Tag: Ryu Murakami

Raffles Hotel (ラッフルズホテル, Ryu Murakami, 1989)

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An actress gradually dissolves into her own image while wandering around Singapore in search of lost love in Ryu Murakami’s adaptation of his own novel, Raffles Hotel (ラッフルズホテル). Ryu Murakami may generally be more associated with the extreme revolving around transgressive sex and violence, yet like its namesake the film is a more elegant affair indulging in its own sense of mystery tinged with a melancholy eeriness in its heroine’s apparent instability. 

Moeko (Miwako Fujitani) later admits that she is no longer an actress, and therefore no longer quite herself uncertain who it is she’s meant to be. In one sense perhaps that’s why she’s come to Singapore though in another it’s someone else she’s looking for though to begin with we may think she’s there to escape him, and it could be that too. “Maybe I’d feel better if he were,” she muses when her tour guide, Yuki (Masahiro Motoki), explains that there are no Japanese people near the gravestones she’s just been looking at trying to assure her that the man she’s seeking is not dead. She thinks she sees him everywhere, dropped into typical Singaporean scenes appearing as a durian seller or a man restoring a church while more literally haunted by the spectre of a friend who apparently died in Vietnam while covering the war. Kariya (Jinpachi Nezu) later tells her that he can’t forget the jungle while she asks to be taken there with him and travels to a mountain lodge where they hunt wild game with a crossbow. 

Yuki first becomes worried about her when her hotel room is filled with orchids she claims are from Kariya only to discover she ordered them herself when the orchid house contacts the hotel to complain that the bill has not been paid. Even so, she continues to believe they are from the man she’s looking for, even going so far as to thank him for them as if unable to process the gap between her realities. We often see her looking at photos from her photo shoots, while she later complains to Kariya that she wants to laugh when she wants to laugh and cry when she wants to cry as if making plain her disconnection with her self and desire to reassert her own identity over those she is forced to assume as an actress. 

This abstraction may also explain her words to Kariya that the sky is full of stars but that they are distant from each other and therefore the sky is only make-believe as if the image of Moeko that we see is only an illusion we’ve patched together from the various components available to us. It speaks of her alienation and loneliness, two qualities only deepened by her presence in an unfamiliar culture where she cannot speak the language. Acting as her guide, Yuki describes her as a polar opposite to his Singaporean girlfriend (Fawn Wong), the daughter of a wealthy family who is bold and confident, unafraid to chase her desires be they dancing or “Japanese hoods” as her father describes them. 

Murakami semi-exoticises Singapore if at times ironically in homing in on the portraits of famous authors in the bar and a man who always seems to be banging away on a typewriter. He sends Moeko all around the island and follows her as she takes in tourist sights, tries durian, and watches Chinese opera but lends an eerie quality to her place within the hotel implying finally that her room has in a way swallowed her as her name is added to the list of famous people who have stayed there even as she remarks that she feels as if the ceiling fan has become sentient in its movement. In any case, the camera is something that she both fears and craves as it both gives and takes her identity. She tries to pick it up herself but points it without looking, finally asking Kariya to take her picture only to find herself becoming one with her image just as Kariya is reduced to shadow as if her very essence had dissipated into the atmosphere as symbolised in a swimming pool full of orchids. “Lost in a fantasy” she may be, but so are we, led astray by a vision of a woman we can never really see. 

It’s All Right, My Friend (だいじょうぶマイフレンド, Ryu Murakami, 1983)

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Ryu Murakami was already a prize-winning author who had successfully adapted his own novel for the screen when he began work on 1983’s It’s All Right, My Friend (だいじょうぶマイフレンド, Daijobu My Friend) yet he was perhaps an odd choice for the material. A big budget blockbuster produced by Toho, the film may have been intended to echo the kind of films Kadokawa was making with its teenage starlets and media mix strategy and like them is largely built around the title song performed by star Leona Hirota. But what might have worked as a countercultural piece of punk cinema if made on a shoestring by starving artists could not help but fail when blessed with the production values of a mainstream picture. 

A case in point, the film stars Hollywood actor Peter Fonda as an alien, Gonzy, who has lost the ability to fly causing him to plummet into an outdoor swimming pool where the three heroes are hanging out. Fonda delivers all his lines in English, while everyone else replies in Japanese. Gonzy explains that he was raised in the US by a kindhearted scientist who taught him to speak (his first words were “Merry Christmas”) but longs to visit his home planet. Meanwhile, he’s being hunted by a mysterious fascistic group of misogynistic eugenicists who want his genes for their cloning programme which hopes to eliminate the need for human women to exist at all. 

Doors have apparently already taken over factories, family restaurants, and psychiatric institutions such as the Tachibana Mental Hospital where they take heroes Monica (Yoshiyuki Noo) and Mimimi (Leona Hirota) and try to brainwash them to recognise a pigeon as an apple and aeroplane as a banana. They also drill into the brain of a young man they describe as a poor delinquent in order to turn him into an obedient drone, the implication being that they wish to turn mankind into a race of automatons and possibly resent women because they pose a threat to their plan. Then again, there is a distantly homoerotic quality to the relationships between the Doors, two of them later dying with clasped hands aside from all their strange musical numbers about how women are inferior and produce only substandard offspring.  

Ryuichi Sakamoto is credited as a composer on the film and the Doors’ henchman appear to be closely styled to resemble Yellow Magic Orchestra, often mimicking their dance moves while otherwise faceless and anonymous behind their identical sunglasses and slicked back hair. Murakami signals his intentions in the opening scene in which Mimimi has a dream sequence in the manner of classic Hollywood musical. She dances with an American sailor against a backdrop that strongly recalls the noir cinema of the late 40s until a car full of gangsters turns up and shoots him with a machine gun leaving her kicking around on her own. Music becomes the device that can break through the Doors’ programming, the drones beginning to twitch to Monica’s Harmonica provoking a vision of dancers in gold lamé that finally ends in a mass disco of liberation from the authoritarian thought police that restores Gonzy’s ability to fly. 

Even so, the reason he couldn’t was apparently his aversion to his personal kryptonite, tomatoes, whose voices he can hear whispering that they hate him and thereby suppressing his powers in reawakening memories of his childhood trauma along with his low self-esteem. To help him fly again, the gang engage in a series of crazy episodes including hang gliding in Saipan while Gonzy continues as an innocent with an incredibly vulgar sensibility eventually turning his “bazooka-like” ejaculate into a key weapon. There might be something in the echoing of an early ’80s anxiety about dangerous technology and weird techno-cults with shady motivations for their scientific endeavours though the irony is often buried under the swanky blockbuster production values and destabilising presence of Fonda who is quite literally in a different film from the rest of the cast by virtue of speaking his own language and being unable to understand what is going on. Even so, the film like the title song is essentially a kind of tribute to intercultural friendship in the bond that arises between the trio of aimless youths and the middle-aged space alien who’s trying to find his way home. Decidedly strange and defiantly surreal, Murakami’s weird countercultural blockbuster is a forgotten piece of 80s pulp but perhaps exposes something of the anxieties of a Japan heading towards the height of its prosperity and developing a fear of flying if not quite of tomatoes.

Karaoke Terror (昭和歌謡大全集, Tetsuo Shinohara, 2003)

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karaoke terror poster.jpgEver since its invention karaoke has provided the means for many a weary soul to ease their burdens, but there may be a case for wondering if escapism is a valid goal in a society which seems to be content in stagnation. The awkwardly titled Karaoke Terror (昭和歌謡大全集, Showa Kayo Daizenshu), adapted from the book Popular Hits of the Showa Era by Audition’s Ryu Murakami, pits two very different groups of karaoke enthusiasts against each other – aimless adolescent males, and jaded middle-aged women. Despite the differences in their ages and experiences, both enjoy singing the wistful bubblegum pop of an earlier generation as if drunk on national nostalgia and longing for the lost innocence of Japan’s hopeful post-war endeavour to rebuild itself better than it had been before.

We open with the slackers and a voice over from the presumed “hero” of the film, Ishihara (Ryuhei Matsuda), who informs us that he can’t really remember how he met most of the guys he hangs out with but that he always knew the one of them, Sugioka (Masanobu Ando), was a bit cracked in the head. In a motif that will be repeated, Sugioka catches sight of a middle-aged woman just on the way back from a shopping trip and decides he must have her but his attempts to pick her up fail spectacularly at which point he whips out his knife and slashes her throat.

Meanwhile, across town, a middle-aged woman, Hemmi (Kayoko Kishimoto), offers to let a co-worker share her umbrella but the co-worker misinterprets this small gesture of courtesy as romantic interest and crudely asks her “how about a fuck?” to which Hemmi is quite rightly outraged. Rather than apologise, the co-worker shrugs and says his “direct” approach works six times out of eight and some women even appreciate it. Once she manages to get away from her odious aggressor, Hemmi ends up stumbling over the body of the woman murdered by Sugioka and realises she knows her. The murdered woman was one of six all named Midori who were brought together for a newspaper article about the lives of middle-aged divorced women and have stayed “friends”. Outraged about this assault not just on their friend and their sex but directly against “women of a certain age” who continue to be the butt of a societal joke, the Midoris decide they want revenge and hatch a plan off Sugioka, but once they have, the slackers hit back by offing a Midori and so it continues with ever-increasing levels of violence.

Which ever way you slice it, you can’t deny the Midoris have a point and Hemmi’s continuing outrage is fully justified. When the boys rock up at a mysterious general goods store out in the country looking for a gun, the proprietor (Yoshio Harada) is only too happy to give it to them when they explain they need it for revenge and that their targets are middle-aged women. The proprietor has a lot to say about ladies of a certain age. In fact he hates them and thinks that bossy, embittered, unproductive women “too old” to fulfil their only reason for existence will be the only ones to survive a nuclear apocalypse that even the cockroaches cannot overcome. The boys appear timid and inexperienced but ironically enough can’t take their eyes off the middle-aged woman from across the way and her sexy dance routines. They feel entitled to female deference and cannot accept a woman’s right to decline. The Midoris are sick of being “humiliated”. They’ve fallen from Japan’s conformist path for female success in getting divorced or attempting to pursue careers. They’ve lost their children and endured constant ridicule as “sad” or “desperate”, made to feel as if their presence in the workplace past a certain age was “inappropriate” and the prices they have paid for their meagre successes were not worth the reward. They strike back not just at these psychotic boys but at a society which has persistently enacted other kinds of violence upon them.

Meanwhile, the boys remain boys, refusing adulthood and responsibility by wasting their time on idle pursuits. Truth be told, karaoke performances involving dance routines and elaborate costumes is not a particularly “cool” hobby by the standards of the time but it appears that none of these men have much else in their lives to invest themselves in. With the economy stagnating and the salaryman dream all but dead, you can’t blame them for their apathy or for the rejection of the values of their parents’ generation, but you can blame them for their persistent refusal to grow up and tendency to allow their insecurities to bubble over into violence.

As it turns out, adolescent males and middle-aged women have more in common than might be thought in their peripheral existences, exiled from the mainstream success which belongs exclusively to middle-aged and older men who’ve been careful to (superficially at least) adhere to all the rules of a conformist society. Neither group of friends is especially friendly, only latterly realising that “real” connections are forged through direct communication. Their mutual apathy is pierced only by violence which, ironically, allows their souls to sing and finally shows them just what all those cheerful songs were really about. Darkly comic and often surreal, Karaoke Terror is a sideways look at two diametrically opposed groups finding unexpected common ground in the catharsis of vengeance only for their internecine warfare to graduate into world ending pettiness.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The greatest hits of the Showa era:

Koi no Kisetsu – Pinky & Killers

Hoshi no Nagare ni – Akiko Kikuchi

Chanchiki Okesa – Haruo Minami

Shiroi Cho no Samba – Kayoko Moriyama

Linda Linda – The Blue Hearts

Sweet Memories – Seiko Matsuda

Kaze Tachinu – Seiko Matsuda

Minato ga Mieru Oka – Aiko Hirano

Sabita Knife – Yujiro Ishihara

Hone Made Aishite – Jo Takuya

Kimi to Itsumademo – Yuzo Kayama

Mata Au Hi Made – Kiyohiko Ozaki

69 (Lee Sang-il, 2004)

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69Ryu Murakami is often thought of as the foremost proponent of Japanese extreme literature with his bloody psychological thriller/horrifying love story Audition adapted into a movie by Takashi Miike which itself became the cornerstone of a certain kind of cinema. However, Murakami’s output is almost as diverse as Miike’s as can be seen in his 1987 semi-autobiographical novel 69. A comic coming of age tale set in small town Japan in 1969, 69 is a forgiving, if occasionally self mocking, look back at what it was to grow up on the periphery of massive social change.

The swinging sixties may have been in full swing in other parts of the world with free love, rock and roll and revolution the buzz words of the day but if you’re 17 years old and you live in a tiny town maybe these are all just examples of exciting things that don’t have an awful lot to do with you. If there’s one thing 69 really wants you know it’s that teenage boys are always teenage boys regardless of the era and so we follow the adventures of a typical 17 year old, Ken (Satoshi Tsumabuki), whose chief interest in life is, you guessed it, girls.

Ken has amassed a little posse around himself that he likes to amuse by making up improbable fantasies about taking off to Kyoto and sleeping with super models (oddly they almost believe him). He talks a big about Godard and Rimbaud, posturing as an intellectual, but all he’s trying to do is seem “cool”. He likes rock music (but maybe only because it’s “cool” to like rock music) and becomes obsessed with the idea of starting his own Woodstock in their tiny town but mostly only because girls get wild on drugs and take their tops off at festivals! When the object of his affection states she likes rebellious guys like the student protestors in Tokyo, Ken gets the idea of barricading the school and painting incomprehensible, vaguely leftist jargon all over the walls as a way of getting her attention (and a degree of kudos for himself).

69 is a teen coming of age comedy in the classic mould but it would almost be a mistake to read it as a period piece. Neither director Lee Sang-il nor any of the creative team are children of the ‘60s so they don’t have any of the nostalgic longing for an innocent period of youth such as perhaps Murakami had when writing the novel (Murakami himself was born in 1952). The “hero”, Ken, is a posturing buffoon in the way that many teenage boys are, but the fact that he’s so openly cynical and honest about his motivations makes him a little more likeable. Ken’s “political action” is merely a means of youthful rebellion intended to boost his own profile and provide some diversion at this relatively uninteresting period of his life before the serious business of getting into university begins and then the arduous yet dell path towards a successful adulthood.

His more intellectual, bookish and handsome buddy Adama (Masanobu Ando) does undergo something of a political awakening after the boys are suspended from school and he holes up at home reading all kinds of serious literature but even this seems like it might be more a kind of stir crazy madness than a general desire to enact the revolution at a tiny high school in the middle of nowhere. Ken’s artist father seems oddly proud of his son’s actions, as if they were part of a larger performance art project rather than the idiotic, lust driven antics of a teenage boy but even if the kids pay lip service to opposing the war in Vietnam which they see on the news every night, it’s clear they don’t really care as much as about opposing a war as they do about being seen to have the “cool” opinion of the day.

Lee takes the period out of the equation a little giving it much less weight than in Murakami’s source novel which is very much about growing up in the wake of a countercultural movement that is actually happening far away from you (and consequently seems much more interesting and sophisticated). Were it not for the absence of mobile phones and a slightly more innocent atmosphere these could easily have been the teenagers of 2003 when the film was made. This isn’t to criticise 69 for a lack of aesthetic but to point out that whereas Murakami’s novel was necessarily backward looking, Lee’s film has half an eye on the future.

Indeed, there’s far less music than one would expect in the soundtrack which includes a few late ‘60s rock songs but none of the folk/protest music that the characters talk about. At one point Ken talks about Simon & Garfunkel with his crush Matsui (Rina Ohta) who reveals her love for the song At the Zoo so Ken claims to have all of the folk duo’s records and agrees to lend them to her though his immediately asking to borrow money from his parents to buy a record suggests he was just pretending to be into a band his girl likes. Here the music is just something which exists to be cool or uncool rather than an active barrier between youth and age or a talisman of a school of thought.

Lee’s emphasis is firmly with the young guys and their late adolescence growth period, even if it seems as if there’s been little progress by the end of the film. There’s no real focus on their conflict with the older generation and the movie doesn’t even try to envisage the similar transformation among the girls outside of the way the boys see them which is necessarily immature. That said, the film is trying to cast a winking, wry look back at youth in all its eager to please insincerity. It’s all so knowingly silly, posturing to enact a revolution even though there’s really no need for one in this perfectly pleasant if slightly dull backwater town. They’ll look back on all this and laugh one day that they could have cared so much about about being cool because they didn’t know who they were, and we can look back with them, and laugh at ourselves too.

Ryu Murakami’s original novel is currently available in the UK from Pushkin Press translated by Ralph McCarthy and was previously published in the US in the same translation by Kodansha USA (but seems to be out of print).

Unsubtitled trailer:

and just because I love it, Simon & Garfunkel At the Zoo

Audition (オーディション, Takashi Miike, 1999)

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audition-posterReview of Takashi Miike’s Audition (オーディション) – first published by UK Anime Network.

The world was a much more innocent place back in 1999. Takashi Miike already had 34 films to his name before Audition became his breakout hit even whilst seeing him branded “sick” by a disgusted audience member at the film’s otherwise successful screening at the Rotterdam film festival. Based on the book of the same name by Japan’s master of the nasty psychological thriller Ryu Murakami, Audition is the twisted romantic nightmare to end all twisted romantic nightmares.

Aoyama is a widower with an almost grown-up child. Now that his parental responsibilities are changing, and spurred on by his encouraging son, Aoyama perhaps feels ready to move into another phase of his life by considering the idea of getting married again. However, Aoyama is a sensitive and romantic man who’s actually a little naive when it comes to matters of the heart and obviously hasn’t had much experience in the dating world in the last twenty years. He turns to an old friend who happens to be a casting director and comes up with the novel (if somewhat inappropriate) idea of letting Aoyama sit in on an audition to look for a new wife.

In glancing over the headshot resumés, one catches his eye – that of a former ballet dancer who equates having had to abandon her dream of becoming a professional dancer because of an injury with a sort of spiritual death. This deep sense of loss strikes a chord in the widowed Aoyama and despite his friend’s warnings that she gives him the creeps, Asami is the one he’s set his heart on. However, Asami is not the sweet and innocent girl she first appears to be…

In the intervening 15 years since its original release, Audition has amassed something of a reputation which is to say that viewers will almost certainly be aware of its “extreme” nature. However, Audition arguably works best when seen blind as it begins as a fairly straightforward romantic drama in which a broken hearted widower begins to live again thanks to the attentions of a shy young woman. Of course, Miike is peppering the otherwise anodyne love story with subtle (and not so subtle) clues all the way through, planting doubts in our minds right away. Is Aoyama just an old fool who’s lost his head over a young beauty or is he right to grow suspicious in the face of the ever increasing, yet circumstantial, evidence of Asami’s strangeness?

Is Asami hiding a dark secret, or is Aoyama projecting his fears of romantic entanglements onto her  silhouette and therefore creating, in some sense, a villainess worthy of his anxieties? According to Miike himself, Audition is not a horror movie (Japanese horror movies are linked with the supernatural and Audition’s terrors are very much of the real world) – Murakami in fact wrote the book as a strange kind of “love letter” to a woman he had wronged. Miike sought to envisage her reply and gives her an opportunity to offer a series of extremely dark explanations of her own. Neither Aoyama or Asami have been honest with themselves or each other. Aoyama is looking for a cookie cutter ideal to fit into the pre-made box marked “wife”, and well, it would be better not to go into all the various ways Asami has misrepresented herself but she does have a point when she calls Aoyama on how easy it was to make him fall for her meek and feeble innocent act.

Asami and Aoyama are always working at cross purposes to each other, engaged in a macabre dance where Asami leads by stealth, waltzing Aoyama into her spider’s web of vengeance by neatly subverting his ideas of femininity. However, this is not to cast Asami as a vile temptress or the predatory female born of male fears of emasculation (though these ideas are definitely in play), nor is she an avenging feminist warrior so much as a lonely, damaged woman. At the very end of the film the pair have perhaps reached a kind of understanding as, according to Asami, only in extreme pain does one understand one’s own mind. Left maimed and helpless, each is scarred and broken but alive and, perhaps, at peace at last.

Audition is now re-released on blu-ray in the UK from Arrow Films in a significantly better transfer than the previous US blu-ray from Shout Factory.