It may be a truism to say that you never really know what’s going on in other people’s lives, but even if a family looks superficially happy and gives the impression everything is going just perfectly for them that might not actually be the case. The title of Taro Kawasaki & Eisuke Sakauchi’s Faraway Family (彼方の家族, Kanata no Kazoku) has a double meaning in that in the Japanese title can be also read as “Kanata’s Family” which is the name of the hero and also a word meaning “somewhere in the distance” which is in fact how both of the boys feel their fathers to exist.
Kanata may feel it more closely in that he lost his father in the 2011 tsunami and has never really dealt with the grief having moved to Yamagata with his mother. Kanata’s father also had quite a difficult relationship with his fisherman grandfather who was intent on railroading him to take over the boat and seemingly never had a good word for anyone yet his father lost his life after heading to the harbour to look for him explaining only that he was family. Now the only breadwinner in the family, his mother has to work to support them and is therefore often absent, leaving him money to buy dinner from a convenience store which he usually eats alone.
Having become withdrawn and fearful of making new relationships that may end suddenly, Kanata also has the added stigma of being someone from Fukushima in the wake of the nuclear disaster. His new teacher, Yoshikazu, makes a well-meaning faux pas in telling Kanata to consider him a father figure yet as it turns out Yoshikazu is a fairly compromised one. On being introduced to his classmate Riku who is also Yoshikazu’s son he thinks he’s had his face rubbed in it with this picture of the perfect family.
But what he discovers is that Riku has many of the same problems as himself seeing as he also fears he does not really fit in his family and wonders if they’d be happier and better off if he weren’t in it. Unlike Riku, Kanata doesn’t seem to be overly burdened by parental expectation and despite the problems between his father and grandfather his early childhood seems to have been happy and filled with love and cheerfulness. His problem is more to do with what he’s lost and the resulting sense of absence it’s left behind as he finds himself eternally missing his father.
For Riku meanwhile, it’s the connection itself which is painfully absent. The more he tries to connect with Yoshikazu the more it seems to backfire while Yoshikazu seems obsessed with the idea of his getting into Japan’s most prestigious university mostly for his own gratification as double proof of what a great teacher and father he is. Or else, to mask his own sense of inadequacy in that he would feel embarrassed professionally if his own son turned out not to be academically inclined. Riku’s family don’t celebrate birthdays and he can’t ever remember getting a present but when he decides to try and buy one for Yoshikazu it’s a reminder of a happier memory when he simply played with him as a loving father rather than a hard taskmaster driving him on to a vicarious goal as evidence of his controlling nature.
Kanata seems to have had more than his share of tragedy in life and is painfully aware of the things just our of reach but also increasingly that not all of them are and if you’re not careful you can in fact be the one to push them away. Shooting in the icy snow of a Yamagata winter, Kawasaki and Sakauchi capture the frostiness of the boys’ emotional isolation but also the quickening warmth of their friendship as they bond over their shared loneliness in pining for an absent father. What Kanata learns is to embrace the things that seem somewhere far away for they do at least exist there, even if no longer present in a physical sense, and that the memory of them can be warm and comforting rather than painful or lonely.
Faraway Family screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.
Original trailer (no subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 