Sodai Kadota – Windows on Worlds

At first glance, the English-language title of Akira Nagai’s adaption of the novel by Katsuhiro Go, Suzuki = Bakudan, might seem a little strange, even aside from the incongruity of leaving “bakudan” (bomb) untranslated. But there is something to be said of the idea that there are little bombs everywhere, and each person is also powder keg waiting to explode given the right trigger. That might play in to the rather cynical view of the Hannibal Lector-like presence at the film’s centre who seems to be leading the police a merry dance with his various riddles and determination to play the part of a man whose mind has been ruined by alcohol and hopelessness.

The first thing about Suzuki (Jiro Sato), arrested for busting up a convenience store, is that he gives a name that at least sounds fake and attempts to brazen it out. Detective Todoroki (Shota Sometani) tells him that the store owner doesn’t want to press charges and will settle for compensation to fix the damage, but Suzuki says he’s broke ad offers to help the police instead. He claims to have psychic powers and knows that a bomb is about to go off, but the police assume it’s an obvious delaying tactic and take no notice, until there’s actually an explosion in the middle of the city.

The obvious conclusion that occurs to Todoroki is that Suzuki is the bomber, but at the same time he seems to think there’s something innocent about him. He is indeed as Todoroki and later Ruike say childish in his playfulness and means of expression, though there’s also a sinister edge to the way he speaks that suggests it’s all an act. He quotes poetry and and appears to ramble like a madman but while Ruike becomes convinced he’s dropping them arcane clues, others think he’s just manipulative and deliberately wasting their time. “Not every word has meaning,” one insists though it seems as if it really might for Suzuki who seems to list not being listened to by society as one of his grudge points.

The point that he makes frequent digs at the homeless despite identifying as one hints at this paradoxical sense of injustice in the contemporary society. In one of the traps he sets for the police, he sets them up with a binary choice of whether to save schoolchildren or the homeless community. The detectives don’t realise that’s what they’re doing, but still didn’t really think to much about the people who live in the park while desperate to find a potential bomb threat in a school. Later Suzuki lists off a series of people he can’t stand from the homeless to pregnant women, families, and lawyers, in fact pretty much everyone which itself seems to be more a reflection of an absurd social prejudice than his own feeling.

He might, however, have a point about social indifference and the arrogance of the police with Todoroki’s superiors rolling their eyes and refusing to take Suzuki seriously while the bombs keep going off. Everything seems to link back to a disgraced police officer, Hasebe, who took his own life by jumping in front of train and was not supported by his colleagues aside from Todoroki who only utters that he’s not insensitive to his feelings which seems like a lukewarm advocation for the police brotherhood. Suzuki seems to have resented not being accorded one of the group, and holds the police in contempt for the way they treat their own. Yabuki (Ryota Bando) is also forever trying to get his foot on the ladder as a detective, but is only exploited by those above him which is one reason he’s willing to take so many risks to catch the bomber.

Suzuki tries to guess the shape of people’s hearts, and finds those of the policemen largely warped by office politics and backstabbing. Selfishness is the sad truth of humanity, he intones. And he might be right, people only really want the bombs not to go off near them and they’re less bothered by the idea of them hurting other people than they’d like to think. After all, Hasebe’s family’s lives imploded too when they were sued by the railway company after Hasebe’s suicide, hounded by the press, and ostracised by former colleagues. Acceptance by the group, it seems, is only ever really temporary. Still, Suzuki leads the police by the nose exploiting all their weaknesses and affecting the persona of a sane madman claiming to be psychic and to have been hypnotised to erase his memory but keeping all his cards close to his chest as the cat and mouse game between him and Ruike ratchets up in tension and finally reaches its ironic conclusion.

Suzuki=Bakudan screens as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

How is it possible to go on living in a society which is often unkind and at times hostile? A collection of sensitive university students find themselves struggling to accept the world around them in Yurina Kaneko’s charmingly empathetic adaptation of the novel by Ao Omae, People who Talk to Plushies are Kind (ぬいぐるみとしゃべる人はやさしい), but discover a kind of solidarity in softness after joining a club where they don headphones and unburden themselves to cuddly toys.

As they point out, it’s good to talk. But talking to someone else about your worries can end up making them worried too and that’s the last thing any of the members of the Plushie Club want which is why they’ve decided to talk to plushies instead. Yet what’s worrying them isn’t just their worries, but a sense of their powerlessness and complicity in having behaved as if they believed the problems of others were nothing to do with them until they were shown otherwise. The hero, Nanamori (Kanata Hosoda) regrets that he “laughed things away with everyone else” rather than speaking up when he saw something that seemed wrong to him and should change while acknowledging that simply by existing as a man he may make someone feel afraid or uncomfortable without meaning to.

Nanamori is careful not to hurt others by his own actions, trying to turn down a confession of love from a classmate in high school as kindly as he can but perhaps failing in his awkwardness even as he straightforwardly tells her that he doesn’t understand the concept of romantic desire. He simply doesn’t know what it means to “like” someone, and feels that there must be something wrong with him that he can’t grasp this simple facet of human behaviour. On a trip home uniting with some boys from school, he is immediately put off by their stereotypically masculine banter in which they ask him about girls and crushes and mock him for being a virgin until he finally leaves and tells them not to laugh at him just because he is different.

Everyone at the Plushie Club is “different” in their own way, but has come to find a place to belong where they are simply allowed to be without needing to offer anything else. As another of the members, Nishimura (Mimori Wakasugi), puts it there’s something between kindness and indifference that is simply gentle, a quiet yet powerful quality of acceptance. When she casually revealed one day that she had a girlfriend, most of her friends were supportive but perhaps superficially. Her revelation had made them uncomfortable and regardless of how they felt about it, their perception of her had changed and she was no longer the person she had been to them before. They began to treat her differently, but at the Plushie Club there was no real difference and everyone carried on reacting to her the same way they always had.

The Plushie Club is a place where it’s permitted to be soft in a hard world, where the members can allow themselves to feel drained by the process of living and find relief from their sense of powerlessness in acknowledging that they have made a choice to continue being kind rather than become what the world wants them to be. In an effort to understand romantic desire, Nanamori begins dating a fellow member, Shiraki (Yuzumi Shintani), but discovers that she has chosen the opposite path laughing at women who complain about societal misogyny and insisting that it’s pointless to resist because nothing will ever change. She joined the Plushie Club because she was sick of being sexually harassed at other uni gatherings but later decides to deliberately join another club filled with sexist guys because the real world isn’t so nice and the only way to survive it is to become hard yourself.

Shiraki claims that she finds Nanamori’s “righteousness” “exhausting” and wishes she could free him and a similarly minded classmate, Mugito (Ren Komai), from their “tormenting kindness” which has in its way hurt her though unavoidably so even as she continues to be kind despite herself if rebelling by refusing to talk to plushies. Kaneko sometimes shifts to a blurry plushie vision with shimmering pastel-coloured edges and a kind of glitter snow effect that makes it seem as if the stuffed toys really are watching over their human friends as they silently, or not, agree to shoulder some of the burden of living. “They’re the ones talking to us,” Nanamori points out though in a way perhaps it’s more that the plushies reflect a part of themselves allowing them to exteriorise their internal dialogue and reach an accommodation with their fear and loneliness amid a world which consistently proves immovable and disappointing.

People Who Talk to Plushies Are Kind had its World Premiere as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Images: (C) 映画「ぬいぐるみとしゃべる人はやさしい」

Tag: Sodai Kadota

Suzuki=Bakudan (爆弾, Akira Nagai, 2025)

People Who Talk to Plushies Are Kind (ぬいぐるみとしゃべる人はやさしい, Yurina Kaneko, 2023)