Soya Kurokawa – Windows on Worlds

What does it mean to commit yourself so entirely to your art that you become it and effectively cease to exist? Playing the role of Ohatsu in Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s Love Suicides at Sonezaki, Kikuo (Ryo Yoshizawa) asks if Ohatsu’s lover Tokubei is really resolved to die for their love. The scene is intercut with his brother and rival Shunsuke leaving the theatre, led away by Kikuo’s girlfriend Harue (Mitsuki Takahata), just as Ohatsu leads Tokubei towards their mutual fate, as if Shunsuke were agreeing that he is not resolved to give his all to art in the way Kikuo evidently feels himself to be, at least in this moment.

The roles between them are reversed several times before they eventually perform the play again, but each of them are, in effect, in a love suicide with the art of kabuki, though kabuki itself is destined to live on. In any case, the “kokuho” of the title is a living national treasure and one who has indeed embodied their art. We’re introduced to one early on, Mangiku (Min Tanaka), an ageless onnagata, or player of female roles, who has a quasi-spiritual quality and warns the young Kikuo that though his face maybe beautiful, it could also be a barrier to his art and, in the end, consume him. It is said of Mangiku that all he will leave behind him is his art. The words are spoken with pity, but this is really what it means to be a kokuho and the highest compliment that might be paid to an artist. Mangiku himself would likely approve, casting an eye around his spartan room and declaring himself unburdened.

But Kikuo is only half-joking when he says he cut a deal with the devil to make him the best kabuki actor in Japan. As a woman he abandoned later scolds him, all his sacrifices were made by others. Actors are greedy, another laments, and it’s true enough that Kikuo feared little in his need for success. The irony is that he too was an heir, only to a yakuza dynasty to which he could not succeed. His was father was gunned down in front of him while preparing to draw his sword, while Kikuo’s rebound tattoo does him no favours in the end and his attempt to avenge his father’s death apparently fails. Nevertheless, he vies for the approval of his surrogate father and kabuki master Hanjiro (Ken Watanabe) who values his skills above those of his biological son Shunsuke (Ryusei Yokohama) who alternately resents having his birthright stolen from under from him and acknowledges that Kiku has an innate talent with which his bloodline can’t compete.

Nevertheless, there’s a genuine and enduring brotherhood between the two men that never quite slips into hate or acrimony even as circumstances conspire against them. They both want what the other has. In the kabuki world, bloodline is everything and Kikuo is viewed as a interloper usurping Shunsuke’s rightful position, while Shunsuke wants the raw talent he knows he lacks and no amount of training and commitment can buy. Yet it is in a way about resolve, or at least the willingness to give your life to the stage and die in the pursuit of art. Kikuo’s signature piece is the Heron Maiden, in which a heron falls in love with a young man and becomes a young woman. But her love is unrequited. She goes mad, and can only show her love for him by dancing until she dies. This is, in effect, Kikuo’s dance with kabuki, a waltz to the death as he yearns for the “scenery” he as been searching for and eventually finds the apotheosis of his art in the moment of the heron’s demise.

Like Lee Sang-il’s previous films Villain and Rage based on a novel by Shuichi Yoshida, the film is a poetic meditation on the price of the pursuit of art that revels in its sumptuous production design and the intricacies of the kabuki world. With shades of Farewell, My Concubine, it frames its central dynamic not quite one of straightforward rivalry but a brotherhood between two halves of one whole who each know that neither of them can really win, while becoming a kokuho is an endless pursuit of artistic perfection in which one must be resolved to kill the self and die on stage in a lover’s suicide with a forever elusive kabuki.

Kokuho screened as part of this year’s LEAFF.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Part-way through Hirokazu Koreeda’s probing drama Monster (怪物, Kaibutsu), a distant headmistress tells one of her teachers that “What actually happened doesn’t matter.” As in The Third Murder, the truth, so far as it can be said to exist at all, is an irrelevance. We need narrative to serve a purpose. Confronted by a worried mother, a teacher accused of using violence against a student claims there’s been a “misunderstanding,” but in many ways there has. We’re so often prevented from speaking our truth by the social conventions that govern us, because of shame, or fear, or simply because when all is said and done is it often easier not to speak.

In may ways this is the internal battle Minato (Soya Kurokawa) finds himself fighting. He sees another boy being bullied, mostly just for being different, and he wants to do something about it but he’s different too and so he’s afraid. He befriends the boy, Yori (Hinata Hiiragi), but also tells him to not speak to him in front of their classmates because he doesn’t want to end up being a target. In the midst of futility all he can do is flail randomly, trashing the schoolroom not to mention his bedroom at home solely because he is unable to voice himself clearly or communicate in any other way.

Because of these lapses in communication, a series of misunderstandings arise. The language we use is often thoughtless and arbitrary. Well-meaning words can still wound. Minato’s mother, Saori (Sakura Ando), tells him that she promised his late father she’d take care of him until he had a wife and family of his own but perhaps that not something Minato will want. Similarly their teacher, Hori (Eita Nagayama), described by one of his colleagues as “shifty-eyed and creepy”, makes a series of throwaway remarks that the boys should act let men, filling their heads with an idea of toxic masculinity echoed in Saori’s insistence that girls prefer boys who don’t know the names of flowers.

Minato is reminded that the bottom layer of the pyramid holds everything else in place, but it’s a responsibility he doesn’t think he can bear. He knows he can’t be the kind of man his father apparently was, a rugby player who may have been with another woman when he died, and feels an acute sense if failure and inferiority in being unable to live up to the expectations of others. He later tells the headmistress (Yuko Tanaka) who is carrying a burden of her own that he knows he can never be happy and believes himself unworthy of it only to find an unexpected source strength in her advocation that happiness is something anyone can have, otherwise it wouldn’t be happiness at all.

Yet for all that Yori seems to be happy, or at least to affect cheerfulness in all things despite his dismal circumstances living with a troubled father who drinks and refers to him as monstrous and diseased. One of the teachers also brands the parents of his pupils as monsters feeling they unjustly “torture” them while shifting the blame for their own bad parenting. Minato too feels himself to be a monster because he senses that he’s different from those around him and is afraid of them and of himself. Throw away remarks hint at buried prejudice, such as in Hori’s dig at single mothers stating that his own mother was one and exposing a degree of insecurity masked by an outward conservatism.

We judge him for this remark, but it’s also true he’s merely parroting something that was said to him. We can never know all of the truth, and Hori suffers in part because of his “shifty-eyed and creepy” appearance that contributes to our conviction the accusations against him are likely to be true in the same way he misunderstands Minato because of his confusing behaviour and inability to communicate. Gossip weaves itself into a kind of folk truth that becomes difficult to unravel no matter the degree of veracity within it, while we discover we can never know the whole of something only the facets of it that are presented to us and might well result in “misunderstandings.”

Koreeda shifts our perspective and exposes the flaws in our assumptions, illuminating with empathy a sense of a more objective truth that was hidden from us but equally the various reasons we cannot always be truthful even with ourselves nor can we see what others see of us. Obsessed with the idea of rebirth, the boys discover their own kind of paradise in private world in the midst of nature free of social conventions or expectation and free to be exactly as they are. The ambiguity of the ending may subtly undercut its seeming utopianism but nevertheless suggests that the only objective truth may be that happiness is something anyone can have if only they can free themselves from the prejudices and petty social conventions which govern our world.

MONSTER is out in UK and Irish cinemas on March 15^th. For more information, go to https://monsteruk.film/

Uk trailer (English subtitles)

Tag: Soya Kurokawa

Kokuho (国宝, Lee Sang-il, 2025)

Monster (怪物, Hirokazu Koreeda, 2023)