Is it better to have a goal and know what you want, or is it easier to be just kind of muddling along? The heroines of Yugo Sakamoto’s oddly titled slacker comedy Nemurabaka: Hypnic Jerks (ネムルバカ) are coming at this from opposite sides. Ruka (Yuna Taira) is a rock band and her dream is to make it as a musician, though she isn’t really sure she has what it takes, while Yumi (Shiori Kubo), though in some ways the more sensible of the pair, has no idea what she’s doing with her life.
The fact that Yumi addresses Ruka only as “sempai” bears out the ways in which she feels slightly inferior to her, and, in fact, to everyone. As she says to Ruka, it’s like everyone else has a foot on the ladder, but she can’t even see where the ladder is let alone climb it. Ruka offers to split her pay for polishing up some ornaments for a friend who works as a maid at a posh person’s house as long as she does half of it, adding that now at least Yumi’s on the bottom rung while simultaneously trying to make her an equal. While Yumi idolises Ruka, Ruka seems to be jealous of Yumi’s carefree nature and relative lack of impetus.
Then again, the way she seems to quickly shut down anyone making romantic overtures towards Yumi along with her habit of gazing at her while she’s asleep may suggest another kind of desire. The gazing turns out to have a practical dimension, at least, that somewhat dissolves the disparity as it’s Yumi who has facilitated Ruka’s art and, to an extent, all her songs appear to be about her. This may be what she means when she tells Yumi that she’s very important to her to try and quell her feelings of low self-worth and inferiority. Nevertheless, this notion of being somehow lesser is only reinforced by the intrusion of a guy, Taguchi (Keito Tsuna), who pretends to have romantic interest in Yumi but is in reality after Ruka who exploits him for free food and the use of his car.
Exposed, Taguchi calls Yumi “low-tier” and “a simpleton”, but inexplicably still expects Ruka to date him despite having just confessed to using her friend and then insulting her as part of a botched apology. Part of the problem is that Taguchi is a spoiled rich kid who doesn’t understand how the world works. He has a useless GPS device installed in his car featuring a maid-style character who deliberately gives rubbish directions because men like him generally prefer women to be stupid and cute even though he’s set his sights on Ruka who is moody and rebellious. While the girls are humming and hawing over a new rice cooker and going hungry at the end of the day, he’s obsessing over getting a new outfit for his GPS mascot. His comparatively more sensible friend who sort of mirrors Yumi indulges in superhero fantasy and is jealous of Ruka because of her certainty about her path in life even if Ruka is anything but certain in her ability to follow it.
It’s that sense of uncertainty that, in a way, convinces her to accept an offer of a record contract despite the fact they only want her and not her bandmates while she’ll also have to move out of the flat she shares with Yumi to go to Tokyo. She admits that she’d like to live this aimless life with her for longer, but is frightened of becoming stuck and never able to progress to anything else. But the price of that is she ends up making soulless idol pop for the commercialised music industry despite having been signed for a punk anthem about youthful despair. Yumi may be the “sleeping idiot” of the title in a more literal sense, but perhaps Ruka isn’t really fully awake either but allowing others to lead her towards what she should want but perhaps really doesn’t. In any case, unlike similarly themed films, this one doesn’t really lean into the idea that an aimless life is fine itself but encourages Yumi and the others to try and find a sense of purpose as she becomes a “sempai” herself, if also maintaining the courage to walk away from a compromised vision of success that isn’t at all what they wanted.
Nemurubaka: Hypnic Jerks screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.
Images: © Masakazu Ishiguro, Tokuma Shoten_Nemurubaka Film Production Committee
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