Tag: Rena Tanaka

Leaving on the 15th Spring (旅立ちの島唄～十五の春～, Yasuhiro Yoshida, 2013)

Posted on by

“How many of them will come back?” a man on the shore ominously asks as he watches the young people of his island ship out to pursue their education in the comparatively better equipped capital. Rural depopulation has become a minor theme in recent Japanese cinema, but the situation is arguably all the worse in the outlying islands of Okinawa. As the title of Yasuhiro Yoshida’s Leaving on the 15th Spring (旅立ちの島唄～十五の春～, Tabidachi no Shima Uta: Jugo no Haru) suggests, teens from the small island of Minami Daito (South Daito) must leave at 15 if they want to attend high school because there isn’t one on the island.

That said, there are more kids than you’d expect in young Yuna’s (Ayaka Miyoshi) middle school and it’s more than just a handful who leave the island each spring, many of them choosing to make lives for themselves in the wider world rather than return to their childhood home. On Minami Daito, the main industry is sugarcane but the prospect of Japan joining the TPP trade agreement has many worried that it will soon no longer be viable and with even fewer economic opportunities available many will have no choice other than to abandon the island for good. 

We’re often reminded just how far the island is from the Okinawan capital Naha and how difficult it is to get to. To leave, the kids are placed in a kind of cage and lifted onto a larger boat moored by a small jetty. Even to get to the next island Kita Daito (North Daito) it’s some time on a ferry which might not run if the weather is bad. Distance becomes a persistent theme, not just in Yuna’s impending exit but the scattering of her family. When kids leave for high school, a parent often goes with them as Yuna’s mother Akemi (Shinobu Otake) did when it was time for her sister Mina (Saori) to depart. But Mina is now a grown woman married with a child of her own and Akemi has not been back to the island for two years. This forcible separation continues to disrupt familial bonds as couples necessarily grow apart and children begin to choose their own paths in life which often take them away from their parents. 

It’s this sense of distance which plays on Yuna’s mind, a kind of countdown starting inside her as she witnesses another girl sing the Okinawa folk song “Abayoi” which means “goodbye” in the local dialect and recounts a young person’s sorrow as they must leave their family and childhood home behind on coming of age. Reminded that she’s next in only a year’s time, Yuna meditates on her past and future while reconsidering her relationships. Abandonment often occurs through a simple lapse in contact. Akemi now rarely phones home while Yuna’s nascent first love with a boy from Kita Daito falters when he abruptly stops calling or returning her letters. Eventually she finds out that despite their pledge to attend the same high school on Naha, he has decided to stay and take over his father’s fishing boat because of his dad’s ill health. 

Kenta has realised that his place is Kita Daito and he will remain there the rest of his life while harbouring a degree of resentment that he couldn’t go to high school or pursue his romance with Yuna. He feels their relationship is doomed simply from the fact that they’re from different islands. He won’t leave his, and she likely would not settle on Kita Daito preferring, either a life in the cities or her childhood home. It’s the same for her parents, Akemi deciding that she prefers life in the city and the degree of independence she has there while her father Toshiharu (Kaoru Kobayashi) would not survive off the island. Both of her siblings have already left, Mina returning with her infant daughter apparently on the verge of separating with her husband partly it seems because of the insecurity the separation of her family has left her with, while Yuna’s brother seems to be a harried workaholic with no family life to speak of. 

Rather childishly she thinks she can reunite her family and dreams of buying a big house on Naha for them all to live together, adult siblings included, without fully accepting that the relationship between her parents has been gradually worn away leaving them strangers to each other and each desiring different kinds of futures. What she comes to is perhaps an acceptance of the distance in her life, the longing for her island home where she says everyone is one big family, as she finds herself choosing independence. A picturesque vision of Minami Daito and its idyllic landscape along with the traditions of the island including its rich musical culture and Okinawan Sanshin, Yoshida’s gentle drama discovers that “abayoi” is a part of life that can’t be avoided but can be sweet as well as bitter once you’ve learned to accept it.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Hijacked Youth – Dare to Stop Us 2 (青春ジャック 止められるか、俺たちを2,  Junichi Inoue, 2024)

Posted on by

A loose sequel to 2018’s Dare to Stop Us, Hijacked Youth (青春ジャック 止められるか、俺たちを2, Seishun Hijack Tomerareruka, Oretachi wo 2) picks up a decade later with an autobiographically inspired tale from writer director Junichi Inouchi but in its way also becomes the latest in a series of indie films to offer a celebration of Japan’s mini theatres still struggling with the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic while exploring the origins of the contemporary independent film scene. 

The allusion seems clear even from the film’s opening in which cinephile and former programmer Kimita (Masahiro Higashide) fears for the future of cinema amid the arrival of the VCR. Having quit his job to support a young family, he is puzzled but eventually won over when unexpectedly contacted by notorious film director Koji Wakamastu (Arata Iura) who has apparently decided to open a cinema in provinciail Nagoya after the screening of Ecstasy of the Angels was restricted because someone bombed a police box for real. Kimita wants to run it as a rep cinema, but Wakamatsu sees it partly as a vanity project and a side business so has his eye on the bottom line. Making the mistake of programming films he thinks are good rather than ones people want to see quickly puts them in the red with Wakamatsu pressuring Kimita to give in and agree to screen pink films even though he himself had admitted that pink cinema had had its day. 

Wakamatsu is forever taking Kimita to task for having a prejudice against these kinds of films which are after all the kind that Wakamatsu makes though he does concede that there are talented directors working in pink film who may someday become the leading lights of the Japanese cinema industry. Some of that is hindsight, but what the film is working towards is a link between pink film, which was independently produced in contrast to something like Roman Porno which was made by a studio with much higher budgets and production values, and the rise of independent cinema which is largely dependent on the mini cinema ecosystem to it keep going. 

But then the film is also a nostalgic memoir revolving around the director’s teenage dreams and his eventual meeting of Wakamatsu thanks to the cinema in Nagoya. The irony is that the first film had been titled “Dare to Stop Us,” focussing on Wakamatsu Pro during the turbulent days before Asama-sanso as an anarchic force in a sometimes staid film industry. But the through line here is that everyone gives up far too easily. Kimita abandoned his dreams to sell video recorders, while the young woman who works for him believes she has three strikes against her, the first being her gender, the second a lack of talent, and the third which she does not disclose that she’s a member of the Zainichi community of ethnic Koreans often discriminated against even the Japan of the 1980s and in fact today. 

Junichi gives up a bit easily too after making a twit of himself on Wakamatsu’s film set, though the picture he paints of him is larger than life. Fatherly and compassionate, he gives him solid advice to go to a proper uni and learn filmmaking with him while otherwise taking him under his wing, but also pretty much takes over after giving him his first opportunity to make a film and has a tendency to take no prisoners when it comes to his crew members. At least as far as the film would have it, he’s become a rather lonely figure now that his more politically minded friends have scattered following he decline of the student movement in Japan. As much as anything else, the film is a sort of hagiography as evidenced by the surreal coda which seems to reference the director’s early death in traffic accident in 2012, jumping forward 30 years to find the cinema still open and celebrating his legacy more literally yet also in its existence in supporting the indie scene Wakamatsu helped to birth. According to Wakamatsu, the most important thing is finding your own angle and sticking to it, something his rebellious spirit at least may have fostered in the many directors who started their careers at Wakamatsu Pro and not least Inoue himself.

Hijacked Youth – Dare to Stop Us 2  screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

Original trailer (English subtitles)

September 1923 (福田村事件, Tatsuya Mori, 2023)

Posted on by

After the devastating Great Kanto Earthquake struck in 1923, it led to a period of hysteria in which in the natural disaster somehow became equated with the Korean Independence Movement, foreigners, and socialists and who were after all thorns in the side of rising nationalism. Documentarian Tatsuya Mori makes his narrative film debut with September, 1923 (福田村事件, Fukudamura Jiken) released to mark the 100th anniversary of the incident and focussing on a little known episode in which villagers turned on a small group of itinerant medicine pedlars they were convinced were not Japanese. 

In this case, at least, they were Burakumin. An oppressed underclass of their own, they too are divided in their views about Koreans some finding solidarity with them as another minority who is bullied and discriminated against while others are quick assert themselves as at least being above them on the pecking order cheerfully using slur words as they go. Shinsuke (Eita Nagayama), the leader of the troupe, laments that they have to live this way, tricking those worse off than themselves into buying their snake oil cures while explaining that though people will often help each other out when times are good, if survival’s on the line they’ll turn against each other. 

Perhaps that’s difficult to imagine in a small village of genial farmers, but militarism has already corrupted its gentle rhythms. Men from the village are fond of telling war stories from their time as conscripts in China or Russia, though one has a particular bee in his bonnet about wives being left lonely with husbands away overseas and is convinced that his father has slept with his wife. Another local woman was indeed having an affair shortly before her husband was killed in action and is then ostracised by the village for her transgressive behaviour becoming yet another oppressed minority. The village chief is keen on democracy and progressive in his way yet soon finds himself powerless against the local militia mostly comprised of old men with a lust for blood and glory. It’s this militarist hysteria that eventually proves tragedy as they find themselves desperate to identify “spies” and protect the village only to murder children and a pregnant woman who were just passing through. 

The absurdity extends to asking those suspected of being Non-Japanese to repeat a particular phrase difficult for Koreans in particular to pronounce, only those from other areas of Japan also pronounce it in a way that might seem “foreign” in Tokyo. Cornered by the militia, Shinsuke asks if it would be alright to kill him even if he were Korean, taking issue with the militia’s absurdist and racist rationale that decides someone must die because of the way they pronounced a certain word or seemed uncomfortable shouting “banzai” at the point of a sword. But one of the villagers unwittingly uncovers a since of guilt felt even by a man in a village miles away from anything that the Koreans have been bullied for years, this the understandable result of their rage boiling over and a moment of retribution. 

The film seems to suggest that the buck doesn’t really stop, except perhaps with the bystander who merely watches this horrifying violence and does nothing. Tomokazu (Arata Iura) has recently returned to the village after many years living in Korea bringing back with him a Korean wife but his marriage is falling apart due to his own guilt and trauma having been complicit in a Japanese atrocity. Watching the massacre unfold, his wife, Shizuko (Rena Tanaka), asks him if he’s just going to watch this time again but his attempt to intervene makes no difference. An idealistic news reporter meanwhile takes her boss to task for publishing propaganda headlines associating Koreans with crime and terrorism rather than real truth of what’s happening on the ground, asking him what the point of the press is if it won’t speak truth to power. But militarists do not listen to reason, and as the headman points out they will have to keep living with those who’ve committed these heinous acts. Sometimes a little on the nose with its symbolism such as a literal murder of hope in the killing of an unborn child, Mori’s otherwise poignant drama lacks the impact it strives for but nevertheless addresses a shocking moment of mass hysteria that is not quite as historical as we’d like to think.

September 1923 screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Crimes That Bind (祈りの幕が下りる時, Katsuo Fukuzawa, 2018)

Posted on by

Crimes that bind posterDetective Kyoichiro Kaga has become a familiar screen presence over the last decade or so in a series of films and TV dramas starring popular actor Hiroshi Abe which might make it something of a surprise that The Crimes That Bind (祈りの幕が下りる時, Inori no Maku ga Oriru toki) is, after a fashion, a kind of origin story and touted as the culmination of the long running franchise. Another of prolific author Keigo Higashino’s key detectives, Kaga’s stalking ground has always been Nihonbashi where he has managed to make himself a friendly neighbourhood cop but, as it turns out, dedication is not the only reason he’s refused promotions and transfers to stay in what is, professionally at least, something of a backwater.

In fact, the film begins way back in 1983 when a young woman, Yuriko (Ran Ito), ran away from her husband and son to become a bar hostess in Sendai offering only the explanation that she felt herself unworthy of being a wife and mother. Some years later in 1997, she met a nice man – Watabe, but died of natural causes in 2001 at which point we discover that she is none other than the long lost mother of our master detective whom she abandoned when he was only eight years old. Being a compassionate man, Kyoichiro Kaga is not angry with his mother only sorry he did not get to see her before she passed and eager to meet the man who made her last years a little happier. Only, it appears, Watabe has also disappeared without trace. The only thing the Mama-san at the bar where Yuriko worked can remember about him is that he once said he often went to Nihonbashi. Kaga searches for the next 16 years with no leads, which is when the main case kicks into gear with the discovery of a badly decomposed body of a woman in a rundown Tokyo flat.

Of course, the two cases will turn out to be connected, giving Kaga an opportunity to investigate himself and come to terms with his difficult family circumstances including his strained relationship with his late father whose coldness he blames for driving his mother away. Parents and children will indeed develop into a theme as Kaga digs into why his mother might have done the things she did while also trying to reverse engineer his clues to figure out why he seems to be at the centre of an otherwise completely unrelated case.

Meanwhile, pieces of the puzzle seem to drop into place at random such as the fortuitous discovery of an old woman claiming to have lost her memory so that she can stay in hospital who may or may not be linked to one of the prime suspects – a top theatre director also known to Kaga thanks to a chance encounter some years earlier. In a neat twist, the theatre production she is currently trying to put on is Love Suicides at Sonezaki – a sad tale of young lovers, an adopted son of a merchant and a courtesan, who realise that they have no freedom to pursue their desires and so decide that their only solution is double suicide. The truth that Kaga uncovers leads him in much the same direction only the love at stake is familial rather than romantic and built on the strange filial interplay of the connection between a parent and a child.

It is quite literally “crimes that bind”, but Kaga’s repeated mantra that lies are the shadow of truth, illuminating as much as they conceal, does not quite fit with the incident he has been investigating which largely hinges on coincidences which place him, improbably, at the centre and tip him off to the hidden connections which will crack the case. Which is to say, the solution lies in the killer overplaying their hand (though for reasons unrelated to crime) and thereby undermining their carefully won subterfuge. Torn between solving the murder and exploring Kaga’s melancholy backstory, The Crimes That Bind finds itself falling between two stools even as its twin plot strands begin to dovetail as neatly as one assumes they eventually will, laying bare the central themes of parental sacrifice and belated filial gratitude. Playing best to those already invested in the Kaga franchise, Katsuo Fukuzawa’s adaptation may serve as a fitting conclusion (to this arc at least) but cannot quite overcome its over-reliance on confessional flashback as method of investigation or the improbable qualities of its admittedly twist filled central mystery.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Dear Etranger (幼な子われらに生まれ, Yukiko Mishima, 2017)

Posted on by 6 Comments

Dear Etranger posterThe family drama has long been considered the representative genre of Japanese cinema, but with the days of Ozu long gone the family itself has become a subject for reappraisal. Yukiko Mishima’s Dear Etranger (幼な子われらに生まれ, Osanago Warera ni Umare) is the latest to take a scalpel to the nation’s basic social unit and ask what the word “family” means in an ever changing social landscape. In an Ozu picture, one family must be broken for another to be formed – this is the way of things and in the end must be accepted if with sadness, but does it really need to be this way or is there room for more as connections become less easy to define?

Makoto Tanaka (Tadanobu Asano) separated from his first wife some time ago and still spends time with his daughter, Saori (Raiju Kamata), though only a few times a year. Four years ago he married another woman, Nanae (Rena Tanaka), who had also been married before and has two children – Kaoru (Sara Minami) and Eri (Miu Arai). Nanae has recently discovered she is pregnant and is thrilled to bits to add to their family, but Makoto is conflicted. He liked the family as it was and worries that the new baby will place a wedge between himself and his step-daughters, that they may suddenly feel themselves pushed out and not really part of the new family that is being forged by a child who has a blood relation to both their parents rather than just one.

In truth, family dynamics aren’t all Makoto currently has to worry about. A 40-year-old man, he’s also hitting the scrap heap at work – rather than laying people off, they’re transferring them to unpleasant jobs in the hope they’ll resign. A lifelong salaryman, Makoto has been sent to the packing warehouse where his every move is logged on computer and he’s rated for speed. This is partly his own “fault”. Rather than play the salaryman game, Makoto wanted to be a family man. He doesn’t work weekends or overtime, he takes public holidays off, and never stays out late drinking with colleagues – all things which mark your card as an antisocial shirker in workaholic Japan.

Makoto’s superior, warning him about the imminent transfers, criticises his attitude. He tells him that he doesn’t think spending time with his children is his “job” as a father. He sees his responsibility as one of providing a role model and he thinks the best way to do that is to be seen working hard as a “respectable” member of society. Makoto couldn’t disagree more. He works to rule, but wants to be the sort of father that’s there for his kids, not just an authoritarian figure who comes home late smelling of booze and throws his weight around. He knows that as the children grow up they’ll grow away from him and won’t want to hang out with dad anymore, so he wants to spend time with them now while he still can.

Makoto’s intense desire to be a family man is perhaps unusual in Japan where men channel their ambition into work and women are (still) expected to channel theirs into the home. It is therefore doubly painful for Makoto when his elder step-daughter, Kaoru, heading into a difficult age, suddenly rejects him on hearing about the new baby. Despite the fact that Kaoru’s biological father (Kankuro Kudo) was violent towards both her and her mother, Kaoru begins to insist on seeing him, complaining that it’s unfair to be forced to live with “a stranger”. On one level, Kaoru is at the age at which most young women begin to find their father annoying and embarrassing, but her resentment is also informed by a fear of abandonment and cultural doubt about her place in a still atypical family, unconvinced that it’s possible for a man to become a father to a child that’s not his own by blood.

Blood ties still seem to trump all in most people’s minds, but bureaucracy plays its part too. Makoto still insists on making time to see Saori – something which is sadly unusual in Japan where divorce usually results not only in the children losing contact with the absent parent but also the entirety of an extended family. Kaoru doesn’t quite like it that Makoto does this, she feels almost betrayed as if he’s choosing his biological child over her and that continuing to associate with Saori means he hasn’t fully committed to her family. There seems to be an idea that the family unit is a distinct bubble and one can’t be inside more than one at a time, just as one can’t be listed on more than one “family register”. When an emergency occurs and Saori needs to get a lift from Nanae who has Eri in the back of the car, she isn’t sure if it’s OK for her to get in even with her father with her. She suddenly feels awkward, as if her presence in his car with his new family is inappropriate. None of these people know each other – the existence of a parallel family is so embarrassing as to be “unseen”, buried like a scandalous secret and kept entirely separate to avoid any cross-contamination. When Eri asks who Saori is, awkward silence prevails until she is forced to introduce herself as a “friend” of her father’s – something he doesn’t bother to correct until the drive home when another encounter has pushed him into reconsidering what it means to be a “father”. 

Makoto’s strong desire for acceptance and for forging a “family” that is “his” may perhaps seem selfish and possessive, yet he also tries to react with patience and empathy towards others in his position. He tries to be patient with Kaoru, advising her that he doesn’t think meeting her “real” dad is a good idea but if it’s what she wants he’ll try to make it happen. Likewise, he is grateful to Saori’s stepfather for raising his daughter when he wasn’t able to. Finally the walls begin to dissolve and it stops being about who belongs on which bit of paper and starts being about connections forged through love and understanding. The new baby, rather than forcing everyone apart, begins to bring them together, each joined by a feeling of joy and responsibility towards the new life to which they are all connected. 

Screened at Nippon Connection 2018.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Flowers (フラワーズ, Norihiro Koizumi, 2010)

Posted on by 2 Comments

flowersThe rate of social change in the second half of the twentieth century was extreme throughout much of the world, but given that Japan had only emerged from centuries of isolation a hundred years before it’s almost as if they were riding their own bullet train into the future. Norihiro Koizumi’s Flowers (フラワーズ) attempts to chart these momentous times through examining the lives of three generations of women, from 1936 to 2009, or through Showa to Heisei, as the choices and responsibilities open to each of them grow and change with new freedoms offered in the post-war world. Or, at least, up to a point.

In 1936, oldest sister Rin (Yu Aoi) is to be married off against her will to a man picked by her father and whom she has never actually met. Bold and wilful, Rin finds herself more than usually torn between her intense resentment at being forced into a one time only life changing event simply on her father’s say so, and the guilt of rejecting centuries of tradition in rejecting her father’s authority. Minutes before the ceremony Rin makes a break for it fully done up in her wedding dress and makeup.

Flashing forward to her funeral in 2009, we learn that Rin did marry (someone, at least) and had three daughters. It’s her granddaughters we’re interested in now – happy mother Kei (Ryoko Hirosue), cheerful even at a wake, and the depressed Kanna (Kyoka Suzuki) – an unmarried former concert pianist who’s recently discovered she’s pregnant and is unsure what to do. In order to understand them we have to flashback a little again – to 1969, 1964, and 1977 to find out what happened to Rin’s three daughters – Kaoru (Yuko Takeuchi), Midori (Rena Tanaka), and Sato (Yukie Nakama).

Koizumi makes the most of his shifts in time periods to experiment with technical effects recreating the look of classic films of the era. Hence, 1936 is a desaturated monotone filled with classic silent movie compositions, seemingly owing a large debt to Ozu, Shimizu, and Mizoguchi. The difference between 1964 and 1969 might be thought slight but partly down to the different genre elements in the two vignettes, the contrast is marked with 1964 taking on the classic romantic melodramas of the period, and 1969 embracing bright and colourful salaryman comedy – only this time it’s a salary woman embarking on the era of having it all (though perhaps, tragically, ten too years to early to make the most of it). 1977 brings us back down with bump of realism as Sato lives an ordinary suburban life as a housewife and mother. Imbuing each of his eras with the warmth of nostalgia backed up with rich period detail, Koizumi has indeed framed his passage of womanhood narrative with an impressive degree of grounding.

This has been a period of intense social change, entirely for the better even if there is still a long way to go. Though marriages of 1936 were referred to as semi-arranged, families could and did place intense pressure on their children to consent or refuse to accept their refusal to do so (perhaps as true for sons as daughters, though sons were unlikely to find themselves in such a difficult position when things went wrong). Thus the course of Rin’s life is decided by her rigid, austere father leaving her with no possibility of choice in a world entirely controlled by men. Her daughters have more freedom and opportunities, marrying for love and choosing careers and/or motherhood as they see fit.

Midori, the most headstrong of the three sisters takes a job at a publishing house where she is the only female employee. Receiving a marriage proposal leads her to question her choices once again, wondering if accepting means jumping off the career ladder altogether. Wanting to get ahead, Midori has been behaving like her male colleagues – dressing in less feminine clothes and in subdued colours, heading off the inevitable sexist comments with aggression and violence but, eventually emboldened, she she finds herself blossoming when embracing her femininity within the workplace.

The world has moved on – women cannot be pushed in the same way Rin was pushed even if social mores can still be used to cajole them into conformity. The one big recent social change is in Kanna’s decision to proceed as a single mother. Though the question is still raised, there is broad approval for the idea which is met with no obvious stigma and only love and support from her immediate family. However, some things apparently don’t change as even if not all roads lead to marriage they all point towards motherhood which is still presented as the only marker of success as a woman. In this respect the closing montage accompanied by the odd choice of Olivia Newton John’s Have You Even Felt Mellow feels ill judged as the sister who’s experienced the ultimate heartbreak bounces around recreating the opening of Georgy Girl (only more successfully) with a new haircut and indulging in an ice-cream as a sort of antidote to eternal widowhood.

Nevertheless, Flowers does present a warm and broadly inspirational ode to the healing power of family and unbreakable female resilience even in the midst of such extreme social change. Painted with a keen eye for period detail and a deeply nostalgic longing for comforts long since passed, Koizumi’s exploration of womanhood through the ages is quick to acknowledge the pain and sacrifice experienced by women of all generations but is, in the end, too ready to accept it.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Summer of Ubume (姑獲鳥の夏, Akio Jissoji, 2005)

Posted on by Leave a comment

Summer of the UbumeAkio Jissoji has one of the most diverse filmographies of any director to date. In a career that also encompasses the landmark tokusatsu franchise Ultraman and a large selection of children’s TV, Jissoji made his mark as an avant-garde director through his three Buddhist themed art films for ATG. Summer of Ubume (姑獲鳥の夏, Ubume no Natsu) is a relatively late effort and finds Jissoji adapting a supernatural mystery novel penned by Natsuhiko Kyogoku neatly marrying most of his central concerns into one complex detective story.

Freelance writer Tatsumi Sekiguchi (Masatoshi Nagase) and occult expert Kyogokudo (Shinichi Tsutsumi) become intrigued by the bizarre story of a woman who has apparently been pregnant for twenty months. If that weren’t enough weirdness, the woman’s husband also went missing a year ago and now her sister has approached the pair hoping they can investigate and figure out what’s really going on. Unbeknownst to him, Sekiguchi has a longstanding connection with several of the people involved and himself plays a role in the central mystery. Demons foreign and domestic, past trauma, infanticide and multiple personality disorder are just some of the possible solutions but as Kyogokudo is keen to remind us, there is nothing in this world that is truly strange.

The mystery conceit takes the form of a classic European style detective story complete witha drawing room based finale in which each of our potential suspects is assembled for Kyogokudo so that he can deliver his final lecture and tick them all off the list as he goes along. The tale takes place in the summer of 1952 and so the spectre of Japan’s wartime past, as well as its growing future, both have a part to play in solving this extremely complex crime. The original supernatural question concerns two otherworldly entities which have become conflated – the Chinese Kokakucho which abducts children, and the Japanese Ubume which offers its child to passersby. Needless to say, the answer to all of our questions lies firmly within our own world and is in no small part the result of relentless cruelty masked as tradition.

The opening scene includes a lengthy discussion between Kyogokudo an Sekiguchi debating the nature of reality. We only experience the world as we perceive it, seeing and unseeing at will. Everybody, to an extent, sees what they need to see, therefore, memory proves an unreliable narrator when it comes to recalling facts which may run contrary to the already prepared narrative.

Jissoji brings his trademark surrealist approach to the material which largely consists of interconnecting flashbacks often intercut with other dreamlike imagery. Filming with odd angles and unusual camera movements, Jissoji makes the the regular world a destabilising place as the strange mystery takes hold. The canted angles and direct to camera approach also add to a slight hardboiled theme which creeps in around the otherwise European detective drama though this mystery is much more about solving a series of puzzles than navigating the dangerously dark world of the noir. That said this is a very bleak tale which, for all its frog faced children weirdness, has some extremely unpleasant human behaviour at its roots.

Supernatural investigator Kyogokudo quickly dispenses with the demonic in favour of the natural but the solutions to this extremely complicated set of mysteries are anything but simple. Making space for the original novel’s author to show up as a travelling picture storyteller with some Shigeru Mizuki inspired illustrations on his easel, Summer of Ubume is not entirely devoid of whimsy but its deliberately arch tone is one which it manages to make work with its already bizarre set up. The enemy is the unburied past, or more precisely the unacknowledged past which generates its own series of ghosts and phantasms, always lurking in the background and creating havoc wherever they go. Occasionally confusing, Summer of Ubume is a fascinating supernatural mystery which takes its cues much more from European detective stories and gothic adventure than from supernatural horror or fantastical ghost story.

Natsuhiko Kyogoku’s source novel is available in an English translation by Alexander O. Smith (published by Vertical in the US).

Original trailer (no subs):