A Japanese Film List That Doesn’t Start With Miyazaki
A sunny afternoon, a dusty apartment, and a sneezing fit that nearly took my soul with it—somewhere between the shelves and the floor I stumbled back into my Japanese film library. Because Japan’s cinema runs a lot deeper than the horror section and the tentacle shelf, even though I am absolutely not surrendering the tentacle shelf. Obviously.
Start with Kikujiro’s Summer. Takeshi Kitano—yes, the same Takeshi from the game show—plays a feckless, mildly dangerous layabout who ends up escorting a lonely boy across Japan in search of his mother. It’s slow and funny in a way that doesn’t announce itself. I caught it late one night on an arts channel and sat there afterwards not quite wanting to move. That particular kind of film.
Then Battle Royale, with Kitano back on screen—this time as the teacher who presides over the carnage with unsettling bureaucratic calm. Kinji Fukasaku directed it. A school class wakes up on a military-sealed island and the assignment is simple: kill each other until one person survives. Uzi, hammer, frying pan—whatever’s in your kit. I was borderline obsessed with this film when I first saw it, and not because of the violence. It kept asking a question it never answers: what would you actually do? I still think about it more often than is probably healthy.
Kamikaze Girls is the palate cleanser. Two girls with nothing in common—one a committed Lolita-fashion devotee who’d rather be living in Rococo France, the other a hard-edged biker gang member who could dismantle you physically and emotionally—and somehow they become the best of friends. It’s completely unhinged and I laughed through the whole thing.
Nobody Knows goes quiet again. Four siblings in Tokyo, abandoned by their mother when she decides adulthood isn’t really her thing. They manage on their own in the city, slowly, invisibly. Hirokazu Kore-eda shoots it almost like a documentary—no dramatic score, no editorial hand on your shoulder telling you how to feel. Just time passing and children getting older than they should have to. It stays with you.
And then, in a category entirely its own: The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai, which earns every prize in the category of most gloriously deranged anti-Bush sex film ever committed to celluloid. A porn actress is shot in the head and becomes omniscient. She also finds George W. Bush’s severed finger, which turns out to be significant. She sleeps with everyone in range. The politics are about as subtle as the title. It is exactly as good as it sounds, which is to say: completely, unimprovably good.