Tag: Jiro Sato

The Brightest Sun (時には懺悔を, Tetsuya Nakashima, 2025)

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Tetsuya Nakashima’s more recent films have often dealt with more controversial subjects. His latest, Brightest Sun 時には懺悔を, Toki ni wa Zange wo), adapted from the novel by Bunzo Uchiumi and delayed from last year due to allegations made by an actress on World of Kanako that nude footage was used without her consent, is not so much a film about disability as the taboo of parental selfishness or a sense of disconnection from one’s biological children.

Nevertheless, the way the film approaches it subject matter may seem insensitive to some in that it often reduces the existence of disabled children to a burden that must be born by someone and preferably by a biological parent. Though rookie detective Satoko (Hikari Mitsushima) raises the issue of the child’s subjectivity and quality of life, others struggle to see him as anything more than an object for which someone must accept responsibility. This is doubly true for her reluctant partner, Satake (Hidetoshi Nishijima), who has taken to drink and is riddled with guilt over his ambivalent feelings regarding his own disabled son who has since passed away. His wife (Ko Shibasaki) has fallen into depression and is living in a psychiatric facility while he is seemingly incapable of caring for their teenage daughter who has become resentful of both parents, feeling as if they were unable to care for her because all their attention went to her brother while she too now feels guilty that she did so little for him and left his care entirely to her mother.

At times, the film is critical of this tendency to force women to accept full responsibility for childcare while men remain otherwise absent from the domestic space, but seems to walk this back in the closing moments. In any case, Satake’s rejection of his son is mirrored in that of Tamie’s (Haru Kuroki) husband who openly declares that it would have been better if Taku had not been born, blaming Tamie for giving birth to a disabled child. His embarrassment makes plain a lingering stigma towards disability or difference in the wider society, as if having a child he sees as imperfect reflects badly on him personally. Tamie, meanwhile, seems as if she may have been suffering from a kind of post-natal depression and is clearly affected by her husband’s resentment along with her own inability to bond with the baby. Though she witnesses her child being kidnapped, she does nothing to stop it with implication being that perhaps she is glad to be relieved of the burden. 

Satoko too has become estranged from her young daughter who struggles with the trauma of witnessing her stab her abusive husband. The implication is that this resentment is born of having seen through her mother and realised that she did not do this out of a desire to protect her, but merely out of selfish rage. The fact is that her desire to protect Shin/Taku is a displacement activity. Everyone’s actions are to one extent or another a vicarious attempt to atone for something they are otherwise unable to address in their own lives. 

This appears to have been true for the man whose murder they are supposed to be investigating, Yonemoto (Jiro Sato), who is said to have been the worst of the worst. Someone who really was “better of dead” as Satoko puts it, though we never really find out why exactly everyone had such a low opinion of him and the detective company itself does not actually seem as sleazy as one might expect. Satake suspects he may have planned to blackmail Tamie, who has since remarried and has two step-children, over the discovery of her son, but in fact he was apparently quite moved by the tender care the kidnapper provided to Shin/Taku all these years and though knowing that he should turn him in, wanted to ensure the child would continue to be well cared for. 

This is apparently where Yonemoto found the redemption centred in the Japanese title and explained in an opening title card. Satake similarly is forced to face his complicated emotions towards his son and family, trying to do the best for Shin/Taku as means of assuaging his guilt much as Satoko shifts her maternal anxiety onto Tamie. The film’s conclusion seems to undercut the idea presented by the policeman that blood ties may not be that important, having witnessed the care and devotion the kidnapper showed to a child that was not his by blood and had complex needs, in its concerted efforts to force Tamie to accept her maternity. Nevertheless, the film does its best to extend sympathy and understanding to all, suggesting that the best thing to do in this situation might have been to leave well alone, but for various reasons that won’t be possible. Opting for a noirish aesthetic, Nakashima abandons his pop aesthetics for something a little more subdued but maintains his fast-paced editing style, drip-feeding us the mystery while pondering the nature of the bonds between parents and their children.

The Brightest Sun screens as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Nameless (名無し, Hideo Jojo, 2026)

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A man who can kill with a seemingly invisible weapon goes on the rampage after being harangued by a religious woman in a cafe, leaving police and witnesses baffled in Hideo Jojo’s adaptation of the manga by actor and comedian Jiro Sato who also stars in the title role. The nameless hero, given the generic moniker “Taro Yamada” by the well-meaning policeman who discovered him in childhood, has a mysterious supernatural ability that causes things he touches with his right hand to temporarily disappear. They return when he takes his hand away, but living creatures appear to have been changed as if they existed in a state between life and death and then generally pass away soon after.

Taro (Jiro Sato) seems to have lived well into his 40s deliberately refusing to use his right hand, so what prompted this sudden turn toward nihilistic and indiscriminate violence? The answers may not be entirely clear, just as there is no concrete explanation of where Taro might have come from or how he acquired these strange powers. But it seems to be a reaction against a society that he feels does not accept him, or at least his failure to connect with it. After experiencing a betrayal by someone close to him, he vows that he’s going to stop trying to connect with people and this murderous rampage seems to be an expression of his loneliness and frustration. 

Then again, society did attempt to reach out to him in some ways even if it does not appear to have made much of an effort to understand his condition or to help him to live with it. Despite the Christianising religious overtones that hang over the film, Taro never seems to consider cutting off his hand or making it unusable. As a child, he bound it with wire, presumably to prevent himself lashing out with it instinctively or accidentally causing harm to other people. His only companion, an equally nameless little girl of unknown origin given the generic moniker “Hanako”, begs him not use it even to protect them, which suggests that he may have done so previously with negative consequences. Perhaps there is some benefit to it which is why he doesn’t try to neutralise his arm, but it’s never clear where things go when he touches them or why they comeback changed or depleted. 

The main issue is that he has a choice about using it. Originally, he didn’t want to, and perhaps didn’t want to kill all those people in the cafe either but ended up doing so. The irony is that he wants to connect, but is literally prevented from reaching out. He has these almost Nosferatu-like ticks and grimaces and is largely mute. He can hear and understand, but barely speaks and when he does, it’s with great effort. His voice his horse and the words come out awkwardly in a strange order. Yet the elliptical quality of the tale seems to hint at a desire to reconnect with his childhood self thereby closing the circle and making himself disappear.

Others may in a way be trying to do the same, such as lead investigator Kunieda (Kuranosuke Sasaki) who suspects the case may be linked to something in his own past but has it taken away from him by the National Police Agency who question the team’s competency while themselves failing to make much of an effort to understand the reality of a man like Taro. Some joke that perhaps he is a ghost, and in a way he does seem to be a supernatural entity. His invisible weapons are visible in a reflected surface such as a mirror, but apparently not captured on camera. His tragedy, though, maybe that he doesn’t understand himself beyond the fact of his difference and is too afraid to open himself to potential rejection by those who might be able to help him if they wanted to, with the potential for exploitation by those with darker motivations. In that sense, his violence, depicted with bloody absurdity by Jojo, does seem to be an attempt at connection or to feel himself a part of this world. Nevertheless, the conclusion seems to suggest that in the end acceptance comes from within and in giving in to his basest instincts the adult Taro may only have disappointed his more innocent childhood self.

Nameless screens as part of this year’s Raindance Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Suzuki=Bakudan (爆弾, Akira Nagai, 2025)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © Katsuhiro Go/KODANSHA Ltd. All Rights Reserved © 2025 FUJI TELEVISION NETWORK, INC./Warner Bros. Japan LLC/ KODANSHA LTD. All rights reserved

Revolver LILY (リボルバー・リリー, Isao Yukisada, 2023)

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A former assassin is drawn back into the light when an old colleague is framed for the murder of a small family in Isao Yukisada’s adaptation of Kyo Nagaura’s pulp novel, Revolver Lily (リボルバー・リリー). Set in the Taisho era, the film finds Japan at a crossroads amid an atmosphere of rising militarism in what is still a very poor country trying to change its fortunes through imperialism while those like Yuri (Haruka Ayase) attempt to stave off the oncoming apocalypse of war.

Though Yuri (whose name means “lily” in Japanese) had been part of a spy ring in Taiwan and trained to further Japan’s interest through political assassinations, she evidently came to see the error of her ways when the group was betrayed and an attack on their hideout led to personal tragedy. Since then, she’s lived as a well-to-do owner of a geisha house apparently under her own name which somewhat conflicts with the idea that she is simultaneously on an international most wanted list. In any case, she’s swept back into action when one of her former comrades, Kunimatsu, is accused of murdering the family of a man named Hosomi who is apparently on the run while militarists also seem to be intent on finding his teenage son Shinta (Jinsei Hamura).

Shinta, who was born with a lame leg which would presumably rule him out for military service, later becomes a kind of symbol of Japan as a more enlightened nation that no longer sees the need to use violence in order to advance its own interests. His father, Hosomi, had apparently done a series of dodgy deals with the military and then run off with all the money which is why they want to find him. It later turns out that he took the money not so much out of greed as that he was trying to turn the tide by growing the country economically in the hope that there would no longer be the need for imperialistic conquest.

Yet the money becomes a means of setting the army and the navy against each other in an increasingly straitened Japan in which neither feels they have the proper finding to pursue their ambitions. Constant references are made to the devastating economic impact of the 1923 earthquake, yet the authorities spend increasing amounts of money on waging war and there seem to be increasing numbers of soldiers on the streets. The army, in general, are depicted as loutish thugs with little on their side except brute force, while the navy in their pristine white uniforms are backroom plotters and always one step ahead.

But there is obviously a giant irony at the heart of the film in that as Yuri declares at the end, “fighting protest nothing,” having just taken out most of the Tokyo garrison in an effort to protect Shinta so that he can be preserved as a symbol of a new pacifist Japan. Though she tries to avoid mortally wounding anyone, Yuri is still prepared to use violence in order to combat it while the fact that merely fight on the side of capitalism suggests that there is, in fact, already a war going on between competing visions of the nation’s future which are both destined to come to pass. Capitalism, too, however, has its rough edges as symbolised by the grinning yakuza boss (Jiro Sato) who boasts of being “a man you can trust” but is only really ever on the side of greed and power.

Yuri, meanwhile, seems to be reawakened by her latest mission. She tells her assailant who accuses her of living in a state of nihilistic limbo, that she has made a choice a live which also symbolically aligns her with the new future opposed to the death cult that is militarism. Nevertheless, history tells us that whatever promises are made the militarists will win and the people will suffer. Yuri, however, continues fighting for peace with the film making full use of Haruka Ayase’s growing stature as an action star following on from franchises such as Caution, Hazardous Wife as Yuri effortlessly takes out huge numbers of army goons assisted by her female comrades. The closing scenes hint at further adventures for Yuri amid the vibrant Taisho-era setting taking on the forces of militarism with impeccable style and elegance.

Revolver LILY is available digitally in US from 27th January courtesy of Well Go USA.

A Girl Named Ann (あんのこと, Yu Irie, 2024)

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In the wake of tragedy, it’s easy to think that if only you had made a different choice then everything would be alright, but in reality it’s never as easy as that and blaming oneself is merely an act of vanity. There’s a peculiar kind of tradeoff that occurs to journalist Kirino (Goro Inagaki), that if he hadn’t written an article exposing a policeman who founded a support group for former drug users trying to integrate into mainstream society as a sex pest, then he might have gone on to help more people. Of course, he would have gone on abusing some of them too and his behaviour would probably have escalated into something much worse. The journalist begins to ask himself if it’s worth it for the net good, without necessarily examining the ramifications of the policeman’s actions.

Yu Irie’s bleak social drama A Girl Named Ann (あんのこと, An no Koto) draws inspiration from a real life case in which a young woman began to turn her life around only to reach a crisis point during the pandemic. The film’s title almost makes an everywoman of its heroine who is resolutely failed by the society in which she lives and in the end discovers only a sense of futility in realising that she will never fully be able to escape the clutches of her abusive mother (Aoba Kawai) who forced her into sex work at age 12. Ann never even finished primary school even though middle school is compulsory and is functionally illiterate. Her reading level is that of a small child which of course makes it near impossible for her to be employed in any kind of salaried job while when she does secure employment her mother steals all her money. 

Being arrested by Tatara (Jiro Sato), a policeman who at first seems well-meaning even if positing “yoga” as a means of turning Ann’s life around, finally gives Ann the encouragement to come off drugs and try to integrate into mainstream society. To his credit, Tatara does everything he can for her from providing a paternal presence to finally helping her escape her mother by getting her a place in an apartment complex set up for women who are being stalked or have experienced domestic violence. Living alone gives Ann a sense of confidence and positivity that allows her to imagine a better future for herself while confronting her past. But on the other hand, it remains true that Tatara may have been better to help her move to another city where her mother would be less likely to find her and derail her life at every conceivable opportunity rather than keeping her close at his own support group which is perhaps an act of vanity if not something worse. No one helps for free and Ann encounters only differing kinds of exploitation from the employers who take her on at poverty wages because they know how desperate she is and don’t think she deserves any better, to the conflicted journalist Kirino who is only really invested in his investigation of Tatara. Ann seems to resent him for exposing Tatara and taking him away from her, but neither of the men make much of an attempt to continue supporting her once the story breaks. 

Ann’s plight exposes how the weakest in society were disproportionately affected by the coronavirus pandemic. The care home she was working at, poignantly because she wanted to learn how to take care of her grandmother (Yuriko Hirooka) who had shielded her from her mother’s abuse, is forced to restrict the number of employees on site meaning Ann is let go while the classes she’d been taking to improve her literacy are also cancelled. Though the apartment requires no rent, she no longer has a means of feeding herself not to mention being stuck inside all the time with nothing to do but study, and not even that when all her pens run out of ink. People are often judgemental and there is no further social support available to her. Even Tatara had been overly fixated on her drug use and while it’s true that she would otherwise be unable to rejoin society without recovering, he otherwise fails to consider other factors such as Ann’s toxic home life or trauma from the long years of abuse she suffered that all contribute to the problems she is facing. 

Even so, unlike her mother Ann is a warm and caring person who is well liked at the care home and clearly has a lot of love to give but the universe won’t seem to give her a break. Perhaps it would be easiest to simply blame her mother, but something must have made her like that too and there’s no one there for her either. She sometimes calls Ann “Mama”, as if the roles were reversed and she were the child being parented by Ann rather than the other way round. In any case, she comes to embody the selfishness of an indifferent society which could have saved a girl like Ann if really wanted to but in the end did not.

A Girl Named Ann screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Images: ©2024 “A Girl Named Ann” Film Partners

Black Night Parade (ブラックナイトパレード, Yuichi Fukuda, 2022)

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According to the opening voiceover of Yuichi Fukuda’s seasonal comedy Black Night Parade (ブラックナイトパレード), we’ve all got Christmas wrong. It’s not completely true that Santa only gives presents to the nice kids for there are in fact two Santas, the other one, the anti-Santa, making sure that bad children have a very unhappy Christmas receiving gifts ranging from the traditional lump of coal to offal. The Santa dressed in black is described as being a little more egalitarian, but does indeed pedal in disappointment and the opposite of the holiday spirit though in another way perhaps he’s just an embodiment of a sense of resentment towards to the unfairness of the contemporary society. 

Miharu (Ryo Yoshizawa) is very definitely grown up and a good example of someone who regards themselves as earnest but is becoming fed up with seeing those he regards as acting inconsiderately prosper. Still working part-time at a convenience store having repeatedly failed to get into university or find a full-time job, he’s irritated by his loudmouth slacker colleague Kaiser (Taishi Nakagawa) who just seems to constantly fall up in life while Miharu ends up being the responsible one doing most of his work for him. When Kaiser asks him to cover his shift Christmas Eve so he can go on a date with his pretty girlfriend seconds after telling him he’s actually had a full-time job offer, it obviously stings more than a little. But when Miharu takes a leaf out of his book and tries to take home one of the expired Christmas cakes, he’s immediately caught and threatened by his boss not to mention being deemed a bad boy by the Santa in black. 

Though in his case, it results in an ironic job officer to become one of Santa’s helpers at a gloomy Santa centre where they run a virtual surveillance state to figure out whether the kids that send in letters to Santa have really been as good as they claim to have been. Surveillance queen Shino (Kanna Hashimoto) decides one little lad hasn’t on catching him cheating on a test despite having emphasised how hard he’d been studying in his letter. Cheating on a test is obviously not “good”, but perhaps it’s not innards in your stocking bad either and Miharu’s moral compass is going haywire trying to understand the strange world he finds himself in while participating in a contest to join the elite Reindeer division of Christmas shock troops. Meanwhile, he’s also confronted by a conspiracy in which the red Santa has already been murdered by rats controlled by a mysterious group who hate Christmas and are trying to eradicate it. If they don’t find a new red Santa soon, the magic will be broken forever.

Despite the zaniness of the concept, the humour is a little less grating than the broad variety style generally employed by Fukuda in his other films even if several of the performances are on the larger side. Rather than rediscovering the true meaning of Christmas or coming to an accommodation with the unfairness of the contemporary society, Miharu is guided towards dealing with his own unresolved childhood trauma which repurposes the empty consumerism of a contrived holiday tradition as a means of signalling of a lack of something or the roots of unhappiness. Even if most most kids are asking for the latest toys it may be because they want others to play with with them, while some just want company because their parents have to work long hours and they’re lonely at home. 

Despite making the astute observation that the best way to disappoint a naughty child is to get them what they asked for but not quite right, Miharu eventually discovers a calling in making sure no child is left empty-handed on Christmas Day spreading the spirit of the season wherever he goes even while being chased by packs of evil rats out to destroy the joy of Christmas forever. Then again, there is some mildly satirical humour in the likening of Santa Claus House to a “black company” ruthlessly exploiting its employees while engaging in some very dubious corporate shenanigans in its use of customer data and clear invasion of privacy in its all-seeing surveillance network. In any case, it does appear that Christmas is safe from the rat race for the moment and children good or bad will wake up to a surprise equally so on Christmas morning for years to come.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Missing (さがす, Shinzo Katayama, 2021)

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“None of us are needed” claims the nihilistic serial killer at the centre of Shinzo Katayama’s dark mystery drama, Missing (さがす, Sagasu). That he’s wrong is an obvious point, but also one reinforced by the teenage heroine’s determination to find her father not just literally and physically, but spiritually and emotionally as she struggles to reorient herself and find direction in her life in the midst of grief and despair. Drawing inspiration from the so-called “Twitter Killer” case of 2017 Katayama asks some difficult questions about the ethics of life and death and how seemingly ordinary people can be pulled towards the dark side by a mixture of greed and misplaced compassion. 

As the film opens, young Kaede (Aoi Ito) is running through the backstreets of Osaka looking for her dad (Harada). What occurs is something of a role reversal as she arrives, breathless, at a convenience store and is forced to apologise because her father has been caught shoplifting having been short the paltry sum of 20 yen which she then has to pay to smooth things over so he won’t actually be arrested. It’s at this point that Satoshi tells her about his big get rich quick scheme which involves claiming the reward for catching a fugitive serial killer, Terumi Yamauchi (Hiroya Shimizu), known as “No Name”, whom he believes to have seen in the local area. Kaede does not take her father seriously, but then Satoshi suddenly disappears. She can’t help but wonder if he was telling the truth and that something untoward has happened to him. 

What she quickly discovers, however, is that no one except herself is very interested in her father’s disappearance. Her teacher tries to help by taking her to the police, but it’s clear that they do not consider Satoshi to be a person worth looking for suggesting that whatever’s happened to him is most likely his own fault for being an imperfect person, implying that he drinks and has debts so most likely has gone missing on purpose. The teacher later comes to the same conclusion, getting a nun from a local orphanage to come and fetch Kaede believing her father has no intention of returning. Probably meaning well, the nun also tells her that her father has abandoned her and there’s no point waiting for him. But even if everyone else thinks that Satoshi is an “unnecessary” person, he is important to her and so she will not stop until she finds him even if that puts her in similar danger hot on the heels of a serial murderer. 

Like the Twitter Killer, Yamauchi disingenuously claims to be helping people, offering “salvation” to those who want to die but cannot bring themselves to end their own lives. By his logic, there are some who are only clinging on to life out of guilt for those who will be left behind while simultaneously blaming themselves that they are “unneeded” and nothing more than a burden to the few who do care about them. His claims are however nothing more than sociopathic justification designed to convince others that what he’s doing is in some way compassionate rather than a sickening attempt to satisfy his own dark desires. As he finally concedes with a repeat customer, in the end none of the people he killed wanted to die but were looking for something else which obviously was not what he wanted to give them. 

Perhaps Satoshi was looking for something too though whether he found it or not only he could say. Katayama hints at the grimness of everyday life in Satoshi’s unsatisfying existence of casual labour, guilt, and loss. When Kaede tries to check whether or not he’s been going to work, no one recognises his picture and it turns out that someone else has been working under his name. A migrant worker urges her to be careful, that the man calling himself Satoshi Harada has bad vibes of the kind he claims you often find “in places like this”. All Satoshi wanted to was to reopen the ping pong parlour he was forced to close in order to care for his wife during a longterm illness which left him with financial debts along with the emotional. It is quite literally a back and fore between father and daughter, a ping pong ball flying across a table until finally hitting its mark as Kaede reveals that she has found the answers she was looking for even if not quite the ones she wanted. Lightened by moments of dark humour, Katayama’s strange procedural grimly suggests that none of us is really so far away from acts of desperate brutality but equally that none of us is ever unneeded no matter how lonely it might feel. 

Missing screens in Chicago on Oct. 30 as part of the 15th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema. It will also be released in the US on Nov. 18 courtesy of Dark Star Pictures.

US release trailer (English subtitles)

From Today, It’s My Turn!! (今日から俺は!! 劇場版, Yuichi Fukuda, 2020)

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The high school fighting manga has long been a genre mainstay but perhaps hit peak popularity in terms of the big and small screen during the Bubble era with such well known hits as Sukeban Deka and Beb-Bop High School. More recent treatments have frequently bought into the genre’s inherent absurdity such as the contemplative and melancholy Blue Spring, or the anarchic Crows Zero series helmed by Takashi Miike to which Blue Spring’s Toshiaki Toyoda later added a sequel. Which is all to say, that a genre so deliberately puffed up and obsessed with macho posturing is near impossible to parody. Leave it Yuichi Fukuda to try with the retro nostalgia fest From Today, It’s My Turn!! (今日から俺は!! 劇場版, Kyo kara ore wa! Gekijoban), a theatrical sequel to the TV drama series adapted from the manga by Hiroyuki Nishimori. 

Set in the genre’s heyday of the 1980s, the action takes place in a small town in Chiba with an improbably large number of high schools. Nerdy high schooler Satoru (Yuki Izumisawa) floats the idea of transferring somewhere else, fed up with all the delinquents at his school disrupting his studies with their constant violence but then it seems like everywhere else is the same. The big problem is that their two top guys have recently been deposed during a conflict with rival school Nanyo leaving a power vacuum while their school is temporarily merging with Hokunei from the next town over seeing as they’ve already burnt their school building down. 

While many high school fighting manga focus on the hierarchy within one particular institution, From Today, It’s My Turn!! is much more concerned with the battle between rival schools even if some of the more antagonistic fighters are in fact secretly friends. The first fight that breaks out is between bleach blond Mitsuhashi (Kento Kaku) and blue-suited Imai (Taiga Nakano) over a juice carton he bought for Mitsuhashi’s aikido-trained girlfriend Riko (Nana Seino) which Mitsuhashi sees as an affront to his masculinity, though in truth the two guys seem to get along well enough in the long run. Most of this fighting is in essence performative posturing, something made plain by the unexpected cowardice of supposed top guy Mitsuhashi who it turns out frequently runs away when challenged even relying on Riko to get him out of trouble. 

Though there are female gangs and female lone fighters, this is largely a male affair as the women, excepting Satoru’s cousin Ryoko (Maika Yamamoto), are expected to perform their femininity as the boys perform their masculinity through fighting. The supposedly evil head of the girl gang from Seiran High, Kyoko (Kanna Hashimoto), turns into a walking embodiment of kawaii when encountering crush Ito (Kentaro Ito) who begins acting in an equally lovey-dovey fashion, but breaks right back into her delinquent tough girl persona as soon as he’s off the scene. Aikido expert Riko meanwhile is largely reduced to trying to keep Mitsuhashi out of trouble while adopting an air of nice girl refinement. Only Ryoko who determines to take revenge on behalf of the bullied Satoru with the aid of a bamboo sword is allowed to stay firmly within the confines of the sukeban. 

Nevertheless, despite their treatment of each other most of the gang members can’t abide bullying which is why they eventually turn on Hokunei realising that they’re the sort of guys that befriend vulnerable people only to betray them later. Yet like Mitsuhashi, Hokunei boss Yanagi (Yuya Yagira) is also an under-confident coward so insecure in his fighting prowess that he has to cheat by taping throwing knives to the inside of his blazer. Legitimate authority is it seems largely absent, parents either unseen or oblivious while the teachers are unable to offer much in the way of help, wandering round the town with a toy police car and a loudspeaker trying to fool the guys into dispersing. 

Fukuda’s brand of humour is nothing if not idiosyncratic and largely inspired by TV variety show sketch comedy which explains the random nature of many of the gags along with the absurdist manga to the max production design. He further amps up the incongruity by casting prominent actors clearly far too old for high school and then saddling them with ridiculous costumes to the extent that Taiga Nakano looks oddly like Frankenstein’s monster with his too broad shoulders and overly bouffant quiff. While action choreography leaves much to be desired, fans of Fukuda’s previous work will most likely have a ball though others it has to be said may struggle. 

From Today, It’s My Turn!! streamed as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Fable: A Contract Killer Who Doesn’t Kill (ザ・ファブル 殺さない殺し屋, Kan Eguchi, 2021)

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Appearances can be deceptive. A case could be made that everyone is in a sense living undercover, pretending to be something they’re not in order to survive in a conformist society and most do indeed have their secrets even if they’re relatively benign. Others, meanwhile, are on a kind of sabbatical from a life of meticulous violence such as the hero of Kan Eguchi’s sequel to smash hit action comedy The Fable, The Fable: A Contract Killer Who Doesn’t Kill (ザ・ファブル 殺さない殺し屋, The Fable: Korosanai Koroshiya) or like his antagonist living a double life with his apparently genuine concern for the lives of disabled and disadvantaged children balanced by his business of targeting wayward youngsters for the purposes of extortion. 

Some months on from the previous action, “Sato” (Junichi Okada), formerly a top Tokyo assassin known as The Fable, is successfully maintaining his cover hiding out in Osaka as an “ordinary” person with a part-time job in a print and design shop. His cover is almost blown, however, when his colleague Etsuji (Masao Yoshii) is targeted by Utsubo (Shinichi Tsutsumi), ostensibly the leader of a local organisation advocating for the rights of children but also a shady gangster who finances his “philanthropy” by extorting the parents of young people who’ve in someway gone off the rails. Etsuji’s crime is, as was exposed in the previous film, his spy cam habit and in particular his planting of hidden cameras in the home of colleague Misaki (Mizuki Yamamoto) with whom he has an unhealthy obsession stemming from her time as an aspiring idol star. Blaming Misaki for his misfortune, Etsuji turns to violence but is shut down by Sato who risks blowing his cover in order to protect her. Realising he has a previous connection with Utsubo, Sato makes the gang an offer they can’t refuse in order to get Etsuji back but quickly finds himself drawn into another deadly battle with bad guys endangering his still in progress no kill mission. 

Focussed this time much more on action than the fish out of water comedy of Sato’s attempts learn the rules of polite society having been raised in the mountains as a super efficient killing machine, The Fable 2 nevertheless wastes no time in exposing the murkiness of the “normal” world Sato is intended to inhabit. Utsubo is a hit with the local mothers, taken with his smart suit and professionalism as he gives “inspirational” speeches about park safety while making time to converse in sign language with a deaf little girl explaining to another mother that it’s important to “listen to every voice”. As part of his patter he implies his assistant, Hinako (Yurina Hirate), who uses a wheelchair, was injured in a freak park-related accident as a child when in reality she sustained the injury while trapped in the back of a car which veered off a roof after The Fable took out its driver. Vaguely recognising her in the local park, Sato takes an interest out of guilt as the young woman attempts to rebuild her strength in the hope of walking again though that might in itself be contrary to Utsubo’s desires. 

As in the first film, Sato may be a ruthlessly efficient killing machine but at heart he’s still childishly innocent, hoping to help the young woman he unwittingly hurt but also keen not interfere with her ability to help herself. Misunderstanding the situation, Hinako asks Utsubo to lay off Sato, explaining that he gives her confidence as she begins to realise that she can stand alone, as the sometimes uncomfortably ablest metaphor would have it, and no longer needs to be complicit in Utsubo’s nefarious schemes nor need she continue to punish herself in guilt over her traumatic past. While Sato and his handler Yoko (Fumino Kimura) pose as a pair of siblings watched over by their benevolent if absent boss (Koichi Sato), Hinako and underling Suzuki (Masanobu Ando) similarly pose as brother and sister only with the comparatively dubious guidance of Utsubo who affects kindness and generosity while burying problematic youngsters alive in the forest in order to extort money from their “protective” parents. “It’s always the villain who tells the truth” Utsubo explains, insisting that it’s shame and humiliation which build self-esteem in direct contrast to the gently invisible support which seems to have re-activated Hinako’s desire for life.

Sato has at least discovered the benefits of a well functioning and supportive “family” network thanks to the, as we discover, equally handy Yoko, and his still largely oblivious workplace friends. Amping up the action value, Eguchi careers from set piece to set piece culminating in a high octane chase through an apartment block and its eventually unstable scaffolding while making space for slapstick comedy such as two guys trying to move a piano at a very inconvenient moment. A gently wholesome tale of a pure-hearted hitman kicking back against societal hypocrisy while figuring out how to be “normal” in a confusing society, The Fable 2 more than builds on the promise of its predecessor while allowing its hero the space to grow as he begins to adjust to his new and very “ordinary” life.

The Fable: A Contract Killer Who Doesn’t Kill screens on July 7 as part of this year’s Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival (NIFFF)

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Miyamoto (宮本から君へ, Tetsuya Mariko, 2019)

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Three years after Destruction Babies, Tetsuya Mariko returns with another ultra-violent though strangely humorous masculinity drama as a mild-mannered salaryman embarks on a quest to win the heart of his one true love by proving himself a man even if aware that his efforts are entirely meaningless while he strikes out where it counts. Inspired by Hideki Arai’s manga, Mariko previously adapted Miyamoto (宮本から君へ, Miyamoto kara Kimi e) as a late night TV drama with the majority of the cast reprising their roles for the big screen feature.

As the film opens, the titular Miyamoto (Sosuke Ikematsu) is walking bruised and bloodied through a children’s park, staring at his unrecognisable face in the hazy mirror of a public bathroom. A regular salaryman, he’s later taken to task by his boss (Kanji Furutachi). After all, how does he expect people to do business with him when he’s lost all his front teeth and has his arm in a sling? His boss reminds him he’s about to be married and will soon be a father so perhaps a little more forward-thinking responsibility is in order. It seems that Miyamoto got into some kind of fight and improbably enough he won, the other guy apparently in hospital not to recover for months though thankfully he does not want to press charges. Nevertheless, Miyamoto seems strangely cheerful, happy in himself as he takes his bride to be, Yasuko (Yu Aoi), home to meet his parents who don’t disapprove but are extremely put out by his continued secrecy especially as Yasuko is already pregnant though something tells us there’s much more to this than your average shotgun wedding.  

Skipping back between the present day of the happily settled couple and the various stages of their courtship we begin to see a pattern developing as the hapless young salaryman falls for the pretty office lady only to discover she was technically using him to break up with an obsessive ex struggling to accept that their relationship is over. Challenged by bohemian playboy Yuji (Arata Iura), Miyamoto instinctively barks out that Yasuko is a special woman and he will protect her at all costs though the jury’s out on how exactly he plans to do that. In any case, Yuji exits and even if unconvinced, Yasuko is taken in by the idea of finding a protector. But Miyamoto is less than true to his word. When it really counts, he lets her down, passed out drunk as she’s assaulted by a friend from his rugby team (Wataru Ichinose). What ensues is partly, in his mind, a means of making amends to her by getting his revenge and a quest to reclaim his self-respect by asserting his masculinity in besting his girlfriend’s rapist in a fight. “It was me he insulted” Miyamoto somewhat problematically insists, rage shovelling rice into his mouth directly from the cooker while Yasuko can barely contain her resentment and exasperation with his continued failure to follow through while painting himself as the victim in her rape. 

Consumed by toxic masculinity, Miyamoto does indeed frame everything through the prism of his fracturing manhood, never jealous or abusive but comparing himself unfavourably to the other men in Yasuko’s life and convincing himself the way to beat them all is by proving himself the most manly through the medium of pugilism. Meanwhile, he emotionally neglects the woman he claims to love and promised to protect, temporarily distancing himself from her while he embarks on his quest, leaving her entirely alone to deal with her trauma. Yasuko makes it clear that she doesn’t care about his pointless and idiotic need to validate himself through male violence, but he does it anyway and then expects her to be impressed (which she isn’t, really). In any case he freely admits he did it all for himself, literally shredding his rival’s manhood in order to retake his own in addition to gaining an extremely ironic form of revenge.  

Absurd and ridiculous as it is, Miyamoto’s quest does at least allow him to gain the self-confidence which will eventually allow him to patch things up with Yasuko, ironically by affirming that he no longer sees the need to look for approval and will protect her and their new family forevermore. A dark satire of fragile masculinity filled with cartoonish yet surprisingly graphic violence, Mariko’s third feature nevertheless retreats from the pure nihilism of Destruction Babies towards a more positive if perhaps equally uncomfortable resolution as the no longer quite so insecure Miyamoto prepares to enter a new phase of his life as a paternal figure and protector of a family.

Miyamoto streams in the US via the Smart Cinema app until Sept.12 as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)