Tag: Shintaro Yuya

The Deepest Space in Us (そこにきみはいて, Yasutomo Chikuma, 2025)

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The dress code at Kaori’s office doesn’t seem to be all that formal, but for some reason she alone looks like she’s going to a funeral. As it turns out, there’s a reason for that, but it also reflects the way that her job makes her feel dead inside and how she’s made to feel by a judgemental society that refuses to accept her as she is but punishes and excludes her for living outside of its expected norms and social codes.

Kaori (Momoko Fukuchi) doesn’t usually attend the team’s after work drinking parties, but is dragged along this time only to sit impassively ignoring everyone until a couple of drunk guys press her for her first love story and then ask a series of invasive questions about what kind of guys are her type. There are obviously a lot of assumptions in play here, and their obsessive probing borders on harassment. Kaori eventually gets up and leaves, but is chased by one of the guys who tries to ask her out. She tells him directly that she’s not interested because she doesn’t experience sexual attraction or desire, but that’s like a red flag to a bull for a certain sort of guy and this one laughs in her face after tearing her shirt as she tries to get away. People simply don’t believe her when she tells them, or else they conclude that there’s something wrong her that needs to be cured. She too feels as if she’s “not normal”, and is pressured by a society in which it’s still marriage and children that are the benchmarks of social success for a woman.

That’s one reason she bonds so easily with Takeru (Kanichiro), the lawyer who handled the probate for her estranged late mother’s estate which Kaori declined to inherit. Takeru tells her that he has something he wants to reject too, and it’s true enough that, to begin with, Kaori may be trying to reject her asexuality. She tries to initiate sex with Takeru in order to overcome it, but it isn’t something that either of them can go through with. Though he tells her that he has someone he can’t forget much as he’d like to, Takeru does not disclose that he is gay because of the intense shame he feels about his sexuality. Kaori evidently had a difficult childhood with a mother who was physically abusive towards her and thereafter raised in foster homes, while Takeru’s conservative mother (Mariko Tsutsui) seems to have instilled in him the same anxieties that plague Kaori in expecting him to marry and have children. Takeru’s former lover, Shingo (film director Ryutaro Nakagawa), has married a woman he doesn’t seem to like for convenience’s sake. Ten years after he and Takeru parted, Shingo is now a successful novelist writing populist fare that he secretly hates himself for knowing he’s writing for others and not himself. 

They all, in their way, attempt bury their true selves to achieve social success through heteronormative marriages, but Takeru and Kaori slowly discover that whatever joy they may have found in their mutual decision to overcome their self-loathing in a platonic union, it won’t work. They each at different times end up in the same hotel room with a hookup date staring a black mark on a wall that comes to represent an internal void. Realising that he will not be able to reject his homosexuality nor get over the grief and sense of loss he feels in Shingo’s rejection, Takeru eventually takes his own life. Struggling to understand why, Kaori ends up on a strange road trip with Shingo in which it’s never quite clear whether she fully realises he is Takeru’s former lover, or has already figured everything out and is trying to help him accept himself as a means of atoning for being unable to help Takeru do the same.

Her trip also strangely brings her into contact with a woman from her office who once claimed to hate her, but has now come to apologise while also looking, like Kaori, for some kind of acceptance and recognition. She says that she too hates herself, sure that men are only ever interested in sex and never in her. Eventually making a pass at Kaori, she admits that for some reason she is only able to be honest with her rather than her friends, family, or lovers. Nevertheless, though Kaori rejects her romantic advances, this simple act of unburdening and watching the sunrise together in silence seems to clear the air and grant both women a kind of peace.

Besides her sexual identity, Kaori seems to have a degree of trouble in dealing with people that suggests neurodivergence, but also longs for acceptance and companionship. While processing Takeru’s death and leading Shingo towards an acceptance of himself, she too learns to embrace her authentic identity and refuses to hide or run away from who she really is to please others rather than herself. Holding a mirror up to a repressed society, she achieves a kind of freedom in self-acceptance, which she then begins to extend to Shingo who once admitted that he ran away from love out of fear, and only now has the courage to face himself and the terrible delayed grief of having lost something precious that can never be reclaimed.

The Deepest Space in Us screened as part of this year’s BFI Flare.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Escape (逃走, Masao Adachi, 2025)

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

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

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

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

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

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