Tag: Takehiro Murata

The Solitary Gourmet (劇映画 孤独のグルメ, Yutaka Matsushige, 2024)

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Isn’t it funny how a good bowl of soup can make everything better? Based on the manga written by Masayuki Qusumi and illustrated by Jiro Taniguchi, the feature-length edition of the long-running series has a distinctly soupy feel as salaryman Goro (Yutaka Matsushige) finds himself travelling Japan and abroad in search for the ingredients of a soup an old man ate as a child. Airing since 2012, The Solitary Gourmet TV series was a trendsetter for Japanese comfort foodie cinema and has given rise to several other similarly themed shows in which the protagonist visits a real life establishment and enjoys whatever they have to offer from food to sake, sweets, and even traditional bathhouses.

In fact, there’s even a meta joke towards the end of Solitary Gourmet (劇映画 孤独のグルメ, Geki Eiga: Kodoku no Gourmet) in which one of the restaurants Goro goes to is featured in a show about a foodie salaryman while he plays a fellow customer. The newly international setting reflects the increased budget of a theatrical feature and also helps to expand the series’ episodic format in leading Goro on a crazy chase that begins with the daughter of an old friend in Paris (Anne Watanabe) who enlists him to hunt down the ingredients for her grandfather’s cherished soup. Of course, this provides an excuse for Goro to go to the remote Goto Islands and learn about the local cuisine while running around collecting random samples like he’s on a side quest in an RPG. 

Then again, it also offers him the chance for some surreal adventures, including getting cast away on an uninhabited island before being rescued by the Korean-speaking residents of a food research institute. It’s there that he meets Shiho (Yuki Uchida), a Japanese woman living on “an island for women who are fed up with men,” and a former restaurant worker retreating from a marriage fracturing under the pressures of trying to run a restaurant in the post-COVID society. When Goro later catches up with her husband (Joe Odagiri), he too is a depressed, broken figure who now only serves fried rice in his incredibly unwelcoming restaurant. But being talked into helping Goro recreate the old man’s beloved soup seems to reactivate his creative juices and give him the desire to get back on his feet. 

Star Yutaka Matsushige directing for the first time throws in a brief homage to Tampopo but what the film is most interested in is the universality and healing power of a tasty broth from the onion soup Goro eats in Paris to the Haejangguk, or hangover soup, that he orders in Korea while being watched over by an exasperated immigration officer (Yoo Jae-myung). That Goro’s quest takes him so far hints at the shared history of the two nations and the various culinary influences and universalities running between them with soup a means of healing and friendship. Exchanging a few words of Korean, Goro tries to ask what the name of the fish in his soup is, only to come to an understanding when the immigration officer writes it down for him in Chinese characters. 

All this food really does bring people together, as Goro gets pretty much everyone he meets roped into his quest to recreate the old man’s childhood dish as his deathbed request. Matsushige recreates the zany humour of the TV series including his familiar “I’m hungry” catchphrase, followed by the camera taking three steps back and picturing Goro in front of some notable landmark. He also doesn’t seem to be getting much work done while running around trying to figure out this soup even he’s never actually tasted it and is reliant on the old man’s fragile recollections. Goro had been in Paris to deliver a painting of somewhere he once lived and the old man remarked that photographs are records of time but painting turns them into memories. Food, or more specifically soup, might do something similar, at least according to the old man who is desperately trying to reclaim something of the home comforts of his youth. Of course, the old man is the only one who knows what the soup tastes like, so perhaps Goro is on a fool’s errand, but as he later says, soup does seem to be the water of life and thanks to its healing qualities a universal symbol of peace and harmony not to mention friendship and kindness.

The Solitary Gourmet screens 29th May as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Images: ©2025 “Solitary Gourmet” Film Partners

Minbo, or the Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion (ミンボーの女, Juzo Itami, 1992)

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“Yakuza are vain, treat them politely,” the heroine of Juzo Itami’s 1992 comedy Minbo, or The Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion (ミンボーの女, Minbo no Onna) instructs a hapless pair of hotel employees trying to solve the organised crime problem at their hotel, but it’s a lesson Itami would go on to learn himself after he was attacked by gangsters who slashed his face and neck with knives. Itami in fact died in fairly suspicious circumstances in 1997 having fallen from the roof of a high-rise building leaving a note behind him explaining his “suicide” was intended to prove his innocence in regards to an upcoming newspaper story alleging an affair with a young actress. Given Itami’s films had often made a point of skewering Japanese traditions and that taking one’s own life is not the way most would choose to clear their name, it has long been suggested that his death was staged by yakuza who’d continued to harass him ever since the film’s release. 

It’s true enough that Minbo may have touched a nerve in undercutting the yakuza’s preferred image of themselves as the inheritors of samurai valour standing up for the oppressed masses against a cruel authority. Of course, that isn’t really how it works and getting the yakuza on your side in a civil dispute may be a case of out of the frying pan into the fire. It’s the yakuza themselves who are the oppressive authority ruling by fear and intimidation. Even so, the yakuza as an institution were in a moment of flux in the early ‘90s following the collapse of the bubble economy during which they’d shifted further away from the street thuggery of the post-war era into a newly corporatised if no more respectable occupation. This change is perhaps exemplified by “minbo”, a kind of fraud in which gangsters get involved in civil disputes underpinned with the thinly veiled threat of violence. 

The yakuza who plague the Hotel Europa, for example, pull petty tricks such as “discovering” a cooked cockroach in the middle of a lasagne, or claiming to have left a bag of cash behind which is later handed back to the “wrong” person by the front desk who probably should have asked for ID. Itami frames the presence of the yakuza as a kind of infestation, suggesting that if you do not tackle it right away it soon takes over and cannot be removed. Dealing with the problem directly may cause it to get worse in the short term, but only by doing so can you ever be rid of them once and for all. At least that’s the advice given by forthright attorney Mahiru (Nobuko Miyamoto) who demonstrated that the only way to deal with yakuza is to show them that you aren’t afraid because at the end of the day the law is on your side. 

Part of the “woman” cycle in which Itami’s wife Nobuko Miyamoto stars as a sometimes eccentric yet infinitely capable woman solving the problems of contemporary Japan through old-fashioned earnestness and everyday decency, Minbo finds its fearless heroine explaining that the yakuza themselves are a kind of con. In general they won’t hurt civilians because then they’re much more likely to be arrested. Going to prison is incredibly expensive and therefore not likely to prove cost effective. She knows that if she can catch them admitting they’ve committed a “crime” then they can’t touch her, and they won’t. They do however go after the rather more naive hotel boss Kobayashi (Akira Takarada) whom they try to frame for the rape of a bar hostess, drugging him after he unwisely agreed to meet them alone to hand over blackmail money. Then again, the hotel isn’t entirely whiter than white either. Kobayashi admits they can’t pull strings with the health ministry over the cockroach incident because they previously used them to cover up a previous instance of food poisoning. 

In any case, the yakuza end up looking very grubby indeed. It’s hard to call yourself a defender of the oppressed when you’re pulling petty stunts no better than a backstreet chancer. Yet like any kind of irritating insect, they too begin to evolve gradually developing a kind of immunity to Mahiru’s tactics in themselves manipulating law only they aren’t as good as she is and they are after all in the wrong. She’s a little a wrong too in that if pushed too far the yakuza will indeed stoop to physical violence against civilians, but she also knows that they thrive on fear and that to beat them she may have to put her safety on the line to prove they have no power over her. It seems Itami felt something similar issuing a statement shortly after his attack to the effect that “Yakuza must not be allowed to deprive us of our freedom through violence and intimidation, and this is the message of my movie”. As gently humorous as any of Itami’s movies and no less earnest, Minbo paints the yakuza as a plague on post-bubble Japan and suggests that it’s about time they were shown the door. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

The Last Dance (大病人, Juzo Itami, 1993)

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A self-involved film director gets a lesson in what it is to live when he discovers that he has terminal cancer in a lighthearted melodrama from Juzo Itami, The Last Dance (大病人, Daibyonin). Itami was apparently inspired by his own stay in hospital after being attacked by yakuza offended by his previous film Minbo and like his debut The Funeral the film has a few questions to ask about the nature of death along with the functioning of the medical system. 

That’s partly because film director Buhei Mukai (Rentaro Mikuni) is not initially told of his diagnosis. His well-meaning doctor, Ogata (Masahiko Tsugawa) a old university friend of his wife, elects to tell him only that he has a stomach ulcer in keeping with an old-fashioned policy that worries patients may lose hope and give up too easily on discovering the extent of their illness. Buhei meanwhile continues to obsess about his condition, convinced it must be cancer and that his wife, Mariko (Nobuko Miyamoto), and the medical staff are lying to him, at one point pretending to be his own uncle in order to tease the truth out of Ogata over the phone and attempting suicide when he accidentally implies that Buhei may not have long left. 

His distress is compounded by the irony that in the film he was working on when he became ill he was starring as a composer with advanced cancer whose wife has also been diagnosed with a more aggressive form of the disease. Whatever we might think about Buhei, it’s fair to say that the film’s sexual politics have not aged well. Not only was he having an affair with the actress playing his wife, but continues to flirt inappropriately with the medical staff and at one point even tries to force himself on his wife who was in the process of leaving him when he was first diagnosed. His lechery seems primed to appeal to men of a similar age while hinting at his virility and desire for life, but is nevertheless crass and often uncomfortable. Nevertheless, as Mariko says he’s like a child inside cheekily joking with the doctors about his drinking and smoking habits while running away from anything unpleasant and trying to get out of having to undergo treatment. 

Itami had often remarked on the weaknesses of Japanese men who “can’t stand loneliness, can’t make decisions alone, can’t face anyone who disagrees with them and can’t accept responsibility for their mistakes,” Buhei seemingly possessing all four. In part regretting her decision to keep the seriousness of his illness from him, Mariko reflects that in the end all they did was leave Buhei alone in his fear and anxiety as the only one who didn’t know the truth, engineering a kind of conspiracy as they cheerfully told him to “soldier on” knowing there was no hope. Yet during his time in the hospital, Buhei is also confronted by the ethical dilemmas of medical treatment on witnessing doctors desperately try to resuscitate a man who was miserable, in pain, bedridden, and unable to communicate, just waiting for the end. As even his grieving wife calls out to the doctors to let him go, Buhei wonders if it’s right to preserve life at all costs especially when the patient has not been given a choice in his treatment and may not have been informed that they have no possibility of recovery. 

Coming to a new realisation he challenges Ogata’s conviction that death is his enemy, telling him that he should see it less as defeat than acceptance reflecting on the irony that he never felt so alive as when dying. Whimsical if occasionally maudlin, Itami throws in a surrealist dream sequence in which Buhei approaches the other side and comes to realise that death might not be so frightening after all even as he watches himself from above in an out of body experience witnessing the accidental violence inflicted on his body by those trying to save it. In some senses, Buhei is fairly unredeemed, winking at his indifferent mistress even on his death bed, but is in others humbled as he looks back on his life with its regrets and unfulfilled promises, repairing his relationship with his long suffering wife while admitting that under different circumstances he and Ogata might have become good friends. Offering a sometimes critical view of medical practice and ethics, Itami’s poetic meditation on what it is to die loses none of his ironic humour even in its unfolding tragedy. 

Wait and See (あ、春, Shinji Somai, 1998)

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In the opening sequence of Shinji Somai’s Wait and See (あ、春,  Ah haru), a large grey cat growls as it creeps through a suburban home and out into the garden where it sits outside a henhouse and loudly miaows at the birds trapped inside. In many ways, this is exactly what’s about to happen to the Nirasakis when a prodigal father suddenly returns to disrupt the life of his incredibly dull and emotionally distant son. 

Hiroshi (Koichi Sato) is the epitome of the ideal salaryman and seems to be living a charmed life having married into his wife’s wealthy family but under the surface nothing is quite as it seems to be. His wife Mizuho (Yuki Saito) seems to be suffering with some kind of mental distress and Hiroshi often appears indifferent or even cold towards to her. At the memorial service for his late father-in-law, Mizuho’s mother (Shiho Fujimura) and aunt (Chisako Hara) reflect on the late patriarch in less than favourable terms remarking that “everything was half measures” with him. He didn’t commit himself fully to either his family or his career and consequently achieved success with neither. 

The implication is that Hiroshi is much the same, simply going through the motions whether at work or at home and largely closed off to his wife at one point even drawing a curtain and leaving her in the dark to escape a conversation. “He never tells you anything” Mizuho’s mother points out after reading in the paper that the company where Hiroshi works may be in financial trouble, while Mizuho too complains that he never discusses anything with her only announcing the results when it’s already finished. 

Hiroshi had always believed his own father to have died when he was five years old, so it’s quite a surprise when the gnomish Sasaichi (Tsutomu Yamazaki) accosts him in the street and claims to be his long lost dad. Like the cat outside the henhouse, he’s set to create a disturbance but not quite the one everyone assumes it will be. Hiroshi’s mother Kimiyo (Sumiko Fuji) warns him that his crass working class dad will only cause embarrassment in the refined elegance of the upper-middle-class family he has married into. Yet Mizuho and her mother actually find Sasaichi quite amusing for the first couple of days, the mother very impressed by Sasaichi’s unreconstructed manliness which she finds so in contrast to the comparatively meek Hiroshi. Sasaichi fixes the leaky bath and sticking door that Hiroshi never got round to symbolising his lack of regard and inability to care for his home, which is in a sense ironic because Sasaichi was never really able to take care of anything. 

Sasaichi later explains that he left because his business failed and he ended up with debts to loansharks so he divorced Kimiyo and moved away to prevent them coming after her money. A fatherless son, Hiroshi struggles to construct the image of himself as a father and cannot create intimate relationships with people, but has settled for fulfilling the role of a successful member of society who can support a family financially even though the sense of himself as a provider is an illusion as his wife’s generational wealth already guarantees them a comfortable existence. Even so, this being the difficult post-bubble economy Hiroshi lives with a sense of economic anxiety but buries his head in the sand refusing to listen to a more savvy friend who can see the writing on the wall and tries to convince him to take a job at another company where he’s just secured a position for himself. But Hiroshi is afraid of change and ironically clings fast to his corporate family even while fearing it will leave him. 

He desperately doesn’t want to think that he is like Sasaichi, that he may fail his family by failing in his career or that he too is an uncouth, unrefined country bumpkin incapable of taking care of himself let alone anyone else. The again perhaps they’re more alike that he’d like to think. Hiroshi and Mizuho object when they realise Sasaichi’s been teaching their son Mitsuru (Keita Okada) how to play craps, but as his friend points out stockbroking is also really just legitimised high stakes gambling. He too wanders around until late at night because he doesn’t want to go home and makes his wife worry so she has to take sleeping pills .

Yet there’s also a side of him that is still the gentle boy from the country as he painstakingly raises chicks in the back garden. In the end, it’s Sasaichi who shows them the maternal warmth they need to grow, gestating the eggs in a pouch inside his haramaki only for them to hatch at the most ironic moment. Hiroshi gives his son a brief life lesson in explaining that the chicks that hatch from these eggs will go on to lay their own in a circular process of renewal just as he is passing on knowledge from his childhood to the next generation. The film begins and ends with a ritual of mourning, though Somai takes us through the passing season moving from Setsubun to Hinamatsuri as Sasaichi continues to outstay his welcome while attempting to repair his corrupted paternity. “Don’t worry, life will go on,” Mizuho reassures a more open Hiroshi finally coming to terms with his anxieties and willing to share them with his family in full knowledge of who he is as a man and a father in a world that’s anything but certain.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Seven Weeks (野のなななのか, Nobuhiko Obayashi, 2014)

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“A death is a history” runs an opening title card in Nobuhiko Obayashi’s poignant existential drama, Seven Weeks (野のなななのか, No no Nanananoka). Returning to some of the director’s key themes, Obayashi’s adaptation of the novel by Koji Hasegawa takes its name from the traditional Buddhist period of mourning reminding us that life and death is a continuous cycle in which all lives are necessarily tied to one another. Some may later ask if those connections are also constraints, thinking perhaps of the sometimes onerous burdens of family, but even they later reflect on the necessity of human ties while contemplating the confluence of the eternal and the transient. 

The death we’re being asked to witness is that of 92-year-old Mitsuo Suzuki (Toru Shinagawa), a former doctor and owner of what some view as a junk shop, who is discovered collapsed by his granddaughter Kanna (Saki Terashima) only to die a few days later at the time shown on his permanently broken wristwatch which also happens to be the time the Great East Japan Earthquake struck in 2011. Soon his extended family begin to arrive beginning with long widowed sister Eiko (Tokie Hidari), grandson Fuyuki (Takehiro Murata) and his daughter Kasane (Hirona Yamazaki), and Kanna’s brother Akito (Shunsuke Kubozuka) while Fuyuki’s brother Haruhiko (Yutaka Matsushige) and his wife Setsuko (Tomoka Shibayama) will make it only in time for the wake. Throwing all into confusion is the unexpected arrival of a mysterious young woman, Nobuko (Takako Tokiwa), later revealed to be a nurse who once lived with the family and fulfilled the role of mother for Kanna and Akito whose parents were killed in a car accident while they were still young. 

Nobuko is in many ways the key to a mystery yet also a cypher, more than one woman at the same time as if in a sense resurrected from Mitsuo’s traumatic memories of love and war in the time of his youth. At his wake, men of a similar age spin their own war stories, Eiko reminding the young that their youth was war and perhaps they’ve a right to romanticise it for all of its terrible cruelty. Mitsuo didn’t go to the front but found himself a victim of shifting borders, ironically a descendent of settler colonisers as a native of Hokkaido travelling to the disputed island of Sakhalin in search of a friend and in the company of the young woman who was engaged to him but with whom he was himself in love believing the war was over only to discover no one had told the Russians and that wars do not end at the same time for everyone, or for some at all. 

In an ironic touch, great-granddaughter Kasane participates in an excavation of an old mine once staffed largely by forced Korean labour, an elderly woman plaintively singing Arirang over the dig site, only to later visit a similar location which has become the “Canada World” tourist attraction including a replica of the house from Anne of Green Gables. As she, Eiko, and Kanna reflect on the changes in the town there’s a minor sadness that the mine has closed which seems somewhat incongruous, even as the wholesomeness of coal from the ground is favourably compared with the dangerously intangible qualities of nuclear energy. Nevertheless, conflicted nuclear engineer Haruhiko later stakes his future on renewable energy, neatly echoing the sense of circularity in a continuous cycle of death and rebirth in which one life is necessarily tied to another and therefore to all lives. 

“We got along with the Russians in Sakhalin before the war” Mitsuo’s friend Ono (Takao Ito) laments, musing on the senselessness of conflict in its propensity to draw lines between people which divide rather than connect. Mitsuo’s death is indeed “a history tying the past and future”, a minor allegory for that of his nation as he contemplates lost love and the end to wandering that is death which leads in turn to new beginnings. “You want to look away. You want to forget about it”, Mitsuo confesses, “but you can’t. You have to remember so that it’s never repeated”. Through their 49-day odyssey, the family members begin to edge their way towards a less anxious if still uncertain future. “We might lose people but not hope” Kanna expounds, recommitting herself to the hometown spirit while opening up to the possibility of romance, while her brother does something much the same, as does her uncle Fuyuki even as his daughter conversely gives up on a possibly inappropriate crush to shift into a more mature adulthood. “We will go on peacefully” runs the final title card, a mission statement for the foundation of a better world. 

Seven Weeks streams in the US July 9 – Aug. 6 as part of Japan Society New York’s Tragedies of Youth: Nobuhiko Obayashi’s War Trilogy season in collaboration with KimStim.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Woman in Witness Protection (マルタイの女, Juzo Itami, 1997)

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woman in witness protection posterJuzo Itami’s fearless taste for sending up the contradictions and hypocrisies of his home nation knew no bounds, eventually bringing him into conflict with the very forces he assumed so secure it was safe to mock – his 1992 film Minbo led to brutal attack by a gang of yakuza unhappy with how his film portrayed the world of organised crime. Woman in Witness Protection (マルタイの女, Marutai no Onna), continuing the “Woman” theme from previous hits A Taxing Woman and the more recent Supermarket Woman, would be Itami’s final feature as he died in mysterious circumstances not long after its completion and like Minbo it touched an open nerve. In 1997, crazy cult violence was perhaps no laughing matter nor as ridiculous as it might have seemed a few years earlier, yet Itami makes the actions of brainwashed conspirators the primary motivator of a self-centred actress’ gradual progress towards accepting the very thing his previous films might have satirised – her civic duty as a Japanese woman.

Itami breaks the film into a series of vignettes bookended by title cards beginning with the first which introduces us to our leading lady – Biwako Isono (Nobuko Miyamoto). Biwako is currently in rehearsals for an avant-garde play about giving birth (“a woman’s moment of glory”) during which she reduces her assistant to tears prompting her resignation, decrying Biwako’s self-centred bitchiness as she goes. Chastened, Biwako spends the evening doing vocal exercises outside her apartment which is how she comes to witness the botched murder of a lawyer by a crazed cultist (Kazuya Takahashi) during which she is almost murdered herself and only survives because the killer’s gun jams. As the only witness Biwako suddenly becomes important to the police which works well with her general need for attention but less so with her loathing for hassle. Seeing as Biwako is a famous actress, her involvement also precipitates increased press interest for the murder and accidentally threatens the ongoing police investigation not least because Biwako likes to play up for the camera and isn’t quite sure how best to deal with her divided responsibilities. With the killer still at large, the police decide to give Biwako protection in the form of two detectives – Chikamatsu (Yuji Murata), a cultured man who’s a big fan of Biwako’s stage career, and Tachibana (Masahiko Nishimura), a rather stiff gentleman who never watches films and rarely indulges in entertainment.

Bringing up cult violence in 1997 just two years after Japan’s only real terrorist incident perpetrated by a crazed cult, might be thought taboo but taboo was not something that Itami had ever run away from. Crazed cults had also popped up during A Taxing Woman’s Return though back then they mostly represented the hypocrisy of the new yakuza as a front for organised crime that thought nothing of bleeding vulnerable people dry while feeding them a lot of semi-religious claptrap to make them feel a part of something bigger while the bubble economy continued its puffed up attempts to make them feel inadequate. This time around our cultists are less well drawn but clearly a collection of unlucky people duped into believing the strange philosophies of the “Sheep of Truth” which teach that the world can only be saved by its followers dividing the world into white sheep and black sheep. Like the policeman and later Biwako, the killer believes he is only doing “that which must be done” in the best interests of the world. He is unaware of the cult’s shadiness and shocked when their lawyer threatens his family in an effort to convince him not to talk once the police have managed to break his programming, ironically through exactly the same methods – manipulating his feelings towards his wife and son.

The cult is however merely background to Biwako’s ongoing character drama. Despite experiencing emotional trauma from witnessing a murder and then being threatened herself, Biwako enjoys being the centre of the attention with the police as well as the warm glow she feels in being able to help them with their enquiries, but balks at the additional hassle of having to be involved in the trial (even if she would be given quite a sizeable platform as a witness in a high profile court case). She resents having the two policemen follow her around – especially as she has quite a busy schedule which includes an affair with her married manager. Nevertheless she gradually allows them into her life with Tachibana even making his stage debut as spear carrier in a production of Anthony and Cleopatra. Tachibana’s steadfast defence of her person even at the risk of his own life begins to teach Biwako a few things about civic responsibility and the importance of duty, even if her final moment of realisation is another of her staged set pieces in which she conjures a poignant monologue from the accidentally profound mutterings of Tachibana, a little of Cleopatra, and the earlier line from the maternity play repurposed as she affirms that testifying against the cultists will be her “moment of glory”.

Rather than end on Biwako’s sudden moment of enlightenment, Itami cuts to an ironic epilogue in which a police detective watching the movie we have just seen complains about its authenticity while emphasising that no one in protective custody has ever been attacked. A little tongue in cheek humour from Itami that is followed by the more usual disclaimer before the credits resume, but perhaps anticipating another dose of controversy from both law enforcement and cult devotees. Lighter in tone and noticeably less surreal than some of Itami’s earlier work, Woman in Witness Protection is the story of a vacuous actress learning the purpose of her stage as her particular brand of artifice meets that of the less innocently self-centred cultists head on and eventually becomes the best weapon against it.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Hanagatami (花筐/HANAGATAMI, Nobuhiko Obayashi, 2017)

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Hanagatami posterIn time the past becomes a dream. A world in and of itself, conjured from feeling and memory and painted in the imprecise strokes of one attempting to recreate a long forgotten scene. The melancholy heroes of Nobuhiko Obayashi’s long career were each trapped in a sense by nostalgia, a yearning for another time and place, or more precisely another, more innocent, version of themselves only with the benefit of hindsight and the confidence of age. Finally realising a long dreamt of project in dramatising Kazuo Dan’s classic wartime youth novel Hanagatami (花筐/HANAGATAMI), Obayashi reunites with another melancholy young man who as he puts it in the opening text wants to tell his story not out of a sense of nostalgia but out of longing for the things which were lost. Those like him who had the misfortune to be young before the war saw their whole world swept away by a kind of madness far beyond their control, losing not only a past but a future too.

When Toshihiko Sakakiyama (Shunsuke Kubozuka) returns home from Amsterdam where he had been living with his parents, Japan is already at war in China. Though the times are changing, Toshihiko’s life remains relatively untouched by conflict, insulated from the concerns of the day by the pleasant natural surroundings of his old-fashioned country town. Returning to the family estate presided over by his war-widow aunt, Keiko (Takako Tokiwa), Toshihiko strikes up a friendship with her sickly sister-in-law, Mina (Honoka Yahagi), whose proximity to death only seems to enhance her beauty. At school he finds himself caught between two polar opposites – the strong and silent Ukai (Shinnosuke Mitsushima) and the cynical nihilist Kira (Keishi Nagatsuka), while his two sets of social circles finally combine with the addition of Mina’s friends Akine (Hirona Yamazaki) and Chitose (Mugi Kadowaki) who also happens to be Kira’s cousin. The world is on the brink of ruin, but there are dances and picnics and festivals and everywhere everyone is desperate to live even in the midst of such foreboding.

Obayashi opens with a quote from one of Dan’s poems in which he mourns the flowers in full bloom shortly to be cut down in their prime. Hanagatami itself means “flower basket” but is also the title of a noh play about a woman driven mad by love for a man from whom she is separated by the arbitrary rules of her society. Japan itself has become a basket of flowers, offering up its youth on a senseless altar to political hubris while a generation attends its own funeral and becomes obsessed with the idea of permanence in a permanently uncertain world. Chitose carries about her camera, bitterly claiming that she will confer immortality on her subjects while privately longing for an end to her loneliness and suffering.

Like the heroine of the noh play, our protagonists too are driven mad by love as the madness of their times spurs them on and holds them back in equal measure. Mina, in all her etherial beauty, becomes the symbol of an age – innocence about die, drowned in its own blood. All in love with Mina, or perhaps with death itself, the men sink further into petty rivalries and conflicted friendships all the while staving off the inevitabilities of their times – that soon they too will be expected to sacrifice themselves for a cause they don’t believe in or risk being left behind alone.

Toshihiko finds himself torn between his two friends – the light and the dark, the robust Ukai and the gloomy Kira. While Toshihiko’s wide-eyed hero worship of Ukai and his idealised male physique takes on an inescapable homoerotic quality, his relationship with Kira leads him towards a darker path on which everything is “worthless” and all pleasures impossible in a world apparently so close to its end. Kira, having committed a truly heinous act, reminds his friends that they routinely kill and eat animals, and that one day they too will be gobbled up, swallowed whole by the cruelty of their times.

One by one the war takes them, if indirectly, leaving only Toshihiko behind. Describing his youth as like a game of hide and seek in which he suddenly realised it had gotten dark and all his friends had gone home, Toshihiko recasts his tale as a ghost story in which he remains haunted by the visions of his younger self and longs for his long absent friends, robbed of the futures promised to them by right of birth. Free floating through dreams and memory, Obayashi conjures an etherial world overshadowed by tragedy but coloured with wistful melancholy as pale-faced soldiers march off for the land of the dead while youth does its best to live all its tomorrows today in rejecting the senseless cruelty of its age.

Screened at Nippon Connection 2018.

Update July 2020: Hanagatami is released on UK blu-ray from Third Window Films on 6th July in a set which also includes a 20-minute making of and 35-minute interview with director Nobuhiko Obayashi.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Goodbye for Tomorrow (あした, Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1995)

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goodbye for tomorrowAfter completing his first “Onomichi Trilogy” in the 1980s, Obayashi returned a decade later for round two with another three films using his picturesque home town as a backdrop. Goodbye For Tomorrow (あした, Ashita) is the second of these, but unlike Chizuko’s Younger Sister or One Summer’s Day which both return to Obayashi’s concern with youth, Goodbye For Tomorrow casts its net a little wider as it explores the grief stricken inertia of a group of people from all ages and backgrounds left behind when a routine ferry journey turns into an unexpected tragedy.

Three months after nine people were drowned when a local ferry sank in the harbour, friends and relatives of the dead begin to receive messages signed by their loved ones instructing them to be at a small island at midnight. Cruel joke or not, each of the still grieving recipients makes their way to the boathouse, clutching the desperate hope that the dead will really return to them. Sure enough, on the stroke of midnight the ghostly boat rises from the ocean floor bringing a collection of lost souls with it, but its stay is a temporary one – just long enough to say goodbye.

Obayashi once again begins the film with an intertile-style message to the effect that sometimes meetings are arranged just to say goodbye. He then includes two brief “prequel” sequences to the contemporary set main narrative. The first of these takes place ten years previously in which a boy called Mitsugu throws a message wrapped around a rock into a school room where his friend Noriko is studying. We then flash forward to three months before the main action, around the time of the boat accident, where an assassination attempt is made on the life of a local gangster in a barber shop. At first the connection between these events is unclear as messages begin to arrive in innovative ways in the film’s “present”. After a while we begin to realise that the recipients of the messages are so shocked to receive them because they believe the senders to be dead.

At three months since the sinking, the grief is still raw and each of our protagonists has found themselves trapped in a kind of inertia, left alone so suddenly without the chance to say goodbye. The left behind range from a teenager whose young love story has been severed by tragedy, a middle aged man who lost a wife and daughter and now regrets spending so much time on something as trivial as work, a middle aged trophy wife and the colleague who both loved a successful businessman, two swimmers with unresolved romances, and the yakuza boss who lost his wife and grandson. For some the desire is to join their loved ones wherever it is that they’re going, others feel they need to live on with double the passion in the name of the dead but they are all brought together by a need to meet the past head on and come to terms with it so that they can emerge from a living limbo and decide which side of the divide they need to be on.

Aside from the temporary transparency of the border between the mortal world and that of the dead, the living make an intrusion in the form of the ongoing yakuza gang war. The Noriko (Kaori Takahashi) from the film’s prequel sequence also ends up at the meeting point through sheer chance, as does the Mitsugu (Yasufumi Hayashi), now a gangster and charged with the unpleasant task of offing the old man despite his longstanding debt of loyalty to him. These are the only two still living souls brought together by an unresolved message bringing the events full circle as they achieve a kind of closure (with the hope of a new beginning) on their frustrated childhood romance.

The other two hangers on, an ambitious yakuza with a toothache played by frequent Obayashi collaborator Ittoku Kishibe, and a lunatic wildcat sociopath played by the ubiquitous Tomorowo Taguchi, are more or less comic relief as they hide out in the forrest confused by the massing group of unexpected visitors who’ve completely ruined their plot to assassinate the old yakuza boss and assume control of the clan. However, they too are also forced to face the relationship problems which bought them to this point and receive unexpected support from the boss’ retuned spouse who points out that this situation is partly his own fault for failing to appreciate the skills of each of his men individually. The boss decides to make a sacrifice in favour of the younger generation but his final acts are those of forgiveness and a plea for those staying behind to forget their differences and work together.

Revisiting Obayashi’s frequent themes of loss and the need to keep living after tragedy strikes, Goodbye For Tomorrow is a melancholy character study of the effects of grief when loved ones are taken without the chance for goodbyes. Aside from the earliest sepia tinged sequence, Obayashi plays with colour less than in his other films but manages to make the improbable sight of the sunken boat rising from the bottom of the sea genuinely unsettling. The supernatural mixes with the natural in unexplained ways and Obayashi even makes room for The Little Girl Who Conquered Time’s Tomoyo Harada as a mysterious spirit of loneliness, as well as a cameo for ‘80s leading man Toshinori Omi. The Japanese title of the film simply means “tomorrow” which gives a hint as to the broadly positive sense of forward motion in the film though the importance “goodbye” is also paramount. The slight awkwardness of the English title is therefore explained – saying goodbye to yesterday is a painful act but necessary for tomorrow’s sake.