Tag: Ken Mitsuishi

Chaos (カオス, Hideo Nakata, 2000)

Posted on by

A down-on-his-luck handyman finds himself swept into intrigue when he agrees to a help a pretty young woman fake a kidnapping in Hideo Nakata’s noirish drama Chaos (カオス). Chaos is certainly what unfolds in the non-linear narrative as we try to piece together this fracturing tale of multiple betrayals and double crossings in which nothing and no one is quite as it seems and we can never really be sure just what game anyone is playing.

Goro (Masato Hagiwara), for instance, seems to be a bit of a sap. His ex-wife accuses him of being incapable of thinking of others, though his young son Noboru comes to him after having been bullied at school. He doesn’t seem to be very invested in his life of odd jobs which includes requests from lonely old men to play go as well as to visit the apartments of pretty women who’ve encountered some kind of plumbing disaster. Perhaps it’s no surprise he’s convinced to help Saori (Miki Nakatani) stage a kidnapping to test her husband’s affections seeing as she suspects he’s started an affair with a younger woman who is just nicer than she is, so she can’t compete.

What is surprising is that Goro turns out to be some sort of kidnapping expert. He explains to Saori that she should wear rope bindings for added authenticity when she’s released as well as refrain some taking showers. She should also not feed the tropical fish her friend asked her to, because if she’s been kidnapped then she’s not available, but then the fish will die, which means she’s sacrificing the life of living creatures just to prove a point. Though Goro treats her with tenderness, he frighteningly turns on after he’s helped her tie herself up, threatening rape. This is then revealed to be a ruse in order to get a real reaction of fear and terror for when he rings her husband Komiyama (Ken Mitsuishi) with the ransom request. 

This reversal makes clear to us that we don’t know who we’re dealing and anyone could suddenly change at a moment’s notice. We’ve just been told, for instance, that Saori tied the ropes so she could easily untie them by herself to go to the bathroom, which means that she could have done so anytime while she thought Goro was attacking her but didn’t. Obviously, she may have been too frightened to think of it, but then again perhaps she is also playing along with her own game too. When Goro extorts Koniyama’s sister, it looks like a cunning double bluff to lend authenticity to the original kidnapping plot while simultaneously pulling off a different scam, but maybe it’s also Goro going rogue and doubling his pay packet.

Despite his circumstances, however, Goro doesn’t seem to be in this for the money so much as white knighting for Saori even though he obviously knows she’s already married. On realising she may have betrayed him, Goro goes into a fairly convincing detective mode, posing as a policeman in order to investigate. He discovers that Komiyama’s mistress was a model who’d recently been cast aside by the agency because of a rumour she slept with a client while they also seem to have a repressive rule about dating. One of her colleagues says she hardly ever goes home to the flat her agency rents for her because she’s secretly living with a boyfriend. This is, perhaps, a world in which a woman can’t really be all of who she is because men are always trying to imprint their vision of idealised femininity on them. Womanhood is, after all, a kind of performance and one which Saori may be manipulating for her own ends. 

Yet it’s not clear where, if anywhere, the performances end and the authentic begins. Even having discovered at least a degree of the truth, Goro isn’t sure he can really trust Saori, while she may not really know either. What he resolves is that that might not matter, but what each of them is really looking for is a kind of escape from the constraints of their lives either through love or money only to discover that there is none, or else it lies only in death either literal or figural in a total reinvention of one’s persona. With shades of Vertigo, Nakata piles on the confusion and uncertainty to create an atmosphere of pure dread in which nothing, really, is quite as it’s assumed to be.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Hotel of my Dream (私にふさわしいホテル, Yukihiko Tsutsumi, 2024)

Posted on by

What does a girl have to do to get her book published in this town? Adapted from the novel by Asako Yuzuki, Yukihiko Tsutsumi’s The Hotel of My Dream (私にふさわしいホテル, Watashi ni Fusawashi Hotel) follows its eccentric heroine through a literary feud with an established master in an attempt to defeat a misogynistic, hierarchal and exploitative publishing industry and finally publish a full-length novel. In part a meditation on identity, the trades on its heroine’s charms and the comedic prowess of leading lady Non.

Set in 1984, the film begins and ends at the Hilltop Hotel popular with writers through the ages thanks to its proximity to book town Jinbocho and the offices of big time publishers. Using the pen name Taiju Aida, Kayoko (Non) is an aspiring author who won her publisher’s newcomer prize a few years previously for a short form essay but has been unable to write anything of substance since after being stung by a harsh review from literary master Higashijujo (Kenichi Takito). After learning from her editor Endo (Kei Tanaka) that Higashijujo is in the room upstairs and is on a tight deadline to complete a story for an upcoming anniversary anthology, Kayoko decides to impersonate a hotel maid so he’ll stay up all night and not make it, forcing Endo to use her story instead.

The irony is that Kayoko’s story is popular with readers and she has real talent as a writer that’s being suppressed by the publishing industry at large in the form of her former publisher, Endo, and Higashijujo. Higashijujo is a representative of a particular kind of older writer and is effectively acting as a gatekeeper by suggesting that young women like Kayoko have no place in the literary scene. Even so, he’s captivated by the story she tells him that’s the same as the essay she later has published which cleverly weaves in some of his own personal details. She plays on his vanity and lasciviousness in telling him she’s a big fan and is romantically naive as if dangling herself as bait. Higashijujo realises that Kayoko is Taiju Aida and kicks off a kind of literary feud in which he disrupts her career and she puts on various different personas to upset or embarrass him. 

Nevertheless, his rivalry with her does seem to stimulate his own latent artistic mojo and have him writing manically once again if partly out of resentment, while Kayoko is forced to change her name again before winning a note literary prize as “Junri Arimori” and writing with a completely different style. On realising that they may both be being manipulated by Endo who is setting them against each other in order to stimulate their writing, they team up against him by attempting to disabuse his daughters of the notion that Santa’s not real only they already know. They were just going along with the ruse because that’s a child’s job in much the same as Higashijujo suggests a writer’s is to conjure a pleasant fantasy for the reader and Kayoko creates a series of false personas further her own literary dreams. 

Yet as Kayoko says she’s not given the kind of support that other writers get and even after getting a book published has to go round to stores on her own to encourage them to stock and promote it. She only rises to prominence by charming a bookseller after catching a notorious book thief who didn’t even steal hers because he only takes “popular” books. Kayoko is indeed a total crazy lady, but perhaps you need to be in order to survive in this environment that’s still dominated by men like Higashijujo writing borderline sleazy novels and hanging out with hostesses in upscale Ginza bars. Resented by his daughter, he stays out in hotels for days at a time, leaving his wife alone and neglecting his family. Kayoko has to fight tooth and nail for her place in this space and to prove herself worthy of a room at the Hilltop Hotel while Higashijujo’s ride was must less fraught with difficulty even if it may not have been easy. The final message seems to be, however, that art is created best in opposition and success isn’t always good for an artist as Kayoko finds herself frustrated, feeling as if she hasn’t achieved all of her revenge but has no left to take it against while perhaps still manipulated by Endo who provides a source of authority for her to kick back against as literary queen trying to hang on to her throne.

The Hotel of my Dream screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © 2012 Asako Yuzuki_Shinchosha © 2024 “The Hotel of my Dream” Film Partners

Sweet Rain: Accuracy of Death (Sweet Rain: 死神の精度, Masaya Kakehi, 2008)

Posted on by

“What do you think about death?” a charming grim reaper awkwardly asks, seemingly taking into account the answers given when deciding whether his “subject” should survive or if the untimely death they’re about to meet should be final. Adapted from the novel by Kotaro Isaka, Masaya Kakehi’s Sweet Rain: Accuracy of Death (Sweet Rain: 死神の精度, Sweet Rain: Shinigami no Seido) contemplates what it means to live well, how to go on living in the midst of pain and suffering, and finally how to know when it’s time to accept the finality of death. 

Chiba (Takeshi Kaneshiro) is a grim reaper and it’s his job to decide whether those involved in unexpected deaths, those not due to old age, illness, or suicide, should be allowed to live. According to his partner, who appears alternately as a black dog or raven, Chiba always chooses to “proceed” but something is obviously a little different with his latest job monitoring customer services representative Kazue (Manami Konishi) in the seven days leading up to her demise. Kazue is currently being harassed by a repeat caller who keeps calling the helpline asking for her personally and has recently graduated to pestering her about meeting up in person. It’s easy to see which way this could go, though luckily for her she ends up meeting Chiba who acts as a kind of protector when she’s hassled yet again by a different set of creeps in a park. As he gets to know her, Chiba learns of Kazue’s loneliness and sense of despair having endured more than her fair share of loss which has convinced her that everyone around her dies and she’s destined to be alone. But whether down to Chiba’s interference or otherwise, a surprising twist sees her offered a gig as a top idol star, leading Chiba to conclude that she has not yet fulfilled her purpose and should be granted more time. 

The expected romance does not quite take place, though Chiba is indeed becoming more interested in human life along with death while fascinated by music which he describes as humanity’s greatest invention. As we gradually gather, Chiba’s three jobs occur at lengthy temporal intervals, though the music store he frequents appears to be a constant and almost unchanged. Bar a hyper-realistic humanoid robot appearing in the final section in which Chiba is sent to assess an elderly hairdresser (Sumiko Fuji), these different temporal spaces are in another sense an extension of the present in which technology does not otherwise change substantially. Chiba picks up an iPod belonging to a petty yakuza on job two but continues to listen to CDs while the hairdresser seems to be doing her job the old-fashioned way and the kids that come to her store all collect Pokémon/Top Trumps-style paper cards. 

Yet Chiba is also a fish out of water, constantly confused by contemporary slang and with a strong tendency towards taking things literally. His discombobulation with language and custom is perhaps enhanced by the casting of Takeshi Kaneshiro who is half-Taiwanese and grew up in Taiwan speaking Mandarin as his first language, later working predominantly in Chinese-language cinema. In the audience perception he carries with him a quality of otherness that adds to the ethereality of his existence as a grim reaper. His appearance changes with each of his subjects, firstly appearing as a handsome young man, then as a grizzled yakuza complete with sunshades, and finally as a slacker student with each of his portals mirroring his destination from telephone booths to emergency exits and shopfront doors. As a grim reaper he has long unruly hair and wears a suit a loosened tie, but perhaps has little identity of his own and laments that he has never seen a blue sky because it is always raining whenever he is in the mortal world.  

The rain might well symbolise the pain and suffering around him as he lives among those who are about to die, but he himself feels that death is nothing special. As the old lady points out, that might be because it’s all he sees, he never visits people while they’re alive and knows nothing of life nor what it is to leave it. The old lady too experienced a lot of loss in her life and came to the conclusion that she was in some way cursed, severing her connection with those she truly loved believing she could only bring them harm and choosing to live all alone. “The sun in the sky’s nothing unusual but it’s important that it be there,” she adds, “death’s like that, maybe”. In any case she seems to have lived a long life that was happy enough even if it was “nothing special” and she can die with no regrets while Chiba too begins to learn something of the world’s ordinary beauty in his first glimpse of a sunny sky even if one overshadowed by the spectre of death. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

Sham (でっちあげ ～殺人教師と呼ばれた男, Takashi Miike, 2025) [Fantasia 2025]

Posted on by

After a couple of hundred years of corporatising culture, sham apologies have become an unfortunate phenomenon all over the world. Corporations in particular will often offer a fairly meaningless apology that acknowledges a minimal level of responsibility but does not bind them to recompense those they’ve wronged nor put right anything that their conduct has made wrong. The problem is that an apology has become a kind of sticking plaster that allows us all to move on but doesn’t really solve anything and may even prevent us from doing so because it turns us all into accidental liars who are primed to say “sorry” to make the situation go away even it wasn’t actually our fault.

That’s essentially what happens to Seiichi (Go Ayano), previously an unremarkable primary school teacher with a teenage son of his own and an apparently happy home. Inspired by a real life case, Takashi Miike’s courtroom drama Sham (でっちあげ ～殺人教師と呼ばれた男, Detchiage: Satsujin Kyoshi to Yobareta Otoko) flirts with ambiguities but in keeping with its themes eventually descends into a defence of the well-meaning man as its hero becomes so embroiled in the injustice being done to him that he doesn’t see that he is not entirely blameless. Though we’re first introduced to him as the “homicidal teacher” the papers describe him as, the film’s title leaves us in no doubt that his account is the truer. But it remains a fact that during his conversation with Ritsuko (Ko Shibasaki), the mother of the boy Seiichi is accused of racially bullying, he did remark that Takuto’s American grandfather may explain his unique characteristics which is perhaps within the realms of thoughtless things well-meaning people say in awkward conversations but hints at a level of latent societal prejudice. In any case, that the fact his conversation with Ritsuko ended up drifting towards subjects like bloodlines and the Pacific War is not ideal, while Seiichi should probably have been more mindful of his politically neutral position as an educator. 

Likewise, he doesn’t dispute that he tapped Takuto lightly on the cheek to “educate” him that it hurt when he slapped another boy, Junya, who, according to Seiichi, he was bullying. He probably shouldn’t have done this either, even if some may see it merely as common sense in teaching the children that violence is wrong, as ironic as that may be. In any case, the film is on Seiichi’s side and insistent that he did not treat Takuto any differently on account of his non-Japanese ancestor nor spout off any of the racist nonsense that Ritsuko attributes to him. But the major problem is that Seiichi is mild-mannered and also a product of this society. He tries to protest his innocence, but is pressured by his headmaster to apologise anyway which is, of course, a form of lying, something they discourage the children from doing. In the end he goes along with it, because it’s easier to just say “sorry” and hope it goes away rather than address the real issues. 

It’s this sham society that the film seems to be critiquing, even if its message gets lost among its intertwining plot threads as Seiichi effectively finds himself bullied by an empowered tabloid media formenting mob justice against what it brands a far-right fascist teacher as a means of selling papers through generating outrage. While he is scrutinised and scorned, no one bothers to look into Ritsuko’s story which is already full of holes such as why, if she’s so protective as a mother, she waited for her son to be a victim of “corporal punishment” 18 times before complaining to the school. Little motivation is given for Ritusko’s actions, though Miike films her and her husband with an an almost vampiric sense of unease as they appear eerily in black on their way to the school. Unhinged herself, the answers may lie in Ritsuko’s own childhood and her yearning for a protective mother figure, not to mention the sophistication of being a child returning from abroad with good education and prospects for the future.

Seiichi refocuses his closing statement on Takuto, insisting that he doesn’t blame him for “lying”, but it’s perhaps also try that he is a kind of victim too whose own actions can only be explained by a closer look at his relationship with his mother and familial environment. But it turns out that it really is easier to just say “sorry” and move on. Even the psychiatrists seem more interested in treating Ritsuko like a customer whose wishes must be obeyed than earnestly trying to help Takuto even if his issues don’t seem to be as serious as his mother might have it. According to Seiichi, telling a child off is the purest expression of love. If everyone carries on with sham apologies, nothing really changes and kids like Takuto get forgotten about as everyone falls over themselves to make the situation go away. No one really cares about the truth, and so it becomes an inconvenience to social cohesion in which those who insist on speaking it are hounded down until they agree with the majority and meekly say “sorry” while those in the wrong nod their heads and continue with their lives free of blame or consequence.

 Sham screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

BAUS: The Ship’s Voyage Continues (BAUS 映画から船出した映画館, Hokimoto Sora, 2025)

Posted on by

According to the hero of Sora Hokimoto’s BAUS: The Ship’s Voyage Continues (BAUS 映画から船出した映画館, Eiga kara Funadeshita Eigakan), films are born of man’s battle against time and the desire to extend one moment into eternity. Yet his father was always looking for a new “tomorrow” and a path towards the future that ironically kept him from being fully in the  present. Inspired by the memoirs of Takuo Honda, the film is effectively a people’s history of cinema culminating in 2014 with the closure of the Baus Town cinema amid a climate in which film itself seems to have entered a terminal decline.

Indeed, Takuo’s father Shigeo (Shota Sometani) becomes almost a ghost himself. Having come to Tokyo insisting that movies were his “tomorrow,” the war leaves him a shadow of his former self and a spectral presence in the auditorium. Though Takuo’s mother (Kaho) and others at the cinema have discovered a new community eating together every night after the final screening, Shigeo is often out drinking with the chamber of commerce and rarely returns home. Still looking for “tomorrow,” he appears lost for direction despite opening a new, more modern cinema fit for the post-war era. 

As the mother of Shigeo’s wife Hama says, men are focused on past and future while it’s women who are forced to face the present leaving most of the more practical problems for Hama to deal with. Shigeo’s brother Hajime (Kazunobu Mineta) had perhaps been overly obsessed with the past and ultimately unable to move forward. After coming to Tokyo with Shigeo, he became an unsuccessful benshi only to be rendered obsolete by the arrival of talkies. Despite being drawn to the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the migrant workers, he later falls hard for militarism and becomes a casualty of the war both literally and spiritually. Shigeo laments the increasing censorship of the late 1930s complaining that it has become impossible to make or show films, but it’s little better afterwards as the Occupation forces push Hollywood movies at the expense of the European or Japanese.

Hajime had snapped back that entertainment wouldn’t change anything and that war purified the world, but Shigeo insists that films are a window from which the local population can learn about other lives and other places, a means of “building the heart” that might a save a soul. The older Takuo envisages a world in which watching a film normally or loving someone normally might become political acts in themselves. He weaves his personal history of film, which is also that of his family, with the political realities of the mid-20th century in which beautiful forests are cut down to make coffins for the endless dead and unexploded incendiaries lurk like ticking time bombs both literally and psychologically as, as one old man puts it, the nation’s struggles to reckon with its role in the war or its traumatic consequences. 

Nevertheless, even if Takuo is closing Baus Town for reasons stemming from his own traumatic loss, he continues to look for tomorrow despite his old age. Asked what his dream was, he replies only that he wanted his children to have better lives than he did, though he worries he may have failed. In any case, he remains lost within the labyrinths of cinema. The building itself, originally surrounded by fields in a much smaller Kichijoji, becomes a haunted space in his memory, half dream and longed-for place of warmth and salvation in which he remains a small child searching for his father in the empty auditorium.

The name for Baus Town is taken from the bow and stern of a ship, echoing Takuo’s own search for other horizons and a constant process of moving through the world. He too is trying battle time and make a moment last an eternity while admitting that there’s nothing so beautiful as smoke in the projector beam. He asks his daughter if smoke, like movies, isn’t connected to the afterlife and there are ways in which Takuo has also become a ghost, both haunted and haunting while films are themselves a kind of other world of the living past and a way of communing with those no longer here. Taking over production after Shinji Aoyama passed away, Sora gives the film an elegiac, poetic quality while asking if cinemas too might be resurrected in the same way as film even as Takuo ponders new directions while continuing to sail ahead in search of tomorrow.

BAUS: The Ship’s Voyage Continues screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Images: ©Honda Promotion BAUS/boid　

The Vancouver Asahi (バンクーバーの朝日, Yuya Ishii, 2014)

Posted on by

Second generation Japanese-Canadians stake their hopes on baseball in Yuya Ishii’s historical drama The Vancouver Asahi (バンクーバーの朝日, Vancouver no Asahi), inspired by the story of the Vancouver Asahi baseball team which was belatedly granted a place in the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in 2003. In many ways a conventional sporting movie in which the underdogs eventually triumph, Ishii does not shy away from the dark shadows of the 1930s even while framing the Asahi’s path to glory as a symbolic punch back against discrimination and oppression. 

As the hero, Reggie (Satoshi Tsumabuki), relates, many like his parents came to Canada at the beginning of the 20th century planning to work for three years and then return to a more comfortable life in Japan only to find themselves trapped in low-paid and exploitative work. Reggie’s main concern is that his drunken and dejected father Seiji (Koichi Sato) still sends the majority of his pay back relatives in Japan meaning their family live like paupers while as he never meant to stay he hasn’t bothered to learn the language or attempt to integrate into the local community. In fact, Reggie is their major breadwinner with his job at the sawmill but the only thing that makes his life worth living is playing baseball with the Vancouver Asahi baseball team even though they are regarded as something of a joke, always at the bottom of the league tables and never actually winning a game. 

The plight of Asahi is closely aligned with that of the immigrant community, divided as it is in its approach to integration with some feeling they should abandon their Japaneseness in order to better get along with Canadians and others fiercely determined to hang on to their traditions. When Reggie admits that they can’t win against the power of the Canadians it feels as if he’s talking about more than just baseball though his solutions are perhaps apt for both in realising that to beat strength you need to be smart. What he comes up with is essentially a bunt and run strategy that plays to their advantages of speed and lightness but also at times feels to him like a trick or a gimmick, an admission that they can’t compete in the normal way. “Why are you always apologising?” Reggie is repeatedly asked, his shyness and mumbling speech always seeking to keep the peace while his desire to offer justification is less as one Japanese old lady puts it “a bad habit of their culture” but a defence mechanism in an environment of potentially violent oppression. 

As Japanese migrants the family faces constant xenophobic micro aggressions, a woman at the hotel refusing to let Reggie’s bellboy friend Frank (Sosuke Ikematsu) carry her bags while they are also suspected as thieves or harassed by the local Canadians. Reggie’s hothead friend Kei (Ryo Katsuji) finds it increasingly difficult to keep his cool, not least as it turns out because his father was killed fighting for the Canadians in the last war and yet he is still treated as a dangerous outsider. Meanwhile, they are paid only half the wages of the Canadian workers, expected to work unreasonable hours, and can be fired without warning. Now an ageing man, Seiji is still a casual labourer fighting for a place on a truck to work at a quarry or construction site often in other towns away from his family in order to get more money. The team is constantly losing players because men lose their jobs and focus on finding new ones or moving away. As one old man laments, there’s no job security and even if you go to a Canadian university it won’t make any difference to your job prospects. Reggie’s sister Emi (Mitsuki Takahata) was on track for a scholarship only to have it pulled at the last minute when parents of the other kids complained it wasn’t right it was going to a Japanese girl. 

After the hotel fires all of its Japanese staff, Frank decides to go “back” to Japan where relatives will help him find work but pointing out to Reggie that he’ll still be seen as an outsider even there and there’s no guarantee anything will be any better in Japan. Poignantly the guys later catch sight of him in a newsreel as a soldier having been sent to the Machurian front. Once war breaks out they are discriminated against again, forced out of their homes and interned leaving all their property behind and destroying their small community, the Asahi included. The team’s unexpected success had forged a bridge between the Japanese and Canadian communities but it was not strong enough to survive the war. Stepping away from the sports movie, Ishii concentrates more on the ways they were betrayed, the team’s success later buried and forgotten while they find the advances they’d made washed away on the shore as if to suggest their strike back against an oppressive society could never be more than superficial while their position remains so precarious. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

Cottontail (コットンテール, Patrick Dickinson, 2023)

Posted on by

A recently bereaved widower travelling to Lake Windermere to scatter his wife’s ashes begins to reclaim an image of family in Patrick Dickinson’s melancholy character study, Cottontail (コットンテール). Having travelled to the Lake District in her childhood to visit her father who was working in the UK at the time, Akiko (Tae Kimura) recalled fondly a sense of familial connection symbolised by a photo she believes to have been taken on the lake’s shores and continued to wear a Peter Rabbit necklace right to her dying day.

In a poignant note to her husband Kenzaburo Lily Franky) written before her dementia worsened and left with a Buddhist priest until the time of her death, Akiko expresses regret that they were never able to go there again as a family while she was alive but would like him to scatter her ashes on Lake Windermere in the company of their Son, Toshi (Ryo Nishikido), who now has a wife and daughter of his own.

As we can see from the opening scenes, Kenzaburo is a man living at odds with the world around him. Emotionally distant, he finds it difficult to relate to his son and often quite literally shuts him out leaving Toshi hurt and resentful. To begin with, Kenzaburo insists he will go to Lake Windermere on his own and only later agrees to allow Toshi and his family to accompany him, making all the travel arrangements. Once there, however, he becomes impatient and after a minor argument over the itinerary takes off alone only to get on the wrong train and end up on the opposite side of the country as he’s kindly informed by a raucous hen party on their way to York. Forced to rely on the kindness of strangers, he’s taken in by a farmer (Ciarán Hinds) and his daughter (Aoife Hinds) who have suffered a bereavement themselves and attempt to help him process his loss while encouraging him to reconcile with his son. Presenting a kind of mirror he may bounce off while mediating these complex emotions in a second language allows Kenzaburo the opportunity to confront himself and his grief along with his feelings of inadequacy as a husband and father.

We can sense his own regret in a flashback to a meeting in a cafe shortly after Akiko was diagnosed with dementia in which she looks to Kenzaburo for reassurance but he remains in denial. She tells him that she’s afraid and can’t bear the idea of losing her family or becoming a burden to them but he simply tells her that it won’t come to that as if he were closing himself off to the reality but also from her in leaving Akiko alone to deal with her fear and loneliness in refusal to confront anything that is emotionally difficult or unpleasant. Yet Kenzaburo refuses to relinquish her memory, stubbornly carrying her ashes in a tea tin and at times holding it up as if he were showing her around and attempting to share this trip with her in a more literal way.

What threatens to devolve into a more conventional road trip drama in which Kenzaburo is helped on his way by a series of improbably kind and sagacious strangers develops into something deeper as he trudges his way through the English countryside which as it turns out is not all that aesthetically different from that of Japan and largely free of the often claustrophobic hedgerows that literally separate us from the surrounding scenery. The landscape further recalls scenes from Kenzaburo’s life as he begins to reflect on his time with Akiko and confront the reality of her loss along with his new life without her.

In effect, he’s journeying towards a recreation of Akiko’s photograph and its capture of a brief moment of familial unity in a gradual process of reconciling with Toshi and his own position as a father. Quiet and unassuming, Dickinson’s film is less a slow voyage through grief and learning to let go as it is one of gaining courage to open a door that had long been closed, Kenzaburo no longer the melancholy octopus hiding deep in the ocean but a bobbing rabbit eager to experience more of the world around him before it’s too late.

Cottontail opens in UK cinemas 14th February courtesy of Day for Night.

UK trailer (English subtitles)

Helpless (ヘルプレス, Shinji Aoyama, 1996)

Posted on by

A title card close to the beginning of Shinji Aoyama’s debut film Helpless (ヘルプレス) lets us know that this drama which spans a single day takes place on Sept. 10, 1989. It is indeed late summer for most of the protagonists, refugees from the Showa era living on borrowed time in Heisei and intensely resentful towards the contemporary society which appears to have no place for them while the glamour of the Bubble economy does not appear to have trickled down to their peaceful provincial existence. 

Yakuza, for example, are very much associated with the post-war past and one-armed foot soldier Yasuo (Ken Mitsuishi) is an old-school street thug who can’t accept that his former boss literally is as dead as the institution itself. He’s met at a train station by two former associates, but it’s clear the older at least is awkward around him finally telling Yasuo not to call “too often”. “It’s nice to be normal,” Yasuo sneers, realising his former comrade has gone straight and lives an ordinary life as a regular businessman which is why he really wants nothing to do with his yakuza past. Yasuo takes his as more than just a personal betrayal and shoots him dead with his own gun.

He is quite literally helpless, there’s no place for him in the contemporary society and his only hope is killing his old boss, who is already dead, so he can go back to prison. The only sticking point his younger sister Yuri (Kaori Tsuji) who has learning difficulties and had been living in residential care. Another of Yasuo’s former associates now longer a yakuza, Kenji (Tadanobu Asano), is similarly caring for his father who is in hospital for serious medical treatment. Kenji’s father hums the Internationale to himself and seems to have been consumed by the failure of his personal revolution muttering about blast furnaces while at home Kenji looks out on the now rusty aspirations of another “new era” in a moribund steel plant. He lies to his father that he has a received a job offer from there. 

The two men seem destined to collide, Kenji’s numbed resignation and Yasuo’s irrational rage, though it’s Kenji who later snaps after learning that his father has hanged himself while he was busy taking care of Yasuo’s sister. Even an old classmate he runs into is filled with resentment, talking about taking his “revenge” at the class reunion by poisoning the punch. He says he “forgives” Kenji because he once helped him find his PE kit, though Kenji claims he did it mostly for selfish reasons.The chef at the roadside diner where they wait for Yasuo also seems to be henpecked by his wife who calls him “weaker than a woman.” Kenji later says that he killed them because they ridiculed him, tipped over the edge by his own insecurity and sense of futility. 

Yasuo discovers something similar after being stopped at a roadblock, a policeman expressing sympathy that “they forgot about a punk like you.” Yasuo points the gun at his own head, discovering one last bullet, but it’s not quite clear what happens after that. Yasuo was a wandering ghost anyway, a man of the Showa era haunting the streets of Heisei with a mission to kill a man like himself already dead. On the severed arm Kenji later discovers in his bag, there’s a tattoo of a skull and the motto “help me” which might speak for them all desperately looking for some kind of way out but finding little support. 

But then again, Kenji proves unexpectedly kind caring for Yuri even while Yasuo selfishly considers a double suicide. Dressed in white though also in a T-shirt featuring the cover for Nirvana’s Nevermind which was released in 1991, Kenji is the light and Yasuo the dark despite their mutual violence one bound by nihilism and the other a strange positivity blithely searching for an escaped rabbit just as helpless as he himself may be. Filled with ironic whimsy the film takes place in a purgatorial space inhabited by those displaced by the Bubble who no longer have anything to pin their hopes on while living on borrowed time in a late summer rapidly drawing to a close. 

All the Long Nights (夜明けのすべて, Sho Miyake, 2024)

Posted on by

The latest in a recent series of films critical of Japan’s contemporary employment culture, Sho Miyake’s All the Long Nights (夜明けのすべて, Yoake no Subete) presents a more compassionate working environment as key to a happy and fulling life brokered by small acts of attentive kindness in the knowledge that we are all carrying heavy burdens. Based on a novel by Maiko Seo, the film captures a sense of serenity that can be found in the wonder of life itself and the discovery of the “infinite vastness beyond the darkness” that a starry sky presents.

A lack of compassion in the generalised society is signalled early on in the fact that the heroine, Misa (Mone Kamishiraishi), struggles with a condition that is little understood and belittled by those around her. On bonding with workplace colleague Takatoshi (Hokuto Matsumura) who is experiencing panic disorder, he dismisses her issues as “that female thing” and suggests it doesn’t compare to the effects his condition is having on his life. She counters him that she didn’t know there was a ranking, but is obviously rankled by the refusal of the world around her to take her PMS seriously even though it causes her to lash out at others and often ruins employment opportunities because it’s impossible for her to regulate her emotions in the way that is generally expected in contemporary working culture. 

Each of them have ended up working at a small company that manufactures scientific instruments for children after originally working in larger corporate structures with very clear hierarchical systems and rigid modes of behaviour. Yet we can see right away that Misa’s colleagues are aware of her condition and seem to have accepted it. When she blows up at Takatoshi over his habit of drinking carbonated water the sound of which gets on her nerves, they gently steer her away while explaining to him not to pay it any mind. In any case, Misa is still embarrassed by her behaviour and regularly buys pastries at a nearby bakery in an act of continual atonement even though her boss tells her not to get into the habit of it.

Takatoshi’s rather rude refusal of her pastries, clumsily explaining that he dislikes raw cream, is another symptom of his aloofness and unwillingness to be a part of the office community. He is continually looking to get his old job back and looks down on this kind of work as being lower in status than a regular office job at a big company, something perhaps reinforced by his well-meaning girlfriend who seems to want him not only to get better but to reassume his former position despite the implication that it’s what made him ill in the first place. Tsujimoto (Kiyohiko Shibukawa), his former boss, however remains compassionate and supportive perhaps in part because his older sister took her own life due to workplace pressures which has made him more sensitive to the troubles of those around him. That’s also true of the boss of the science company, Kurita (Ken Mitsuishi), whose younger brother also took his own life for unclear reasons leaving him acutely aware of the importance of paying attention to the feelings of others.

It’s in this compassionate environment that Misa and Takatoshi each begin to rediscover a new sense of confidence in their mutual solidarity regarding their personal struggles along with a better idea of what kind of life suits them rather than focusing on how they’re seen by others or living up to a societal notion of what defines conventional success. As they’re tasked with creating a voiceover script for the company’s mobile planetarium, they come to an appreciation of the beauty found in darkness along with the light that shines within it in. As Misa reflects, there is nothing in life that does not change, not even the stars, but amid all that anxiety we can still help each other and live peaceful, quietly profound lives finding fulfilment in the mundane. Shot in a hazy, slightly detached naturalism the film eventually finds a joy in life’s simplicity and the warmth of human connection that exists outside of the corporate superstructures that have come to define most of our lives while otherwise robbing us of the ability to fully embrace it or ourselves.

All the Long Nights screened as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Dreaming in Between (逃げきれた夢, Ryutaro Ninomiya, 2023)

Posted on by

Everyone keeps asking Suenaga (Ken Mitsuishi) is if he’s okay. He has these tiny moments in which it looks like he’s on pause, sudden instances of stillness in which he stares vacantly into space. We start to wonder if he’s experiencing some kind of mental distress, having a stroke or developing dementia as those around him seem perplexed about his his behaviour which to us seems cheerful and pleasant. In fact, it seems confusing and unfair that he’s held in such contempt by his wife and daughter not to mention the pupils at his school and sullen young woman at the cafe he often frequents. 

A man of a certain age with a once overbearing father now mute and living with dementia in a retirement home, Suenaga is indeed undergoing a crisis of life. A year away from retirement, he begins to wonder what it was all for and how his relationship with his family became what it is today. He asks his wife Akiko (Maki Sakai) if they somehow gradually became estranged from each other in an impassioned speech in which he begs for love that neither she or his daughter are very minded to give him. Perhaps we can infer from the surprised reactions to his cheerfulness and attempt to take an interest in his daughter’s life that he hasn’t always been this way, though he too seems confused and perhaps not so much trying to make a mends but only to be his real self at what he fears may be the close of his life. 

When he surprises the waitress at a local cafe he goes to frequently by sitting in a different seat and then neglecting to pay the bill, it’s not really clear whether he actually forgot or did so deliberately as an attempt to assert himself. Likewise when he makes a clumsy attempt to embrace his now emotionally estranged wife or calls in sick to work it seems like more examples of his strange behaviour, yet Suenaga claims he’s becoming more of himself and on looking back over his life so far feels dejected and unfilled.

This  sense of mid life crisis is exposed in his conversation with Minami (Miyu Yoshimoto), the waitress at the cafe and an former pupil. He reveals that he wanted to become a head master but didn’t make it, and thinks he was only appointed deputy head because of picking up so many cigarette butts dropped by his rebellious charges, Minami is in many ways his opposite number, young and grumpy yet also grateful to him in another way restoring meaning to his life when she tells him that his words once saved her when he told her that she was fine the way she was. Even so she goads him a little, joking and maybe not really that he should give her his retirement money so she can have a better life. Echoing the opening conversation with his father, Minami hints she may soon quit the cafe to become a bar hostess or sex worker to save up before eventually emigrating Greece.

For all his teacherlyness, Suenaga seems to be a man who wants to be more understanding. He takes an interest in his pupils though they assume he doesn’t and again tells Minami that people should live the way they choose. In the rawness of their final parting, he tells her not to do anything she’ll regret but then adds that maybe she should, as if a life with no regrets is not really lived or perhaps reflecting that despite his own unhappy circumstances he does not really regret the life he’s lived. 

Filming in 4:3, Ninomiya makes great use of closeups, not least of Mitsuishl’s cheerful expression which somehow carries with it a great sorrow amid his own disappointments and yearnings. False or otherwise, there is something touching the connection of these dejected souls, the ageing teacher and the former pupil looking for permission to move on with her life but also teaching something to Suenaga in her sullen defiance and the eventual drive to keep going. Quiet and gentle if suffused with melancholy, Ninomiya’s poignant drama does indeed seem to argue that people in general are alright as they are but false acts jollity are as likely to confuse as console.

Dreaming in Between screens 1st June as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

Original trailer (English subtitles)