Tag: Yoko Oshima

Ringu (リング, Hideo Nakata, 1998)

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As the investigative duo at the centre of Hideo Nakata’s eerie supernatural horror Ringu (リング) begin to unlock the mystery of Sadako, we’re told that a strange woman who may have had some kind of psychic powers was loathed by those around her in part because of her habit of sitting and staring at the sea. Nakata opens the film with waves and often returns to them as if suggesting in this millennial horror that what we fear is a transmission we cannot see. In the end there may not be so much difference between the magic of an analogue TV broadcast and a message from another plane. 

In any case, perhaps the central message is that one should pay more attention to the words of those whose warnings are often dismissed on the grounds of their age and gender. Journalist Reiko (Nanako Matsushima), for example, doesn’t seem too invested in a video she’s making about a cursed video related by a trio of high school girls in a cafe who explain that they don’t personally know anyone who’s died after watching it but have been reliably informed by friends of friends who apparently do. As will later be discovered, the girls actually give Reiko crucial information but for whatever reason she does not remember it until coming to the same conclusion herself. In any case, it’s not until her own niece, Tomoko (Yuko Takeuchi), dies in mysterious circumstances that Reiko starts to wonder if this is more than a spooky story elevating the chain letter to new technological heights.

According to the urban legend, if you watch the cursed tape you’ll immediately get a phone call telling you you’ll die in seven days. The supernatural entity now synonymous with the film, Sadako, is manipulating these still analogue waves for herself. Sending her messages via television and telephone she is a literal ghost of the airwaves and as Reiko’s ex-husband Ryuji later puts it radiating her sense of rage in her own mistreatment, insisting that her story be known and that those who refuse to acknowledge it should not be allowed to survive. Just as Reiko should have listened to the high school girls, someone should have listened to Sadako and because they didn’t others now have no choice. 

In a sense Sadako represents this nascent fear of technological advancement. When Reiko answers her flip phone, it’s a reminder that there’s no escape from unwanted communication even if you can in theory try to switch it off. The girl with Tomoko when she died was driven out of her mind and now won’t venture anywhere near a television, as if you could escape Sadako’s wrath by merely keeping your distance from the portal. The two teenagers who died around the same time as Tomoko were in a car in the middle of nowhere, but cars have radios which receive radio waves. Sadako travels through the air, invisible until she chooses not to be. She may only have a direct line, but it is in one sense a call for help she’s issuing only in the very inefficient manner of a vengeful ghost whose rage has become indiscriminate or at least directed towards the society that wronged her and everyone in it rather than a single guilty party. 

In a certain sense, you can cure the curse only by spreading it. If everyone everywhere suddenly understood, learned Sadako’s painful history, then the curse would wither and die with no new hosts to go to which is perhaps what Sadako wants. Yet it leaves Reiko with a dilemma, knowing that to save the lives of those closest to her she may have to ask someone else to risk their life or even expose them without their consent. Throughout the film she’s been depicted as an imperfect mother, divorced and often leaving her small son Yoichi to fend for himself at home while the boy at one point walks past his own father in the street and does not seem to recognise him so absent had he been in his life. Through their shared quest to undo the curse, the pair in a sense reclaim their parental roles and repair their familial ties in working together to save their son’s life in contrast to the parental figures surrounding Sadako who may have done the reverse. Sadako frightens us because of her transgressive qualities, quite literally transgressing the barriers between ourselves and the stories we tell by crawling out of them and finding us here, on the other side of the screen, where we thought we were safe to remind us not to look away and to listen to those whose voices are all too often ignored. 

Ringu screens at Japan Society New York on Oct. 7 as part of the Monthly Classics series.

20th anniversary trailer (English subtitles)

My Father’s Tracks (僕と彼女とラリーと, Renpei Tsukamoto, 2021)

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A struggling Tokyo actor begins to re-appreciate small-town wholesomeness after returning home for the first time in many years on learning of his semi-estranged father’s death in Renpei Tsukamoto’s heartwarming drama My Father’s Tracks (僕と彼女とラリーと, Boku to Kanojo to Rally to). As much a celebration of the idyllic countryside villages around the city of Toyota in Aichi, obviously closely associated with the automobile industry, Tsukamoto’s gentle coming-of-age tale sees its hero find his purpose in returning to his roots while gaining a new perspective on his parents’ relationship and the father he’d always resented who became a local hero but was never around when his family needed him. 

At 29 Taiga (Win Morisaki) is still trying to make his mark as an actor in Tokyo, his dejected manager complaining his trouble is that though he’s quick and clever he’s essentially soulless which is why he’s failing to captivate the audition panel. He repeatedly ignores calls from his semi-estranged father Toshio (Masahiko Nishimura) and then answers one on the urging of a friend only to utter some very unkind words before unceremoniously hanging up. The next time he answers his phone, however, the call is from an old friend and neighbour, Miho (Mai Fukagawa), letting him know that his father has passed away suddenly of a heart attack. Though they had not been on good terms, Taiga cannot help feeling guilty that his final words to his father were so harsh especially as he’d called to invite him to visit the following November. 

Though everyone in the town seems to have held Toshio in high regard, he was a frequent fixture on the local TV channel for which Miho works, both Taiga and his older brother Hiroyuki (Ryuta Sato) who has become a cynical and heartless businessman feel only contempt for him for having selfishly neglected his family while travelling all around the world as a mechanic with a champion rally team not even making it home in time to see their mother before she passed away of a longterm illness. Taiga can’t forgive him for leaving his mother lonely, but later comes to reflect that perhaps he wasn’t best placed to fully understand the relationship between his parents and may have misinterpreted something which as he later puts it only a husband and wife can know. Meanwhile, it seems his father had also been a supportive force in the community having given jobs to those who might not ordinarily find them in a mechanic with a criminal record, an old man past retirement age, and a young woman so shy she is largely unable to speak. Taiga can see how important his father was to these people and worries what will happen to them now whereas his coldhearted brother is deaf to their pleas planning to close the business and have it and the family home bulldozed as soon as possible to settle the estate without undue delay. 

Hurt even more deeply that Taiga, Hiroyuki has become cruel and cynical often running his brother down rolling his eyes that no one makes a living from a “hobby” while insisting this isn’t one of his “namby-pamby” plays. He claims that he needs the money to protect his family, something that he feels his father failed to do in spending all his time on a “hobby” of his own even shutting down his own small son’s curiosity and desire to join in with the other kids’ fun. Even so after repeatedly telling him to “man up” and get a real job, Hiroyuki is less than impressed by Taiga’s desire to take over the family business which he admittedly knows nothing about having acquired a driving license solely for a role, only relenting when threatened by a flamboyant human rights lawyer with the name of a legendary samurai (Riki Takeuchi).  

Nevertheless, marshalling the skills he picked up in Tokyo and working alongside the locals Taiga begins to rediscover the sense of purpose he’d been missing while gaining a new understanding of his father and greater sense of future possibility. Despite complaining that there is “nothing here” in comparison to Tokyo only for Miho to remind him of all the things Tokyo doesn’t have or that are freely given in Toyota but need to be paid for in the city, he quickly settles back in to small town rhythms and begins to accept his father’s legacy finally finding his sense of direction and taking his place in the driving seat of his own life. A heartwarming tale of familial reconnection and the power of community, not to mention a celebration of rural small-town Toyota, My Father’s Tracks insists life is a rally, all about the going there and coming back, walking on blazing a trail and never giving up no matter the sharp corners and unexpected turns a life may take. 

My Father’s Tracks streams in the US until March 27 as part of the 14th season of Asian Pop-up Cinema

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Born Bone Born (洗骨, Toshiyuki Teruya, 2018)

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Bone Born Bone poster“Is this really Japan?!” asks the bemused boyfriend of the protagonist of Born Bone Born (洗骨, Senkotsu), only to be met with the reply “on paper, at least”. Comedian Toshiyuki Teruya, better known as Gori, returns to his native Okinawa for his second feature but to an island culture of which he was completely unaware. Aguni is one of the last on which the ancient ritual of “Senkotsu” or “bone washing” still takes place.

Beloved matriarch Emiko (Mariko Tsutsui) died four years ago. Now the time for her “senkotsu” is approaching. Daughter Yuko (Ayame Misaki) has come home, but with a secret. She is heavily pregnant and as yet unmarried, a fact she knows will scandalise the still conservative island community. Meanwhile, her her father Nobutsuna (Eiji Okuda) has retreated into drunken reverie, unable to accept his wife’s death or the many disappointments of his life. Yuko is waiting for her brother, Tsuyoshi (Michitaka Tsutsui), to arrive before explaining any further about the baby, but he even he is much less supportive than she hoped he might be and seems to be dealing with some troubles of his own which might explain why his wife and daughter have not accompanied him on this very difficult family occasion.

The island of Aguni practices open air burial, which is to say the bodies are enclosed in a wooden coffin and entombed in cave. Four years later the relatives return, retrieve the body and wash the bones before re-enclosing them in a smaller casket which will then be interred on the island’s “other world”. It is, of course, a difficult and frightening prospect to consider seeing one’s loved ones in such an altered state – so much so that many cannot bear to do it without getting roaring drunk which at least ameliorates the solemnity of the occasion. The human terror is in a sense the point as an exercise not only in memento mori but in acceptance of total loss and the finality of the physical.

Before all that, however, you still have to live and the Shinjos are having a fairly hard time of it. A small island somewhat trapped in the past, Aguni is intensely conservative and so the local old ladies can’t get their heads around Yuko’s unwed pregnancy. Yuko of course knew this would be the case but could hardly refuse to come and has braced herself for the worst of it. However, after the initial shock has worn off, she finds an unexpected ally in her stern aunt Nobuko (Yoko Ohshima) who assures her that if she finds it hard to raise the child on her own she can always come back to the island where she and Nobuko’s daughter will help if needed. Her father Nobutsuna, in boozy fog as he is, is also broadly supportive even if her brother shows little sign of coming round, engaging in unexpected small town conservatism as he accuses his little sister not only of shaming the family but of becoming a burden on it too.

In a motif that will be repeated, it’s the men who struggle to cope with loss while the women get on with life with stoicism and fortitude. Nobutsuna has remained unable to come to terms with Emiko’s death, drinking himself into oblivion while blaming himself for placing undue strain on her after their family business went bust. Nevertheless he is a good hearted man who wants the best for everyone even if his mild-mannered deference has Tsuyoshi sniping at the sidelines for his supposed fecklessness. He too blames his father for his mother’s death, but is also struggling with the elders’ expectation that he will return home to the island to take over as head of the family while there is evidently something else going on in his life which has left him irritable and judgemental.

If nothing else the Senkotsu ritual forces each of them to accept the fact of Emiko’s death, but also of her life and their own place within a great chain of humanity stretching both forward and back. In a sense, as Tsuyoshi puts it, it’s their own bones they’re washing in honour of the undying part of Emiko that exists in all of them and something of her kindly spirit certainly seems to be present on the beach that day as the family slowly repairs itself, emerging from their deep seated grief back to the friendly island solidarity as they resolve to treasure what they have in acknowledgement of what is to come.

Born Bone Born was screened as part of the 2019 Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Original trailer (no subtitles)