Tag: Minori Terada

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Death Threat (女囚さそり 殺人予告, Toshiharu Ikeda, 1991)

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It had been 14 years since the conclusion of the rebooted Female Prisoner Scorpion series and 18 since the iconic Meiko Kaji had stepped away from the role when Toshiharu Ikeda decided to resurrect the iconic Nami Matsushima for Toei’s V-Cinema line. Ikeda was reportedly a fan of the original series and put his name forward to direct with the intention of getting Kaji to return as a now middle-aged Sasori but she turned him down flat so they instead embarked on a quasi sequel in which the original Nami has died and another woman slowly takes her place to become the next incarnation of the legend.

Consequently, Scorpion is not the protagonist of this film that otherwise bears her name. Cast in the lead role of a nameless hit woman, Natsuki Okamoto was then a popular pinup model known as “High Leg Queen”. The film opens with her emerging from a barrel of concrete after being dumped by a group of men who had gang raped and then left her for dead. She’s then rescued by a yakuza, Kaizu (Minori Terada), who teaches her how to kill and is effectively her handler. After posing as a bigger to knock off an obnoxious businessman, he’s recruited by Goda (Kenji Imai), the former warden prison stabbed in the eye (though not by Nami as he claims here) in the original trilogy but now a local councillor with aspirations of being elected to parliament. The prison is about to be redeveloped and Goda claims he’s been keeping Nami a prisoner in the dungeon for the last 20 years so he needs her knocked off before anyone bothers to have a look down there.

Of course, there are a few things that don’t make sense with this scenario and are out of continuity with the events of the original trilogy. In any case, now called 701 the assassin infiltrates the prison and knocks off a woman she’s been led to believe is the original scorpion but may not actually be. It seems Scorpion has already passed into legend and the woman has become less important than the idea or the inspiration she provides to the other inmates who are then minded to rebel against authority. By hiding Scorpion away, the authorities have made a rod for their own back in allowing her apotheosis into a goddess of vengeance of all women kind.

701 is in a way reborn as Sasori. Betrayed by the people who hired her, she’s crucified in the courtyard until rescued by fellow inmate and Sasori fan Shindo (Mineko Nishikawa) who helps her try to escape from the prison in an attempt to find out what happened to the “real” Nami. It’s she who first likens the fire in 701’s eyes to that of the Scorpion and begins to give her permission to take on her name and mission. A line is drawn between the two in Nami’s incasement in concrete and 701’s breaking out of it in the opening sequence. Though it would be wrong to call this horror film, Ikeda makes frequent use of ghostly techniques to imply Nami’s apotheosis such as the sound of her spoon scraping the concrete which she later bequeaths to 701 who then becomes the “new” Scorpion. 

The film was in fact a big hit for Toei video and theatrical sequel was planned as a co-production with Golden Harvest in Hong Kong though the project fell through when Okamoto took a break from show business ostensibly for health reasons though there were rumours she had objected to the requirements for nudity. Contrary to expectations for a straight to video release, there is not actually a lot of sexual content in the film which is mainly restricted to a single sequence in which two prisoners pretend to get it on in order to distract a guard to facilitate an escape attempt. Unlike other instalments in the series, the film doesn’t have a lot of women in prison elements either, though it does make space for Dump Matsumoto, a popular villain character from women’s wrestling, as a sadistic guard with a crush on another warden who is she says the only one who treated her like a woman. Instead, it focuses on 701’s passage towards becoming Scorpion and the fulfilment of her twin missions as an avenger of wronged women breaking free from the concrete dungeon of patriarchal oppression to take bloody revenge on the forces of corruption.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Alone in the Night (夜がまた来る, Takashi Ishii, 1994)

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A woman enters the homosocial world of the yakuza in search of revenge for her murdered husband, but discovers only more degradation and hopelessness in Takashi Ishii’s rain-soaked noir, Alone in the Night (夜がまた来る, Yoru ga mata Kuru). Then again, perhaps it’s not really revenge Nami (Yui Natsukawa) is after so much as death itself, her relentless fall one of self-harm born of her sense of futility in world ruled by irony in which there is no such thing as truth or justice.

Indeed, one of the things that propels Nami on her mission is the injustice that her husband Mitsuru (Toshiyuki Nagashima), killed while working undercover investigating a gang dealing drugs, is then accused of taking the drugs he seized and selling them on himself. After her husband dies, she’s hounded by the press who paint him as a corrupt cop while she’s also denied his police pension because he died in disgrace. What she wants is to clear his name and thereby drag her husband back from the netherworld in an affirmation of their love for each other. 

But she too becomes corrupted by the darkness of the criminal underworld. Soon after the funeral, yakuza thugs break into her home and rape her while looking for the drugs they assume Mitsuru stashed somewhere. Amid the chaos, she attempts to take her own life by slashing her wrist with one of Mitsuru’s bones but is unexpectedly saved by a mysterious man. Reborn after her brush with death, she reinvents herself as bar hostess “Mitsuru” as a means of getting close to the gang boss, Ikejima (Minori Terada), she believes to be responsible for her husband’s death. Her attempts to kill him, however, prove unsuccessful. She’s once again raped, this time by Ikejima, and thereafter becomes his mistress until another opportunity arises which she then botches by stabbing him in a non-lethal way which only gets her beaten and tortured by his underling Shibata (Kippei Shiina) and eventually sold to a brothel in Chiba where they get her hooked on drugs to make her easy to control. 

In fact, she’s only spared death once again thanks to the intervention of the mysterious man, Muraki (Jinpachi Nezu), a middle-aged yakuza seemingly weary of life and perhaps drawn to Nami as to death. He seems uncomfortable and out of place in this world of brutal masculinity while his modernity is singled by his association with the gun to counter Shibata’s with the sword. He has other reasons for his duality, but is charged with rooting out moles in the yakuza of which there seem to be an inordinately large number. Despite warning her off, he does what he can to help Nami, in part of out of guilt and a need for atonement, but also a kind of escape from his own entrapment within the purgatorial space of the yakuza underworld. 

Permanently raining and shot in an eerie blue, the world around Nami and Muraki takes on an etherial, dream-like quality as if taking place somewhere between sleeping and waking. After rescuing her from an attempt to drown herself, Muraki remarks that Nami slept like the dead or perhaps as if someone was calling to her from the other side. Death seems to be beckoning each of them, even as Muraki desperately tries to keep Nami alive by tenderly nursing her back to health and helping her beat drugs so she can finally free them both by achieving their mutual revenge.

But the film’s irony is that Nami cannot achieve her vengeance on her own. She’s constantly rescued by Muraki who achieves some if for her while each of her attempts only plunge her further down the cycle of degradation and in danger of losing herself entirely. She is and remains an ordinary woman venturing into hell in search of justice, but discovering only cruel ironies and futility. Muraki too is unable to transcend himself and meets a personal apocalypse in embracing his authentic identity. Nami has been chasing a ghost all along, though in some ways it may be her own as she tries to make her way back into the world of the living by reclaiming a vision of the world she had before in which her husband was a good and honest man and there was justice in the world even she declared herself largely disinterested in world outside of their romance and their private paradise just for two.

Alone in the Night is available as part of Third Window Films’ Takashi Ishii: 4 Tales of Nami boxset.

Labyrinth Romanesque (花園の迷宮, Shunya Ito, 1988)

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“Poor things, born in the wrong time,” a woman laments of two girls perhaps not that much younger than herself yet as trapped by the age of militarism as anyone else. Adapted from a short story by Edogawa Rampo, Shunya Ito’s gothic mystery Labyrinth Romanesque (花園の迷宮, Hanazono no Meikyu) effectively skewers militarism’s hypocrisies and lays bare the dehumanising effects its nihilistic philosophy has wrought on the nation as a whole. When killing is almost an imperative, life has little value and brutality seemingly the only acceptable response to mass violence.

Ito conjures a sense of haunting by adding a modern day framing sequence in which the abandoned hotel is an eerie space of cobweb-ridden collapse. A wrecking ball arcs back and fore, threatening to unearth a truth long buried and this is after all a mystery, at least in part. With extraordinary finesse, the camera travels from the ruins into the hotel of old as a woman enters the frame. We are now in 1942. This is Yokohama, a harbour town, and so the “hotel” is filled with military personnel though transgressively it also seems trapped in a kind of before time. The sailors dance to American standards such as Georgia on my Mind and Goodnight Sweetheart though otherwise at war with America. All eyes are on sex worker Yuri (Hitomi Kuroki) and her dashing Zero Fighter pilot boyfriend, Takemiya (Tatsuo Nadaka).

But later we learn that Takemiya hated planes and was scared of heights to the point that it kept him up at night. Apparently from a military family, he felt unable to avoid going on with this militaristic charade and saw no future for himself other than glorious death. Everyone at the Fukuju Hotel is in their way already dead and chief among them the madam, Tae (Yoko Shimada), who becomes the prime suspect when her unpleasant husband Ichitaro (Akira Nakao) is murdered during the night. Her nemesis is however. Ichitaro’s sister, Kiku (Kyoko Enami), who has just been deported from the US where she had been living after selling herself into sexual slavery in order to financially support Ichitaro after their parents died. 

Kiku had been Tae’s madam, bringing her over from Japan at 17 and as she will do again, actively sitting on her face when she screamed and fought after being assigned her first customer. This brutalisation seems have driven Tae towards a desire for escape, but that was only available to her by marrying Ichiro who then betrayed his own sister to open another brothel that he ran with Tae before leaving the US and setting up in Yokohama in light of the declining relationship between America and Japan. Though she herself was brutalised, Tae can only earn her freedom by exploiting other women. At the beginning of the film two young girls, Mitsu (Mami Nomura), 18, and Fumi (Yuki Kudo), 17, arrive from the country excited for their new lives but without fully understanding what they’ve signed up to. Like Tae, Omitsu fights back when chosen by a sleazy, nouveau riche factory owner who made his money making planes for the navy, and while Tae tries to talk her down Kiku simply sits on her face and tells the man to do his business. Afterwards, Mitsu tries to kill herself and her friendship with Fumi is strained by her internalised sense of shame. Determined to save enough money to redeem Fumi’s contract before the same thing happens to her, she throws herself into sex work and begins to lose Fumi’s respect. 

It’s the two girls who see this place as haunted most clearly, firstly in catching sight of Tae wandering the corridors in her nighty on the night of her husband’s murder, and then by Fumi’s belief she has seen the pale ghost of a geisha only to realise it was just a wig on a shelf. Mitsu says it belonged to a woman who contracted syphilis, went mad, and then died, a fate she now fears may also befall her. Like many of the other women, the girls have been sold into sexual slavery by their parents most likely because their families are poor and they can’t feed their other children. This kind of rural poverty is of course exacerbated by the financial demands of imperial expansion while the dehumanising elements of militarism, the belief that everything must be devoted to the war effort, allow this heinous relic of the feudal past to continue. Sons after all belong to the emperor and will become brave soldiers fighting for their nation, while daughters have no intrinsic value other than as wives or sex workers to be advantageously traded or sold on.

It’s this that Fumi comes to realise and resent. She insists that she will never return to her home or parents because at the end of the day, they sold her. Yet she feels little sympathy on learning that one of the other women is a notorious criminal who murdered her foster parents because they too took girls in to sell them on. The hotel somehow becomes the nexus of all this pain and violence, a place the women can never escape. Ito does his best to make clear that this is hell by travelling through the air ducts, on towards the eerie glow of the furnace and the dank passages running under the hotel and out into the sea. The boiler room connects all other areas of the hotel and exposes all their secrets in the sound that travels through the ducts. But some secrets are designed to remain forever hidden until the wrecking balls of the contemporary era force them into the light and confront us with this buried history. Until then, the hotel exists in a ghostly state, Ito flooding it with hazy images and visitations that read as eternal apparitions of this place’s inescapable despair trapping all within its labyrinth of unresolved longing.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Motion Picture: Choke (映画（窒息）, Gen Nagao, 2023)

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Humans place themselves above animals precisely because of their ability to communicate and work together to create complex plans that allow them to overcome their circumstances. Robbed of our speech, would we still say the same? Gen Nagao’s dialogue-free drama Choke (映画（窒息）, Eiga Chissoku) takes place in a world in which language appears to have disappeared. Humans communicate only through gesture and are therefore prevented from explaining themselves fully, able to rely only on the vagueness of feeling to convey their thoughts and intentions. 

Yet we might not quite grasp this at first, because the heroine (Misa Wada) lives a solitary life in which she rarely needs to talk to anyone anyway. Shot in a crisp black and white, this appears to be some kind of near future, post-apocalyptic world in which even ancient technologies have largely been forgotten. The woman lives in a concrete structure, presumably a disused factory which is dotted with broken machinery that the woman largely ignores as she lives her simple and repetitive life of waking, fetching water, hunting, cooking and eating. We have no reason to think that she is unhappy for besides the occasional sigh, she simply gets on with her daily tasks and then goes to sleep seemingly unafraid of external threats.

But it is indeed male violence that punctures her world when she’s set upon by three men, seemingly an older man and his grown-up sons one of whom holds her still while the middle-aged man rapes her after breaking the magnifying glass she’d bought off a cheerful pedlar enraptured by the wonder of instant fire (well, while the sun shines at least). Her world becomes darker and she finds herself haunted by a shadowy figure that hovers over her as she sleeps. But then, her trap catches a young man (Daiki Hiba) whom she at first seems as if she’s going to kill and eat but later reconsiders and lets him go presumably calculating he poses no threat to her. The young man has a goofy grin and cheerful disposition, returning to bring the woman gifts and follow her around doing odd jobs before the pair develop a relationship and start living as a couple. The young man even devises a system of bamboo pipes to bring water from the brook so the woman won’t need to carry buckets back and forth anymore in a seeming rediscovery of technology born of his desire to make her life easier.

This more nurturing, protective kind of masculinity brings a new a dimension to her life but their harmonious days do not last long before male violence intrudes once again and proves a corrupting influence for the young man who seemingly becomes cruel and vengeful, though not toward the woman even as she begins to reconsider her relationship with him and if this kind of inhumanity is something she can tolerate in the idyll she’d crafted for herself before he arrived. Then again, in trying to deal with it is there something that becomes cruel or violent in herself in that wasn’t that way before even if doing so also makes her sad and leaves her lonely?

Until then she’d found only wonder in the natural world, repurposing the disused, man-made structures of the factory to make music in the rain and more problematically filled with childish glee when something wanders into her trap. But nature holds its dangers too even if there don’t appear to be any predators here besides man in the form of poisonous mushrooms easily mistaken for the edible kind. Even so, it’s violence that finally poisons her world. A senseless kind of violence that doesn’t seem to be about competition for resources, but only an animal lust and craving for dominance. If only they could communicate in a more concrete way perhaps it could be avoided, but then that doesn’t seem to have worked out that way for us who face such threats every day with words often ignored. 

In any case, Nagao finally heads into a more abstract space as the woman seems to react to the abrupt halt of the film’s soundtrack followed by the removal not only of speech but sound from her world as is if she had lost her hearing. Her reality fractures and we can’t be sure she hasn’t just imagined anything that went before or that she has been targeted by some unseen supernatural or spiritual force for her transgressions leading to her exile from a disintegrating paradise. Obscure and haunting, the film nevertheless has a kind of cheerfulness in its innate absurdity captured in the lunking physicality of the actors who move with a cartoonish strangeness and exaggerate their facial expressions in a strenuous attempt to communicate in the absence of words. The message seems to be that in the end we ruin things for ourselves, either through violence or simply doing what we think is right but in the end may really be no different nor any better.

Motion Picture: Choke screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Original trailer (dialogue free)

Wait and See (あ、春, Shinji Somai, 1998)

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In the opening sequence of Shinji Somai’s Wait and See (あ、春,  Ah haru), a large grey cat growls as it creeps through a suburban home and out into the garden where it sits outside a henhouse and loudly miaows at the birds trapped inside. In many ways, this is exactly what’s about to happen to the Nirasakis when a prodigal father suddenly returns to disrupt the life of his incredibly dull and emotionally distant son. 

Hiroshi (Koichi Sato) is the epitome of the ideal salaryman and seems to be living a charmed life having married into his wife’s wealthy family but under the surface nothing is quite as it seems to be. His wife Mizuho (Yuki Saito) seems to be suffering with some kind of mental distress and Hiroshi often appears indifferent or even cold towards to her. At the memorial service for his late father-in-law, Mizuho’s mother (Shiho Fujimura) and aunt (Chisako Hara) reflect on the late patriarch in less than favourable terms remarking that “everything was half measures” with him. He didn’t commit himself fully to either his family or his career and consequently achieved success with neither. 

The implication is that Hiroshi is much the same, simply going through the motions whether at work or at home and largely closed off to his wife at one point even drawing a curtain and leaving her in the dark to escape a conversation. “He never tells you anything” Mizuho’s mother points out after reading in the paper that the company where Hiroshi works may be in financial trouble, while Mizuho too complains that he never discusses anything with her only announcing the results when it’s already finished. 

Hiroshi had always believed his own father to have died when he was five years old, so it’s quite a surprise when the gnomish Sasaichi (Tsutomu Yamazaki) accosts him in the street and claims to be his long lost dad. Like the cat outside the henhouse, he’s set to create a disturbance but not quite the one everyone assumes it will be. Hiroshi’s mother Kimiyo (Sumiko Fuji) warns him that his crass working class dad will only cause embarrassment in the refined elegance of the upper-middle-class family he has married into. Yet Mizuho and her mother actually find Sasaichi quite amusing for the first couple of days, the mother very impressed by Sasaichi’s unreconstructed manliness which she finds so in contrast to the comparatively meek Hiroshi. Sasaichi fixes the leaky bath and sticking door that Hiroshi never got round to symbolising his lack of regard and inability to care for his home, which is in a sense ironic because Sasaichi was never really able to take care of anything. 

Sasaichi later explains that he left because his business failed and he ended up with debts to loansharks so he divorced Kimiyo and moved away to prevent them coming after her money. A fatherless son, Hiroshi struggles to construct the image of himself as a father and cannot create intimate relationships with people, but has settled for fulfilling the role of a successful member of society who can support a family financially even though the sense of himself as a provider is an illusion as his wife’s generational wealth already guarantees them a comfortable existence. Even so, this being the difficult post-bubble economy Hiroshi lives with a sense of economic anxiety but buries his head in the sand refusing to listen to a more savvy friend who can see the writing on the wall and tries to convince him to take a job at another company where he’s just secured a position for himself. But Hiroshi is afraid of change and ironically clings fast to his corporate family even while fearing it will leave him. 

He desperately doesn’t want to think that he is like Sasaichi, that he may fail his family by failing in his career or that he too is an uncouth, unrefined country bumpkin incapable of taking care of himself let alone anyone else. The again perhaps they’re more alike that he’d like to think. Hiroshi and Mizuho object when they realise Sasaichi’s been teaching their son Mitsuru (Keita Okada) how to play craps, but as his friend points out stockbroking is also really just legitimised high stakes gambling. He too wanders around until late at night because he doesn’t want to go home and makes his wife worry so she has to take sleeping pills .

Yet there’s also a side of him that is still the gentle boy from the country as he painstakingly raises chicks in the back garden. In the end, it’s Sasaichi who shows them the maternal warmth they need to grow, gestating the eggs in a pouch inside his haramaki only for them to hatch at the most ironic moment. Hiroshi gives his son a brief life lesson in explaining that the chicks that hatch from these eggs will go on to lay their own in a circular process of renewal just as he is passing on knowledge from his childhood to the next generation. The film begins and ends with a ritual of mourning, though Somai takes us through the passing season moving from Setsubun to Hinamatsuri as Sasaichi continues to outstay his welcome while attempting to repair his corrupted paternity. “Don’t worry, life will go on,” Mizuho reassures a more open Hiroshi finally coming to terms with his anxieties and willing to share them with his family in full knowledge of who he is as a man and a father in a world that’s anything but certain.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Door II: Tokyo Diary (Banmei Takahashi, 1991)

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A sequel in name only, Banmei Takahashi’s Door II: Tokyo Diary has almost nothing to do with his previous film Door, the title was apparently tacked on at the behest of studio execs who noticed that it had sold well on home video. Nevertheless, the film has its own door motif as the aimless heroine searches for herself among the many available to her, temporarily trying on other personas while wilfully flirting with danger. 

A menacing voice message reminds Ai (Chikako Aoyama) that her work is dangerous, a woman telling her to back off but for unclear reasons either genuinely concerned for her safety or annoyed she’s infringing on her business. Ironically enough, Ai is a call girl who runs her own operation through the soon-to-be obsolete technology of a telephone answering service which unlike the phones in Door offer her a one way portal of communication that isolates her from her potential clients. She explains that she chooses the men for herself, watching idly having quadruple booked the same appointment until finally deciding which door to open though it seems unclear how far she is aware of her vulnerability given that working alone means there’s no one to call if something goes wrong as it eventually does. Even the first client we see her with changes the moment he steps over the threshold, becoming angry having realised that Ai doubled booked the appointment while playing rough with her and forcing her down onto the bed. 

Ai (whose name means love) seems to treat each of the doors as another world in which she must play her assigned role. As such, she submits herself to every degradation though it’s unclear if the act of submission is empowering or she is really just at the mercy of these wealthy mean who’ve paid to do what they like with her. Then again as Ai explains to sometime love interest Ichiro (Shingo Kazami), her real motive is sex and not money leading her to turn down an appointment with a sweet older gentleman who’s checking call girl experience off his bucket list but does not actually want to sleep with her only go on a date. Meanwhile, she finds herself bound and blindfolded while a man in heavy makeup and a nazi uniform dribbles wine down her face as part of a urination role-play. She later plays the piano for him while he curls up in a little ball at her side. 

Becoming involved with a mysteriously wealthy art dealer (Joe Yamanaka) who treats her with unusual tenderness seems to shift Ai’s world view, but equally does an incredibly dark encounter with a dangerous man who attacks Ai and her friend Tomoyo (Yukino Tobita) with a pair of scissors until Tomoyo bites one of his toes off so they can escape. This is the danger the middle-aged madam (Keiko Takahashi) tried to warn her about and causes her to reconsider her life as a call girl until she finally decides to try the same door again and bursts the fantasy bubble by telling the art dealer she loves him. 

A climatic and hugely inappropriate speech at a wedding which nevertheless earns the appreciation of the bride, allows Ai to begin to rediscover herself realising that it was the sense of anticipation that she craved not knowing what she’d discover beyond each and every door. She decides she’d like to swim in the great ocean of infinite possibility once again, ready to open more doors to find out what lies beyond possibly reassured by the art dealer’s assertion that though most of his paintings are fakes he’s discovered a handful of “originals” too restoring Ai’s sense of self as an individual rather than an anonymous call girl who comes when called and has no direction of her own. A melancholy tale of youthful anxiety in the fracturing economy of the Bubble on the eve of its implosion the film trades on Takahashi’s experience in pink film in its at times perverse eroticism but ultimately presents a tale of a young woman regaining control over her self and her life, willing to embrace new possibilities and their concurrent dangers so long as she chooses them for herself. 

Door II: Tokyo Diary is released in the UK on blu-ray 30th October courtesy of Third Window Films.

Restoration trailer (English subtitles)

Like a Savage (野蛮人のように, Toru Kawashima, 1985)

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Hiroko Yakushimaru had been the breakout star of Haruki Kadokawa’s idol cinema in the early 1980s, but as she approached her 20th birthday had developed an increasing desire to retire and leave the showbiz world behind. Having won the prestigious Blue Ribbon Best Actress award for her role in W’s Tragedy, she ended her contract with the studio but following the outcry over news of her intention to retire ultimately set up on her own as an independent performer with her own management company. 

Like a Savage (野蛮人のように, Yabanjin no Youni) was her first project after moving on from Kadokawa and was intended to signal a new phase in her career though incorporating many of the elements that had made her teen idol films so successful. This time around, she plays a character seemingly a few years above her actual age though in other ways childlike and something of a fantasist. Tamako is a blocked novelist in her mid-20s who had tremendous success with her first work published when she was only 15. Ostensibly, she leads an incredibly aspirational life living in a beautiful cabin on the beach where she tries to write sitting out in the sun on her terrace. In the opening sequences, we see her taking a break by reading a novel in English while she also shows a knowledge of French which adds to her intellectual credentials and sense of contemporary sophistication. 

But it seems that she may be bored with this seemingly charmed life and is having trouble gaining inspiration because she’s become too comfortable. She also has a capricious selfish streak, randomly abandoning her friends who’ve come for a fireworks party by driving her open-topped jeep all the way into the centre of Roppongi “to find adventure in the night”. Adventure ends up finding her when she’s unwittingly drawn into underworld intrigue after being mistaken for a sex worker who was with a yakuza boss immediately before he was assassinated, as it turns out by one of his own men intent on succession but trying to disguise his ham-fisted bid for power as turf war. Teaming up with yakuza-adjacent fixer Eiji (Kyohei Shibata) she finds herself on the run before eventually taking him back to the cabin to hide out and recuperate from a stab wound. 

Yakushimaru had played similar roles as a teen star, but adds an adult edge as Tamako chain smokes and is almost always drinking, in fact being seven sheets to the wind while driving the jeep to the city. In other ways, however, she retains a childlike quality most obviously in the film’s repeated to references to Alice in Wonderland which paint the contemporary capital as a fantastical place coloured by her own literary imagination. In her flight through the city, she passes what seems to be a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, while there’s also a neon sign featuring what looks like the Cheshire Cat grinning wildly in the Cabaret-influenced drag bar where Eiji works in which a performer dressed as Sally Bowles sings in French and many of the waiters are implied to be trans or gay. When the gangsters finally surround the beach house in the final act, a pottery figurine of a rabbit with a stopwatch is obliterated by their bullets as if to remind her that she’s not in Wonderland anymore and all of this is “real” rather than the romanticised fantasy she may have bought into while nursing a handsome yakuza back to health by the sea. 

Even so, the city has its darkness. The girl who really was with the yakuza boss when he died twice gives her age as only 15, one of many Eiji shepherded around as part of his yakuza-adjacent job. The head yakuza has an eerie presence deepened by the use of a strange voice effect whenever he speaks, while Kawashima captures a fantastical side of Bubble-era Tokyo lit by the warm glow of hazy neon. In a moment of irony, a large sign on the building where the yakuza boss met his end reads “Desire” with its letters finally flickering out to leave just “Die” as if to tell us this rampantly consumerist city of darkness will eventually consume all those who cannot escape its allure. 

In any case, Tamako finds herself literally blowing up her world to cure her existential crisis reflecting that life is like a firework destined to burn out bright. What she experiences is another kind of rebirth, the climactic shootout occurring on her birthday which Eiji, who does not know his date of birth presumably having been abandoned as a baby, later adopts as his own. Surprisingly stylish and generally upbeat despite the darkness around its edges, Kawashima’s zeitgeisty action drama captures something of an age of ennui in which fantasy is the only escape from the emptiness of a neon-lit Tokyo. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Typhoon Club (台風クラブ, Shinji Somai, 1985)

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A collection of frustrated teens find themselves trapped within a literal storm of adolescence in Shinji Somai’s seminal youth drama Typhoon Club (台風クラブ, Taifu Club). “You’ve been acting weird lately” one character says to another, but he’s been “acting weird” too and so has everyone else as they attempt to reconcile themselves with an oncoming world of phoney adulthood, impending mortality, and the advent of desires they either are unable or afraid to understand, or perhaps understand all too well but worry they will not be understood. 

Most of the teens seem to look to the pensive Mikami (Yuichi Mikami) as a mentor figure. It’s Mikami they call when some of the girls end up half drowning male classmate Akira (Toshiyuki Matsunaga) after some “fun” in the pool gets out of hand. Luckily, Akira is not too badly affected either physically or emotionally, but presents something of a mirror to Mikami’s introspection. Slightly dim and etherial, he entertains his friends by seeing how many pencils he can stick up his nose at the same time, but he’s also as he later says the first to see the rain once it eventually arrives. Notably he leaves before it traps several of the others inside the school without adult supervision and otherwise misses out on the climactic events inside. Even so, Rie (Yuki Kudo), who also misses out by virtue of randomly stealing off to Tokyo for the day, later remarks that he too seems like he’s grown though her words may also be a kind of self projection. 

Mikami’s kind of girlfriend, perpetual spoon-bender Rie, finds herself at a literal crossroads after waking up late because her mother evidently did not return home the night before. Eventually she sets off for class running all the way, but then reaches a fork in the road and changes her mind heading to Tokyo instead. Mikami has been accepted into a prestigious high school there, and perhaps a part of her wanted to go too or at least to get closer to him through familiarity with an unfamiliar environment. Unfortunately she soon encounters a firearms enthusiast (Toshinori Omi) who buys her new clothes and takes her back to his flat which she thankfully manages to escape even if she’s stuck in the city because of a landslide caused by the typhoon.  

Mikami, however, continues to worry about her unable to understand why he’s the only one seemingly bothered about her whereabouts believing she’s “gone crazy”. Trapped in the school, the kids try to ring their teacher Umemiya (Tomokazu Miura) for help but he’s already drunk and can’t really be bothered. In any case he has problems of his own in that his girlfriend’s mother suddenly turned up during class to berate him for stringing her daughter along and also having borrowed a large amount of money which obviously ought to have some strings attached, only as it turns out Junko leant the money to another guy she was seeing though it’s not exactly clear whether she and Umemiya actually broke up or not. “In 15 years you’ll be exactly like me” Umemiya bitterly intones into the phone when Mikami directly states that he no longer respects him deepening Mikami’s adolescent sense of nihilistic despair. 

Of all the teens, he does seem to be the most preoccupied with death. “As long as she’s an egg, the hen can’t fly” he and his brother reflect on discussing if it’s possible for an individual to transcend its species and if it’s possible to transcend it though death all of which lends his eventual decision a note of poignant irony even if its absurd grimness seems to be a strange homage to The Inugami Family. As he points out to his somewhat disturbed friend Ken (Shigeru Benibayashi), “I am not like you” and indeed Ken isn’t quite like the other teens. Obsessed with fellow student Michiko (Yuka Ohnishi) but unable to articulate his feelings, Ken pours acid down her back and watches her squirm as it eats into her flesh. Repeating pleasantries to himself as a mantra, he later attempts to rape her after violently kicking in the dividing walls of the school only to be stopped in his tracks on noticing the scar again and being reminded that he is hurting her. 

The storm seems to provoke a kind of madness, the teens embracing an elusive freedom entirely at odds with the rigid educational environment. The other three girls trapped in the school are a lesbian couple who’d been hiding out in the drama department and their third wheel friend who might otherwise have been keen to hide their relationship from prying eyes having previously been caught out by a bemused and seemingly all seeing Akira. But in this temporary space of constraint and liberation, the teens are each free for a moment at least to be who they are with even Ken and Michiko seemingly setting aside what had just happened between them. They co-opt the stage for a dance party and then take it outside, throwing off their clothes to dance (almost) naked in the rain while a fully clothed Rie does something similar on the streets of the capital. In some ways, in that moment at least they begin to transcend themselves crossing a line into adulthood in a symbolic rebirth. In any case, Somai’s characteristically long takes add to the etherial atmosphere as do his occasional forays into the strange such as Rie’s encounter with a pair of ocarina-playing performance artists in an empty arcade. “We want to go home, but we can’t move” Mikami says looking for guidance his teacher is unwilling to give him neatly underlining the adolescent condition as the teens begin realise they’ll have to find their own way out of this particular storm. 

Typhoon Club screens at Japan Society New York on April 28 as part of Rites of Passage: The Films of Shinji Somai

The Burning Buddha Man (燃える仏像人間, Ujicha, 2013)

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“There are many strange things happening in this world” according to the mysterious young woman who appears in the brief live action sequences bookending Ujicha’s debut feature, The Burning Buddha Man (燃える仏像人間, Moeru Butsuzo Ningen). Who is she? One of the “space people” mentioned in the accompanying voice over which also points out that humans are hard to trust seeing as they don’t even trust each other, or merely a stand in for the omnipotent artist sitting down as she does and looking over her creation her butler dutifully waiting at her side? Who can say, it’s just one of many mysteries at the heart of Ujicha’s beguiling retro sci-fi/horror Buddhist conspiracy thriller animated in his now trademark and equally retro “gekimation” style. 

Taking place in the director’s native Kyoto, the action opens with a strange, alien-like creature breaking into a temple and firing some kind of laser from a phallic device on his belt directly into the head of a colossal Buddha statue. The couple who look after the family-run temple, mindful of their duty to protect their ancestral legacy, are perturbed and politely ask the creature to stop but are later caught in the crossfire when the statue suddenly disappears leaving only their bottom halves behind. Cue the arrival of teenage daughter Beniko (Yuka Iguchi) in her school uniform who is quickly taken in by weird old monk Enju (Minori Terada) who explains that he’s an old friend of her parents and that the theft of the statue is part of a spate of similar heists across the Kyoto area perpetrated by a crazed cult who are apparently intent on “rescuing” neglected Buddha statues from “disrespectful” modern people. Staying with him in his temple, however, Beniko starts to have doubts especially after encountering the strange-looking children who run wild in the grounds Enju claims are “disadvantaged” kids he’s taken in after they were abandoned by their parents because of their odd appearances, not to mention an encounter with Enju’s sculptor grandson Enji (Ryuki Kitaoka) who suddenly frees a small dog apparently trapped inside the uchiguri cavity of an Buddhist statue after being caught in the range of the “Matter Transference Device” used by the thieves to teleport the neglected icons to “safety”. 

A weird tale of spiritual fusion, The Burning Buddha Man’s villains have apparently forgotten all their Buddhist teachings and become “addicted” to melding with statues in order to harness their power and become all powerful beings. Beniko, however, is still pure of heart and is not after revenge for what happened to her parents but to save the wrongdoers by making them “reform”. To do so, however, she’ll have to undergo an apparently reversible transformation herself as well as journeying to another world where, she discovers, her elderly catatonic grandmother (Chisako Hara) has apparently been in training for just such an eventuality for the last couple of decades. “It’s easy just to kill them” Beniko later explains, “but no one can get out from their suffering that way” apparently hoping to undo some of the pain in the world caused by this strange new technology through an act of healing. 

As showcased in the live action intro/extro sequences in which the young woman painstakingly assembles and then disassembles her world, pausing briefly to look admiringly at a figure perhaps representing herself before handing it back to her gloved butler for safekeeping, Burning Buddha Man’s aesthetics consist of a series of beautifully painted backdrops and paper cut out puppets of its strange cast of characters which include a gang of Giger-esque biomechanical former Buddhist monks rendered monstrous by their experiments in spiritual enhancement. Amping up the body horror quotient, real liquid often oozes from their mouths made sickening in its viscosity while blood later fills the screen. Yet for all that there’s a strangely childlike glee in the macabre grimness as the wholesome heroine and her pure-hearted friends push back against the corruptions of hyper-religiosity and spiritual madness hoping to restore rather than destroy but ultimately finding themselves forging a purifying hellscape that ends only in fire (and a peculiar kind of sludge making its way towards the drain of all humanity). Deeply strange yet strangely charming Ujicha’s Buddhist body horror conspiracy thriller is undeniably dark but also imbued with a sense of ironic playfulness in its truly bizarre cosmology.

The Burning Buddha Man is available on blu-ray in the UK courtesy of Third Window Films in a set which also includes Ujicha’s second feature Violence Voyager as well as a selection of shorts.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Yasha (夜叉, Yasuo Furuhata, 1985)

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In melancholy gangster movies, the hero often dreams of leaving the city for an idealised rural paradise to start again as a righteous man redeeming himself through hard work with a good woman by his side. Usually, they don’t make it, their goodness is nothing but a weakness in the harsh post-war environment, but even if they did could they really lay their violent souls to rest and live as the rest of us do? Once again played by a manfully stoic Ken Takakura, the hero of Yasuo Furuhata’s Yasha (夜叉, AKA Demon) tries to find out, but discovers that sooner or later the past will always catch up with you. 

15 years ago, fisherman Shuji (Ken Takakura) was the notorious Osaka yakuza known as “Yasha”. A war orphan given refuge by a gangster brotherhood, two things happened to change his way of life, the first being innocent country girl Fuyuko (Ayumi Ishida) whom he met by chance and rescued on the dangerous streets of the city. The second is the death of his younger sister who had become addicted to heroin. Fiercely resistant to the traffic of drugs, Shuji quit the clan, married Fuyuko, and retreated to her fishing village home to take over her late father’s fishing business. Well respected in the community as a steady hand, he now has three children and a settled happy life though one tinged with anxiety in the need to keep his back covered lest anyone find out about his violent past. 

The violent past is brought home to him when a young woman, Keiko (Yuko Tanaka), arrives in kimono with her young son in tow to take over the local bar. Keiko is a bar hostess from Osaka hoping to make a new start far away from the city, not so much for herself it seems as her no-good boyfriend Yajima (Takeshi Kitano) who is a drug-addled thug and openly hostile to her little boy. It’s Yajima who threatens to disrupt the gentle rhythms of the town, firstly getting the fishermen hooked on all night games of mahjong which damage their daytime productivity, and then selling them heroin to keep them propped up. Unused to such urban vices as hard drugs and serious gambling, the fishermen are lambs to the slaughter, handing over their hard earned savings to the thuggish Yajima to keep their heads above the water. 

Shuji wants to keep the town clean, but he can’t exactly admit just how familiar he is with things like drink and drugs which are, as his friend Keita (Kunie Tanaka) points out, not things “normal” people should know about. After realising an old friend is the middle-man, Shuji has a quiet word with Yajima as one thug to another but it only makes the situation worse. He tries talking to Keiko instead, but her decision to get rid of the drugs has disastrous consequences for all when Yajima goes on a crazed, knife-wielding rampage through the town which only Shuji can end. During the fight Yajima slashes Shuji’s fisherman’s jumper right through to the expose the demon beneath, leaving his colourful tattoos on show for all to see. 

You’d think that Yajima’s rampage would have taught the town a lesson, shown them that they were in over their heads and Yajima was not the sort of person it was good to be associated with, but their animosity overwhelmingly turns to the demon Shuji whom they unfairly begin to blame for their many misfortunes. The fishwives begin to avoid Fuyuko, telling their kids not to hang out with her kids and suggesting that it must have been Shuji who got the guys playing mahjong. Shuji meanwhile doubts himself, drawn to Keiko as to Osaka and the sleeping demon within. Yasha reawakens and he wonders if he has the right to live here after all. 

Fuyuko’s mother tells her that it’s a good wife’s job to quell the demon, but she struggles to maintain hold on Shuji while Yasha is pulled towards the city. He makes a manly choice, attempting to redeem Yajima in redeeming himself by returning to his point of origin. The widow of his old boss warns him off, reminds him that he’s a fisherman now, and that should he move against her she will have to act in accordance with the rules of the underworld, but privately mutters to herself that he hasn’t changed at all, “stupid man”. In the end, Yasha’s manly gesture ends in futility. He cannot escape himself but neither can he solve his problems through violence as he might have before, not least because the code is no longer secure motivating those he thought he could trust towards betrayal. He still has a choice, leave with Keiko to be Yasha once again accepting the futilities of a violent life (and its inevitable end), or stay to be a peaceful fisherman with the “good wife” Fuyuko. One man cannot possess two souls, but the given the chance the demon can be subdued if there is the will to subdue it and the belief that the man himself is good enough for the world in which he wants to live.

Original trailer (no subtitles)