Tag: Shinobu Otake

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)

The Boy and the Heron (君たちはどう生きるか, Hayao Miyazaki, 2023)

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Sales of Genzaburo Yoshino’s 1937 novel How Do You Live? (君たちはどう生きるか, Kimitachi wa Do Ikiru ka? went through the roof when it was announced that the no longer retired Hayao Miyazaki would be directing a new film with the same title. Predictably, Miyazaki’s film turned out not to be an adaptation at all, or at least not a literal sense, but was intensely interested in the question not so much how do you live but how will you? Will you allow the past to make you bitter and live in a world of pain and resentment, or will you choose to live in a world of peace and beauty free of human malice?

These are of course the questions faced by a post-war generation, the children of Miyazaki’s own era who came of age in a time of fear and suffering. Mahito (Soma Santoki), the hero, loses his mother in the firebombing of Tokyo. He runs through a world of shadows to save her from the flames but of course, he cannot. A year later everything has changed. His father has remarried, taking his mother’s younger sister Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura) as his new wife. Natsuko is now pregnant which suggests the relationship began some time ago though Mahito knew nothing of it and had no recollection of ever having met Natsuko before being sent to live in her giant mansion in the country more or less untouched by the war. 

It’s here that Mahito’s own malice rises. He is polite, if sullen, but cannot warm to his new stepmother and resents his father’s relationship with her. Perpetually bothered by a grey heron (Masaki Suda) his first thought is to kill it, crafting a bow and arrow from bamboo and one of the heron’s own feathers. Shunned as the new boy at school he hits himself on the head with a rock while his father, Shoichi (Takuya Kimura), comically vows revenge and lets him stay home. As he points out, there’s not much “education” going on anyway with most of the students pulled away from their studies for “voluntary” labour in service of the war effort in this case agricultural. 

Shoichi has moved to the country to open a factory which it seems produces canopies for fighter planes which is all to say that he is profiting from the business of war, though transgressively referencing the failure in Saipan over breakfast with the mild implication that it might work out alright for him. There is after all a grim reason they’ll be in need of large numbers of aircraft parts in the near future. Mahito’s dark impulses are directly linked to those of militarism and the folly of war. When he finally enters the tower of madness apparently constructed by a great-uncle who went insane through reading too many books, he discovers that his enemies are an ever expanding clan of fascistic, man-eating parakeets led by a Mussolini-like despotic leader attempting to manipulate the Master of the tower. 

Inside the tower is a land out of time, a place for those already dead or in essence an eternal past. It’s here that Mahito is presented with a choice, how will he live? Will he choose malice and destruction, or will he choose to leave and build a new world of beauty and peace above? In many ways, the important point is that the choice is his as it is ours, that we are free to decide and that our choices create the world in which we live. Through his adventures in the tower, Mahito begins to come to terms with his situation and resolves to accept Natsuko as a mother and make friends of those he once considered enemies. When the tower itself crumbles, it takes with it the last vestiges of authoritarianism and tyranny.

Prompting his epiphany, Mahito discovers a copy of How Do You Live? in his room, a present from his late mother inscribed to the grown-up Mahito. He is surrounded by the world’s ugliness, forced into a surprisingly graphic fish gutting session that leaves him wiping away blood, recalling his profusely bleeding head injury and the scar it will forever mark him with. Pelicans imprisoned in the other world meanwhile tell him that they have no choice but to behave as they do for the Master of the Tower neglected to put enough fish in the rivers intending them to destroy rather nurture new life while their young too learn all the wrong lessons. Yet there is beauty and strangeness here too, along with kindness and humanity. Boundlessly inventive, Miyazaki couples surrealist visions of murderous birds and the hellish scenes of a city on fire with Mahito the only figure visible in his pale blue school uniform darting through the soot and the shadows. A vivid symphony of life, the film may in its way be about grief and the pain of moving on but finally discovers a kind of serenity in an accommodation with the present and the eternally unfinished question of how you yourself will live. 

The Boy and the Heron screened as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

GO (Isao Yukisada, 2001)

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“We never had a country” a student at a North Korean school in Japan fires back, hinting at his feelings of displacement in being asked to remain loyal to a place he never knew while the culture in which he was born and raised often refuses to accept him. The hero of Isao Yukisada’s Go is not so much searching for an identity as a right to be himself regardless of the labels that are placed on him but is forced to contend with various layers of prejudice and discrimination in a rigidly conformist society.

As he points out, when they call him “Zainichi” it makes it sound as if he is only a “temporary resident” who does not really belong in Japan and will eventually “return” to his “home culture”. In essence, “Zainichi” refers to people of Korean ethnicity who came to Japan during the colonial era and their descendants who are subject to a special immigration status which grants them rights of residency but not citizenship. Sugihara’s (Yosuke Kubozuka) situation is complicated by the fact that his father (Tsutomu Yamazaki) has a North Korean passport, making him a minority even with the Korean-Japanese community. He attends a North Korean school where speaking Japanese is forbidden and is educated in the tenets of revolutionary thought which are of course entirely contrary to the consumerist capitalism of contemporary Japan. 

His father eventually consents to swap his North Korean passport for a South Korean one mostly it seems so he can take a trip to Hawaii with his wife (Shinobu Otake) which seems to Sugihara a trivial reason for making such a big decision especially as it caused the lines of communication to break down with his bother who returned to North. Yet it seems like what each of them is seeking is an expansion of internal borders, the right not to feel bound by questions of national identity in order to live in a place of their own choosing. “I felt like a person for the first time,” Sugihara explains on being given the opportunity to choose his nationality even if it is only the “narrow” choice between North and South Korea. 

But on the other hand he wonders if it would make his life easier if he had green skin so that his “non-Japaneseness” would be obvious. Sugihara reminds us several times that this is a love story, but he delays revealing that he is a Zainichi Korean to his girlfriend because he fears she will reject him once she knows. On visiting Sakurai’s (Ko Shibasaki) home, it becomes obvious that she comes from a relatively wealthy, somewhat conservative family. Her father, who is unaware Sugihara is Korean-Japanese, immediately asks him if he likes “this country” but is irritated when Sugihara asks him if he really knows the meaning behind the various words for “Japan” again hinting at the meaninglessness of such distinctions. When he eventually does tell Sakurai that he is ethnically Korean, her reaction surprises both of them as she recalls her father telling her not to date Korean or Chinese men on account of their “dirty” blood. 

Such outdated views are unfortunately all too common even at the dawn of the new millennium. Even so, Sakurai had not wanted to reveal her full name because she was embarrassed that it is so “very Japanese” while conversely Sugihara takes ownership of the name “Lee Jong-ho”. He embraces the “very Japanese” tradition of rakugo, and hangs out in the Korean restaurant where his mother works dressed in vibrant hanbok. Given a book of Shakespeare by his studious friend, he is struck by the quote which opens the film which states that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet and wonders what difference a name makes when its the same person underneath it. 

Perhaps his father’s admission that he always found a way to win wasn’t so off base after all, nor his eventual concession that Sugihara may have it right when he rejects all this talk of “Zainichi” and “Japanese” as “bullshit” and resolves to “wipe out borders”. He insists on being “himself” or perhaps a giant question mark, and discovers that Sakurai may have come to the same conclusion in realising that all that really mattered was what she saw and felt. Yukisada captures the anxieties of the age in the pulsing rhythms of his youthful tale which keeps its heroes always on the run, but is in the end a love story after all and filled with an equally charming romanticism. 

GO is released on blu-ray in the UK on 22nd May courtesy of Third Window Films.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Demon (鬼畜, Yoshitaro Nomura, 1978)

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By the late 1970s Japan had achieved its economic miracle, but it had yet perhaps to deal with the traumas of the immediate post-war era. Once again adapted from a story by Seicho Matsumoto, Yoshitaro Nomura’s shocking social drama The Demon (鬼畜, Kichiku) explores the radiating effects of orphanhood and economic privation on the family unit producing as a rather judgemental policeman eventually puts it a generation of parents who don’t know how to raise children and may even lack the inclination to do so even if thankfully not to the extent of the couple at the film’s centre.

Nomura opens with one of his trademark lengthy train sequences following a harried mother and her three children travelling in the sweltering heat from the countryside to the city as she makes a last, desperate attempt to remind the father, Sokichi Takeshita (Ken Ogata), of his responsibilities. Once a successful businessman, Sokichi has become financially ruined after a fire destroyed his print shop and no longer has the means to maintain a second household for his mistress and children at a discrete distance from the home he shares with his wife, Oume (Shima Iwashita). As Kikuyo (Mayumi Ogawa) points out to him, she is unable to support herself economically while caring for the children but he has little answer for her especially once the previously oblivious Oume overhears their conversation. After a series of heated arguments, Kikuyo makes the radical decision to simply abandon the children with their father and thereafter disappears having vacated her previous home and left no forwarding address. 

A part of the problem in the Takeshitas’ marriage had been that they have no children of their own, Sokichi remarking to Kikuyo, whom he met while she was working in a traditional teahouse where he used to take clients, that he had always wanted a child. Conventional gender roles have in a sense been reversed, Oume angrily insisting that her husband would never have made any money had not been for her while it appears that she is more or less in charge of their business affairs and he is the one largely looking after the children to the extent that they are “looked after”. To Oume, the siblings are partly a reminder that her husband betrayed her with another woman but also an attack on her femininity in reminding her that she was unable to become a mother while someone else has given birth to Sokichi’s children. For all of these reasons they are to her children which cannot continue to exist. She undermines Sokichi’s attachment to them by frequently questioning their paternity pointing out that they share little physical resemblance while reminding him that he met Kikuyo through her occupation on the fringes of the sex trade. 

Her mistreatment begins as neglect, refusing to feed or bathe “a stranger’s” child and then graduates to physical violence stuffing food into the mouth of Sokichi’s infant son Shoji after catching him playing with the dinner bowls. Yet when Sokichi finds her endangering the baby while moving heavy papers from a shelf he does nothing, suspecting his wife has become a threat to the children’s safety but also as she later implies wanting to be rid of them himself. The couple could, of course, have simply surrendered the children to an orphanage (it remains unclear how exactly their existence has been registered), but ultimately choose not to as if they wanted to obliterate the idea of them as if they had never been born. 

It may be tempting to view Sokichi as a helpless victim casting Oume as terrifying Lady Macbeth intimidating him into destroying the evidence of his indiscretion, but even if it was Sokichi “looking after” the children, it is finally he who must also “take care” of them. During his abandonment of his second child, 3-year-old daughter Yoshiko (Miyuki Yoshizawa), he takes her into a toy store where a group of boys are playing with remote control cars demonstrating that this is no longer an age of economic privation and that in the end the reason for the children’s second abandonment is not primarily financial even if Sokichi has been in a sense humbled, deluded into a false sense of security in his business success only to be robbed of the era’s increasing prosperity through a freak accident. “Everybody’s struggling” he eventually reflects as his assistant (Keizo Kanie) informs him that he is leaving, ironically to take better care of his ageing parents and small children presumably in a less toxic environment.

Yet as we discover the reasons for Sokichi’s sense of displacement stem back to his own post-war childhood, apparently born out of wedlock never knowing his father and then abandoned by his mother, bounced around between relatives all of them poor who viewed him as nothing more than a burden until effectively indentured to a print shop at ten years old by an uncle who stole his advance pay and once again abandoned him. These kinds of familial disruptions whether caused by a literal orphanhood or the economic constraints of the immediate post-war period have produced according to the moralising policeman at the film’s conclusion a generation of people who do not know how to parent because they were not effectively parented themselves many of whom go on to have children perhaps accidentally but have no idea how to relate to them, frightened of the responsibility or resentful of the “burden” as Sokichi eventually seems to have become. 

Nevertheless, Nomura ends on a note of ambiguity, the goodness in eldest son Riichi (Hiroki Iwase) emphasised as he refuses to name his father or reveal his abuse, an action interpreted by the police as an attempt to protect Sokichi but could equally be a trauma response owing to have been returned to him by the police once before. In any case the film asks if in being rescued from his toxic family circumstances, effectively orphaned, Riichi will simply end up continuing the cycle of displacement, another man unable to become a “father”. But then again, what of Kikuyo who branded Sokichi “inhuman” yet left her children with him and disappeared, perhaps as a neighbour implies with another man? A sympathetic policewoman (Shinobu Otake) reassures Riichi they’ll look for his mother, but as she too abandoned him would that actually help? The jury seems to be out on whether this sense of displacement, in essence the integrity of the traditional family, can ever effectively be repaired even as an increasingly consumerist society continues to erode its foundations. 

The Demon screens at the BFI on 12/19 December as part of BFI Japan. It is also available to stream in the US via Criterion Channel.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko (漁港の肉子ちゃん, Ayumu Watanabe, 2021) [Fantasia 2021]

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Most children begin to find their parents embarrassing as they approach adolescence, but the problem seems to be particularly acute for young Kikuko. Adapted from the (quite wonderful) novel by Kanako Nishi, Ayumu Watanabe’s Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko (漁港の肉子ちゃん, Gyokou no Nikuko-chan) finds its young heroine struggling to define herself in world of constant anxieties while coming to accept that “ordinary is best” after all and even if her mother is “imperfect” it hardly matters, she loves her all the same. 

As Kikuko (Cocomi) outlines in her opening monologue, she’s recently moved to a small Northern port town with her larger than life mother, Nikuko (Shinobu Otake), after weaving a trail of romantic disappointment over half of Japan. In fact and somewhat unusually, mother and daughter share the same first name (if written with different characters), which is why the sometimes exasperated Kikuko has taken to referring to her mother as “Nikuko”, “Niku” meaning meat in reference to her weight. Though the film Kikuko is less caustic than her counterpart from the novel, there is a good deal of fat shaming in her sometimes contemptuous dismissal of her mother, also often regarding her as stupid both in terms of her intellectual ability, she’s obsessed with kanji puns but often makes spelling mistakes, and in her tendency to be duped by a string of no good men who generally take advantage of her kind heart. 

Being young as she is, Kikuko hasn’t yet learned to appreciate the importance of a kind heart, a lesson she’s about to learn as she finds herself in the middle of a burgeoning conflict between her classmates some of whom feel “left out” in never being picked by the popular girls when they peel off to play basketball at lunch time. When her friend Maria (Izumi Ishii) stages a rebellion, Kikuko doesn’t quite know what to do. After all, what Maria’s doing is only a different kind of bullying, but as she says it isn’t nice to feel left out and even if her solution may be wrongheaded perhaps Kikuko should have looked more deeply at why her friend felt that way rather than rather cruelly assuming she was doing it for attention and deserved everything she got. Bonding with a near silent boy, Ninomiya (Natsuki Hanae), who finds himself compelled to pull faces when no one’s looking, shows her the error of her ways in that she never thought herself to be such a “mean and nasty” person. 

It’s this lack of emotional intelligence that causes her to feel embarrassed by her mother who is, it has to be said, something of walking cliché of a stereotypical working class Osaka woman, loud, brash, and nattering away in her Southern dialect. Mother and daughter couldn’t be more different, tomboyish Kikuko stick thin and a serious bookworm, while the bubbly Nikuko is childishly impulsive and openhearted. Kikuko sometimes feels as if she’s the parent and is embarrassed by Nikuko’s larger than life qualities in a culture that prefers women to remain quiet and take up as little space as possible. Not to mention the fact they live on a boat. About to enter adolescence she’s also sick of being constantly on the move and is becoming paranoid that Nikuko is about to start another relationship with a terrible man meaning they’ll have to move again. 

Yet Nikuko hardly minds Kikuko’s contempt of her and despite having lived a hard life remains compassionate and understanding, seeing the best in everyone and always finding the small moments of joy life has to offer. She is also infinitely in tune with her daughter, half thinking she can hear it too when Kikuko “hears” various creatures and even a shrine “talking” to her as she wanders about the town exercising her rather overactive imagination. A series of climactic events culminating in a medical emergency in which she figures a few things out forces Kikuko to wrestle with herself and stop judging her fiercely non-judgemental mum to realise that she loves her after all even if she can’t resist being a little unkind in expressing it. A gentle coming-of-age tale set in a delightfully old-fashioned and beautifully animated fishing village, Fortune Favors Lady Kikuko is chock-full of heart (not to mention expertly translated kanji puns) as its somewhat resentful heroine begins to find safe harbour and finally steps into herself with a spirit of acceptance and understanding. 

Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Rex: Dinosaur Story (REX 恐竜物語, Haruki Kadokawa, 1993)

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Like him or loathe him, Haruki Kadokawa was the dominant force in commercial Japanese cinema from the mid-70s to the end of the Bubble era. Thanks to his circular marketing approach which involved producing movie adaptations of books his company published starring idols he had under contract at his movie studio and releasing the theme songs they often sang to accompany them on his record label, Kadokawa had a virtual stranglehold on ‘80s pop culture. All that came to an end, however, in 1993 when he was arrested for cocaine use/smuggling and accused of embezzling money to pay for his habit, eventually winding up with a four-year jail sentence. Despite all of that, Rex: Dinosaur Story (REX 恐竜物語, Rex: Kyoryu Monogatari) was until the release of Lord of the Rings in 2002 the highest grossing movie distributed by veteran studio Shochiku and was due to extend its 10-week run but was ultimately pulled early because of the “moral embarrassment” surrounding its director’s arrest. 

That moral panic might be all the more acute because as the title and poster might imply, Rex: Dinosaur Story is a tentpole family film released, despite its Christmas setting, at the height of the summer season and in the wake of Jurassic Park with an obvious eye on merchandising (much of which actually appears in the movie). The slightly ridiculous story revolves around 10-year-old Chie (Yumi Adachi) whose parents have recently split up with her mother Naomi (Shinobu Otake), a professor of veterinary medicine, heading to New York for an exciting work opportunity while she’s stayed behind with her nerdy father Akira (Tsunehiko Watase), a researcher of Japan’s Jomon period, and moved in with her maternal grandmother (Mitsuko Kusabue) at a Hokkaido ranch. Little Chie is it seems finding it hard to adjust and has become very withdrawn, refusing to answer when expected to introduce herself at her new school. Mostly she spends her time alone on the farm hanging out with the family dog and riding a horse while drawing pictures of her longed-for mother in a stylish Edwardian outfit with the farmhouse in the background. 

Meanwhile, Akira has made a discovery. A Jomon statue appearing to feature a boy riding on the back of a dinosaur along with a collection of shards he thinks are from a dinosaur egg have convinced him that dinosaurs may have survived in Japan until the Jomon period and perhaps may survive still. Intrigued by a message on a stele that advises one should not advance any further because a giant god is living further up the mountain, Akira takes his daughter and a handful of researchers to meet an Ainu priest (Fujio Tokita) who eventually leads them to a grotto where they find a giant dinosaur egg, narrowly escaping with it after having angered the gods. Akira and the researchers eventually hatch the egg, giving birth to Rex and allowing Chie to become his “mother”.

The egg’s discovery eventually hastens Naomi’s return, but she virtually ignores her daughter greeting her with nothing more than a curt hello while making it plain she’s only here to work on the historically significant discovery not patch up her family. Chie’s relationship with Rex is, in many ways, a way of bonding with her aloof mother who, it has to be said, comes in for a lot of slightly misogynistic criticism as a woman who “abandoned” her daughter to chase career success. Nevertheless, through parenting Rex Chie comes to understand something of motherhood while recognising that she and Rex are essentially the same and that he is most likely lonely missing his dinosaur birth mother. 

Meanwhile, she’s also acutely aware that not everyone has Rex’s best interests at heart. The birth of a cute baby dinosaur is obviously front page news with the consequence that Rex becomes the moment’s biggest celebrity trotted out for a host of TV commercials (featuring a cameo by Kirin Kiki) one of which has Chie and Rex perhaps insensitively sitting down to enjoy a wholesome family meal of Japanese curry. Aside from the irony, Chie’s attempt to suggest that they take break because Rex is after all a baby and he’s tired results in one of the other scientists, Morioka (Mitsuru Hirata), physically abusing him. Sidelined from the project, he enacts a dastardly plan to steal Rex for himself, turning up with four minions dressing like he’s just joined the Gestapo. 

In typical kids movie fashion, Chie and Rex end up on the run through a weird Christmas wonderland in which religious ceremonies and Santa mingle freely, a choir full of children led by her schoolfriend Kenta (Yuta Yamazaki) eventually aiding their escape by throwing snowballs at the bad guys. Chie’s attempts at “disguise” may be laughably bad, but it seems so many people are indulging in Rex cosplay that it becomes possible to blend in even while travelling with a dinosaur companion wearing a Santa hat and sunglasses. Nevertheless, the lesson that Chie begins to learn is that sometimes mothers have to separate from their children but it doesn’t mean they love them any less or that it doesn’t make them sad. Incongruously relegating the “happy ending” to a post-credits sequence, Rex’s distinctly Mid-Western aesthetic with its Dorothy-esque Hokkaido ranch coupled with the fantastical Jomon-era/Ainu mythology lend it a rather strange flavour but it remains an oddly nostalgic experience even as it lifts gleefully from its Hollywood contemporaries. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Shadowfall (影踏み, Tetsuo Shinohara, 2019)

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Cinema has an odd preoccupation with twins. The uncanniness of seeing more than one person with the same face in the same frame injects a note of inescapable unease, not least because of the oddness of the techniques required to make one actor appear to be in two places at once. Shadowfall (影踏み, Kagefumi) adapted from the mystery novel by 64’s Hideo Yokoyama, places the “evil twin” motif at its heart but, perhaps a little uncomfortably, uses it as a metaphor for the shadow self as the conflicted hero attempts to find closure with past trauma and family legacy in order to reintegrate his two selves into one complete whole capable of living a life both spiritually and emotionally honest. 

As the film opens, ace cat burgler Shuichi (Masayoshi Yamazaki) is in the process of breaking into the home of a local politician. Whilst there, however, he discovers petrol pooled on the hall floor and the politician’s wife, Yoko (Yuri Nakamura), nervously grasping a cigarette lighter. He manages to snap the lighter shut before she can use it, saving her life (as well as that of the husband she was about to kill), but is then caught by a policeman, Sosuke (Pistol Takehara), who happened to be “just passing by” and is also, coincidentally, a childhood friend. Shuichi gets two years, and is met on his release by a young man, Keiji (Takumi Kitamura), dressed in incongruously old-fashioned, gangster-style clothes and adressing him as “Shuichi-ni” or “big brother Shuichi”. Together, the pair form a small crime fighting team determined to find out what became of Yoko while poking their noses into some conspiratorial corruption which links her with yakuza, police, and the judiciary. The situation is further complicated when Sosuke is found dead after a visit to Yoko’s bar, leaving Shuichi implicated in the possible murder of his old friend. 

Reflecting on the case, police detective Mabuchi (Shingo Tsurumi), who also knew Shuichi in his youth, remarks that twins are tied to each other like heaven is to hell. One will necessarily drag the other down. Later, he corrects himself, that if is that is true then the reverse must also be and one should be able to raise the other up. What we see, however, is largely the former. We discover that Shuichi had an identical twin who was “no good”, a petty teenage hoodlum always in trouble with the police where he was a top student preparing to study the law and become a prosector. Their mother (Shinobu Otake), a teacher, found herself a victim of social stigma as the mother of a criminal, asked to resign from her job because a woman who can’t raise her own son to be a law abiding citizen is not fit to educate those of others. Hisako (Machiko Ono), who had been friends with both the boys and is still carrying a smouldering torch for the “good” Shuichi, experiences something of the same when she’s targeted by a creepy stalker (Kenichi Takito) who leaks her “criminal associations” on the message board of the nursery school where she too teaches. 

Having waited for him all these years, Hisako is praying for the restoration of the Shuichi she once knew who was good where his brother was “bad”. Despite her deep and abiding love for him, she claims to have chosen Shuichi, rather than his brother, because loving the good is the safer, more responsible choice. Shuichi, meanwhile, describes himself as walking in his brother’s shadow, a darkened space into which Hisako wishes to be admitted but is wilfully denied. He tells himself he does this to keep her safe, but is in reality unable to step into that space himself and occupy it as a full and complete person. He claims that his criminality is an act of revenge when it is actually a kind of self-harm that ensures his two selves, the shadow self that is his departed brother, and the ghost self which is the cat burglar, will remain forever separate. 

Talking with another twin whose mirroring of his brother had even darker results, Shuichi confesses that to share a soul with another human being is a terrible curse and one he secretly longed to be released from. It’s this latent sense of guilt which haunts him, cleaving his soul in two. Only by dealing with the traumatic past, the memories inflamed by Yoko whose burden is a fear of an excessive “niceness” she too must learn to let go, can he reintegrate his two selves into one complete whole with only a single shadow. A noirish tale of haunting grief and unresolved regret, Shadowfall finds hope in the simple act of acceptance and the promised restoration of the imperfect whole. 

Screened as part of the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2020.

International trailer (English subtitles)

The Empty Table (食卓のない家, Masaki Kobayashi, 1985)

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The Empty TableJapanese cinema of the 1980s is marked by an increasing desire to interrogate the idea of “the family” in an atmosphere of individualist consumerism. Yoshimitsu’s Morita’s The Family Game had blown the traditional ideas of filial piety and the primacy of the patriarch wide open in exposing his ordinary middle-class family as little more than a simulacrum as its various members sleepwalked through life playing the roles expected of them free of the true feeling one would expect to define familial bonds. A year later, Sogo Ishii’s The Crazy Family took a different, perhaps more positive approach, in depicting a family descending into madness through the various social pressures of maintaining a conventional middle-class life in the cramped environment of frenetic Tokyo. Masaki Kobayashi, unlike many of his contemporaries, was not so much interested in families as in individuals whose struggles to assert themselves in a conformist society became his major focus. The Empty Table (食卓のない家, Shokutaku no nai Ie) is not perhaps “a family drama” but it is, if indirectly, a drama about family and the ways in which the wider familial context of society at large often seeks to misuse it.

Set in 1973, The Empty Table is also among the earliest films to tackle the aftermath of the 1972 Asama-Sanso Incident. For ten days in February, the nation watched live as the police found themselves in a stand off with five United Red Army former student radicals who had taken the wife of an innkeeper hostage and holed up in a mountain lodge, refusing to give themselves up to the police. The discoveries surrounding the conduct of the United Red Army which had descended into a cult-like madness involving several murders of its members (including one of a heavily pregnant woman) shocked the nation and finally ended the student movement in Japan.

Kidoji (Tatsuya Nakadai) is the father of one of the student radicals, Otohiko (Kiichi Nakai), who took part in the siege. In Japanese culture, it’s usual for the parents of a person involved in a scandal to come forward and offer an official apology to the nation on behalf of the their children. During the siege itself the family had also been weaponised as mothers, particularly, were enlisted to shout from outside the inn, offering poignant messages intended to get their sons to give themselves up and come home. Kidoji, unlike the other fathers (one of whom hanged himself in shame), refuses his social obligation on the grounds that the actions of his grownup son are no longer his responsibility. 

As a scientist, Kidoji is used to thinking things through in rational terms and outside of Japan his logic may seem unassailable – after all, it is unreasonable to hold the conduct of a family member against an otherwise upright and obedient citizen. In Japan however his actions make him seem cold and unfeeling, as if he has disowned both his son and his position as the father of a family with whom rests ultimate responsibility for those listed on his family register. This way of thinking may be very feudal, but it is the way things work not just in the late 20th century, but even in the early 21st.

Kidoji’s refusal to do what is expected of him eventually leads to the crumbling of the family unit. Far from the cheerful scene we see of Kidoji, his wife, and their three children seated around a dinner table in celebration, the family now eat separately and Kidoji returns home to cold meals and an empty table. Kidoji’s wife, Yumiko (Mayumi Ogawa), has had a breakdown and had to be hospitalised, while his daughter Tamae (Kie Nakai) is forced to break off her engagement only to resort to underhanded methods to be allowed to marry the man she loves. While Otohiko languishes in prison, only his younger brother Osamu (Takayuki Takemoto) remains at home.

Kobayashi’s central concern is the conflict in Kidoji’s heart as he faces a choice between maintaining his principles and saving his family pain. It’s not that Kidoji feels nothing – on the contrary, he is profoundly wounded by all that has happened to him, but ironically enough, puts on the face society expects but does not want in maintaining his composure in a situation of extreme difficulty. Kidoji’s deepest anxieties rest in the need to “take responsibility”, something he must do in acknowledging that it’s not his son’s disgrace which has destroyed his family but his own rigidity in refusing to bend his principles and obey social convention. What Kidoji wants is for his son to take responsibility for his own choices as an individual rather than expecting his family to carry his load for him. He must, however, also take responsibility for the effect his choices have had on others, including on his family, and accept his role both as an individual and as a member of a society with rights and obligations.

Kidoji’s refusal to apologise on behalf of his son looks to the rest of society like an abnegation of his paternal authority, and without paternal authority the family unit crumbles like a feudal household whose lord has been murdered. Yet Kidoji, like many of Kobayashi’s heroes, refuses to compromise his principals no matter how much personal pain they eventually cause him. Where the rules of society make no sense to him, he will ignore (if not quite oppose) them, remaining true to his own notions of moral righteousness.

In many ways, Kidoji is the archetypal Kobayashi hero – standing up to social oppression and refusing to simply give in even when he knows how beneficial that may be to all concerned. He is also, however, just as problematic in allowing his family to continue suffering in preservation of his personal beliefs. Kobayashi’s final feature film, The Empty Table is extremely dated in terms of shooting style with its overly theatrical dialogue and frequent use of voice over and monologue which were long out of fashion by the mid-1980s. Kobayashi does, however, return to the more expressionist style of his earlier career, moving towards an etherial sense of poetry as his hero contemplates his place in a society which often asks him to behave in ways which compromise his essential value system. The family, broken as it is, is also (partly) mended once again as Kidoji begins to reconcile his various “responsibilities” into a more comprehensive whole as he prepares to welcome a new generation seemingly as determined to live in as principled and unorthodox a way as he himself has.

Mary and the Witch’s Flower (メアリと魔女の花, Hiromasa Yonebayashi, 2017)

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Mary and the witch's flower posterWhen Studio Ghibli announced that it would be ceasing production, it couldn’t help but feel like the end of an era. The studio which had made Japanese animation an internationally beloved art form was no more. Into the void stepped a brand new animation studio which vowed to pick up the Ghibli gauntlet – Studio Ponoc was formed by former Ghibli producer Yoshiaki Nishimura who enlisted a host of other ex-Ghibli talent including Arrietty director, Hiromasa Yonebayashi. 

Mary and the Witch’s Flower (メアリと魔女の花, Mary to Majo no Hana), Ponoc’s first feature is, like Yonebayashi’s When Marnie was There, an adaptation of a classic British children’s novel. Part of the ‘70s children’s literature boom, Mary Stewart’s The Little Broomstick was more or less forgotten until the film, paradoxically, brought it back into print. Like many post-war children’s novels, The Little Broomstick is the story of a clever and kind little girl who thinks she doesn’t quite fit in. Mary and the Witch’s Flower is no different in this regard, even in updating the tale (seemingly) to the present day as its spiky heroine finds herself taking on mad scientists and crazed witches in a strange fantasy realm all while trying to get used to the comparatively gentle rhythms of country life.

Mary Smith (Hana Sugisaki) is bored. She hates her frizzy red hair which a horrible local boy, Peter (Ryunosuke Kamiki), uses as justification to describe her as a “red haired monkey”, and fears that the rest of her life will merely be a dull exercise in killing time until its inevitable conclusion. Mary has just moved in with her Great-Aunt Charlotte (Shinobu Otake) in the country while her parents are apparently working away and, as she still has a week left of summer holidays until school starts, she’s desperate for something to do. Unwisely following two cats into a misty forest, she chances upon a mysterious flower – the “Fly By Night” which blooms only once every seven years. With no respect for nature, Mary picks herself some of the pretty bulbs to take back to the gardener but unwittingly opens up a portal to another world. Taking hold of an abandoned broomstick, she finds herself swooped off to Endor College – an elite institution of witchcraft and wizardry where she dazzles all with her magical skills. Thinking she’s finally found her place, Mary is content to go along with everyone’s assumption that she is the new student they’ve been waiting for but on closer inspection, Endor College is not quite all it seems.

Mary’s initial dissatisfaction with herself is somewhat sidelined by the narrative but there’s something particularly poignant about her loathing of her red hair. In British culture at least, those with red hair often face a strange kind of “acceptable” prejudice, bullied and ostracised even into adulthood. Thus when Peter calls Mary a “red haired monkey” it isn’t cute or funny it’s just mean and she’s probably heard something similar every day of her life. When she rocks up at Endor and they tell her that her red hair makes her special and is the sign of high magic potential, it’s music to her ears but it’s also, perhaps, reinforcing the idea that simply having red hair makes her different from everyone else.

Feeling different from everyone else perhaps allows her to look a little deeper into the world of Endor than she might otherwise have done. Despite her conviction that she doesn’t fit in and is of no use to anyone, Mary is never seriously tempted by the promises of Endor which include untold power as well as a clear offer of acceptance and even respect. When she realises that the couple who run the school – a witch and a scientist, have been abusing their powers by committing heinous acts of experimentation on innocent “test subjects”, Mary learns to stand up for those who can’t stand up for themselves even if she couldn’t have done it for herself.

Messages about the seductive power of authoritarian regimes exploiting feelings of disconnection, the scant difference between magic and science, and the need for respect of scientific ethics in the pursuit of knowledge, all get somewhat lost amid Mary’s meandering adventures, as does Mary herself as her gradual progress towards realising that she possessed her own “magic” all along ticks away quietly in the background. Yet the biggest problem Mary and the Witch’s Flower faces is also its greatest strength – its ties to Studio Ghibli. With echoes of Yonebayashi’s previous adaptations of classic British literature, Mary and the Witch’s Flower also indulges in a number of obvious Ghibli homages from the Ponyo-esque flying fish and Laputa influenced design of Endor to the overt shot of Mary riding a deer on a rocky path, and the unavoidable girl+broomstick echoes of Kiki’s Delivery Service. Even if Mary and the Witch’s Flower cannot free itself from the burden of its legacy, it does perhaps fill the void it was intended to, if in unspectacular fashion.

Mary and the Witch’s Flower will be released in UK cinemas courtesy of Altitude Films in May 2018.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Pieta in the Toilet (トイレのピエタ, Daishi Matsunaga, 2015)

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pieta-in-the-toiletSomewhere near the beginning of Daishi Matsunaga’s debut feature, Pieta in the Toilet (トイレのピエタ, Toire no Pieta), the high rise window washing hero is attempting to school a nervous newbie by “reassuring” him that the worst thing that could happen up here is that you could die. This early attempt at black humour signals Hiroshi’s already aloof and standoffish nature but his fateful remark comes back to haunt him after he is diagnosed with an aggressive and debilitating condition of his own. Noticeably restrained in contrast with the often melodramatic approach of similarly themed mainstream pictures, Pieta in the Toilet is less a contemplation of death than of life, its purpose and its possibilities.

Having left his country home for Tokyo to become a painter, Hiroshi (Yojiro Noda) has become a bitter man, wilfully drowning in his own broken dreams. A chance encounter with an old flame, Satstuki (Saya Ichikawa), further deepens Hiroshi’s sense of inadequacy – she is about to open a solo exhibition in the very building which Hiroshi is currently engaged in washing the windows of. After having so sarcastically made fun of his new colleague’s fear of the rig, it’s Hiroshi who finds himself collapsing on the job and requiring medical treatment.

Seeing as the hospital have requested he bring a family member along with him for the results of the examination, it’s probably not good news. Not wanting to involve his parents, Hiroshi persuades Satsuki to masquerade as his younger sister only to restart an old argument in the waiting room prompting his former love to remember why they aren’t together anymore and hightail it out of there. Spotting a high school girl arguing with a salaryman she says has torn her uniform, Hiroshi decides to offer the job to her. Mai (Hana Sugisaki) plays her part to perfection but the news is even worse than he’d feared – aggressive stomach cancer requiring immediate hospitalisation and sustained chemotherapy if he is to have any chance at all of surviving more than a couple of months at most.

Prior to his illness, Hiroshi is a difficult man, permanently grumpy and irritated as if carrying a great sense of injustice. Despite several different voices reminding him that he had talent, Hiroshi has given up drawing in the belief that his artistic career was always doomed to failure. Intent on punishing himself for just not being good enough to succeed, Hiroshi’s decision to make window washing his career signals his lack of personal ambition, content to simply keep existing while a silent rage bubbles under the surface.

After the original failed reconnection with Satsuki who, we later discover, has moved in another direction using her society connections to advance her career in a way of which Hiroshi does not approve, Hiroshi’s illness brings him into contact with a number of people who each do their bit to reopen his heart. The most important of these is the feisty high school girl, Mai, who refuses to simply disappear from Hiroshi’s life after the awkward bonding experience of being present at the cancer diagnosis of a total stranger. As angry and defeated as Hiroshi, Mai’s difficult homelife has brought her untold suffering but unlike the brooding painter, hers in an externalised rage which sends her reeling into the world, looking for reaction and recognition rather than the introspective craving for disappointment and indifference which marks Hiroshi’s approach to his internalised sense of inadequacy.

Hiroshi’s hospital stay produces twin motivators from both ends of the spectrum in the form of an older man in the next bed, Yokota (Lily Franky), who enjoys taking photographs (especially of pretty girls), and a terminally ill little boy who remains cheerful, polite and friendly despite Hiroshi’s rather rude attempt to shake him off. It’s on a visit to the hospital chapel with the boy, Takuto (Riku Sawada), and his mother (Rie Miyazawa) that Hiroshi first comes across the statue of the pieta which inspires his ultimate, life affirming act which sees him turn the smallest room of the house into a new Sistine Chapel with a large scale installation recasting Mai as Mary, arms outstretched ready to receive her sorrowful burden.

Hiroshi’s life had been mere existence but reaching an acceptance of its end forces him into a process of more positive self reflection and a desire to leave something more permanent behind. Inspired by a few words found on the final page of the diary kept by the godfather of manga, Osamu Tezuka, himself battling stomach cancer at the time, Pieta in the Toilet puts art at the core of life as Hiroshi picks up his paint brush, Yokota his camera (albeit with slightly less than artful intentions), and Takuto his painstakingly collected colour-in heroes. Necessarily melancholy yet somehow life affirming Pieta in the Toilet offers a nuanced though no less powerful contemplation of life, death and art in which each gives meaning to the other, ensuring the richness of a life fully lived.

Screened as part of the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2017.

Original trailer (English subtitles)