Tag: Japanese

The Wind Blows Twice (風ふたゝび, Shiro Toyoda, 1952)

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Struggling with the end of her marriage, a young woman finds herself listless yet considering new possibilities in Shiro Toyoda’s The Wind Blows Twice (風ふたゝび, Kaze Futatabi). Adapted from a serialised novel by Tatsuo Nagai, the title is echoed in a remark from one of two potential suitors that youth is something that can come two or even three times so as long as you remain young at heart. They are each, however, each currently frozen and unable to move forward in the wake of their personal traumas. 

Kanae (Setsuko Hara), it seems, married for love but her husband has apparently been arrested for some kind of corruption. She has severed all ties with him and returned to the house of the uncle and aunt who raised her after her mother’s death where she helps out in their shop. Meanwhile, she learns that her semi-estranged father Seijiro (Ken Mitsuda), a university professor who lives in Sendai and hasn’t been in contact despite his daughter’s difficult circumstances, collapsed on the steps of the local station and is being cared for by a former student, Miyashita (Ryo Ikebe). She travels to look after him and becomes closer to Miyashita, who currently works as an auctioneer and has dreams of becoming a greengrocer, but is perturbed to learn that her father is a suspect in the theft of 10,000 yen from the wallet of a wealthy man, Michihara (So Yamamura), who carelessly left in the toilet and discovered the money missing when he went back to pick it up. Worried that the rumour may damage her father’s career, Kanae goes to apologise and find out what’s going on but Michihara tells her not to worry and it was his own fault anyway but his sudden magnanimity seems suspicious. In any case, Kanae later tells her friend Yoko that Michihara frightened her, also remarking to Miyashita that she felt as if she managed to slip away from him as she made her escape.

Though he later turns out to be sympathetic, Michihara appears as the villain of the piece. He thinks Kanae reminds him of his late wife and intends to ask her to marry him one the seventh anniversary memorial service is concluded. He starts using his wealth and power to gently interfere in her life, setting up a job for her on hearing that she’d been looking for employment and later approaching her father with the idea of investing in his research into the use of fluorides in the production of resin. Despite her initial dislike of him, Kanae goes along with everything and is soon sucked into Michihara’s world while otherwise wilfully oblivious of his feelings for her (which she does not share) and hoping he’ll help her convince Miyashita that he ought to return to science and help her father with his research which would obviously pave the way for them be together romantically.

The problem is that like Kanae Miyashita has become frozen inside, scarred by his wartime experiences and soured on science. Yet just as staying with him restores Kanae’s spirit and encourages her to want to look for work and find purpose in her life, her influence on him reawakens his passion for scientific research only he is less happy about it than she was. The interest that’s sparked in him ironically lies in the frozen north, travelling to Hokkaido to see an old friend and researching how to prevent potatoes from freezing in order to improve people’s quality of life. In essence it seems as if the futures they may want are too different. Now much more cheerful and energetic, Kanae genuinely enjoys her work in broadcasting and is less than keen to give it up and move to rural Hokkaido to help Miyashita study potatoes while secretly hoping she can convince him, with Michihara’s help, to become a respectable academic like her father and live a nice middle class life researching things that are more useful to industry and big business than to regular people.

Miyashita is disinclined to do so. He bounds straight off a train to see her with three day stubble from the journey, only to be disappointed witnessing in her in an elaborate kimono with her hair constrained in traditional style while Michihara is there waiting to see him to discuss a job offer from Seijiro. It’s at this point that he seems to decide his romantic desire for Kanae is most likely futile and she has chosen the rarified world of Michihara rather a rustic and homely life with a man like himself. Of course, this makes it sound as if Kanae doesn’t have much choice at all herself and to an extent she doesn’t or at least she feels backed into a corner while her aunt pressures her to remarry, unbothered to which man but excited about the proposal from Michihara because it means she will enjoy a life of uninterrupted financial comfort.

Having chosen her own suitor and seen things go drastically wrong also increases her aunt’s conviction that she shouldn’t make the same mistake again while she too is perhaps wary of remarrying. In any case. Kanae seems to want work and enjoys her job in broadcasting as much as she’s naturally drawn to Miyashita who brings out in her a greater desire to live while Michihara only seems to want her to be a shadow of his late wife suggesting that to marry a man like that may itself be a kind of death sentence. To that extent, the choice Kanae makes involves a predicable sacrifice, but still in any case it is a choice that she makes for herself to strike out for happiness and fulfilment of her own choosing rather than allow herself to be railroaded by conventionality unable to express her own desires.

Kalanchoe (カランコエの花, Shun Nakagawa, 2017)

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The truth is, most people genuinely mean well but they often make mistakes. They make them because they don’t think things through, fail to consider perspectives outside of their own, or act on assumptions that they later realise were incorrect (or tragically do not). Most people will come to understand where they went wrong and resolve to do better in future, but you don’t always get a second chance and a momentary lapse in judgement can do untold and sometimes irreparable harm.

Perhaps that’s just a lesson you learn as a part of growing up, but it doesn’t make it any less painful or indeed shocking at least for the heroine of Shun Nakagawa’s 40-minute mid-length film Kalanchoe (カランコエの花, Kalanchoe no Hana). The film’s title refers to a bright red plant that in the language of flowers means “I will protect you.” But protection can be a double-edged sword, and Tsuki’s (Mio Imada) later attempt to do just that for her friend seriously backfires well meaning though it may have been. The same is true of an ill thought out decision by the school nurse to give a mini lecture on LGBTQ+ issues to Tsuki’s class when their English teacher’s off sick. Because it was only their class that received this talk, some of the students assume it must mean that one of them is gay and begin a kind of witch-hunt trying to figure out who it might be which is completely the opposite of the reaction the talk was supposed to provoke.

Of course, the nurse meant well but it probably should have occurred to her to make sure the class wasn’t singled out and support was available for any students who might be experiencing anxiety surrounding their sexuality or gender identity rather than doing something essentially superficial to make herself feel better. Though most of the students are indifferent to the talk, the class clown bears out the latent homophobia of the current society in badgering the nurse to find out if there are any gay people “or other creeps” in their class while vowing to root them out and making it a kind of game to catch one. The girls, meanwhile, engage in some aggressive heteronormativity talking about boys and pretty much making it impossible for any of them to declare themselves for whatever reason uninterested. 

As it turns out, one student overheard the conversation in the nurse’s office that provoked the talk and knows that one of the students is indeed gay, perhaps inappropriately telling Tsuki who it is in an effort to relieve the burden on herself of carrying this explosive information. When Sakura (Arisa), the student in question, begins to tell Tsuki that she’s gay, Tsuki firstly reacts well patiently waiting rather than admit she already knows though in the end Sakura cannot go through with it despite having said that Tsuki was the person she most wanted to understand. Sakura had admired Tsuki’s red scrunchie that she herself had worried was too bold, prompting her to turn over in her hands and consider it as if thinking over how she intends to react to this information and how she herself may or may not feel.

But on her second opportunity she missteps. Fearing Sakura has been outed, she loudly and clearly says it isn’t true even though she knows it is in a mistaken attempt at “protection” as if she were clearing her name which is also an expression of her own latent belief that it being true is in someway bad. In its way, it echoes the fateful moment in William Wyler’s The Children’s Hour in which Shirley MacLaine tells Audrey Hepburn there’s some truth in the rumour, but Audrey Hepburn tells her she’s lost her mind and though the outcome may not be quite as devastating it’s still a crushing blow with the brutal conclusion implying nothing more than Tsuki will have to live with her bad decision and the pain it caused for the rest of her life. Nakagawa skips between idyllic scenes of the girls on a bike, head gently resting on a shoulder, and scenes of regular high school life but ends on a note of quiet tragedy that feels somehow casually cruel.

Kalanchoe is available to stream via SAKKA from 20th September.

A Family (ヤクザと家族 The Family, Michihito Fujii, 2020)

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“No one can survive as a yakuza in this world” according to another orphaned son playing the long game of a crime adjacent existence in Michihito Fujii’s melancholy gangster drama, A Family (ヤクザと家族 The Family, Yakuza to Kazoku The Family). The yakuza, or at least yakuza in the movies, has long been a relic of the Showa era rendered increasingly irrelevant in a society no longer in need of its dubious claims of protection. In truth, it’s hard to mourn the passing of organised crime, but Fujii at least finds a kind of pathos and infinite sympathy for these men for whom the gangster brotherhood took the place of a family even if one with a self-destructive legacy. 

To begin with, petty street punk “Li’l Ken” (Go Ayano) wants nothing to do with the yakuza, seemingly the only guest at the funeral of the drug dealer father he resented other than a corrupt cop from the organised crime squad, Osako (Ryo Iwamatsu), who expresses regret that had he simply arrested him perhaps Ken’s father would be still be alive. Visiting another “familial” environment, a Korean barbecue run by the maternal Aiko (Shinobu Terajima) herself the widow of a gangster currently with a baby on her back, Ken gets himself noticed by local mobster Shibasaki (Hiroshi Tachi) by taking on some punks who stormed into the restaurant and attacked his guys. Explaining that his guys don’t associate with drugs, Shibasaki offers him a job which he refuses but having his card in his pocket literally saves his life when he’s pickup by rival gang leader Kato (Kosuke Toyohara) after having stolen and then destroyed some of their stash after stumbling across a drug deal. The course of Ken’s life is set, he joins the Shibasaki gang along with his two delinquent friends and accepts Shibasaki as his “oyabun” or “father”. 

In Shibasaki, Ken finds a father figure more palatable than the one he lost. As in many a yakuza movie, the Shibasaki clan is positioned as “good yakuza” of the old school kind who believe in things like duty and honour and are apparently pursuing the path towards becoming “true men”. The rival Kyoyo, by contrast, are “bad” new yakuza who no longer play by the old rules and make their money through destructive vices such as drugs. The expected turf war does exactly materialise though the uneasy truce between the rival gangs becomes increasingly strained as the economic situation of millennial Japan begins to shift, the local town council apparently set on demolishing the red light district as part of their plans for redeveloping the city. Kyoyo would rather take over its entirety, pushing Shibasaki to retreat in exchange for a small amount of monetary compensation while shady cop Osako tries to play the situation to his own advantage. 

Yet it’s also clear that the yakuza as an institution is on its way out. After a 14-year prison term, Ken emerges into a very different world in which organised crime has been hounded further into the margins thanks to effective, though the film would also argue inherently vindictive, legislation. No one can make any money anymore, and the slightest slip up can lead to arrest. The Shibasaki gang is now a handful of old men, most of the guys having moved on only moving on from the yakuza life is not easy as Ken’s old friend Hosono (Hayato Ichihara) explains. In order to rejoin regular society, a former yakuza must endure five years in the wilderness unable to open a bank account or get a regular job leaving them with few possibilities for basic survival that enable them to leave a life of crime. Now with a young daughter and job in waste disposal, Hosono is nervous and reticent, reluctant to be seen in public with Ken lest he be tarred with the criminal brush and lose access to the new life he’s managed to build for himself as a responsible husband and father. 

Urged by Shibasaki, Ken eventually leaves one family for another in reuniting with a woman he loved before prison who has since made a respectable life for herself as a low level civil servant but once his life of crime is exposed by a thoughtless colleague at his new job in deconstruction, he discovers that there is no place for a “reformed” yakuza in the contemporary society because in a sense there can be no such thing. Once gangster always a gangster, there is no path forward. Complaining that Osako has stolen his right to life, Ken is told only that the yakuza lost human rights long ago. 

“They’re my family. No reasons are needed” Ken replied when asked why he became a yakuza, but he continues to find himself torn between the various concepts of family and the inheritances of his two very different father figures. “Your time is over old man”, Aiko’s fatherless son Tsubasa (Hayato Isomura) tells an unrepentant Kato attempting to hang on to his territory in the face of a younger generation operating on an entirely different level, rejecting the codification of gangsterdom but seemingly embracing its romance. Tsubasa too is later sucked in by the hyper masculine revenge drama of the yakuza way, seeking vengeance for the death of his father and apparently prepared to ruin his life in order to gain it. It’s for this surrogate son, now a kind of father figure himself, that Ken will eventually make a sacrifice. A sad tale of dubious paternal legacies, frustrated fatherhood, life’s persistent unfairness, and a perhaps uncomfortable lament for a bygone Japan defined by giri/ninjo conflict ruled by manly men, the ironically titled A Family has only sympathy for those trapped by an inescapable spiral of manly violence but also reserves its respect for those who know their time has passed and elect to end the cycle in order to set their “sons” free. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Tokyo Sweetheart (東京の恋人, Yasuki Chiba, 1952)

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It appears that even as early as 1952, some people were doing “very well, thank you” despite the suffering going on all around them. Then again, the heroes of Yasuki Chiba’s charming ensemble rom-com Tokyo Sweetheart (東京の恋人, Tokyo no Koibito) are relentlessly cheerful and likely wouldn’t use the word “suffering” to describe themselves, preferring instead to laugh at the foolishness of wealthy men and their petty squabbles while continuing to value what is honest and genuine above greed and insincerity.

At least, there’s a minor irony in the fact that Akazawa (Hisaya Morishige) makes his living selling pachinko balls, a a source of elusive hope that’s brought ruin to millions. His mistress, Konatsu (Murasaki Fujima), exclaims that when you’re doing well a ring or two is nothing, trying to manipulate Akazawa into buying a 500,000 yen diamond from the jewellers’ downstairs. Akazawa can afford to buy it, but he doesn’t really want to because he’s cheap and greedy. Later we’re introduced to a friend of portrait artist Yuki (Setsuko Hara) who does caricatures on the street corner below the office and hangs out with the three shoeshine boys opposite. Harumi (Yoko Sugi), a sex worker, has fallen ill presumably from tuberculosis. They only need 500 yen daily for her living expenses and medicine, but the only way they can hope to come up with it is by getting a large amount of people to part with a small amount of money which they are all willing to do as an act of solidarity. 

In rather farcical turn of events, the jeweller’s has commissioned a fake ring to display in the window for security purposes while they keep the real one in the safe. Konatsu suggests a complex plan to the jewellers of getting Akazawa to buy the diamond but giving him the fake which she will then return and pocket difference. Only Akazawa has the same idea, or rather he only wants to buy the fake one because Konatsu won’t know the difference and he doesn’t think she’s worth the expense of the real one. When he ends up with both rings, Akazawa’s wife, Tsuruko (Nijiko Kiyokawa), makes him give the fake one, which is actually real, to the tea girl, Tama, who wants to sell it, even if it is fake, to help Harumi not only with her illness but to escape sex work. The boys tell her she’s being selfish and naive. If Harumi had any way of escaping sex work she would have done so years ago, there’s no real hope for her now. “A shoe can be repaired,” one of the boys sighs, “but I’m not so sure about her.”

In some ways, it seems as if the genuineness of the ring is unimportant. The two are often mistaken for each other and few can tell the difference. After all, if you like it, what does its supposed authenticity matter and what does that really mean anyway? It does, however, seem to matter to Yuki who later says that she thought the film’s most genuine person, Kurokawa (Toshiro Mifune), was “gaudy and slick” when they first met because he was wearing a tacky tie pin and ring which stand out a mile to her as “fake”. Kurokawa in fact makes the replica jewellery displayed in front windows and dresses in that way as a kind lived brand though he does not necessarily approve of his own occupation. He exceeds expectations when he tracks the gang down in order to pay back some money Yuki had lent him when the conductor couldn’t give him change for his bus fare, as well as treating the shoeshine kids to ice creams and warning off the creepy yakuza type who keeps trying to bother Yuki for dates.

But the contradictions are brought to the fore when Harumi’s health declines and Yuki decides she ought to call the estranged mother to whom Harumi had written a comforting letter stating that she’d married and was living happily in Tokyo, enclosing a photo of herself and Kurokawa one of the shoeshine boys had taken on his toy camera. Yuki wants Kurokawa to pose as the husband so the mother won’t be so upset, only for him to point out that she now asks him adopt a fake persona after taking him to task for confusing people with his “fakes”. Again, this false comfort does seem to bring genuine relief to the mother even if as Kurokawa suspects she’s seen right through their ruse suggesting that authenticity of feeling is the only kind that matters.

Akazawa and his wife, meanwhile, bankrupt themselves trawling the river looking for the lost “genuine” ring sinking to all new depths of absurdity as even Tsuruko dons a diving suit and goes in to look herself. Unfortunately, all they find is a single pachinko ball. There is something quite abrupt about the sudden tonal shift from Harumi’s death bed to the gang laughing away at the foolishness of Akazawa and his wife, the boys convinced that Yuki and Kurokawa are now a couple though they never really enjoy much of a romantic resolution. Kurokawa lives a long way out of town and his home is surrounded by rubble and empty lots, signs of post-war devastation still not fully cleared away though Yuki and the boys, presumably war orphans, remain endlessly cheerful even as the extreme irony of Kurokawa’s rendition of Moon Over Ruined Castle washes over them. They do at least have each other and the strength of their community, living honest and genuine lives every day in contrast to men like Akazawa chasing pointless yet shiny trinkets and falling straight down the plughole themselves.

Luminous Moss (ひかりごけ, Kei Kumai, 1992)

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At the end of the increasing surreal trial which concludes the play within a play in Kei Kumai’s Luminous Moss (ひかりごけ, Hikarigoke), the protagonist turns to the people of the court and asks them to look at him. He wants to know if they see the ring of light around his head that looks like the luminescent plants inside the cave where he spent three months or so after being shipwrecked in the middle of the war. His plea is as much to ask what would you have done and if we can ever really judge him when we ourselves have never been faced with his dilemma.

It is however a dilemma many were faced with, and one tacitly suggested in other earlier films such as Kon Ichikawa’s Fires on the Plain though at that point too taboo and painful to address openly. In the framing sequence which bookends the film, an author visits a town in Northern Hokkaido in search of inspiration and is guided to a cave, now reachable by a roadway built after the war, where luminous moss grows. The man who takes him, a headmaster (Rentaro Mikuni), also tells him of an incident which took place there in which four shipwrecked men swam to shore and took refuge within the cave. Only the captain (also played by Rentaro Mikuni) survived, making a perilous trek across the ice a few months later when his food source depleted and he was left with no other choice.

The middle of the film is presented as a flashback, but actually the play the author is writing based on the investigations of the headmaster who says that he increasingly came to sympathise with the captain because of his own experiences as a prisoner of war in Siberia. Hachizo (Kunie Tanaka), a middle-aged father to a large family who refuses to eat the corpse of the first man to die, Gosuke (Tetta Sugimoto), because he promised him he wouldn’t, describes the captain as a “resourceful man” in both positive and negative senses of the word. He assumes the captain is already calculating when the current supply will run out, and when his own body will have consumed, leaving him with a dilemma about what to do next. The captain is in no real doubt about the necessity of eating Gosuke’s flesh and feels no guilt about it, after all he died of natural causes after consuming seawater and is now, in the captain’s view, simply meat so not eating him is just a pointless waste. Perhaps the situation would be different if he had killed him deliberately in order to eat him, but on the other hand it would not really be advantageous to do so given that the captain’s end goal is surviving until the end of the winter when it will be possible to return to the mainland. Thus he waits for his men to die and leaves the rest up to fate. 

The situation only comes to light when a wooden box is washed to shore containing the bones of Private Nishikawa (Eiji Okuda), whom the captain did actually kill but accidentally while he was trying to commit suicide so that the captain would not be able to eat him. Nishikawa is originally a thorn in the side to the stranded men, a brainwashed militarist who insists they must survive out of loyalty to the emperor. He refuses to eat Gosuke’s corpse on moral grounds, but is eventually unable to resist unconsoled by Hachizo’s well-meaning advice that he should tell himself he did it for the emperor. Knowing that he did it solely for his own survival shatters his illusions of himself as a loyal subject and fractures his sense of identity. He cannot live with himself having eaten human flesh, while as the captain says those who were going to die were always going to while those who must survive must to everything to do so. 

Thus at his trial, in which he appears to have lost his mind, he stresses that though he does not object to the legal process or its consequences he will not feel himself to have been judged by the prosecutor (Hisashi Igawa) as he has never eaten human flesh nor had his own flesh eaten. While in the cave, Hachizo had claimed to see a glowing ring around Nishikawa’s face which he attributed to a folk belief that such a ring resembling the green glow of luminescent moss was a signifier of his guilt visible only from a certain angle and for a short time only to those who look for it. It’s this ring that captain asks others to look for at his trial, to show him the signifier of his own guilt so that he may himself accept it. But then he may actually have a point that those who have never experienced what he has experienced are incapable of judging him. At the critical moment, the trial is interrupted by an air raid, there after becoming increasingly surreal as the location is shifted back to the cave as if it were all taking place within the captain’s mind. 

The prosecutor tries to attack him for attempting to blame it all on nation and society, suggesting that his actions have disgraced all of Japan and brought shame on the emperor about whom the captain makes an inappropriate remark suggesting that the emperor too is human and merely “enduring” his circumstances. Pressed to explain himself, the captain only says that he is “enduring” many things and that during his time in the cave he simply “endured”, doing what seemed to him the only thing he could do. The prosector points out that Hachizo refused and chose death, while Nishikawa attempted suicide to atone for his actions, asking what right the captain had choose survival but the only ones who can really judge him the three men he cannibalised each of whom appear as (almost) silent ghosts whose judgement cannot be interpreted. 

Though the film is not as visually striking as others in Kumai’s earlier career, he succeeds in conjuring a sense of primeval eeriness in the swirling mists and oddly shaped icicles of the cave while avoiding any sense of gore in the act of cannibalism itself which might otherwise unbalance the ethical dimensions he wishes to address. In the closing sequence, both the writer and the headmaster are positioned behind the bars which now protect the moss as if this kind of primal impulse could really be restrained or tempered by our civility. After the death of Gosuke and given the objections of the other two men, the captain suggests waiting a day or two to see how long their “human feelings” could hold in the face of their survival, the answer perhaps being less than you’d hope and about as long as you’d expect.

In the Distance (距ててて, Saki Kato, 2022)

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Can two people who have completely different outlooks and ways of living learn to get along and eventually become friends? A pandemic-era dramedy, Saki Kato’s In the Distance (距ててて, Hedatetete) asks just this question when two women are unexpectedly forced to co-exist on a greater level after their roommate is suddenly stuck abroad. A series of surreal adventures might leave them with no option other than to confront their differences, but also shows them that difference can be complementary rather than disharmonious. 

The main issues between Ako and San are those which are common to any house sharing arrangement particularly if the people involved did know each other well previously. Ako is an aspiring photographer who sees part-time work as a necessary evil but continues to struggle amid the vagaries of the covid-era economy. She is neat and tidy and likes the house to be in order. San, meanwhile, is picking up most of the rent and has a job which has not been too badly affected by the pandemic. But she’s also a total mess when it comes to her share of the housework and has an annoying habit of picking up everyone’s post and stuffing it somewhere in her room without letting her roommates know a letter has come for them. Obviously, this is also an invasion of privacy on top of simply being annoying so Ako’s irritation is understandable but she has a kind of animosity towards San simply for being what she sees as a boring wage slave while she’s just slumming it until she gets a break with her photography.

But then again, San is “artistic” if in a problematic way in that her accordion playing has caused complaints from neighbours but when their property manager comes to have a word with them he ends up bringing his ocarina to join in the fun. San vents her frustrations to a friend, Tomoe, who has a similar problem of her own in that she’s in the process of breaking up with her boyfriend because they keep disagreeing over trivial things like brands of rice or misaligned printing on greetings cards. They only talk to each other in terms of metaphor with Tomoe apparently sick of their mismatched pairing and hoping to find a new partner with more common interests while the boyfriend seems near distraught by the thought of the relationship ending. 

Ironically it’s San who points out their relationship may be fairly complementary and it’s more the case that they can get along together because they are different yet she still struggles with her relationship with Ako whom she finds uptight and pretentious. Ako, meanwhile, is having a strange encounter of her own with a teenage girl looking for a misdirected letter presumably spirited away by San. She claims not to have a phone or use a computer and implies that her mother is very strict, though when she actually arrives at the house she’s incredibly nice and even cooks a hearty meal though there is something a little sinister in her manner lending the pair a kind of supernatural quality like something out of a fairytale. 

In any case, a misplaced keepsake eventually prompts a confrontation between the two women that allows them to clear the air and find a way to work together. Turning somewhat surreal in its final section, the film hints at a transportational quality of their new alliance that drops them in a new and unfamiliar place with only each other to rely on. The lesson seems to be that sharing an environment necessarily gives rise to various interpersonal issues which can be dissolved while outside of it, and that even if two people seem completely incompatible they can still find common ground and learn to get along especially against the stressful backdrop of a global pandemic in which enforced isolation can exert additional pressure on an already strained relationship just when mutual cooperation becomes an absolute necessity. Filmed with everyday naturalism and a surrealist, deadpan humour Kato’s indie dramedy hints at the strangeness of the ordinary but also discovers the small moments of unexpected connection often brokered by casual misunderstanding.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

School of the Holy Beast (聖獣学園, Norifumi Suzuki, 1974)

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“Why is sex wrong?” a rebel nun enquires, hinting at the hypocritical atmosphere of the convent which comes to stand in for the patriarchal superstructure of the contemporary society. That it does so might in a way be surprising given that Christianity has relatively little cultural relevance in Japan save its stance as a persecuted religion during the feudal era. Director Norifumi Suzuki jumps on the nunsploitation bandwagon but does so with a baroque romanticism mixed with punkish youthfulness as two young women find themselves rebels in the house of God.

They are both there for reasons largely unconnected to religion. 18-year-old Maya (Yumi Takigawa) is searching for the truth behind her birth and her mother’s death, while Sister Ishida (Emiko Yamauchi) claims she’s been sent there by a wicked stepmother. Ishida also kicks up a stink during a class by questioning the truth of immaculate conception which is quite odd for someone who wanted to become a nun, while otherwise punished for drinking whisky in the middle of the night. Punishment does seem to be the main thrust of their religious practice with the transgressions of “adultery”, which includes all impure thoughts, murder (!), and theft taken the most seriously. On her first night at the convent Maya is woken by the sound of another nun furiously whipping herself though in fairness there just isn’t much else to do. 

Suzuki rams home the erotisicm of ritual in the baptism Maya undergoes during her initiation as a nun in which she is totally nude and instructed to stand with her arms out as if on the cross in front of the altar. She must then bend to kiss the crucifix before receiving her veil as a bride of Christ. The nuns talk of lives of eternal virginity while burying themselves in asceticism in an effort to deny their natural desires but have to a degree sublimated their lust in violence. The most common form of punishment is whipping, while Maya is later tortured with thorns and artfully battered by roses. When one nun steals money in guilt for having abandoned her impoverished family to begin her spiritual journey to Christ, she confesses herself to a priest who offers her the same amount so that she can help her family and ease her conscience by returning it. But in reality the priest has tricked her. He resents that she feels as if her sin has been forgiven and she may forget her guilt, cruelly telling her that she will never hear the voice of God before going on to violate her. 

The act of betrayal, of himself breaking the code to which he should subscribe, is only a echo of an societal corruption which allows men to abuse their power often with the complicity of the women around them such as the abess who has long been in love with him. Kakinuma (Fumio Watanabe) is a man whose faith has been shaken. He bears the scars from exposure to the atomic bomb in Nagasaki which is centre of Christianity in Japan. After telling Hisako (Yayoi Watanabe) that God will not see her, he asks if anyone has actually seen him and why he does nothing when his people suffer. 

Both he and the abbess are trapped in a hell of their own making, though as the girls both say the convent is akin to a prison. When Hisako’s sister visits her they talk to each other through glass as if she were a prisoner, though in many ways she is oppressed by her own repressed desires while those of the other nuns have begun to drive them quietly out of their minds and into sadomasochistic fury. This peculiar madness is only deepened by the arrival of a new Mother Superior who returns from Europe insistent on rooting out “witches” in league with the devil. Suzuki signals the absurdity by playing a chorus of elation when a tortured nun wets herself over a tablet featuring a crucifix in the inversion of a bizarre Edo-era ritual designed to identify secret Christians who were at that point illegal. 

To break free of the covent and return to her liberated life in contemporary Japan as seen in the cheerful opening sequences of her date with Kenta (Hayato Tani), Maya must also free her mother’s ghost and the souls of her sisters by forcing Kakinuma to reckon with his crimes if in the most ironic of ways. Suzuki shoots with febrile romanticism, the pastel colours of the church lending it a hellish glow even before the resurrection of a ghost enacts karmic revenge in a feverish atmosphere of romantic jealously and masochistic repression.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

*Norifumi Suzuki’s name is actually “Noribumi” but he has become known as “Norifumi” to English-speaking audiences.

Ajin: Demi-Human (亜人, Katsuyuki Motohiro, 2017)

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Katsuyuki Motohiro’s 2001social drama Transparent: Tribute to a Sad Genius had attempted to show the government acting with compassion having discovered humans with a potentially dangerous power, in that case the unfortunate ability to broadcast their every thought. Rather than locking them up in labs, the government had allowed the Transparents to live in the community under the caveat that they must never be told of their ability while continuing to monitor them secretly and in fact micromanaging their lives with less than ethical attention. 2017’s Ajin (亜人), adapted from the manga by Gamon Sakurai, is in many ways Transparent’s flip side in which the government has discovered the existence of a series of people known as Demi-Humans with super fast healing ability meaning that they cannot die from injury and has been conducting what is essentially vivisection on them justifying themselves that “the Ajin are the precious key to the evolution of mankind”. 

Nevertheless, they are mindful that the public would not accept it if they knew the government’s claims of “protecting” Ajins was a smokescreen to disguise the fact they’ve been experimenting on them, let alone selling the results to commercial companies for the production of chemical weapons among other things. Previously a regular medical student, Kei Nagano (Takeru Satoh) is the third Ajin to be unmasked in Japan after being hit by a bus only to heal rapidly and stumble away. After a brief period of torture, Kei is “rescued” by crazed terrorist revolutionary leader Sato (Go Ayano) and his underling Tanaka (Yu Shirota), escaped Ajins 1 and 2, but becomes their enemy after he refuses to turn against the scientists who had been torturing him pointing out that killing them would only make him feel worse and is therefore counterproductive. 

The implication is that 20 years of brutal torture at the hands of mad scientists has turned Sato into a crazed fascist hellbent on the extinction of the human race, seeking an “autonomous” space for Ajin along with full civil rights for Demi-Humans. Though we are told that only three Ajin have been unmasked so far in Japan, the implication is that there are many more living quietly some of whom Sato recruits after putting out a call for all disenfranchised Demi-Humans to join his revolution not for equality but domination. It’s this movement Kei can’t support, the classically “good” Ajin who disapproves of Sato’s actions and wants to leave peacefully alongside humanity. As such, there’s something a little uncomfortable in his inevitable decision to team up with the people who were just vivisecting him in order to stop Sato achieving his goal of guaranteed civil rights for people like him asking for nothing more than that his family be protected and he be left alone and given a new ID to live quietly in somewhere in Japan when all of this over. 

The unpalatable implication seems to be that minorities are only worthy of respect if they serve those in power, both Kei and another closeted Ajin benefiting directly and individually by siding with humanity though humanity may not honour the various promises it makes while they are partially complicit in the torture and exploitation of other Ajins. Sato’s basic request is only to given his full rights in the freedom from torture, but even this cannot be granted because of the threat he presents to humanity in that the inability to die means that he cannot be controlled through violence. Ironically enough Sato does seem to believe himself to be the next step in human evolution, after 20 years of brutal torture believing that humanity is a lesser being which those like him are intended to replace. 

Kei meanwhile encounters kind humans such as Mrs. Yamanaka (Kazuko Yoshiyuki) who kindly offers him a place to hideout because when you see someone is in trouble you just help them even if a baying mob later turn up at your door to ask why. There may be a minor allegory in the way the Ajins are treated, feared by and excluded from regular society, forced to keep their true natures secret in order to live a “quiet” life but than again Sato and his cohort of equally crazed young Demi-Humans who presumably have never been tortured are depicted as quasi-fascist radicals selling their own organs on the medical black market and eventually prepared to unleash a chemical weapon on Tokyo to make it unliveable for regular humans in order to claim their own space. Nevertheless, Motohiro’s drama is at its best during its high impact, well choreographed action sequences displaying some top quality visual effects as the Ajins produce their ghostly avatars or reassemble themselves after catastrophic injury even if the discomfort of the underlying messages cannot be entirely escaped. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Target (薔薇の標的, Toru Murakawa, 1980)

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By 1980 Toru Murakawa was an in-demand director thanks largely to his extremely successful collaborations with late ‘70s icon Yusaku Matsuda. Fresh off the back of the Game series, Toei Central Film hired him to do for their aspiring star Hiroshi Tachi what he’d done for Matsuda with grimy noir Target (薔薇の標的, Bara no Hyoteki). Interestingly enough Target shares its Japanese title with the 1972 drama The Target of Roses, a truly bizarre thriller in which a hitman stumbles on an international nazi conspiracy that was penned by the same screenwriters but is otherwise entirely unconnected with the earlier film and shares no common plot elements whatsoever. 

Set firmly within the contemporary era, the action takes place in Yokohama and is essentially a tale of proto-heroic bloodshed as the hero, Hiroshi (Hiroshi Tachi), seeks vengeance for the death of his best friend, Akira, during a drug deal which is ambushed by a third party who make off with both the drugs and the money killing Akira in the process. Hiroshi goes to prison for four years and then sets about getting some payback on his release by chasing down the Idogaki gang through gunman Yagi who he believes was directly responsible for Akira’s death. 

The plot is perhaps straight out of the Nikkatsu playbook, a little less honour than you’d find in the usual Toei picture though also cynical and nihilistic in keeping with the late ‘70s taste for generalised paranoia. Hiroshi is soon targeted by the Idogaki gang, but is saved by an old prison buddy, Kadota (Ryohei Uchida), who is a little older than he is and to an extent has a noble reason for his life of crime in that he has a son who became disabled after contracting polio and wants to get enough money together to make sure he’ll be alright when he can no longer look after him. Kadota then adds a third a man, Nakao, a former narcotics cop who jokes that he was kicked off the force for rape but according to Kadota was forced out for noble reasons after his attempt to help a friend backfired. The three men team up to turn the tables on Idogaki by ambushing his own drug deal with, in a throwback to ‘60s Sinophobia, gangsters from Shanghai. 

Meanwhile Hiroshi is caught between the life he had before and the contemporary reality in reuniting with his former girlfriend Kyoko (Yutaka Nakajima) who has evidently become the mistress of a wealthy man and is presumably the mysterious benefactor who paid all his legal fees. After a meet cute at a florist he also strikes up a tentative relationship with a wealthy young woman, the daughter of a CEO who plans to move to Mexico. Despite the rising prosperity of Japan in the early ‘80s, pretty much everyone has their sights set on going abroad, Kadota planning to head to Canada after making sure his son is well provided for. Yet Hiroshi is trapped in the Japan of the past, obsessed with vengeance for his friend while torn by his relationship with Kyoko who similarly wants to exit her comfortable yet compromised life to return to a more innocent time at Hiroshi’s side while unbeknownst to him the mistress of high ranking Idogaki boss Hamada. 

What becomes clear is that there is no prospect of escape from contemporary Japan, not even perhaps in death, Hiroshi left alive but dead inside at the film’s conclusion having committed a kind of spiritual suicide born of the dark side of what remained of his honour in seeking vengeance for the death of his friend who had seemingly only participated in the drug deal at Hiroshi’s command in an effort to improve the fortunes of their gang. Once again produced by Toei’s subsidiary Toei Central Film, Target has lower production values than the films Murakawa was making with Matsuda (who has a small yet memorable cameo as a rockstar whose life has been ruined by drugs) with non-synchronised dialogue and a grimy aesthetic which only adds to its sense of fatalistic nihilism otherwise enlivened by Murakawa’s artful composition and atmosphere of moral ruin in which there is no more humanity nor justice. 

Baby Assassins: Nice Days (ベイビーわるきゅーれ ナイスデイズ, Yugo Sakamoto, 2024) [Fantasia 2024]

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After beginning to conquer the demands of adulthood, Mahiro (Saori Izawa) and Chisato (Akari Takaishi) are taking a well-deserved break, or more like a working holiday to be precise, but soon find themselves with another unexpected mission to clean up a messy situation on behalf of the Guild. Baby Assassins: Nice Days (ベイビーわるきゅーれ ナイスデイズ, Baby Valkyrie​: Nice Days), the third in series of deadpan slacker action movies from Yugo Sakamoto, adjusts the balance of the previous two films shifting more towards action than the girls’ aimless lives while setting them against an opponent who is anything but aimless.

In fact with the girls find their way to the home of Kaede Fuyumura (Sosuke Ikematsu), is plastered in ironic motivational slogans that seem to be a kind of parody of salaryman’s kaizen obsession. Fuyumura likes to rank things and wants to make sure he’s at the top, but also wants out of the game because he’s bored with it and also fed up with difficult clients frustrated when one takes ages to decide whether or not he should kill the target resulting unnecessary stress for them and an unsatisfying kill for Fuyumura. That’s largely why he’s agreed to this one last job of killing 150 people who took part in cancelling a university student online. The problem is that Fuyumura is a freelancer which presents a problem for the Guild which has decided he must die for violating their rules and bringing the profession into disrepute. Thus Mahiro and Chisato find themselves in an awkward position when they turn up to kill their latest target and realise they’ve been double booked to take out Fuyumura ’s kill.

The admin mixup, though it isn’t one really, rams home the series’ persistent absurdity that this weird world of assassins isn’t so different from contemporary corporate culture while the girls are still subject to the same problems as any other 20-something. This time around, we’re introduced to another prominent agency which is run out of a farmer’s agricultural co-op and hides weapons inside boxes of vegetables, while Mahiro and Chisato get a pair of supervisors with the de facto team leader Iruka (Atsuko Maeda) going off on lengthy rants about why it’s impossible to work with Gen Z while the girls struggle with her uptight dismissiveness. Yet even when there’s tension or discord, the fact remains that the Chisato and Mahiro are also part of a team and have a vast network of support to rely on including their cleanup squad while Fuyumura is a lone wolf who’s driven himself half out of his mind with his quest to be the best, a message is brought home to him when he approaches the farmer’s union to ask for “a replacement” after getting one of their guys killed only to be told off and reminded the farmers work as one big family rather than a series of disposable minions. 

There is something a little poignant about Fuyumura’s wondering when his birthday is as if this small forgotten detail represented his missing humanity. The only time he feels like a human being is doing something mundane like cleaning his microwave and brushing his teeth. As she had the brothers in the previous film, Mahiro finds a kind connection with Fuyumura as they each discover a worthy match but knowing only one of them can survive. In an introspective movement, Mahiro asks Chisato if they can still hang out together on the other side if the worst happens, but she shuts the question down perhaps more in an attempt to shift Mahiro’s mindset but also berating herself for forgetting her birthday and making hurried plans to coverup her crime against friendship.

For all the absurdity about hitman union rules and rights of employment in an illegal profession, the films has a genuine affection for the relationship between the two girls as well as that between the wider team who are always around to have their back while they also take care to protect each other. Perhaps having to field a work crisis during their “holiday” is their final test of adulthood, and one they largely pass in enforcing their boundaries and defiantly having a good time anyway even if they did have to cancel their reservation at local barbecue restaurant to stakeout the home of a crazed killer. Once again featuring a series of well choreographed and innovative action sequences, the series’ third instalment seems to come into its own expanding the world of the Baby Assassins but setting them free inside it evidently a lot more at home with the concept of adulting.

Original trailer (no subtitles)