Tag: Japanese

Fujiko (Taichi Kimura, 2026)

June 3, 2026June 5, 2026by Hayley Scanlon

A young woman’s simple desire to be with her daughter sparks a quiet revolution in Taichi Kimura’s autobiographically inspired drama, Fujiko. Though set in the late 1970s and early 1980s, not that much has really changed in terms of the difficulties faced by those raising children alone even if they’re less likely to be told that it just isn’t possible or that they’ve brought their struggles on themselves by choosing divorce.

Fujiko doesn’t so much choose divorce as have it thrust upon her by her own feisty mother. The family she married into don’t see her as much more than a labourer and are then put out when she has a child because it means she has less time for them. The mother-in-law eventually coopts Fujiko’s infant daughter, while Fujiko’s husband Jiro does nothing, unable to stand up to his mother. Having lost Mari, Fuji goes into a kind of depression before being dragged to a women’s liberation rally by her boss reawakens her desire to fight.

Though Fujiko’s decision making may not be consciously feminist, it’s here that she realises that nothing changes if you just keep quiet. You have to fight for what you really want. But the battle doesn’t end once she’s retrieved her daughter. Life as a single mother is, as many tell her, all but impossible. Securing a place to stay thanks to her boss, Fujiko struggles to find anyone to watch her daughter so she can return to work. It’s only with the intervention of a friend that’s she’s able to overcome these issues and earn her own living.

The other employers’ refusal seems to be down in part as a reflection of social prejudice but also a fear that she’s breaking the rules that govern an employee/employer relationship in having something that will always take priority. Time and gain, it’s the kindness of strangers that saves her as she goes on to forge a more independent way of life. In need of money, she can’t be too picky about what the joy actually is and ends up accepting a position as a cook for an illegal yakuza gambling den only to see the money she’s saved go up in smoke when her placed is turned over. It may seem like the world is against her, but with every setback Fujiko only seems more determined to make it through.

Fujiko finds a more positive example of supportive family by bonding with an old friend of her father’s who takes her in and helps her get back on her feet while helping her to see what she really wants out of life. Harbouring some resentment towards her mother for favouring her brother as the only boy, making her give up on art college so that he could go to Tokyo University, but equally disapproving of her marriage, Fujiko too struggles with the idea of conventionality that is projected onto her and the suggestion that she’s doing something wrong when the best option is simply remarriage. Given the option of marrying again and gaining a steadier home as a house, she once again has to decide if she’s going to fight for what she wants or be railroaded into settling for a more conventional success.

Rediscovering her father’s music helps Fujiko to get back in touch with herself and encourages her to follow her heart. Using psychedelic animation and propulsive rock music, Kimura lends Fujiko’s story a true punk rock spirit while staging much of the film as a flashback as Fujiko lays out her “sob story” for a prospective client having become an insurance saleswoman. Despite the difficulties she’s facing, the film remains upbeat and positive, seeing it all with a sense of humour as Fujiko does her best to escape the patriarchal net, refusing to be bound either by her first husband’s ineffectuality nor by what her mother insists her life should be. Instead she aims for an uncompromising independence, claiming her position as her daughter’s mother and doing her best to provide for her but also fulfilling herself in the midst of a patriarchal society which tells her that marriage and motherhood are the only rightful goals for a woman.

Fujiko as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

A Moon in the Ordinary (平場の月, Nobuhiro Doi, 2025)

June 2, 2026by Hayley Scanlon

Back in the early 2000s, Nobuhiro Doi was a leading figure of the short-lived “jun-ai” or “pure love” boom with films such as Be With You, and Tears for You, as well as TV dramas like Beautiful Life and Orange Days. Adapted from the novel by Kasumi Asakura, A Moon in the Ordinary (平場の月, Hiraba no Tsuki) is a kind middle-aged take on the same material in which former classmates reunite 35 years later but discover that they aren’t really any better equipped to understand what love is than they were as teenagers.

The pair even bond over hearing Hiroko Yakushimaru’s Main Theme, the title song of the movie of the same name, in which the singer laments that they still don’t understand love even after living 20 years. Kensho (Masato Sakai) and Yoko (Haruka Igawa) have lived more than 20 years since they last saw each other and are each carrying their own particular baggage of failed or compromised romances. Each having returned to their hometown where they’ve reconnected with their former classmates, there is something of a return to childhood in their relationship even while tempered by the compromises of age. As one of Kensho’s former classmates says, he’s reached the age where doing new things is a bother and now the conversation turns on people’s health issues or those of their parents.

Kansho moved back after his divorce to care for his mother but she now lives in a care home and has advanced dementia. Every time he reminds her who he is, she replies that “Kensho is dead,” but he just humours her. Yoko, meanwhile, has moved back after an ill-advised affair with a younger man left her broke. Widowed young, she harbours a degree of guilt over the circumstances that led to her marriage while also perhaps a little embarrassed to be working in the hospital cafe having graduated from a good university and holding a well-paying job in the city. Despite her initial reluctance, she bonds with Kensho over their shared sense of middle-aged despair as he awaited the results of some potentially concerning medical tests.

Health issues are, however, only a part of the problem. Yoko is also carrying childhood trauma and a low sense of self-worth that once made her determine to live life alone, which is a difficult habit to break. Following her experiences, she lives in a spartan flat she says she keeps tidy to make life easier for whoever has to deal with it after she’s gone and also makes sure to sleep on the bed so the mess will be contained if it’s a while before anyone finds her if she passes away. Even before encountering her own life issues, she seems to be living in a kind of limbo state until reconnecting with Kensho. The “impossible dream” she describes might be as simple as getting to grow old with the person you love, though it’s something she doesn’t really think she’s entitled to or deserving of.

As Kensho says, they’ve both been plenty hurt already, what if they just end up hurting each other more? His older co-worker advises him that getting hurt is just part of it and he’d gladly go through it all again, but romance is as hard at 50 as it was at 15. Some things have changed and others haven’t. It’s a little ironic, in some ways, that the film ends with a Chinese-style disclaimer reminding audience members that it’s illegal for two people to be riding the same bike given that the film’s main theme is the unchanging innocence of romantic connection. After meeting Kensho, Yuko starts to plant flowers in her makeshift garden rather than purely practical herbs as if she were welcoming joy back into her life, but she still feels herself to be a burden and has a tendency to pull away rather than expose herself emotionally while Kensho’s decision to allow her to do that seems foolish in the extreme. In the end, perhaps there is only loneliness and absence. In a flashback to their teenage years, Kensho says that he didn’t want to become a regular grown-up which he inevitably has, now filled with middle-aged regrets while Yoko never quite managed to move past herself and accept the possibility of love as another than an impossible dream.

screens as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Night Flower (ナイトフラワー, Eiji Uchida, 2025)

June 1, 2026by Hayley Scanlon

The first thing we see in Eiji Uchida’s elliptical crime thriller Night Flower (ナイトフラワー) is a sign reading “Paradise” that’s ironically positioned in the bathroom of a hostess bar staffed by middle-aged women that has the Japanese equivalent as its name. In a moment of dark foreshadowing, the sign tells us exactly where we’re headed while suggesting that the kind of familial utopia the heroine is seeking will always be just out of reach.

This is largely due to circumstances beyond Natsuki’s (Keiko Kitagawa) control. As hard as she tries to provide for her two young children, the fact is that the odds are stacked against her in this rather patriarchal society. The film opens with her boss shouting at her for having fallen asleep on the toilet, but it’s obvious that Natsuki exists in a permanent state of exhaustion. She’s already working multiple jobs and failing to make ends meet after having been abandoned by her husband who ran off after accruing massive debts. Even after moving from Osaka to Tokyo to try and escape them, she’s being hassled by loan sharks and is already at the end of her tether. It’s not surprising then that when she happens to come across a drug dealer who’s been mugged by his client she steals his remaining stash with the intention of selling it on.

The real villain is, of course, the society that fails to come to the aid of women like Natsuki and leaves them with little choice other than to turn to crime. None of her part-time jobs pay enough to live on and when she approaches the town hall, they tell her she can’t claim any more benefits for another month despite being down to her last few coins. The jobs Natuski does are those available to people with few qualifications where the pay is low and disproportionately done by women. There seems to be an implicit assumption still in place that a woman will to some degree have a man to rely on for financial security, though all of the men we see are unreliable from Tamae’s trainer (Ken Mitsuishi) whose gambling problem endangers the gym to Mrs Hoshizuki’s (Reina Tanaka) husband who refuses to take any responsibility for the domestic sphere and treats his wife as a glorified housekeeper.

To that extent, there is a direct line being drawn between wealthy housewife Mrs Hoshizuki, who is effectively a single mother because her husband is functionally absent from the domestic space yet provides financially, and Natsuki that suggests money is not the central issue. Natsuki’s young daughter Koharu is earnest and considerate. She well understands how difficult her mother’s life is and does her best to make it easier. Mrs Hoshizuki’s daughter, meanwhile, falls in with a bad crowd at school and begins using drugs. Her mother is powerless to help her and her father refuses to get involved. When she first hires a detective who discovers Natsuki and Tamae pushing drugs on the streets, Ms Hoshizuki asks if they have families too as if she understood on some level that they’re not necessarily bad people and were reluctant to get them into trouble, but also perhaps wondering how they can do this to someone else’s child if they have children of their own.

Natuski can’t really afford to think about the customers, and when earning more money through drugs continues her other part-time work and lives modestly wanting to provide for her children if something were to go wrong. She even asks her partner, aspiring MMA fighter Tamae, to look after them as if she were already resolved to pay the price if caught. Tamae is in this because she wanted to get out of sex work which she’d been doing to fund her career in the absence of a sponsor. It’s never quite clear if there is a romantic dimension to their relationship, but it’s certainly incredibly close as Tamae becomes an essential part of the family, dying her hair to match Natsuki’s and beginning to speak with an Osaka accent just like they do. For a time, they find the kind of paradise they’re looking for, but also seem to know that it can’t last.

It seems that Tamae was also abandoned by her mother, while the androgynous gang boss Ms Sato gives them a little leeway precisely because she admires the way Natsuki fights for her kids when theirs did not. Most of the other gangsters also report having bad or no relationships with their mothers, which circles round to a rather conservative viewpoint of blaming mothers for everything. But no matter how hard Natsuki and Tamae fight, the fact is they always lose and the odds are forever stacked against them. All they have is the solidarity they’ve found together as a family unit, but it’s not enough to protect them against the harshness of the world they’ve entered. Night flowers bloom when they feel like it, but it seems like this one only blossoms in an impossible paradise.

Night Flower screens as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Tiger (Anshul Chauhan, 2025)

May 31, 2026by Hayley Scanlon

At 35 years old, Taiga (Takashi Kawaguchi) is beginning to tire of city life and thinking of settling down, but as a gay man in contemporary Japan, there are limits to how much that is possible for him. Inspired by real life stories from the LGBTQ+ community, Anshul Chauhan’s Tiger is more character study than issue drama, but explores the ways in which Taiga’s horizons are constrained by the way society receives his sexuality to the point that he finds himself considering entering a platonic marriage as the only real way to ensure a full domestic life with the possibility of raising children.

As someone from the “Friendship Marriage” organisation points out, even the recently introduced partnership system available in some areas of Japan is a long way from a legal marriage and is geared more towards housing provision and hospital visits. It doesn’t confer inheritance rights for those who own property, or even the right to attend a funeral if the other relatives object. Child adoption is relatively rare in Japan in any case and not generally available to same sex couples while even costly options such as IVF and surrogacy could be bureaucratically difficult given the way the family register system works.

Though the woman giving the presentation seems incredibly angry about the weakness of the partnership system legislation, labelling it “a disgrace”, it can’t be denied that Friendship Marriage is essentially complicit with the heteronormative views of mainstream society in which it is still socially and in some cases practically difficult not to be married. After signing up for the service, Taiga meets a woman who is half-Iranian and grew up in Tehran. It doesn’t occur to him that her decision to come to Japan was not made entirely freely and that she cannot safely return there without the threat of violence. Taiga may feel himself constrained, but he won’t be arrested or tortured solely for existing as a gay man. Nevertheless, he faces reduced options when it comes to employment and has never revealed his sexuality to his father fearing that he will reject or disown him.

Tensions come to a head, as they so often do, when the matter of inheritance is raised. Taiga’s sister Minami (Maho Nonami) is aware of his sexuality though does not seem altogether accepting and is resentful of his life in Tokyo which she assumes to be aimless and free of responsibility while she has had to shoulder the burden of caring for their ageing father alone. It’s obvious that she has been banking on inheriting the family home and is resentful on hearing their father has suggested leaving it to Taiga on the condition that he marries and has children, knowing that this is something that is not possible in contemporary Japan. The implication is that Taiga had no choice but to leave his home town in order to lead a more authentic life and essentially develops two opposing personas, that of “Tiger” the aspiring porn star and “Taiga” the would-be-family man.

Minami later wields this duality against him, asking him to baby-sit her daughter Kaede to whom he is especially close, while threatening to out him to their father if he doesn’t agree to give up his right to the domestic space represented by their family home. His former lover, Koji (Yuya Endo), has entered a conventional heterosexual marriage without disclosing his sexuality to his wife and is riddled with regrets over not leaving with Taiga and trying to start a domestic life in the city as a gay couple. The Friendship Marriage system removes the element of betrayal, but also elides authenticity in providing a mechanism for each partner to fulfil social and parental expectation while avoiding disclosing their sexuality, and equally prevents them from enjoying a full and loving domestic relationship with a same-sex partner.

The film never particularly suggests that there is anything wrong with the way Taiga is living in Tokyo nor with his desire to get into gay porn, but merely highlights the sense of emptiness he feels as someone denied the possibility a full domestic life. There is after all a kind of age cap involved in his life as a sex worker working at a men-only massage parlour which he may fast be approaching even aside from the clients who like to exorcise their own sense of powerless by paying money to abuse and humiliate him. In the end, all he’s left with is an uncertain liminal space living as a literal stand-in marooned on the sidelines with no place to call his own.

Tiger screens as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © Tiger Production Partners

Suzuki=Bakudan (爆弾, Akira Nagai, 2025)

May 28, 2026by Hayley Scanlon

At first glance, the English-language title of Akira Nagai’s adaption of the novel by Katsuhiro Go, Suzuki = Bakudan, might seem a little strange, even aside from the incongruity of leaving “bakudan” (bomb) untranslated. But there is something to be said of the idea that there are little bombs everywhere, and each person is also powder keg waiting to explode given the right trigger. That might play in to the rather cynical view of the Hannibal Lector-like presence at the film’s centre who seems to be leading the police a merry dance with his various riddles and determination to play the part of a man whose mind has been ruined by alcohol and hopelessness.

The first thing about Suzuki (Jiro Sato), arrested for busting up a convenience store, is that he gives a name that at least sounds fake and attempts to brazen it out. Detective Todoroki (Shota Sometani) tells him that the store owner doesn’t want to press charges and will settle for compensation to fix the damage, but Suzuki says he’s broke ad offers to help the police instead. He claims to have psychic powers and knows that a bomb is about to go off, but the police assume it’s an obvious delaying tactic and take no notice, until there’s actually an explosion in the middle of the city.

The obvious conclusion that occurs to Todoroki is that Suzuki is the bomber, but at the same time he seems to think there’s something innocent about him. He is indeed as Todoroki and later Ruike say childish in his playfulness and means of expression, though there’s also a sinister edge to the way he speaks that suggests it’s all an act. He quotes poetry and and appears to ramble like a madman but while Ruike becomes convinced he’s dropping them arcane clues, others think he’s just manipulative and deliberately wasting their time. “Not every word has meaning,” one insists though it seems as if it really might for Suzuki who seems to list not being listened to by society as one of his grudge points.

The point that he makes frequent digs at the homeless despite identifying as one hints at this paradoxical sense of injustice in the contemporary society. In one of the traps he sets for the police, he sets them up with a binary choice of whether to save schoolchildren or the homeless community. The detectives don’t realise that’s what they’re doing, but still didn’t really think to much about the people who live in the park while desperate to find a potential bomb threat in a school. Later Suzuki lists off a series of people he can’t stand from the homeless to pregnant women, families, and lawyers, in fact pretty much everyone which itself seems to be more a reflection of an absurd social prejudice than his own feeling.

He might, however, have a point about social indifference and the arrogance of the police with Todoroki’s superiors rolling their eyes and refusing to take Suzuki seriously while the bombs keep going off. Everything seems to link back to a disgraced police officer, Hasebe, who took his own life by jumping in front of train and was not supported by his colleagues aside from Todoroki who only utters that he’s not insensitive to his feelings which seems like a lukewarm advocation for the police brotherhood. Suzuki seems to have resented not being accorded one of the group, and holds the police in contempt for the way they treat their own. Yabuki (Ryota Bando) is also forever trying to get his foot on the ladder as a detective, but is only exploited by those above him which is one reason he’s willing to take so many risks to catch the bomber.

Suzuki tries to guess the shape of people’s hearts, and finds those of the policemen largely warped by office politics and backstabbing. Selfishness is the sad truth of humanity, he intones. And he might be right, people only really want the bombs not to go off near them and they’re less bothered by the idea of them hurting other people than they’d like to think. After all, Hasebe’s family’s lives imploded too when they were sued by the railway company after Hasebe’s suicide, hounded by the press, and ostracised by former colleagues. Acceptance by the group, it seems, is only ever really temporary. Still, Suzuki leads the police by the nose exploiting all their weaknesses and affecting the persona of a sane madman claiming to be psychic and to have been hypnotised to erase his memory but keeping all his cards close to his chest as the cat and mouse game between him and Ruike ratchets up in tension and finally reaches its ironic conclusion.

Suzuki=Bakudan screens as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

New Group (Yuta Shimotsu, 2025)

May 26, 2026by Hayley Scanlon

If all your friends went and formed a giant human pyramid, would you go and form a giant human pyramid too? Parents used to caution against such dangerous group think, but it has to be said that perhaps they only complained when the group activity didn’t suit them or required some additional expense they didn’t really want to pay. If the group activity was studying hard at school to get into a good university and become a successful member of society rather than buying the later must have fashion item to fit in at school, then they’d hardly complain about that.

Yuta Shimotsu’s absurdist satire New Group is in many ways about the deeply ingrained patterns of thought that exist within a society to the extent that they are rarely ever questioned. Ai (Anna Yamada) is coming to an age in which she is beginning to feel hemmed in by a conformist society but at the same time does not have the courage or confidence to challenge it. When she sees another girl being bullied, she wants to step in to defend her but all she manages to do is give the bullies a hard stare. Her friend Haru asks her what university she’s thinking of applying to to, but Ai only says she’ll apply to the same one as her and study the same thing. She can’t even answer when she’s put on the spot about what she wants to do for the school festival for fear of picking the wrong one and being ostracised from a particular faction, so she just goes along with the first person who asked for her vote.

As her teacher says, though there is a strong groupthink in play, everything comes to a binary. It’s always “uchi-soto”, us and them. But what does it mean to be a member of the main group? Ai isn’t convinced she wants to give up her autonomy just to fit in and increasingly feels herself to be an outsider. Her name is of course reminiscent of the English pronoun “I”, though it’s true meaning is “love”. She’s pulled out of inertia by a boy named “Yu” who nevertheless is later pulled into the pyramid and tells her that “ai” is here, meaning both that the group is love and Ai, the individual, belongs with in it. She replies that he’s wrong, that isn’t love, and it isn’t her. There is no room for the individual within the pyramidic structure of the group.

Yu has recently returned from abroad and is living alone free of parental authority which is why he doesn’t fit into the carefully controlled harmony of the school. He is out of step at marching practice and less afraid to voice his true opinions. He intervenes to save the other girl from the bullies and chastises Ai that just watching makes you complicit. Yu might as well be one of the space aliens they keep talking about on TV, a subversive force out to destabilise the harmonious society. Yet Ai’s doubts seem to have arisen because of a personal trauma. As a child, she chose the group over her younger sister who was then killed in an accident. She feared being excluded and essentially sacrificed her sister for approval while also denying her affiliation to the group that is her family.

The quest of Ai and Yu is then to maintain their selfhoods while operating in a society that demands conformity. Controlled by the maniacal headmaster, their schoolmates all immediately start marching to the beat of the PE teacher’s whistle and dutifully take their place in the pyramid in which all they do is uphold the structure of the group. As the pair are chased by the zombie-like figures, Ai has to confront the fact that it might just be easier to go with the flow, even if that too comes at a price. Even so, in her efforts to resist, is Ai not just creating another group of her own that can only exist because of its opposition to the first? If there is “I” there must also be “you” and never the twain shall meet. A TV commentator played by the director Takashi Shimizu tries to speak out about the nonsense groupthink being conveyed through the innocuous medium of daytime television but is dragged off air while shouting at everyone to wake up and think for themselves. It seems that few are brave enough to switch off and think for themselves while the only path to freedom lies in loneliness and exile even if in the end it is “love” that saves us after all.

New Group screens as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Sai: Disaster (災劇場版, Yutaro Seki & Kentaro Hirase, 2025)

May 25, 2026by Hayley Scanlon

We like to tell ourselves that if we do everything right and follow all the rules then everything will be okay. But the reality is that life is chaotic and you have no control. No one knows when, where, or who, will suffer a disaster, as one man puts it. But then again, in Yutaro Seki and Kentaro Hirase’s Sai (災劇場版, Sai Gekijoban), there may be someone who does know and acts as some kind of harbinger of doom guiding the unlucky towards their unhappy fates.

The mysterious man (Teruyuki Kagawa) appears in different guises to different people and apparently disappears not long after they do. A policewoman, Domoto (Anne Nakamura), is becoming convinced that a series of unexplained deaths in which the bodies were missing a small piece of their hair is the work of a serial killer, though others tell her it’s a just coincidence. It remains unexplained whether the mysterious man is, as Domoto suspects, a very human serial killer travelling all over Japan and inserting himself into people’s lives before engineering their deaths, or else a more supernatural creature and embodiment of the very nature of “disaster”.

In any case, a bereaved husband says he’d rather think of his wife’s death that way. Just something that happened for no rhyme or reason, like a landslide or an earthquake. It doesn’t matter to him whether she killed herself or was murdered, because the net result is that she’s dead. People don’t die for no reason, Domoto insists, but there is a kind of crushing inevitability to each of the stories as the mysterious man works his magic often offering a listening ear or a shoulder to cry on. Other times he seems oddly impish, encouraging one’s worst instincts as he does with recovering alcoholic Kuramoto (Ryuhei Matsuda) by constantly tempting him with drink.

The lives of the victims paint a particularly bleak vision of contemporary Japan as a place ruled by loneliness and fear. No one can get what it is they want, and they don’t even want that much. Kuramoto seems to want to rebuild his life after killing someone drunk driving by giving up drink and working hard to be reaccepted by his community, but his wife doesn’t want to see him and according to her mother at least, his problems were more serious than he first suggests. Schoolgirl Yuri (Sena Nakajima) just wants to continue with her education and eventually become an architect but is saddled with toxic parents who couldn’t care less about her future. The first victim that we see, a young woman running a restaurant for fishermen (Yumi Adachi), seems to be caught between loneliness and humiliation following the sudden disappearance of her husband. A cleaner working at the shopping centre (Chika Uchida) is the only one to take her job seriously, but has no luck with men. An inn keeper (Jiro Ohkawara) takes to smoking marijuana after his wife leaves him for another man while struggling to maintain his family business.

When his wife left him, the inn keeper assumed the worst had already happened and he’s survived his disaster, but it doesn’t really occur to him there could be another one waiting. The sense of dread that Seki and Kentaro Hirase conjure is the manifestation of this anxiety that something bad is lingering on the horizon just out of sight but ready to strike at any moment. In editing down the original six-part TV drama into a feature film, Seki and Hirase intercut each of the stories rather than letting them play out in linear fashion. It’s only later that we get dates, making it clear that all of these stories are taking place at different times and happening in sequence rather than parallel meaning that they could, perhaps, all be motivated by the same person and the mysterious man is just that rather than a malevolent supernatural entity or walking disaster in human form. Perhaps that’s all he really is anyway, no different from an earthquake or a landslide, just something that happens to you if you’re unlucky enough to stray into his path. As much as Domoto might try to create some kind of order by pinning a narrative onto the unexplained deaths or trying to solve the mystery, the truth is that some things cannot be explained. Disaster lurks at every turn and strikes when least expected.

Sai: Disaster screens as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Youth Killer (青春の殺人者, Kazuhiko Hasegawa, 1976)

May 23, 2026by Hayley Scanlon

An angry young man railing against “family imperialism” eventually kills both parents in a moment of intense frustration, abandons his girlfriend, and ends up alone, but what he discovers maybe less the freedom he was seeking than only more loneliness and despair. Adapted from a story by Kenji Nakagami that was itself inspired by a real-life case of patricide, Kazuhiko Hasegawa’s The Youth Killer (青春の殺人者, Seishun no Satsujinha) is imbued with the nihilistic sense of powerlessness that coloured the 1970s as its Hamlet-like hero tries to free himself from an oppressive social system only to find it indifferent to his existence.

Part of Jun’s (Yutaka Mizutani) problem is a protected adolescence as evidenced in the opening scenes in which he and his girlfriend Keiko (Mieko Harada) run round playfully reciting nursery rhymes. The irony may be that his name means “pure”, and that he is too thin-skinned to survive in this overly complex world. His father (Ryohei Uchida) stopped him from going to university like many of his friends, preventing him from moving on into a more settled adulthood. He did this, he says, because of the student protests not out of fear that harm would come to him but fear that he would cause it. The farmland surrounding Jun’s parents has been earmarked for Narita airport and despite angry clashes between local farmers and an uneasy alliance with student protesters, will eventually go ahead. Those like Jun are being squeezed off of their land and have nowhere else to turn.

Perhaps sensing his listlessness, Jun’s father gives him the money to open a bar and capitalise ion the new custom from the airport, but this too leaves Jun feeling childish and emasculated, as if it’s his father who will actually be in charge. The two men hug and wrestle, alternately showing affection and tussling for power. His secondary problem is that his parents apparently don’t approve of his girlfriend Keiko with whom he is running the bar. His father has hired a private detective who tells him that Keiko was raped by her mother’s lover resulting in her mother hitting her and causing her to lose the hearing in one ear. Jun’s father does not believe that Keiko was raped and insists that it was Keiko who seduced her mother’s lover.

It seems to have been this fracture point that caused Jun to snap and kill his father, less because of his attachment to Keiko than because of the challenge to his masculinity implied by the suggestion that his girlfriend simply sleeps with anyone she pleases. In fact, Jun doesn’t seem to particularly like Keiko and is wary of committing to relationships owing to his fear of “family imperialism”. He becomes fixated on the question of her deafness, niggled by the possibility she lied about its cause and his father is right. Never examining why Keiko might choose to create a different truth around what happened to her, he in fact tries to rape her himself and is obsessed with tying to find out whether not there was a fig tree near their old home as Keiko says or an azalea as others would have it.

The conflict he has with Keiko is not so different from that with his mother who, on learning of her husband’s death, quickly shifts to protecting her son, but then seizes on it as a chance to claim her own freedom. Sick of the drudgery of working at the family’s auto repair shop, she suggests running away with Jun to start a new life in a new place just the two of them. Her language becomes increasingly romantic before she eventually asks Jun to make love to her. When he eventually kills her, she tells him to stick it in and be gentle as if she were talking to a lover. But she too also doubts him, fearing he means to take the money from the safe and escape alone. Not even maternal love can overcome this kind of cynicism in a society ruled by money.

Hasegawa frames Jun’s progress as a series of confrontations, between his father, his mother, Keiko, and eventually himself in which he discovers he is still a child. He has killed his parents, but has failed to become a man. Sitting on a beach with Keiko he is overwhelmed by loneliness remembering a happy family moment when his father sold ice lollies rather than toiling at the garage. Scenes in his student film contain imagery echoing self-immolations and this is what he eventually tries to do himself in setting the bar on fire with him inside it only to be rescued by Keiko. After fleeing the scene he stows away on a truck and removes the bandage from his hand symbolising the transgression of his parents’ murder, but he is quite literally being driven to a destination not of this own choosing. Rather than freedom in solitude, he’s discovered only loneliness and despair. Condemned to a limbo state, he has nowhere to go and can only travel in circles looking for an elusive exit from this very particular kind of hell.

The Youth Killer screened as part of Japan Society New York’s Kazuhiko Hasegawa’s Anarchic Ethos.

The Road I Travel with You (君と行く路, Mikio Naruse, 1936)

May 21, 2026by Hayley Scanlon

Changing class distinctions frustrate the lives of two bothers in Mikio Naruse’s The Road I Travel With You (君と行く路, Kimi to Yuku Michi). Adapted from a play by Yukiko Miyake, the film is in many ways about the limits of social change and in its rather melancholy conclusion eventually reinforces a conservative status quo in which the only way for the lovers to be together is death and that the love therefore must be willingly rejected.

Asaji (Heihachiro Okawa) is love with the young woman from across the way, Kasumi (Naoyo Yamagata), but cannot marry her because her family disapprove of his background as an illegitimate child, Kasumi’s conservative upbringing is signalled in the fact that she always appears in kimono unlike her best friend, Tsukiko (Masako Tsutsumi), a modern girl. Her family may be posh, but it’s also increasingly impoverished and Kasumi is to be promised to a wealthy older man who will, in return, save her family’s business. Asaji thinks he’s out of the running in two grounds, not only is he the son of a mistress but despite his comfortable circumstances is not in the position to be financially useful to Kasumi’s family. For her part, Kasumi is loyal to Asaji and says that she would rather die than marry someone else, but in reality has little choice. Her family gradually isolate her, preventing her from going out or seeing Tsukiko.

On one level, Asaji feels he should remove himself from the situation in order for Kasumi to make a good marriage. He feels that his situation is hopeless because neither he or his brother will ever be accepted by mainstream society. The fact that their mother (Tamae Kiyokawa) was a geisha and their birth illegitimate essentially means that they have no class status and no one quite knows how to place them. Asaji in particular resents his mother, finding her vulgar and irritated by her practicality in the conviction that she cares more about money than she does about them.

It may be that she’s more realistic and less sentimental than they are, as evidenced by her excitement that her younger son Yuji has received an offer adoption. Adoption to her doesn’t mean that she’d lose her son, rather she thinks she could accompany him, but that he’d be legitimised. As an adopted son-in-law, he’d no longer be a bastard child and would even be wealthy with an accomplished wife. Yuji, is however, not keen, in part because he’s seen a woman likes on the train that turns out to be Tsukiko, while he also doesn’t have the same sense of despair that prevents Asaji from moving forward. He rather amusingly suggests they’ll be able to coast on their good looks and thereby overcome the constraints of their class.

But Asaji is uncertain. If the world is such a romantic place, he asks why are things so difficult for them? The film begins like a romantic comedy in which the obstacles will somehow be overcome and the love between Kasumi and Asaji affirmed, but slowly the tone begins to darken. We realise that Kasumi is also a victim of her social class and gender. Essentially a treated as a tool by her father, her life and happiness have little value. Asaji is resigned to his fate and lacks the will to fight for their love, believing it to be impossible rather than challenging the status quo. These social conventions cannot in the end be overcome. Only through death can the lovers be together. She lived her life in her father’s house, Utsugi laments of Kasumi, she must have wanted to die outside it.

The boys’ mother meanwhile, rather insensitively suggests that Kasumi ended up like this because she didn’t listen to her parents. Essentially, she’s paid a heavy price for defying filial piety and desiring a happiness that only exists outside of conventional mores and patriarchal control. The modern girl, Tsukiko, now advises Yuji to accept the adoption offer. She too believes that their love can only end in death and has no viable future. She does not exactly as him to wait, but suggests that she might be strong enough one day to fight, though today is not that day nor is it certain it would ever come. Despite Yuji’s reprimanding of his mother and by extension everything she represents, the melancholy conclusion too seems resigned to the immutability of these social mores in which Yuji must give up on his impossible love and settle for a life of material comfort and respectability at the cost of emotional fulfilment.

Retreat Through the Wet Wasteland (濡れた荒野を走れ, Yukihiro Sawada, 1973)

May 20, 2026May 20, 2026by Hayley Scanlon

Despite its lurid title which contains the classic signifier “wet”, Yukihiro Sawada’s Retreat through the Wet Wasteland (濡れた荒野を走れ, Nureta koya wo hashire) is more sleazy nihilistic drama than classic Roman Porno. Though it obeys many of the genre’s rules, the placement of its erotic scenes feels less formulaic and the film as a whole less about eroticism than abject despair in the wake of Asama-Sanso in a Japan that has become an authoritarian paradise ruled by bruiser cops driven fragile by egos and greed.

The central mystery is, for some at least, whether fugitive cop Nakamura (Hirokazu Inoue) is really “mad” or merely using the mask of mental illness to protect himself from his former colleagues who want him dead because he knows too much. The truth may be, however, that Nakamura has wilfully retreated inside his mind as a means of escape from a world of constant corruption. Or else, that his desire for the world to be better is in itself a mental illness that’s seen him institutionalised and tortured with shock treatment in an effort to cure him of his problematic humanitarianism. In any case, he has lost all his memory and knows himself only as “Number 19” having been robbed of selfhood and individuality. All of which might suggest that he isn’t as much of a threat to his colleagues as they seem to believe him to be, though the question is why exactly they fear him so much when it’s clear that they face no consequences for their actions.

The film opens with a gang of thugs raiding a church where the pastor has been collecting money to help villages in Vietnam rebuild after the war. The thugs beat the pastor and rape his daughter who is captured in a beatific pose with a crucifix on her chest as choral music plays. When the pastor calls the police, we see the policemen receive the call while one is busy stuffing the tracksuits the thugs were wearing into the boot. They are assigned to investigate the crime they have just committed while it appears that their superiors at the station are all well aware of these kinds of activities are taking place and are even encouraging of them. The police is now the biggest gang and anyone not a part of the corruption cannot tolerated in this system because it’s underpinned by an idea of mutually assured destruction.

Nakamura appears to have been a more idealistic officer and though it is not clear whether he participated in the corruption himself, evidently opposed it at least philosophically, which is what has destroyed his mind. He was once Harada’s (Takeo Chii) mentor, cautioning against his desire to become stronger as becoming strong and powerful only makes you an oppressor which is not, evidently, what he considers the proper role for a policeman. To an extent, the film frames Harada as the hero as perhaps he would be in a certain kind of crime thriller. He’s effortlessly cool in his sunshades with a cigarette hanging from his lip, but he’s also a broken loser hollow on the inside and nothing without the authority granted to him by being a member of the police force. When he and Kato (Akira Takahashi) visit a sex worker, she complains that Harada can’t get it up as if signalling his essentially powerlessness and implying his violence is rooted in fear and insecurity.

Haunted by what seems to be flashbacks to an Anpo protest, Nakamura is apparently a counter to these authoritarian instincts. Having escaped the psychiatric hospital, he’s accompanied by a young woman who seems to be something of an outsider herself and the film’s real moral compass. She feels sorry for Nakamura and sees his inner purity, while in turning to Harada at the film’s conclusion and exclaiming that she pities him too reasserts her power over him. It’s she who takes Nakamura to her cousin’s travelling theatre troupe wandering the “wasteland” outside of the cities and thereby wilfully existing outside of mainstream society. Nevertheless, they are at first invaded by Harada and his partner Kato who have brought along Nakamura’s wife, and then by rightwing bikers who destroy their camp. Even these small enclaves cannot be permitted to exist and no attempt to escape the system can be tolerated. Sawada expresses this oppressiveness though the overuse of censorship bars many of which are not hiding anything that might be considered objectionable but are, in a certain sense, merely decorative. In Harada’s final demonic grin as he retreats across the wasteland, the film seems to suggest that there is no other way to escape this world of corruption other than madness or death.

Retreat Through the Wet Wasteland screened as part of Japan Society New York’s Kazuhiko Hasegawa’s Anarchic Ethos.