Tag: Yuki Yamada

Army on the Tree (木の上の軍隊, Kazuhiro Taira, 2025)

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Based on an unfinished play by Hisashi Inoue, Kazuhiro Taira’s Army on the Tree (木の上の軍隊, Ki no Ue no Guntai) confronts the absurdity of war by marooning its heroes in a banyan tree far above the conflict but also increasing unwilling to come down and face an uncertain reality. Instead, they remain in a kind of limbo, trapped somewhere between life and death in continuing to fight their war in their own way while unbeknownst to them, the wider world moves on.

In any case, this “army of two” is comprised of very different men with a complicated and ever-shifting dynamic. Lieutenant Yamashita (Shinichi Tsutsumi) is a loyal militarist from Miyazaki on the mainland, while private Agena (Yuki Yamada) is a local who has never left the Okinawan island where his family were once farmers, until the Japanese army requisitioned their land. The truth is that Japan is a coloniser here, too, and there’s an awkwardness involved in the way they see the islanders as both Japanese and not. While discussing the building of a new air base Yamashita describes as the envy of the Orient, one of the other officers suggests they will simply use “the locals” in suicide attacks as if their lives are completely disposable and not of equal value to those of the mainland soldiers, while simultaneously suggesting they belong entirely to the empire for the commanding officers to use as they see fit. They’ve been training the civilian villagers in local defence using spears to attack straw models labelled “Churchill” and “Eisenhower”, but when one older man jokes about smearing his with excrement so the enemy might have a better chance of dying of infection, Yamashita beats him about the head for what seems like an eternity.

It’s Yamashita who seems to cling fiercely to militarist ideology and his loyalty to the emperor, even if there’s an obvious conflict in the fact that he’s “run away” to hide in this tree with Agena while the rest of his men are dead. This also gives him an additional psychological reason to want to stay up there so that he won’t have to face his guilt and shame in the defeat and having survived it along with having allowed all of his men but one to die. Trapped there together, the two men have no reason to believe that anything has changed and think the battle is still ongoing with American soldiers patrolling the forest. They attempt to survive foraging for food and water, drinking from a trough into which a dead body has fallen while Yamashita at first firmly rejects the idea of eating tinned food left behind by the Americans, describing it as “enemy food” and the eating of it as an act of treachery. Agena is not so foolish and finally gets Yamashita to eat some and avoid starvation by tipping some of it into an old Japanese army ration tin.

But as much as Yamashita is in charge by virtue of military hierarchy, he’s also a stranger here while Agena is intimately familiar with the terrain. He has a much better idea of knowing how to survive in the forest and which plants and insects are okay to eat. The truth is that the army had confiscated all this land to turn it into an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” which the local recruits had to build with their own hands. Once the situation deteriorates, they’re ordered to blow the whole thing up to prevent the Americans taking it over rendering their labour entirely pointless especially as their only goal is to slow the Americans down. They have no real prospect of stopping them or of surviving the assault. Meanwhile, as Agena points out, neither he nor the island will ever be the same again. His mother had lost her mind after their land was taken and his father failed to return from the war, while most of his friends are dead and the places he played as a child have taken on new meanings or perhaps no longer exist. The world before the war is lost to him, and he can’t ever go home again, unlike Yamashita who still has somewhere, and presumably also someone, to go back to.

Yamashita is not altogether appreciative of this fact as much as he comes to see Agena as a stand in for the son from whom he’d become estranged because of his hardline authoritarianism. Nevertheless, the bond that’s arisen between them does begin to reawaken his humanity and dissolve the rigidity of his ideology so that he is gradually able to accept the reality that Japan has lost the war, their battle is over, and it’s time to come down from the tree. Taira largely avoids judgement or falling into the trap of glorifying these men’s actions as soldiers who refused to give in, focussing instead on the absurdity of their position along with the literal and psychological dimensions of their purgatorial existence as they attempt to process how to move forward into an unknown world while still tormented by the old.

Army on the Tree screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Blue Giant (Yuzuru Tachikawa, 2023)

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There’s something quite poignant in the central themes of Yuzuru Tachikawa’s impassioned jazz anime Blue Giant that these very young men have decided to dedicate themselves to art that even they describe as dying. At their earliest meeting, saxophone player Dai (Yuki Yamada) and pianist Yukinori (Shotaro Mamiya) have a minor disagreement with Yukinori critical of the musicians he was previously playing with describing them as old and their lack of innovation as the reason that the art is decline but according Dai they are also the bearers of its legacy and the ensures of its survival.

It’s an ironic moment at least in that Yukihiro will also later be criticised for a “boring” performance style that plays it safe by concentrating on technical proficiency as opposed to the unbridled anarchy embodied by Dai whose determination to become the world’s greatest jazz player comes off as earnest more than arrogant and a mark of his intense self-belief which also generous and kind rather than jealous or petty. Like many anime heroes, Dai is a young man making the journey to the city and struggling to fulfil his dreams amid its various pressures. On arrival in Tokyo he struggles to find somewhere to practice that is both free of city noise and unlikely to disturb those around him but eventually discovers a small oasis not so different from the riverbank he played by in Sendai. 

We’re often reminded that music can be a lonely profession with the implication that Dai has had to sacrifice other areas of his life to dedicate himself to perfecting his art but has achieved surprising skill for only three years experience. Yukinori began playing at four and is envious of an innate talent he doesn’t believe he has or at least to the same extent as Dai. Then again, it may just be that his talent lies elsewhere and he has not yet quite discovered it. Rather than a musical rivalry the pair fall into a mutually beneficial rhythm in which they encourage each other to improve even if as Yukinori said jazz bands aren’t intended to stay together for long and are only ever more like stepping stones to somewhere else.

Their brotherhood is further tested by Dai’s decision to bring in his equally dejected friend Tamada (Amane Okayama) as their drummer despite his never having played the drums before insisting that it would be wrong to frustrate his newfound interest in music. Like the others, Tamada is struggling to rediscover himself after working hard to get into a university in Tokyo but bored by his lectures and disappointed in his fellow students who already seem to be playing the salaryman game. He’s drawn to music in part because of Dai’s love for it and it does seem to be his passion rather than jazz itself that wins over new converts to the supposedly dying art.

Dai claims to have fallen for jazz because it’s “hot” and “intense” and allows him a means to express himself in freely in a way that becomes almost infectious in its dynamism. Adapted from Shinichi Ishizuka’s manga, the animation emphasises the physicality of performance and the strength and stamina required to become a successful musician though the use of rotoscoping for additional authenticity sometimes seems oddly static and uncanny while largely at odds with the more expressive aesthetics with which the background drama is imbued. Even so Tachikawa echoes the freewheeling nature of the medium through drifting off into abstract, psychedelic sequences that attempt to visualise the transcendent and liberating quality of jazz.

Much of that featured in the film is composed by international jazz pianist Hiromi Uehara which lends a kind of irony to Yukinori’s growing realisation that his piano is the weak link as long he remains unable to unlock his potential and express himself freely through music rather than fallback on the safety and security of tried and tested techniques. In any case, it’s the relationships between them that propel the boys forward towards their respective destinies which may or may not coincide but are as much founded on friendship and solidarity as they are on a love of music.

Blue Giant opens in UK cinemas on 31st January courtesy of Anime Limited.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © Blue Giant Partners

Black Night Parade (ブラックナイトパレード, Yuichi Fukuda, 2022)

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According to the opening voiceover of Yuichi Fukuda’s seasonal comedy Black Night Parade (ブラックナイトパレード), we’ve all got Christmas wrong. It’s not completely true that Santa only gives presents to the nice kids for there are in fact two Santas, the other one, the anti-Santa, making sure that bad children have a very unhappy Christmas receiving gifts ranging from the traditional lump of coal to offal. The Santa dressed in black is described as being a little more egalitarian, but does indeed pedal in disappointment and the opposite of the holiday spirit though in another way perhaps he’s just an embodiment of a sense of resentment towards to the unfairness of the contemporary society. 

Miharu (Ryo Yoshizawa) is very definitely grown up and a good example of someone who regards themselves as earnest but is becoming fed up with seeing those he regards as acting inconsiderately prosper. Still working part-time at a convenience store having repeatedly failed to get into university or find a full-time job, he’s irritated by his loudmouth slacker colleague Kaiser (Taishi Nakagawa) who just seems to constantly fall up in life while Miharu ends up being the responsible one doing most of his work for him. When Kaiser asks him to cover his shift Christmas Eve so he can go on a date with his pretty girlfriend seconds after telling him he’s actually had a full-time job offer, it obviously stings more than a little. But when Miharu takes a leaf out of his book and tries to take home one of the expired Christmas cakes, he’s immediately caught and threatened by his boss not to mention being deemed a bad boy by the Santa in black. 

Though in his case, it results in an ironic job officer to become one of Santa’s helpers at a gloomy Santa centre where they run a virtual surveillance state to figure out whether the kids that send in letters to Santa have really been as good as they claim to have been. Surveillance queen Shino (Kanna Hashimoto) decides one little lad hasn’t on catching him cheating on a test despite having emphasised how hard he’d been studying in his letter. Cheating on a test is obviously not “good”, but perhaps it’s not innards in your stocking bad either and Miharu’s moral compass is going haywire trying to understand the strange world he finds himself in while participating in a contest to join the elite Reindeer division of Christmas shock troops. Meanwhile, he’s also confronted by a conspiracy in which the red Santa has already been murdered by rats controlled by a mysterious group who hate Christmas and are trying to eradicate it. If they don’t find a new red Santa soon, the magic will be broken forever.

Despite the zaniness of the concept, the humour is a little less grating than the broad variety style generally employed by Fukuda in his other films even if several of the performances are on the larger side. Rather than rediscovering the true meaning of Christmas or coming to an accommodation with the unfairness of the contemporary society, Miharu is guided towards dealing with his own unresolved childhood trauma which repurposes the empty consumerism of a contrived holiday tradition as a means of signalling of a lack of something or the roots of unhappiness. Even if most most kids are asking for the latest toys it may be because they want others to play with with them, while some just want company because their parents have to work long hours and they’re lonely at home. 

Despite making the astute observation that the best way to disappoint a naughty child is to get them what they asked for but not quite right, Miharu eventually discovers a calling in making sure no child is left empty-handed on Christmas Day spreading the spirit of the season wherever he goes even while being chased by packs of evil rats out to destroy the joy of Christmas forever. Then again, there is some mildly satirical humour in the likening of Santa Claus House to a “black company” ruthlessly exploiting its employees while engaging in some very dubious corporate shenanigans in its use of customer data and clear invasion of privacy in its all-seeing surveillance network. In any case, it does appear that Christmas is safe from the rat race for the moment and children good or bad will wake up to a surprise equally so on Christmas morning for years to come.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Godzilla Minus One (ゴジラ-1.0, Takashi Yamazaki, 2023)

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When Godzilla emerges from the waves in Takashi Yamazaki’s entry into the classic tokusatsu series Godzilla Minus One (ゴジラ-1.0), he does so as an embodiment of wartime trauma most particularly that of the hero, Koichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a kamikaze pilot who failed die. Some might call his actions cowardice, returning to base siting engine trouble rather than doing what others regard as his duty, though the film implies it’s simply a consequence of his natural desire to live, a desire which the tenets of militarism which in essence a death cult insisted he must suppress. 

But for Koichi as he’s fond of saying the war never ends. He’s trapped in a purgatorial cycle of survivor’s guilt and internalised shame, feeling as if he has no right to a future because of the future that was robbed from other men like him because of his refusal to sacrifice his life. When he first encounters Godzilla on a small island outpost, he is ordered back into his plane to fire its guns at him but freezes while the rest of the men, bar one, are killed. Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki), a mechanic who had already branded Koichi a treacherous coward, gives him a packet of photographs belonging to the dead men each featuring the families they were denied the opportunity to return to. Photographs on an altar become a motif for him, though he has none for his parents who were killed when their house was destroyed by the aerial bombing of Tokyo. A surviving neighbour similarly blames him, directly aligning Koichi’s act of selfish cowardice with the razing of the city.

The return of Godzilla is literal manifestation of his war trauma which he must finally confront in order to move into the new post-war future that’s built on peace and solidarity rather than acrimony and resentment for the wartime past. But then again, the film situates itself in a fantasy post-war Tokyo in which the Occupation is barely felt and the government, which mainly consisted of former militarists, is also absent. Both the US and the Japanese authorities refuse to do anything about Godzilla because of various geopolitical implications making this a problem that the people must face themselves, though they largely do so through attempting to repurpose rather than reject the militarist past. Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka), a scientist who worked on weapons production during the war, gives a rousing speech in which he explains that this time they will not pointlessly sacrifice their lives but instead fight to live in a better world which is all very well but perhaps mere sophistry when the end result is the same. 

Called back by their old commander, many men say they will not risk their lives or abandon their families once again because they have learned their lessons but others are convinced by the message that they must face Godzilla if they’re ever to be free of their wartime past. Koichi wants vengeance against Godzilla but also to avenge himself by doing what he could not do before. The film seems to suggest that this time it’s different because he has a choice. No one has ordered him to die, and he is free to choose whether to do so or not which is also the choice of being consumed by his war trauma or overcoming it to begin a new life in the post-war Tokyo that Godzilla has just destroyed. 

Despite the desperation and acrimony he returns to, Koichi maintains his humanity bonding with a young woman, Noriko (Minami Hamabe), who agreed to take care of another woman’s child. Even the neighbour, Sumiko (Sakura Ando), who first rejected Koichi and is suspicious of Noriko, willingly gives up her own rice supply for the baby proving that in the end people are good and will help each other even if that seems somewhat naive amid the realities of life in the post-war city ridden with starvation and disease. In any case, it’s this solidarity that eventually saves them, Godzilla challenged less by a pair of large boats than a flotilla of small ones united by the desire to finally end this war. Like Yamazaki’s previous wartime dramas The Eternal Zero and The Great War of Archimedes, the film espouses a lowkey nationalism mired in a nostalgia for a mythologised Japan but as usual excels in terms of production design and visual spectacle as the iconic monster looms large over a city trapped between the wartime past and a post-war future that can only be claimed by a direct confrontation with the lingering trauma of militarist folly.

Godzilla Minus One opens in UK cinemas 15th December courtesy of All the Anime.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Tokyo Revengers (東京リベンジャーズ, Tsutomu Hanabusa, 2021) [Fantasia 2021]

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“You don’t deserve to change my life” the hero of Tsutomu Hanabusa’s adaptation of Ken Wakui’s manga Tokyo Revengers (東京リベンジャーズ) eventually affirms in finally facing his fears while trying to change destiny not least his own. In contrast to its original meaning in English, the wasei eigo “Revenge” usually means not payback but “rematch” or at least a second chance to prove oneself or make up for a past mistake. Through his time travel shenanigans, this is perhaps what young Takemichi (Takumi Kitamura) is attempting to do in revisiting the events which he feels ruined his life and left him a useless coward too cowed to offer much resistance to his continual degradation. 

Now 27, Takemichi lives in a rundown, untidy apartment and works part-time in a bookstore where his boss inappropriately mocks for him for still being a virgin, the kind of guy who peaked in high school and can’t move on from adolescent bravado. He might have a point in a sense in that Takemichi is indeed arrested but hearing on the news one day that his first love Hinata (Mio Imada) has been killed in a car accident supposedly caused by the Tokyo Manji gang alongside her brother Naoto (Yosuke Sugino), he finds himself thinking back to his school days. It’s at this point that someone shoves him off a train platform and, facing certain death, he suddenly finds himself in the body of his 17-year-old, bleach blond delinquent self. Takemichi assumes it’s a near death flashback, but later wakes up back in the present and realises that his actions in the past have consequences in the future. 

Quite clearly taking its cues from classic high school delinquent manga in which moody high school boys vie for the top spot through relentless violence, Tokyo Revengers nevertheless undercuts the genre’s macho posturing in firstly having Takemichi broken by his first defeat and then allowing him to reclaim his space as a hero through his determination to care for and protect others even if his final victory is in facing the man he held responsible for shattering his sense of self. Sent back into the past to prevent the Tokyo Manji Gang from ever forming, Takemichi refuses the obvious early solution but remains conflicted in realising that at its inception “Toman” saw itself as a compassionate force for good, a far cry from the nihilistic violence it now brings to the city. Rather than more violence, he finds a solution in its reverse, safeguarding relationships and preventing heartbreak in order to ensure no one else’s soul is corrupted by grief or loneliness. 

Takemichi feels himself powerless but is valued by his friends for his determination to protect others no matter the cost to himself, as he unwittingly proves through his time travel adventures attempting to save himself as much as Hinata by restoring his sense of self apparently shattered by his subjugation at the hands of a rival gang back back in high school. At 27 he’s a meek and broken man, forever apologising for his existence and living an unfulfilling life always running away from challenge or difficulty. Given an improbable second chance, he begins to find the courage to do it all differently with the benefit of hindsight and the stability of age, finally facing his teenage trauma as a fully adult man.  

Like any good delinquent movie, Hanabusa makes space for more than a few mass brawls along with intensely personal one-on-one battles drawing a direct line between high school violence and street war thuggery. “Thugs aren’t cool anymore” Toman leader Mikey (Ryo Yoshizawa) had explained, his compassionate second in command Kenchin (Yuki Yamada) reminding him to “have a heart” in keeping gang violence within the confines of their society and refraining from injuring innocent people. Toman aren’t yakuza, but they are perhaps the inheritors of jingi, or at least would be if left untouched by trauma and betrayal. In beating his own trauma, Takemichi undoes his destiny saving his friends and himself by learning to embrace his inner strength and refusing to back down in the face of intimidation. Part high school delinquent manga, part time travel adventure, Hanabusa’s sci-fi-inflected drama swaps macho posturing for a more contemplative take on the weight of past mistakes while giving its hero a second chance to be the kind of man he always thought himself to be.

Tokyo Revengers screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

My Little Monster (となりの怪物くん, Sho Tsukikawa, 2018)

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A wilfully self-contained high school girl falls for a big-hearted classmate, but struggles to understand that they are in essence fighting different battles in their parallel quests for acceptance. Adapted from the hit shojo manga by Robico, Sho Tsukikawa’s My Little Monster (となりの怪物くん, Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun) is in many ways a typical high school rom-com in which a repressed young woman begins to deal with her abandonment issues essentially by mothering a displaced young man whose “problematic” big-heartedness sees him regarded as a “monster” by a still conservative society. 

Opening with a flashback presumably set in the present day, an older Shizuku (Tao Tsuchiya) now wearing a lawyer’s pin listens wistfully to Kana Nishino’s 2010 hit Best Friend and reflects on a time when all she cared about was studying, rejecting all human connection. Until that is she met the titular “monster” Haru (Masaki Suda) and suddenly found herself surrounded by people. Haru, as we discover, got into a fight on the first day of school and never actually showed up for classes. Because Shizuku should have been his desk neighbour, the panicked teacher asks her to take the handouts etc to his home in the hope he’ll one day return. Shizuku has no interest in doing as the teacher has tasked her but fulfils her duty, only to unexpectedly encounter Haru who then decides they must be “friends” based on a primary school understanding that friends take each other notes and homework when one of them is sick. 

It turns out that Haru hasn’t been coming to school because it bothers him that everyone finds him scary because of his lack of impulse control. He desperately wants to make friends and thinks he has some in a trio of local boys but Shizuku can see right away that they are essentially bullying him for money and tries to explain that “real” friends don’t sponge off each other. Perhaps because of his innate kindness, Haru is completely guileless and sees the best in everyone unable to understand when he’s being taken advantage of. Despite herself, Shizuku begins to feel protective assuring Haru that he will one day be surrounded by people who understand him unwittingly echoing the words of his late aunt who was the only other person who’d ever rooted for him. Straightforward as ever, Haru immediately confesses his love and so their awkward high school romance begins. 

Shizuku, however, is still largely uninterested in love. She has devoted herself to studying and only cares about coming top in the school exams. As we discover this is less because of academic ambition than practical application. She studies hard and immediately sees results. It’s the sure thing, something which is completely within her own control, unlike other people’s feelings which are necessarily messy and unpredictable. There is however an uncomfortable conservatism in the centring of Shizuku’s trauma solely in the fact that her mother works outside the home and is therefore not present in her life in the way that mothers are expected to be in a patriarchal society while her family set up is regarded as unusual in that her father, having failed several times in business, is a househusband. 

Meanwhile, she remains fairly blinkered to Haru’s parallel familial disconnection in that he has apparently been disowned by his authoritarian father for his free-spirited ways. Taken to a birthday party held for Haru’s older brother Yuzan (Yuki Furukawa), Shizuku begins to realise there is a large class difference between them but reacts badly, confused that he is rejecting the very things she’s striving for in refusing to reconnect with his father, ignoring the fact that he has separated from him because he is essentially abusive. He refuses to let Haru be Haru, trying to straight-jacket him into conventionality by forcing him to clamp down on his noisy impulsivity, something which he seems unable to do even if he wanted to. Shizuku fails to realise the hurt she deals him in refusing to understand his reluctance, unable to see that it amounts to a rejection from the one person he assumed had completely accepted him. 

What she discovers is that you won’t always be forgiven for momentary thoughtlessness and in the end you have to let people be what they are, which throws into light the problematic “monster” of the title which is how Haru is often seen by others, a quality brought to vivid life in Suda’s manic performance. A rival suitor, Yamaken (Yuki Yamada), selling himself as the slow and steady candidate perhaps more suited to Shizuku in being more like herself, describes their relationship as a “make-believe friendship” rather than a real romance, something she has to accept may have a grain of truth in it in her inability to fully understand the person she claims to love, but nevertheless comes to the conclusion that while Yamaken may make her feel at ease in herself it’s the stressful stimulation with the intense yet passionate Haru that she truly craves. That aside, their romance is a fairly cool affair and its resolution too contrived to have any kind of impact which is perhaps why Tsukikawa resorts to anime-style imagery including a flying leap of love accompanied by bright sunshine flooding in from behind. Nevertheless, in true shojo fashion My Little Monster celebrates not only its heroine’s gradual path towards an embrace of the chaos of being alive, but also the power of friendship and acceptance as the gang find a place to belong in each other and with it a more concrete sense of self.

Singapore release trailer (English/Simplified Chinese subtitles)

Kana Nishino – Best Friend

My Long Awaited Love Story (わたしに運命の恋なんてありえないって思ってた, Takafumi Hatano, 2016)

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My Long Awaited Love Story posterChristmas is synonymous with romance in Japan, but should you really rush into love just to get a pretty picture under the bright lights of a shopping mall holiday display? Perhaps not, but rom-coms are not generally the best place to look for realistic dating advice. “Realistic dating advice” is what the lovelorn heroine of My Long Awaited Love Story (わたしに運命の恋なんてありえないって思ってた, Watashi ni Unmei no Koi nante Arienaitte Omotteta) ends up giving when she runs into a socially awkward CEO with a crush on an employee, but in true rom-com fashion finds herself falling for him instead.

27-year-old Riko (Mikako Tabe) has given up on love, at least in the “real” world. Ironically enough, her job is writing romantic storylines for dating sims at which she is apparently very successful which is why she’s been hired as a consultant by a tech firm looking to branch out in the hope of capturing the female market. The problem is that the more she observes “real” guys in the world all around her, the more they disappoint. The handsome “prince” at a coffee shop says all the right things but then claims to have forgotten his wallet. The clingy cutie has another girl on the line, and the domineering Type-A hunk crumbles in front of a strong woman. Riko knows that Hollywood-style meet cutes don’t happen in everyday life, but finds herself repeatedly running into them only for something to burst her bubble unexpectedly.

At the meeting for her new game, the assembled team being almost entirely female which, when you think about it, is a little bit depressing because it means the boss has used it to get all the women off the floor, Riko is taken by the handsome, sensitive Midoritani (Jun Shison) but gets a rude awakening when another guy turns up and immediately makes it clear he hates all her ideas. According to him, women who play dating sims must be ugly or stupid, the sort of people unwilling to see reality, retreating into a frothy fantasy land to escape their unhappy lives. Thoroughly fed up, Riko sets him right, only to realise this man, Kurokawa (Issey Takahashi), is actually the president of the company.

They haven’t exactly hit it off, and Riko is further enraged when she overhears him giving an interview to a women’s magazine in which he claims to be “supporting women”, parroting all the words she threw at him to make himself sound progressive. Gently teasing him about his obvious crush on Momose (Aya Ohmasa), a pretty employee, however brings them a little closer and earns her an apology. Kurokawa takes some of her advice, tries out a tactic from a game she wrote, finds it kind of works, and eventually asks her to teach him the ways of love. Despite feeling under confident in her own love life as an unattached 27-year-old, she agrees.

Gradually we discover that Riko’s taste for romantic fantasy is a clear eyed choice designed to keep her “safe” from heartbreak because it’s not real and the idealised 2D guys from her games are never going to let her down. Annoyingly, Kurokawa was right up to a point, but you can’t deny that the world Riko lives in is in itself disappointing, a fiercely sexist society in which the men are timid children and the women socially conditioned not to make the first move. Kurokawa’s courtship of Momose, it has to be said, borders on harassment considering he’s the boss and she’s much younger than he is. Early on, Riko outs herself as a youthful devote of shojo manga, given unrealistic ideas about romance from idealised stories of innocent love filled with charming, handsome princes and infinite happy endings. Riko wanted to fall in love like that, which is to say, unrealistically without fully engaging with all the difficult bits of being in a relationship.

Needless to say, she begins to fall for Kurokawa who, for all his awkwardness, has a good a heart and the willingness to learn. Thanks to him she gets the courage to humiliate a bunch of high school bullies at a reunion, but still struggles with the idea of opening herself up to “real” love and the possibility of heartbreak. When Kurokawa has a crisis and calls her, she knows where he’ll be but sends Momose instead, either out of a sense of awkwardness or perhaps just afraid to face him in such an emotional state. A professional humbling and the miracle of Christmas conspire to convince them both that you’ll never be happy hiding your feelings and if you want “real” love you’ll have to accept the risk of getting hurt. That’s reality for you, but it can probably wait until after the festive season.

Currently available to stream via Viki.

Teaser trailer (no subtitles)

My Tomorrow, Your Yesterday (ぼくは明日、昨日のきみとデートする, Takahiro Miki, 2016)

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Tomorrow I will date with yeaterday's you posterLike the Earth and the Moon, are lovers destined to move past and away from each other, sharing the same space only for a cosmic instant yet forever connected by the arc of their existences? It’s a heavier question than you’d expect from your average romantic melodrama. My Tomorrow, Your Yesterday (ぼくは明日、昨日のきみとデートする, Boku wa Asu, Kino no Kimi to Date Suru), another finely crafted tragic romance from genre master Takahiro Miki, is a kind of sci-fi “junai” in which the barriers to romantic fulfilment aren’t cultural or societal or medical, but cosmic in that our star-crossed lovers occupy opposing temporal realms which conspire against their union while also carving it into the arc of the spacetime continuum like a cruel existential joke.

At 20, art student Takatoshi (Sota Fukushi) spots the beautiful Emi (Nana Komatsu) on his morning commute. Hit by a thunderbolt, he falls for her instantly but is shy and diffident. Despite himself, Takatoshi decides that if she alights at the same station as him then it’s really meant to be and he can’t not at least try talking to her. Alight she does and he chases after her as best he can only for his cheerful attempt to ask for a phone number to be rebuffed by the ultimate excuse that she doesn’t have one. Surprisingly, Emi’s claim turns out to be the truth rather than an attempt to politely decline his attentions, though Takatoshi is surprised that his attempts at romance eventually provoke a few tears from the visibly moved Emi. The pair eventually start dating and are well into the world of young love when Emi reveals her secret – she is from a parallel universe where time runs in the opposite direction. Takatoshi’s future is her past, and her past his future. Their universes only overlap every five years for a maximum of 30 days and so this is their one and only shot at true love.

Miki begins in true romantic fashion as Takatoshi giddily pursues his first, idealised romance only latterly beginning to see signs of trouble on the horizon in Emi’s sometimes quirky behaviour and strange ability to predict the future. They walk through the usual steps towards becoming a committed couple, finally dropping the honourifics in  mutual recognition of their deepening bond, but every decisive step reduces Emi to tears in a fashion that runs beyond the merely cute or girlish. Takatoshi, young, naive, and in love, finds his mild suspicion vindicated when he discovers Emi’s diary which seems to run in reverse order and mainly contains entries for dates which have not yet happened.

Gradually, Takatoshi begins to realise that he and Emi exist on opposing planes, destined forever to orbit each other with only this brief moment of connection to sustain them. He muses on whether moving past each other is the natural path of a romance before learning to accept the transitory nature of love so that he might appreciate this brief gift he’s been given even in the knowledge that it will soon be over. Briefly petulant, he resents Emi’s dependence on the diary, filled as it is with “facts” from his 25-year-old self gleaned during a “previous” meeting, wondering if she is merely going through the motions of their predetermined romance and spoiling his vision of easy, serendipitous love in the process.

Privileging his own perspective, Takatoshi comes late to the realisation that Emi has been making a series of sacrifices on his behalf and that their strange romance is likely to prove much more painful for her than it will for him. Their relationship is built not on “shared” memories, but only in their brief moments of togetherness as they actively forge a present for themselves which is distinct from their two worlds of past and future. Like the diverging points which heralded their meeting, they are travelling in different directions – every first for him is a last for her as their moments of joy and pain become strange mirrors of their eventual heartbreak. Nevertheless, each eventually comes to the realisation that their love is worth enduring despite its inevitably sad end and that something of it is destined to remain even in the entropic melancholy of their love story. An old fashioned romance in every sense, My Tomorrow, Your Yesterday offers a surprisingly deep appreciation of true love anchored by mutual understanding and emotional equality even if it acknowledges that the world is cruel and that love is unlikely to survive as anything more than a bittersweet memory.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Shoplifters (万引き家族, Hirokazu Koreeda, 2018)

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Shoplifters poster 2Tolstoy once said that all happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The family drama is the mainstay of Japanese cinema, though to be fair it rarely features families which are noticeably “unhappy” so much as struggling under the weight of social expectations. Nevertheless, since consumerism arrived in force, the concept of “the family” has come in for regular interrogation. That at the centre of Shoplifters (万引き家族, Manbiki Kazoku), Hirokazu Koreeda’s return to the genre with which he is most closely associated, are on one level among the happiest of families ever captured on film, but then again they are not quite like all the others.

The Shibatas live in a small Japanese-style house owned by “grandma” Hatsue (Kirin Kiki) whose pension (or, to be more precise, that of her late husband) makes up a significant portion of the family income. Patriarch Osamu (Lily Franky) has a casual job as a day labourer while his wife, Nobuyo (Sakura Ando), works in a laundry. Her “sister” Aki (Mayu Matsuoka) tells people she works as a kind of hostess but actually dresses up as a schoolgirl and performs sex services behind a two-way mirror in a sleazy club. Meanwhile, Osamu and Nobuyo’s “son”, Shota (Jyo Kairi), alternates his time between homeschooling himself and helping out with the family’s only other source of income – thievery. It’s after one partially successful foray to the local supermarket that Osamu and Shota come across a little girl, Yuri (Miyu Sasaki), stuck out on a balcony alone in the freezing cold and decide to take her home for something warm to eat.

Of course, this family itself is the very definition of makeshift. Osamu and Nobuyo may be a “real” couple, but no one else is actually related. The Family Game may have attempted to take the family apart and expose it as an artificial mechanism devoid of real feeling in which each is simply playing the role expected of them, but Shoplifters asks the opposite – if a found family can actually be more “real” that the real thing because it has been chosen, is wanted, and continues to function because of an organic bond between individuals which exists in the absence of blood.

In a sense, the family itself has been “shoplifted”. Later, under questioning, Nobuyo is accused of “throwing away” Hatsue but she corrects them – she didn’t and she wouldn’t. Someone else “threw away” Hatsue and she found her. Hatsue was abandoned by her husband who fathered a family with another woman, but seemingly not with her. Alone she longed for a family of her own and most of all to avoid the looming threat of a “lonely death”. Whatever else they might have gained from the “arrangement”, Osamu and Nobuyo are at least able to offer her the thing that would make her life complete as she prepares to meet its end. By the logic of the family drama, one family must be broken in order to forge another and it’s true enough to say that each member of the Shibata clan has been pilfered from somewhere else but in the end perhaps it’s better this way, free of the cold obligation of a blood or legal tie.

Then again, there are cracks in the foundation. Little Shota, growing fast into a young man, is increasingly conflicted about the way the family makes ends meet. Trapped in low paid, casual employment, Osamu and Nobuyo are working but poor, unable to support their family on their wages alone. Injured at work, Osamu is left without compensation because he’s only a day labourer and therefore not entitled to workplace protections while Nobuyo is eventually forced into a “workshare” arrangement and then to resign when her boss cruelly tells her and a friend that they can decide between themselves which of them gets to keep their job. They steal because they’re hungry, but also perhaps because they enjoy this small way of rebelling against the system. Osamu tells Shota that stealing from stores is OK because no one really “owns” anything while it’s still on the shelf, but Shota begins to doubt his logic. It’s not just “taking”, it’s taking “from” and Shota is increasingly worried about who it is their way of life may be harming. He worries that in taking in Yuri the family is corrupting her, indoctrinating her into their morally dubious universe.

Morally dubious it may be, but life with the Shibatas is warm and safe which is a lot more than can be said for Yuri’s life with her birth parents who don’t even bother to report her missing – social services eventually figure out she isn’t around two months later and come to the conclusion that the parents may have got rid of her in some unspecified way. Which sort of “corruption” is worse – an upbringing filled with abuse and neglect, or one filled with love and habitual criminality? Yet it’s an act of love that finally breaks the family apart and leaves them at the mercy of cold and official forces too obsessed with their own sense of narrative to bother listening to the “truth”. Shoplifters wants to ask if the “natural” laws of society still serve us when little girls fall through the cracks and our definition of “family” is so narrow and rigid that it denies us a way of saving them. Sometimes the found family is stronger than the inherited one, but society is primed to crush it all the same in its relentless and indifferent quest to preserve the social order.

Shoplifters opens in UK cinemas on 23rd November courtesy of Thunderbird Releasing.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Wilderness (あゝ、荒野, Yoshiyuki Kishi, 2017)

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wilderness posterWhen Shuji Terayama published his only novel in 1966, Japan was riding high – the 1964 Olympics had put the nation back on the global map and post-war desperation was beginning shift towards economic prosperity. In adapting Terayama’s jazz-inspired avant-garde prose experiment for the screen, Yoshiyuki Kishi updates the action to 2021 and a slightly futuristic Tokyo once again feeling a mild sense of post-Olympic malaise. Terayama, like the twin heroes of Wilderness (あゝ、荒野, Ah, Koya), got his “education” on the streets of Shinjuku, claiming that more could be learned from boxing and horse races than any course of study. Both damaged young men, these lonely souls begin to find a place for themselves within the ring but discover only emptiness in place of the freedom they so desperately long for.

Shinji (Masaki Suda), abandoned to an orphanage by his mother after his father committed suicide, has just been released from juvie after being involved in a street fight which left one of his best friends paralysed. Discovering that his old gang won’t take him back he’s at a loss for what to do. Meanwhile, shy barber Kenji (Yang Ik-june) who stammers so badly that he barely speaks at all, is battling the possessive stranglehold his drunken, violent ex-military father weilds over him. Raised in Korea until his mother died and his father brought him back to Japan, Kenji has always struggled to feel a part of the world he inhabits. The two meet by chance when Shinji decides to confront the man who attacked his gang, Yuji (Yuki Yamada) – now an up and coming prize fighter. Shinji is badly injured by the professional boxer while Kenji comes to his rescue, bringing them to the attention of rival boxing manager Horiguchi (Yusuke Santamaria) who manages to recruit them both for his fledgling studio.

The Tokyo of 2021 is, perhaps like its 1966 counterpart, one of intense confusion and anxiety. Plagued by mysterious terrorist attacks, the nation is also facing an extension of very real social problems exacerbated by a tail off from the temporary Olympic economic bump. As the economy continues to decline with unemployment on the rise, crime and suicides increase while social attitudes harden. In an ageing society, love hotels are being turned into care homes and wedding halls into funeral parlours. The elder care industry is in crisis, necessitating a controversial law which promises certain benefits to those who commit to dedicating themselves either to the caring professions or to the self defence forces.

Yet nothing much of this matters to a man like Shinji who ignores the crowds fleeing in terror from the latest attack in favour of “free” ramen left behind by the man who recently vacated the seat next to him out of a prudent desire to make a speedy escape. Shinji takes up boxing as way of getting public revenge on Yuji but also finds that suits him, not just as an outlet for his youthful frustrations but in the discipline and rigour of the training hall as well as the camaraderie among the small team at the gym. Kenji, by contrast, is kind hearted and so shy he can barely look his opponent in the eye. He comes to boxing as a way of finally learning to stand up for himself against his bullying father, but eventually discovers that it might be a way for him achieve what he has always dreamed of – connection.

Asked why he thinks it is we’re born at all if all we do if suffer and long for death, Kenji replies that must be “to connect” though he has no answer when asked if he ever has. For Kenji boxing is a spiritual as well as physical “contact sport” through which he hopes to finally build the kind of bridges to others that Shinji perhaps builds in a more usual way. Shinji tells himself that the only way to win is to hate, that in boxing the man who hates the hardest becomes the champion but all Kenji wants from the violence of the ring is love and acceptance. Shinji’s friend, Ryuki (Katsuya Kobayashi), has forgiven the man who crippled him and moved on with his life while Shinji is consumed by rage, warped beyond recognition in his need to prove himself superior to the forces which have already defeated him – his father’s suicide, his mother’s abandonment, and his friend’s betrayal.

While Shinji blusters, shows off, and throws it all away, Kenji patiently hones his craft hoping to meet him again in the boxing ring and “connect” in the way they never could before. There’s something essentially sad in Kenji’s deep sense of loneliness, the sketches in his notebook and strange relationship with an equally sad-eyed gangster/promoter (Satoru Kawaguchi) suggesting a hankering for something more than brotherhood. Nevertheless what each of the men responds to is the positive familial environment they have never previously known, anchored by the paternalism of coach Horiguchi and cemented by unconditional brotherly love.

Caught at cross purposes, the two young men battle each other looking for the same thing – a sense of freedom and of being connected to the world, but emerge with little more than scars and broken hearts, finding release only in a final transcendent moment of poetic tragedy. Kishi’s vision of the immediate future is bleak in the extreme, a nihilistic society in which hope has become a poison and death its only antidote. A tragedy of those who want to live but don’t know how, Wilderness is a minor miracle which proves infinitely affecting even in the depths of its despair.

Screened at Nippon Connection 2018.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Interview with director Yoshiyuki Kishi conducted at the Busan International Film Festival (Japanese with English subtitles)