Tag: Yuya Matsuura

The World of You (麻希のいる世界, Akihiko Shiota, 2021)

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A girl with a chronic illness becomes fixated on a traumatised classmate in Akihiko Shiota’s meditation on the self-destructive effects of obsessive love, The World of You (麻希のいる世界, Maki no iru Sekai) . It is not, however, the heroine that primarily experiences them, as her own romantic obsession is in one sense a purer love, but in another is a way of making her mark on the world before her short life comes to an end. 

Yuki (Yuzumi Shintani) spots Maki (Marin Hidaka) leaving a local shack and locking the door behind her preceded by a shady-looking young man. She later recounts that she once stayed in this same shack for three days after running away from home following her parents’ divorce which she thinks her illness may partly have been responsible for her. The shack represents different things for each of them, but is also a space of their otherness and isolation from which neither of the girls is able to escape. It’s clear that Yuki’s growing obsession with Maki who is ostracised at school and resented by all is romantic, yet Maki appears to reject her attentions and reminds her she’s the type of girl who sleeps with guys.

Yuki sighs and she says knows as if she’s already resigned herself to the impossibility of her romantic desires being fulfilled, but Yuki continues to behave flirtatiously and otherwise uses the desire she knows Yuki feels for her as a means to manipulate her. Even so, on some level, she too has genuine feelings for Yuki and repeatedly tries to push her away in fear that she will only cause her trouble and pain. She tells her that her father is a convicted paedophile, which is why she is shunned by the local community. Though people are sympathetic at first, they often come to reject and resent her which is why she alternately responds to and then refuses Yuki’s insistence on connection. Though she never says so, her behaviour hints her father may have abused her too or at least that was she sexualised at an early age now and has a self-destructive attitude to sex in which she engages in potentially dangerous relationships with older men and uses her desirability to manipulate her male classmates.

Among them is Yusuke (Airu Kubozuka), who has a one-sided crush on Yuki that she continually rejects but he seemingly cannot take no for an answer. The situation between them is further complicated in that Yusuke’s father is also Yuki’s doctor. After her parents’ divorce, Yusuke’s father entered an affair with Yuki’s mother and eventually left his wife for her, breaking up their family. It’s already a messy situation, though Yusuke’s obsessive love is seemingly more possessive, whereas Yuki’s has taken on a passive quality. She does not really expect that Maki will ever return her feelings and seems to be aware that she uses them to manipulate her, but makes it her remaining life’s purpose to ensure that Maki’s musical talent is appreciated by the wider world. 

In some senses it’s a classic tale of an incredibly toxic love triangle in which Maki plays off both Yusuke and Yuki though may not actually care for either them as all romantic desires are effectively processed through her. Each of the teens is unfairly made to pay for the sins of their parents and effectively left without proper guidance or more positive examples of healthy romantic relationships. Though they all lose something, Yuki’s loss of her voice is especially ironic given that she’d barely talked to begin with but had bared her soul to Yuki who is then in fact reborn, possibly as the “even more wonderful Maki” that Yuki hoped she be though she no longer remembers her. Nevertheless is there is something that seems more hopeful in Yuki’s insistence that they will meet again when pitted against Yusuke’s repeated claims that he knows Yuki will come to love him eventually, especially considering the destructive actions they ultimately lead him to. Yuki’s love, meanwhile, is only self-destructive or in its way life giving in allowing her to sacrifice herself for the world that has Maki in it but that she may never see.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Escape (逃走, Masao Adachi, 2025)

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Satoshi Kirishima’s incongruously smiling face was a familiar presence across on the nation for over 40 years until he finally made a deathbed confession revealing his true identity as a man wanted in connection with a series of bombings in the 1970s and that he’d successfully evaded the authorities until the very end of his life. What apparently appealed to director Masao Adachi, a former Japanese Red Army member, was the question of why he chose to come clean rather than enjoy his secret victory by taking the truth to his grave.

That might be a minor irony at the centre of the Escape (逃走, Toso) in that Satoshi (Kanji Furutachi) is essentially in flight from himself only to finally escape from his torment by accepting his original identity. As a young man, Satoshi had been a member of a left-wing cell that wanted to awaken the population at large to the ways Japanese society had not changed in continuing to discriminate against the Ainu, those from the Ryukyu Islands, Koreans and other minorities while modern corporations enact another kind of capitalistic imperialism built on exploitation. It was for this reason that they embarked on a bombing campaign targeting large companies, but due to a miscalculation with the explosives, the bombing of the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Building in 1974 proved more destructive than intended resulting in loss of life. 

Satoshi was not directly involved in that bombing which was carried out by another cell but was wanted for allegedly setting up a bomb in the Economic Research Institute of Korea which did not result in any casualties. Details of the real Satoshi’s life during his 40 years on the run are thin on the ground, but Adachi paints him as a man torn apart by internalised conflict and unable to make peace with the sense of guilt he feels for those who killed even if he was not directly responsible. The film’s Japanese title is a kind pun in that it’s a homonym which can mean both “escape” and “struggle” which for Satoshi become one and the same. He’s in flight from his younger self while simultaneously preoccupied with how he can continue the revolution in the name of his friends who were not so lucky. Adachi structures the later part of the film as a kind of self-criticism session as Satoshi engages in various dialogues with himself notably as a Buddhist priest interrogating him about his worldly attachments. 

These worldly attachments also obviously separate him from his true calling to revolution including a non-relationship with a woman he meets at a concert venue and is later told has two previous convictions for marriage fraud. Most of the people around him are also leading double lives or harbouring secrets of their own including a man that Satoshi once worked with whom he finds out years later was also another former member of the far left movement living life on the run. The implication is that this sense of isolation and aloneness in wilfully having to suppress his identity became a kind of prison, but that it also liberates Satoshi to a more intensive examination of the self. 

To that extent, his escape is also from contemporary Japan and an act of resistance towards an increasingly capitalistic and indifferent society. Hoping to stay below the radar, Satoshi works a series of casual construction jobs chiefly because of their anonymity. There was plenty to be built in this era and jobs like these were plentiful, usually offering basic accommodation in a company dorm. He experiences the hardships of the working man first-hand and lives a life of asceticism in which live music and drinking are his only outlets. “We’re all dying to survive,” he reflects, “trying to go home,” though he no longer has a home to go to and has become estranged from his previous identity. He meditates on fallen comrades who either took their own lives or spent them in prison while convincing himself that he’s continuing the struggle on their behalf even in the act of running away in perfecting his “escape”. Though Adachi’s approach is less sentimental than Banmei Takahashi’s in I am Kirishima, he is not immune to sentiment as in his depiction of Satoshi’s final escape from life as the ultimate form of liberation even as his ghost proclaims he will continue to fight, but nevertheless introduces a meta commentary of self-examination in Satoshi’s constant questioning if his long years of struggle have really been worth it.

Escape screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

The Beast Hand (獣手, Taichiro Natsume, 2024)

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This world makes monsters of us all in Taichiro Natsume’s low-budget indie body horror Beast Hand (獣手, Kemonote). In many ways, Osamu (Takahiro Fukuya) is pursued by his own left arm in his continual powerlessness and tendency towards self-destructive acts of crime and violence. But it’s also true that it isn’t just his hand that makes him monstrous to the world around him and that his “deformity” is also symbolic of the ways in which he is excluded from mainstream society.

Indeed, Osamu already lives a marginal existence in a cramped, reclaimed space on the edges of a town. Having served time in prison, he gets by doing casual labour and quite literally kicking the can down the road, while we also seem him shoplift a can beer after paying for his dinner. His life appears to be defined by futility even before Inui (Yota Kawase), a man with whom he seems to have shared a criminal past, arrives on his doorstep and barges his way back into his life. Technically on parole but having absconded from his probation office, Inui forces Osamu to give up the contact details for his old girlfriend, Koyuki (Misa Wada), who stopped visiting him in prison and was apparently so desperate to get away from him that she had “full body surgery” to essentially become someone else and start a new life.

Starting a new life is it seems something that they both want to do but are each unable to shake off the hold that Inui has over them. He, however, is in the same position and though he bullies and assaults them both, bows down before a man he met in prison who gave him extra food from the canteen. The old prison friend wants help on a job robbing the woman who still hands out physical pay-packets to workers at a local factory, but Inui turns him down stating that he’s still on parole and it’s too risky though secretly plotting to have Osamu do the job on his own. Predictably, it all goes wrong and Osamu ends up losing an arm only for Koyuki to drag him to a backstreet doctor who first refuses to help but then apparently experiments on him with a drug he’s researching into regenerative health with the consequence that Osamu’s arm grows back but as a monstrous lump of throbbing grey muscle that he is no longer able to fully control. At moments of high emotion, the arm takes him over and he’s transformed into a mindless, thrashing beast to the extent that Koyuki has to chain him to the wall to ensure her own safety.

Having bonded in their shared sense of subjugation, they once again attempt to change by living a more normal life in a small town by the sea. But even here, Osamu is rejected in part because of the arm itself, which he keeps disguised in bandages and a sling as if it were broken, and otherwise because of his secrecy about it which sees him fired by the kindly older gentleman running a factory where Osamu found temporary employment. Koyuki becomes pregnant, but financial pressures and the lingering anxiety about what kind of child this world might produce eats away at them. Osamu isn’t sure if the baby’s his or Inui’s nor which of those two options is better given that the child might inherit whatever’s infected his arm, while Koyuki is no longer certain about the viability of raising a child in their present circumstances. Both from single-parent families, they lamented that neither of them had the experience of being taken to the beach by their parents which seems to be the idyllic picture of a carefree childhood they’re trying to recapture.

But still they find themselves hounded and pursued, this time by a shady businessman who doesn’t want cure Osamu but to exploit him by ripping off his arm and using the technology for his own nefarious ends. The remorseful doctor also wants a tissue sample, but promises a salve in return that would at least subdue his violent impulses and allow him to live a more normal life. The implication is, however, that the only way Osamu can have the semblance of a happy family is by wilfully sacrificing himself and accepting that he has no place within in it. Condemned by his monstrousness to the edges of the frame, he accepts his liminality rather than railing against it and resigns himself to self-isolation as a permanent exile from a continually unforgiving society.

The Beast Hand is released in the US on DVD and blu-ray May 13 courtesy of Cleopatra Entertainment and available from MVD.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Lonely Glory (わたしの見ている世界が全て, Keitaro Sakon, 2023)

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A thoroughly unpleasant young woman gradually begins to realise that other people have feelings too and she has no idea what she’s doing with her life in Keitaro Sakon’s indie drama Lonely Glory (わたしの見ている世界が全て, Watashi no Mite Iru Sekai ga Subete). Haruka currently runs a startup geared towards helping people maintain good mental health which is ironic in the extreme because she has no understanding of or regard for the feelings of others. Yet as she says during a role play with an employee, the basic principle of their business is helping people identify their problems which she ironically does on returning home to her estranged family if not entirely for altruistic reasons. 

Before that, however, we see her be unnecessarily harsh during a staff evaluation later justifying herself to the boss that they needed to clear out those who are of no use. To her, the staff member’s feelings were irrelevant, she just informed them of their subpar performance. Her boss isn’t buying it. He tells her that her management techniques are counterproductive and that with multiple accusations of bullying behaviour she herself says she is unwilling to work on (because she doesn’t understand she’s done anything wrong) he has no option other than to ask for her resignation. Unfazed, Haruka decides to start her own startup, but is soon confronted with another crisis on learning that her mother has passed away. 

On arrival at the hospital and despite being the youngest sibling Haruka immediately takes over, seemingly unmoved, and opts for the cheapest funeral plan available. She didn’t come to her father’s funeral and her siblings didn’t expect to see her for this one either, but now she has an ulterior motive in that she wants to sell the family home and business to finance her new business venture despite the fact all three siblings still live there and two of them are financially dependent on the cafe/greengrocers for their living. Haruka is incredibly judgemental about her small-town siblings’ life choices branding them as delusional and generally carrying on with an air of superiority but it’s also true enough that they are all to a degree trapped, unable to move on with their lives while afraid to leave the safety of their childhood home. 

As she says, sometimes people just need a little push which is something that she can give them but it’s never quite clear if she genuinely cares or is motivated solely by the desire to manipulate her siblings into agreeing to sell the house. Divorced sister Miwako is fairly unfussed either way but oldest son Keisuke is consumed with shame in the idea of giving up the family business while Takuji has self-esteem issues and thinks everyone looks down on him for never managing to get a job since he finished university four years previously. Challenged by Keisuke’s much younger farm girl girlfriend Asuka on the nature of success, Haruka replies that it’s having everyone around you admit you were right which lays bare her own insecurity and need to dominate every situation that she’s in. But then ironically enough she does help each of her siblings identify their problems and then gain the courage to begin moving forward. 

The dissolution of the family business and the erasure of the family home becomes in its way liberating, less the glue that bound them together than that trapped them in a perpetual adolescence. Haruka begins to realise she’s not much better than the life coach scammer who sold her vulnerable brother false promises of easy success, and that the way she treats others can have unintended consequences but in the end she’s the one left rootless and bereft of direction after closing the shop. Perhaps that’s her lonely glory, the knowledge that she helped each of her siblings do what she now can’t (or maybe just that she got what she wanted and doesn’t know what to do with it). Told with a down to earth naturalism, Sakon’s indie drama is also a lament for the changing nature of small-town life and a loss of community as the closure of the store robs the locals of another neighbourhood hub ironically leaving Haruka all alone in the now empty space of her family home with a newfound sense of loneliness still searching for the right words and a new direction. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

September 1923 (福田村事件, Tatsuya Mori, 2023)

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After the devastating Great Kanto Earthquake struck in 1923, it led to a period of hysteria in which in the natural disaster somehow became equated with the Korean Independence Movement, foreigners, and socialists and who were after all thorns in the side of rising nationalism. Documentarian Tatsuya Mori makes his narrative film debut with September, 1923 (福田村事件, Fukudamura Jiken) released to mark the 100th anniversary of the incident and focussing on a little known episode in which villagers turned on a small group of itinerant medicine pedlars they were convinced were not Japanese. 

In this case, at least, they were Burakumin. An oppressed underclass of their own, they too are divided in their views about Koreans some finding solidarity with them as another minority who is bullied and discriminated against while others are quick assert themselves as at least being above them on the pecking order cheerfully using slur words as they go. Shinsuke (Eita Nagayama), the leader of the troupe, laments that they have to live this way, tricking those worse off than themselves into buying their snake oil cures while explaining that though people will often help each other out when times are good, if survival’s on the line they’ll turn against each other. 

Perhaps that’s difficult to imagine in a small village of genial farmers, but militarism has already corrupted its gentle rhythms. Men from the village are fond of telling war stories from their time as conscripts in China or Russia, though one has a particular bee in his bonnet about wives being left lonely with husbands away overseas and is convinced that his father has slept with his wife. Another local woman was indeed having an affair shortly before her husband was killed in action and is then ostracised by the village for her transgressive behaviour becoming yet another oppressed minority. The village chief is keen on democracy and progressive in his way yet soon finds himself powerless against the local militia mostly comprised of old men with a lust for blood and glory. It’s this militarist hysteria that eventually proves tragedy as they find themselves desperate to identify “spies” and protect the village only to murder children and a pregnant woman who were just passing through. 

The absurdity extends to asking those suspected of being Non-Japanese to repeat a particular phrase difficult for Koreans in particular to pronounce, only those from other areas of Japan also pronounce it in a way that might seem “foreign” in Tokyo. Cornered by the militia, Shinsuke asks if it would be alright to kill him even if he were Korean, taking issue with the militia’s absurdist and racist rationale that decides someone must die because of the way they pronounced a certain word or seemed uncomfortable shouting “banzai” at the point of a sword. But one of the villagers unwittingly uncovers a since of guilt felt even by a man in a village miles away from anything that the Koreans have been bullied for years, this the understandable result of their rage boiling over and a moment of retribution. 

The film seems to suggest that the buck doesn’t really stop, except perhaps with the bystander who merely watches this horrifying violence and does nothing. Tomokazu (Arata Iura) has recently returned to the village after many years living in Korea bringing back with him a Korean wife but his marriage is falling apart due to his own guilt and trauma having been complicit in a Japanese atrocity. Watching the massacre unfold, his wife, Shizuko (Rena Tanaka), asks him if he’s just going to watch this time again but his attempt to intervene makes no difference. An idealistic news reporter meanwhile takes her boss to task for publishing propaganda headlines associating Koreans with crime and terrorism rather than real truth of what’s happening on the ground, asking him what the point of the press is if it won’t speak truth to power. But militarists do not listen to reason, and as the headman points out they will have to keep living with those who’ve committed these heinous acts. Sometimes a little on the nose with its symbolism such as a literal murder of hope in the killing of an unborn child, Mori’s otherwise poignant drama lacks the impact it strives for but nevertheless addresses a shocking moment of mass hysteria that is not quite as historical as we’d like to think.

September 1923 screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Penalty Loop (ペナルティループ, Shinji Araki, 2024)

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Time loop cinema has made a resurgence in Japan of late, but Shinji Araki’s Penalty Loop (ペナルティループ) is not quite what you’d assume it to be rather a meditation on the grieving process in a constant process of recycling rage and hurt day after day. When his girlfriend is murdered and her body is found dumped in a local lake, Jun becomes obsessed with the idea of revenge and turns up at the killer’s place of work where he poisons his morning coffee and then stabs him to death in his car before poetically dumping his corpse in the same lake where disposed of Yui’s (Rio Yamashita) body.

The weird thing is, that Jun (Ryuya Wakaba) wakes up the next day to discover it’s still 6th June and he has to do the same thing all over again. Rather than switching up his methods, he simply repeats the process but it turns out the Killer (Yusuke Iseya) is also aware they’re trapped in a loop and starts trying to avoid being killed. Before too long, the men have begun to trauma bond over their shared despair of being trapped in this constant cycle of retribution and become almost friends in an absurdist, existential meditation on the fallacies of justice and revenge. The killer and his indirect victim are locked in this cycle together and, the film seems to suggest, can only escape it through a process of healing and forgiveness rather than Jun’s futile attempts at revenge by killing the killer over and over again.

It is though somewhat perplexing that Jun never asks the Killer why he killed Yui and shows no real curiosity in his motives only asking him if he killed a lot of people. Yui also seems to have been mixed up in a concurrent conspiracy which the film does not go into or was in fact locked into her only cycle of despair and futily as the Killer suggests in volunteering that Yui wanted to die anyway, telling him that she had nothing to live for and was filled with emptiness. Of course, perhaps it’s simply the case that a kind of justice has already taken place in the “real” world and that Jun already knows why Yui was killed but simply wants a more personal kind of revenge to satisfy his hurt and anger, or that the Killer would not really be able to tell him much anyway because we can’t be sure he’s “real” or just a character existing for the purpose of Jun’s revenge no different from a dummy punch bag.

A strange, grinning man (Jin Daeyeon) is often seen observing the two men and later becomes irate on hearing Jun state that he no longer plans to kill the Killer but seems to have befriended him instead. His presence hints at a wider authoritarian presence that feeds off Jun’s negative emotions and forces him to continue vengeance long after he has tired of it. At this point, his killings become less violent. Rather than the poison and a knife, the bloody struggle in the car and the clinical process of bagging the body to be dumped in a lake, Jun uses a gun and the Killer patiently allows himself to be killed so that the cycle can continue. Further revelations suggest that the loop is less cosmic than commercial and Jun is constrained by a contract he signed for something that is supposed to be a kind of therapy the ethics of which would be very debatable, as would the offer of a secondary “rehab” programme on his completion of the process though how he, a man with no apparent income who lives in a room that already resembles a prison where he builds model houses that express the life he might have liked to give Yui, would be able to afford all this.

In any case, it’s true enough that Jun is imprisoned by his grief and powerlessness and his desire for vengeance is an attempt to free himself though in the end he can only do it by abandoning his rage and violence and finding empathy for the killer with whom he is trapped in this hellish cycle of grief and retribution. Araki lends his quest a dystopian air, taking place largely in some kind of hydroponic facility which otherwise exists only for the purposes of Jun’s revenge. Strangely quirky in its absurdist humour and bleak in some of its implications the film otherwise suggests that forgiveness is the only path out of grief for the cycle of vengeance will never really end.

Penalty Loop screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

Life of Mariko in Kabukicho (探偵マリコの生涯で一番悲惨な日, Eiji Uchida & Shinzo Katayama, 2022)

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It’s all go in Kabukicho in Eiji Uchida and Shinzo Katayama’s zany tale of aliens, serial killers, and secret assassins. The film’s Japanese title (探偵マリコの生涯で一番悲惨な日, Tantei Mariko no Shogai de ichiban Hisanna Hi), the most tragic day in the life of detective Mariko, may hint at the melancholy at the centre of the story in putting the titular investigator front and centre even while her success is fuelled by her position on the periphery but this is also very much the story of an area and community in a shrinking part of the city. 

It’s true enough that Mariko’s (Sairi Ito) karaoke bar seems to have become a local community hub filled with a series of regulars each of whom have stories of their own. Born and raised in Kabukicho, Mariko knows every inch of the area and thanks to the confessional quality of her work has her finger truly on the pulse which is what makes her such a good detective. Her case this time around is though a little more difficult as she’s been hired by the FBI to track down an escaped space alien because all aliens apparently belong to the US. This one’s been liberated by a mad scientist, Amamoto (Shohei Uno), who they say wants to team up with the alien for ill intent.

In what seems to be a nod to cult 1983 horror movie Basket Case, Amamoto carries the alien around in a picnic basket from which it occasionally irradiates people when frightened. Meanwhile, a serial killer is also stalking the area. One of Mariko’s regulars, Ayaka (Shiori Kubo), is keen to catch him though not for justice but the reward because she’s become obsessed with a bar host who’s been spending a lot of time with another customer because she can pay more. Mariko turns her offer down on the grounds that she doesn’t want to enable her romantic folly and otherwise seems rather uninterested in the serial killer case perhaps because no one’s hired her to solve it, but she also refuses a job from another regular who wants to track down his estranged daughter after being forced on a suicide mission by his former yakuza associates possibly because she suspects he won’t like the answer when she finds her. 

Home to the red light district, Kabukicho has a rather seedy reputation but here has a kind of homeliness in which the veneer of sleaze is of course perfectly normal and unremarkable. A yakuza intimidates a love hotel worker while standing directly in front of a rotating electric dildo in an S&M-themed room later visited by one of Mariko’s regulars with her nerdy film director crush who is so sensitive he can barely walk after exiting the cinema so moved is he by the cinematic expression. Most of the regulars are in their own way lovelorn and lonely, perhaps no less Mariko herself who has an attachment to a middle-aged ex-chef (Yutaka Takenouchi) who now runs a moribund dojo teaching ninja skills to anyone willing to learn. Despite the warmth of the community, life in Kabukicho can be hard as the host later echoes looking around his tiny apartment and sighing that he’s tired. It took so much out of him just to get this little and he barely has it in him anymore. 

Mariko too has her sorrow and buried trauma, hiding out in her bar but secretly imprisoned within the borders of Kabukicho as a kind of self-imposed punishment linked to her tragic past. The intersecting stories paint a vivid picture of an absurd world in which the innocuous civil servant next to you might be a secret assassin or you could turn a corner and run into a serial killer, not to mention a mad scientist with an alien in a basket. But for all its craziness it has a kind of integrity in which the strange is also perfectly normal and Mariko becomes a kind of anchor restoring order to an unruly world. As she’s fond of saying thing’s will work out and it’s difficult not to believe her or the defiantly upbeat spirit even among those depressed and downtrodden otherwise unable to escape the confines of a purgatorial Kabukicho.

Life of Mariko in Kabukicho screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Mad Cats (Reiki Tsuno, 2023) [Fantasia 2023]

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The captive felines of Japan are mad as hell and they aren’t going to take it anymore in Reiki Tsuno’s absurd action comedy, Mad Cats. Sick of mistreatment and exploitation at the hands of humans who breed them for sale, these cats have transformed into a cult-like band of vigilantes thanks to a forbidden ancient Egyptian catnip that grants superpowers unearthed by a cat-loving Egyptologist who has been missing for the previous two years.

Mune (So Yamanaka) had been the responsible brother and in his extended absence, Taka (Sho Mineo) has become an irresponsible layabout behind on his rent and surrounded by old food cartons. A cassette tape delivered in a letter addressed only with his first name alerts him to the fact his brother is being held captive in a place where they once found a black cat and needs rescuing while he should also make sure to pick up a small wooden box on his way. Taka jumps straight on his bike, but unfortunately is not the sharpest knife in the drawer and finds himself ill-equipped to face off against the Mad Cats who are only more annoyed when he makes off with the their secret stash of forbidden Egyptian catnip.

Despite becoming anthropomorphised the cat women (they are all female cats) still behave in noticeably feline ways with their strange grins and vacant eyes not mention to weird head tilts and cat-like gestures such as pawing the air or slapping an opponent when otherwise not armed with axes or nunchucks. Later Taka is joined by another mysterious woman, Ayane, who apparently once belonged to the same cat lady cult but is somehow immune to the catnip aside from having become human and is determined to stop the others from going too far on their quest for revenge against human cruelty. 

Perhaps you can’t really blame them for that, though their vengeance does take on a rather ironic quality as they keep Mune tied up in a cage and force him to eat like a cat hunched over on his knees with his hands bound. Meanwhile, Taka teams up with a homeless man who is also enjoys cat food and is forever complaining that he’s not supposed to be here he just got swept up in some bizarre events while minding his own business. Takezo (Yuya Matsuura) also seems to be somewhat displaced, estranged from his wife and family and like Taka is looking for a way to go home even if he didn’t have running away from mad cats on his bingo card. 

The pair of them go through a training bootcamp thanks to Ayane but otherwise continue to flounder, forgetting everything they’ve learnt and cowering cartoonishly when faced with a marauding cat hoping Ayane will arrive to save them after all. Then again, they aren’t particularly bothered about trying to save the corrupt pet shop owners who callously breed cats for sale in poor conditions to possibly unsuitable people, perhaps sympathising with their concerns as genuine cat lovers reevaluating their thinking around pet “ownership”. 

Rounding out the absurdity, Tsuno adds in a series of action set pieces featuring cat-like choreography as Ayane squares off against the rest of the Mad Cats who are otherwise dressed in eerie white gowns like the members of a bizarre cult living an isolated existence in the mountains. From the cassette tape to the roller diner where Taka and Takezo are first attacked, the film has a quirky, retro sensibility that is perfectly in tune with its absurdity even as the guys drive around a borrowed car that has a registration plate reading “killer blow” while tracked by the seemingly unstoppable Mad Cats who, as we later realise, really do have nine lives. There is something quite touching underneath the strange allusions to Egyptian cat gods, superpowered catnip, and vengeful felines in the strength of the relationships not just between the brothers but between cats and their guardians despite the vengeful mission of the Mad Cats who reject their captivity by ridding themselves of irresponsible cat traffickers. Deadpan and surreal, the film has an infectious sense of fun in its boundless inventiveness and quirky composition while also carrying a more serious message about animal cruelty and responsible pet guardianship in a world in which even the lives of living creatures have been commodified.

Mad Cats screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Teaser trailer (dialogue free)

TOCKA (タスカー, Yoshitaka Kamada, 2023)

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The man at the centre of Yoshitaka Kamada’s bleak social drama Tocka (タスカー) claims that he no longer knows why he’s alive, but as the woman he’s just asked to kill him replies no one else really knows either but even so they continue to live. Set in the northernmost reaches of Hokkaido where you can pick up Russian-language radio and it’s not unusual to spot signage in Cyrillic, the film’s title is taken from a Russian word that describes a quality of spiritual agony that manifests as listless ennui while its sensibility seems to be very much in tune with that of 19th century Russian literature. 

This indeed a cold a barren place almost devoid of signs of life. The heroine, Saki (Nahana), has returned in flight from the implosion of her life in Tokyo but has not told her parents who presumably live not too far away that she’s lost her job or broken up with her fiancé. Instead, she’s living a difficult and dissatisfying life with a part-time job in a local supermarket while contending with massive debts. Unable to see a way forward, she begins to consider taking her own life which is how she ends up meeting Shoji (Kiyobumi Kaneko), a man who wants to die but is unable to kill himself so is looking for someone to help him. 

Perhaps it says something of Saki’s own desperation that she considers his proposal or at least does not necessarily see anything odd about it aside from Shoji’s general vagueness about the reasons he wants to die. Like her, he is living a dissatisfying life but mostly precipitated by the loss of his family and his subsequent descent into alcohol dependency. He used to run a junk shop selling second hand appliances, but his business has also gone bust leaving him with nothing. His only goal is to make sure his daughter receives the payout from his life insurance policy which would be void if it was ruled that his death was a suicide. 

Yukito (Hiroki Sano) also works as a junk man, but scams his clients by pressing them to pay despite advertising a free removals service for unwanted appliances. He also steals petrol to sell illegally on the side and has nothing much going for him in his life while feeling guilty that he has failed to repay the sacrifices his mother made to raise him. Meanwhile, his sister is pregnant and the baby’s father has abandoned them leaving her in much the same position as her own mother but worried she doesn’t have the strength to manage on her own. 

It’s not difficult to understand the reasons why they want to end their lives even if as they sometimes suggest it’s more that they lack reasons to live while those in favour of dying are readily apparent. There doesn’t appear to be much going on in Northern Hokkaido when the businesses seem to be those dedicated to moving around obsolete items, buying junk or selling junk or maybe even stealing junk to sell to people who can’t afford anything better or else for scrap. All three feels themselves already on the scrap heap with nothing more than broken dreams to their names. Saki once wanted to be a singer in Tokyo, but now can’t seem to see a reason to be much of anything at all.

The way she later sees it, it’s alright to want to die and it’s alright to do it too even if you’ll hurt the people you’ll leave behind. None of them are fully able to escape their sense of despair or hopelessness despite the bonds that arise between them as they try to fulfil Shoji’s dying wish. In the end, the firmest expression of friendship is that they will help one another die if and when it’s what they really want though they may never meet again in more pleasant circumstances. In any case, Kamada captures a sense of bleakness in the beauty of the snowbound landscape which remains otherwise barren and defined by emptiness even as those trapped inside it try to find reasons either to live or to die but more often than not find nothing much of anything at all. 

TOCKA screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Images: ©2022 KAMADA FILM

Yamabuki (やまぶき, Juichiro Yamasaki, 2022)

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The lives of a series of dejected souls in a moribund quarry town intersect in unexpected ways in a poetical drama from Juichiro Yamasaki, Yamabuki (やまぶき). The film takes it name from a colourful mountain flower which as someone later comments grows in the shade where no one can see, much like the sullen teenage girl whose mother named her after it because as she says “sunflowers face the sun but you don’t have to”. A tale of finding a place to root oneself in a rocky landscape the film has an understandably melancholy atmosphere but nevertheless eventually finds hope in perseverance or as one of the heroes finally sighs, “ask and ye shall receive”.

“This is my family” former Korean equestrian Chang-su (Kang Yoon-soo) beams on visiting a local ranch where his girlfriend’s daughter Uzuki is learning to ride. Chang-su explains that he was forced to give up horse riding after his father’s business went bust, implying at least that he’s from a formerly wealthy family in Korea with whom he seems to have few emotional ties. We see him send money abroad which seems to be intended to pay off loan sharks, presumably his father’s debts unwisely incurred by his failing business and perhaps the reason why Chang-su has come to Japan to work a manual job in a quarry. Most of the other workers are also economic migrants, many of them from the same area and conversing with each other in their own shared language though Chang-su seems to be the only Korean. After receiving the news that he’s to be made a regular employee rather than a casual worker, he starts to think that his life is back on track allowing him to once again ride a horse. 

But his hopes are suddenly dashed when his car is hit by falling rocks dislodged by police detective Hayakawa (Yota Kawase) trying to uproot a yamabuki flower to take home with him while his teenage daughter, Yamabuki (Kirara Iori), rolls her eyes and storms off. Reeling from the death of her war reporter mother in a Middle Eastern combat zone, Yamabuki is at odds with her father and searching for her own identity. She has begun hanging out with a group of protestors who stand silently at the roadside with prominent signage though their protests seem to take on many forms with no particular focus. One moment it’s the consumption tax and the next American presence in Okinawa or racism in contemporary Japan. This last one is met with a counter protest by a man shouting at them to go back where they came from, echoing the kind of othering and displacement felt by Chang-su who is let go from the quarry after the accident.

Just as Chang-su tries to anchor himself with his new family, Hayakawa tries to remake his in the absence of his wife while carrying on a kind of relationship with a Chinese sex worker equally displaced by the modern society and looking for a place to belong. As she points out, her mother came to Japan because at that time it looked like the future, but like the quarry town it now seems like the past. Her mother returned to the economic powerhouse of Shenzhen and has apparently become wealthy, though her half-Japanese daughter struggles to find a place for herself. As Chang-su reveals, “yamabuki” was also the name given to gold coins offered as bribes in the feudal era, lamenting the money-oriented nature of the contemporary society just as Yamabuki herself concludes that she wants her life to mean something and to feel present in every second of her existence. Her father had objected to the protests, but eventually tells her that she should be preparing for her independence and learning to be accountable to herself for her actions. She must have the courage of her convictions, as he lays out in a scene shot in the manner of a political rally and echoing Soviet realist cinema, so she can’t regret it later even if she one day changes her mind.  

They are all, in their ways, like the yamabuki rooting themselves in rocky ground and growing in the shade each discovering something new that allows them to continue despite the continual disappointment of their lives. Shot in a grainy 4:3 16mm, the film emphasises the aura of impossibility that enshrouds the town as if it were somehow trapped in the past, but equally lends it a kind of elegiac quality peppered with the colourful yellow of the yamabuki flowers which suggest that it is possible to blossom even under the constant gloom of a continually uncertain existence.

Yamabuki screens at New York’s IFC Center on Feb. 10 & 11 as part of ACA Cinema Project’s New Films From Japan. Director Juichiro Yamasaki will be present at each screening for a Q&A.

Original trailer (English subtitles)