film, eyeballs, brain

I’ve only seen a couple of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s horror movies — namely, the somewhat underwhelming Pulse (Kairo, 2001) and Cure (Kyua, 1997), touted back in the day as emblematic of the J-horror genre (along with Hideo Nakata’s The Ring and Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-on). His latest film, Tokyo Sonata, strikes me as perhaps more deeply unsettling, especially in these precarious times.

Ryûhei Sasaki, a Japanese sarariman (played ably by Teruyuki Kagawa), husband, and father of two, is summarily dismissed from his middle-management position. He returns home as if nothing has happened – though he pretty much has to invent a reason for why he’s home early – and goes out the next day in his suit and tie, still dressed as if he’s going to the office.

The joke, if it could be called that, is that he’s not alone. An acquaintance of his is engaged in the same deception, and so are many others, suited up and lining up for free food at lunch, and then queueing up again in an unemployment office’s dark stairwell, where they walk up one stair at a time as if inching their way up one circle of hell to another. Ryuhei’s friend even programs his cell phone to ring five times an hour, to give the illusion of busyness.

There’s something darkly comic about all this humiliation, but it’s tempered by an undercurrent of genuine sadness running throughout – not just because Ryuhei has to maintain the facade of normalcy, but because it’s clear that his job is the very core of his identity. It’s all he has, and when Ryuhei, clad in a red jumpsuit, finally finds a job cleaning toilets in a mall, the effect is almost devastating.

It’s important to note that money, or the loss of it, doesn’t exactly comprise the central seed of anxiety around which the movie revolves. When their youngest son Kenji (Inowaki Kai) asks if he can start taking music lessons, Ryuhei forbids it quickly, without much thought – not, it seems to me, because he sees it as unnecessary expense, but because he sees it simply as unnecessary, a frivolous and useless endeavor that won’t prepare Kenji for the grown-up life outside, and because, as Kenji’s father, he can.

Kenji starts using his lunch money to take piano lessons on the sly, engaging in a little deception of his own. (He also practices on a broken portable organ he found in the trash.) His beautiful piano teacher tells him he’s a music prodigy — one of the finest she’s ever taught, she says – and encourages him to enroll in a special high school for musicians. It places Kenji in a bind, but it’s quickly “resolved” — of course it’s out of the question.

All this distress, even if it’s deliberately concealed, nonetheless takes its toll on the family. But it’s an individual, patriarchal panic as well; Ryuhei’s slipping hold on his children – and later, his injurious physical rage — is symbolic of his impotence both inside and outside the house. (Speaking of inside the house, cinematographer Akiko Ashizawa strategically places the camera behind shelves and stair banisters; the cramped quality of the domestic space is analogous to the secrecy and lack of communication within the family as well.)

There’s a wonderful scene when the father returns from another day of subterfuge and sits at the dinner table and opens a beer. His family patiently waits for him to pick up his utensils so that everyone can start eating, but he takes his time, drinking his glass in one gulp like a man in a desert. He’s either oblivious to his family’s waiting, or exercising some passive aggressiveness; either way, his unchallenged authority still holds, momentarily, but almost pettily.

The theme is repeated throughout the movie. In a hilarious sequence, Kenji – punished by his teacher for something he wasn’t at fault for – turns the tables by announcing to the class that he had seen the teacher reading porn manga on the subway. (The teacher is renamed “ero-bayashi” by the students, his authority immediately undermined.) Takashi, the eldest son (Yû Koyanagi), has decided to join the U.S. Army and volunteer as a soldier in the Middle East despite the fact that it’s prohibited by the Japanese Constitution. It seems like an odd subplot, except that it, too, represents a loss of authority on a national level – one that’s doubled when we get to the ending of Takashi’s story.

His wife Megumi (played wonderfully by Kyôko Koizumi) is, on the surface, the stereotypically subservient Japanese wife – dutifully cooking and serving dinner, waiting in the living room for her husband to come home, handing him his briefcase at the door – but in the movie she takes a more interesting and nuanced “inward journey” of discovery, as Kurosawa put it in the Q&A portion afterwards. “Screw your authority!” she finally yells at her husband, but it isn’t necessarily an act of feminist defiance; it’s merely a recognition of the new order of things.

I’m guessing that what most audiences will be talking about is the film’s abrupt shift in tone towards the end. (Kurosawa explained that writing events in a more “realist” manner wouldn’t have worked for the ending, or words to that effect.) The film suddenly descends – though I hasten to add that “descends” isn’t necessarily negative – almost into absurdist farce: there’s a home invasion, there’s jail time, there’s much directionless running around the streets of Tokyo, there are long dark nights of the soul. It’s as if Kurosawa is suggesting that chaos opens up different directions and possibilities – whether narrative or emotional or even spiritual — or that chaos is the only real direction where the film, collapsing with the accumulated weight of its miseries and lies, could go. It’s an uneasy fit, but it works.

The real ending to Tokyo Sonata is a literal coda – I can’t spoil its five minutes by telling you exactly what happens, though unfortunately it’s in the previews and in some of the posters – but it’s arguably one of the most sublimely beautiful movie endings I’ve seen in recent years. It’s the transcendent, if tentative, conclusion to Kurosawa’s affecting and powerful film.

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Possibly related posts:

1. Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, and Bong Joon-ho, "Tokyo!" (2009).
2. Akira Kurosawa, "Drunken Angel" (1948).
3. Akira Kurosawa, “Sanjuro” (1962).