Tag: Momoi Shimada

Life of Mariko in Kabukicho (探偵マリコの生涯で一番悲惨な日, Eiji Uchida & Shinzo Katayama, 2022)

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It’s all go in Kabukicho in Eiji Uchida and Shinzo Katayama’s zany tale of aliens, serial killers, and secret assassins. The film’s Japanese title (探偵マリコの生涯で一番悲惨な日, Tantei Mariko no Shogai de ichiban Hisanna Hi), the most tragic day in the life of detective Mariko, may hint at the melancholy at the centre of the story in putting the titular investigator front and centre even while her success is fuelled by her position on the periphery but this is also very much the story of an area and community in a shrinking part of the city. 

It’s true enough that Mariko’s (Sairi Ito) karaoke bar seems to have become a local community hub filled with a series of regulars each of whom have stories of their own. Born and raised in Kabukicho, Mariko knows every inch of the area and thanks to the confessional quality of her work has her finger truly on the pulse which is what makes her such a good detective. Her case this time around is though a little more difficult as she’s been hired by the FBI to track down an escaped space alien because all aliens apparently belong to the US. This one’s been liberated by a mad scientist, Amamoto (Shohei Uno), who they say wants to team up with the alien for ill intent.

In what seems to be a nod to cult 1983 horror movie Basket Case, Amamoto carries the alien around in a picnic basket from which it occasionally irradiates people when frightened. Meanwhile, a serial killer is also stalking the area. One of Mariko’s regulars, Ayaka (Shiori Kubo), is keen to catch him though not for justice but the reward because she’s become obsessed with a bar host who’s been spending a lot of time with another customer because she can pay more. Mariko turns her offer down on the grounds that she doesn’t want to enable her romantic folly and otherwise seems rather uninterested in the serial killer case perhaps because no one’s hired her to solve it, but she also refuses a job from another regular who wants to track down his estranged daughter after being forced on a suicide mission by his former yakuza associates possibly because she suspects he won’t like the answer when she finds her. 

Home to the red light district, Kabukicho has a rather seedy reputation but here has a kind of homeliness in which the veneer of sleaze is of course perfectly normal and unremarkable. A yakuza intimidates a love hotel worker while standing directly in front of a rotating electric dildo in an S&M-themed room later visited by one of Mariko’s regulars with her nerdy film director crush who is so sensitive he can barely walk after exiting the cinema so moved is he by the cinematic expression. Most of the regulars are in their own way lovelorn and lonely, perhaps no less Mariko herself who has an attachment to a middle-aged ex-chef (Yutaka Takenouchi) who now runs a moribund dojo teaching ninja skills to anyone willing to learn. Despite the warmth of the community, life in Kabukicho can be hard as the host later echoes looking around his tiny apartment and sighing that he’s tired. It took so much out of him just to get this little and he barely has it in him anymore. 

Mariko too has her sorrow and buried trauma, hiding out in her bar but secretly imprisoned within the borders of Kabukicho as a kind of self-imposed punishment linked to her tragic past. The intersecting stories paint a vivid picture of an absurd world in which the innocuous civil servant next to you might be a secret assassin or you could turn a corner and run into a serial killer, not to mention a mad scientist with an alien in a basket. But for all its craziness it has a kind of integrity in which the strange is also perfectly normal and Mariko becomes a kind of anchor restoring order to an unruly world. As she’s fond of saying thing’s will work out and it’s difficult not to believe her or the defiantly upbeat spirit even among those depressed and downtrodden otherwise unable to escape the confines of a purgatorial Kabukicho.

Life of Mariko in Kabukicho screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Mondays: See You “This” Week! (MONDAYS／このタイムループ、上司に気づかせないと終わらない, Ryo Takebayashi, 2022)

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If you got stuck in a time loop at work reliving the same week several times over, how long would it take you to notice? For the harried employees at a small creative agency in Ryo Takebayashi’s Mondays: See you “This” Week! (MONDAYS／このタイムループ、上司に気づかせないと終わらない, MONDAYS / Kono Time Loop, Joshi ni Kizukasenaito Owaranai), sleep deprivation and the mind-numbing sameness of their lives prevent them from realising that events have begun to repeat themselves and if it weren’t for the sacrifice of a suicidal pigeon they never might never wake up at all. Waking up is in many ways the point as the heroine is forced to reflect on the unintended consequences of her corporate drive while conversely accepting that sometimes you do have to take care of yourself for the good of all. 

Yoshikawa (Wan Marui) is on the verge of landing her dream job at another firm, but is determined to see out a particularly problematic project trying to mount a campaign for a miso soup-flavoured soda tablet to please an incredibly picky client. When her colleagues try to explain that they’re stuck in a time loop, she thinks they’re just messing around and ignores them along with their warning not to take a taxi to her meeting because she’ll get into a car accident and hurt her head. After a series of failed attempts, they finally convince her using the smack of a poor pigeon into the office window as a device to snap her out of their collective delusion. 

Amusingly enough, the plan to bust out of the time loop can only be enacted by following office protocol. Yoshikawa understandably asks why they can’t talk to the boss directly to discuss the problem, but soon discovers he won’t listen to her so they have to “escalate” the issue through the proper channels by waking each of the team members in order of seniority so the highest can bring the matter to the boss’ attention. The boss, Nagahisa (Makita Sports), is always the last to arrive at the office, though that might be a moot point seeing as the team are forced to work through the night even at the weekend and in fact rarely get to go home anyway. This level of sleep deprivation might fuel their belief that they’re stuck in a time loop, but equally they soon become to convinced that the boss is more directly to blame in wearing a cursed bracelet and unwittingly stopping time because he’s about to turn 50 and is realising that he has nothing to show for his life. 

As some of the employees remark, it’s like time has been repeating for the last ten years. They find little fulfilment in their work and are often exploited, expected to work extreme overtime which damages both their health and relationships with others. Yoshikawa’s boyfriend is becoming very fed up with her workaholic lifestyle and is on the verge of breaking up with a girlfriend who never has time for him while she throws everything she has into getting her dream job working for someone who tells her success comes to those who put themselves first. 

Yet being forced to work as a team alongside the colleagues she previously looked down on, Yoshikawa comes to a better appreciation of the values of community and recommits herself to pursuing their common goal of escaping the time loop even if it means sacrificing her big job opportunity. Then again, the team have a difficult time getting through to their boss in part because he’s too meek and incapable of putting his own interests first which is why he’s feeling maudlin about turning 50 while filled with regret in having failed to chase his dreams. 

There may be a slight irony in the employees being trapped in their office while trying to vicariously fulfil the dreams of their dejected salaryman boss, but there’s also something quite poignant in the team’s genuine desire to help him out of an existential hole if only so they can climb out too. “There’s not much you can do alone” he admits simultaneously selling both the value of teamwork and the importance of fulfilling one’s personal desires for a healthy and harmonious life in the office and out. Slickly edited and perfectly plotted, Ryo Takebayashi’s quirky time loop comedy neatly satirises the mind numbing absurdities of contemporary corporate culture but ultimately makes the case that there are things more important than work and to find them you’ll need to find a way to escape the never-ending drudgery of life at the office. 

Mondays: See You “This” Week! screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection. It will also be screening in New York Aug. 6 as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Lying to Mom (鈴木家の嘘, Katsumi Nojiri, 2018)

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Lying to Mom posterLearning to live with loss is difficult for any family, but when the loss was caused by suicide the pain is even more acute as those left behind try to understand why it is their loved one had to die and if there was anything else they could have done to prevent it. The family at the centre of Lying to Mom (鈴木家の嘘, Suzukike no Uso) choose, initially at least, to avoid dealing with it at all. Each taking their individual paths through grief, they keep the past painfully alive by pretending that oldest son Koichi (Ryo Kase) is only temporarily absent and will eventually return.

Koichi, who has been a hikikomori for many years, takes one last look at the peaceful suburban scene outside his window and hangs himself from a storage closet in his room. His mother Yuko (Hideko Hara), out at the time, only discovers the body when trying to get him to come down to lunch. Panicked, she injures herself and ends up in a coma in hospital while nothing could be done for Koichi. When she wakes up some time later, she’s lost all her memories of the incident and the family don’t have the heart to tell her that her son is gone so they pretend he went to work for his uncle in Argentina.

This is of course very comforting to Yuko who now believes that as a result of her illness Koichi has finally been able to leave his room for a more productive life, but it places a strain on the other family members – father Yukio (Ittoku Kishibe) and daughter Fumi (Mai Kiryu), who remain conflicted about keeping up the pretence while dealing with their own grief in secret. Fumi, whose idea it was to lie in the first place, types out beautiful letters supposedly from Koichi to be handwritten in his handwriting by an associate in Argentina which detail his new life full of freedom and promise overseas.

Meanwhile, Yukio ponders on his relationship with his son with whom he admits he never quite bonded. He sets about trying to find a mysterious woman named on Koichi’s life insurance policy less for practical reasons than to ascertain some sort of evidence that his son lived, even if he lived the last years of his life alone in a room. The reasons for Koichi’s isolation are never exactly explained with Yuko blaming high school bullying and the stagnant economy, but it is clear that he never managed to find himself in Japan and perhaps if he really had gone to Argentina things might have been different.

Wracked with guilt, Fumi finds herself trying out a support group for relatives of those who died by suicide but struggles to put her own thoughts in order. Though people try their best, insensitivity reigns when they try to offer words of condolence. Only love can save people, Fumi’s colleague smugly tells her with a random story about coaxing a shy high school student out their room, little realising he’s tacitly accusing her of not trying hard enough to save her brother. People can’t be saved, Fumi retorts, and she might well have a point. Even the leader of the support group shows himself up when he considers banning a grief-stricken woman with a loud personality because her problems are “smaller” seeing as she’s wealthy. As another attendee tells him, people grieve in different ways and having money or not is unlikely to affect the degree of your emotional pain even if it might in some sense reduce the burden. Besides, his assumptions about her are mostly wrong because he’s not been paying attention to the things that really matter only to his own surface level prejudices.

Despite the prevalence of suicide, the Suzukis still find themselves embarrassed by Koichi’s passing. They tell people it was an illness or avoid mentioning it all. Meanwhile they keep the secret from Yuko and avoid talking about it amongst themselves until finally forced to deal with all of their anger, guilt, pain and confusion. A comforting lie may serve its purpose, but only an emotional reckoning can clear the air. There may be no real answer to why Koichi did what he did, but the Suzukis will have to make their peace with it, finding fresh hope in the process as they begin to repair their emotional wounds together as a family.

Lying to Mom was screened as part of the 2019 Udine Far East Film Festival. It will also be screened at the 2019 Nippon Connection Film Festival on 30th May at 7.30pm.

International trailer (English subtitles)