Do we wear the clothes, or is it more like the clothes wear us? There is something haunting about the sense of absence contained within an outfit that no longer has a body to wrap itself around, as if it were the flesh remaining long after the spirit has departed. This is, in a way, how the titular Tony Takitani (Issey Ogata) comes of see them, as shadows of his now departed wife never to be inhabited again.
Adapting a short story by Haruki Murakami, Jun Ichikawa maintains a gentle lateral motion of the camera as he proceeds through Tony’s early life as if we were gradually unrolling scroll painting. The motion seems to come to a stop on Tony’s unexpected marriage to a woman 15 years younger than himself who was already seeing another man when he proposed to her after only five dates. For a time, his life of loneliness comes to an end, if giving way to an anxiety that he will not be able to bear being alone again. The only cloud in his otherwise blissfully happy life is that Eiko (Rie Miyazawa) has an obsession with clothes that is not only a financial drain but potentially unhealthy.
Tony himself says it’s as if she was born to wear them, as if Eiko existed solely to be the soul within the fabric. She says that the clothes, in turn, fill a hole inside her. It’s like an addiction. Tony asks her if she really “needs” so many, and she accepts that perhaps she doesn’t, but in other ways the clothes to her are something without which she cannot survive in the same way she could not survive without food or water. Tony’s mere asking her if she would consider reining her spending in is akin to breaking the spell, asking her to reject the very thing she is which may not be so different from dying anyway.
After her death, Tony hires another woman, Hisako (also played by Rie Miyazawa), to wear his late wife’s clothes clumsily explaining that seeing this simulacrum of Eiko will finally convince him that she is gone. Another being is now inhabiting the clothes, filling the void where Eiko once was. On seeing the room full of orphaned outfits, Hisako breaks down in tears. She tells Tony that she has never seen so many beautiful clothes and is overwhelmed by the sight. But perhaps she too is affected by this space that has become a manifestation of loneliness and the unfillable void that exists within us all.
Tony’s void was perhaps forged by his lonely childhood. His mother died not long after his birth, and his father (also played by Issey Ogata) was a jazz trombonist ill suited to fatherhood who was always on the road. He gave him his unusual name anticipating an era of American dominance, but mostly it brought him nothing other than loneliness and isolation. Though he has made a successful career for himself as an illustrator, some say that his drawings lack warmth hinting at his inability, or perhaps lack of desire, to connect with other people before meeting Eiko.
Ichikawa too employs this distancing effect in having the tale narrated by an anonymous third party with the actors breaking in to speak a few lines of their own while trapped within a kind of dreamscape in which they are isolated and alone. The muted colour palette similarly hints at the colourlessness of Tony’s existence without the possibility of human connection. The ambiguous conclusion is either a tragedy or sign or new possibilities as Tony appears to want to reach out once again, but finds his call unanswered. Perhaps he will try another time, or otherwise remain mired in loneliness longing for connection but continually denied. In any case, Ichikawa’s film has a kind of elliptical quality, a poetic cycle of grief and longing that is at once filled with melancholy and enduring sadness but also a kind of transcendence in the rare moments in which two people fully connect no matter how brief or fleeting they may turn out to be.
The rate of social change in the second half of the twentieth century was extreme throughout much of the world, but given that Japan had only emerged from centuries of isolation a hundred years before it’s almost as if they were riding their own bullet train into the future. Norihiro Koizumi’s Flowers (フラワーズ) attempts to chart these momentous times through examining the lives of three generations of women, from 1936 to 2009, or through Showa to Heisei, as the choices and responsibilities open to each of them grow and change with new freedoms offered in the post-war world. Or, at least, up to a point.
