Tag: Tomokazu Miura

A Pale View of Hills (遠い山なみの光, Kei Ishikawa, 2025)

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A young woman returns home at a moment of crisis, but finds herself with only more questions in an attempt to understand her mother and her decision to leave Nagasaki for the UK 30 years previously in Kei Ishikawa’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s debut novel, A Pale View of Hills (遠い山なみの光, Toi yama-nami no Hikari). Set alternately in 1952 and 1982, the film positions the Greenham Common anti-nuclear protests as a point of connection between the two nations and the reason that Niki (Camilla Aiko) is currently so interested in her mother’s story seeing as there’s increased interest surrounding the atomic bomb, even if her editor keeps asking her about “Hiroshima”.

Another reason for Niki’s sudden return is that the editor is a married man Niki has been having an affair with. It seems she’s made a significant investment in the relationship by dropping out of university to work as a reporter, but despite saying he would, he has not left his wife and Niki suspects she may now be pregnant. All of which encourages her to investigate the relationship she has with her mother, Etsuko (Yo Yoshida / Suzu Hirose), and her late sister Keiko with whom she did not seem to get on, through tracing back her Japanese roots and trying to understand her familial history.

But what Etsuko, who is abruptly selling the family home, tells her is confusing and indistinct. Much of Etsuko’s story doesn’t line up, and we understand in part why later, but it seems almost as if the lacunas and contradictions are intentional and designed to hint at the ways we paper over cracks in our identities or create new mythologies for ourselves in an attempt to escape the traumatic past. Etsuko found a more literal escape in coming to the UK, but there’s something a little poignant about the way she says she thought there’d be more opportunities here and that Keiko would have had the chance to be anything she wanted which Japan would have denied her. Later she suggests that she always knew the UK wouldn’t be good for Keiko, but she came anyway. 

Now she’s selling the house, literally unpacking the past, Etsuko has begun dreaming about a woman she knew, Sachiko (Fumi Nikaido), and her daughter, Mariko, who lived near her in Nagasaki when she was pregnant with Keiko. Whereas Etsuko and her salaryman husband Jiro (Kohei Matsushita) live in a flat on a “danchi”, aspirational post-war housing estates for young families, Sachiko lives in a rundown shack across the way where the neighbours gossip about her for entertaining American soldiers who are still in the country post-Occupation because of the Korean War which is also what’s fuelling the economic recovery. Sachiko has met a man called Frank who says he’ll take her to America, but she doesn’t really believe him. 

On the one level, it seems that Etsuko and Sachiko are mirror images of each other yet they are in other ways alike, while their stories share several details in common. What unites them is that they both experienced the aftermath of the bomb, though Etsuko has been careful not to disclose the extent of her exposure and is now fearful of what effect it may have on the baby along with on her relationship with her husband who appears to share some of the prevailing social prejudice against those who were exposed to radiation. Jiro, meanwhile, is a distant workaholic who criticises Etsuko for not being more “motherly” and sees her as little more than a domestic servant. He has a damaged hand from his wartime service that seems to reflect his wounds, but still rolls in drunk occasionally singing war songs with his inconsiderate friends. 

When his father, Ogata (Tomokazu Miura), announces he’s coming to stay with them, Jiro is pleased to see him but rebuffs his request that he talk to an old school friend, Matsuda (Daichi Watanabe), about an article he published claiming that it’s a good thing that teachers like Ogata were let go after the war. Ogata evidently feels hard done by, but it’s also true that the cause of his son’s animosity towards him is that he was a card-carrying militarist who cheered when he left for the front and indoctrinated children with imperialist ideology in his job as a teacher. He is the past Japan must move on from, and a representative of the wartime generation by which the young of today feel betrayed. As Matsuda tells him, it’s a new dawn. Ogata has to change, and so does everyone else including Etsuko who may not be as happy in her marriage as others might assume and may well be seeking other paths towards self-fulfilment rather than allow herself to become another miserable, self-sacrificing housewife.

Even so, the contradictory message seems to be that perhaps you can’t actually move on from this past and Keiko, in particular, may have been changed by her exposure not to the bomb but it’s aftermath, the terrible things she heard and saw amid the wreckage and the stigma she faced afterwards. The artificiality of the Japanese sets might speak to the slipperiness of Etsuko’s memory, as if she were observing a film of herself rather than recalling real events or else reimagining them differently so they play out a little more cinematically, in comparison to the concrete reality of the Sussex bungalow which perfectly captures a lived-in Britishness of the early 1980s. In many ways, Niki might not have clarified very much at all, or perhaps begun to accept the idea that not knowing doesn’t matter in coming to understanding of her relationship with her mother and along with it of herself as she too decides it’s time for change.

A Pale View of Hills screens 16/18th October as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Golden Partners (黄金のパートナー, Kiyoshi Nishimura, 1979)

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Kiyoshi Nishimura began his career in the action genre with a series of paranoid thrillers so it feels particularly odd to see him tackle similar themes in such a breezy, lighthearted way as 1979’s Golden Partners (黄金のパートナー, Ogon no Partner). Though based on a novel by Kyotaro Nishimura, the film seems to have been envisioned as an homage to Robert Enrico’s Les Aventuriers in following two men and a young woman on a quest to track down a missing person and also find a large amount of gold supposedly contained in a downed submarine. 

Kosuke (Tomokazu Miura) is a rather aimless young man who lives on a fishing boat and has a career as a freelance photographer taking photos of things people would rather weren’t photographed, while his best friend Shusaku (Tatsuya Fuji) is a motorcycle-riding policeman who has a strong sense of civic duty yet mostly spends his time giving out tickets to locals traveling slightly over the speed limit. They’re both good friends with the landlord at the Polestar bar whom they affectionately refer to as Pops (Taiji Tonoyama). Pops has let them run up a significant tab even though he doesn’t appear to have any other customers. In any case, their aimless days are interrupted when Kosuke begins hearing a strange SOS message but can’t seem to identify where it’s coming from to be able to help. Meanwhile, a young woman arrives looking for Pops and explains that her father, an old friend of his, has gone missing which may be connected to the mysterious stash of gold bars Pops is fond of talking about every time he has too much to drink. 

Figuring out that the SOS message is using a code employed by the Imperial Navy during the war, the trio embark on trying to solve the mystery partly to help the young woman, Yukibe (Misako Konno), and partly because they want to find the gold. Basically a buddy movie, the film has a childlike quality as it mainly follows the trio hanging out on the beach in Saipan solving puzzles and getting into minor arguments. Things take a slightly darker turn when Shusaku decides to stay on even after his paid leave from the police force ends despite realising it’s unlikely they’re going to find the gold bars or even figure out what’s happened to Yukibe’s father. Having realised that Yukibe likes Kosuke and despite his own feelings for her, he’s beginning to feel like a third wheel but in the end cannot bring himself to leave this unending holiday adventure.

But after making a shocking discovery, what they stumble on is a wartime conspiracy in which a corrupt spy killed the other men assigned to transport the gold and took it for himself. He then used it to become a rich and powerful man in post-war Japan, apparently suffering no consequences for his actions hinting at the essential corruption of the post-war society. Realising he likely can’t be prosecuted nor would justice really be served if he went to prison for a few years, they decide on blackmail as their way of recovering the gold little realising how far someone who has killed before will go to protect their secrets. Nevertheless, despite the conspiratorial overtones the atmosphere remains largely cartoonish rather than dark or threatening right up until another tragedy occurs and brings the whole thing to an end.

This laidback sensibility is aided by the soundtrack provided by Takao Kisugi who briefly appears at the end of the film as his city pop folk songs run constantly throughout. Nishimura’s use of a ghostly zero fighter as the gang investigate the former airbase on Saipan proves slightly uncomfortable though ties in with some ghostly imagery as an evocation of a past that’s apparently still very present and largely unresolved. In any case, like a classic children’s adventure story the film does not particularly engage with its larger themes but concentrates on the trio’s attempts to solve the mystery along with their zany plans and crazy stunts culminating in the guys parachuting out of a private plane after aiming it right at that of the bad guys in a moment of extreme irony. A little bit sad and more tragic than it perhaps ought to be, the film is nevertheless a warmhearted tale of male friendship, the childish glee of solving a mystery, and the satisfaction of getting one over on the bad guys even if it comes at a very high price.

Trailer (no subtitles)

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)

Perfect Days (Wim Wenders, 2023)

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A man in late middle-aged quite obviously living in the past begins to wake up to the possibilities of change in Wim Wenders’ Tokyo-set drama, Perfect Days. Even so, Hirayama’s (Koji Yakusho) days may be pretty much the same but that doesn’t necessarily mean that his life is dull or even predictable while it’s clear that he manages to find joy in small moments of serenity even if he may also seem to be harbouring a great sadness. 

The irony is that Hirayama lives in a rundown postwar tenement that happens to be almost directly under the Tokyo Skytree which Wenders often cuts back to as if to signal the disparity between the rich and glitzy skyline of the contemporary city and the lives of those on its margins. Hirayama’s home has an almost eerie quality owing to the glowing purple light shining out of the window of his spare room where he nurtures tiny saplings back to health. The traditional-style two-floor flat has two tatami-mat rooms on the upper level, the other filled with books and cassette tapes amid an otherwise spartan interior. Before leaving for work each morning he brushes his teeth over the kitchen sink, the place has no bathroom, and meticulously takes up his belongings neatly placed in order on a shelf by the front door. 

Perhaps it’s this kind of order that Hirayama craves, clinging to the security of the usual and dedicating himself to his work with unusual rigour. A municipal toilet cleaner, he painstakingly scrubs each and every bowl and urinal, checking the nozzles on the bidet function and shining a mirror underneath to make sure everything is as clean and tidy as it could possibly be only for drunken salarymen to push past him and quite literally piss all over his hard work. Like many such workers, he attains a kind of invisibility and should anyone need to use the facilities while he’s cleaning them he’s obliged to step outside and wait before starting all over again. When he finds a little boy crying alone in a park toilet he takes him by the hand and tries to help him find his mum, only when he finds her she completely ignores Hirayama and even goes so far as to wipe the boy’s hand with a wet wipe. The boy’s little wave of thank you as they leave is the only ray of comfort and recognition. 

Yet for all that, it’s as if this the life Hirayama has chosen. He barely interacts with his chatty colleague Takashi (Tokio Emoto) who has a habit of rating everything out of ten and sees no value in his work, hardly bothering to do much cleaning at all while complaining that he has no money to romance the bar hostess he’s hoping to make his girlfriend. Takashi and Aya are fascinated by Hirayama’s collection of cassette tapes which he plays in his van, though Takashi more so for the commercial value that may be attached to them in a world in which everything old is new again and specialised stores in the trendy neighbourhood of Shimokitazawa trade exclusively in secondhand LPs and Sony Walkmans. Even so, Aya too appears to have her private sadnesses drawn to the voice of Patty Smith but pressing stop when the tape mentions suicide. The melancholy office lady in the park and an elderly homeless man who lives there too must have their own stories as unknown to Hirayama as his is to them. 

A surprise visit from a teenage niece suggests that he may have come from a relatively wealthy family with a tyrannical patriarch and that this ascetic life of his is a kind of rebellion or else or a refuge, but there’s a look of pain on his face when the landlady at his favourite bar (played by enka legend Sayuri Ishikawa) laments that she wishes everything could stay the same. Perhaps he’s tired of this very analogue life and its otherwise pleasant monotony as he further confirms for himself realising that it’s not right for things not to change as he engages in a game of shadow tag with another middle-aged man who’s evaluating his life after a terminal cancer diagnosis. In truth, the film risks straying into orientalism in its advocation of Japanese serenity in simplicity (something not helped by the final title card explaining the term komorebi) while the musical choices appear a little on the nose and the celebration of mundanity in Hirayama’s labour might otherwise seem flippant. Even so, Yakusho’s typically astute performance keeps the film on an even keel as Hirayama finds himself on a turbulent journey towards a “new world” of fulfilment and possibility. 

Perfect Days screened as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Typhoon Club (台風クラブ, Shinji Somai, 1985)

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A collection of frustrated teens find themselves trapped within a literal storm of adolescence in Shinji Somai’s seminal youth drama Typhoon Club (台風クラブ, Taifu Club). “You’ve been acting weird lately” one character says to another, but he’s been “acting weird” too and so has everyone else as they attempt to reconcile themselves with an oncoming world of phoney adulthood, impending mortality, and the advent of desires they either are unable or afraid to understand, or perhaps understand all too well but worry they will not be understood. 

Most of the teens seem to look to the pensive Mikami (Yuichi Mikami) as a mentor figure. It’s Mikami they call when some of the girls end up half drowning male classmate Akira (Toshiyuki Matsunaga) after some “fun” in the pool gets out of hand. Luckily, Akira is not too badly affected either physically or emotionally, but presents something of a mirror to Mikami’s introspection. Slightly dim and etherial, he entertains his friends by seeing how many pencils he can stick up his nose at the same time, but he’s also as he later says the first to see the rain once it eventually arrives. Notably he leaves before it traps several of the others inside the school without adult supervision and otherwise misses out on the climactic events inside. Even so, Rie (Yuki Kudo), who also misses out by virtue of randomly stealing off to Tokyo for the day, later remarks that he too seems like he’s grown though her words may also be a kind of self projection. 

Mikami’s kind of girlfriend, perpetual spoon-bender Rie, finds herself at a literal crossroads after waking up late because her mother evidently did not return home the night before. Eventually she sets off for class running all the way, but then reaches a fork in the road and changes her mind heading to Tokyo instead. Mikami has been accepted into a prestigious high school there, and perhaps a part of her wanted to go too or at least to get closer to him through familiarity with an unfamiliar environment. Unfortunately she soon encounters a firearms enthusiast (Toshinori Omi) who buys her new clothes and takes her back to his flat which she thankfully manages to escape even if she’s stuck in the city because of a landslide caused by the typhoon.  

Mikami, however, continues to worry about her unable to understand why he’s the only one seemingly bothered about her whereabouts believing she’s “gone crazy”. Trapped in the school, the kids try to ring their teacher Umemiya (Tomokazu Miura) for help but he’s already drunk and can’t really be bothered. In any case he has problems of his own in that his girlfriend’s mother suddenly turned up during class to berate him for stringing her daughter along and also having borrowed a large amount of money which obviously ought to have some strings attached, only as it turns out Junko leant the money to another guy she was seeing though it’s not exactly clear whether she and Umemiya actually broke up or not. “In 15 years you’ll be exactly like me” Umemiya bitterly intones into the phone when Mikami directly states that he no longer respects him deepening Mikami’s adolescent sense of nihilistic despair. 

Of all the teens, he does seem to be the most preoccupied with death. “As long as she’s an egg, the hen can’t fly” he and his brother reflect on discussing if it’s possible for an individual to transcend its species and if it’s possible to transcend it though death all of which lends his eventual decision a note of poignant irony even if its absurd grimness seems to be a strange homage to The Inugami Family. As he points out to his somewhat disturbed friend Ken (Shigeru Benibayashi), “I am not like you” and indeed Ken isn’t quite like the other teens. Obsessed with fellow student Michiko (Yuka Ohnishi) but unable to articulate his feelings, Ken pours acid down her back and watches her squirm as it eats into her flesh. Repeating pleasantries to himself as a mantra, he later attempts to rape her after violently kicking in the dividing walls of the school only to be stopped in his tracks on noticing the scar again and being reminded that he is hurting her. 

The storm seems to provoke a kind of madness, the teens embracing an elusive freedom entirely at odds with the rigid educational environment. The other three girls trapped in the school are a lesbian couple who’d been hiding out in the drama department and their third wheel friend who might otherwise have been keen to hide their relationship from prying eyes having previously been caught out by a bemused and seemingly all seeing Akira. But in this temporary space of constraint and liberation, the teens are each free for a moment at least to be who they are with even Ken and Michiko seemingly setting aside what had just happened between them. They co-opt the stage for a dance party and then take it outside, throwing off their clothes to dance (almost) naked in the rain while a fully clothed Rie does something similar on the streets of the capital. In some ways, in that moment at least they begin to transcend themselves crossing a line into adulthood in a symbolic rebirth. In any case, Somai’s characteristically long takes add to the etherial atmosphere as do his occasional forays into the strange such as Rie’s encounter with a pair of ocarina-playing performance artists in an empty arcade. “We want to go home, but we can’t move” Mikami says looking for guidance his teacher is unwilling to give him neatly underlining the adolescent condition as the teens begin realise they’ll have to find their own way out of this particular storm. 

Typhoon Club screens at Japan Society New York on April 28 as part of Rites of Passage: The Films of Shinji Somai

Goodbye Cruel World (グッバイ・クルエル・ワールド, Tatsushi Omori, 2022)

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Tatsushi Omori has had a rather strange career beginning with the incredibly grim Whispering of the Gods which was so controversial that the only way he could screen it was to set up a marquee in a park and put it on himself. Since then he has in recent years softened a bit with the incredibly charming Seto and Utsumi and heartwarming tea ceremony drama Every Day a Good Day. Goodbye Cruel World (グッバイ・クルエル・ワールド) returns to the nihilism of Omori’s earliest work, but with a layer of heavy irony in its self-consciously cool aesthetics. 

This is world is cruel indeed, pulling each of the worldweary protagonists into an inescapable hell of crime and violence. As the film opens, a car of full of criminals drives towards a love hotel where they plan to rob a bunch of yakuza in the middle of a money laundering exchange. If you have to rob someone, perhaps it’s fair enough to rob the yakuza but for obvious reasons it’s not a very good idea. Still, the fact is they accomplish the heist pretty easily not least because the yakuza are lazy and complacent. Not only could they not be bothered to change their meeting place like the boss told them, the lookouts didn’t even put up much of a fight. “Japan’s gone to hell,” “old-leftist gone bad” Hamada (Tomokazu Miura) sighs lamenting that no one does their job properly anymore.

Now in his 70s, Hamada waxes on his days as a student protestor while now a disillusioned old man who was previously dismissed from his position as a political secretary for cooking the books. In a last ditch bid to change the status quo, he later hatches on a plan to rob the secret campaign stashes of the incumbent conservative candidate whom he has also exposed for tax evasion and an affair with a bar hostess not to mention a general air of sleaze and corruption. The robbers’ main competition is a corrupt policeman who’s been working with the yakuza ever since he was foolish enough to accept a tip off from boss Ogata (Shingo Tsurumi) to arrest some of his rivals. 

Like everyone else, what Detective Hachiya (Nao Omori) wants is out but there is no out from this hellish world of crime. Anzai (Hidetoshi Nishijima) tried to go straight in the wake of anti-organised crime legislation but there are no second chances for ex-yakuza. He just wanted a normal life, but it’s hard to leave the yakuza world behind when you can’t even open a bank account and no wants to employ a former thug. Hachiya steals the money to buy himself a new life trying to resurrect his father-in-law’s failed hotel in a moribund seaside town where the other businessmen lament the decline of the local shopping area amid the economic complexities of the contemporary society. But he’s frustrated by the arrival of former associates, Iijima (Eita Okuno), who blackmails him over his yakuza past and poignantly says he’s done for the same reasons Anzai does the robbery, he just wants to be able to live together with his wife and child. 

Miru (Tina Tamashiro) says she came up with the idea of robbing the yakuza to escape sex work and is helped by hotel employee Yano (Hio Miyazawa) who dreams of running away with her. She says all she wants is sleep, while he wants to live comfortably in a quiet seaside town. Like the kids that hang round Hamada, they represent a kind of rebellious youth rejecting the corrupt authority of men like Anzai and Hachiya but are quickly slapped down. As Hachiya points out, the “grown-ups” took all the money and the only reason they’re not dead is that Ogata wants them to clean up their mess before they go by taking out the other gang members. During the robbery, Miru appears an unwilling participant so frightened that she cannot pry her fingers from the pistol when the sociopathic Hagiwara demands it back. But on her eventual murder spree/mission of revenge she’s an ice cold killer with vacant eyes trying to shoot her way out of existential malaise. 

Omori signals the degree to which they are all trapped by the ubiquity of retro nostalgia in the unlikely ‘70s getaway car and the soul music which plays on its sound system. Seeming to directly reference ‘90s Tarantino in musical choices, the film’s self-consciously cool aesthetic sometimes works against it even while hinting at the general sense of emptiness which envelops those caught in this hellish underworld. As Anzai later suggests, they are all the same, covered in blood with nowhere to go for there is no place for any of them in contemporary Japan. A bloody tale of nihilistic futility and self-destructive violence, Goodbye Cruel World suggests that there’s no way back from the purgatorial exile of an underworld existence.

Goodbye Cruel World screened as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Adrift in Tokyo (転々, Satoshi Miki, 2007)

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An aimless young man finds unexpected direction while walking the streets of the city with an unlikely father figure in Satoshi Miki’s meandering dramedy Adrift in Tokyo (転々, Tenten). These two men are indeed adrift in more ways than the literal, each without connections and seeking a concrete role in life while attempting to make peace with the past. But like any father and son there comes a time when they must part and their journey does indeed have a destination, one which it seems cannot be altered however much they might wish to delay it.

That Fumiya (Joe Odagiri) is aimless might be assumed from his unruly hair and the fact that he thinks tricolour toothpaste might be enough to jolt him out of his sense of despair but is confirmed by his matter of fact statement that he’s in his eighth year of university where nominally at least he’s studying law. His problem is that he’s amassed massive debts to a loanshark, Fukuhara (Tomokazu Miura), who breaks into his apartment and threatens him by shoving a sock in his mouth before leaving with his ID and driving licence. Fukuhara, however, later decides to make him another offer that he will cancel the debt and even give Fumiya even more money if only he will agree to wander around Tokyo with him for an unspecified time until they reach Kasumigaseki where he intends to hand himself in at police headquarters claiming to have recently murdered his wife. 

Like many things that Fukuhara says, it’s not clear whether or not he has indeed killed his wife though Miki frequently switches back to a scene of a woman who seems to have passed away and has been laid out in bed though she shows no signs of having died violently. Her zany co-workers keep thinking they should check on her seeing as she hasn’t shown up in days but something always distracts them and they end up forgetting about her entirely. The body appears to have been treated with love, hinting that if what Fukuhara says is true and this woman was his wife whom he killed in a fit of passion he has quite clearly thought through his plan of action rather than attempting to flee the scene and is perhaps only delaying the inevitable while walking out some other trauma in the company of Fumiya a surrogate son mirroring the description he gives of taking walks in the company first of his father and then of his wife. 

Fumiya deflects every question and agrees that he hates memories having burned his photo albums before leaving for university. He claims that he has no parents, describing the people who raised him as just that, as his mother and father both abandoned him as a child leaving him in a perpetual state of arrest which is one reason he’s still a student four years after most people have graduated. He never went to the zoo or rode a rollercoaster or called a man dad and seems to think of himself as nothing much of anything at all. Yet the fake can sometimes be more real than the real as he eventually discovers becoming part of an awkward family unit with Fukuhara’s “fake” wife (Kyoko Koizumi) he used to accompany to weddings as a paid guest, just beginning to enjoy being someone’s son when Fukuhara decides he’s reached the end of his road. 

There is a sense that everyone is chasing the ghost of someone else or perhaps even themselves, Fumiya finding shades of the father who abandoned him in career criminal Fukuhara who tells someone else that he once had a son who died in infancy, and seeing something of his mother in fake wife Makiko discovering transitory roots in an unlived imaginary childhood. But then there are also occasions of cosmic irony such as a coin locker bag being full not of money but of bright red daruma dolls and tengu noses, or a rebellious street musician meekly bowing to the police. A repeated gag says you’ll have good luck if you spot iconic actor Ittoku Kishibe out and about in the streets, and perhaps in a way Fumiya does in learning to make peace with his childhood self walking with Fukuhara who also comes to accept his failures as a man, a husband, and perhaps a father too. Filled with zany humour and a warmth underlying its melancholy, Adrift in Tokyo is a meandering journey towards a home in the self and a sense of rootedness in the middle of a sprawling metropolis filled with infinite possibility. 

Adrift in Tokyo is released on blu-ray in the UK on 12th December courtesy of Third Window Films.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Small, Slow But Steady (ケイコ 目を澄ませて, Sho Miyake, 2022)

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Part way through Sho Miyake’s empathetic character study Small, Slow But Steady (ケイコ 目を澄ませて, Keiko, Me wo Sumasete), an older man visits a doctor and is told that though he may think there is nothing really to worry about at the moment, a tiny drop of water falling steadily can soon make its mark in stone. It’s in one sense the small, slow, but steady stresses of everyday life that have eaten away at the soul of Keiko (Yukino Kishii), an aspiring boxer who is fast losing the will the fight. Yet it is also a small, slow, but steady process that allows her to begin moving again, climbing a new hill towards the next bout no longer so afraid of leaving the safety of the familiar. 

Deaf since birth, Keiko became a professional boxer two years previously and makes ends meet with a part-time job in housekeeping at an upscale hotel. Miyake often positions her as in a way free of the frenetic nature of the noisy city, unaffected by the shouts of rude passersby and unlike the men at her boxing gym never subjected to angry rants from her coaches. Yet it’s also at times as if she feels a kind of loneliness in the minor rejections of an indifferent society which often fails to cater to her difference. Few people are able to sign, even those at her gym haven’t learned, while others are sometimes impatient in her attempts to communicate. The restrictions of the coronavirus pandemic meanwhile only make things worse for her given that constant masking means she can no longer rely on lipreading nor can she hear the public health messages being blasted out in public spaces reminding citizens that there is a state of emergency in place and they should restrict their journeys to the barest of essentials. 

Then again, in the gym, she obviously cannot sign because the gloves her impede her ability to communicate. Nor can she hear the session bell or words of encouragement and advice from her coaches and the crowd. The chairman of the boxing club (Tomokazu Miura) admits in an interview that deafness is potentially fatal for a boxer, but that what Keiko may crave is a kind of internal peace in the surrender to the purely physical which allows her to empty her mind of everyday troubles. She may have taken up boxing as some say after being bullied as a child because of her disability, quite literally fighting back against a conformist society she refuses to beaten by, but has also found something reassuring in its slow and steady rhythms that allows her to reorient herself blow after blow. 

The chairman also says, however, that it’s not a matter of having a preternatural talent so much as a steady work ethic and above all a big a heart, describing her finally as simply “a really nice person”. “Why don’t you have your guard up properly?” another of her coaches asks her, while her brother having noticed there is obviously something bothering her tries to get her to talk, only for her to point out that “talking doesn’t doesn’t make a person any less alone”. With rumours the pandemic, along with the boss’ failing health, will finally take the boxing gym too, Keiko fears losing this final safe space but finds herself unable to stand up and fight for it. Though she had struggled to find a gym who would accommodate her disability, she is ambivalent when a new solution is found in an empathetic female coach (Makiko Watanabe) running a modern training facility who is learning sign language and keen to empower her in her own decision making rather than patronise or railroad her. Afraid of getting hurt, she takes a step back unwilling leave the security of the past for the possibility of the future. 

As Keiko reminds herself in her diary, self-control is the most important thing and the force she struggles with, suddenly losing her concentration in the middle of a match because the thoughtless referee keeps telling her to listen to him when he calls stop. In the end, it’s something quite trivial that sets her back on the path, a kind yet seemingly meaningless moment of acknowledgement from an unexpected source. Shot in a richly textured 16mm, Miyake captures Keiko’s isolated everyday with stunning clarity finding her alone amid the noisy city staring into space and looking for direction. Using intertitles to translate sign language his composition mimics that of a silent movie and lends an almost elegiac quality to the moribund boxing gym as it becomes an accidental victim of its times but ends on a note of quite resilience in the small, slow, but steady rhythms of gentle forward motion. 

Small, Slow But Steady screened as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Detective Chinatown 3 (唐人街探案3, Chen Sicheng, 2021)

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Cerebral sleuth Qin Feng (Liu Haoran) and his larger than life uncle Tang Ren (Wang Baoqiang) are back on the case in the third instalment in the Detective Chinatown franchise (唐人街探案3, Tángrénjiē tàn àn 3) picking up as promised in Tokyo as the duo take on another locked room mystery on the invitation of dandyish local investigator Hiroshi Noda (Satoshi Tsumabuki). This time around, the mystery is only tangentially connected to a Chinatown though the solution in itself does indeed lead back towards the Mainland and the complicated relations between China and Japan, while Qin in particular finds himself confronting the idea that oligarchy is in fact the “perfect crime”. 

Hired by a yakuza boss, Watanabe (Tomokazu Miura), accused of offing a Thai rival, Su Chaiwit, following a dispute over development rights in the local Chinatown, Qin and Tang Ren quickly find themselves hamstrung by their own discovery of evidence which further implicates their client and brings them to the attention of top cop Tanaka (Tadanobu Asano) who wastes no time telling them to mind their own business. Meanwhile they are also being pursued by muscly Thai detective Jaa (Tony Jaa) working for the other side. In a new high tech motif, the guys are each handed a simultaneous translation earbud which allows the Japanese and Chinese guys to converse with each other in their own languages though Hiroshi often chooses to speak directly in Mandarin instead while the Thai contingent exclusively use English. Unlike previous instalments the duo do not venture into the local Chinese community and Chinatown itself is merely territory contested by Japanese yakuza and South East Asian gangsters. 

Even so Qin and Tang Ren find themselves at a nexus of cross-cultural conflict caught between the cops, yakuza, and Thai gangsters each looking not so much for the truth but some kind of advantage for their side all of which culminates in a hilarious series of mixups at a morgue. Once again, Tang Ren falls in love with a local woman, in this case Su Chaiwit’s secretary Anna Kobayashi (Masami Nagasawa) who is certain Watanabe is guilty and later apparently kidnapped by a crazed serial killer (Shota Sometani) just by coincidence. Of course, all this cycles back towards the franchise’s growing mythology, Qin pursued and manipulated by the mysterious entity known only as “Q” which, as we learn, is as obsessed with the idea of the perfect crime as Qin largely in that they think they’ve perfected it in the stranglehold placed over civilisation by a shady elite. 

In this, the film may be taking aim at hidden oligarchy and the immorality of growing social inequality, but in its Japanese setting Chen is also freer to take potshots at contemporary Chinese society such as in Tang Ren’s confusion that they can’t simply bribe the police to get Qin out of jail when he is wrongfully arrested. “Justice and equality require sacrifices” Qin explains after solving a grim riddle only to be asked some difficult questions about the nature of justice and his own role within it by a manipulative villain, but in a classically censor-friendly move ends the movie with a brief monologue declaring that “justice always prevails and light overcomes darkness”, he and his team recommitting themselves to fighting “vices”, and presumably the shady elitism fostered by Q, wherever they arise. 

Like Detective Chinatown 2’s New York setting, the vision of Japan on display is deliberately stereotypical from an Akihabara cosplay carnival to tasks involving masked kendo fighters and a sumo wrestler, not to mention bumbling comedy yakuza forever threatening to cut off their fingers, the Shibuya Scramble set piece, or a playful homage to Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. Meanwhile, Chen continues his taste for huge ensemble action such as the complex slapstick routine that opens the film and now traditional end credits sequence featuring the cast dancing to theme tune “Welcome to Tokyo” dressed in the classic green detective mac worn by Qin. Truth be told, the solution to the central mystery is heavily signposted and slightly unsatisfying though Chen’s visualisations of Qin’s deductions are expertly rendered even as the hero’s growing confidence as a crimefighter unbalances his relationship with the increasingly silly if goodhearted Tang Ren. Boasting a host of A-list Japanese acting talent, the film also makes space for an unexpected cameo from one of the most recognisable faces in Sinophone cinema before teasing a further instalment to take place in London, home to the greatest consulting detective of them all. 

Detective Chinatown 3 is available to stream in the UK via iTunes, Google Play, Amazon Prime, Microsoft, Sky, and Virgin Media courtesy of Cine Asia.

Original trailer (English / Simplified Chinese subtitles)

The Taste of Tea (茶の味, Katsuhito Ishii, 2004)

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Katsuhito Ishii is among a small coterie of directors who developed a cult following in the early 2000s but have since fallen by the wayside. In Ishii’s case, that may partly be because he chose to shuttle between live action and animation, continuing to work on short films and TV projects with the consequence that he’s directed only five (solo) features since his 1998 debut Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl, the last of which, grisly manga adaptation Smuggler, was released back in 2011. Smuggler had perhaps taken him back to the “Tarantino-esque” (Ishii also worked on the animated sequence for Kill Bill), as they were sold at the time, absurdist gangster dramas of his earlier career, but all these years later it is something altogether softer if no less strange that has stood the test of time. 

2004’s The Taste of Tea (茶の味, Cha no Aji) with its Ozu-esque title, rural setting, and preference for meditative long takes, is a “conventional” family drama. A collection of surreal episodes in the life of an ordinary family living in the countryside in the contemporary era, there are no real crises though each member is perhaps heading into an individual point of transition which, in the main, they cope with alone. Son Hajime (Takahiro Sato), whose flat-out running opens the film, is in the midst of adolescent romantic confusion while his younger sister Sachiko (Maya Banno) is quite literally plagued by self-consciousness, haunted by a giant version of herself continually staring at her. Mum Yoshiko (Satomi Tezuka) is making an indie animation at her kitchen table in an attempt to assert herself outside of her role as wife and mother, while dad Nobuo (Tomokazu Miura), a hypnotherapist, is a barely visible presence. And then there’s grandad Akira (Tatsuya Gashuin), a playful figure tormenting the children while helping Yoshiko figure out the bizarre poses needed for her project. 

Ishii signals his commitment to the surreal during the opening sequence which begins in darkness with only the sound of Hajime’s panting as he chases the train which will take his love away from him. Sadly he is too late, she is already gone and he can’t even console himself that he did his best because he knows deep down that even if he saw her he would have not have had the courage to say what he wanted to say which in any case he could have said at any other time but never did. As he’s thinking, a bulge develops in his forehead from which emerges a small train, carrying her out of his present and into a nebulous other space of memory. Nevertheless, it’s not long before Hajime finds a new love, a blissed out expression permanently on his face as he dreams of go-playing transfer student Aoi (Anna Tsuchiya). 

For all the idyllic countryside, however, there is darkness even here as the children each discover, Hajime and his dad witnessing a yakuza altercation outside the station, and Sachiko given the fright of her life by a “mud man” in a patch of ground technically out of bounds but central to her quest to be free of her other self. Uncle Ayano (Tadanobu Asano), an aimless young man working as a sound mixer undergoing a wistful moment of his own in insincerely congratulating his high school girlfriend on her marriage, tells his niece and nephew of his own strange haunting incident involving a ghostly gangster (Susumu Terajima) from which he thinks he was able to escape after learning how to do a backflip on the monkey bars. As it happens, that wasn’t it at all, but even small achievements have value as Sachiko discovers on realising that someone else was watching her struggle from a distance and evidently envisaged for her a happy resolution, a giant sunflower eventually engulfing all with a wave of love that also marks a point of transition, washing away its anxiety.  

A timeless portrait of rural family life, Ishii’s vision is surreal but also very ordinary and filled with the details of small-town living with all of its various eccentricities from two nerdy guys working on their robot cosplay to baseball playing gangsters and avant-garde dancers performing for no one on the shore. “It’s more cool than weird, and it stays in your head” Yoshiko says of a song composed by eccentric third brother Todoroki (Ikki Todoroki) in praise of mountains. The Taste of Tea has a strange and enduring flavour, savouring the surreal in the everyday, but finding always a sense of joy and serenity in the small moments of triumph and happiness that constitute a life. 

The Taste of Tea is released on blu-ray in the UK on 5th October courtesy of Third Window Films in a set which also includes a 90-minute making of feature and the “Super Big” animation.

Original trailer (English subtitles)