Tag: Japanese

A Mother’s Touch (桜色の風が咲く, Junpei Matsumoto, 2022)

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A young man begins to ponder the meaning of his life while losing both his sight and hearing in Junpei Matsumoto’s heartwarming biopic, A Mother’s Touch (桜色の風が咲く,Sakurairo no Kaze ga Saku). The English title aptly hints at the maternal devotion that kept Satoshi (Taketo Tanaka) part of the world even as he feared becoming isolated from it, though the Japanese “when the pink wind blooms” leans towards the poetic in echoing the ways in which he is able to open himself to a different kind of sensory experience. 

Satoshi Fujisawa would later go on to become the first deaf blind university professor in Japan though the films opens with a toddler Satoshi discovering that he has a rare condition that causes the pressure in his eyeball to increase endangering his vision. Though he undergoes various treatments, he eventually loses the sight in one eye and then the other several years later. While in high school he then discovers that he is also beginning to lose his hearing which, along with braille, had been his primary way of experiencing the world around him. 

Matsumoto’s film does not really go into the various ways in which Satoshi is inconvenienced by a largely ableist society aside from his having to leave home and go to Tokyo to attend a school for the blind. Satoshi does, however, experience bullying as a child particularly from an obnoxious gang of boys who egg him on to remove his glass eye in front of them while otherwise isolated by the constant need to rest his eyes with only rakugo to listen to on the radio. Introduced to braille, he is immediately fascinated remarking that the person who came up with it must have been a genius and explaining that he has not given up on his sight but it doesn’t hurt to learn. 

It’s braille that eventually becomes his lifeline as his mother figures out a way to communicate with him by pressing his fingers as she were typing on a braille keyboard while he replies vocally. Her adhoc solution has apparently gone on to provide an important means communication for other deaf blind people across the world and reminds Satoshi that though he may feel as if he as been marooned in deep space he is not alone and is able to interact with the world around him. While still trying to save his hearing, he had decided to try an alternative treatment method which emphasised heavy exercise and bland food designed to boost the immune system though he discovered that it only robbed him of an additional sensory input and a resultant longing to eat something sweet. Though he is unable to see or hear, he can still taste and smell the world around him welcoming the spring in unexpected ways while embracing his potential and independence.

That said, his major philosophy is that life is full of voids designed for other people to fill in the ways that we can all help each other. The film doesn’t shy away from exploring the strain placed on Satoshi’s family as they try to cope with his medical needs which leave his mother feeling guilty that she is often away from her other two children caring for him at the hospital, and his father lonely and overburdened while trying to balance the demands of his working life with that of taking over the domestic space. In any case, they resolve to get through it as a family doing what they can to support Satoshi without robbing him of the opportunity to lead as independent a life as possible. Satoshi comes to believe that his disabilities may be the price for his purpose, that there must be something he is uniquely supposed to do with his life along with places only he could discover. The film eventually finds him in a space of possibility, recalling happy times with his family as a child but also looking forward towards a new potential for pushing the boundaries and moving beyond the limitations others might have placed on him. 

A Mother’s Touch screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Tsugaru Lacquer Girl (バカ塗りの娘, Keiko Tsuruoka, 2023)

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Which traditions should we keep and which should we lose? A young woman finds herself frustrated by outdated gender norms in her desire to take over the family lacquerware business in Keiko Tsuruoka’s gentle rural drama, Tsugaru Lacquer Girl (バカ塗りの娘, Bakanuri no Musume). While her family, save older brother Yu (Ryota Bando) who has already rejected lacquerware, do nothing but run her down and claim she’ll never be a success at anything all she wants to do is devote her life to a traditional craft her father no longer believes has any kind of future. 

Even so, Seishiro (Kaoru Kobayashi) is dead set on Yu taking over the business to the point that they have become semi-estranged. He calls Miyako (Mayu Hotta) “clumsy” and complains that she has no aptitude for anything unlike Yu who was always good at anything he tried. Miyako too later suggests that she was her brother’s opposite, while he was cheerful and outgoing she is shy and melancholy but then perhaps it’s hard to be cheerful when everyone’s always telling you you’re useless and doing everything wrong. In an interesting parallel, Yu is also trapped by outdated social codes in that he is gay and he and his partner have decided to move to London where they can legally get married and live their life out and proud in a way they feel they cannot do in contemporary Japan. 

Lacking other direction in her life, Miyako has been working a part-time job in a local supermarket which she hates while her father occasionally allows her to help him finish big orders though it’s clear her salary is now their main source of financial support. A local inn keeper who is a good customer of theirs explains to some of his guests that craftsmen rarely construct large pieces such as tables because they are no longer cost effective while fewer young people are willing to take up apprenticeships leaving the traditional art in danger of dying out despite the frequent remarks that everything tastes better out of a lacquerware bowl which is after all in the modern parlance “sustainable” in that it will last for many decades and can easily be repaired if damaged. 

Seishiro doesn’t seem to have a reason for rejecting the idea that Miyako might take over aside from basic sexism in preferring to hand the business over to his first born son. It might be tempting to think that he dissuades her because he thinks there isn’t a future in lacquerware, but if that were the case he could simply retire. Her mother (Reiko Kataoka), who left the family some years ago in part it seems because of her own animosity towards lacquerware and its lack of financial promise, seems to feel much the same comparing Miyako to a more successful cousin who has kids and a high powered job at an international trading firm, telling her that she should be settling down and getting married suggesting that she is simply incapable of becoming a successful lacquerware artist and should at best keep it as a hobby. 

Her mother had also shut down her desire to learn piano as a child by telling her there was no point because she’d never be good at it. Miyako’s decision to prove herself by re-laquering an abandoned piano in her disused school is then an act of rebellion against both parents showing them what she can and will achieve along with the direction she has chosen for her life. Not everyone respects it even if her father begins to come around but really it doesn’t matter because the decision is hers alone whatever anyone else might have said. Far from being insular, the embrace of traditional culture gives Miyako new opportunities and allows her to grow in confidence until she’s finally ready to set off along her own path. Even so, it seems there are some traditions she thinks it would be better to lose, such as her father’s sexism and the homophobia that has forced her brother to emigrate in order to live a happy life just as he is. They call it “fools lacquer” because no one but a fool would go to all this trouble to make a bowl but in many ways that’s the point. Miyako pours all of herself in to the lacquer, piling layer on layer dotted by handfuls of thrown rice that give it its pattern much as she herself is slowly tempered by the world around her.

Tsugaru Lacquer Girl screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Passionate Spinster (結婚相談, Ko Nakahira, 1965)

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A woman still unmarried at the comparatively late age of 30 begins to go out of her mind while on a hellish descent into vice and crime in Ko Nakahira’s darkly comic satire, The Passionate Spinster (結婚相談, Kekkon Sodan). Shimako (Izumi Ashikawa) begins to feel as if her existence has no value as a single woman who has already aged out of the arranged marriage market, pressured by her family members to settle down and with seemingly no possibility of supporting herself as an independent woman almost as if such a thing could not exist even in the more enlightened world of 1965.

Shimako’s age is her primary problem. We often see her using some kind anti-aging device on her face and reapplying her makeup but as others reveal men in search of marriage are looking for women in their early 20s as is soon confirmed to her when she decides to visit a matchmaking agency after attending the wedding of a close friend, Mikiko (Michiyo Yokoyama), at which she is made to feel like something of an embarrassment giggled at by her younger coworkers who regard her with thinly concealed pity. As a voiceover explains, far more women sign up to matchmaking agencies than men while the age range is typically late 20s. Men’s only condition is that the woman be young, while women are mainly concerned with a man’s height and educational background. Shimako is not particularly picky and simply lists that she’d prefer a man of over 170cm in height, under 35 years old, and a university graduate but despite the beauty with which she is often credited she soon discovers that being over 30 is a deal breaker for most. 

The first man she meets remarks to the matchmaker that she looks “young” for her age and then inappropriately adds that she must be virgin, but eventually decides to marry a 24-year-old woman introduced by his boss. The second, a farmer with an interest in electronics, makes her an offer but is quickly vetoed by his family who feel that there must simply be something wrong with a woman who remains unmarried at 30. The last man the matchmaker, Tonobe (Sadako Sawamura), suggests is a 50-year-old widower named Hidaka (Tatsuo Matsushita) whom Shimako only considers out of desperation but later warms to uncomfortably because he reminds her of the father she lost in the war. Hidaka tells he that once they marry he will be a “father” to her too while taking this as a firm promise Shimako ends up sleeping with him to seal the deal. 

It’s with this that she damns herself, driven into a near nervous breakdown on realising that Hidaka may have been just another married man using a dating agency for extramarital sex. Then again, she’s told this by Tonobe who as it turns out, despite her frequent claims of being “not a yakuza” and concern for her agency’s reputation fearing she will be accused of running an illicit sex ring, is actually doing exactly that. Shimako accepted money from Hidaka and in so doing could be taken for a sex worker. Reminding her that sex work is against the law, Tonobe essentially blackmails Shimako into quitting her office job to work for the agency full time as a call girl, “protected” and “observed” by her two goons one of whom the agency’s other girl, Asako (Michiko Sasamori), suggests is actually Tonobe’s husband. 

In another kind of film, Shimako’s new line of work may have proved liberating, freeing her from the patriarchal ideals surrounding marriage, but it’s true enough that she falls into in a dangerous underworld as a virtual slave of the increasingly monstrous Tonobe whose demonic laughter begins to ring in Shimako’s ears along with all the criticism she’s received from men so far regarding her age. She seeks romantic escape after bumping into office lothario Takabayashi (Masaya Takahashi) who ironically asks her to pose as his fiancée to help him get rid of a problematic bar hostess who’s latched on to him. He promises to marry her too, only it soon transpires that he has massive debts and has been embezzling money from the company which he fears will soon be discovered because of an unexpected merger. Just as Hidaka had offered to become her father, Takabayashi likens her to his mother adding that he was never breast fed. 

With somewhat incestuous overturns, the lines between to blur between the ideals of wife and motherhood as Shimako becomes in effect responsible for a failed man pledging that she will use her body to pay off the debt that Takabayashi owes so that he won’t be prosecuted while believing that he will actually marry her. But her body belongs to Tonobe who reminds her that though she doesn’t care who she marries (an odd comment considering how they met) uncompensated romance is against the rules and she must now be punished in being sent to a further level of hell in essentially being offered up to an ogre in a remote Western-style mansion. Taking on gothic overtones, Shimako unexpectedly finds a kind of fulfilment while essentially embodying maternity in fulfilling the oedipal desires of a young man apparently driven mad who immediately tells her that avatars of his mother have appeared in this place before ominously adding that he has killed all the “fake” ones. Shimako later tells his sympathetic mother that her son was the best of the men she’s met while doing this kind of work and the first she’s slept with whose feelings were pure. 

Through this expressionist sequence which takes place during a gothic, violent storm surrounded by pictures of the Madonna, Shimako undergoes the first of her rebirths in effect giving birth to herself as a woman no longer quite so concerned with the necessity of being married though the film strongly implies she soon maybe. Her maternity is later reconfirmed when she unexpectedly reunites with her former boss, possibly the only “good” man seen in the film in having embraced his own paternity while caring for a wife with a longterm illness and raising his two children. His wife having died, when Shimako meets him again it’s almost as if she were meeting her own father in the memory she described to Hidaka though he is much closer to her in age while also unlikely to have any strong feelings either way regarding either her being over 30 or the scandals surrounding everything that happened to her after quitting the company. 

The film may suggest that it’s partly Shimako who is “old-fashioned”, something she later accuses her mother of being once she discovers that Shimako has been engaging in a sexual relationship with Takabayashi on only the promise of marriage, in contrasting her with the slightly younger Sakata (Kaoru Hama) who scoffs that she wants to put off her (already confirmed) marriage because she’s only 23 and wants to have a little fun first later seen in a nightclub with a gang of rough-looking guys who nearly cart off a near comatose Shimako, but then stops short of actually critiquing the institution of marriage only suggesting that Shimako’s intense anxiety was misplaced because the right man would have come along eventually. It may expose the matchmaking agency for what is really is and in its way fight back against the archaism of the arranged marriage along with the patriarchal social system and its intrinsic ageism but leans towards the view that a woman’s value lies in maternity in positioning Shimako to become a stepmother rather than simply a wife. Nakahira shoots with a noirish intensity before descending into a gothic eeriness in the demonic laughter of the incredibly sleazy Tonobe and creepiness of the mansion even if what Shimako discovers there is perversely a kind of purity that finally allows her to reclaim an image of herself as a pure woman even in the depths of her degradation. 

Tea Friends (茶飲友達, Bunji Sotoyama, 2023)

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Japan’s rapidly ageing society has provoked an epidemic of loneliness but also perhaps new business opportunities in Bunji Sotoyama’s empathetic social drama Tea Friends (茶飲友達, Chanomi Tomodachi). The phrase may sound innocuous enough, but given some potentially outdated cultural connotations the men who spot the advert cunningly placed in a newspaper to catch the eyes of older readers may have reason to assume that it’s more than just tea and chat on offer. Though as it turns out, it’s not just the old who are lonely as a younger generation in turn often in conflict with their parents also attempt to seek security and comfort in found family.

That said, there’s something a little cult-like about the way that Mana (Rei Okamoto), a former sex worker, talks about her organisation which aims to cure late life loneliness through what others might describe as an elderly sex ring. Employing a collection of older women, she accompanies them to meet new clients where they silently slide viagra over the table. The gentleman caller subscribes to a plan to purchase “tea” and anything that happens inside the hotel room they subsequently go to is just “free love” rather than “prostitution”. Mana sees herself as running a “community safety net” and helping elderly people who might otherwise have become isolated and depressed keep active as part of one big happy family along with the other members of staff who have, like her, become estranged from their parents and relatives. 

For Yoshiki, one of the men who escorts the ladies around, it’s that he views his father as a failure for leaving a well-paid corporate job to open a bakery which subsequently went bankrupt and has led to him living in his car. He thinks that in the end it’s better not to try at all than be left with the humiliation of things not working out. But then for Mana herself it’s more a sense of parental rejection. After a difficult childhood, her now terminally ill mother continues to reject her on the grounds of her history of sex work while she continues to crave the unconditional love of a family. Like a mother hen, she nestles those around her into the Tea Friends organisation which operates out of her own home and strives to create a place where everyone can feel they belong. 

Which is all to say she’s the loneliest one of all, but as someone else later cautions her you can’t cure your own loneliness with the loneliness of others. What she sees as a social enterprise others may see as a deliberate attempt to take advantage of vulnerable people who have admittedly been let down by an indifferent society and are in need of the money even more so than comfort or validation. At the other end of the spectrum, a young woman working at Tea Friends discovers that she is pregnant but her boyfriend immediately rejects her, insisting that he refuses to take responsibility and revealing that he is already married. Chika wants to have her baby, but everyone seems to be telling her that she shouldn’t. The doctors seem to look down on her after realising she isn’t married and the father most likely not in the picture, while an attempt to inquire about benefits at the town hall leads only to judgement as the clerk pithily tells her that they’re there for when you need them but she shouldn’t “depend” on them too much virtually calling her a scrounger and implying she’s been irresponsible in becoming a single mother. 

As another of the older women admits, being used was better than being ignored and at least being part of Tea Friends gave her a sense of purpose and acceptance if only for a time. In any case, Mana’s attempt to find unconditional love from her new “family” largely flounders as even those she’d come to believe herself close to desert her when the threat of legal proceedings enters the picture leaving her to face the music alone while she continues to protect them insisting that they’ve done nothing wrong even if it it was technically against the law. An old man’s devastation on picking up the phone and getting no answer suggests that Mana might have had a point when she said it was a social service seeing as no one else seems keen to tackle the problem of late life loneliness even if she did go about it in a problematic way. As Mana often says, righteousness does not equal happiness and it is often outdated social brainwashing that keeps people unhappy and not least herself as she struggles to find the unconditional love lacking in her life that would enable her to cure her own loneliness even in the prime of her youth.

Tea Friends screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Firing The Lighter Gun (ピストルライター の撃ち方, Kohei Sanada, 2022)

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“Whatever got you here, it can’t be any good” a resident of a flophouse reflects on their moribund circumstances suckered to into debt bondage by exploitative yakuza who force them to risk their lives doing clean up in a nuclear exclusion zone. Kohei Sanada’s bleak indie drama Firing the Lighter Gun (ピストルライター の撃ち方, Pistol Lighter no Uchikata) takes place after second nuclear disaster has left even more of the land unsurvivable. The heroes have been quite literally displaced, left without a place to return to or call a home, but are also emotionally alienated unable to envisage an escape for themselves from this otherwise hopeless existence.

Having recently been released from prison, Ryo (Yu Nakamura) remarks that the area has changed since he’s been away but his friend Tatsuya (Yuya Okutsu) counters that he doesn’t really think so. In any case, Tatsuya lives with a huge inferiority complex most evident on his attendance at a school reunion he didn’t want to go to where he sits sullen and dejected among those who’ve moved up in the world not least his ex, Shoko (Emi Okamura), who left him for a guy with a steady government job but still drops by to care for his ageing mother who suffers from dementia and the legacy of domestic abuse. Tatsuya is not a yakuza but his work is yakuza adjacent in that he drives a van full of equally hopeless men recruited for a dodgy operation offering cleanup services in the nuclear exclusion zone. 

Though the jobs are supposed to pay well with a bonus for the hazardous nature of the work, most of it is being skimmed by the yakuza bosses who deduct vast amounts from the men’s pay-packets for “expenses” such as the right to sleep in a communal flophouse where they charge them exorbitant amounts for snacks and drinks which they have to buy because they aren’t allowed to go out. Nor are they allowed to quit the job, trying to run incurs a 50,000 yen fine on top of any debts they’re supposed to be working off. An unexpected addition to Tatsuya’s van one day is Mari (Anju Kurosu), a sex worker, who’s been forced to work for the gang to pay off a debt incurred by an ex who’s since run off. 

As she later says, it’s a waste of time dreaming about a home, life is easier when you no longer expect one. But despite themselves a gentle bond soon arises among the trio of dispossessed youngsters who each feel trapped by their circumstances but are uncertain if they still have the strength to contemplate escape. Tatsuya’s sense of impotence is embodied by the cigarette lighter he carries around which is shaped like a pistol and realistic enough to cause a yakuza bodyguard a moment of concern but of course of no real use to him. As Ryo puts it, Tatsuya’s problem is that he still cares about those around him and is not heartless enough to treat the flophouse men like the “disposable tools” others regard them to be. He is constantly belittled by grinning boss Takiguchi (Ryoji Sugimoto) who blames him for everything that goes wrong and calls him useless and ineffectual, while the flophouse boss also regards him as soft for refusing to beat one of the men who had tried to escape. 

Ryo meanwhile swings in the opposite direction, giving in to a sense of hopelessness that sees him shift towards yakuza violence but perhaps eventually allows him to bounce back and take a chance on escape even if it maybe short-lived or spent in constant hiding. Tatsuya may feel trapped by responsibility to his mother, but is otherwise psychologically unable to move forward staking all his hopes on the rumour of a new power plant hoping it will ignite the town in the way the construction of the last one did despite knowing its attendant risks. Unlike Ryo, he says there’s no point in running, despite himself still yearning for a home. The flophouse men are no different, the few who escape are soon drawn back to other similar kinds of work because there is no other hope for them. Still, once the final shots have been fired there is a kind of clearing of the air and the light of a new dawn even if few seem to be able to see it. 

Firing The Lighter Gun screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Natchan’s Little Secret (ひみつのなっちゃん。, Yasujiro Tanaka, 2023)

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On learning that their friend and mentor has died, a trio of drag queens vows to do whatever it takes to fulfil her wishes and ensure her family never know about her sexuality in Yasujiro Tanaka’s road trip comedy Natchan’s Little Secret (ひみつのなっちゃん。, Himitsu no Natchan). In some ways it may seem old-fashioned, that rather than ensuring her family knew who she really was they decide to honour Natchan’s desire for secrecy but nevertheless meditate on the nature family while finally landing on a poignant sense of loss for all that secrecy entails.

Virgin (Kenichi Takito), an accountant by day and former drag queen who’s lost the taste for dancing, and Morilyn (Shu Watanabe) who works at the bar Natchan owned, are forced to confront the fact that in many ways they didn’t even know Natchan at all. They don’t know her address or hometown and have only the vague idea that she was estranged from her family. Virgin reflects that she was “secretive”, but in the end none of them really know what to do now that she’s gone. Another drag queen turned TV celebratory, Zubuko (Tomoya Maeno), laments that some take their secret to their grave realising that’s exactly what Natchan has done. That’s one reason why the trio become obsessed with the idea of cleaning out Natchan’s flat to make sure that her family don’t find anything they weren’t expecting. 

But then again, the trio frequently refer to the gay community as their family while claiming Natchan as their own. Without really thinking about it, Morilyn allowed hospital staff to assume he was family in a more legal sense and started making funeral arrangements. He also packs up some of Natchan’s property without realising he could be accused of theft while trying to tidy up her life. They may feel that the birth family are in a sense intruding, reasserting ownership over someone they never accepted in life and preventing those who truly loved them to honour their wishes. Yet Natchan’s mother (Chieko Matsubara) turns out to be sweet old lady who is in her way hurt that she and her son became estranged wishing that they could have been closer while he was alive.

It’s she who eventually invites them to Natchan’s rural hometown which is famous for a particular kind of festival dance. None of them are sure they want to go, partly because they fear accidentally blowing Natchan’s cover but also the social attitudes of what they imagine to be a more conservative, traditional area. Only it appears quite the reverse is true. Residents at the inn where they stay actually have a fierce curiosity about drag and enthusiastically enjoy a risqué routine performed by Morilyn and Zubuko while even a manly man later shrugs his shoulders and claims it’s not so different from Gujo Odori which also makes people sparkle. 

Maybe Natchan’s little secret is that she was a person who had learned to see the beautiful things in life and wanted others to see that they were beautiful too even if some told them that weren’t or they didn’t feel that they were. Virgin describes Morilyn’s straightforward living as a beautiful thing, especially as he recounts being made to do karate by conservative parents afraid of what the neighbours would think of their effeminate son, an experience he describes as emotionally destabilising and has led to a degree of repression as an adult. Virgin is out at work and well liked by a collection of female colleagues but now only dances alone at home and keeps it as her own kind of secret. Yet through their various adventures on the road the trio begin to come to new acceptances of themselves as they prepare to say goodbye to Natchan while comically affecting the tropes of conventional masculinity in an attempt not to give the game away. They wander through queer spaces in search of her and rediscover their own sense of family realising that they did know Natchan after all or at least all that was important to know as did others even if they pretended not to because that seemed to be how she wanted it. Finding liberation amid the Gujo Odori, the trio finally say goodbye but also discover a new sense of solidarity and self-acceptance joining the dance at which all truly are welcome. 

Natchan’s Little Secret screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Life of Mariko in Kabukicho (探偵マリコの生涯で一番悲惨な日, Eiji Uchida & Shinzo Katayama, 2022)

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It’s all go in Kabukicho in Eiji Uchida and Shinzo Katayama’s zany tale of aliens, serial killers, and secret assassins. The film’s Japanese title (探偵マリコの生涯で一番悲惨な日, Tantei Mariko no Shogai de ichiban Hisanna Hi), the most tragic day in the life of detective Mariko, may hint at the melancholy at the centre of the story in putting the titular investigator front and centre even while her success is fuelled by her position on the periphery but this is also very much the story of an area and community in a shrinking part of the city. 

It’s true enough that Mariko’s (Sairi Ito) karaoke bar seems to have become a local community hub filled with a series of regulars each of whom have stories of their own. Born and raised in Kabukicho, Mariko knows every inch of the area and thanks to the confessional quality of her work has her finger truly on the pulse which is what makes her such a good detective. Her case this time around is though a little more difficult as she’s been hired by the FBI to track down an escaped space alien because all aliens apparently belong to the US. This one’s been liberated by a mad scientist, Amamoto (Shohei Uno), who they say wants to team up with the alien for ill intent.

In what seems to be a nod to cult 1983 horror movie Basket Case, Amamoto carries the alien around in a picnic basket from which it occasionally irradiates people when frightened. Meanwhile, a serial killer is also stalking the area. One of Mariko’s regulars, Ayaka (Shiori Kubo), is keen to catch him though not for justice but the reward because she’s become obsessed with a bar host who’s been spending a lot of time with another customer because she can pay more. Mariko turns her offer down on the grounds that she doesn’t want to enable her romantic folly and otherwise seems rather uninterested in the serial killer case perhaps because no one’s hired her to solve it, but she also refuses a job from another regular who wants to track down his estranged daughter after being forced on a suicide mission by his former yakuza associates possibly because she suspects he won’t like the answer when she finds her. 

Home to the red light district, Kabukicho has a rather seedy reputation but here has a kind of homeliness in which the veneer of sleaze is of course perfectly normal and unremarkable. A yakuza intimidates a love hotel worker while standing directly in front of a rotating electric dildo in an S&M-themed room later visited by one of Mariko’s regulars with her nerdy film director crush who is so sensitive he can barely walk after exiting the cinema so moved is he by the cinematic expression. Most of the regulars are in their own way lovelorn and lonely, perhaps no less Mariko herself who has an attachment to a middle-aged ex-chef (Yutaka Takenouchi) who now runs a moribund dojo teaching ninja skills to anyone willing to learn. Despite the warmth of the community, life in Kabukicho can be hard as the host later echoes looking around his tiny apartment and sighing that he’s tired. It took so much out of him just to get this little and he barely has it in him anymore. 

Mariko too has her sorrow and buried trauma, hiding out in her bar but secretly imprisoned within the borders of Kabukicho as a kind of self-imposed punishment linked to her tragic past. The intersecting stories paint a vivid picture of an absurd world in which the innocuous civil servant next to you might be a secret assassin or you could turn a corner and run into a serial killer, not to mention a mad scientist with an alien in a basket. But for all its craziness it has a kind of integrity in which the strange is also perfectly normal and Mariko becomes a kind of anchor restoring order to an unruly world. As she’s fond of saying thing’s will work out and it’s difficult not to believe her or the defiantly upbeat spirit even among those depressed and downtrodden otherwise unable to escape the confines of a purgatorial Kabukicho.

Life of Mariko in Kabukicho screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Ripples (波紋, Naoko Ogigami, 2023)

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Sometimes it’s useful to feel like a rock in the stream and let it all flow past us, but our actions affect others in ways we barely understand reverberating and rebounding until ripples become waves and in their time small tsunamis. In Naoko Ogigami’s Ripples (波紋, Hamon), the effects of the 2011 earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster continue to radiate while some find themselves reeling unable to reorient themselves in a world which has become somehow threatening. 

Middle-aged salaryman Osamu (Ken Mitsuishi) suddenly disappears on his wife and teenage son after becoming intensely afraid of radiation only to return years later claiming that he has cancer. In his absence his wife, Yoriko (Mariko Tsutsui), has become a devotee of a strange cult, Green New Life, which peddles special purifying water and preaches otherwise wholesome virtues of solidarity and sacrifice. But even if Yoriko superficially agrees that it’s better to affect tolerance and put others before herself she’s secretly seething with frustration and resentment. She clearly does not want to take Osamu back, remembering how he left her to care for his bedridden father who knowingly or not made inappropriate sexual advances towards her. 

The cult’s anthem preaches that there is no fear if you have faith which might explain Yoriko’s devotion along with that of many others who similarly find themselves attracted to new religions in the wake of unsettling events such as natural disaster or global pandemic. But then can we really say that what the cult promises is any different to that of other organisations which at least portray themselves as scientific authorities. It transpires that the real reason Osamu has returned is that his doctor has recommended an experimental new treatment that is not covered by medical insurance and costs a significant amount of money but all Osamu has to go on is desperation and his faith in the medical establishment that the supposed cure is any more effective than Yoriko’s holy water (it turns out not to be). There is after all a lot of money in fear and people’s desire to be free of it. 

But Yoriko is afraid of many things. Her petty prejudices are exposed when her now grownup son returns home on a business trip with a hitherto undisclosed fiancée in tow who happens to be deaf. Yoriko probably would not have liked it anyway whoever Takuya (Hayato Isomura) had brought but resolutely fails to hide her disgust that he chosen a woman with a disability. She remarks that people at the church find inspiration in seeing disabled people “suffer and endure”, which is a fairly offensive thing to say in any case even if she later confesses his prejudice outright to a colleague at the supermarket where she works claiming that it’s different because it’s her son and she doesn’t see why he had to choose a woman “like that”. While the cult leader pushes her towards what are superficially at least more wholesome values of love and acceptance, Mizuki (Hana Kino) pulls her back towards her darker impulses but also a kind of liberation in her desire not to be bound by the old-fashioned conservative values that encourage her to fulfil the stereotype of the perfect wife over and above her own happiness or fulfilment. 

The dryness of her life is echoed in the zen sand garden she meticulously rakes into the shape of waves each morning while the water many feared contaminated after the earthquake is really a symbol of the life and vitality she continues to deny herself. Yet in an odd way, it’s human connection that perhaps begins to awaken her in her devotion to Mizuki who reveals that she was so overwhelmed with despair that she became unable to fix the damage in her apartment after the quake struck and has been living amid the ruins ever since. Ogigami turns her quirky gaze to life’s absurdities, the ridiculous things we cling to in order not to be afraid, but eventually allows Yoriko to find the courage to dance in the rain rather than fear its arrival having blown straight through her various “faiths” to become something that is at least more resolutely herself. 

Ripples screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Dry Spell (渇水, Masaya Takahashi, 2023)

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A literal drought becomes a metaphor for bureaucratic heartlessness in Masaya Takahashi’s empathetic social drama The Dry Spell (渇水, Kassui). Inspired by Mitsuru Kawabayashi’s 1990 novel, the film puts a contemporary spin on prejudice and poverty as a collection of officials from the waterboard point at airconditioners and mobile phones while asking why the residents have fallen into arrears with their water payments only to reflect that yes, water like air and sunlight should be free.

The argument that one of Iwakiri’s (Toma Ikuta) colleagues makes, is that they have a right and a duty to charge for the water supply to support the nation’s infrustructure along with their advanced purifcation system which keeps people safe. Iwakiri isn’t so sure about that, but as others later say of him he’s a man who’s made of water himself. He doesn’t like his job but he doesn’t really dislike it either and justifies himself that it’s not him turning people’s water off so much as it’s a natural consequence of them not paying their bills and all they need to do to get it turned back on is settle them. But then as another colleague who eventually refuses to continue cutting people off suggests, every time you do it you lose a little piece of your soul. 

Iwakiri may not have had much of a soul to begin with. He’s as dried up as the town in the middle of a recordbreaking drought and heatwave. Having endured a difficult childhood, he’s become alienated from his wife and son who have decamped to her hometown with no clear indication of when or if they’ll return. That may be one reason he finds himself empathsithig with a pair of sisters who have been abandoned by both parents and are living alone in a house that has already had its gas and electricity supplies cut off. Iwakiri turns off their water supply because it’s the rules, but begins to hate himself for doing it and develops a desire to go against the flow for the first time in his life.

Keiko (Nanami Yamazaki) and Kumiko (Yuzuho) are a pair of water babies who have a yearning for the sea and the father who was apparently once a sailor but seemingly disappeared a year previously while their disappointed mother does her best to support the family through sex work which is as she points out the only line of work open to a single mother with limited qualifications. Iwakiri advises her to apply for benefits but she refuses on the grounds that she doesn’t want them poking around in what she describes as a complicated family situation which makes plain her predicament. But even as Iwakiri begins to meditate on his own paternal failures, his partner Kida (Hayato Isomura) flows in the opposite direction keener to hold onto his job after he learns he’s a baby on the way and unwilling to rock the boat despite how much he may also feel that water should be free. 

In any case, Iwakiri is trying to un-dam himself, waiting for the great big rain that Kumiko says will make everything go back to normal. Except it won’t, at least not literally  though it will in some senses open the flood gates liberating Iwakiri from his emotional repression and the girls from their illusions accepting that they are now alone but will always have each other. As he points out, they are just watermen and there’s not much they can do for the struggling people whose supplies they’ve cut off. It wouldn’t help to pay their bills for them even if they could, and in a better world water should indeed be free though it becomes much harder for them to justify their complicity with a heartless system that can arbitrarily remove access to something so essential for life. Takahashi flits between cheerful scenes of ice lollies in the sun to the cruel realities of the lives of Keiko and Kumiko who continue to long for the sea as does Iwakiri in struggling to repair his relationships with his wife and son while trying to escape the legacies of own traumatic upbringing. The film doesn’t offer any easy answers, but does perhaps suggest that the rain will bring change and the promise of a better future.

The Dry Spell screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Guard From Underground (地獄の警備員, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1992)

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Ever feel like your job is trying to kill you? Released at the tail end of the Bubble era, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s The Guard from Underground (地獄の警備員, Jigoku no Keibin) positions an office building as an industrial hell complete with a demon living in the basement but grimly suggests it’s just one of many hazards to be aware of for a woman in the corporate environment. Then again, the hellish guard himself has a sorrowful look in his eyes that speaks of true loneliness and might evoke pity if only in the fatalistic inevitability of his office-bound killing spree. 

It has to be said, Akebono Trading should have another look at its hiring procedures through in any case there’s something odd about this building which feels more like an abandoned hospital than a place of business while we might also wonder why we’re seeing signs for cargo depots and engine rooms and staff getting locked in the filing room is apparently not an uncommon occurrence. The new security guard has the same name as a former sumo wrester acquitted of the murders of his stablemate and lover on the grounds of temporary insanity, Fujimaru (Yutaka Matsushige), and is himself a hulking presence, tall but of medium build so who knows if it’s really the same guy or just the office rumour mill going into overdrive.  

Meanwhile, the other new recruit is a refined young woman, Akiko (Makiko Kuno), who’s been brought on as an art expert to help a new division recently diverted into prospecting with art sales to assess what is and isn’t a fair market price for a priceless piece of art. As Akiko admits, she’s not well placed to give that information because her background is in curation so she’s not particularly well versed in the collector market but presumably the job pays a bit better than the museums sector so she’s trying to do her best. Her new boss, Kurume (Ren Osugi), is a bit of a weirdo (like all the other men in the building) and crassly remarks that paintings like women have no value if there’s no buyer while she struggles to understand what the point of her job is. Meanwhile we’re left to wonder if Section 12 is actually a real department at all or a shady enterprise set up to help the enigmatic boss, Hyodo (Hatsunori Hasegawa), improve his investment portfolio which will probably serve him well when the bubble finally bursts. 

It’s tempting to read Fujimaru as a personification of corporate culture slowly picking off the employees and largely doing so by means of the building itself, electrocuting them by forcing their hand on the circuit breaker, bashing one inside a locker, or otherwise using his security guard’s truncheon to bludgeon them to death. To begin with, it seems as if he’s developed a fondness for Akiko and while that may be true in the same way King Kong develops a fondness for Fay Wray, it soon becomes clear that he isn’t in fact trying to protect her by taking out all the skeevy guys but seemingly killing for no reason. He looks a painting of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son with fascination, again hinting at his nature as the personification of capitalistic corporatism devouring the employees who might one day overthrow him, yet also lends the guard an eerie, mystical quality suggesting he merely enjoys the act of carnage though he does not actually eat anyone (that we see). More than that he seems almost like Frankenstein’s Monster, somehow lonely in identifying his otherness as he eventually confesses to Akiko remarking that “desolate time” flows through him unlike her “kind”. As he leaves, he pleads not to be forgotten. 

Akiko defeats him by refusing to believe his story and declaring herself disinterested in his truth possibly stood in good stead by the constant necessity of evading the attentions of the men around her such as those of Kurume who starts off giving paternalistic advice about looking after her parents and the preferential savings rates on post office accounts before randomly taking off his trousers. Anticipating his later career, Kurosawa makes the office a place of lurking dread and anxious eeriness only deepened by its industrial aesthetics along with the tiny windows leaking apocalyptic lighting from the oblivious outside world now cut off except for the new/old teletype text and ironic benefits of international time zones. “Traffic’s hell this time of day” a taxi driver chirpily advises, ironically delivering his passenger straight into its fiery depths. 

The Guard From Underground is released in the UK on blu-ray on 25th September courtesy of Third Window Films.

Trailer (English subtitles)