• せかいのおきく (Okiku and the World)

2/25/24 (Sun)

When you hear a movie is about two guys peddling sh*t, you’d normally assume they were selling trivial products. But the guys in this movie are in fact dealing in excrement – and we learn that their job was an essential function in Edo society. Who knew?

The time is the mid 19th century at the tail end of the Edo Era, when the entire system of government is about to be overthrown – but the characters here don’t know that. Yasuke is a purveyor of manure, buying the product from homes (after digging it out of the outhouse pits) and selling it to farmers. The latter need the waste as fertilizer to grow food, which is eaten and processed through people’s bodies as new waste product in a virtuous cycle for the likes of Yasuke. The gathering and reprocessing of waste served a critical role in Edo in keeping the villages clean; while Yasuke was dirt poor and at the absolute bottom of the social rung, he was actually more important in the scheme of things then the higher-ranking samurai, who received money from the state for doing very little.

Yasuke is soon joined by Chuji, a young paper seller in need of steadier work. As a member of the merchant class, the poor Chuji outranks Yasuke in social terms, but can’t afford to maintain such niceties in his desperation for food and work. Yasuke is light-hearted about his job, which lends itself to endless puns, but Chuji takes it more seriously. The ungainly work is tough and makes them outcasts. But it’s a living. Aside from the back-breaking nature of the work itself, which involves shoveling manure into buckets that they carry on their backs, they face indignities like higher-end households demanding more money on the contention that their better diet makes for higher quality poop, i.e., their sh*t is literally better than yours.

Kiku (known in polite form as O-Kiku), teacher at a village school and the outspoken daughter of a fallen samurai, encounters them during a rainstorm. She brushes off the outgoing Yasuke with a warning not even to say her name, but takes an interest in the handsome Chuji, who responds tentatively given the big difference in their social status as well as his unseemly job. Whereas Yasuke, being off the social scale entirely, has nothing to lose in approaching her, Chuji finds it tough to get past society’s arbitrary rules.

When Kiku later intervenes unsuccessfully to save her father from a murderous gang, her throat is slashed, leaving her unable to talk and psychologically depressed. The remainder of the film shows a growing closeness between Kiku, who is physically unable to express her feelings, and Chuji, who is mentally unable to forget the social distance between them. The ending is ambiguous, typically for Japanese films, but positive.

The film is divided into multiple chapters with various headings. Some of those headings, like “Early Spring”, are reminiscent of Ozu. That goes as well for the farting jokes, which Ozu was fond of (e.g., Ohayo).

The movie’s curious title Sekai no O-Kiku, all written unusually in alphabet (hiragana) rather than kanji characters, means something like The World’s Kiku or Kiku of the World. That’s inverted in the final section’s subtitle to a more logical “O-Kiku no Sekai” (Kiku’s World). The director explains that the title, which was there from the movie’s beginnings as a short film, came from Chuji’s desperate gestures to Kiku toward the end to convey his feelings. Shying from words both from respect for the mute Kiku and his own inability to voice his emotions, he pounds frantically on the ground and sweeps his arms toward the sky to indicate that he loves her more than anything in the world. The word sekai was evidently used at that time only in the meaning of society rather than the world or physical earth; Chuji is actually asked by the samurai if he even knows what the word means, suggesting that it was not common. The movie title suggests the physical meaning, while the last chapter’s subtitle would indicate Kiku’s own surroundings. In one of the film’s final lines, the bumbling priest explains in a calligraphy lesson that sekai is something that lets you travel in one direction and eventually return in a perfect circle. Sounds like a good summary of both Buddhism and poop. (Trivia: O-Kiku literally means Lady Chrysanthemum, the original name of the character who later became Madame Butterfly. It’s also a name used in the current remake of Shogun.)

Kuroki Haru (Every Day a Good Day) does great work as the title character both in her imperious early stages and later voiceless and more caring phase. Ikematsu Sosuke is completely credible as the buoyant Yasuke, ably avoiding the trap of overplaying the comedy. The single-named Kanichiro is capable if unexciting as Chuji, while his real-life father Sato Koichi has a rather one-note take on the samurai. Claude Maki and Ishibashi Renji play the remainder of the named cast.

Poop is the great leveler here, and the film revels in it: churning in pits, shoveled into buckets, plumped out with rainwater, overflowing in the streets, flung at people in fights. The wisdom of the director’s decision to film in black & white becomes clear from the few brief moments in color, especially one showing Yasuke covered in muck. The portrait of people of all status dashing for and squatting in the outhouse, from samurai to Kiku to Yasuke, is a sly commentary on a class-based society, a worthy successor to Yamanaka Sadao’s great Humanity and Paper Balloons nearly a century earlier. It’s certainly a fresh (if that’s the word) take on the subject.