Divided into four hour-long segments, Little Forest (リトル・フォレスト) opens with a voice over from Ichiko (Ai Hashimoto) introducing us to Komori, her home village. High in the mountains, Komori is a community of farmers without a single store though there is a farmer’s co-op if you make the half-hour bike ride to the high street. It’s downhill so not so far on a bike on your way, but a good 90 minute walk in the winter snow. Most people do their shopping at the supermarket a few towns over but if Ichiko wants to go there it takes her the best part of a day. Ichiko, however, has a taste for doing things herself and so she grows most of her own food or barters for that which she doesn’t have with some of the other sharecroppers. Always with one eye on the future and particularly for the winter to come, Ichiko preserves her produce and makes the most of all she has.
Despite her feelings of inadequacy and incompleteness, Ichiko throws herself into the business of farming, weeding her rice field and preparing for the harvest all alone. She doesn’t seem to mind the solitude or the monotony, rejoicing in cooking the food she has grown and savouring each of its flavours. A gifted cook, Ichiko also likes to experiment, finding new ways to use each of the vegetables in her garden and trying them out on her two old school friends Yuta (Takahiro Miura) and Kikko (Mayu Matsuoka).
Yuta, like Ichiko, tried life in the city but ultimately decided to come home to the country. Despite wanting nothing but escape, Yuta found that he couldn’t adapt to the city’s insincerity. He missed real conversation and the ability to talk seriously about serious things whilst learning from others – something he so admired in the village. Ichiko, rather than empathising with him, is a little jealous. Yuta came home to face himself and discovered who he really was whereas she suspects she came back to escape doing exactly that. In short, she ran away and is living in hiding.
Yuta, adopting the gentle tones he was so in praise of, almost points this out to Ichiko albeit in a subtle way by telling her that he admires the way she does everything for herself but that he’s worried she may have missed the point. Ichiko’s need for independence is perhaps a reaction to abandonment by her mother which apparently happened quite abruptly in her teenage years. Her mother’s letters are vague and don’t include a return address or any details regarding where, how, or with whom she is currently living. Her last letter, however, seems to contain some relevant advice in the form of various excuses. Ichiko’s mother tells her that she was worried she’d just been wandering round in circles but finally realised that the arc of her life has been more like a spiral. Never taking the same path twice, she learned as she went and so finding yourself back at the start is not the same as never having set off.
Rather than actively making the choice, Ichiko merely commits to making it. Realising that it’s time to come out of hibernation and figure out where it is she wants to be rather than simply allowing Komori to become her default setting, the decision is made quickly and keenly. Yet it takes time, effort, and experience to bring something to fruition and, skilled as she is, Ichiko still has a few things to learn. Filled with wonderful food and idyllic scenery, Little Forest is perhaps an idealised view of country life – the kind of life lived by those who know how to live happily even when life is hard, but there is truth in its age old wisdom as long as you know how to harvest it.
Released as two two-part movies: Summer/Autumn (2014) & Winter/Spring (2015)
Summer/Autumn trailer (no subtitles)
Winter/Spring trailer (no subtitles)
Learning to love Tokyo is a kind of suicide, according to the heroine of Yuya Ishii’s love/hate letter to the Japanese capital, The Tokyo Night Sky is Always the Densest Shade of Blue (夜空はいつでも最高密度の青色だ, Yozora wa Itsudemo Saiko Mitsudo no Aoiro da). This city is a mess of contradictions, a huge sprawling metropolis filled with the anonymous masses and at the same time so tiny you can find yourself running into the same people over and over again. Inspired by the poems of Tahi Saihate, The Tokyo Night Sky is at once a meditative contemplation of city life and an awkward love story between two lost souls who somehow find each other in its crowded backstreets.
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.
Tradition vs modernity is not so much of theme in Japanese cinema as an ever present trope. The characters at the centre of Yukiko Mishima’s adaptation of Aoi Ikebe’s manga, A Stitch of Life (繕い裁つ人, Tsukuroi Tatsu Hito), might as well be frozen in amber, so determined are they to continuing living in the same old way despite whatever personal need for change they may be feeling. The arrival of an unexpected visitor from what might as well be the future begins to loosen some of the perfectly executed stitches which have kept the heroine’s heart constrained all this time but this is less a romance than a gentle blossoming as love of craftsmanship comes to the fore and an artist begins to realise that moving forward does not necessarily entail a betrayal of the past.
Koji Fukada first ventured into the family drama arena with the darkly comic satire 
The work of director Yuki Tanada has had a predominant focus on the stories of independent young women but The Cowards Who Looked to the Sky sees her shift focus slightly as the troubled relationship between a middle aged housewife who escapes her humdrum life through cosplay and an ordinary high school boy takes centre stage. Based on the novel of the same name by Misumi Kubo, The Cowards Who Looked to the Sky (ふがいない僕は空を見た, Fugainai Boku wa Sora wo Mita) also tackles the difficult themes of social stigma, the power of rumour, teenage poverty, elder care, childbirth and even pedophilia which is, to be frank, a little too much to be going on with.
Windows on Worlds 