The Depressed Girl
Chiaki’s dead,
a quiet voice comes from the other side of the table. Ichika’s eyes search for sympathy, but Kana doesn’t understand a word. Chiaki… which Chiaki?
Chiaki Sano?
Ichika replies. We were in the same class.
The curly-haired one?
Ichika nods. What happened?
I don’t know. She didn’t leave a note.
She killed herself?
Yes. With a door handle, at her parents’ house. She used her Mac charger.
Was the cable long enough?
No idea.
I walked past a poster for Desert of Namibia in Shimokitazawa, and something about it caught me off guard. Kana’s face—its profound emptiness—pulled at me. I wasn’t sure if it reminded me more of myself or of people I used to know, people from a time in my life when everyone seemed to lack something essential, some basic capacity to feel. A lack of empathy was everywhere back then, in my hometown and definitely in my own heart. And I catch myself doing it still sometimes, wearing that same empty look even when I’m with people I actually care about, and I hate it when I notice it happening.
Yumi Kawai is extraordinary as Kana. She’s 21, works at a laser hair removal salon in Tokyo, and she’s always on the edge of something you can’t quite name. She drifts between two men—one who steadies her with careful, almost desperate affection, another whose charm masks a cruelty that matches her own. She doesn’t really choose between them. She just moves between worlds, carrying her restlessness like weather, and Kawai makes you feel the weight of it.
Yoko Yamanaka made her debut film on basically nothing when she was a teenager, and now she’s made something that doesn’t hurry, doesn’t explain itself. The film holds in tight, boxy 4:3 frames—hair removal cubicles, cramped kitchens, narrow hallways—and it feels claustrophobic in a way that perfectly mirrors what’s happening inside Kana. She’s surrounded by men who can’t quite hear her even when she’s screaming.
There’s this scene where Honda comes home from a work trip where he went to a hostess bar, and what follows is honest in a way that feels almost painful to watch. The apologies that mean nothing, the moment Kana’s quiet fury becomes something physical and irrational, and the film refuses to tell you who’s right. They’re both somehow both.
And then there’s the salon, which is actually kind of funny—Kana and her coworker speculating about an elderly woman’s bikini wax, Kana getting fired for telling a customer she’s been wasting money on cosmetic procedures. The film does this thing where it cuts between absurdist comedy and something genuinely unsettling without warning, and that tonal whiplash is exactly what it feels like to be around someone like Kana. You don’t know what’s coming.
Midway through, Kana sees a therapist, and it’s one of the most real psychiatric scenes I’ve seen in a movie. The doctor’s careful questions, Kana suddenly ranting about pedophilia as a philosophical point, her asking the therapist to dinner. They float the idea of bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, but nothing sticks. Kana’s trying to understand who she is, and she says it so quietly you almost miss it, and that feels important.
By the end the film gets strange—panda ants, campfire songs, parallel universes bleeding into what was a fairly grounded story—and some people will feel like that’s liberating while others will feel the ground disappear. Maybe it’s the least controlled part of the film, but there’s something right about that incoherence too. Kana can’t be resolved. She can’t be diagnosed or taught a lesson or fit into an arc. She just continues, and that’s the whole point.
Yumi Kawai’s performance has this electricity to it, this quality where suffering looks like something alive and vital. She deserves every award she got for this. She never condescends to Kana, never asks you to feel sorry for her, never explains her away.
Desert of Namibia isn’t comfortable and it doesn’t want to be. But watching it made me feel like I was seeing something necessary, a film that holds contradiction the way we actually have to hold it in our lives—uneasy and unflinching, refusing easy answers, refusing to turn its impossible heroine into something safe or understood.