• 日日是好日 (Every Day a Good Day)

10/12/18 (Sat), Tokyo

A beautiful meditative film of 2018 whereby the tea ceremony (“the way of tea”) serves as a metaphor for several zen-based ideas: that the meaning of things becomes evident only over time, that we should feel rather than analyze, that we should enjoy every instant in life as an experience that will never occur again.

A college student (Kuroki Haru) with no clear aim in life decides to take up the art of tea in the months before graduation. She puzzles at the arcane and intricate rituals involved in every minute action from folding a tea cloth to walking into the tearoom to pouring cold vs. hot water, but the teacher (Kiki Kirin) tells her just to concentrate on getting it right without obsessing for now about why. After years of practice, the girl finally comes to realize that the point is the acute consciousness of every movement, the importance of every moment, the heart over the brain. Even though the ritual is the same every time, each gesture lives anew with the new occasion. This idea is reflected in the film’s title, rendered in English as “Every Day a Good Day”, an ancient zen phrase that appears on a hanging scroll in the tearoom. (A similar phrase that’s one of my favorites, ichigo ichie (one moment, one picture, i.e., each moment is a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence), pops up in the dialogue as well.) In the 24-year span of her studies – covering loneliness, broken love affairs and family tragedy – the girl has gained a deeper perspective on life that finally brings her peace.

The unhurried plot revolves around the girl’s lessons, which are carried out in painstaking detail: folding the cloth, pouring the water, lowering the scoop, whisking the tea leaves, offering the tea to guests, and so forth. This seems to drag at first, but we gradually realize that we should not be looking for meaning in each scene but absorbing the film as a whole, precisely the lesson that the girl herself is learning. The medium truly is the message here. That is suggested as well by the reference to Fellini’s La Strada, which the girl saw as a child but never understood until many years later when she revisited the film as an adult. In another case, the girls marvel that a cup showing the “year of the dog” is used only once every dozen years when the 12-year Chinese animal cycle comes around again; it is only 24 years later, when the cup reappears, that we realize how much time has passed and the significance of that earlier dialogue.

Kuroki gives a wonderfully restrained performance (other than a few melodramatic moments necessitated by the plot), and Tabe Mikako proves an able match as the girl’s energetic cousin who joins her in the lessons. The film’s real core, though, is Kirin, whose patience and quiet confidence as the tea teacher embody the very message she was aiming to convey. Her mastery of the ceremony’s minutiae was extremely impressive given that she reportedly never learned it before taking the role, and her calm unshowy approach grounded the film in both plot and theme. This was her last role prior to her death in September 2018 (the previous was a strong showing in Koreeda’s acclaimed Shoplifters), and she will be missed. The director Omori Tatsushi, known for much wilder fare, shows an unexpectedly subtle side with this work that I hope he continues to pursue.

I’ve noted misguided claims in several overseas reviews that tea ceremony is exclusively for women, with some implying that it’s an instrument of female subservience. Anyone know what they’re talking about? Despite the overwhelming presence of women in the film (there’s only one real male role), the ceremony is and always has been very much for men as well – it was established in its present form by a man, Sen Rikyu, in the 16th century, and I’ve participated in ceremonies many times along with other men. The Japanese would laugh their heads off at this twisted interpretation, which says more about Western fixations than Japanese society. If that’s the only thing that these reviewers gained from the film, they’ve wasted two hours of their time. The shallow understanding that foreign reviewers bring to the Japanese arts is a constant irritation (the NY Times was similarly clueless about Kabuki), and they seem to have learned nothing. Bummer.