5/29/24 (Wed)
The title of Koreeda’s superior 2008 film is taken from Ishida Ayumi’s old pop hit “Blue Light Yokohama”. It literally means “regardless of how much [one] walks” or “despite walking and walking”, the implication here being that the person will never reach the destination. The song itself features in the film in a startling confession muttered off-handedly by the mother.
5/19/24 (Sun)
Genji Kuyo (Commemorative Prayer for Genji) assumes an awareness of the 11th-century Tale of Genji, the classic story of the imagined romantic life of a randy former prince. The Noh play is based on the idea that fiction, being an invention of the mind, is a violation of Buddhist strictures against falsehoods and must be atoned for. The text alludes to a Tang Chinese poet’s musings on the sin of “wild words and flowery language” (狂言綺語). The anonymous drama has been around since at least 1464, when Genji would have been over 400 years old or as far as Shakespeare is from the present day.
4/21/24 (Sun), Tokyo
A lesser performed but highly entertaining Romeo-and-Juliet type piece with some unusual features. Continue reading
4/9/24 (Tues)
A British adaptation by writer/director Andrew Haigh of the Japanese novel Strangers (1987), which was also filmed in Japanese the following year under the English title The Discarnates. The original Japanese title in both cases, Ijin-tachi no Natsu (偉人たちの夏) is something like “Summer with Strangers”, the latter word (ijin) usually referring to foreigners. Whereas the Japanese film followed the novel closely, Haigh has different ideas.
3/17/24 (Sun), Tokyo
While this work is traditionally attributed to Noh’s founder Zeami, the light narrative style and large cast make it feel like a much later piece. It centers on the famed poet Ono Komachi, but here she is young and vibrant as opposed to the withered old woman longing for her youth in the other of Noh’s seven Komachi works. The piece impossibly brings together some of the Six Great Poets from different eras, making the fantasy element clear.
I see where the stage adaptation of the popular anime film Spirited Away that played in Tokyo a few years back has transferred with the original cast to London, performing in Japanese (with English surtitles). I noted at the time that the Tokyo production seemed a “trial run” for a future production in the more profitable theater worlds of London or New York given the foreign talent involved, starting with director John Caird (whose wife is Japanese). The show appears to have received a rapturous welcome in London by both critics and audiences despite the language barrier and will be playing for an unusually long stay of four months. With London’s recent wonderful English-language staging of that other Japanese anime classic, My Neighbor Totoro (soon headed for the West End), the stage may be set, so to speak, for a flood of other anime adaptations, which have already taken Tokyo by storm in musical, Kabuki and other versions. Here is my take from the Tokyo run.
3/3/24 (Sun)
This 1955 work is Tanaka Kinuyo’s third directorial effort but the first that she started from scratch. (The first two were based on scripts by Kinoshita and Ozu and staffed partly by their assistants.) The film was formerly known in English rather startlingly as The Eternal Breasts, which is closer to the Japanese but makes it sound like a very different kind of film; the Japanese title would probably be rendered better as, “Breasts, Be Forever With Me”. The change in the English in this case was probably for the better. The real-life Fumiko was only famous for four months from publication of her efforts to her early death, but she is considered one of Japan’s three seminal female poets of the 20th century. She passed away only a year before the film. Continue reading
3/2/24 (Sat)
This 1953 work marked actress Tanaka Kinuyo’s debut as director, using a script by Kinoshita Keisuke. This is the first fictional film by a female director in Japan.
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.
2/11/24 (Sun), Tokyo
Bunraku has been homeless in Tokyo since the closure of the National Theater last October, leaving it to wander among venues. Today’s venue, a 1,249-seat theater, is way too big for puppets (the NT had around 800 seats), but I’ll take what I can get. They chose an audience-friendly three-part program of classics at just two hours or so each, a smart change from the usual two-part show of 4-5 hours each. This was the day’s second pairing. Continue reading
9/30/23 (Sat), National Noh Theater (Tokyo)
Basho: A dialogue-heavy show by Zenchiku with an unusually beautiful text. A monk in rural China meets a woman who, overhearing him read from the Lotus Sutra, wants to discuss Buddhist precepts. He doesn’t allow her in his hut at first since women are normally prohibited, but gives in when she notes that they live in the same city and draw water from the same river, suggesting a karmic connection.
She turns out to be the spirit of a plantain tree (basho), a plant with large and particularly delicate leaves. They discuss how even non-sentient objects such as trees (“even women and heartless plants,” according to one translation) can attain salvation. Continue reading
1/28/24 (Sun)
Shibuya Ward (which encompasses Shibuya, Harajuku, Aoyama and other Tokyo hot spots) had apparently approached Japanophile Wim Wenders to make a documentary on its clean public toilet project, the Tokyo Toilet, which has installed some innovative and attractive facilities throughout the district (many of which I’ve used). Wenders decided to turn this into a piece about a devoted public worker, allowing him to show the facilities as background for something more profound.
sekenbanashi 