Tag: Tatsuo Suzuki

The Youth Killer (青春の殺人者, Kazuhiko Hasegawa, 1976)

Posted on by

An angry young man railing against “family imperialism” eventually kills both parents in a moment of intense frustration, abandons his girlfriend, and ends up alone, but what he discovers maybe less the freedom he was seeking than only more loneliness and despair. Adapted from a story by Kenji Nakagami that was itself inspired by a real-life case of patricide, Kazuhiko Hasegawa’s The Youth Killer (青春の殺人者, Seishun no Satsujinha) is imbued with the nihilistic sense of powerlessness that coloured the 1970s as its Hamlet-like hero tries to free himself from an oppressive social system only to find it indifferent to his existence.

Part of Jun’s (Yutaka Mizutani) problem is a protected adolescence as evidenced in the opening scenes in which he and his girlfriend Keiko (Mieko Harada) run round playfully reciting nursery rhymes. The irony may be that his name means “pure”, and that he is too thin-skinned to survive in this overly complex world. His father (Ryohei Uchida) stopped him from going to university like many of his friends, preventing him from moving on into a more settled adulthood. He did this, he says, because of the student protests not out of fear that harm would come to him but fear that he would cause it. The farmland surrounding Jun’s parents has been earmarked for Narita airport and despite angry clashes between local farmers and an uneasy alliance with student protesters, will eventually go ahead. Those like Jun are being squeezed off of their land and have nowhere else to turn.

Perhaps sensing his listlessness, Jun’s father gives him the money to open a bar and capitalise ion the new custom from the airport, but this too leaves Jun feeling childish and emasculated, as if it’s his father who will actually be in charge. The two men hug and wrestle, alternately showing affection and tussling for power. His secondary problem is that his parents apparently don’t approve of his girlfriend Keiko with whom he is running the bar. His father has hired a private detective who tells him that Keiko was raped by her mother’s lover resulting in her mother hitting her and causing her to lose the hearing in one ear. Jun’s father does not believe that Keiko was raped and insists that it was Keiko who seduced her mother’s lover.

It seems to have been this fracture point that caused Jun to snap and kill his father, less because of his attachment to Keiko than because of the challenge to his masculinity implied by the suggestion that his girlfriend simply sleeps with anyone she pleases. In fact, Jun doesn’t seem to particularly like Keiko and is wary of committing to relationships owing to his fear of “family imperialism”. He becomes fixated on the question of her deafness, niggled by the possibility she lied about its cause and his father is right. Never examining why Keiko might choose to create a different truth around what happened to her, he in fact tries to rape her himself and is obsessed with tying to find out whether not there was a fig tree near their old home as Keiko says or an azalea as others would have it.

The conflict he has with Keiko is not so different from that with his mother who, on learning of her husband’s death, quickly shifts to protecting her son, but then seizes on it as a chance to claim her own freedom. Sick of the drudgery of working at the family’s auto repair shop, she suggests running away with Jun to start a new life in a new place just the two of them. Her language becomes increasingly romantic before she eventually asks Jun to make love to her. When he eventually kills her, she tells him to stick it in and be gentle as if she were talking to a lover. But she too also doubts him, fearing he means to take the money from the safe and escape alone. Not even maternal love can overcome this kind of cynicism in a society ruled by money.

Hasegawa frames Jun’s progress as a series of confrontations, between his father, his mother, Keiko, and eventually himself in which he discovers he is still a child. He has killed his parents, but has failed to become a man. Sitting on a beach with Keiko he is overwhelmed by loneliness remembering a happy family moment when his father sold ice lollies rather than toiling at the garage. Scenes in his student film contain imagery echoing self-immolations and this is what he eventually tries to do himself in setting the bar on fire with him inside it only to be rescued by Keiko. After fleeing the scene he stows away on a truck and removes the bandage from his hand symbolising the transgression of his parents’ murder, but he is quite literally being driven to a destination not of this own choosing. Rather than freedom in solitude, he’s discovered only loneliness and despair. Condemned to a limbo state, he has nowhere to go and can only travel in circles looking for an elusive exit from this very particular kind of hell.

The Youth Killer screened as part of Japan Society New York’s Kazuhiko Hasegawa’s Anarchic Ethos.

Raffles Hotel (ラッフルズホテル, Ryu Murakami, 1989)

Posted on by

An actress gradually dissolves into her own image while wandering around Singapore in search of lost love in Ryu Murakami’s adaptation of his own novel, Raffles Hotel (ラッフルズホテル). Ryu Murakami may generally be more associated with the extreme revolving around transgressive sex and violence, yet like its namesake the film is a more elegant affair indulging in its own sense of mystery tinged with a melancholy eeriness in its heroine’s apparent instability. 

Moeko (Miwako Fujitani) later admits that she is no longer an actress, and therefore no longer quite herself uncertain who it is she’s meant to be. In one sense perhaps that’s why she’s come to Singapore though in another it’s someone else she’s looking for though to begin with we may think she’s there to escape him, and it could be that too. “Maybe I’d feel better if he were,” she muses when her tour guide, Yuki (Masahiro Motoki), explains that there are no Japanese people near the gravestones she’s just been looking at trying to assure her that the man she’s seeking is not dead. She thinks she sees him everywhere, dropped into typical Singaporean scenes appearing as a durian seller or a man restoring a church while more literally haunted by the spectre of a friend who apparently died in Vietnam while covering the war. Kariya (Jinpachi Nezu) later tells her that he can’t forget the jungle while she asks to be taken there with him and travels to a mountain lodge where they hunt wild game with a crossbow. 

Yuki first becomes worried about her when her hotel room is filled with orchids she claims are from Kariya only to discover she ordered them herself when the orchid house contacts the hotel to complain that the bill has not been paid. Even so, she continues to believe they are from the man she’s looking for, even going so far as to thank him for them as if unable to process the gap between her realities. We often see her looking at photos from her photo shoots, while she later complains to Kariya that she wants to laugh when she wants to laugh and cry when she wants to cry as if making plain her disconnection with her self and desire to reassert her own identity over those she is forced to assume as an actress. 

This abstraction may also explain her words to Kariya that the sky is full of stars but that they are distant from each other and therefore the sky is only make-believe as if the image of Moeko that we see is only an illusion we’ve patched together from the various components available to us. It speaks of her alienation and loneliness, two qualities only deepened by her presence in an unfamiliar culture where she cannot speak the language. Acting as her guide, Yuki describes her as a polar opposite to his Singaporean girlfriend (Fawn Wong), the daughter of a wealthy family who is bold and confident, unafraid to chase her desires be they dancing or “Japanese hoods” as her father describes them. 

Murakami semi-exoticises Singapore if at times ironically in homing in on the portraits of famous authors in the bar and a man who always seems to be banging away on a typewriter. He sends Moeko all around the island and follows her as she takes in tourist sights, tries durian, and watches Chinese opera but lends an eerie quality to her place within the hotel implying finally that her room has in a way swallowed her as her name is added to the list of famous people who have stayed there even as she remarks that she feels as if the ceiling fan has become sentient in its movement. In any case, the camera is something that she both fears and craves as it both gives and takes her identity. She tries to pick it up herself but points it without looking, finally asking Kariya to take her picture only to find herself becoming one with her image just as Kariya is reduced to shadow as if her very essence had dissipated into the atmosphere as symbolised in a swimming pool full of orchids. “Lost in a fantasy” she may be, but so are we, led astray by a vision of a woman we can never really see. 

Kekkon Annai Mystery (結婚案内ミステリー, Yoshikuni Matsunaga, 1985)

Posted on by

Selected via a talent competition held in conjunction with the search for a new actress to play the leading role in Kosei Saito’s Ninja Wars, Noriko Watanabe became the second of the new “Sannin Musume” alongside the future star of The Little Girl Who Conquered Time, Tomoyo Harada, and Kadokawa’s top idol Hiroko Yakushimaru. Her career with the studio was however comparatively short-lived affording her only three leading roles before she eventually left the agency and went independent after turning down a lead in Koibitotachi no Jikoku because of its explicit nude scenes. Again adapted from a novel by Jiro Akagawa, Kekkon Annai Mystery (結婚案内ミステリー) was her final leading performance as a Kadokawa idol (though she would also play a supporting role in Obayashi’s His Motorbike, Her Island) and saw her playing a slightly more mature role as a young woman working for a matchmaking agency who finds herself mixed up in a country house mystery after accepting an unusual proposal from a client. 

At 19, Hiroko (Noriko Watanabe) is the sole employee at the Fukada Marriage Consultation Agency owned and operated by her boss Mr. Fukada (Bengal). As we first meet her she’s deep undercover at a rival firm which has already shifted into a new era of computer-assisted matchmaking whereas Mr Fukada prefers to do things the old-fashioned way which is presumably why he has no business. It comes as something of a shock therefore when he receives a call from Mrs. Sekine (Aiko Nagayama), the temporary CEO of a major company who apparently wants to find a match for her son Masakazu (Ken Watanabe) who is shortly to return after graduating from Harvard in order to take over the family business following the death of his father six months previously. At the initial consultation, however, Mrs Sekine scandalises Mr Fukada by immediately selecting Hiroko as a potential bride. Seeing as it’s only an initial meeting, which would earn them a bonus payment, Hiroko agrees but when they drive out to the Sekines’ creepy gothic mansion in the middle of nowhere they discover all is not quite as it seems. Masakazu has a fiancée already, but unfortunately she was involved in a traffic accident and is currently in hospital which is a problem because for undisclosed reasons they need to hold the wedding right away. Hiroko is to act as a proxy seeing as no-one who’ll be coming to the ceremony has met Masakazu’s girlfriend and so will be none the wiser. 

Perhaps somewhat naively, Hiroko agrees and ends up staying in the house posing as Masakazu’s intended which includes sharing a room. Briefly shifting genres, a training montage sees Hiroko undertaking a crash course in how to be posh, adopting the correct deportment, using cutlery elegantly, and learning to walk downstairs in massive heals or up while wearing an inconveniently long dress. Which is all to say, the fabulously wealthy inhabit a different world of which Hiroko was hitherto ignorant. This is further brought home by the apparent cracks in the foundations of the Sekine family which is also a corporate entity with the other board members largely favouring other candidates more closely connected to the themselves to take over as chairman while apparent liability uncle Masao (Tamio Kawaji), whose creepy crossbow-carrying young son Mamoru is for some reason being raised by Mrs Sekine, is in some kind of trouble with yakuza loansharks. The other main issue is that Mrs Sekine is a second wife and longtime mistress of the late CEO. Masakazu was born out of wedlock and Mrs Sekine will do anything and everything she can to ensure he assumes his birthright. 

Counter-intuitively succession intrigue has little to do with the central mystery which begins to unravel when Hiroko is attacked on the eve of her wedding by a strange woman who had previously tried to warn her off Masakazu and kills her in self-defence. The body, which we can identify as that seen buried in the snow in the solarised green-tinted opening sequence, is taken care of by Mrs Sekine’s right hand man Kinoshita (Hayato Tani), but Hiroko begins to have her doubts after catching sight of a woman who looks exactly like the one she killed at the local ski resort. 

“Rich people are like that. They’d lie about anything in order to keep their wealth” Hiroko is told, realising she may be at the centre of an infinitely complex plot and becoming aware of Mrs Sekine’s tendency to throw money at people to get them to play along with her plans. Like any good gothic mystery, however, the house holds a dark secret in a hidden room which perhaps hints at the corruptions of the Bubble era along with those of the super rich elite and the undue pressure it puts on its young while uncomfortably suggesting that Mrs Sekine herself is the source of the corruption in her attempt to integrate into a higher social class into which she was not born. Atmospheric in its chilling vistas of the freezing snow, Kekkon Annai Mystery’s twisting tale of greed and manipulation may end in tragedy but ironically lives up to its name as its heroine finds a potential match in her accidental co-conspirator. 

Boxer (ボクサー, Shuji Terayama, 1977)

Posted on by

Boxer posterArtistic polymath Shuji Terayama was fond of claiming that more could be learned about life from boxing rings and race courses than from conventional study. Immersing himself in the countercultural epicentre of mid-century Shinjuku, he became known for iconoclastic street theatre before shifting to film, instantly recognisable for his striking use of colour filter and theatrical, avant-garde aesthetic. 1977’s Boxer (ボクサー) is, however, his most conventional experiment, a generic tale of a struggling boxer yearning to be a champion and battling himself, along with his society, in the claustrophobic arena of the ring, but for all the expected triumph it’s futility which marks his life and the ropes which restrain rather than liberate.

Former boxing champion Hayato (Bunta Sugawara) now lives a lonely existence alone with his beloved dog in a rundown boarding house. His brother is about to be married and wanted him to be in the engagement photos, but he told the young couple to go ahead without him. He may come to regret that because his brother quickly becomes the victim of an accident that may not have been quite that at the construction site where he and his fiancée worked. It seems that another employee, Tenma (Kentaro Shimizu) – an aspiring boxer with a limp, had taken a liking to the same girl and, either distracted by the news she intended to marry someone else, or not thinking clearly, he allowed his digger to hit Hayato’s brother and kill him. Of course, Hayato is not happy about that and determines to track Tenma down, looking for him at a neighbourhood bar where a small boy guides him to the gym, which he is eventually expelled from by the other boxers. Nevertheless, Tenma, having heard about Hayato’s past and been dismissed by his trainers because of his disability, is determined to overcome the debt that exists between them and become Hayato’s mentee hoping to go on to boxing glory.

Like many a Shinjuku tale, this is one of scrappy chancers longing to escape the vice-like grip of an underworld that refuses to release them. In the land of broken dreams, the hopeless man is king, and Hayato is nothing if not hopeless. Years ago, we’re told, he was a champion, yet he suddenly quit boxing mid-way through a bout that he was clearly winning. He had a wife and daughter, but now lives alone (except for the dog), making a living by pasting up flyers. In response to Tenma’s request, Hayato recounts to him the histories of boxing champions in Japan all of whom met a sticky end: dying of typhus in Manchuria, drowning after demobilisation, dying under a bridge, hit by a train, suicide after revenge on a yakuza who’d killed his brother, killed when a runaway truck hit his home, car accidents etc. The boxing match which opens the film is preceded by a minute of silence for a champion who died just a few days previously. So what, Hayato seems to say, we fight but we all die in the ring anyway. What’s the point?

Still, for all the meaningless of his success, he too finds a kind of purpose in Tenma’s quest even if he knows it’s futile and that it is perhaps perverse to commit to saving the man who killed his brother either by accident, as he claims, or out of romantic jealousy. Tenma tells him that he wants to be a champion to appear on TV and be famous. He has, it seems, something to prove. Hayato tells him that boxing’s not for everyone, cruelly echoing the words of the president of the boxing society in his letter explaining to Tenma that there is no place for him in the boxing world because of his disability. His reasoning is however different. He asks him if he is able to hate, to which which he replies that yes, he hates his mother, father, brother, and in fact “the whole damn world” which makes him a perfect mirror for his defeated mentor.

Terayama opens the film with a melancholy black and white sequence in which a boxer walks down a long corridor towards a door filled with light while other contenders pass him from the opposite direction, some badly beaten and others unable to walk. This is the price, he seems to say, a literal manifestation of life’s battery. Even the denizens of the strangely colourful, warm and cheerful little neighbourhood bar with its Taisho intellectual, former actress turned streetwalker, smoking child, and bookmakers who don’t pay their bills, are fighting a heavy battle, crushed under the weight of their broken dreams. Hayato tries to offer encouragement from the sidelines, “Get up if you refuse to be a loser”, he yells to a barely conscious Tenma struggling raise himself from the mat, but even if he does what will he gain? Suitcase in hand the women leave looking for better lives, while Tenma struggles to escape from the ring, chasing hollow victories of illusionary manhood but finding salvation only in the struggle.

Opening sequence (no subtitles)

The Man Who Stole the Sun (太陽を盗んだ男, Kazuhiko Hasegawa, 1979)

Posted on by Leave a comment
(C) Toho 1979

man who stole the sun posterIn the post-Asama-Sanso world, Japanese society had shifted into period of intense calm in which improving economic prosperity was in the process of delivering comfort rather than the creeping acquisitive anxiousness that began to overshadow the bubble era. Nevertheless, in cinematic terms at least anxiety was everywhere and not least among the young who, swept along by this irresistible economic current, were quietly doubtful about their place in a changing society. Co-scripted by an American screenwriter, Leonard Schrader (brother of Taxi Driver’s Paul), The Man Who Stole the Sun (太陽を盗んだ男, Taiyo wo Nusunda Otoko) provides a satirical snapshot of this confusing moment as an oppressed, belittled high school science teacher builds an atomic bomb in his apartment just to show he can but then realises he has absolutely no idea what to do with it.

Technically speaking, the science teacher’s name is Makoto Kido (Kenji Sawada) but no one really calls him that. The kids at school refer to him as “Bubble-gum” because he always seems to be chewing on the rather childish confectionary. Not the most conscientious of teachers, he tailors the curriculum to his own interests, teaching the kids all about atomic energy and the bomb, but the kids aren’t interested. They only want to know what’s going to be on the test. To them Kido’s information is irrelevant and so they ignore him, talking amongst themselves while he carries on, preaching to a seemingly empty room.

Meanwhile, Kido is building the bomb at home, for real. As he tells the kids, anyone can build an atomic bomb – you only need the plutonium which is, admittedly, tightly controlled for just this reason. He acquires his through a daring heist on a nuclear plant. Kido never elaborates on what prompted him to begin his bizarre masterplan, but there is certainly a degree of pent up rage inside him born of resentment with his reduced circumstances. “Just” a high school science teacher, who would really think he’d have the capability to build an atomic bomb, alone, using only household equipment (plus the plutonium and a custom furnace purchased after nearly exploding his oven)?

Kido’s problems are the same as many middle-aged men in ‘70s Japan in that he feels intensely oppressed from above and below. What he’s trying to tell the kids is that they have access to this power already – anyone can build a bomb, if you bother to learn how. The only thing that’s being kept from him is the plutonium (and for good reason), which he manages to acquire anyway. A chance encounter with the madness of the age seems to kickstart his plan into gear when he meets his opposing number in police inspector Yamashita (Bunta Sugawara).

Kido, having halfheartedly escorted a group of students on a school trip, finds himself rendered powerless once again when the bus is hijacked by a distressed older gentleman (Yunosuke Ito) armed with a rifle and grenade and wearing a World War II soldier’s uniform. He demands to be driven to see the emperor from whom he intends to demand the return of his son, presumably killed in the war 30 years earlier. Yamashita, clean cut and authoritative, is the gung-ho cop who masterfully brings the hostage crisis to a close by lying to the man that the emperor has consented to see him. During the evacuation the old man is killed by police snipers (despite Yamashita’s too late cries of “don’t shoot” after having dispatched the grenade and disarmed the suspect).

Like Kido, the old man likely didn’t really know what he intended to do, only that he was lonely and desperate. The emperor couldn’t give him back his son (whose uniform he seems to be wearing) and his gesture is one of futile defiance coupled with a suicide bid that has no real goal save making an elaborate protest against the world in which he lives. Kido makes the bomb, lets the authorities know he has it, but then realises he has no demands. He asks them to fix something minor that annoys him, to stop the TV networks pulling the plug on late running baseball games to make way for the news, and finds himself rewarded. He has taken back the power, they believe he has the bomb and they fear him, but he has no further goals or notion of how his society should change. There is no idealised future he is fighting for, all there is is futility and indifference.

Meanwhile, ironically enough, Kido’s desperation provokes a mini revolution in others. A talkshow radio host (Kimiko Ikegami) named “Zero” (in contrast to Kido’s adoption of the codename “No. 9” as the 9th owner of a nuclear device and the only individual), broadcasts his on-air request for ideas, believing it to be a kind of thought experiment. The ideas she gets from the public are of the usual kind – lonely men who want to bathe with naked women, nationalists who want to start a war with America, dreamers who think it might be better not to want anything and just embrace the dream, while she muses that she wants the Rolling Stones concert that was cancelled a few years ago after a band member’s narcotics conviction to be reinstated. That being as good as anything is what Kido goes for in an overture that passes as an odd kind of romance and a suitably ironic kick back against strait-laced authority.

Kido’s war is, in a sense, a war with the fathers of the world as symbolised by men like Yamashita with their suits and neatly trimmed haircuts. Their button-down existence has never offered anything to men like Kido who feel trapped and angry within it. Yet Yamashita is also reacting against his own generation of fathers as symbolised by the old man on the bus, the last remnant of wartime resistance offering a defeated cry against a world which got away from them. Yamashita let the old man die when he prioritised his own sense of heroism, and that annoyed Kido. He can’t help sympathising with his plight which is in a way also his own in being relentlessly silenced and ignored by austere authority figures.

Turning down Yamashita’s clumsy attempt at a pickup, Zero affirms that Kido has given her a dream, which no small thing and she feels bound to him because of it. It’s an ironic statement because Kido has no dreams and not only that, he has no future either – he is slowly dying of radiation poisoning despite his precautions during the building of the bomb. In their final confrontation, Yamashita, adopting a paternal authority, neatly summarises Kido’s dilemma. The only life he has the right to take is his own, and his own death is the only thing he really wants, but he’s embarked on this elaborate plan to make his presence felt all the while aware that he will remain totally anonymous. No one will ever see him. He will die, like thousands of others, faceless. A lowly high school science teacher, no terrorist mastermind or bomb building genius. His revenge is as absurd as it is futile. Male inferiority complexes threaten to drown us all in a sea of violent resentment, and as the Earth dies screaming all we will have to reflect on is that we ourselves brought this world into being through our own incurable apathy.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Akanezora: Beyond the Crimson Sky (あかね空, Masaki Hamamoto, 2007)

Posted on by Leave a comment

Akanezora - Beyond the Crimson Sky poster“It’s not all about tofu!” screams the heroine of Akanezora: Beyond the Crimson Sky (あかね空), a film which is all about tofu. Like tofu though, it has its own subtle flavour, gradually becoming richer by absorbing the spice of life. Based on a novel by Ichiriki Yamamoto, Akanezora is co-scripted by veteran of the Japanese New Wave, Masahiro Shinoda and directed by Masaki Hamamoto who had worked with Shinoda on Owl’s Castle and Spy Sorge prior to the director’s retirement in 2003. Like the majority of Shinoda’s work, Akanezora takes place in the past but echoes the future as it takes a sideways look at the nation’s most representative genre – the family drama. Fathers, sons, legacy and innovation come together in the story of a young man travelling from an old capital to a new one with a traditional craft he will have to make his own in order to succeed.

The story opens in the early 18th century when a couple stop to chat to a friend and, while they aren’t paying attention, their small son Shokichi wanders off after a doll show. Fastforward a decade or so and a young man, Eikichi (Masaaki Uchino), arrives from Kyoto intent on opening up a tofu shop in the capital. Enjoying the delicious local water, he runs into cheerful local girl, Ofumi (Miki Nakatani), who insists on helping him find his way around an unfamiliar city.

Ofumi proves invaluable in helping him set up his small neighbourhood store, but as skilled as Eikichi is, Kyoto tofu and Edo tofu are much more different than one might think. Eikichi’s tofu is smaller in size and fluffy where Edo tofu is larger yet solid, and though its flavour is superior, it does not suit the local taste or cuisine. Ofumi helps him out again, and once the shop is doing better the two marry. Flashforward another 18 years and the couple have three children, two sons and a daughter, but as successful as they are, they are no longer free of familial disharmony.

Strange coincidences are in play, such as Eikichi’s tofu making heritage lining up perfectly with that of a lonely couple, Oshino (Shima Iwashita) and Seibe (Renji Ishibashi), still grieving the loss of their little boy whose fate remains an open mystery. Though their son remains lost to them, Oshino and Seibe see something of the man he might have been in Eikichi who is also a practitioner of the trade they intended to pass on to him. Eikichi is a down to Earth southerner – naive, in one sense, yet honest, straighforward, kind and courteous. Though all agree his craftsmanship is first rate and his tofu excellently made, they privately advise he consider firming it up in keeping with local tastes. Eikichi is as stubborn as he is genial – he will not betray the “tradition” which has been passed down to him from his master and which he fully intends to hand down to his sons, purveyors of refined Kyoto tofu in fashionable Edo.

Thanks to Seibe’s generous patronage and Ofumi’s perseverance, Eikichi is a success but clashes with his eldest son and presumptive heir, Eitaro (Kohei Takeda), who resents his role as a kind of sales rep for his dad’s company. Following a volcanic eruption and subsequent poor harvest, grain prices are at a premium yet Eikichi, following the “Kyoto way”, refuses to raise prices, much to the consternation of fellow merchants who take out their displeasure on the young and impressionable Eitaro. One in particular launches a plan to ruin Eikichi’s tofu shop and gain access to the best of the city’s wells by befriending the lonely young son, getting him hooked on gambling and then bankrupting him with the help of local gangster boss Denzo (Masaaki Uchino).

Eikichi’s tofu, as someone later puts it, prospered not only because of his hard work and dedication, but because it was made with the heart. His overwhelming dedication to his craft might seem to blunt his dedication to those he loves but he cares deeply about his wife and children even if his “straightforward” character means he has a funny way of showing it. A running joke circles around Eikichi’s country bumpkin Kyoto accent and though the culture clash goes further than debating the proper texture of tofu, he finds himself a home thanks to the kindness of strangers. Akanezora, like Eikichi’s tofu, proves a little too spongy, its narrative connections too subtle in flavour to make much of an impact when fed only with Hamamoto’s serviceable if plain visuals, the unexpectedly chirpy performance of Miki Nakatani as the energetic Ofumi, and Masaaki Uchino’s impressive double duty as the earnest Eikichi and omnipotent Denzo. Tragedy breaks one family only to bring another back together, somehow restoring a once broken cycle yet even if Akanezora’s rosy skies suggest a resurgent warmth, it isn’t quite enough to solidify its otherwise watery brew.

Screened as part of the Japan Foundation Summer Explorers 3 season dedicated to films about food.