What Yen Town Leaves Behind

Shunji Iwai’s Swallowtail Butterfly—released in 1996, also known as スワロウテイル—opens in a city that doesn’t exist and makes you feel its humidity anyway. Yen Town is what the immigrants call it: a district somewhere in Japan where the desperate and the ambitious pile up together, all of them chasing yen, none of them with paperwork and most of them without illusions.

Ageha is a girl who grows up in this place after her mother dies, taken in by a Chinese woman named Glico who works nights and loves her in the mornings. The story turns on a discovery inside a dead client: a small device, surgically implanted, that engraves currency. With counterfeit yen suddenly flowing, the small ragged crew—Japanese, Chinese, American—does exactly what you’d expect. They get a nightclub. Glico becomes a singer. The Yen Town Band is born.

And then the money does what money does. It surfaces every worst impulse in everyone it touches. The greed, the infighting, the killers who want the engraving machine back—it all descends on them the way it always descends on people who were never supposed to have anything in the first place. The film doesn’t moralize about it. It just watches.

What makes it something more than its plot is Iwai’s camera and Chara in front of it. Chara plays Glico with a kind of wounded magnetism—she recorded the film’s songs herself, and they became genuinely famous in Japan, the Yen Town Band crossing over from fiction into reality. The whole film has that quality: slightly overexposed, slightly too beautiful for its subject matter, like a memory that’s been held too long and started to glow at the edges.

Japanese, dirty, real. Exactly how I like it.