Tag: Japanese

Zero (零戦燃ゆ, Toshio Masuda, 1984)

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The Zero Fighter has taken on a kind of mythic existence in a romanticised vision of warfare, yet as Toshio Masuda’s Zero (零戦燃ゆ零戦燃ゆ, Zerosen moyu) implies its time in the spotlight was in fact comparatively short. Soon eclipsed by sleeker planes flown by foreign pilots, the Zero’s glory faded until these once unbeatable fighters were relegated to suicide missions. On one level, the film uses the Zero as a metaphor for national hubris, a plane that ironically flew too close to the sun, but on another can never overcome the simple fact that this marvel of engineering was also a tool of war and destruction. 

The film is loosely framed around two members of Japan’s Imperial Navy, Hamada (Daijiro Tsutsumi) and Mizushima (Kunio Mizushima), who as cadets consider deserting to escape the brutality of Navy discipline. Having left the base they’re accosted by an inspirational captain who talks them out of leaving by showing them a prototype model of the Zero and convincing them they only need to stick it out for a few more years in order to get the opportunity to fly one. Mizushima, the film’s narrator, doesn’t qualify as a pilot and is related to the ground crew while Hamada does indeed get to pilot a Zero fighter and becomes one of the top pilots in the service. 

The viewpoint is is then split between the view from the ground and that from the clouds. Mizushima makes occasionally surprising statements such as candidly telling love interest Shizuko (Yû Hayami) that they are unlikely to win the war, while becoming ever more concerned for Hamada at one point telling him there’s a problem with his plane in the hope that he won’t take off that day. Hamada meanwhile is completely taken over by the spirit of the Zero and even when given a chance to escape the war after being badly injured, chooses to return because he does not know what else to do. When he visits home after leaving hospital, no one is there. His mother eventually arrives and explains that the family has become scattered with his siblings seconded to the war effort in various places throughout the country. 

Hamada’s dedication and personal sacrifice are in some senses held up as the embodiment of the Zero. The reason for its success is revealed to lie in the decision to remove the armouring for the cockpit leaving the pilot’s life unprotected, something which the American engineers describe as unthinkable. In an early meeting, a superior officer complains that they’re losing too many pilots and need to reinstall some of the armouring, but finds little support. Not only this is a cold and inhuman decision, but it’s poor economic sense given that skilled pilots are incredibly valuable and in short supply. After all, you can’t just make more. If you start from scratch you’ll need to wait 20 years and then teach them fly, but it’s a lesson the Navy never learns that is only exacerbated with the expansion of the kamikaze squads which squander both men and pilots for comparatively little gain. 

These “philosophical differences” are embodied in the nature of the Zero which is configured to be nimble and outmanoeuvre the enemy but is quickly eclipsed not least when foreign powers figure out the way to beat it lies in numbers in which they have the advantage. There is something of a post-Meiji spirit in the feeling that Japan is lagging behind Western powers and desperately needs to develop its own military tech in order to defend itself. On hearing rumours of the Zero fighter, MacArthur scoffs and says that Japan can’t even build cars so he doesn’t believe they could design a plane that could fly such large distances while others suggest that they will still need the element of surprise if they ever go to war with America because its technology is still superior. 

Walking a fine line, the film tries to avoid glorifying “war”, but it cannot always help indulging in nationalist fantasy such as in its statement that thanks to the Zero “the Japanese flag covered a vast area of the Pacific” in the wake of Pearl Harbour. These may be fantastically well designed machines that were incredibly good at what they were created to do, only what they were created to do was kill and destroy. The plane’s fortunes and Japan’s are intrinsically linked, the sense of superiority in the air lasts only a short time before Western technological advances over take it and the war continues to go badly. The film dramatises the tragedy of war through the friendship between the two men which eventually causes Mizushima to sacrifice his love for Shizuko by convincing her marry Hamada hoping that his priorities would change and he’d decide to take a position as an instructor rather than heading back to the front. 

For her part, it seems that Shizuko was also in love with Mizushima, but also caught in a moment of confusion between love and patriotism that encourages her to think she should do as Mizushima says and embrace this man who has dedicated his life to his country. In the end, it buys them each loss and misery, but also a moment of transcendent hope even if it was based on a falsehood in the pleasant memory that Mizushima gives Hamada of the life he is giving up by rejecting it to return to the front. For Mizushima, Hamada and the Zero may become one and the same. At the end of the war he can’t bear to see the remaining Zero’s sold for scrap and asked to be “gifted” one as the Captain who’d first shown one to him said he would be, so that he can give it a proper a “funeral”, or perhaps send it to Hamada in the afterlife after he is killed mere days before the surrender. Masuda cannot help romanticising the wartime conflict with his dashing pilots and their thrilling dogfights, often depicting it more as a kind of game than an ugly struggle of death and destruction, but does lend a note of poignancy to his tale of lives thwarted by the folly of war.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Every Trick In The Book (鳩の撃退法, Hideta Takahata, 2021)

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A down on his luck writer finds himself at the centre of a mystery only how much is truth and how much “fiction”? Based on the novel by Shogo Sato, Hideta Takahata’s Every Trick in the Book (鳩の撃退法, Hato no gekitai-ho) ponders the possibilities of literature as the hero seems to create a fictional world around him in which it is largely unclear whether he is solving a real world mystery or simply imagining one based on his impressions of the strange characters he encounters through the course of his everyday life.

That everyday life is however eventful just in itself. Tsuda (Tatsuya Fujiwara) once won a prestigious literary prize and was destined to become a popular author but hasn’t written anything of note for some time and in fact now largely works as a driver ferrying sex workers around on behalf of his shady boss. The mystery begins when he approaches a man, a rare solo reader in an overnight cafe, and promises to lend him a copy of Peter and Wendy by JM Barrie only to later discover that the man went missing along with his wife and the daughter he had explained was fathered by another man. 

Like many of his subsequent encounters it isn’t entirely clear if this meeting really took place or at least as Tsuda said it did or is only part of the novel he is beginning to write. The man, Hideyoshi (Shunsuke Kazama), asks him if it’s a novelist’s habit to begin imagining backstories for everyone he sets eyes on and there may well be some of that even as Tsuda is fond of claiming that amazing things happen around us every day to which we are mostly oblivious. Still, Tsuda probably didn’t expect to be pulled into the orbit of local gangster Kurata (Etsushi Toyokawa) after accidentally passing on counterfeit currency he found by chance. It’s true that most of what’s happening to him is the result of a series of bizarre coincidences or cosmic confluence which has accidentally united this collection of people in an unintended mystery which Tsuda intends to solve in either literal or literary terms. 

“It’s all a novelist can do” he later claims in trying to write a better ending for “characters” he has come to like than the one he assumes they “actually” met. But then his editor Nahomi (Tao Tsuchiya) chief worry is that, like his previous novel, Tsuda’s story will contain too much of the “literal” truth which could cause his publishers some legal problems. Part of the reason Tsuda left the industry is apparently because his last book was inspired by a real life affair which was then considered somewhat hurtful and defamatory. For that reason it comes as quite a blow to Nahomi as she begins to investigate and discovers that much of Tsuda’s story lines up with “real” places and events, but then again as he says if you can draw connections between known facts then you begin to see a “hidden” truth which may in its own way be merely his invention. 

The film’s Japanese title translates more literally as something like “how to fend off a dove” which does indeed have its share of irony especially considering the meaning the dove symbolism turns out to have in the film but perhaps also hints at the essential absurdity of trying to fight back against something that is otherwise harmless and in fact represents peace. Tsuda may be onto something and nothing, embracing the bizarre serendipity of a writer’s life while trying to recover his creative mojo but embellishing it with more danger and strangeness than it actually has to offer. Then again as his editor discovers, there really is an incinerator it seems anyone can just walk up and use to burn whatever they want including dead bodies, while people in general are full of duplicities all of which keeps the “fake” money circulating as people use it to try to buy things that can’t really be bought. Hideyoshi calls them “miracles”, embracing the strange serendipity of his life as an orphan longing for a family to call his own and unexpectedly finding one which is “real” in someways and “fiction” and in others. Then again, if you believe in something does it really matter if it’s “real” or not? Hideyoshi and Tsuda might say it doesn’t, the publishing company’s lawyers might feel differently, but it seems there really are amazing things going on around us every day if only you stop to look. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

A Wife’s Heart (妻の心, Mikio Naruse, 1956)

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“We’re too late for everything these days,” mutters an overly cheerful geisha whose behaviour is becoming ever more erratic. A sense of fatalism, that everything has already been decided and there is no real escape from the misery of life, hangs over much of Naruse’s filmmaking even if his heroines often do their best to rail against it and on occasion succeed. Kiyoko (Hideko Takamine), the heroine of A Wife’s Heart (妻の心, Tsuma no Kokoro), finds herself faced with just this dilemma while considering which side of a generational divide she might be on and whether she has the power to escape from her disappointing life to chase emotional fulfilment. 

We can see the literal distance between herself and her husband Shinji (Keiju Kobayashi) in the opening sequence as he stands in a vacant lot at the back of their property and she firmly within the domestic space hanging washing. Yet for all that she seems excited, perhaps even a little giddy as they plot their escape together through planning to turn that vacant space into a cafe in an attempt to fend off the economic changes ravaging their town and wider society of Japan in the mid-1950s. Out and about on his bike, Shinji looks anxiously at the construction of a new pharmacy much larger than his own and with flashy modern signage. Their business is failing and they don’t know how to save it so the cafe is their way out and also a break with the depressing past represented by Shinji’s grumpy mother, Ko (Eiko Miyoshi), who is predictably dead against the cafe idea. 

The new business, in its way, is also a stand-in for the child they don’t have and a means for Kiyoko to find domestic fulfilment in a society ruled by motherhood. This one reason that the sudden arrival of her sister-in-law Kaoru (Chieko Nakakita) with her small daughter Rumiko causes so much disruption. Kaoru has fulfilled the social obligations which Kiyoko has not and quickly insinuates herself within the house, taking over the domestic space as symbolised by her otherwise trivial action of putting back a pair of nail clippers in the place she sees fit rather than their usual home. Yet she does this in part because her husband, Zenichi (Minoru Chiaki) who left the family to become a salaryman in Tokyo, is so obviously unreliable and appears to have not for the first time lost his job while employed at a company possibly involved in something untoward. On getting wind of Shinji’s plans to open a cafe, Zenichi announces he’s thinking of opening one himself and gets his mother to put pressure on the couple to give him the money they borrowed for their dream project.

It’s the loan that in part allowed Kiyoko to consider life beyond her marriage in reuniting with the still unmarried brother of her best friend Yumiko (Yoko Sugi). Kenkichi (Toshiro Mifune) is everything Shinji is not, handsome, well dressed, and with a good, middle-class job working at a bank. On a visit to her relatives, Kiyoko’s aunt remarks that everyone wanted to marry her provoking a slight twinge of pain in Kiyoko’s face. Mother-in-law Ko arranges marriages and it’s likely she arranged the one between Kiyoko and her son and that Kiyoko likely agreed out to of social obligation under the rationale that Shinji was a good catch as the proprietor of a successful business. The implication is that if, like Yumiko, she had held out a little longer she probably would have fallen in love and married Kenkichi. As the atmosphere in the family home grows ever more toxic, she grows closer to him yet at least in part as a symbol of the path not taken, what her life may have been like if only she had resisted and claimed a little more freedom for herself. 

Ko has also arranged a marriage for youngest daughter Sumiko (Akemi Negishi) who asks her if all of her matches were happy. An indignant Ko replies that only one or two have split up, but as Sumiko points out just because a couple stays together does not mean they are happy. “Women don’t have the courage, they just give up,” she remarks implying that she, as a representative of the younger generation, might be less minded to simply accept a disappointing situation in the same way as someone of Kiyoko’s age may feel she had to. For these reasons Kiyoko is torn. Yumiko remarks that she and Shinji didn’t even particularly like each other when they married and perhaps remain indifferent to each other now. The cafe may have brought them closer as a couple, but now it’s causing a rift in the wider family while also offering Kiyoko the faintest glimmer of an escape route. When she returns to the cafe where she was learning the ropes as a part-time employee, much to Ko’s chagrin at losing a domestic helper, it’s clear that she’s doing so in part to have a means of supporting herself as she leans closer to the idea of leaving Shinji. 

But for all that it seems unlikely that she has the courage, as Sumiko put it, to break with the traditional social codes of feminity by leaving a husband who was not really bad but that she did not love and made her unhappy. In rebellion, Shinji has an indiscretion with a local geisha who goes missing on the way home from a hot springs and is later found dead having taken her own life because she was trapped in a bad relationship with her husband. The implication is that this is the only way many women find to escape from their dismal circumstances and may soon present itself to Kiyoko if she cannot find a way to reconcile herself to her life with Shinji or find the confidence to leave it. The enemy is the increasingly outdated institution of arranged marriages as advocated by the austere Ko who refuses to hire maids while believing herself entitled to the free labour of her daughters-in-law, and the patriarchal social codes of a modernising nation in which Shinji can have his dalliance with a geisha and his wife is expected to put up with it, but merely being seen walking with a man not one’s husband provokes gossip and jealousy. 

When Shinji implies he suspects her of having an affair with Kenkichi, he tells her that she’s free to follow her heart and he understands if she chooses to leave him but of course by telling her this he seals her fate by making it almost impossible for her to do so. The couple repairs itself, but the resolution is far from comfortable as it becomes clear that each is essentially resigning themselves to misery because of social convention vowing that they’ll build their cafe in the next season though it seems like a dream destined to go unfulfilled while the institution of Rumiko left behind in the family superficially fills the void it was designed to fill. The fades to black between scenes seem to echo an exhalation of bleakness as the interrupted thought of Kenkichi’s dangerous “Kiyoko…” as an admission that the prospect of escape is only ever a torturous fantasy and a heart is something that must be sacrificed in the name of conventional success. 

Summer Vacation 1999 (1999年の夏休み, Shusuke Kaneko, 1988)

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The curious thing, or perhaps a curious thing among many, about Shusuke Kaneko’s loose adaptation of Moto Hagio’s The Heart of Thomas Summer Vacation 1999 (1999年の夏休み, 1999 Toshi no Natsuyasumi) is that it takes place in a theoretical future that is also quite clearly an imaginary past. In a second introductory sequence, the voice of an adult man tells us that his is his memory, a fragment of the past kept alive by the clarity with which he remembers it. We don’t know who this voice belongs to, though the images encourage to think it must be the man the boy on screen, like the others played by a girl, will one day become but in another sense this boy doesn’t really exist either or at least is the bearer of several different identities.

The fact he travels to this remote mansion in the countryside on an otherwise empty train signal’s the place’s unreality and detachment from the regular world. We’re told it’s 1999, a year that was still to come on the film’s release in 1988, and inevitably hints at a millennial dread along with the new dawn the writer describes himself having in experienced in what is otherwise a summer holiday movie. However, in the opening sequence we witnessed a boy who looked very like this one slip what is later assumed to be a suicide note under another boy’s door before walking through the gothic space of the country mansion and out to a rugged cliff where he takes his own life by jumping into a nearby lake. The name of the boy who died, apparently brokenhearted and filled with despair after his romantic overtures to another boy were rebuffed, was named Yu (Eri Miyajima). This one claims his name is Kaoru (also Eri Miyajima) and is different in temperament in character to the boy who may have died, his body has not been found, though to the others staying at the school over the summer holiday he seems somehow like a vengeful ghost arriving to take them to task for Yu’s death. 

Kaneko specifically frames the school as haunted through the gothic photography of its billowing curtains and 19th century European aesthetics but also through its emptiness. The sound of children laughing, the boys who have left and returned somewhere else, echo through empty corridors further framing it as a place of memory and it seems true enough that the other boys who remain are trapped here in the same way they are trapped within themselves in their inability to express their emotions. The youngest of the boys, the sensitive Norio, (Eri Fukatsu) intensely resents Kazuhiko (Tomoko Otakara) who is as he describes beloved by all but himself cannot bear to be loved and may have contributed to Yu’s suicide through the abruptness of his romantic rejection. 

Later Kazuhiko recalls a memory of himself watching the sunset as a child in which he felt so terribly alone, as if he were the only person left on earth and there was no one with whom he could share this beauty. This sense of loneliness and isolation is further symbolised by the remote nature of the boarding school which seems to exist outside of time itself. Inspired by the setting of the novel, the boys dress in a fashion more associated with 19th century aristocracy than the late 1980s yet they are surrounded by machines and makeshift, retro futuristic technology in which they spend their days programming some kind of computer system. The leap into the lake is also into memory, but otherwise a kind of rebirth or rebaptism which allows Kazuhiko to make sense of himself and the other boys to come to an acceptance of Yu, Kaoru, and everything he embodies in relation to themselves. 

Even so, the elliptical nature of the film’s ending hints that this is a continually looping story replaying endlessly in the memory of a now much older man recalling the journey into adolescence in which he ruptured the shell of his ignorance much as the caterpillar becomes a butterfly even if that butterfly was something that Kaoru wanted to kill without harming its beauty. Perhaps in away that’s what the man has done in preserving this memory with its all of its gothic shades of billowing curtains and shadowy corridors amid the ethereality of the twilight of youth.

Summer Vacation 1999 screened as part of this year’s Queer East.

Female Yakuza Tale (やさぐれ姐御伝　総括リンチ, Teruo Ishii, 1973)

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Having completed her quest for revenge, Ocho (Reiko Ike) returns in Female Yakuza Tale (やさぐれ姐御伝　総括リンチ, Yasagure anego den: Sokatsu Lynch) once again swept up in intrigue after being framed for a bizarre series of murders. With Teruo Ishii taking up the reins from Norifumi Suzuki, the film has a slightly more realistic aesthetic making frequent use of handheld particularly in the narrow backstreets of the late Meiji Society while eventually taking a bizarre detour into the cruel world of an early 20th century mental health institution. 

In any case, Ocho’s troubles start when she’s met at Kobe harbour by a woman who says she’s come to fetch her. On arrival at her destination, Ocho is chloroformed and sexually assaulted by three men who evidently think she’s think she’s someone else and decide to get rid of her after realising their mistake. She wakes up next to the dead body of another woman and is in danger of becoming the prime suspect in a series of murders the subtitles don the “crotch-gauge” killings. After managing to escape, she sets about trying to find out who set her up and what’s going on while getting involved in a succession crisis in the Ogi in which the old boss who was once good to her has been killed. 

Though with much less political subtext, the film nevertheless indulges in the Sinophobia common in many similarly themed dramas in revealing a Mr Lee of Yokohama to be a major player in a drug trafficking scam in which women are forced to smuggle drugs in their vaginas after the gang gets them hooked to manipulate them. Besides Ocho, another woman dressed eerily like Sasori in a black wide brimmed hat and loose dress known as “Yoshimi of Christ” is also on their tail and seeking revenge while echoing some of the religious themes of the first film. She later teams up with recently released yakuza Jyoji who is looking for the daughter of the old boss who has gone mysteriously missing while he is also convinced that present boss Gondo had something to do with it along with the old man’s death. 

This is however mainly a tale of female revenge, Ocho’s being on the yakuza who cut off the Old Boss’ finger after he stood up for her as a teeanger whens she was caught cheating at a gambling den. Nevertheless, what eventually emerges is a sense of female socildairy as Ocho, Yoshimi, and the other women abused by the gang come together to free themselves from its grasp in a strange orgy of violence utilising eerie green lighting to lend it an almost supernatural dimension even if in the end the final blow is struck by a man and not without a little irony. 

This sense of unreality otherwise out of keeping with the immediacy of Ishii’s handheld camera is also seen in the mental institution to which the film eventually travels, a foggy gothic building echoing the Western mansion in the first film but similarly filed with oppressed and abused women sent mad by a patriarchal society or perhaps merely sent there to become so by men who wanted them out of the way. Gondo himself seems to be a regular visitor bringing along his own electroshock machine but finally resorting to using his bare hands in order to tie up a loose end and preserve his own position as head of the clan. 

Ocho is not above using her sexuality to manipulate him, while Ishii maintains the naked sword fights from the first film both from the balletic opening of Ocho and her parasol to the chaos of the final sequence as the women come together to take their revenge as one. Perhaps strangely there isn’t an awful lot of gambling in the film, but Ocho nevertheless makes good use of her trademark hanafuda cards while in a moment of symmetry it’s the wife of her target who eventually settles the matter in a more diplomatic fashion by subjecting herself to the same humiliation to which Ocho had been subjected to bring the circle to a close. Having once again stood up against corrupt crooks and greedy men, Ocho later takes her sisters with her as she walks off this time into the sunset rather than the dark. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Sex and Fury (不良姐御伝 猪の鹿お蝶, Norifumi Suzuki,1973)

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An orphaned daughter takes revenge against the corruptions of the late Meiji society in Norifumi Suzuki’s pinky violence classic Sex and Fury (不良姐御伝 猪の鹿お蝶, Furyo anego den: Inoshika Ocho). As the opening voiceover explains, the Japan of the early 1900s is already stoking imperial ambitions closely linked with the ideas of “modernisation” and “civility” it is seeking though in reality it is very much a gangster society as the three villains the heroine searches for have come to dominate the new Japan. 

This moment of schism is depicted in the opening sequence set in 1886 in which the little girl who will later take the name Ocho witnesses the murder of her policeman father by three unseen assassins who steal from him evidence of a scandal they then use for their own gain. The murder takes place in a shrine, the young Ocho rolling her paper ball onto a discarded charm that reads “misfortune”, while the film then jumps on to 1905 through a series of historical images prominently featuring the emperor Meiji along with a host of patriotic symbols that seem to signal the wrong path that is being taken. 

As for Ocho (Reiko Ike), she has survived by living on her wits as an excellent pickpocket and gambler but is otherwise uncorrupted continuing to dress in kimono and giving off an air of refined elegance that belies her toughness. In the course of her revenge, she is met by her opposite number, Shunosuke (Masataka Naruse), whose father was also killed by the same three duplicitous yakuza and is dragged into geopolitical intrigue by means of plot by the British to turn Japan into the site of the second opium wars using a spy disguised as a dancer played by Swedish starlet Christina Lindberg who is really in Japan for Shunosuke with whom she fell in love abroad only to be cruelly abandoned. 

Somewhat contradictorily, it’s these Western intrusions that are being resisted with Ocho the representative of an older Japan, and the gangsters that of a newer, largely amoral society of burgeoning militarism. Arch villain Kurokawa (Seizaburo Kawazu) lives in a huge Western-style mansion and is preparing to transition into national politics in the post-feudal society insisting that he and his organisation will soon control “everything”. His underling Iwakura (Hiroshi Nawa), who travels by motorcar, will also be handling the construction of Tokyo Harbour. When the girls from Ocho’s adopted family are kidnapped, they are taken to dance hall Panorama which is bedecked both with Christmassy tinsel and signs celebrating the victory in the Russo-Japanese conflict, while in an anachronistic touch scenes of the war are projected inside. Just to ram the point home, the man who throws a knife at Ocho is wearing stereotypical Chinese dress, while Kurokawa is later seen to have at his disposal a secret attack squad of nuns armed with switchblades and has Ocho whipped, by British spy Christina, in front of a large mural of Christ in some kind of underground chapel. 

In taking her revenge, Ocho is also in a sense attempting to right a historical wrong in removing these usurping men and their accomplice from power while fighting their perversion with her sexuality over which only she is master going so far as to kill one with poison rubbed on her own skin. In accidentally having exposed the equally duplicitous practices in a gambling hall, she is attacked while in the bath but instantly leaps into action entirely in the nude in a strangely beautiful sequence of elegant violence and poetic bloodletting that echoes the film’s conclusion in finally moving out into the snow. Eventually captured, she is bound tightly with rope and tortured but manages to cut herself free using only one of her trademark hanafuda cards which also symbolise her skill as a gambler even if her climactic game with Christina is played with Western cards for casino chips over a dining table. 

Suzuki signals the chaotic nature of this early 20th century world in his riotous use of colour and frequent anachronisms along with canted angles and a spinning top shot that seems to echo the world spinning out of control as Iwakura breaks a sacred promise between gamblers and rapes a young woman he had agreed to spare if Ocho was victorious in her bout with Christina. He saves his most expressionistic technique for the film’s closing moments in which Ocho singlehandedly puts a stop to Kurokawa’s corruption, another picture of Emperor Meiji looking down at her as she launches her final attack, and then stops to purify herself in the snow before wandering off into a storm of hanafuda cards with only darkness ahead of her.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

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

The Mosquito on the Tenth Floor (十階のモスキート, Yoichi Sai, 1983)

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A beaten-down beat cop’s existential crisis progressively deepens after he throws himself into financial ruin to buy a computer in Yoichi Sai’s debut The Mosquito on the Tenth Floor (十階のモスキート, Jikkai no Mosquito). Like Pool Without Water, star Yuya Uchida conceived and co-scripted the film as a vehicle for himself and was apparently inspired by the sight of some blood, his own, on a wall where he’d squashed a mosquito though he also claimed the the 10 in the title is intended to reference the 10 commandments in addition to simply where the unnamed protagonist lives.

The fact that he lives on the 10th and top floor in a building with no lift is symbolic of his dismal circumstances. On the one hand he can rise no higher but on the other is stuck with an inconvenient living situation precisely because of his inability to rise socially. As it transpires the hero, a policeman, joined the force right out of high school with aspirations of rising to the rank of captain but has spent the entirety of his 20-year career manning a police box. He’s repeatedly failed the exam for promotion to lieutenant and realistically speaking is now simply too old to make much further progress. A man of few words, he listens as the other officers who took the exam with him outline the hierarchal structure of the police force while meditating that as a man on the wrong side of 40 his possibilities have decreased and it’s more than likely he’ll be stuck in the police box until he retires. 

His boss later says as much, sympathising with him but also pointing out that a policeman is also a public servant with a role to serve within the community. He is supposed to make people feel safe and contribute to the progress towards a crime-free society, but it’s clear that his life has spiralled out of control precisely because he cannot ally his career goals with the kind of life he wished to lead. His wife divorced him two years ago seemingly because she wanted a greater degree of material comfort and became resentful that he failed to progress in his career and could not move on from the low-salaried position of an ordinary street cop. She now makes a living selling golf club memberships, looking ahead to the oncoming Bubble-era and a society of affluent salarymen which is very much what her new boyfriend seems to be. Meanwhile, she lives in a very nice townhouse with their teenage daughter and constantly hassles the policeman for falling behind with his child support and alimony payments. He’s also racked up a healthy tab at a karaoke bar where he regularly hangs out and has a serious gambling problem with betting on boat races seemingly his only other form of social outlet.

As his daughter and others keep reminding him, the world is changing and his decision to buy a computer after unwisely taking out a payday loan is in part a symbol of his desire to progress into the modern society even if, somewhat ironically, others chastise him for spending what is then a huge amount of money on something they think of a child’s toy. Otherwise an upstanding policeman who irritatedly deflects a colleague’s joke about bribing someone to pass the exam, the policeman finds himself taking out one payday loan to pay another with loansharks constantly ringing him at the police box to remind him he’s behind on his payments. To overcome his sense of powerlessness, he begins by abusing his authority in catching a punk woman shoplifting and arresting her but then taking her back to his flat to play computer bowling and take advantage of her sexually. He later does something similar with a bar hostess, Keiko (Reiko Nakamura), who took him home when he was drunk. Though the encounter begins as rape, Keiko soon gives in and even comes back for more claiming that she’d never done it with a policeman before and it exceeded her expectations which is in many ways reflective social attitudes at the time. Emboldened, he invites danger by raping a female traffic cop, tearing her clothes as she fights back, screams, and cries though she presumably does not report him given the professional and social consequences that may adversely affect her life and career if she chose to. 

His ex-wife Toshie (Kazuko Yoshiyuki) says she’s not even sure if he’s human anymore, and his failed attempt to rape her after his boss reminds him that he advised against getting a divorce in the first place because it would negatively affect his chance of promotion may be a perverse way to prove he is though it obviously backfires. Having failed in every area of his life and with no prospect of ever getting back on track or starting again, he begins to go quietly insane typing rude words into his computer while the constant calls from loansharks take on a mosquito-like buzzing as does his own final wail of despair and powerlessness as he’s brought down by same authority he once served. His aloneness and confusion are palpable when he ventures into the city and discovers his teenage daughter Rie (Kyoko Koizumi) dancing in Harajuku staring at her intently but then walking away having invaded this space reserved for the young. “Police yourself!” one of the Rockabilly guys ironically instructs him on noticing that he’s dropped his ice cream cone, explaining that the police might shut them down if they’re discovered to be using the space irresponsibly by littering. Rie and her friends tell him to get a life, explaining that the world is changing while tapping him for cash he doesn’t have but is too embarrassed to refuse, laying bare the extent to which he and those like him have been left behind by the economic miracle, buzzing around maddeningly in mid-air with safe nowhere safe to land. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Mom, Is That You?! (こんにちは、母さん, Yoji Yamada, 2023)

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“People of my generation can’t throw anything away,” an older woman admits on her hearing her daughter-in-law has just been featured in a TV series about decluttering. Inspired by Ai Nagai’s 2001 play, the latest from veteran director Yoji Yamada Mom, Is that You? (こんにちは、母さん, Konichiwa, Okasan) seems to hint at a series of circular generational divides while suggesting that the children of the Bubble-era in particular are too quick to get rid of things they don’t think they don’t need anymore.

That’s the irony of soon-to-be 50-year-old Akio’s (Yo Oizumi) salaryman job in HR. It’s his job to cut dead wood from the company and this current round of polite requests to employees of a certain level to take early retirement includes his uni friend Kibe (Kankuro Kudo) who doesn’t take kindly to what he sees as a personal betrayal. Unlike Akio who is beginning to tire of the salaryman dream, Kibe fiercely fights for his position and identity as an executive at a big company even when faced with banishment room treatment and disciplinary dismissal after an altercation with the boss.

But what Kibe doesn’t know is that Akio is already facing a series of crises. His marriage has collapsed and his university student daughter Mai (Mei Nagano) is having a crisis of her own. Fresh from her tidying success, her mother has told her that all she can do is get good grades followed by a boring salaryman job like her dad’s which doesn’t seem to be what she wants which is why she’s run off to stay with her grandmother Fukue (Sayuri Yoshinaga) who runs a traditional shop selling tabi socks near the Sumida River. Fukue has a kindly, laid-back attitude remiscent of the shitamachi spirit found in other Yamada films in contrast to the stressed out uptightness of Akio who hasn’t told her about his impending divorce nor work troubles but finds himself paying a visit home in an attempt to sort himself out only to find Fukue keeping herself busy with a local charity group and nascent relationship with a church pastor. 

Fukue’s charity work is emblematic of a waste not want not philosophy that has otherwise disappeared from the modern society as they pick up the things other people don’t want and donate them to the needy even if it sometimes seems a little simplistic or patronising. Biting into some reject crackers from the local rice cracker shop, Akio reflects that they’re something that’s made to console people and it’s work that has meaning unlike his soulless corporate job that gives him nothing other than stress and money. At the time the play was written, the fallacy of the salaryman dream was clear for all to see in the post-Bubble society but to a man like Akio getting a company job was a big deal and his success is still the talk of his mother’s friends even he starts to wonder if he still has time to start again and discover a more meaningful way of living.

Some of these ideas, and the timescales involved, make much more sense for the play’s millennial setting rather than the film’s apparent present day given the references to the firebombing of Tokyo which would require the older protagonists to be their late 80s to even remember. Akio dismisses his mother’s charity work and insists that the homeless are only those who opted out of the competitive society he too has come to doubt or else were excluded from it, while he’s resentful of her attachment to the pastor in contrast to Mai who is excited by the prospect of her grandmother’s love affair and enduring possibilities of age while Fukue is beginning to fear not death but dependency if her health should suddenly decline. 

It’s in the midst of her heartbreak that the film affords Fukue a new beginning if in coming full circle, Akio choosing to make a clean break with the unhappiness in his life and Mai embracing her youth while falling for the old world charms of her grandmother’s tabi sock shop almost exclusively catering to sumo wrestlers, who as someone points out never waste anything, and people trying ceremony for the first time at 60. Like most of Yamada’s work, the film has a gentle humanity and melancholy poignancy but also a sense of hope and continuity that run contrary to an overly corporatised society in which young and old are already losing faith.

Mom, Is That You?! screened as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Original trailer (No subitles)

Don’t Call it Mystery (ミステリと言う勿れ, Hiroaki Matsuyama, 2023)

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Totono once again finds himself at the centre of of conspiracy in the big screen edition of the popular drama based on the manga by Yumi Tamura, Don’t Call it Mystery (ミステリと言う勿れ). Embroiled in what first looks like a family succession drama as he points out recalling The Inugami Family, he soon discovers there’s more in play than might be expected but also that the wounds of the past are slow to heal and often cause people to act in unexpected ways.

In any case, he ends up getting involved care of Garo (Eita Nagayama) who is still on the run following the end of the TV series so unable to help a teenage girl, Shioji (Nanoka Hara), who is one of four grandchildren in line to inherit her grandfather’s legacy if only she can fulfil the bizarre quest he left for them in his will. Her worry is that, as family law dictates one person inherits everything, there will inevitably be deaths and violence involved as the cousins battle each other for the prize of a giant estate near Hiroshima where Totono also just happened to be on a day trip.

Once again, the running gag is that mystery just seems to find Totono who only wants to get on with living his peaceful life as a student eating curry and going to museums though there are some tantalising clues to his own backstory littered through the piece such as his unexpected familiarity with the city of Hiroshima. The case this time as also has a link to Totono’s famously curly hair which only adds to his Kindaichi-esque sense of eccentricity deepened by his reluctance to allow Shioji’s family to do his laundry or to a take a bath in another person’s home. But these foibles are, as he points out to those around him, reflective of a conflict in what is considered considerate behaviour. They think they’re being nice by offering to do his laundry, but he doesn’t want them to so it’s just additional inconvenience for him much in the same way as you if offer someone a lift to the station thinking that’s easier for them and they accept not to cause offence but are secretly disappointed because they were looking forward to the walk.

Totono’s defining characteristic as an accidental detective is indeed his emotional intelligence and ability to pick up on the slightest things that might be bothering those around him, often prone to lengthy monologues that advocate for a more compassionate world and better understanding between people. As the mystery becomes clear, he begins to realise that the parents of the grandchildren were trying to protect them from the toxic legacy of tradition and end the ridiculous family succession drama that apparently led to the deaths of some of their immediate relatives. He gives similar advice to Shoji’s cousin Yura (Ko Shibasaki) on hearing her father tell her that women are happiest as wives and mothers and she should drop what she’s doing to pay more attention to her husband and daughter. Totono takes him to task for his sexist thinking and tells him it’s unfair, advising Yura that she might not unwittingly want to pass these ideas on to her own daughter by suppressing herself to conform to her father’s outdated idea of conventional femininity.

As Totono says, children are like wet cement and the things dropped on them leave their mark for the rest of the child’s life. It seems that the family was in a sense haunted by a child they’d wronged and worried would someday come back to wreak their revenge as a phantasmagorical embodiment of their latent guilt and shame about how they usurped their fortune. What the grandchildren come to realise, is that their late parents did actually understand them and wanted them to be happy following their own paths rather than bound by tradition or outdated notions of properness regardless of whatever happens with the grandfather’s more literal legacy and the buried skeletons it contains. Filled with the same kind of gentle intrigue and mystery along with the compassionate spirit of the TV series and manga, the big screen edition features another difficult case for Totono that also begins to illuminate his own troubled past and the secrets behinds his empathetic soul.

Don’t Call it Mystery screened as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Missing (ミッシング, Keisuke Yoshida, 2024)

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Why is it that we rush to judgement rather than empathy? When a little girl disappears during a short walk from a local park to her home, less than helpful members of the public are quick to turn on the parents while news media, eager for ratings and clicks, is only too happy to give the people what they want casting aside ethical concerns in their exploitation of the parents’ pain all while the little girl remains missing.

In this society, it’s quite normal culturally for children of Miu’s age, six, to walk short distances alone and be left unsupervised at home at for short periods of time. Nevertheless, the public is quick to blame the mother, Saori (Satomi Ishihara), because she had gone to a concert that night and didn’t notice frantic calls from her husband worried because Miu was not at home when he got back from work at 7pm. Soari too blames herself, as is perhaps natural, but it’s unreasonable to expect anyone to never go out for an evening again after having children. Her husband comes in for less scrutiny, which might be surprising, though her brother, Keigo (Yusaku Mori), soon finds himself the prime suspect having been the last to see Miu and allowed her to walk home alone though he would previously have walked her back.

The family find themselves under scrutiny with their every move judged by an unforgiving society. When they dare to buy fancy pastries, online trolls suggest they can’t be all that bothered about Miu after all and are living the high life with the extra money they no longer need to spend on her. Given all that, it might be surprising that they turn to the media for help but in their desperation to find Miu they will leave no stone unturned. Idealistic reporter Sunada (Tomoya Nakamura) seems to want to help them, but is constantly undermined by his bosses who pressure him to take the story into more sensational territory. Though he wanted to write a human interest piece supporting the parents and raising awareness about Miu’s disappearance, he ends up placing them in the firing line for even more trolling and particularly of Saori’s brother Keigo who is an introverted, awkward man not suited to appearing on television. 

Sunada says he wants to help, but it’s undeniable that the media is exploiting the parents’ desperation raising serious ethical concerns as to how they safeguard sources and subjects while shaping the narrative around sensitive issues. Sunada takes a producer to task for placing images of a cement mixer and the sea into the ident for the piece as if it were hinting at what might have happened to Miu but really what the station is most interested in is digging up dirt on the family rather than drawing out new information on the case. A fellow journalist is having great success with a salacious story about the mayor’s son committing fraud, but his piece is less crusading investigative journalism than gossip inviting judgement. Disliking his flippant attitude, Sunada reminds him their job’s not to make people laugh, but his colleague gets a fancy promotion to head office while Sunada is stuck doing random feel good stories about seals.

Their treatment at the hands of the media also exposes a divide within the couple with Saori often frustrated by her husband’s attitude, feeling as if he isn’t invested enough. Yutaka (Munetaka Aoki) suggests simply not reading the online comments and ignoring the trolls while Saori feels compelled to defend herself. He is also warier of pranks and scammers, unwilling to simply jump on every lead out of desperation when so many people seem intent on causing them further pain. Perhaps it makes people feel more in control of their lives to blame the parents, as if something like this couldn’t happen to them because they make what they feel to be better choices, rather than accept that life is random and unfair and little girls can disappear into thin air mere steps from their own door. Unable to find her own daughter, Saori begins defending other people’s children getting a job as a crossing guard to ensure they reach home safely while simultaneously frantic and afraid, handing out fliers to a largely disinterested populace ever hungry for novelty and excitement and embarrassed by her pain even as they continue to feed on it.

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

Original trailer (English subtitles)