Taking place at the tail end of the Bubble era and on the eve of a technological revolution, Jun Ichikawa’s No Life King (ノーライフキング) in many ways anticipates the world we have today in which much of our communication has already become digitised. The cult-like speech of the next-gen guru who pops up towards the film’s conclusion may have eerie ring to it, but he has a kind of point in his talk of “new children” who will become “new adults” in a new digital world that was then only just becoming a reality.
As someone later says, “the problem is not video games” though many seem to assume it is. The hero, Makoto (Ryo Takayama), whose name means “truth”, is one of a group of five boys obsessed with Nintendo console gaming. A game series known as Life King has become so popular that hundreds of youngsters camped out all night waiting for the release of the fourth instalment. The only problem is that the game seems to be unbeatable, and Makoto’s young friends begin to hear rumours that some of the cartridges are “cursed” with an alternate “No Life King” version that means death for players who cannot finish the game.
The “curse” reflects a confusion that is beginning to emerge over what is “real” and what is “virtual” in an era of rapid technological development. The kids begin to worry that if you die in the game you die for real, while otherwise becoming obsessed with all kinds of urban legends relating to mysterious deaths and conspiracy theories such as that of the actor who plays tokusatsu hero Pris secretly being dead and that all the collectible Pris pencil erasers you can get from gachapon machines are cursed with the resentment he felt as he died. Some would be keen to dismiss this kind of thing as silly things kids say, but then Makoto’s mother also suggests that cakes from the bakery the family of his classmate Noriko owns are “cursed” as customers have been coming down with food poisoning after eating them. According to the guru’s assistant Mizuta (Neko Saito), the rumours are having a serious economic impact and have led to delays in product launches and construction projects in addition to provoking a politician’s resignation.
Then again, the film seems to wonder if it’s the Bubble-era economy which is the enemy. While Makoto plays video games on his own but chats to his friends doing the same thing via telephone headset, his mother often works late into the night staring at a computer screen in their home. Makoto attends a summer cram school where all of the work is done via computers linked via a primitive version of the internet. The teacher is present but cannot actually see any of the children and they can’t see him. Questions are asked and answered via the interface rather than directly, though the computer network of cram school students does eventually allow Makoto to get in touch with other “new children” who are just as worried about the cursed game as he and his friends are while the adults respond by taking their consoles away which of course denies them the ability to lift the curse by beating the game.
The “curse” itself may symbolise mortality, though obviously the children will still someday die regardless of whether they beat Life King IV because life itself is an unwinnable game. “The problem is…” the opening text crawl explains, “the battle has begun. It is unlikely to end until you die.” The same words are uttered by Makoto’s principle only he substitutes “video games” for the second part of the sentence before dramatically falling backwards just like the stricken king of the game while Makoto and the other kids are lined up almost identically to the ranks of soldiers amassed in front of him. This moment of symmetry links back to a line from the guru Akiyuki Mori who hints at a new world in which life and death exist simultaneously. It is this new world that “new children” must learn to adapt to as they grow with technology.
“It’s scary, but we’ll die if we can’t lift the curse” Makoto tells one of his online buddies and eventually becomes an accidental folk hero with the other kids looking to him to free them by beating the game. Graffiti tags go up all over the city reading, “hang in there, Makoto”, while he becomes preoccupied by the nature of the “real” as related to him by Mori and his assistant Mizuta who begin to view him as something like a prophet or at least the first of the “new children” to enter the “new real” in which the distinction between the “real” and “virtual” has disappeared. Fearing for his mortality, Makoto saves himself in the digital space by writing a bio and saving it to floppy disc much as a hero who died in the game was immortalised in stone so that no one would ever forget that he existed.
By the film’s conclusion, “real life” has become a kind of game as evidenced by the advice of Makoto’s cram school tutor that he try and raise his score by 20 points to increase his chances of getting into a higher level institution. The mysterious boy somewhere on another computer tells him to go and look around outside at which point he wanders through the contemporary city and sees it with new eyes. “It is all real” he concedes, catching sight of Mori and his assistants in the crowd just as we start to wonder if this really is “reality’ after all. Then again, perhaps the best lesson the boys learn is from one of their grandfathers who simply “kept living until he died”. Ichikawa captures a sense of technological anxiety in the uncanny eeriness of the “real” world around the boys but is perhaps less pessimistic about the new age that awaits them in the solidarity that exists between the “new children” despite the seeming indifference of the adults incapable of understanding the anxiety that engulfs them.
Windows on Worlds 