At several points during Shinpei Yamasaki’s indie drama During the Rains (つゆのあとさき, Tsuyu no Atosaki) we encounter someone whose life has been disrupted by the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic. The danger is, of course, that the pandemic itself becomes the problem which is also a way of glossing over all the problems that existed before and will likely survive whatever kind of sickness they encounter. Chief among those problems and impacting the lives of the women at the film’s centre is problematic men and the generalised disregard for women.
It seems that Kotone was working in hostess bar that closed because of the pandemic while her no good boyfriend ran off with a necklace a customer had given her. Left with nowhere to go she’s noticed on the street by Kaede, a young woman who promises her a room in a love hotel but does so in order to recruit her for a threesome. Sometime later Kotone is working in a “cafe” where young women sit behind a glass window in numbered booths for male customers pick out and select though she also has a “daddy”, Kiyooka, who pays the lease on her flat and would be annoyed to discover she was still frequenting the cafe.
It’s the at the cafe that she meets Sakura, a naive young college student who was pushed into sex work when the place she was working before closed down because of the pandemic. Kotone at one point snaps back at her that she wouldn’t even be at the cafe if it weren’t for the pandemic as if suggesting she were in some way better than the other girls after she reacted with horror to Konone’s plan to find a “hardcore daddy” who’ll pay more for the right to break a few bones and cause other kinds of harm.
This might be ironic in a sense as Sakura is a Christian who carries around bible verses to calm herself down including the ones about turning the other cheek and blessing those who persecute you which don’t seem to be particularly good advice for the situations she finds herself in especially as the lesson she’s learned from them is that you should accept whatever abuse comes your way without complaining. Ironically that might be what Kotone has been doing in her almost total indifference to her circumstances. The Roomba in her apartment gets stuck in her hallway and shuffles in confusion between the walls after constantly butting its head unable to find a way out. Yet according to Kiyooka what separates Kotone and Sakura is that Sakura seems desperate in a way Kotone does not which is a quality he appreciates presumably because it gives him more control over her, something he knows he doesn’t have over Kotone who point black tells him she has no strong feelings about whether he dumps her or not after he discovers she’s still seeing other men and engaging in casual sex work.
The lollipops she’s always sucking on give Kotone a slightly childish edge as perhaps does her moodiness but she’s also cynical beyond her years and seemingly living the way she does almost as an act of self harm. She’s being relentlessly trolled by someone who accuses her of having a sexually transmitted disease while even the other girls at the cafe resent her, ironically calling her a slut and other misogyinistic insults. Later she’s even knocked down some stairs by a previous client who is resentful that she doesn’t really remember him while another of her regulars, Yata, paws at her insultingly as if feeling himself entitled to her body. Another customer whose wife and daughter left him after his business failed asks her why she does this, adding that he’s worried about his daughter which seems to be an incredibly ironic comment given the situation.
Even the girls at the cafe complain that they’re getting les work because of the influx of women showing up there after being pushed towards sex work out of desperation, but it’s almost as if the film would like to believe the pandemic was the problem rather than attitudes society has towards these women and indeed all women. Nevertheless, through her growing friendship with Sakura and an unexpected tragedy Kotone comes to realise that she can perhaps change her circumstances and does not necessarily have to continue turning the other cheek to a society that had largely turned its back on her.
Windows on Worlds 