Tag: Kyoka Shibata

Drawing Closer (余命一年の僕が、余命半年の君と出会った話。, Takahiro Miki, 2024)

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Takahiro Miki has made a name for himself as a purveyor of sad romances. Often his protagonists are divided by conflicting timelines, social taboos, or some other fantastical circumstance, though Drawing Closer (余命一年の僕が、余命半年の君と出会った話。, Yomei Ichinen no Boku ga, Yomei Hantoshi no Kimi to Deatta Hanashi) quite clearly harks back to the jun-ai or “pure love” boom in its focus on young love and terminal illness. Based on the novel by Ao Morita, the film nevertheless succumbs to some of genres most problematic tendencies as the heroine essentially becomes little more than a means for the hero’s path towards finding purpose in life.

17-year-old Akito (Ren Nagase) is told that he has a tumour on his heart and only a year at most to live. Though he begins to feel as if his life is pointless, he finds new strength after running into Haruna (Natsuki Deguchi) who has only six months yet to him seems full of life. Later, Haruna says he was actually wrong and she felt completely hopeless too so actually she really wanted to die right away rather than pointlessly hang round for another six months with nothing to do and no one to talk to. But in any case, Akito decides that he’s going to make his remaining life’s purpose making Haruna happy which admittedly he does actually do by visiting her every day and bringing flowers once a week.

But outside of that, we never really hear that much from Haruna other than when she’s telling Akito something inspirational and he seems to more or less fill in the blanks on his own. Thus he makes what could have been a fairly rash and disastrous decision to bring a former friend, Ayaka (Mayuu Yokota), with whom Haruna had fallen out after the middle-school graduation ceremony that she was unable to go to because of her illness. Luckily he had correctly deduced that Haruna pushed her friend away because she thought their friendship was holding her back and Ayaka should be free to embrace her high school life making new friends who can do all the regular teenage things like going to karaoke or hanging out at the mall. Akito is doing something similar by not telling his other friends that he’s ill while also keeping it from Haruna in the hope that they can just be normal teens without the baggage of their illnesses. 

The film never shies away from the isolating qualities of what it’s like to live with a serious health condition. Both teens just want to be treated normally while others often pull away from them or are overly solicitous after finding out that they’re ill but at the same time, it’s all life lessons for Akito rather a genuine expression of Haruna’s feelings. We only experience them as he experiences them and so really she’s denied any opportunity to express herself authentically. Rather tritely, it’s she who teaches Akito how to live again in urging him that he should hang in there and continue to pursue his artistic dreams on behalf of them both. Meanwhile, she encourages him to pursue a romantic relationship with Ayaka, in that way ensuring that neither of them will be lonely when she’s gone and pushing them towards enjoying life to its fullest.

Nevertheless, due to its unbalanced quality and general earnestness the film never really achieves the kind of emotional impact that it’s aiming for nor the sense of poignancy familiar from Miki’s other work. Perhaps taking its cues from similarly themed television drama, the production values are on the lower side and Miki’s visual flair is largely absent though this perhaps helps to express a sense of hopelessness only broken by beautiful colours of Haruna’s artwork. Haruna had used drawing as means of escaping from the reality of her condition, but in the end even this becomes about Akito with her mother declaring that in the end she drew for him rather than for herself. Even so, there is something uplifting in Akito’s rediscovery of art as a purpose for life that convinces him that his remaining time isn’t meaningless while also allowing him to discover the desire to live even if his time is running out.

Trailer (English subtitles)

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

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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)

Goodbye, Bad Magazines (グッドバイ、バッドマガジンズ, Shoichi Yokoyama, 2022)

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With the 2020 Olympics on the horizon, Japan began looking for ways to tidy up its image expecting an influx of foreign visitors which for obvious reasons never actually materialised. As part of this campaign, leading chains of convenience stores announced that they would stop selling pornographic magazines in order to create a more wholesome environment for children and families along with tourists who might be surprised to see such material openly displayed in an ordinary shop. Then again, given the ease of access to pornography online sales had fast been falling and the Olympics was perhaps merely a convenient excuse and effective PR opportunity to cut a product line that was no longer selling. 

Based on actual events, Shoichi Yokoyama’s Goodbye, Bad Magazines (グッドバイ、バッドマガジンズ) explores the print industry crisis from the inside perspective of the adult magazine division at a major publisher which has just announced the closure of a long running and well respected cultural magazine, Garu. Firstly told they don’t hire right out of college, recent graduate Shiori (Kyoka Shibata) who had dreamed of working in cultural criticism is offered a job working on adult erotica and ends up taking it partly in defiance and encouraged by female editor Sawaki (Seina Kasugai) who tells that if she can make a porn mag she can make anything and be on her way to working on something more suited to her interests with a little experience under her belt. 

Her first job, however, consists entirely of shredding voided pages filled with pictures of nude women which is slightly better than the veteran middle-aged man who joined with her after being transferred from Garu who is responsible for adding mosaics to the porn DVDs they give away with the magazines to ensure they conform to Japan’s strict obscenity laws. Later a mistake is made and mosaics are omitted placing the publishing company bosses at risk of arrest and the magazine closure. Aside from being one of two women in an office full of sleazy men and sex toys, Shiori’s main problem is that she struggles to get a handle on the nature of the erotic at least of the kind that has been commodified before eventually falling into a kind of automatic rhythm. “It’s easy when it does’t mean anything” she explains to sex columnist and former porn star Haru (Yura Kano) who is much franker in her expression but perhaps no more certain than Shiori when it comes to the question asked in her column, why people have sex. 

Shiori asks her sympathetic colleague Mukai (Yusuke Yamada) for advice and he tells her that what’s erotic to him is relationships, but it seems his work has placed a strain on his marriage while his wife wants a baby and he has trouble separating the simple act of meaningless sex with that which has an explicit purpose such as an expression love or conceiving a child. According to Shiori’s editor Isezaki (Shinsuke Kato), the future of erotica will come from women with their boss finally agreeing to an old idea of Sawaki’s to create an adult magazine aimed at a female audience in the hope of opening a new market while handing a progressive opportunity to Sawaki and Shiori to explore female desire, but at the same time magazines are folding one after the other with major retailers canceling their orders and leaving them to ring elderly customers who’ve been subscribing for 30 years but don’t have the internet to let them know the paper edition is going out of circulation. 

The editorial team have an ambivalent attitude to their work, at once proud of what they’ve achieved and viewing it as meaningless and a little embarrassing. Not much more than a few months after working there, Shiori has become a seasoned pro training a new recruit who’s just as nervous and confused as she was but offering little more guidance was than she was given while becoming ever more jaded. When handed evidence that her boss has been embezzling money, she just ignores it though perhaps realising that when he’s found out it means the end for all of them too. Like everyone else, he’d wanted to start his own publishing company but the editor who left to do just that ended up taking his own life when the business failed. Yet, on visiting a small independent family-run convince store near the sea, Shiori hears of an old man who visits specifically to buy the magazines she once published because he can’t get them anywhere else while they have steady trade from fishermen who need paper copies to takes out to sea. The message seems to be there’s a desire and a demand for print media yet, even if it’s not quite enough to satisfy the bottom line. A sympathetic and sometimes humorous take on grim tale of industrial decline, Goodbye, Bad Magazines sees its steely heroine travel from naive idealist to jaded cynic but simultaneously grants her the full freedom of her artistic expression along with solidarity with her similarly burdened colleagues.  

Goodbye, Bad Magazines streamed as part of the 2022 Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival.

Teaser trailer (English subtitles)