the town. He told her he had no family since his wife passed away but turns out to have a mute nephew who later claims to be his stepson said to have lost his tongue to cancer though we later wonder if that is really case. In seducing the nephew/stepson she takes on a more dominant, masculinised role while he is later feminised by the middle-aged man if also becoming an embodiment of the triangular griefs that bind them, the boy for his mother, Mari for her father, and the middle-aged man for the wife is rumoured to have killed. 

Okuhara is not so much interested in solving the literal mystery of the middle-aged man’s potential as a covert serial killer as exposing Mari’s inner psychodrama as she attempts to process the unanswered questions of her father’s death, literally haunted by the image of him wondering whether or not she as loved as a child while straining to break free of her mother’s controlling impulses but otherwise trapped within the oppressive atmosphere of the Hotel Iris. Caught between Taiwan and Japan, Mari occupies a liminal state of constant inertia while spreading her rainbow wings in search of danger and excitement. Shot with a moody ethereality, Okuhara’s poetic psychodrama captures an almost gothic sense of intensity as the heroine investigates the mystery of herself through transgressive relationships with the living and the dead on permanently shifting sands. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Inferno (地獄, Tatsumi Kumashiro, 1979)

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No one can escape from their sins according to the ominous voiceover that opens Tatsumi Kumashiro’s loose reimagining of Nobuo Nakagawa’s Jigoku, The Inferno (地獄, Jigoku). Then again, some of these “sins” seem worse than others, so why is it that a woman must bear a heavy burden for adulterous transgression while the man who killed her seemingly suffers far less? Perhaps hell, in this case, is born of conservative social attitudes more than anything else besides the darker elements of the human heart such as jealousy and romantic humiliation. 

Those negative emotions are however as old as time as reflected in the folk song which opens the film about a young couple, though not the young couple currently onscreen, who are eloping because their incestuous desire is not accepted by the world around them. The connection between the couple onscreen might also be deemed semi-incestuous for Ryuzo (Ken Nishida) has run off with the wife of his brother, Miho (Mieko Harada), who is carrying (what she claims to be) Ryuzo’s child. Unpei (Kunie Tanaka), the brother, finally catches up with them and shoots Ryuzo with a shot gun. Miho tries to escape, but her foot is caught in a bear trap and Unpei decides to leave here there to die, while Ryuzo’s jealous wife Shima (Kyoko Kishida) later does the same. The body is found by local hunters, and in a strange miracle the baby is born from Miho’s dead body while Miho is dragged to hell for her “sins” where she learns that her baby has been born in hell but remains above. Not knowing what to do, the locals give the baby, Aki, to Shima but she obviously doesn’t want it and so swaps it with a foundling thanks to a weird old man, Yamachi, coming to love this other child, Kumi, as a daughter. 

This is quite literally a tale of the sins of the parents being visited on the child, the 20-year old Aki (Mieko Harada) later lamenting that she has no identity of her own and is solely a vehicle for her mother’s revenge. Though she apparently ends up in the same rural town “by chance” knowing nothing of her past, she resembles her mother physically and discovers she has some of her talents such as an innate ability to play the shamisen. What she also has is a trance-like lust that bewitches the men around her, though this is in a sense complicated by the fact it does not seem to be of her own volition so much so as a manifestation of her mother’s curse. Thus she ends up sleeping with the vulgar younger brother of the man she actually likes, Suchio, who in truly ironic fashion is actually her half-brother. She describes herself as having her mother’s “tainted blood”, while Shima later adds in a degree of class and social snobbery revealing that Miho had been a geisha Unpei unwisely fell for and was unworthy even of being a maid in their upper-middle class household let alone the wife of the second son. 

For all of her resentment, Shima is otherwise a loving mother to her sons and even to Kumi whom she is able to accept as a daughter in a way she would never have accepted Aki who was after all an embodiment of her husband’s betrayal. Colder and more austere than Aki or Miho would seem to be, she clings to the mummified body of her husband kept in a secret vault as a secret triumph over her humiliation laughingly remarking that now he’s hers forever and will never cheat on her again. Even if she left Miho to die, Shima does not particularly resist her fate well aware that her son has fallen for his half-sister (which probably wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t swapped babies) and merely hoping Aki can be convinced to leave town alone rather than plotting any more drastic action. 

But the inferno of hell envelopes them all, crying out for retribution as the cycles of repressed or inappropriate attractions repeat themselves. Kumi realises that her love for her brother, Suchio, is actually not inappropriate because they are not related after all but is then consumed by her own hell in realising that he does in fact love his biological half-sister but is uncertain if he accept damnation in order to pursue it. What she, Miho, and Aki are punished for is female sexual desire aside the arguably taboo qualities of its direction though in hell it seems men are punished for this too, or more accurately for giving in to it, in a way they often aren’t in the mortal realm. “They cut their own flesh and blood for the vision of a woman in the future,” the guide explains as the brothers and Unpei literally climb over each other reaching for an illusionary representation of Aki/Miho at the top of the tree. In the mortal world they do something similar, grappling with each other, mired in competitions of masculinity as mediated through sexual dominance, conquest, or humiliation. 

Yet Aki’s path to hell is also a confrontation with her femininity and her search for an identity as a woman by reuniting with the birth mother who died before she was born. Kumashiro’s visions of hell are terrifying and outlandish, a giant land in which the dead are thrown into a huge meat grinder they then have to push themselves. For the sin of eating meat, others are condemned to spend eternity eating human flesh. Miho has lost all sense of reason and is incapable of recognising her daughter seeing her only as another source of food but there is a kind of rebirth that takes place even if it’s only once again to be born in the underworld. Surreal and harrowing, Kumashiro’s eerie land of giant demons and shuffling corpses does indeed suggest that as the opening titles put it we all live our lives alongside hell.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Curse of the Dog God (犬神の悪霊, Shunya Ito, 1977)

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By the late 1970s, Japan was a very prosperous place and the cutting edge of modernity yet old beliefs die hard and those who run afoul of a natural order they assumed had long been forgotten will pay a heavy price for their arrogance. After a four-year hiatus following the third of the Female Prisoner Scorpion films, Shunya Ito returned with a strange slice of folk horror The Curse of the Dog God (犬神の悪霊, Inugami no Tatari) in which it is indeed the city invaders who have transgressed these ancient boundaries in their wilful indifference to the natural world.

The conflict between these two Japans is clear in the opening sequence in which three men pass through a tunnel in a truck bearing the logo of a nuclear power company and emerge into a village where a group of boys jump out from behind a row of tiny haystacks wearing masks made of leaves. The boys crowd around the van asking the strangers why they’re here and they jokingly tell them that they’ve come to look for “treasure,” which turns out to be a quest to find uranium in the local mountains. Otherwise uninterested in the village or the landscape, the men back their truck into a dilapidated roadside shrine which then collapses, and subsequently run over a little boy’s dog which had attempted to stop their car by barking fiercely at them. Rather than stop to apologise or comfort the boy who is cradling his dead dog in his arms, the men sheepishly drive off as if embarrassed. 

Of course, the shrine turns out to belong to the Dog God who is guardian deity of these mountains and now incredibly annoyed not just by the destruction of the shrine and killing of the dog, but by the men’s intention to tear the natural world apart looking for something which could prove very destructive even if they claim they want to use it responsibly to fuel the economic rocket which is Japan in the 70s. The Kenmochi family, the head of which, Kozo, is the local mayor are very receptive to the firm’s entreaties and immediately grant them access to their land while arranging a marriage which at least in part dynastic between Kozo’s daughter, Reiko (Jun Izumi), and the head of the expeditionary group Ryuji (Shinya Owada). But once they return to the city, the other two men die in mysterious circumstances, one entering a kind of trance and walking off the roof of the hotel after the couple’s formal wedding reception and the other attacked by a pack of wild German Shepherds in the middle of Tokyo. 

Reiko is quick to exclaim that it’s all the fault of the Dog God, though it’s never quite clear whether or not she is aware that her family is the subject of an ancestral curse because they themselves offended the deities by getting their hands on the land cheaply when it was used as collateral for a loan. In contrast to the Tarumis, the family of Reiko’s best friend Kaori (Emiko Yamauchi) and her little brother Isamu (Junya Kato) who is the boy whose dog they killed, the Kenmochis put on heirs and graces and as if they were the ancestral aristocracy of this area rather than having made a speedy class transition thanks to someone else’s misfortune and the vagaries of the post-war era. The Tarumis, meanwhile, live in a much more humble home and dress in a much more traditional mountain village manner. Patriarch Kosaku (Hideo Murota) point-blank refuses to sell his land and will have little truck with Ryuji or the mine once it opens, leaving the family regarded as outcasts within the village. 

But then there is a definite and literal pollution signalled by the arrival of the prospectors. At a meeting, it’s suggested that the sulphuric acid they’re using to flush out the uranium in inaccessible areas of the mine could contaminate the local groundwater which is a problem when many families are still taking their water from wells but they all laugh it off. Sometime later Ryuji is horrified to see dead fish floating in the river, while his own in-laws, the older generation of the Kenmochi family, are also killed by ingesting contaminated water. A rumour arises that the culprit is the Tarumis who have poisoned the wells out of spite, and when Ryuji tries to raise the alarm after getting a positive result for sulphuric acid in the water supply the company tell him to pin it on them instead. 

The intrusion of modernity has interrupted the careful, if woefully feudal, balance of the village with terrifying and tragic consequences. Yet Kosaku is also surprised, asking how a city man like Ryuji could really believe in something like a “curse”. The shamans they bring in to do a ritual also blame everything on the Terumis, adding the suggestion that the ill will is motivated by Kaori’s sexual jealousy over Ryuji giving rise to yet another interpretation of the curse’s origin besides the Kenmochi’s class transgression and the unintentional offence caused by the destruction of the shrine. Then again, perhaps it really is all because of the Dog God in a great confluence of coincidences that have led to this incredibly strange and unfortunate situation. In the end, even the film’s purest character, the Kenmochi’s small daughter Mako (Masami Hasegawa), is possessed by the evil spirit and made to take her revenge with a remorseful Ryuji desperately trying to repair what he himself broke in the acceptance that he should not have come here and was the catalyst for this confrontation with fate. Weird and haunting even in its bizarre obscurity the film nevertheless makes a case for the protection of the dark heart beating at the centre of the contemporary society which speaks of something older that cannot be crossed and most specially by those hellbent on a hubristic path to prosperity that has little respect for the land.

The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty (憲兵とバラバラ死美人, Kyotaro Namiki, 1957)

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The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty (憲兵とバラバラ死美人, Kenpei to Barabara Shibijin) was apparently a substantial hit on its release, though to modern eyes at least it doesn’t quite live up to the salaciousness of its title. In fact, it seems a little more interested in reassessing the militarist past while attempting to rehabilitate an authoritarian power and reframing it as good and compassionate unlike the corrupted killer who is selfish and ambitious to the extent that he’s literally poisoning the militarist wells. 

What we’re first introduced to, however, is a rather familiar tale of a soldier who’s gotten a girl pregnant but now won’t marry her mainly because he’s onto a good thing with a pretty girl from a prominent family so his girlfriend’s in the way. Though we see a prelude to the murder, we don’t get good a look at the soldier’s face (though we do hear his voice) which on one level hints at the generalised violent threat of the militarist machine but is also a neat plot device that allows us to into the crime but still maintains the mystery. When we do see the actual killing, it’s surprisingly frank for the time period and disturbing in its sexual charge though there is no gore involved save a grisly discovery in yet another well. 

The killing occurred shortly before the regiment left for Manchuria, which seems to be one way the killer sought to move on and leave his crime behind. The first hint of the corruption is discovered by a gang of new recruits as yet unused to the militarist machine. They notice that the water in the well in the barracks is bad, but are at first bullied and insulted by another soldier who’s been there longer and gives them a rather priggish speech about the sanctity of the regimental water. What they discover is that the water tastes bad because there’s a dismembered torso in there and has been for the last six months. One has to wonder why the culprit would think this a good place to hide a body given the risk of discovery and increasing suspicion but as it turns out no one is all that interested. The Military Police aren’t that keen on investigating themselves, and then we get the familiar conflict between the local cops and the specialists as a top investigator, Kosaka (Shoji Nakayama), is assigned to investigate the crime and insists on doing so thoroughly rather than just beating their favourite subject into a false confession. 

Kosaka is then posited as a nice Military Policeman, an emissary of legitimate authority rather than bumbling provincials who are ridiculous and self-serving not to mention incompetent and resentful. We’re told repeatedly that Kosaka is prepared to work with the civilian police unlike the other military policemen who insist on militarist primacy and refuse to allow the detectives onto the base to investigate. He’s a representative of a less authoritarian age that looks forward to the democratic future, but he is also a part of that organisation himself no matter how different he may seem to be and cannot escape the overarching structures of militarism. Nevertheless, his edges are further softened by a nascent romance with the middle-aged innkeeper at his lodging house while his assistant is after her sister, a childhood friend who can’t stop calling him by his old nickname. 

The two of them investigate scientifically, making frequent trips to the pathologist to discuss theories and evidence though Kosaka is eventually guided towards the solution after seeing the young woman’s ghost. The local military police meanwhile fixate on another soldier who has a reputation for using sex workers, one of whom has recently disappeared, though Kosaka thinks the man is a just a crook with what modern viewers make think of as a sex addition that sees him steal supplies from the kitchen to sell in order to finance his visits to the red light district. The military police whip him in an oddly sexually charged manner to try to get him to confess, but he maintains his innocence. One of the motives for the murder was seemingly that the victim planned to expose the affair, taking her concerns to the killer’s superior officer in an effort to force him to marry her which would have ruined his career prospects in what is supposed to be an organisation of honourable men. Unlike Kosaka who shares his name with the writer of the novel the film is based on which may have been inspired by true events, the other military police are largely like the killer, arrogant, selfish and unfeeling though all Kosaka himself represents is a supposedly more benevolent authority that for his niceness may not actually be all that much nicer.

Laughing Under the Clouds (曇天に笑う, Katsuyuki Motohiro, 2018)

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A cheerful former samurai chooses laughter as the best weapon against existential anxiety in Katsuyuki Motohiro’s big budget adaptation of the manga by Karakara-Kemuri, Laughing Under the Clouds (曇天に笑う, Donten ni Warau). Set amid the chaos of the late Meiji social revolution in which the samurai are no more, Motohiro’s supernatural drama is in some ways uncomfortably reactionary even as it takes as its heroes the defenders of a burgeoning new democracy who, our hero aside, seem to have a tendency towards authoritarianism in their insistence on the kind of order only they can bring. 

Indeed, prisoners brought to “prison island” are coldly informed that “hope, freedom and peace. These are things of the past” because “once you’re in here you’ll never get out”, “you have no rights in here”. Most of the prisoners are here it seems because of their opposition to the new regime including the mysterious Fuma Kotaro former leader of a ninja clan wiped out by imperial forces now held in solitary confinement. The man we first see dragged in is apparently a former samurai struggling to adjust to his loss of privilege and unable to find new ways of living in a world of superficial equality. 

Yet it’s not this destabilisation of the social order which presents the moment of chaos so much as a prophecy that Orochi, a vengeful snake spirit, is due to make his return to Earth and wreak even more havoc. As the legend goes, Orochi brought clouds and rain which provided humanity with a bountiful harvest yet humanity resented him for his ugliness and so Orochi took revenge for their ingratitude by creating chaos. Tenka (Sota Fukushi), a former member of the Nile imperial Wild Hound squad, sees his familial legacy as the duty to combat the vicious cycle of hate through the power of laughter. His decision to leave the Wild Hounds after his parents were murdered by ninjas in order to care for his orphaned brothers is another indication of his essential humanity as is his determination that he will protect not only his town but whoever it is that has been selected as a vessel for Orochi’s return. 

These humanitarian concerns stand in direct contrast with the unfeeling authoritarianism of the Wild Hounds or the innate cruelty of the existence of a place like prison island where those who threaten the new regime are exploited as slave labour. On the other hand, the anger of the disempowered ninja clans is perhaps understandable even if their opposition to the regime, intending to harness the power of Orochi to overthrow the government, is an attempt to hang on to their privilege as a path back to the way things used to be. As such it’s they rather than Orochi who become the central villain though one could also read Orochi as an expression of the intense anxiety of the age especially as it invades the body of a young man himself feeling resentful and confused while looking for a sense of direction in a rapidly changing society. 

Tenka’s opposition is rooted in cheerfulness, in learning to laugh even under the clouds and becoming stronger for it though his otherwise openhearted nature stands in direct contrast with his oft repeated catchphrase “I am the law” as he enforces order in his small provincial town willingly delivering criminals and fugitives to prison island but also making a point of befriending a former ninja, Shirasu (Ren Kiriyama), he rescued after the raid which killed his parents in acknowledging that Shirasu himself was not responsible for their deaths only the chaotic world in which they live. 

Boasting some impressive special effects as Tenka and the forces of order team up for some spiritual magic to send Orochi back where he came from, Laughing Under the Clouds ultimately sells a positive message casting Tenka’s revolution as an ideal world of love, laughter, and happiness while simultaneously ignoring the oppressive qualities of new social model such as its shady prisons, lack of tolerance for opposing political views, and failure to make good on the promises of a classless society. Nevertheless with its fantastical production design and inherent cheerfulness it does perhaps suggest that laughter may be the only real salve for internal darkness.  

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Jungle Block (地図のない町, Ko Nakahira, 1960)

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The contradictions of the post-war era are thrown into stark relief in the forced redevelopment of slum area on the edge of an increasingly prosperous city in Ko Nakahira’s intense noir, Jungle Block (地図のない町, Chizu no nai Machi). The slightly unfortunate English title may hark back to that chosen for a US screening of Nakahira’s landmark film Crazed Fruit, Juvenile Jungle, or just echo the titles of classic Hollywood noir movies such as Asphalt Jungle and Blackboard Jungle, but otherwise has little to do with the content of the film. The Japanese title, meanwhile, means something like “a town not marked on the map” and hints at the invisibility of those who live in this slum, a self-built post-war shantytown inhabited by those largely left behind by the nation’s rising prosperity. 

Then again, Shinsuke (Ryoji Hayama) seems to have fallen behind on his own account. We’re later told that he resigned from his position at the hospital because of some kind of medical mistake for which he blames himself and has since taken to drink and gambling while working at the poor clinic run by his former mentor Kasama. The most immediate effect of his, perhaps unnecessary, decision to resign was that it prevented the marriage of his younger sister, Sakiko (Kazuko Yoshiyuki), as he was then financially dependent on her. Having delayed the wedding for two years waiting for Shinsuke to pull himself together, Sakiko and her fiancé are set upon by local gangsters working for yakuza turned politician and legitimate businessman Azusa (Osamu Takizawa). Sakiko attempts to take her own life and the relationship does not survive this crisis thanks to her fiancé’s wounded masculinity in having been unable to save her or stand up to the goons afterwards. 

As repeated flashbacks reveal, Azusa is the root of the disease spreading across the city. It’s he that’s intent on clearing the slum, as he says just doing what the government has asked him to do, planning to build luxury apartments on its site along with supermarkets and entertainment facilities. Perhaps it’s not an entirely bad thing to clear a slum, the living conditions are in themselves a health hazard, but Azusa has drastically cut the amount of compensation on offer preventing the residents from securing new places to live and essentially rendering them homeless which defeats the humanitarian justification for forcing them out when most of them don’t want to go. 

Kayoko (Yoko Minamida), an old flame of Shinsuke’s who’s since become a sex worker to pay off her father’s debts to loan sharks and ends up as Azusa’s mistress, has a cat that she confesses to mistreating which makes her feel better only to feel terrible afterwards. The film seems to align the cat with the people of the slums who are bullied by men like Azusa who have untold influence buying off police and politicians while he himself later holds public office. The cat eventually fights back by scratching Kayoko who acknowledges it’s her own fault for her treatment of it, while it’s clear that the anger of the slum dwellers will eventually boil over and they too will strike back against the corruptions of this post-war era which otherwise sees fit to leave them behind. 

Meanwhile, Shinsuke plots a revenge he may not have the courage to take explaining to Kasama (Jukichi Uno), otherwise the voice of moral reason, that it’s the city that sick and the only way to save it is an operation to remove the Azusa-shaped tumour that’s currently killing it. It’s not for mere convenience that his weapon of choice is a scalpel. Kasama, however, tells him that he’s got the wrong idea and it’s their responsibility as doctors to take the long-term view and patiently run their clinic to produce results in the far off future. But Kasama’s eventual decision would seem to walk that back, suggesting that perhaps a radical solution really is necessary to save the patient from the ravages of amoral capitalism. 

Then again, like Kayoko’s father Yoshichi (Jun Hamamura) who is branded a “cripple” and “only half a man” by Azusa, Shinsuke begins to realise that perhaps you can’t create lasting change on your own and taking out Azusa won’t solve the problem as someone else will simply rise to take his place. There is a pervasive sense of hopelessness, Shinsuke caught and frantic amid the dim backstreets of this rundown town desperate for revenge when the police are in league with Azusa and no one really cares about the residents of the slum who are beginning to lose the will to resist. Nevertheless, eventually rediscovering himself Shinsuke opts to follow Kasama’s path insisting that will join the ranks of “good, honest, people” who, like the cat, will eventually scratch back until then resisting by “doing the right thing” even in the face of violence and intimidation while staunching the flow of corruption and cruelty from the seeping wounds of the post-war society.

DVD release trailer (no subtitles)

Happyend (Neo Sora, 2024)

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The central thesis of Neo Sora’s mildly dystopian drama Happyend is that the real looming earthquake the powers that be are so afraid of is a youth revolution. But the film seems to ask if that’s something that’s really achievable or if idle teenage fantasies of a better world will soon be snuffed out by its seeming impossibility or the internalised desire for a conventionally successful life lived under a system they know to be corrupt, unfair, prejudiced, and staunchly hierarchal.

Thus the school at its centre becomes a microcosm for the society at large. Set slightly in the future, though with a retro sensibility, the film revolves around a close group of friends who are nevertheless pulled in different directions as they approach the end of high school while becoming aware of the destructive effects of an authoritarian educational system on children across the nation. The priggish headmaster (Shiro Sano) is involved in dubious schemes with local government and high tech companies and drives a flashy yellow sports car to work. Somehow the teens manage to prank him by standing it on its end like some kind of monolith to his hypocrisy and corruption. The headmaster quickly brands the obviously harmless prank as a “terrorist” action and uses it to crack down on lapses of discipline in the school. 

His actions are mirrored in those of the Prime Minister who uses the looming fear of “the big one” as a means of forwarding his fascitistic agenda. He alludes to the false narrative that Koreans and other minorities committed crimes and poisoned wells in the wake of the 1923 earthquake as justification for his tough approach to immigration while limiting the ability of those who do not hold Japanese citizenship to participate in democracy. Kou (Yukito Hidaka), the most conflicted of the teens is a zainichi Korean whose family as he points out has been in Japan for four generations. He’s not obliged to carry his permanent residency documentation on him, but is repeatedly asked for it by police who scan his face to pull up his records on their ominous new devices. Drawn to rebellious student Fumi (Kilala Inori), he’s minded to resist social oppression but also mindful of his single-mother’s hopes that he will win a scholarship and attend university. 

Nevertheless, he begins to drift away from childhood friend Yuta (Yuta Hayashi) who resists by immersing himself in the dance music of the past. Kou regards him as childish or unenlightened, irritated that he doesn’t seem to have grown or changed at all and increasingly convinced he’s outgrown their friendship. There may be something naive about Yuta’s simple desire to enjoy his time with his friends and find his freedom in music, but he is the only one of the teens who really does reject the system by choosing to live outside it. 

Tensions come to a head when the school instals a mass surveillance system under the cute name “Panopty,” doubtless inspired by Jeremy Bentham’s famous design for the perfect prison. The system awards points for infractions on discipline but ruthlessly and without thought. A delicious moment sees a telltale baseball student fined once for smoking after picking up a discarded butt with the intention of throwing it away and then again for littering when he inevitably drops it. Led by Fumi, the kids resist in distinctly old-fashioned ways with a sit-in at the headmaster’s office but cracks soon start to appear and some aren’t willing to risk their academic futures on something which will only benefit the kids of tomorrow. In the end they win the right to a free vote on the surveillance system, but have perhaps underestimated how many of the young will also vote for “safety” over freedom in the mistaken belief that the system does not infringe on the rights of people like them.

This is a city in which ominous red lights blink in the distance like silent alarms, where the kids are forever hanging out next to signs that read “caution”, where earthquake alerts are so common no one really pays much attention to them but the looming threat of mass destruction hangs over everything and everyone. Even so, these kids are just teens growing up, having fun with their friends, and beginning to decide which path they’ll take in life. A poignant moment takes place at the end of a bridge with steps on either side and the sense that at some point you go one way and your friend another and you may never see each other again. Perhaps this is their earthquake, the silent tremor that sends them into adulthood and a society still in flux that seems somehow beyond repair.

Happyend screened as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

When I Get Home, My Wife Always Pretends to be Dead (家に帰ると妻が必ず死んだふりをしています。, Toshio Lee, 2018)

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“If you give it some time it becomes just right,” according to the eccentric wife in Toshio Lee’s quirky contemplation of the modern marriage, When I Get Home, My Wife Always Pretends to be Dead (家に帰ると妻が必ず死んだふりをしています。Ie ni kaeru to tsuma ga kanarazu shinda furi wo shite imasu.). A more cheerful take on Harold and Maude, Lee’s not quite newlywed couple are heading out of their honeymoon phase and perhaps harbouring twin anxieties as they face the three year itch and start to wonder what marriage is all about and if they have what it takes to go the distance. 

Regular salaryman Jun (Ken Yasuda) is particularly preoccupied with the “three year wall” because he was married once before and the relationship failed at the three year level which is, coincidentally, when many small businesses and restaurants fail. Perhaps unusually he has a friend at work, Sano (Ryohei Ohtani), with whom he discusses his marriage who ironically points out that Jun is essentially thinking of his marital status in the same way as a “contract renewal” as if worried he’s about to be let go. Around this time, however, he gets a nasty shock on returning home discovering his wife Chie (Nana Eikura) lying on the living room floor covered in blood. Distraught, he struggles to remember the number to call an ambulance only for Chie to suddenly burst out laughing. The same thing begins happening to him every time he goes home with the scenarios becoming increasingly elaborate such as being eaten by an alligator, for example, or being abducted by aliens. All things considered, Jun is quite a dull man, too embarrassed even to let his wife kiss him goodbye on the doorstep lest it scandalise the neighbours, so all of this fantasy is doing his head in but his rather blunt hinting that he’d prefer it Chie stop with the playing dead stuff only seems to hurt her feelings while she shows no signs of abandoning her strange hobby. 

Part of the problem is that Jun is also intensely self-involved and perhaps the product of a conformist, patriarchal society. He never reveals the reasons why his first marriage failed, only that his wife abruptly left him without much of an explanation. It never seems to occur to him that Chie may be fixating on death because she lost her mother young, possibly around the same age she is now, and is in a sense role playing demise to ease her anxiety probably grateful each time he returns home and “saves” her. For his part he insists he doesn’t “need excitement” and wants “a normal wife”, desperate to appear conventional and paranoid that Chie is going out of her mind. Rather than fully see her he keeps trying to “fix” the problem by encouraging her to take a part-time job and make new friends, worried she’s bored at home and lonely after moving away from her family home in Shizuoka.  

His friend Sano, seemingly happily married for five years, has a much more relaxed attitude to the mysteries of marriage but as the two wives begin to bond the cracks in their respective relationships are gradually revealed. Like Jun, Sano is also a conventional salaryman with traditional ideas about marriage which he somewhat rudely exposes in thinking he’s doing Jun a favour by “explaining” to Chie that her hobby is offensive to Jun because men work hard all day and want to sit down quietly without any bother when they come home. His quiet word provokes an outburst in his own wife Yumiko (Sumika Nono) who can no longer bear the irony, asking him why it is that she’s supposed to tiptoe around because he’s “tired” as if she does nothing at all day just waiting for him to come home. It’s as if they think their wives go back in the box until they ring the doorbell in the evening and wake them up again, as if the only value in their existence lies in supporting their husbands. Sano is mildly shocked on witnessing Yumiko suddenly brighten and embark on a mini lecture of crocodile facts after catching sight of Chie’s prop (bought on sale, making the most of her thrifty housewife skills), totally unaware she was into reptiles and equally stunned to learn she’s also a karate master. Five years, and it’s like they’re strangers. 

“Thinking won’t give you answers, when you don’t know, ask,” advises Jun’s boss, constantly carping about his ungrateful wife but later revealing that his deep love for her is what’s kept him going all these years. Miscommunication lies at the root of all their problems, Jun even failing to identify the most common if poetic of cliched idioms in his wife’s tendency to remark on the beauty of the moon seemingly at random. Clued in a little by Chie’s patient father, Jun begins to wake up himself, finally seeing his wife and understanding that she’s been trying to tell him something all this time only he was too self-involved to notice. “You can always find me if you look,” Chie was fond of saying, indirectly hinting that marital bliss is a matter of mutual recognition aided by empathy and a willingness to be foolish in the pursuit of happiness. 

When I Get Home, My Wife Always Pretends to be Dead is available to stream in the UK via Terracotta

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Living Koheiji (怪異談 生きてゐる小平次, Nobuo Nakagawa, 1982)

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“This play will never end,” says one of a pair of actors, in love with the same woman near the conclusion of Nobuo Nakagawa’s haunting final feature, The Living Koheiji (怪異談 生きてゐる小平次, Kaiidan: Ikiteiru Koheiji). Based on a 1924 play by Senzaburo Suzuki which had not originally been a kaidan or ghost story, what originally seems seems to be a conventional love triangle drama develops into something darker and stranger as its trio of protagonists find themselves trapped in an escapable loop of obsession, violence, love and misogyny.

At heart, this is a story of a woman trapped between two men, an abusive husband she cannot leave and a childhood friend who says he loves her she may want not want either. We’re told that Ochika (Junko Miyashita) was once the daughter of a wealthy landlord and entered into an arranged marriage with wealthy man but was eventually sent back and married Taku (Shoji Ishibashi), the son of a teacher the landlord may otherwise have regarded as beneath them. A childhood friend of each of them, Koheiji (Fumihiko Fujima) was the son of an itinerant actor and loved Ochika too but bit his tongue. However, he can do so no longer. At breaking point, he must make his feelings known. Ochika does not accept them, but neither does she fully reject him. At an impasse, Koheiji states that he will kill Taku so that Ochika will then be free to marry him. On a fishing trip with Taku he directly asks him to surrender Ochika, but he refuses and becomes angry. Knocking him into the water and hitting him with an oar, Taku believes he has killed Koheiji, dissolves the acting troupe to which they all belong, and returns home. Koheiji soon turns up there but relief turns to rage when he repeats his request for Ochika’s hand and Taku kills him again.

We can never really be sure if “the living Koheiji” as he takes to calling himself is alive or dead, an actual ghost or a man with a talent for surviving living only for his obsessive love. He continues to haunt the couple, or more directly Taku whose guilt he may be manifesting. From what we can tell of Taku, he is a monstrously insecure figure who attempts to assert dominance through violence. Of the three, he is the only one outwardly frustrated by his lowly socio-economic position as an itinerant actor and only the troupe’s drum player at that. He has been writing his own play, a love suicide drama, in an attempt to bump himself up to the intellectual position of playwright but the manager rejects his work or else Taku lacks the economic power to bribe him. 

It’s possible in one sense that what we’re watching is the love suicide drama that Taku is writing. He does indeed later invite Chika to die with him while haunted by the living Koheiji. The dialogue between the three is ostensibly theatrical and delivered in the rhythms of kabuki theatre as if they were constantly rehearsing a play, yet Koheiji in particular often slips into a rhythm that mimics that of the Akita Ondo, a bawdy folk chant that is part nonsense song and part improvised diatribe against the state of the nation. Koheiji may also have been professionally frustrated in his desires to become another Danjuro, his lack of success another barrier to romantic fulfilment, but ultimately feels that Ochika should be his and Taku should consent to give her up. 

He points out that Taku is violent towards her. When Ochika asks him about his play, she says that women shouldn’t pry into men’s work and beats her. She asks him for a divorce which he refuses to grant, but later tells Koheiji that his violence is only a sign of his love for her though it’s clearly an expression of his wounded masculinity. In many ways, Ochika is a woman haunted by two men neither of whom she can fully escape. We can’t even be sure she isn’t dead too, or else a figment of Taku’s fevered imagination furiously writing out this love tragedy in real time. In any case, she continues to follow him and is continually disillusioned. On discovering that she engineered a miscarriage, he questions the parentage of the child and is resentful that she chose not to tell him about the pregnancy because it trapped her in an abusive relationship from which she wanted escape. She may have been willing to use Koheiji to help her, but does not appear to return his feelings and is in any case denied any agency. Just as she was traded away by her father, Koheiji simply demands her of Taku as if she had no right to refuse.

The living Koheiji becomes more grotesque each time he resurrects himself, eventually disguised as a leper and as pale as a ghost whether or not he actually is one. Wracked with guilt, Taku begins to experience ghostly nightmares featuring scenes from classic tales of horror such as Koheiji tied to a board and floating in a lake much as Oiwa and the servant in Nakagawa’s own Yotsuya Kaidan. A master of the genre, the eeriness that Nakagawa conjures here is of a different order. An ancient, unending haunting that as Koheiji says will never end destined to be repeated by the trio in an eternal and irresolvable cycle of suffering. The final scene takes place at Sai-no-kawara, the shore of the river of life and death to which the souls of deceased children go to be watched over by the crowds of jizo at the cave, echoing the faces of the dolls that once watched Taku and Ochika. What happens there may represent escape or merely damnation, Ochika perhaps freed or only to repeat this cycle for all eternity. 

Trailer (English subtitles)