Tag: Mutsuo Yoshioka

Brand New Landscape (見はらし世代, Yuiga Danzuka, 2025)

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Do we inhabit spaces, or do the spaces inhabit us? Yuiga Danzuka’s autobiographically inspired Brand New Landscape (見はらし世代, Miwarashi Sedai) situates itself in a haunted Tokyo which is forever remaking itself around its inhabitants like a constantly retreating cliff edge that leaves them all rootless and in search of a home that no longer exists. Some long for a return to the past and wander endlessly, while others defiantly refuse to look back and are content to let history eclipse itself in a journey towards an ineffable “new”.

These imprinted spaces come to represent the disintegration of a family torn apart by their shifting foundations. Ten years previously, Ren (Kodai Kurosaki) and Emi’s (Mai Kiryu) mother, Yumi (Haruka Igawa), took her own life during a family holiday after their father Hajime (Kenichi Endo) told her that, despite his promises, he would be returning to Tokyo to pursue a work opportunity. “It’s pointless to go back and forth like this,” he remarks with exasperation, making it clear that he’ll be going no matter what she says. Rather than simply being a workaholic, Hajime is a deeply selfish person who doesn’t much care how other people are affected by the decisions that he makes. He wants this opportunity to prove himself and acts out of a mixture of vanity and a desire for external validation through professional acclaim rather than the love of his family. He claims he’s doing this for them, that the opportunity will provide additional financial security and a better quality of life for his children, but Yumi replies that they don’t need any more money. All she wanted was family time, albeit within this artificial domestic space of a rented holiday villa by the sea.

Three years after their mother’s death, Hajime left the children to chase opportunities abroad and they haven’t seen him in years. Younger son Ren is now working as a floral delivery driver for a company selling expensive moth orchids. It’s on a job that he first learns that Hajime has returned and is holding an exbitiion of his work that includes the controversial Miyashita Park redevelopment project designed to fuse the natural space of the park with a commercial centre the exhibition’s copy describes as a symbol of the “new” Tokyo. It also, however, required the displacement of a number of unhoused people who were living in the park in order to provide space for upscale outlets such as Louis Vuitton and Gucci. When Hajime accepts the opportunity to work on another such project, a young woman on his team voices her concern. She asks him where these unhoused people are supposed to go, but Hajime says it’s not his problem. It’s for the authorities to decide. She asks him if he’s considered the effect taking on such a large project will have on their team when the company is already working beyond its limit, but he gives her all the same excuses he gave Yumi that make it clear he’s not interested in the needs and well-being of his employees just as he wasn’t interested in those of his family. “It’s pointless going back and forth,” he tells her while trying to sound sympathetic but really emphasising that his decision is made and nothing she could say would sway him from his course.

Maybe, to that extent, oldest daughter Emi is much the same in that she’s decided she doesn’t want to see her father and resents Ren’s attempts to force her into doing so. She’s about to move in with her boyfriend and looking ahead towards marriage, but also prone to “low energy” days like her mother and anxious in her relationships, fearful that like that of her parents’ they can only end in failure. Ren, meanwhile, struggles with authority figures like his ridiculous boss who tries to assert dominance by giving him a public telling off about the non-standard colour of his hip pack, and then yells at him that he’s fired only to chase him out of the building throwing punches when Ren calmly replies that shouting only makes him look silly. In the midst of the drama, another young woman states her own intention to quit, politely bowing to everyone except one particular man before walking out the other door towards freedom as if to remind us that there are countlessly other stories going on in this city at the same time.

There’s a moment when Ren is delivery the orchids that he just stands there holding them, like he doesn’t know where to go or what to do. He’s lost within this space and is unable to find his way back within a Tokyo that’s always changing. In an attempt to find some sort of resolution, he drives Emi back to the service station where they had their final meal as a family, only their mother’s chair remains painfully empty. A perpetually falling ceiling light hints at the unreliability of these spaces. It isn’t and can’t ever be the same place it was before and has taken on new meanings for all concerned. Ren stares up at the Miyashita Park development as if caught between admiring his father’s achievement, wondering if it was worth it, and mourning the loss of everything it eclipsed in building over the past with a “new” that will quickly become the “old” and then be rebuilt and replaced. Nevertheless, he has perhaps begun a process of moving on even if for him moving forward lies in looking back.

Brand New Landscape screens as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Escape (逃走, Masao Adachi, 2025)

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Satoshi Kirishima’s incongruously smiling face was a familiar presence across on the nation for over 40 years until he finally made a deathbed confession revealing his true identity as a man wanted in connection with a series of bombings in the 1970s and that he’d successfully evaded the authorities until the very end of his life. What apparently appealed to director Masao Adachi, a former Japanese Red Army member, was the question of why he chose to come clean rather than enjoy his secret victory by taking the truth to his grave.

That might be a minor irony at the centre of the Escape (逃走, Toso) in that Satoshi (Kanji Furutachi) is essentially in flight from himself only to finally escape from his torment by accepting his original identity. As a young man, Satoshi had been a member of a left-wing cell that wanted to awaken the population at large to the ways Japanese society had not changed in continuing to discriminate against the Ainu, those from the Ryukyu Islands, Koreans and other minorities while modern corporations enact another kind of capitalistic imperialism built on exploitation. It was for this reason that they embarked on a bombing campaign targeting large companies, but due to a miscalculation with the explosives, the bombing of the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Building in 1974 proved more destructive than intended resulting in loss of life. 

Satoshi was not directly involved in that bombing which was carried out by another cell but was wanted for allegedly setting up a bomb in the Economic Research Institute of Korea which did not result in any casualties. Details of the real Satoshi’s life during his 40 years on the run are thin on the ground, but Adachi paints him as a man torn apart by internalised conflict and unable to make peace with the sense of guilt he feels for those who killed even if he was not directly responsible. The film’s Japanese title is a kind pun in that it’s a homonym which can mean both “escape” and “struggle” which for Satoshi become one and the same. He’s in flight from his younger self while simultaneously preoccupied with how he can continue the revolution in the name of his friends who were not so lucky. Adachi structures the later part of the film as a kind of self-criticism session as Satoshi engages in various dialogues with himself notably as a Buddhist priest interrogating him about his worldly attachments. 

These worldly attachments also obviously separate him from his true calling to revolution including a non-relationship with a woman he meets at a concert venue and is later told has two previous convictions for marriage fraud. Most of the people around him are also leading double lives or harbouring secrets of their own including a man that Satoshi once worked with whom he finds out years later was also another former member of the far left movement living life on the run. The implication is that this sense of isolation and aloneness in wilfully having to suppress his identity became a kind of prison, but that it also liberates Satoshi to a more intensive examination of the self. 

To that extent, his escape is also from contemporary Japan and an act of resistance towards an increasingly capitalistic and indifferent society. Hoping to stay below the radar, Satoshi works a series of casual construction jobs chiefly because of their anonymity. There was plenty to be built in this era and jobs like these were plentiful, usually offering basic accommodation in a company dorm. He experiences the hardships of the working man first-hand and lives a life of asceticism in which live music and drinking are his only outlets. “We’re all dying to survive,” he reflects, “trying to go home,” though he no longer has a home to go to and has become estranged from his previous identity. He meditates on fallen comrades who either took their own lives or spent them in prison while convincing himself that he’s continuing the struggle on their behalf even in the act of running away in perfecting his “escape”. Though Adachi’s approach is less sentimental than Banmei Takahashi’s in I am Kirishima, he is not immune to sentiment as in his depiction of Satoshi’s final escape from life as the ultimate form of liberation even as his ghost proclaims he will continue to fight, but nevertheless introduces a meta commentary of self-examination in Satoshi’s constant questioning if his long years of struggle have really been worth it.

Escape screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Cloud (Cloud クラウド, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024)

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“We wanted to make easy money,” a down-on-his luck reseller admits, “is life easy now?” Factory worker Ryosuke (Masaki Suda) rebels against capitalism by subverting it through buying low and selling high while repeatedly refusing promotions at his job in a textiles factory. Though it might seem that reselling is just a way to earn an income that seems almost passive but is actually fairly labour-intensive, it’s clear that Ryosuke is a young man dissatisfied with capitalistic realities and lacking direction in his life. 

Reselling has become a kind of game to him and like a gambler who plays to lose he’s hooked on the thrill of making a killing exploiting other people’s misery. He’s at once filled with pride and smugness over his apparent triumph over his society and consumed by self-loathing. His friend and fellow reseller Muraoka (Masataka Kubota) tells him that another acquaintance has been arrested for scalping concert tickets with both of them lamenting his foolishness in getting involved with something so risky. The implication is that their friend, Goto, must have been in real desperation to lower himself to such levels and they each fear they may someday end up in the same position. Muraoka laments that that kind of selling is a young man’s game and neither of them have the time or energy to spend all day queuing to buy stuff just to sell it on cheap. They are each, it seems, beginning to feel the increasing desperation of their age that they are running out of time and have little to show for their efforts nor any prospects for the future. 

But on the other hand, neither of them want to be locked into the grind or join the oppressive but secure world of the salaryman. In many ways, Ryosuke’s factory boss Takimoto (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa) represents the “correct” path of hard and honest work, though his own paternalistic conviction in meritocracy seems outdated in a man of his age whose formative years occurred during an era of economic stagnation. He talks to Ryosuke as if he’s a young man who wants to get on but lacks confidence, telling him that he has leadership potential and is wasted on the shop floor, but his language also has an edge of the uncanny as if he were trying to recruit Ryosuke into his own worker drone revolution. In any case, even if it might be true that Ryosuke lacks confidence and ambition, that isn’t the reason he refuses promotions, which seems to be another way of rebelling against capitalism. When he eventually quits, he suggests it’s because he’s sick of being told what to do and wants more autonomy over his life and finances.

He tells his girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) that she should quit her job too, which she’s only too happy to do because, unlike him, she actively doesn’t want to work and only wants to spend money. When she said she was thinking of giving up her apartment, Ryosuke naturally asked her to officially move in but she refused because his place is too small and she has too much stuff. Akiko has already been corrupted by the same consumerist bug that’s driving Ryosuke’s reselling business, but neither of them can really afford this lifestyle in the city. Ryosuke’s bright idea is to move to the remote countryside where he’s able to rent a huge, though ominous-looking, property for a fraction of the price with the idea of also economically supporting Akiko who will revert to traditional gender roles as a housewife in charge of the domestic space and most especially the kitchen.

But freedom cannot be found simply by retreating from urbanity and the couple soon find themselves plagued by a pervasive sense of resentment. The locals are not particularly accepting of people from Tokyo and are also needled by their success which is something they feel they’ve been unfairly denied. When Ryosuke tries to report a smashed window, even the policeman hassles him and says he’s received a tip-off that Ryosuke is breaking trading standards regulations by selling counterfeit goods as the real thing. Reselling in itself is not illegal, if definitely dubious morally and incredibly cynical. Ryosuke doesn’t seem to like to think about that and tells his new assistant, Sano (Daiken Okudaira), that he tries to sell all the items as quickly as possible so he doesn’t have to worry too much about their authenticity. If they’re wanted they’ll sell, Ryosuke justifies but he might as well be talking about himself.

“Being real or fake doesn’t matter?” Sano asks him, just as Ryosuke’s online and offline personas start to blur. He’s unaware that there are people actively hunting him for selling them substandard goods and is later pursued by real life vigilantes acting like online trolls and planning to torture him to death during a livestream. Like many of Kurosawa’s heroes, Ryosuke is completely convinced that he’s the benchmark for normal and it’s everything around him that’s strange or unfair. As the internet once again invades the “real” world, or perhaps it’s more that Ryosuke’s living his online life offline, the increasing unreality of the situation makes us wonder if any of this is “really” happening or product of Ryosuke’s fractured identity as it finally collapses under the twin corruptions of capitalism and social media. “Please keep focusing only on making money,” his new guardian angel Sano tells him, “everything will be obtainable. Whatever you want. Even things that can end the world.” Flying through ironically heavenly clouds, Ryosuke reflects that the path to hell really is paved with gold and his Mephistophelian pact with hyper-capitalism may have damned him beyond all repair.  

Cloud is in cinemas from 25th April courtesy of Blue Finch Film Releasing 

UK trailer (English subtitles)

Ghost Cat Anzu (化け猫あんずちゃん, Yoko Kuno & Nobuhiro Yamashita, 2024)

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It can be comforting, in a way, to think that this world is deeper than we often think it is and that we live surrounded by ancient spirits who touch our lives in ways we never suspect. All of this is, however, a little more palpable in Iketeru, the town of eternal summer, where the heroine of Yoko Kuno and Nobuhiro Yamashita’s animation Ghost Cat Anzu (化け猫あんずちゃん, Bakemono Anzu-chan) is unceremoniously dumped by her feckless father as he attempts to sort out some persistent trouble with loan sharks. 

Of course, to a girl from Tokyo who hoped to spend the summer break with her cram school crush, being sent to a temple to stay with an estranged grandfather it’s not even clear she has ever met before is not a whole lot of fun. But then as Karin (Noa Goto) says, she’s used to being alone, which might be why she takes against the giant ghost cat, Anzu (Mirai Moriyama), who lives like a human but obviously isn’t one. The funny thing about Iketeru is that no one finds Anzu’s existence odd, if at times troublesome. He’s even patiently arrested by a pair of policemen for not having a proper license for his moped which he didn’t think he needed because, after all, he’s a ghost and also a cat. A pair of little boys who’ve formed their own gang called “The Contrarians” to “defy society” call him “aniki” like some kind of yakuza boss and try to recruit him though being in a gang seems like too much bother for Anzu, which is something he has in common in Karin. 

But the funny thing is, Anzu isn’t really so different from her father in that he too can be somewhat irresponsible. Though he knows he shouldn’t, he spends the money he was keeping for her on pachinko hoping to win big but predictably loses it all. He gets over excited about jobs that pay 3000 yen (£15) a day and overcooks food he’s dropped on the floor because it’ll burn off all the dirt. But like Karin, Anzu can be a little standoffish and it isn’t even until her arrival that he starts to interact with some of the other supernatural creatures in the area who appear to have already set up some kind of club. Having invited them over, Anzu complains they didn’t pay him enough attention and he won’t invite them again while Karin asserts that they seemed “nice”. Though Anzu himself has not yet quite taken to her, the yokai are touched by her tragic circumstances and feelings of abandonment so decide to do what they can to help her. 

Part of Karin’s problem is that she’s still struggling to come to terms with her mother’s death three years previously. Iketeiru calls itself the town of eternal summer, but the summer in Japan is synonymous with the Bon festival during which this world and the other are at their closest and the spirits of the departed may temporarily return. Thus the town itself is a liminal space caught between the living and the dead which the mortal and supernatural co-exist in a very tangible way even if Karin’s eventual descent into hell involves jumping into a broken toilet in a Tokyo columbarium. Even so, she eventually finds herself squaring off against the King of Hell himself in the middle of the Bon festival while straddling the worlds of the living and dead and discovering the will to go on living which is perhaps what the town’s name may actually mean. 

In that sense, it’s a place Karin discovers as much as it’s home to cure her sense of rootless abandonment. The rotoscoped animation and live-recorded dialogue lend a sense of uncanniness to the beautifully animated backgrounds which effortlessly evoke a sense of serenity in the timelessness of a summer in small-town Japan. The juxtaposition of the ancient and the modern, Jizo playing Nintendo Switch, yokai working at the golf course which is perhaps a manifestation of the disruption wrought on the natural world by human endeavour, echo a kind of cosmic irony but also an odd kind of warmth in the strangeness of the world around us with its immortal cat spirits and friendly supernatural creatures that seems a far cry from the sterility of the city with its violent loan sharks and indifferent friends. 

Trailer (English subtitles)

Thorns Of Beauty (恋のいばら, Hideo Jojo, 2023)

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“Can two women who like the same guy become best friends?” A loose remake of Pang Ho-Cheung’s 2004 Hong Kong comedy Beyond our Ken, Hideo Jojo’s Thorns of Beauty (恋のいばら, Koi no Ibara) finds a jilted ex teaming up with the current squeeze against a no good guy who has compromising photos of each of them he could potentially expose online anytime he feels like it. Not quite everything is as it first appears, yet as they plot revenge against the caddish Kentaro (Keisuke Watanabe) the pair begin to discover a bond that runs deeper than their shared quest for validation.

Momo (Honoka Matsumoto), a mousy librarian, first accosts Riko (Tina Tamashiro), an aspiring dancer who works at a nightclub, on a bus, staring at her intensely until she finally removes her earphones. In truth, Momo never quite shakes an edge of possibly dangerous eccentricity and there is always an underlying doubt that she is telling the truth when she explains to Riko that she and Kentaro were previously an item and he has private photographs of her she fears he may intend to post online. For whatever reason, Riko decides to hear her out and though insisting that Kentaro’s not that sort of guy seems to think there may be something in it. A photographer by trade, Kentaro has in the past photographed her without her consent claiming that he spends all day photographing things other people find beautiful and wanted capture something for himself in his free time. 

Much of the story is filtered through a version of Sleeping Beauty that Momo finds at the library where she works. As the two women bond in their shared quest for revenge, Jojo often plays with the image of them as “witches” lighting them in an eerie green while they dress in black with hats that cast shadows over their faces. Yet we also find ourselves wondering who the sleeping beauty is in this scenario, an unexpected candidate turning out to be Kentaro’s elderly grandmother who has dementia and spends her days collecting shiny things to build a vast fairytale castle. Momo comes to see herself as hoping to wake Riko from a moment of romantic fantasy with a man who in the end doesn’t really care for her which she likely knows but has allowed the relationship to continue mainly out of a sense of inertia. 

But in teaming up with Riko, Momo also begins to awaken from her own low self-esteem in believing herself to be inferior to someone like her. There are times when we wonder if this is going to turn into a Single White Female-style bid at identity theft as Momo seems to idolise her new friend possibly planning to eliminate her and reclaim her place in Kentaro’s life. In the end, however, both women are throughly awakened from their romantic illusions in realising that Kentaro is indeed that sort of person with a hard disk full of pictures of other women just like them while their friendship also begins to take on a distinctly homoerotic quality that clearly runs beyond simple friendship or female solidarity. 

As Momo reflects, Sleeping Beauty is a passive heroine who is asleep for the entirety of her own story. When she’s born, the fairies give her various gifts that turn her into a stereotypical figure of idealised femininity and leave her with nothing to want or strive for. Momo wonders if that doesn’t make her a little boring and if Sleeping Beauty actually wanted any of those things or in the end they were just burden to her. Momo would only be grateful for things she actually wanted like the ability to totally become herself, while Riko reflects on a “past life” as a woman living happily with her two sons by a lake in Switzerland. Cutting through the thorns of their illusions, they awaken each other to a sense of possibility each of them may long have forgotten. Strangely poignant in the touching quality of its central romance along with fairytale allusions, the film in the end allows both women to reclaim an image of themselves from a man who tried to take it from them without ever really bothering to look at it. 

Thorns Of Beauty screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle (Onoda, 10 000 nuits dans la jungle, Arthur Harari, 2021)

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For most people, the Pacific War ended in 1945. For Hiroo Onoda it may in a sense never have ended though he laid down his arms in 1974, 30 years after his initial dispatch, having spent the intervening three decades pursuing guerrilla warfare in the Philippine jungle the last two of them entirely alone. Arthur Harari’s three-hour existential epic, Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle (Onoda, 10 000 nuits dans la jungle), explores the psychological dimensions of his quasi-religious conviction in the righteousness of a mission which is in one sense no more than to survive along with his refusal to accept that the war is over and his personal struggle has been pointless. 

Immediately in opening the film in 1974 with a young man identified only as a “tourist” (Taiga Nakano) arriving on the island in search of Onoda (Kanji Tsuda), Harari draws a direct contrast between these two arrivals and subsequent departures. As he says, the Tourist is just that in town for a specific purpose after which he will leave and though you might be able to say the same of Onoda who came to the island of Lubang in late 1944 his reality was very different. On luring him out of the jungle by playing the patriotic war song he had sung with the other soldiers who unlike him accepted the surrender, the Tourist poignantly tells Onoda that he has travelled to over 50 countries whereas Onoda in a certain sense has never left Japan. “This island belongs to us” he’s fond of insisting seeing it as a piece of the Japanese empire which others are trying to take from him but he alone must defend. 

As we discover, the young Onoda (Yuya Endo) had wanted to become a pilot but washed out of the training program because of a fear of heights and was subsequently put forward for a kamikaze squadron. The irony of his life is that he is a man who refused to die for the emperor, his will to survive bringing him to the attention of Major Taniguchi (Issey Ogata) of the notorious Nakano spy school who sells his students a line that they are the good guys helping to liberate East Asia from Western imperialism. Trained in guerrilla warfare part of Onoda’s mission is to foster an uprising in the local population whom he assumes will also oppose American influence never realising that he is in fact a part of a destructive colonising force they will also seek to repel not least because of the way they have been treated by Japanese forces. 

Onoda’s first meeting with his captain on arriving on Lubang is interrupted by the arrival of the mayor of a nearby town who has come to complain that Japanese soldiers have been stealing food supplies from local farmers. This comes as a surprise to Onoda who is obviously not fully aware of the reality on the ground. His initial orders are largely ignored by the remaining NCOs who get up and leave during his briefing knowing that what he’s proposing is impossible. These men are already battle weary, many of them are sick, and they are running low on supplies. Onoda is 22 and fresh faced, arriving full of energy and patriotic zeal assuming these men are simply lazy or lack ideological commitment. He has no grounds to wield authority and no combat experience that would permit him to understand the circumstances in which he finds himself. In an especial irony, his first kill occurs after the war has (for everyone else) ended and he will himself go on to commit acts of atrocity against the local population which he justifies as acts of war. 

The military song which he is fond of singing celebrates there being no more bandits, yet banditry is essentially what he has been reduced to calling into question any idea of heroism which might be attributed to his refusal to accept the wartime defeat. In his Nakano spy school training, Onoda had been encouraged to ignore the accepted rules of war, that all is permissible in the pursuit of victory. He is also told that the prize for the “secret war” he is conducting will be a “secret glory” that goes unrecognised by others while he alone will possess true integrity in knowing that he never wavered in his mission. Yet there is something in him which weakens when he encounters the Tourist and is told that most of Japan believes him to be dead, rendering his struggle an irrelevance. 

He begins to admit the concept of surrender but only if given new orders from Taniguchi whose contradictory teachings have informed the course of his life, yet Taniguchi like many of his generation in the Japan of 1974 does not want to face his wartime past. The bookshop he now runs sells no military books and he claims not to remember Onoda or Lubang refusing his responsibility for his role in the conflict now filled with shame and regret. Yet it’s also possible that Onoda misunderstood the nature of the mission he’d been assigned, that in saving him from the kamikaze squadron because he did not want to die, Taniguchi gave him only one order – to survive. “You do not have the right to die” he reminds the recruits while giving them the ultra-individualist mantra that they must be their own officers which is in essence the paradoxical instruction to obey no orders but their own meaning that Onoda was always free to accept defeat. 

The psychological consequences of doing so, however, may have been too great. Coming of age in a militarised society, he already feels himself emasculated and embarrassed by his failure to become a pilot essentially because he is afraid to die. An awkward meeting with his father (played by film director Nobuhiro Suwa) resembles that of a Spartan woman sending her son to war with the instruction to return with his shield or on it. To return in defeat is psychologically impossible and suicide forbidden and so the only choice is inertia. In this Onoda may be hiding in the jungle unable to face a post-war future, descending into delusional conspiracy when presented with evidence that the war is over choosing to see the attempts of others to discourage him from his mission as proof of its importance, as if he and the remaining soldier sticking with him are key players in geopolitical manoeuvring worthy of such an elaborate plot. To believe the world is wrong is easier than to accept that he’s wasted his life in service of a mistaken ideal while failing to prove himself a man by the standards of a heavily militarised society. 

He’s tempted out of his delusion only by the Tourist who confronts him with the face of a new Japan entirely unknown to him, a Japan of economic prosperity, of the Shinkansen, of democracy. Being taken off the island means he must finally leave his dreams and delusions behind to enter a new post-war reality. Harari frames the island of Lubang as a psychological realm, the topography of Onoda’s delusion, but is also mindful of the islanders living outside it whom Onoda terrorises under the justification of war no better than a bandit in his quest for survival. In Harari’s oneiric landscapes, Onoda’s vistas are forever haunted by the spectres of his latent regret in the reflections of the boy he once was who came to Lubang to prove himself a man only to leave it a ghost. 

Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle opens in UK cinemas April 15 courtesy of Third Window Films. It will also be released on blu-ray May 16 in a set which also features an interview with actor Kanji Tsuda plus an interview with director Arthur Harari, DOP Tom Harari and assistant director Benjamin Papin.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Ninja Girl (シュシュシュの娘, Yu Irie, 2021)

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What can the ordinary person do when encountering injustice? Saying no is a start, but it might not be enough in the long run. According to the inspirational grandpa in Yu Irie’s Ninja Girl (シュシュシュの娘, Shushushu no Musume), if no one’s coming with you you’ll have to go on your own. Part coming-of-age drama, part political satire, Ninja Girl finds its reserved heroine coming into herself as she agrees to take on her grandfather’s unfinished mission and avenge the death of a family friend who took his own life in shame after being bullied into falsifying government documents in order to help a corrupt local council pass some overtly racist legislation. 

The reticent Miu (Saki Fukuda) takes care of her elderly grandfather (Shohei Uno) and has a steady job at the town hall, yet despite her ordinariness she is also a target for local shunning because of her grandfather’s intense resistance towards the “Immigrant Elimination Ordinance”. Miu isn’t in favour of it either, but is otherwise too shy to do much about it despite being harangued by her extremely unpleasant and intimidating supervisor Ms. Muteda (Mayumi Kanetani). On returning home one evening she overhears her grandfather talking to a family friend, Mano (Arata Iura), who appears depressed and talks of taking his own life after being strong-armed by Muteda among others to illegally alter and/or falsify official documentation in order to help them pass their odious bill. Mano then takes his own life in protest by jumping off the roof of the town hall, leaving Miu and her grandfather intent on avenging him by retrieving the evidence he’d preserved of governmental impropriety and exposing the mayor for what he is. Miu’s grandfather presents this as a “mission” he’s leaving to his granddaughter because he believes he’s not long left, revealing a long hidden family secret to the effect that Miu is actually descended from a long line of ninjas. 

Ms. Muteda tries to talk Miu round by insisting that the legislation is neither “discriminatory” nor “racist” which seems like a stretch when you’re using words like “eliminate”. After accepting her ninja legacy and using the book she’s found to make herself an authentic ninja outfit, Miu tries to do some digging all of which eventually takes her to a scrap yard mostly staffed by migrant workers whom Mano had been trying to help. Miu is originally turned away by the owner because of her association with local government but returns hoping to find the password for Mano’s thumb drive only to discover a weird gang of racist thugs dressed in lime green high visibility jackets beating up the scrap yard’s owner and spouting a lot of rubbish about how his workforce is taking jobs off Japanese people who apparently find themselves in need following the earthquake and coronavirus pandemic. 

For all of their talk about making Japan great again and keeping Japanese traditions in the hands of the Japanese, there’s a strange irony that their nemesis comes in the form of that most quintessentially culturally specific avenger, the ninja, and not only that a young female ninja rising up against oppression all on her own. Despite agreeing that she has no real skills, Miu’s grandfather thinks she’ll make a good a ninja because of her general invisibility while her childhood hobby of making blowpipes will also stand her in good stead. Accepting her “mission” gives Miu the kind of confidence otherwise lacking in her life to seize her own agency and stand up for what she believes in even when victory seems more or less impossible. Meanwhile, Muteda and her cohorts laugh loudly about how they’re only doing what the national government and other prefectures do in illegally altering their documents to make it look like they’re not doing anything wrong while they ride roughshod over the rights of ordinary people and pursue their xenophobic agenda. 

“Never again” Miu’s grandfather insists on recalling the pogroms which occurred after the 1923 Kanto earthquake leading to a massacre of Koreans, while finding himself branded a traitor to his nation. In another touch of irony, the cheerful children’s folksong Hana plays in the background as red balloons are launched to celebrate the Immigrant Elimination Ordinance in a nationalistic incongruity that seems to leave Miu more bemused than ever. Removing herself from this intensely corrupt social order and committing herself to ninja mastery while training alongside her her favourite collection of ‘80s pop hits, she determines to clean up town sending poison darts against the otherwise unopposed voices of disorder. Shot in a strangely comforting 4:3, Yu Irie’s quirky drama is drenched in the absurd but sends a very real message as its shy, reserved heroine steps into the shadows in order to resist societal corruption even while those all around her are content to stand by and watch as their freedoms are taken from them. 

Ninja Girl screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

You’re Not Normal, Either! (まともじゃないのは君も一緒, Koji Maeda, 2021)

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What’s so great about being “normal” anyway? As the title of Koji Maeda’s quirky screwball comedy You’re Not Normal, Either! (まともじゃないのは君も一緒, Matomo Janai no wa Kimi mo Issho) suggests neither of its heroes is quite in tune with the world around them but then again, is there really such a thing as “normal” or is it more that most people are making themselves unhappy by settling for less simply because they think that’s just how things are and resistance only makes you seem awkward? 

Nerdy cram school maths teacher Yasuomi (Ryo Narita) thought he was OK with being a little different, but just recently he’s begun to feel lonely and fears the possibility of being alone for the rest of his life. Perhaps inappropriately, he looks to one of his students, forthright high schooler Kasumi (Kaya Kiyohara), for romantic and life advice hoping that she will teach him how to be, or at least present as, more “normal”. Unbeknownst to him, however, Kasumi is not quite “normal” herself and is in fact obsessed with a tech entrepreneur, Isao (Kotaro Koizumi), who is all about a new and freer future in which humanity is freed from the burden of labour. Finding out that her crush is already engaged to Minako (Rika Izumi) the daughter of a hotel magnate, Kasumi hatches a plan to break them up while training Yasuomi in the art of seduction. 

Kasumi’s insecurities seem to be down to her failure in her middle school exams, attracted to Isao’s philosophies because they offer a possibility of freedom outside the rigid demands of academic success in Japan. She tells Isao in a not quite by chance meeting that she wants to become a teacher in order to expand children’s minds rather than force them into a fixed perspective as the rather authoritarian, rote learning system of education often does. Yet she also feels out of place among her peers whom she sees as vacuous always gossiping about part-time jobs and boys. She frowns at Yasuomi when he accidentally cuts the conversation dead with an awkward comment while attempting to chat up a pair of bubbly office workers in a bar, but often does the same thing herself while sitting with her high school girl friends who fall silent and then change the subject after she injects a little realism into their mindless chatter. 

Yasuomi had viewed himself as “normal” and never understood why others didn’t, noticing that people often stopped associating with him but not knowing the reason why. Obsessed with pure mathematics, over literal, and overstimulated by the complications of life he takes refuge in the forest and the sensory overload of its nocturnal creatures speaking quite eloquently about the beauty of numbers and actually fairly emotionally intelligent in his understanding of the two women. Resolutely failing at Kasumi’s Cyrano act, he comes into himself only when speaking more honesty much to Kasumi’s annoyance actually hitting it off with Minako who is herself just as lonely and alienated but perhaps wilfully trapped. 

Predictably enough, Isao isn’t exactly “normal” either or perhaps he is but only in the most depressing of ways, his rosy vision of the future delivered with more than a little snake oil and just as much sleaze. Minako may know what sort of man Isao is, that her marriage is largely a dynastic affair set up by her overbearing, authoritarian father, but she too may think this is “normal” and might have preferred not to have to confront her sense of existential disappointment while attempting to fulfil the role of a “normal” woman content with creating a comfortable space in which her husband can thrive.  

Romantically naive, Kasumi wonders how people come to fall in love informed by two relatively mature classmates that for them at least falling in love is a gradual process of increasing intimacy generated through casual conversation. This turns out to be pretty much true for Kasumi too, though in ways she didn’t quite expect watching as Yasuomi opens up to Minako and finding herself unexpectedly jealous while reluctant to let go of the idealised vision she had of Isao as some kind of messiah for a better Japan. There is something a little uncomfortable in the potentially inappropriate relationship between a student and her teacher even as the roles are, on one level at least, reversed but there’s also a kind of innocence in their childish friendship and later determination to start small and let things grow while abandoning the idea of the “normal” altogether to embrace their true selves in a freer future of their own creation. 

You’re Not Normal, Either! screens in Chicago on Oct. 7 as part of the 13th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Modern Lovers (東京の恋人, Atsuro Shimoyashiro, 2019)

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Where now the dreams of youth? It may be impossible to escape a regretful middle age, wondering what might have been if only you knew then what you know now, but for the heroes of Atsuro Shimoyashiro’s The Modern Lovers (東京の恋人, Tokyo no Koibito) the pain seems all the more acute. “Today’s the day our youth ends” a brokenhearted woman laments, trying to make peace with her choices but finding that her return to the past may have done more harm than good. 

Tatsuo (Ryu Morioka) is a 31-year-old salaryman, married with a baby on the way and living in provincial Gunma. With the anxiety of impending fatherhood on his mind, he’s surprised to receive a message from his university girlfriend, Marina (Nanami Kawakami), who wants to reconnect. Telling his wife he’s going on a business trip, Tatsuo decides to spend the weekend in Tokyo, staying with another friend from uni before meeting up with Marina for a Sunday in the city reminiscing about old times. 

Like Tatsuo, his old college friend Komazawa (Tomoki Kimura) has long since given up the dream of becoming a filmmaker. A breakdown at 27 has apparently led to a diagnosis of bipolar disorder leaving him unable to hold down a job and dependent on his wife, Seiko (Maki Nishiyama), who supports both him and his step-daughter Shizuko through sex work while Komazawa has become an idle alcoholic. Despite his disappointment, Tatsuo spends the evening bonding with the local bar lady who claims to be able to see the future before leaving early in the morning to meet Marina who suggests revisiting the seaside they went to years before. 

Very much ready to step back into the more innocent past, Tatsuo has brought with him a tape of a song they used to listen to way back when and wastes no time in reassuming the poses of his 20-year-old self, sunshades and all. Marina, by contrast is self-consciously cute but mature, if perhaps sad. Tatsuo starts to tell her that he gave up his filmmaking dreams, married a good woman, and took a regular salaryman job at the family firm, but fails to complete the thought. Marina meanwhile casually remarks that she married a wealthy man but hints that she did so largely for convenience and material comfort rather than love. 

“We never get to marry the woman we love the most” Tatsuo’s strangely boys will be boys brother-in-law (Mutsuo Yoshioka) sighs, commiserating with Tatsuo’s lament for his disappointed youth and failure to make his filmmaking dreams a reality. We discover that an early success in a scriptwriting competition gave him an inflated sense of possibility, and that his desire for success was largely a desire to impress his girlfriend. Wounded male pride in his sense of artistic failure eventually convinced him he had to break things off while she silently cursed him, jokingly sentencing him to 18 years of solitude in a playful reference to a Tai Kato film. Now he realises his foolishness and is filled with regret in having settled for a conventional middle-class life as a husband and father.

Marina, meanwhile, is feeling something much the same in trying to achieve closure on the past before she becomes a mother. After breaking up with Tatsuo, she drifted through nude modelling and ended up the trophy wife of a wealthy man she doesn’t love, pegging her hopes on material comfort and hoping that love will come later. “I’m glad you’re happy now” a bar owner and former Instagram fan tries to congratulate her, but all Marina can do is smile sadly and ask her similarly troubled companion if happy is what she looks.    

“I’m not young anymore, I can’t live for a dream” Tatsuo accepts, but living on a dream is all they’re doing, recalling the time when they were “modern lovers” in Tokyo kidding themselves that they were urban sophisticates when perhaps all they did were the kinds of things unsophisticated suburbanites do like hang out at batting cages and go to barbecue restaurants. It’s too late to turn back now, but the past is a difficult trap to escape and perhaps what they long for is not so much the love cut off in its prime but a return to the possibilities of youth. Meeting again reawakens the desire for something more out of life than life may now have to give them, but this is day that youth ends, hitting the end of the road in a slow car crash of realisation that regret is the price of age.

The Modern Lovers was screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Retro hit Love You, Tokyo by Akira Kurosawa (not that one!) & Los Primos which recurs frequently throughout the film

5 Million Dollar Life (五億円のじんせい, Moon Sung-ho, 2019)

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5 Million Dollar Life posterIs it possible to live a life without “debts” of one kind or another or are we all just living on loans? The hero of Moon Sung-ho’s 5 Million Dollar Life (五億円のじんせい, Gooku Yen no Jinsei) wants to find out, not least because he feels himself indebted to those who have helped him in the past and struggles with the pressure of living up to their expectation. An unexpected source provides some helpful advice in pointing out that “value” in one sense at least is not something you’re free to decide for yourself but is defined by others. Then again, not being certain of your own worth makes it impossible to claim your rightful place in society as someone as worthy of love and respect as any other.

When Mirai (Ayumu Mochizuki) was six, his family found out he had a congenital heart defect and would need to go abroad for a transplant. His community rallied around him and raised five million dollars so he could go to America for treatment. The heartwarming story also made him the star of an ongoing documentary in which he’s interviewed on television every year so those who contributed to saving his life can find out how he’s getting on. Becoming a local celebrity and an accidental TV star is obviously a lot of pressure for any young man, but Mirai feels acutely burdened by the responsibility of “repaying” the kindness that was offered to him. He doesn’t feel his life was worth five million dollars and knows he is unlikely to repay their “investment”. He is after all just “ordinary”. He won’t win a Nobel prize or cure cancer, all he can do is live his life in the normal way but that’s hard when it feels like everyone is secretly looking over his shoulder and waiting for him to make a mistake.

Meanwhile he’s also become a role model to the suicidal Chiharu (Hikari Kobayashi) who doesn’t “see the value in life”  and feels that “death is glorious” because people can hate you while you’re alive, but they’ll love you when you’re gone. Mirai gets where she’s coming from. He longs for an ending too, if only to reject the responsibility he feels towards those who saved his life. Attacked by a troll online, he takes up the challenge to make the five million dollars back and then kill himself to bring an end to the whole affair but quickly discovers that it’s a lot harder to make five million dollars than he thought.

Neatly taking place during the last summer of high school, Mirai’s odyssey sends him on an odd trek across working class Japan as he finds himself alone and without money or means to support himself. At only 17, he can’t even stay in a hotel on his own and so he winds up becoming homeless but is taken in by a nice old man who claims he decided to help him because he bought an umbrella with his last pennies rather than pinching someone else’s. Though he is often exploited and betrayed by those who take advantage of his goodness, that same quality finds an answer in others who, sometimes despite themselves, want to help him because he seems like the sort of person who needs help.

This idea finds encapsulation in the surprisingly astute words of wisdom Mirai receives from a petty gangster he meets after getting involved with sex work. The gangster, who starts off by telling him that he’s making a mistake selling himself short when it’s the customer who decides what his “value” is, later explains that it’s not so much that the world is divided into people who are nice and people who aren’t, but that some people are “worth” being nice to and Mirai, for one reason or another, is one such person who thrives on kindness.

Mirai’s desire to quantify his life by putting a price on it may be mistaken, as proved by the sad case of a family committing suicide because of monetary debt, but what he realises is that people help because they want to and they don’t necessarily expect anything in return other than kindness. If he wants to find a way to repay them, he’ll have to figure it out on his own terms first, but all they really wanted they wanted from him was that he live his life as happily as possible. 5 Million Dollar Life goes to some pretty dark places, but always maintains a healthy cheerfulness as Mirai goes on his strange odyssey looking for the “value” in being alive and discovering that it largely lies shared kindnesses and unselfish connection.

5 Million Dollar Life screens on 11th July as part of the 2019 New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)