Tag: Toronto Japanese Film Festival

Give It All (がんばっていきまっしょい, Yuhei Sakuragi, 2024)

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The last year of high school is a little premature to be defeated by life, but this seems to be what has happened to Etsuko. It’s fitting in a way, because her problem is that she simply gives up too early and is incapable of seeing anything through because she’s already convinced herself that there’s no point in trying. Yuhei Sakuragi’s anime adaptation of the book by Yoshiko Shikimura, Give It All (がんばっていきまっしょい, Ganbatte Ikimasshoi) is indeed all about how there’s no point giving up before the end and no matter the result there’s satisfaction to be gained just knowing that you gave it all you could.

But Etsuko can’t see that to begin with because she peaked too early. Back in primary school, she won all the races because she was tall for her age. But the other children eventually started catching up with her, and she started to fall behind. It didn’t really occur to her train or to try to compete with them because she was used to just winning and the realisation that she wasn’t “special” after all made her feel like a failure at life. To save herself similar pain, she started giving up before she even started believing that there wasn’t any point in trying. Even so, she’s sullen and miserable, not to mention resentful of those who do put in the effort and start to see results. 

That’s one reason she’s reluctant to get involved with the rowing club again despite the encouragement of her best friend Hime. Badgered into it by transfer student Riina, she does the bare minimum and lets the others down, at one point just letting her oars drop while asking herself what it is she’s even doing here. But it’s also being part of a team that gives her a new sense of purpose as she realises that she’s the one who’s the weak link because she doesn’t have the stamina to keep up with the other girls. 

Meanwhile, they all have their problems too. Riina is struggling to make new friends after moving to the town following her mother’s marriage and is also nervous around boys because she’s always attended single-sex schools. Taeko and Mayumi only joined the club to get back at each other because their families are supposedly feuding, though there’s a little bit more to their relationship drama than a buinsseness dispute between their parents. Hime is really just trying to keep the peace and get Etsuko back to being the confident and outgoing person she used be rather a sullen figure of defeat who is aloof to the point of rudeness and refuses to try at anything. 

Ironically, it’s an encounter with the awkward team captain of a rival high school’s team that begins to open her eyes. Based on her earlier experiences, Etsuko assumes that the other team must just be innately talented and will win the upcoming race easily, but the other girl tells her that she’s mistaken. They didn’t win easily and they don’t have room for complacency. Though she seems jealous of the fun Etsuko and the others seem to be having and the genuine friendships that have arisen between them in contrast to the frosty determination and rigorous training that defines her relationship with her teammates, she reminds Etsuko that they work hard and that Etsuko’s team has potential if only they gave it their all.

While the 3D animation sometimes appears uncanny and distracts from the overall aesthetic, the beautifully designed backdrops add to the sense of peace and serenity in the town and echo Etsuko’s own unfolding sense of joy as the world around her brightens thanks to her new friends. What she learns is that it’s foolish to give up too soon without even trying, while not doing anything will leave her stuck in the middle of the water like a boat with no one rowing for the rest of her life. The thing about rowing is that it requires unity and the team to think as one, which means that she has to engage and bond with her teammates while finding fulfilment in her individual contribution through resolving to give it her all no matter what and knowing that’s worth it no matter the result.

Give It All screened as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

She Taught Me Serendipity (今日の空が一番好きとまだ言えない僕は, Akiko Ohku, 2024)

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Akiko Ohku’s quirky dramedies have so far mostly focused on an introverted woman’s quest for love, but with She Taught Me Serendipity (今日の空が一番好きとまだ言えない僕は, Kyo no Sora ga Ichiban Suki to Mada Ienai Boku ha) she moves into new territory in adapting the novel by Shusuke Fukutoku in which an alienated college student is unwittingly caught between two women. Set in the picturesque city of Kyoto, the film echoes the work of Tomihiko Morimi and revels in the power of serendipitous connection but equally the melancholy loneliness that underpins it in the legacy of grief and regret.

Returning after a six-month absence following the death of his grandmother, Konishi (Riku Hagiwara) is indeed at odds with his environment. He walks as if in a fog and is slightly out of tune with the world around him while often carrying an umbrella, or parasol depending on the weather, as a bulwark to protect him from prying eyes. Unlike his classmates, he speaks in the standard dialect rather than with an Eastern-inflection which his only friend Yamane (Kodai Kurosaki) has taken to extremes, describing his manner of speech as “Yamane Dialect”. It’s on campus that he begins catching sight of a young woman Yamane has dubbed the “solo soba” diner who seems to be just as solitary as he is, though the pair later strike up a connection precisely because of their shared sense of alienation.

To that extent, it’s not unreasonable that Konishi might doubt his new friendship with his young woman, Hana (Yuumi Kawai), who seems to be tailor-made for him and appeared seemingly from nowhere during his absence. Meanwhile, he’s resumed his old job at a local bathhouse where he cleans after hours with a girl-named Sacchan (Aoi Ito) who, judging by the looks she exchanges with the owner’s daughter Kaho, is secretly in love with him though he hasn’t noticed. While Hana is like him quiet and mysterious, Sacchan is a live wire, a young woman full of life who can’t stop talking and makes each of their cleaning sessions a riot of fun and silliness. 

But in keeping with these kinds of stories, Konishi suffers from extreme main character syndrome and never really sees either woman as a whole person rather than as an extension of himself. As Sacchan says in a poignant monologue movingly delivered by Aoi Ito, he never even bothered to ask her full name. He promised to buy her dinner to make up for missing shifts and needing extra help, but most likely never planned to follow through, nor did he ever listen to the song she recommended to him, though he went and read the short story Hana referenced right away. On the one level, there was nothing he could do to avoid hurting her feelings when he couldn’t return them, but at the very least he’s been self-involved and insensitive, just as he is when Hana suddenly drops out of contact and he convinces himself she was only hanging out with him as a joke. Rather than process his pain, he lashes out at Yamane instead and almost loses his only remaining friend before finally growing up a bit and making the effort to say sorry. 

The Japanese title translates as something like “I, who still can’t say, ‘Today’s sky is my favourite’,” echoing a common phrase repeated by Hana’s late father and Konishi’s grandmother, and hinting at Konishi’s inability to embrace whatever life gives him and find joy within it. Nevertheless, he does perhaps learn the importance of saying how he feels before it’s too late while taking into account the feelings of others even if his final confession comes at an awkward and insensitive moment, though it’s true enough that he’s really talking to himself. On one of their surreal adventures, he and Hana visit an unusual restaurant where all the dishes have quirky codenames except for one. It turns out the proprietor used to have someone to help him, but for whatever reason they’re not around anymore. Playing with aspect ratios and split screen, Ohku often fills the frame with a sense of absence in which characters simply disappear quite abruptly, echoing the fragility of these connections and, in fact, of everything, but makes plain that the main thing is to embrace them when they come rather than live in the shadow of loss or let the chance for love pass you by in fear of its failure.

She Taught Me Serendipity screened as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Ravens (レイブンズ, Mark Gill, 2024)

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“All I see are self portraits”, the hero’s by then former wife cuttingly remarks on visiting his comeback exhibition in the company of her new husband, seemingly a much more conventional businessman. Japanese films about photographers are similar to those other countries make about writers in that their protagonists are often very flawed people, tortured artists consumed by their own trauma and often turning to drink at the expense of their personal relationships. Tadanobo Asano has in fact played similar roles a few times before. In Yoichi Higashi’s Wandering Home, he played real life war correspondent Yasuyuki Tsukahara who passed away from kidney cancer at the age of 42 after years of alcohol dependency, while in 1999’s One Step on a Mine, It’s All Over he played Taizo Ichinose whose obsession with getting a photograph of Angkor Wat eventually results in his death.

Masahisa Fukase was one of the key photographers of the post-war era and also an incredibly troubled soul. The conceit of Mark Gill’s Ravens (レイブンズ) is that Fukase is accompanied by a giant, anthropomorphised, English-speaking raven (José Luis Ferrer) who gives voice to his darkest thoughts and impulses. A magazine profile describes Fuksase’s work as having dark and occult influences, which the film attributes to the fact that his incredibly conservative father (Kanji Furutachi) used to lock him inside a more literal dark room as a punishment when he was a child. 

Like many of his contemporaries, Fukase’s photographs often express the widening gap between the traditional and the modern in the changing post-war society and the film also uses many of his motifs such as his family photographs to express the changing dynamics between them. Fukase himself is caught in the nexus of this continuing battle in inheriting the legacy of his father’s war trauma. A heavy drinking, violent man, Sukezo insists that as the oldest son Fukase must take over their family photography studio and that taking photogaps is a commercial activity not an artististic one. Fukase’s wife and muse Yoko (Kumi Takiuchi) often says the same thing, undercutting Fukase’s sense of purpose in his work even while he also denies Yoko’s role as a collaborator rather than simply as a subject. “Any woman will do,” the Raven tells him though that turns out not quite to be the case. 

Yoko complains that that Fukase never really looks at her but sees the world abstractedly through the lens of his camera which is really just another way of avoiding reality. She thinks she begins to understand him after belatedly meeting Fukase’s family years after their marriage and witnessing one of his father’s drunken rages first-hand, but it only seems to push them further apart. Despite his claims of artistry, Fukase quickly becomes jealous of the attention Yoko attracts as the star of his photographs as if she has eclipsed him, the artist, and can no longer be controlled by his camera. He clearly wanted the fame and acclaim through his success only seems to deepen his self-loathing and desire for death. His father had told that a man who failed to achieve success by 40 should kill himself, though when Fukase does eventually attempt to take his own life he does so by hanging, hoping that his assistant will photograph it, rather than by using the sword his father shoved at him.

Though Fukase describes Yoko as a very modern woman she too is caught by this cycle in that her mother tells her it’s a wife’s duty to forgive her husband even after he wounds with a knife during a drug-fuelled psychotic episode. Despite separating from him, Yoko continues to visit Fukase in the hospital where he remains after suffering a traumatic brain injury until his eventual death in 2012. In its way, it’s a frustrated love story in which the relationship between them is disrupted by the intrusion of outdated social codes, generational trauma, and Fukase’s own demons which appear to have been with him since childhood. The conviction that Yoko comes to is that all his pictures are actually reflections of himself and that he is incapable of seeing the world through any other lens even as he tells her that the sky is just the sky and ravens are just ravens, nothing means anything. He tells his assistant that he thought he was in search of death the whole time, but maybe it was death that was looking for him. Dreamlike and ethereal, Gill weaves back and fore throughout Fukase’s life from his conservative upbringing to the heady 1970s and gradual comedown of his later years before finally discovering a melancholy sense of serenity as Fukase, finally, dares to gaze back into the lens.

Ravens screens 20th June as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

International trailer (dialogue free)

Hakkenden (八犬伝, Fumihiko Sori, 2024)

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Kyokutei Bakin thinks he’s a hack who writes inconsequential pulp that will be forgotten faster than yesterday’s headlines. He’d never believe that people hundreds of years later would still be talking about his work. Yet he may have a point in his conviction that people crave simple stories where good triumphs over evil specifically because the real world is not really like that and a lot of the time the bad guys end up winning. But does that mean then that all his stories are “lies” and he’s irresponsible for depicting the world not the way that it is but the way he wants it to be? 

Fumihiko Sori’s Hakkenden (八犬伝) is on one level an adaptation of the famous tale probably most familiar to international audiences as The Legend of the Eight Samurai, and also a story of its writing and the private doubts and fears of its author. In dramatising the tale, Sori plays fantasy to the max and revels in Bakin’s outlandishness. An unusually picky Hokusai (Seiyo Uchino), Bakin’s best and he claims only friend and unwilling collaborator, points out that his use of guns is anachronistic because they didn’t come to Japan until 60 or 70 years after the story takes place but Bakin doesn’t care. He says people don’t notice things like that and all they really care about is that good triumphs in the end, so he’ll throw in whatever he feels like to make a better story. In any case, the tale revolves around magical orbs, evil witches, dog gods and good fairies, so if you’re worrying about there being guns before there should be, this isn’t the story for you. 

Hokusai is also shocked that Bakin has never been to the place where the story is set, but as he tells him it all happened long ago and far away so going there now would be pointless. Even so, Hokusai needs to see what he draws which is why he spends half his life on the road costing him relationships with his family. Whatever else anyone might say about him, and he admits himself to being a “difficult” person, Bakin is very close to his family even if his wife yells at him all the time for being rude to influential people and not making any money when he could have just taken over her family’s clog-making business rather than carry on with this writing malarkey. His biggest ambition is that his son become a doctor to a feudal lord and thereby restore their samurai status which on one level points to a kind of conservatism that doesn’t matter to Hokusai and singles Bakin out as a tragic figure because the age of the samurai is nearing its end anyway. 

In his fantasy, however, he hints at and undoes, up to a point, injustices inflicted on women in the romance between Shino (Keisuke Watanabe) and Hamaji (Yuumi Kawai) who is almost forced into a marriage with a wealthy man because of her adoptive parents’ greed but is finally revealed to be a displaced princess and returned to her father who is thereby redeemed for having accidentally killing his other daughter in a mistaken attempt to control her after accidentally promising her in marriage to a dog god without really thinking about what he was saying. A neat parallel is drawn in a brief mention of Hokusai’s artist daughter Oi and Bakin’s daughter-in-law Omichi (Haru Kuroki) who did not receive an education and is almost illiterate but finally helps him to complete the story by transcribing it in Chinese characters he teaches her as they go after he loses his sight.

As his literary success increases, Bakin’s own fortunes both improve and decline. He becomes wealthier and moves to nicer houses in samurai neighbourhoods, but his son Shizugoro’s (Hayato Isomura) health declines and he never opens his own clinic like he planned while remaining committed to the idea that his father is actually a great, unappreciated artist. In a way, completing the story gives Bakin a way to say the world could be kind and just even if it has not always been so to him. He needs to maintain the belief in a better world in order to go living even if he feels it to be inauthentic while his life itself is a kind of fiction. On a trip to the theatre, he ends up seeing Yotsuya Kaidan and is at once hugely impressed and incredibly angry. The world that Nanboku sees is the opposite of his own. People are selfish and greedy. The bad are rewarded and the innocent are punished. Yet perhaps this is the “reality” of the way the world really is, where as his work is a wishful fantasy. All he’s doing is running away from the truth. But then, as his son’s friend tells him, if a man devotes himself to the ideal of justice and believes in it all his life, then it becomes a reality and ceases to be fiction. There is something quite poignant about the dog soldiers coming to take Bakin to the better world he dreamed of where bad things happen but good always triumphs in the end, which has now indeed become a reality if only for him.

Hakkenden screens 13th June as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Mom, Is That You?! (こんにちは、母さん, Yoji Yamada, 2023)

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“People of my generation can’t throw anything away,” an older woman admits on her hearing her daughter-in-law has just been featured in a TV series about decluttering. Inspired by Ai Nagai’s 2001 play, the latest from veteran director Yoji Yamada Mom, Is that You? (こんにちは、母さん, Konichiwa, Okasan) seems to hint at a series of circular generational divides while suggesting that the children of the Bubble-era in particular are too quick to get rid of things they don’t think they don’t need anymore.

That’s the irony of soon-to-be 50-year-old Akio’s (Yo Oizumi) salaryman job in HR. It’s his job to cut dead wood from the company and this current round of polite requests to employees of a certain level to take early retirement includes his uni friend Kibe (Kankuro Kudo) who doesn’t take kindly to what he sees as a personal betrayal. Unlike Akio who is beginning to tire of the salaryman dream, Kibe fiercely fights for his position and identity as an executive at a big company even when faced with banishment room treatment and disciplinary dismissal after an altercation with the boss.

But what Kibe doesn’t know is that Akio is already facing a series of crises. His marriage has collapsed and his university student daughter Mai (Mei Nagano) is having a crisis of her own. Fresh from her tidying success, her mother has told her that all she can do is get good grades followed by a boring salaryman job like her dad’s which doesn’t seem to be what she wants which is why she’s run off to stay with her grandmother Fukue (Sayuri Yoshinaga) who runs a traditional shop selling tabi socks near the Sumida River. Fukue has a kindly, laid-back attitude remiscent of the shitamachi spirit found in other Yamada films in contrast to the stressed out uptightness of Akio who hasn’t told her about his impending divorce nor work troubles but finds himself paying a visit home in an attempt to sort himself out only to find Fukue keeping herself busy with a local charity group and nascent relationship with a church pastor. 

Fukue’s charity work is emblematic of a waste not want not philosophy that has otherwise disappeared from the modern society as they pick up the things other people don’t want and donate them to the needy even if it sometimes seems a little simplistic or patronising. Biting into some reject crackers from the local rice cracker shop, Akio reflects that they’re something that’s made to console people and it’s work that has meaning unlike his soulless corporate job that gives him nothing other than stress and money. At the time the play was written, the fallacy of the salaryman dream was clear for all to see in the post-Bubble society but to a man like Akio getting a company job was a big deal and his success is still the talk of his mother’s friends even he starts to wonder if he still has time to start again and discover a more meaningful way of living.

Some of these ideas, and the timescales involved, make much more sense for the play’s millennial setting rather than the film’s apparent present day given the references to the firebombing of Tokyo which would require the older protagonists to be their late 80s to even remember. Akio dismisses his mother’s charity work and insists that the homeless are only those who opted out of the competitive society he too has come to doubt or else were excluded from it, while he’s resentful of her attachment to the pastor in contrast to Mai who is excited by the prospect of her grandmother’s love affair and enduring possibilities of age while Fukue is beginning to fear not death but dependency if her health should suddenly decline. 

It’s in the midst of her heartbreak that the film affords Fukue a new beginning if in coming full circle, Akio choosing to make a clean break with the unhappiness in his life and Mai embracing her youth while falling for the old world charms of her grandmother’s tabi sock shop almost exclusively catering to sumo wrestlers, who as someone points out never waste anything, and people trying ceremony for the first time at 60. Like most of Yamada’s work, the film has a gentle humanity and melancholy poignancy but also a sense of hope and continuity that run contrary to an overly corporatised society in which young and old are already losing faith.

Mom, Is That You?! screened as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Original trailer (No subitles)

Don’t Call it Mystery (ミステリと言う勿れ, Hiroaki Matsuyama, 2023)

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Totono once again finds himself at the centre of of conspiracy in the big screen edition of the popular drama based on the manga by Yumi Tamura, Don’t Call it Mystery (ミステリと言う勿れ). Embroiled in what first looks like a family succession drama as he points out recalling The Inugami Family, he soon discovers there’s more in play than might be expected but also that the wounds of the past are slow to heal and often cause people to act in unexpected ways.

In any case, he ends up getting involved care of Garo (Eita Nagayama) who is still on the run following the end of the TV series so unable to help a teenage girl, Shioji (Nanoka Hara), who is one of four grandchildren in line to inherit her grandfather’s legacy if only she can fulfil the bizarre quest he left for them in his will. Her worry is that, as family law dictates one person inherits everything, there will inevitably be deaths and violence involved as the cousins battle each other for the prize of a giant estate near Hiroshima where Totono also just happened to be on a day trip.

Once again, the running gag is that mystery just seems to find Totono who only wants to get on with living his peaceful life as a student eating curry and going to museums though there are some tantalising clues to his own backstory littered through the piece such as his unexpected familiarity with the city of Hiroshima. The case this time as also has a link to Totono’s famously curly hair which only adds to his Kindaichi-esque sense of eccentricity deepened by his reluctance to allow Shioji’s family to do his laundry or to a take a bath in another person’s home. But these foibles are, as he points out to those around him, reflective of a conflict in what is considered considerate behaviour. They think they’re being nice by offering to do his laundry, but he doesn’t want them to so it’s just additional inconvenience for him much in the same way as you if offer someone a lift to the station thinking that’s easier for them and they accept not to cause offence but are secretly disappointed because they were looking forward to the walk.

Totono’s defining characteristic as an accidental detective is indeed his emotional intelligence and ability to pick up on the slightest things that might be bothering those around him, often prone to lengthy monologues that advocate for a more compassionate world and better understanding between people. As the mystery becomes clear, he begins to realise that the parents of the grandchildren were trying to protect them from the toxic legacy of tradition and end the ridiculous family succession drama that apparently led to the deaths of some of their immediate relatives. He gives similar advice to Shoji’s cousin Yura (Ko Shibasaki) on hearing her father tell her that women are happiest as wives and mothers and she should drop what she’s doing to pay more attention to her husband and daughter. Totono takes him to task for his sexist thinking and tells him it’s unfair, advising Yura that she might not unwittingly want to pass these ideas on to her own daughter by suppressing herself to conform to her father’s outdated idea of conventional femininity.

As Totono says, children are like wet cement and the things dropped on them leave their mark for the rest of the child’s life. It seems that the family was in a sense haunted by a child they’d wronged and worried would someday come back to wreak their revenge as a phantasmagorical embodiment of their latent guilt and shame about how they usurped their fortune. What the grandchildren come to realise, is that their late parents did actually understand them and wanted them to be happy following their own paths rather than bound by tradition or outdated notions of properness regardless of whatever happens with the grandfather’s more literal legacy and the buried skeletons it contains. Filled with the same kind of gentle intrigue and mystery along with the compassionate spirit of the TV series and manga, the big screen edition features another difficult case for Totono that also begins to illuminate his own troubled past and the secrets behinds his empathetic soul.

Don’t Call it Mystery screened as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Missing (ミッシング, Keisuke Yoshida, 2024)

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Why is it that we rush to judgement rather than empathy? When a little girl disappears during a short walk from a local park to her home, less than helpful members of the public are quick to turn on the parents while news media, eager for ratings and clicks, is only too happy to give the people what they want casting aside ethical concerns in their exploitation of the parents’ pain all while the little girl remains missing.

In this society, it’s quite normal culturally for children of Miu’s age, six, to walk short distances alone and be left unsupervised at home at for short periods of time. Nevertheless, the public is quick to blame the mother, Saori (Satomi Ishihara), because she had gone to a concert that night and didn’t notice frantic calls from her husband worried because Miu was not at home when he got back from work at 7pm. Soari too blames herself, as is perhaps natural, but it’s unreasonable to expect anyone to never go out for an evening again after having children. Her husband comes in for less scrutiny, which might be surprising, though her brother, Keigo (Yusaku Mori), soon finds himself the prime suspect having been the last to see Miu and allowed her to walk home alone though he would previously have walked her back.

The family find themselves under scrutiny with their every move judged by an unforgiving society. When they dare to buy fancy pastries, online trolls suggest they can’t be all that bothered about Miu after all and are living the high life with the extra money they no longer need to spend on her. Given all that, it might be surprising that they turn to the media for help but in their desperation to find Miu they will leave no stone unturned. Idealistic reporter Sunada (Tomoya Nakamura) seems to want to help them, but is constantly undermined by his bosses who pressure him to take the story into more sensational territory. Though he wanted to write a human interest piece supporting the parents and raising awareness about Miu’s disappearance, he ends up placing them in the firing line for even more trolling and particularly of Saori’s brother Keigo who is an introverted, awkward man not suited to appearing on television. 

Sunada says he wants to help, but it’s undeniable that the media is exploiting the parents’ desperation raising serious ethical concerns as to how they safeguard sources and subjects while shaping the narrative around sensitive issues. Sunada takes a producer to task for placing images of a cement mixer and the sea into the ident for the piece as if it were hinting at what might have happened to Miu but really what the station is most interested in is digging up dirt on the family rather than drawing out new information on the case. A fellow journalist is having great success with a salacious story about the mayor’s son committing fraud, but his piece is less crusading investigative journalism than gossip inviting judgement. Disliking his flippant attitude, Sunada reminds him their job’s not to make people laugh, but his colleague gets a fancy promotion to head office while Sunada is stuck doing random feel good stories about seals.

Their treatment at the hands of the media also exposes a divide within the couple with Saori often frustrated by her husband’s attitude, feeling as if he isn’t invested enough. Yutaka (Munetaka Aoki) suggests simply not reading the online comments and ignoring the trolls while Saori feels compelled to defend herself. He is also warier of pranks and scammers, unwilling to simply jump on every lead out of desperation when so many people seem intent on causing them further pain. Perhaps it makes people feel more in control of their lives to blame the parents, as if something like this couldn’t happen to them because they make what they feel to be better choices, rather than accept that life is random and unfair and little girls can disappear into thin air mere steps from their own door. Unable to find her own daughter, Saori begins defending other people’s children getting a job as a crossing guard to ensure they reach home safely while simultaneously frantic and afraid, handing out fliers to a largely disinterested populace ever hungry for novelty and excitement and embarrassed by her pain even as they continue to feed on it.

Missing screened as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

(Ab)normal Desire (正欲, Yoshiyuki Kishi, 2023)

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There’s a pun embedded in the Japanese title of Yoshiyuki Kishi’s heartfelt drama (Ab)normal Desire in that first character in the word for “sexual desire” (seiyoku, 性欲) has been replaced by one that can be read the same but has the meaning of “correct”, or “proper”. But “normal” is also relative construct that implies conformance with the majority even if that may not actually be the case. As one of the protagonists later remarks “everyone is pervy” though they themselves feel such a degree of shame and otherness that it’s largely prevented them from living any kind of life at all.

In that sense it may be hard to understand why a fetish for water would invite such severe self-loathing in that it causes no harm to others if admittedly resulting in ridicule if exposed. Then again, society can be a fierce watchdog. Department store shop assistant Natsuki (Yui Aragaki) is taken to task by her pregnant colleague who refuses to take her seriously when she says she’s not really interested in getting a boyfriend before giving her a lecture about her biological clock. Though Natsuki appears uninterested in her vacant prattling, the woman later becomes upset and harshly tells her that she was only trying to be “nice” because she felt “sorry” for her and that making people be nice to you in this way is actually a form of harassment which, whichever way you look at it, is some particularly twisted logic.

Her alienation seems to stem from the fact that she feels “abnormal” and that her fetish for water is a part of herself she must be careful to hide. Her parents watch a news report on Tokyo Rainbow Pride and marvel at the idea that there are now choices other than marriage and children but even among the young there remains confusion and shame amid an inability to reconcile the seemingly opposing concepts of “normality” and “diversity” as they struggle to define themselves. A plan to have a male dancer who usually dances in a masculine style dance in a more feminine way backfires when he points out that asking someone to dance in a way they don’t want to doesn’t really do much to advance “diversity”.

But diversity isn’t considered an ideal by all and parents of young children find themselves confused and conflicted when their kids begin to reject conventionality at an early age by asking to withdraw themselves from school and instead focus on other kinds of education that align with their interests. Challenged by his wife about why he never listens to their son’s concerns, prosecutor Hiroki (Goro Inagaki) replies that he should “just be normal” and later describes people who are “unable to live normal lives” as bugs in the system which must eradicated. A symbol of lingering authoritarianism, Hiroki is an intensely conservative man obsessed with properness who thinks it’s his job to decide which crimes everyone is guilty of rather than make any attempt to understand the world around him outside of binary terms like right and wrong or normal and abnormal. When his assistant passes him information on fetishes as a potential explanation for the case of a man who repeatedly steals taps, he simply rolls his eyes and dismisses it.

Yet he perhaps has his own fears and internalised shame as evidenced by his outrage on discovering that another man has been coming to the house to help his wife with tech setup for their son’s new outlet in livestreaming and not only that, he was able to blow up the balloons that Hiroki himself failed to inflate. It’s his rigid authoritarianism that eventually alienates his wife and son who come to see him only as an oppressive bully unable to accept anything that differs from his own definition of “normal”. Finally, he’s the one who is isolated, imprisoned by his own repression and lack of understanding or unwillingness to accept those around him.

Even so, despite its positive messages that no one should feel themselves alone or that society has no place for them the film muddies the waters by introducing fetishes that are necessarily problematic in that they cause harm to others who do not or cannot consent and could not and should not be accepted by mainstream society though oddly those that have them seem to feel less shame only fearing being caught because acting on their desires is against both moral and judicial laws. In any case, in discovering togetherness, that they are not alone, those who feel their desires to be “abnormal” can begin to ease their loneliness and find a place for themselves in an often judgemental world.

(Ab)normal Desire screened as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Matched (マッチング, Eiji Uchida, 2023)

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The dangers of online dating are, as Eiji Uchida’s Matched (マッチング) suggests, a blurring of the lines between romantic fantasy and “real” organic love that threatens to spiral into dangerous obsession. Part stalking drama, part technophobic thriller, the film seems certain that dating apps are bad but perhaps also critiques another kind of romantic mania that leads people to believe there’s something wrong with not being coupled up and maybe it’s worth the risk of encountering someone dangerously unhinged in the desperation to find Mr. or Mrs. Right.

Rinka (Tao Tsuchiya) originally had no interest in dating apps, though she’s beginning to feel awkward about still being single at 29 and spending her free time drinking with her father (Tetta Sugimoto). His advice that romance isn’t really her thing and that’s alright doesn’t really go down all that well with her, yet the fact remains that on a baseline level it’s not really something she actively wants for herself. This is in part ironic as she works as a wedding planner running around satisfying her clients every whim to give them the big day they’ve always dreamed of only to see the man she’s long been carrying a torch for, her old high school teacher, marry a woman he met through an app.

Rinka’s intense resentment might cause us to wonder if she has something to do with the spate of serial killings targeting newly wed couples who got together through the Will Will dating app only after her friend signs her up on in, she too becomes a kind of victim after matching the decidedly creepy Tom (Daisuke Sakuma) who lurks around in the shadows declaring that he was born under bad star and abandoned in a coin locker as an infant. When the school teacher is murdered and she’s somehow linked to the case by a tabloid media article, Rinka’s life begins to spiral out of control while she can only believe that it must be Tom, who continues to stalk her relentlessly with ominous messages, that’s behind it with only the support of Will Will engineer Tsuyoshi (Nobuaki Kaneko) to rely on.

The really mystery is why Will Will doesn’t seem to have a block function or at least why Rinka wouldn’t use it unless she genuinely fears for her safety and thinks their message history will be good evidence. Her friend Naomi’s (Moemi Katayama) constant swiping hints at the superficiality of app-based dating, judging only by a photograph on gut feeling alone. To that extent, Rinka’s offline connection with Tsuyoshi should then be the rightful path to love but he’s a little odd too. Even given Rinka’s situation and his theoretical ability to help her because of his access to the app, he comes across as somewhat possessive and over eager announcing to Rinka in a record store after a single date that she need never fear anything again because he will protect her. 

It’s men that may be the problem, along with the inherent temptations presented by technology as evidenced by the legacy of a romance that bloomed during the chatroom boom and eventually turned about as toxic as it’s possible to get. The other problem with dating apps is that they’re full of people who are already attached and looking for romantic fantasy to escape from the monotony of their everyday relationships along with the stress and burden of responsibility that comes with having a family. These are sins that have quite literally been visited the children, but to come full circle the film may eventually suggest that you can’t really trust anyone and that people can often be callous and indifferent such as the young man inspecting the room where his uncle hanged himself and dismissively tossing away a photo of happier times. 

We never really find out the motives behind the serial killings beyond a suggestion of resentment that these people have supposedly found “love” online in a way others couldn’t having been rejected for what they see as superficial reasons. Meanwhile, the line between a devoted boyfriend and a controlling stalker already seems quite thin, and there are times when Rinka may think the stalker is the lesser of two evils no matter how creepy he might otherwise seem. In any case, love is serious business and you’ll pay a heavy price for betraying it. Ideally, it’s the fantasy and reality that have to match but Rinka at least seems a little lost between the two despite the increasing surreality of the events which have engulfed her.

Matching screened as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Kanasando (かなさんどー, Toshiyuki Teruya, 2024)

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“Don’t forget I’m thinking of you” run the lyrics of the classic Okinawan folk song Kanasando (かなさんどー), but the theme of forgetting, and also of rediscovery, is central to Toshiyuki Teruya’s charming island dramedy in which a young woman begins to reclaim her memories of her parents on returning home after being informed her estranged father has been placed on palliative care and is not expected to last much longer.

Mika (Ruka Matsuda) had left the island seven years previously following the death of her mother, Machiko (Keiko Horiuchi), from a longterm illness severing ties with her father, Satoru (Tadanobu Asano), whose philandering and insensitivity she believes made her mother’s life a misery. In addition to his his illness, Satoru is now suffering with dementia and has obviously forgotten many things including his wife but seeing Mika, who is the spitting image of her mother at her age, begins to spark his memories. 

Yet in many ways it’s really Mika who has forgotten, displaced from her island home and filled with intense resentment towards her father. Having placed her own interpretation on her parents’ relationship, she begins to reevaluate on recalling conversations with her mother and reading her diary. Though she had felt miserable for Machiko, seeing her as belittled and humiliated by Satoru’s inconstancy, she failed to consider that staying was a choice her mother made or that though she may not have understood the relationship they had with each other it may have worked for them.

Then again, perhaps there is a surprising generational conflict between the youngish Mika now living in Tokyo and her mother whose traditional values seem overly strong and a little outdated for the time in which she lived. Burderned by her illness and unable to work, Machiko devotes herself entirely Satoru’s happiness. She dresses well every day, wears full makeup, and is constantly making Satoru’s favourite food while he stays out late drinking and seeing other women. Mika never really considers that her mother wears makeup because she likes it, but it does indeed seem as if it was in part a desire to compete with her husband’s philandering. Insecure in her illness she tells Mika that she just wanted to be seen as a woman even at the end of her life.

Satoru can no longer offer much of an explanation but as the song says, may have been thinking of his family even while an imperfect father and insensitive husband. In what she learns of him from his coworkers and friends, Mika comes to realise that her father had cared for her mother is and wracked with guilt over his behaviour even if he was thinking about her as he still may be despite the erasure of all his other memories. The folk song becomes a conduit that helps Mika reconnect with her island culture and understand the relationship of her parents just as it acts as a plaintive call of longing for each of them. In an effort to help her father not to forget, she ends up becoming her mother, dressing in her clothes and reenacting scenes from her diary hoping to break through her father’s forgetfulness and restore his wife in a gentle process of healing the family unit. 

Through this act of role play Mika comes to a new understanding of her parents’ relationship along with the things which meant something to them but which she had not really understood including the importance of flowers as a symbol of their love, something that is embodied in Mika’s own name which is written with the characters for “beautiful” and “flowers”. Heartrending poignancy of its final sequence aside, Teruya undercuts the potential for gloominess with quirky island humour and captures a real sense of warmth between between Mika and the mother she may not really have understood or at least forgotten the reality of in the midst of her own grief and resentment. The folksong of the title both reunites her parents and also enables Mika to begin processing the secondary loss of her father’s imminent passing with a fuller understanding of the couple and the realisation that Satoru may have been always thinking of them after all in a constant desire to protect the flower of their love along with its island home.

Kanasando screened as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival

International trailer (English subtitles)