Tag: Ryuya Wakaba

My Sunshine (ぼくのお日さま, Hiroshi Okuyama, 2024)

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A golden light seems to pour into the life of Takuya (Keitatsu Koshiyama), a nervous young man with a stammer, as he stands transfixed by the elegant movements of a figure skater. As the world around him literally brightens, he begins to discover another side of himself, though it’s never quite clear if it’s Sakura (Kiara Takanashi), a moody teenage girl whose attitude to figure skating seems ambivalent at best, with whom he’s fallen in love or the simple act of figure skating itself. 

Drawing on autobiographical experience, Okuyama studied figure skating himself while his older sister trained to be a champion, My Sunshine (ぼくのお日さま, Boku no Ohisama) otherwise roots itself in the small-town Japan of the late ‘90s and 2000s in which being different was not exactly welcomed. But in fact, most people seem accepting of Takuya, if in a sometimes patronising way, viewing him as a boy with his head in the clouds and cutting him off when he attempts to speak rather than give him the time to finish. When the teacher is going around the class asking the children to read out a stanza of a poem each, he picks on Takuya and tells him to take his time, though the boy’s anxiety is palpable. The teacher may be caught between two options and struggling to decide which is better, not asking him to read at all to spare him from his classmates’ mocking which would also be to exclude him and reinforce a sense of inferiority in his otherness, or to ask him deliberately and try to encourage patience to teach him and the other children that there’s nothing wrong with the way he speaks. 

But in any case, Takuya is already something of an outsider in that he has no aptitude for sports and it’s never clear if he actually enjoys them or just participates because it’s what you do in this town to be man. When a recent arrival to the town and former international pro-figure skater Hiroshi (Sosuke Ikematsu) catches sight of him clumsily trying to teach himself how to dance like Sakura, it enlivens something in him that reminds him of the passion he once felt for skating. He finds himself wanting to help the boy, gifting him his old figure skating skates and teaching him for free before hitting on the idea of training him alongside Sakura as a pair.

Sakura isn’t all that keen to begin with, though at times, it seems as though she may not even like figure skating and is only doing it because her mother makes her. She tells Hiroshi that she isn’t aiming to become the best ice dancer and is a little resentful of being forced to go back to basics to meet Takuya’s skill level but goes along with it because the coach says so. What she thinks of Takuya isn’t exactly clear, though she seems to look down on him a little like the other kids who also mock him giving up ice hockey to do a “girl’s” sport. For her part she seems to have a crush on the handsome and mysterious Hiroshi that, like Takuya, she is unable to articulate. For this reason, along with an insecurity in her talent, she resents the special attention Takuya seems to be getting when it’s her mother who’s paying for the lessons and comes to the conclusion that he’s just more interested in him than her.

She may not altogether be incorrect. In his early coaching sessions with Sakura, Hiroshi doesn’t seem all that invested and is distracted by Takuya in the same way Takuya is distracted by the sunlight or the snow. In trying to help Takuya, he’s trying to help himself and for a time succeeds as the three of them generate a joyful familial relationship, culminating in a day skating on a frozen lake. But he too is unable to be honest about the fact that he came to this rural town to be with his partner who decided to take over the family business when his father passed away. Kai (Ryuya Wakaba) laughs off questions about whether he’s married yet, and the two men seem to live together quietly otherwise isolated from the community around them. When Sakura catches sight of them together, she realises something she may not really be equipped to fully understand, only further deepening her sense of resentment in an unreasonable feeling of betrayal. It isn’t really homophobia that motivates her as much jealousy when she suddenly brands Hiroshi as “‘disgusting” and accuses him of getting a kick out of making a boy do a girl’s sport, excusing her conviction that he prefers Takuya over her and potentially giving herself an out to quit skating (though it seems her mother’s not taking the hint).

But like Sakura, Hiroshi is also uncertain if this is the right place for him or if he and his partner can really live together in this small town permanently. Though he answers “of course” when Kai asks if he’s glad he came, Hiroshi pointedly gives no answer when he’s asked if he really wants to be here. Kai says that he hasn’t talked about skating like this for ages nor seemed so happy, suggesting that there may have been something missing in his life that the relationship didn’t compensate for and may not survive without. How his professional career ended is never explained, though his telling Sakura that he only got to compete internationally because of the lack of male dancers speaks to a degree of insecurity that contributes to a lack of ambition in his personal and professional lives. All three of them are, for varying reasons, unable to say what they really want or how they really feel. Though they find temporary solace in their fragile bond, it is only, as Takuya’s brother cruelly puts it, meant to last until the snow melts. Nevertheless, now dressed in a new school uniform clearly far too big for him that suggests he has some more growing to do, Takuya may have found a means of self-expression in dance that might give him the courage to speak his mind.

My Sunshine screened as part of this year’s Queer East.

Trailer (English subtitles)

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

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“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)

Wonderwall: The Movie (ワンダーウォール 劇場版, Yuki Maeda, 2020)

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It’s funny, in a way, that young people are often the ones fighting to preserve the old while those in middle-age and beyond are largely keen to bulldoze the past for future gain. Yuki Maeda’s campus drama Wonderwall (ワンダーウォール 劇場版, Wonderwall: Gekijoban) sees a collection of students take a stand against the bureaucratic capitalism of their university in their attempt to save a much loved dorm but largely finding their efforts frustrated by an implacable hierarchy. 

The Konoe Dorm at Kyoto University was built in 1913, which is to say the beginning of the Taisho era in which arts and culture flourished in a rapidly modernising and international nation. As one of the students tells us, Konoe is run not by the faculty but the students themselves and operates like a commune in which there is no hierarchy, all are equal and equally responsible. They have regular “meetings” about various domestic problems such as refuse collection which can go on for hours because all decisions must be unanimous while they also operate gender neutral bathrooms so that everyone really can be equal and free to be themselves. It’s impossible not to see the university’s attempts to destroy it as an attempt on the students’ autonomy and an attempt to impose order on their bohemian existence. 

At more than one point, a student remembers walking past the alley that leads to the dorm in the dark and seeing the light glowing from its doors as if beckoning them in. In this space, the students inherit what has been passed down to them while teaching each other and the next generation what they know including the negotiation skills they’ve been using to argue their case in their ongoing battle with the faculty. The film’s title refers to a plastic screen that was placed in the student affairs office separating the students from the staff so that they could no longer meet them on their own terms. The narrator likens the wall to the one that fell in Berlin in 1989 and laments that back then we knocked walls down but now we only throw them up. The students argue that the dorm is well built and of architectural interest while it would otherwise be possible to renovate and bring it up to current earthquake codes if only the university would agree. Tragically, a sympathetic teacher who is forced to agree with them is then compelled to reverse his decision and shockingly dies not long after presumably from the stress of the situation along with his own inner conflict regarding the treatment of the students. 

Mifune (Satoshi Nakazaki), the leader of the protests, eventually becomes disheartened. They managed to oust the old battleaxe from the front desk and assumed they could take a step forward to the next boss, but she was merely replaced and by a pretty young woman to boot leaving the guys feeling like they’ll never win. It transpires that the university wants the land the dorm sits on to build a high rise along with additional medical and engineering labs as these are the subjects that bring in funding which is otherwise thin on the ground from the current government. Yet as a visitor says, if prosperity made you happy there wouldn’t be so many young people who feel they have no option other than to take their own lives. If so many people are fighting for its survival, the dorm must have something essential for human happiness. Mifune comes to describe his feeling for the building as something like love in the warmth with which it inspires him.

Quite poignantly, Maeda ends on a series of title cards revealing that the university now refuses to speak to the student body at all and has in fact silenced them, even going so far as to sue 15 tenants who refused the order to move out. Another of the students wonders if the dorm was a victim of its own success, that their “utopian” thinking left them unable to unite for a common goal and perhaps it would have been better if they’d turned to the dark side and gone in all guns blazing in a show of violent defiance. The action shifts to a pair of musical set pieces in which the students and well-wishers play the “Wonderwall” song as a makeshift orchestra breathing life into the rapidly dilapidating building’s walls while continuing to fight for the survival not only of the Konoe Dorm but everything it represents in the freedom and community the students fear will soon disappear from the their lives. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Laughing Under the Clouds (曇天に笑う, Katsuyuki Motohiro, 2018)

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A cheerful former samurai chooses laughter as the best weapon against existential anxiety in Katsuyuki Motohiro’s big budget adaptation of the manga by Karakara-Kemuri, Laughing Under the Clouds (曇天に笑う, Donten ni Warau). Set amid the chaos of the late Meiji social revolution in which the samurai are no more, Motohiro’s supernatural drama is in some ways uncomfortably reactionary even as it takes as its heroes the defenders of a burgeoning new democracy who, our hero aside, seem to have a tendency towards authoritarianism in their insistence on the kind of order only they can bring. 

Indeed, prisoners brought to “prison island” are coldly informed that “hope, freedom and peace. These are things of the past” because “once you’re in here you’ll never get out”, “you have no rights in here”. Most of the prisoners are here it seems because of their opposition to the new regime including the mysterious Fuma Kotaro former leader of a ninja clan wiped out by imperial forces now held in solitary confinement. The man we first see dragged in is apparently a former samurai struggling to adjust to his loss of privilege and unable to find new ways of living in a world of superficial equality. 

Yet it’s not this destabilisation of the social order which presents the moment of chaos so much as a prophecy that Orochi, a vengeful snake spirit, is due to make his return to Earth and wreak even more havoc. As the legend goes, Orochi brought clouds and rain which provided humanity with a bountiful harvest yet humanity resented him for his ugliness and so Orochi took revenge for their ingratitude by creating chaos. Tenka (Sota Fukushi), a former member of the Nile imperial Wild Hound squad, sees his familial legacy as the duty to combat the vicious cycle of hate through the power of laughter. His decision to leave the Wild Hounds after his parents were murdered by ninjas in order to care for his orphaned brothers is another indication of his essential humanity as is his determination that he will protect not only his town but whoever it is that has been selected as a vessel for Orochi’s return. 

These humanitarian concerns stand in direct contrast with the unfeeling authoritarianism of the Wild Hounds or the innate cruelty of the existence of a place like prison island where those who threaten the new regime are exploited as slave labour. On the other hand, the anger of the disempowered ninja clans is perhaps understandable even if their opposition to the regime, intending to harness the power of Orochi to overthrow the government, is an attempt to hang on to their privilege as a path back to the way things used to be. As such it’s they rather than Orochi who become the central villain though one could also read Orochi as an expression of the intense anxiety of the age especially as it invades the body of a young man himself feeling resentful and confused while looking for a sense of direction in a rapidly changing society. 

Tenka’s opposition is rooted in cheerfulness, in learning to laugh even under the clouds and becoming stronger for it though his otherwise openhearted nature stands in direct contrast with his oft repeated catchphrase “I am the law” as he enforces order in his small provincial town willingly delivering criminals and fugitives to prison island but also making a point of befriending a former ninja, Shirasu (Ren Kiriyama), he rescued after the raid which killed his parents in acknowledging that Shirasu himself was not responsible for their deaths only the chaotic world in which they live. 

Boasting some impressive special effects as Tenka and the forces of order team up for some spiritual magic to send Orochi back where he came from, Laughing Under the Clouds ultimately sells a positive message casting Tenka’s revolution as an ideal world of love, laughter, and happiness while simultaneously ignoring the oppressive qualities of new social model such as its shady prisons, lack of tolerance for opposing political views, and failure to make good on the promises of a classless society. Nevertheless with its fantastical production design and inherent cheerfulness it does perhaps suggest that laughter may be the only real salve for internal darkness.  

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Penalty Loop (ペナルティループ, Shinji Araki, 2024)

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Time loop cinema has made a resurgence in Japan of late, but Shinji Araki’s Penalty Loop (ペナルティループ) is not quite what you’d assume it to be rather a meditation on the grieving process in a constant process of recycling rage and hurt day after day. When his girlfriend is murdered and her body is found dumped in a local lake, Jun becomes obsessed with the idea of revenge and turns up at the killer’s place of work where he poisons his morning coffee and then stabs him to death in his car before poetically dumping his corpse in the same lake where disposed of Yui’s (Rio Yamashita) body.

The weird thing is, that Jun (Ryuya Wakaba) wakes up the next day to discover it’s still 6th June and he has to do the same thing all over again. Rather than switching up his methods, he simply repeats the process but it turns out the Killer (Yusuke Iseya) is also aware they’re trapped in a loop and starts trying to avoid being killed. Before too long, the men have begun to trauma bond over their shared despair of being trapped in this constant cycle of retribution and become almost friends in an absurdist, existential meditation on the fallacies of justice and revenge. The killer and his indirect victim are locked in this cycle together and, the film seems to suggest, can only escape it through a process of healing and forgiveness rather than Jun’s futile attempts at revenge by killing the killer over and over again.

It is though somewhat perplexing that Jun never asks the Killer why he killed Yui and shows no real curiosity in his motives only asking him if he killed a lot of people. Yui also seems to have been mixed up in a concurrent conspiracy which the film does not go into or was in fact locked into her only cycle of despair and futily as the Killer suggests in volunteering that Yui wanted to die anyway, telling him that she had nothing to live for and was filled with emptiness. Of course, perhaps it’s simply the case that a kind of justice has already taken place in the “real” world and that Jun already knows why Yui was killed but simply wants a more personal kind of revenge to satisfy his hurt and anger, or that the Killer would not really be able to tell him much anyway because we can’t be sure he’s “real” or just a character existing for the purpose of Jun’s revenge no different from a dummy punch bag.

A strange, grinning man (Jin Daeyeon) is often seen observing the two men and later becomes irate on hearing Jun state that he no longer plans to kill the Killer but seems to have befriended him instead. His presence hints at a wider authoritarian presence that feeds off Jun’s negative emotions and forces him to continue vengeance long after he has tired of it. At this point, his killings become less violent. Rather than the poison and a knife, the bloody struggle in the car and the clinical process of bagging the body to be dumped in a lake, Jun uses a gun and the Killer patiently allows himself to be killed so that the cycle can continue. Further revelations suggest that the loop is less cosmic than commercial and Jun is constrained by a contract he signed for something that is supposed to be a kind of therapy the ethics of which would be very debatable, as would the offer of a secondary “rehab” programme on his completion of the process though how he, a man with no apparent income who lives in a room that already resembles a prison where he builds model houses that express the life he might have liked to give Yui, would be able to afford all this.

In any case, it’s true enough that Jun is imprisoned by his grief and powerlessness and his desire for vengeance is an attempt to free himself though in the end he can only do it by abandoning his rage and violence and finding empathy for the killer with whom he is trapped in this hellish cycle of grief and retribution. Araki lends his quest a dystopian air, taking place largely in some kind of hydroponic facility which otherwise exists only for the purposes of Jun’s revenge. Strangely quirky in its absurdist humour and bleak in some of its implications the film otherwise suggests that forgiveness is the only path out of grief for the cycle of vengeance will never really end.

Penalty Loop screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

Ichiko (市子, Akihiro Toda, 2023)

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If for some reason your name were taken from you and it became much easier to live by some other person’s name that you were compelled to use, would you be content to be them or be prepared to go to extreme lengths to reclaim your own identity? Based on his own play, Akihiro Toda’s Ichiko (市子) explores similar themes to his 2018 film The Name as the absent heroine fights to reassert herself just as we try to piece her together to a create semblance of the whole being we may never truly understand.

In many ways, it’s absence that defines Ichiko (Hana Sugisaki) who like the mysterious spirit of a fairy tale must be gone as soon as she is seen. Or at least, you could forgive Yoshinori (Ryuya Wakaba) for feeling this way when his girlfriend of three years suddenly disappears soon after he’d presented her with marriage papers. It’s not until he’s visited by a policeman, Goto (Shohei Uno), sometime later that he’s forced to admit he actually knew very little about her. He assumed she’d had a difficult past, and neither of them said too much about themselves so he doesn’t know if her parents are still alive, where she was from, or if she has any family or friends she might have gone to. What shocks him most, however, is that Goto informs him that on paper at least the woman named Ichiko Kawabe does not exist.

Flashing back across several years from Ichiko’s childhood to the present day, we see people call her by another name which she often tries to correct telling them that her name is Ichiko but it isn’t originally clear to us if this is because she’s being forced to live under false name or if she merely dislikes the name she was given and wishes to be “Ichiko” instead. In any case, she appears to have developed a healthy fear of letting anyone in thanks to her incredibly disordered home life. At times, would-be friends attempt to visit, but are either kicked out or merely horrified by what they see there and leave soon afterwards putting an end to the friendship. That might in itself explain why she may wish to be someone else, but in fact what she wants is the right to be herself.

Gradually it becomes clear that because of the way Japanese society works, Ichiko has been forced to live two lives as one and can live neither fully. It’s not quite right to call it a double life or to say that she multiple personalities but more that she cannot quite locate herself within herself and is increasingly distressed in being forced to answer to a name which is not her own and live someone else’s life for them. Later she explains that all she wanted was a “normal” existence though this is the very thing denied her in part because she is denied her rightful identity though there is something quite poignant in her remaining innocence. Her touching description of finding happiness in the scent of miso soup wafting from ordinary houses at dinner time expresses her desire for the comfort and safety of a conventional family she never really had or may perhaps have experienced for a brief moment in early childhood. 

Ironically enough, she exclaims that she likes walking in the rain because it washes everything clean though for her it will spell disaster in quite literally revealing the skeletons buried in her past and with them exposing the precarious web of lies on which her adult life was based in an attempt solely to recapture the authenticity of her essential identity. A further irony may be that the identity she ends up with may not even be her own but that of someone else who decided they no longer wanted theirs, perhaps because the world had also been unkind to them and so they did not understand its worth. As the policeman says, she did what she had to do survive whether that be lying about who she was or otherwise burying her other self literally or metaphorically. Dark and melancholy, Toda’s twisty psychological mystery has its poignant qualities but ultimately asks whether living as your true self is worth the price or it’s better just to accept the name that fate and society have dealt you.

Ichiko screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

Original trailer (English subtitles)

God Seeks in Return (神は見返りを求める, Keisuke Yoshida, 2022)

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It’s perfectly natural a lot of the time to feel as if you expect nothing in return for helping someone, after all it’s only what you should do as a fellow human being. But really we do expect something even if it’s just acknowledgement and it can be hurtful and upsetting if don’t feel we get it while the sensation that we’re being taken advantage of can leave us feeling silly for having offered in the first place. Keisuke Yoshida’s Good Seeks in Return (神は見返りを求める, Kami wa Mikaeri wo Motomeru) revels in these human paradoxes as a self-confessed nice guy is pushed to breaking point by the fallout from all his attempts to be neighbourly which seem to have backfired exponentially. 

Then again, Tamogami (Tsuyoshi Muro) almost certainly does at least hope for something in return when he agrees to help out struggling YouTuber Yuri (Yukino Kishii) with her moribund channel by enlivening it with his skills in video editing and design. He isn’t helping her in order to engineer a sexual relationship, and in fact turns Yuri down when she suddenly disrobes exclaiming that it’s the only way she can repay him for his kindness, but does appear interested and is additionally irritated when she begins hanging out with a bunch of vlogger cool kids he thinks are just exploiting her naivety. Yuri had already payed him back with homemade beef stew, an offer that was accepted in the interest of friendship, but her constant references to repayment of a favour expose her idea of relationships as essentially transactional which to be fair they well may be. Even so, she appears somewhat guileless, opportunist rather than calculating and desperate for attention.

That might be why she can’t see that the reason she became unexpectedly popular after agreeing to a “body paint” stunt with a pair of more established YouTubers is that people wanted to see her naked which is why they’re always requesting more of the same. The first half of the film plays as quirky comedy, an offbeat romance between a nice middle-aged man and a dippy young woman who thinks she’s no good at anything and incapable of being alone. But things soon turn sour when one of Yuri’s stunts seems like it might have serious consequences for a local business owner and Tamogami has to muster all of his PR skills to put this particular fire out. The simple friendship between them that was brokered by a weird ogre-like mascot suit Yuri christens Jacob is disrupted by Yuri’s desire for fame as she undergoes a complete personality transformation after falling in with a group of more successful, media savvy YouTubers who have fancy design skills and marketing teams. She dismisses Tamogami as old-fashioned and joins in when the others make fun of him in rejection of the genuine friendship that had arisen between them.

When a friend he’d helped out financially and even stood guarantor on his debts takes his own life Tamogami is deep in the hole. Finally he wonder’s if he shouldn’t have something in return for all the unpaid labour he’s been doing for Yuri but she predictably brushes him off until he finally embarks on a weird vendetta trying to “expose” her YouTube channel for being founded on lies and exploitation. There may be something in her that’s regretful, wistfully looking at the sweater Tamogami had given her with cute illustrations of her and Jacob on it, while her new “god” Murakami openly mocks him leaving her conflicted about the dark side of their new internet endeavour effectively bullying a guy whose only crime was being nice and bit too dull and middle-aged for her new hipster friends sure to drop her like she’s hot as soon as something goes wrong.

Though not as extreme as some of Yoshida’s other films, God Seeks in Return suggests that nice guys never prosper but also that no one’s really as “nice” as they think they are. We wall want something in return even if it’s just a thank you and not to be belittled or taken advantage of. There can be something paradoxically selfish in niceness in which people do it more for their own gratification or to feel they are better than those they help and conversely the same in those who take advantage of others. In it’s way bleak and melancholy in its vision of human relationships, the film nevertheless holds out a faint hope in the reality of the genuine connection between its mismatched heroes no matter how dark and twisted it may eventually become.

God Seeks in Return screens 1st June as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

International trailer (English subtitles)

Punk Samurai (パンク侍、斬られて候, Gakuryu Ishii, 2018)

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Gakuryu Ishii began his career under the name Sogo as a representative of the youth voice, in fact still a college student when invited by Nikkatsu to film a feature-length version of his Panic High School short though they paradoxically saddled him with the more experienced Yukihiro Sawada as a co-director in case his voice turned out to be more youthful than anticipated. In any case, he went on to make his name with a series of anarchic punk films such as Burst City and The Crazy Family before retreating from filmmaking in the early 2000s. When he returned in 2012 with Isn’t Anyone Alive?, he did so under a new name, Gakuryu, as if signalling a new phase in his artistic career that seemed to have left punk behind.

Like 2015’s That’s it, Punk Samurai is billed as a kind of return to Ishii’s anarchic roots while also harking back to surreal samurai movie Gojoe. Even so, Punk Samurai isn’t really a punk samurai film even in its irreverence towards the genre so much as an ironic jidaigeki comedy which eventually positions its hero’s nihilistic outsider status as his saving grace in a “fake” world where nothing has true meaning. “This world might be fake, but I’m alive” he insists, claiming not to ask anything of it, simply stating that he is “different” because he belongs to no group and has been a lonely a wanderer.

Nevertheless, Kake (Go Ayano) had wanted to join a clan so desperately that he spun a tale of dangerous cult rebellion to a naive retainer of a useless lord whose inability to rule has ruined his fiefdom. After killing a pilgrim he believed to be a member of the Bellyshaker Party, Kake is taken in by the Kuroae where he is enlisted by duplicitous councillor Naito (Etsushi Toyokawa) who seizes on the idea of the Bellyshaker threat as a means of undermining his rival, Ohura (Jun Kunimura), to seize the reins from overly serious lord Kuroae (Masahiro Higashide). 

The Bellyshaker cult believes that this “fake” world exists within a giant tapeworm and seeks escape though being excreted by it into the “real” world as a means of achieving some kind of spiritual enlightenment. Their furious belly shaking is deliberately meaningless in an effort to antagonise he tapeworm to such a degree that it gives it spasms to “spew” the believer into a more authentic existence. Not even the cult leader believed this to be true, and as Kake later suggests the appeal lies in a kind of Manichaeanism that allows the believer to believe nothing is their fault it’s just that this “fake” world is wrong. In the end, the conflict comes down to a battle between “monkeys and idiots”, while even an enlightened ape (Masatoshi Nagase) finds his revolution failing and is left with no option other than to retreat to the Heavens. 

The world is indeed in disarray, Kuroae is constantly plagued by his own poor decision making, or failure to make decisions at all, while there are constant allusions to the decline of his clan from persistent famine to military weakness after having made most of his foot soldiers redundant as part of an austerity programme. Many of the recruits to the “fake” Bellyshaker cult resurrected by Naito with the assistance of former devotee Chayama (Tadanobu Asano), who has two telepathic servants who speak for him, are in fact refugees from Kuroae who fled its disorder. Kake prides himself on being an outsider but in reality had wanted to join the clan, and there is perhaps something in the sudden collapse of the world around him along with a return to blue skies the moment his rebellion is ended. 

Yet for all its weirdness and incomprehensibility, for much of is running time Punk Samurai is a typical jidaigeki comedy about a useless lord, his clever underlings, and a chaotic ronin if one that also hints at the absurdist meaninglessness of the hierarchical samurai society. Only in its closing moments does the film truly embrace its punk spirit with psychedelic kaleidoscope backgrounds, electric swords, and the true slash down of the social order as Kake’s life comes full circle proving that even in this “fake” and meaningless world there are some things from which there is no escape.

Punk Samurai is released on blu-ray in the UK on 13th March courtesy of Third Window Films.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

It’s All My Fault (ぜんぶ、ボクのせい, Yusaku Matsumoto, 2022)

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A young boy and a homeless drifter attempt to overcome the legacy of parental rejection in Yusaku Matsumoto’s sensitive coming-of-age drama, It’s all My Fault (ぜんぶ、ボクのせい, Zenbu, Boku no Sei). “It’s all my fault” is something many children think about circumstances which are well beyond their control, but it’s also something they’re encouraged to believe by an abusive or neglectful parent who tells them that they are to blame for the treatment they receive. Nevertheless, Yuta (Haruto Shiratori) comes to think that all the bad things happening in the world are in some way his fault, which might on one level be easier to believe than trying to accept that the world is sometimes a relentlessly unkind place. 

A sad and sullen boy, Yuta is viewed with some suspicion by the staff at the care home where lives due to his brooding nature and refusal to speak. The cause of his anger is that he was told by a previous caretaker that he’d be able to see his estranged mother, Rika (Marika Matsumoto), when he entered middle school and is resentful that he has still had no contact with her. The sad fact is, however, that Rika stopped taking their calls a long time ago and seemingly has no further intention of maintaining contact with her son. 

After the orphanage is rocked by a literal earthquake, Yuta sets off to find his mother but though she is moved to see him it quickly becomes clear that she is not really prepared to play a maternal role. When her drunken boyfriend returns home, she tells him that Yuta is a relative’s child she agreed to watch for a short time and appears otherwise conflicted, solicitously making sure he has enough to eat but more or less forgetting he’s even there whenever the boyfriend is around. Eventually she rings the care home to come and take him back, forever ruining Yuta’s faith in genuine human connection. 

Managing to run away, Yuta is later taken in by eccentric drifter Sakamoto (Joe Odagiri) who strongly identifies with the boy in having grown up with an abusive mother whose legacy he has been unable to escape. Shiori (Ririka Kawashima), a teenage girl with issues of her own who also befriends Sakamoto, is envious of his untethered lifestyle viewing him as free and bound by no one. But in truth he too is trapped as symbolised by the broken van which prevents him from leaving to travel to Nagoya and confront his mother as he often says he intends to do. Sakamoto describes his trauma as a like a rock in the heart that tortures him as he continues to resent his mother for the abuse she dealt him while simultaneously suggesting that she has dementia and may not even remember that she has a son. Yuta by contrast insists that his mother is not a bad woman and continues to yearn for her, treasuring the friendship bracelet she made for him only for it to be broken by thuggish teens who get their kicks bullying those they perceive to be weaker than themselves.

Sakamoto becomes an awkward paternal figure, teaching Yuta how to survive in his way of life by hatching scams on wealthy passers by and fetching junk to sell to a local scrap merchant but is equally arrested, unable to come to terms with the traumatic past and therefore unable to move on. Shiori envies what she sees as his freedom in part because she has little of her own. Secretly blaming her authoritarian father for her mother’s death which she has come to doubt was really from an illness as she was told, Shiori has an internalised sense of shame and inadequacy knowing that she cannot be the person her father wants her to be and longs to escape him. Yuta continues to dream of a family, inviting Shiori to come with them to Nagoya when the truck is fixed, but is met only with despair as the world conspires against his happiness and encourages him to blame himself for his all his misfortune. Shot with an unsentimental if empathetic eye, Matsumoto’s hard-hitting drama examines the legacies of parental abuse, neglect, or absence persisting long into adulthood while his young hero struggles with himself in his conflicting emotions towards the woman who abandoned him with only an impossible future. 

It’s All My Fault screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Prior Convictions (前科者, Yoshiyuki Kishi, 2022)

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An earnest young woman finds herself questioning her way of life after one of her charges is implicated in a spate of murders in Yoshiyuki Kishi’s social drama Prior Convictions (前科者, Zenkamono). As the double meaning of the English title implies, the issue is as much about preconceived notions and unfair judgements as it is about “crime”, its causes and legacies, while ultimately arguing for a more compassionate approach to law enforcement which prizes healing and rehabilitation over meaningless punishment. 

Kayo (Kasumi Arimura) is what’s known as a volunteer probation officer which is to say that she assists those who’ve recently been released from prison to reintegrate into mainstream society so that they can live comfortable lives within the law. She is not however a civil servant and though making regular reports to an official probation officer has very little power and no pay for her work which can at times be difficult and emotionally draining especially considering that she also needs to work a regular job in a convenience store to support herself. In what seems like a very poor safeguarding decision, she meets most of her clients in her own home where she lives alone one of them even breaking in while she’s not there for an impromptu hotpot party. 

While she is exasperated by some of her charges such as a woman who can’t seem to stick to a regular job no matter how many she finds her, Kayo is incredibly proud of her work with Kudo (Go Morita), a quiet and soulful middle-aged man who was convicted of murder after stabbing a co-worker who had been bullying him so badly that he lost the hearing in one ear. Kudo had been struggling to reconcile himself to his crime, intensely worried that while unable to understand why he did it he might end up doing it again. When Kudo suddenly disappears after being linked to a series of suspicious deaths most assume the worst, but Kayo alone refuses to believe that Kudo could be the killer and is determined to find out what’s really going on if only to vindicate her conviction that her work is good and useful rather than naive and misguided as some including intense police officer Takimoto (Hayato Isomura) seem to see it. 

As Kayo later reveals she’s carrying some baggage herself which contributed to her decision to begin working with those who’ve been convicted of crimes, but is doing it with the aim of reducing suffering and ending the cycle so that there are no more victims or victimisers. Also wounded, Takimoto tells her that murderers aren’t human and can never be rehabilitated, while she’s forced to consider the problem from all angles meeting with a lawyer (Tae Kimura) who defended an abusive husband who murdered his wife and learning that she did so for similar reasons to herself certain that he too deserved a second chance and could perhaps be reformed if given the proper treatment. Kayo sees that many of the people she meets ended up committing crimes because of traumatic personal circumstances and if someone had helped them earlier they may not have offended in the first place. She can’t change the past but at least in helping them now she might prevent further crimes in the future while giving them a source of stability as they attempt to root themselves more firmly in mainstream society. 

Inspired by Masahito Kagawa’s manga, Prior Convictions was previously adapted into six-part WOWWOW TV drama to which the film is technically a sequel though fairly stand alone in its gentle unpacking of Kayo’s own unresolved trauma and subsequent epiphanies as regards her relationships with those she’s trying to help. As one young woman puts it, they find her vulnerability reassuring in contrast to the often authoritarian, didactic approaches taken by law enforcement and social services who only talk down to them from a condescending place of superiority rather than trying to meet them on a more human level. In the end it’s about healing, trying to find an accommodation with the traumatic past and limiting its legacy to break the cycle of pain and violence. The prior convictions which most need addressing are those of a judgemental society that all too often contributes to the mechanisms of violence in seeking to punish rather than to help.

Prior Convictions screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

International trailer (English subtitles)