ryuganji: film news from japan

Sadly it’s not me but rather film critic Umemoto Yoichi who’s had the privilege of seeing Kurosawa’s welcome return to non-supernatural material. Going on this, it sounds very thematically similar to Toyoda Toshiaki’s “Hanging Garden”, and Koizumi’s presence will probably serve to encourage comparisons. My rough and ready translation follows.

Koizumi Kyoko, who plays housewife and mother to the Sasaki family, says something along the lines of “Wouldn’t it be nice if we awoke and this was all a nightmare?” For the Sasakis, who have most likely led extremely ordinary lives up until that point, the father’s redundancy is the catalyst that sets off a chain of events. No, that too is possibly everyday life, but once they sense small cracks appearing in their everyday lives that had felt uneventful up until then, they begin to be tossed around by the rough seas of society.

The Sasaki home, located next to a train line, is constantly filled with the roar of passing trains; the oldest son, a university student, does nothing but work at his part-time job and never returns home at a decent hour; and the father is pressured to quit his job. Perhaps this is also ‘everyday life’. However, despite his ebullience in leaving his company behind, he encounters the harshness of reality for the first time when he goes to a job centre. When asked bluntly “What can you do?”, he cannot find an answer. And what of the eldest son? And the mother?

A block of highrise buildings can be seen from the tiny park that the father begins frequenting - where the homeless loiter and line up for food - and a row of skyscrapers at night is seen in the background of the river that the oldest son dumps packets of tissues into; leftovers from his part-time job handing them out on the street. No doubt those highrise buildings are filled with people living tranquil lives. These structures flaunt their existence, as if laughing derisively at the fractured world that the film’s characters inhabit.

The youngest son, a 6th-year elementary student, falls under his teacher’s suspicion for passing a comic around during class, but blurts out that he was sitting in front of the teacher on the train and saw him reading a porno mag, to which the teacher says he’ll forget about the student if the student forgets about him. Later, one of his classmates tells him: you’ve started a revolution.

Several small episodes accumulate, and the characters take their first steps outside of the comfort zone they had hitherto resided in. Outside of this self-contained world is another ruled by the simple principle that one must eat, fight, and have money to live. Koizumi’s character, who is at the core of that self-contained world and claims that pretending to be a mother isn’t all bad, is not exempt from those principles. That’s because she learns that her comfort zone merely exists fleetingly thanks to temporary social relation. She, like Antoine Doinel in “The 400 Blows”, finds herself with nowhere left to go with the sea before her.

Yes, that world is one encountered not only by the Sasaki family. You, me, we all live in that world. Is there no hope? Is there no hope in this world we live in?

Yes, there is hope, declares Kurosawa Kiyoshi. There is hope, he says. With “Retribution” he displayed his full control of the medium for the first time since “Cure”, and with “Tokyo Sonata” he makes another new, rough impression. He shocks us with its extraordinary power, and at the same time, makes us forget ourselves and moves us with the salvation he has prepared for us.