Japan Musings 2023

I've come back to Japan for the first time since the pandemic started. This was not an unplanned on the whim moment; circa 2019, my then-fiancée and I wanted to get married and go here for our honeymoon. We'd saved up the money after a few years of frugal living. The planned dates would have been March 2020 for the wedding (no lavish ceremonies, just a small gathering) and October for the honeymoon. Guess how that went.

Here are a few things I did before going to this year's Tokyo International Film Festival:

My relationship with the movies of Shunji Iwai began with me watching his 1996 film Swallowtail on the Japanese satellite channel WOWOW with no subtitles. Chunks of the film were in English and the story was relatively easy to understand, so even for Japanese illiterate me in the early 2000s it was not a problem. More than two decades later, with a slightly higher level of Japanese and still with no subtitles, I watched his latest film, Kyrie no Uta (or simply Kyrie) in a Osaka cinema.

Spanning more than a decade, the film intercuts between at least four separate timelines: in the present day, Kyrie (Aina the End) is a homeless busker living life hand to mouth. She meets Ikko (Suzu Hirose), an old friend who decides to become her manager and give her a break in showbiz. Many years ago, Kyrie and Ikko were friends, but with different names; Kyrie was Luca and Ikko was Maori. Both are connected with Natsuhiko (Hokuto Matsumura), who himself is connected with another Kyrie - Luca's sister, who was his girlfriend prior to an unspeakable tragedy that would upend all of their lives.

Each character deals with that tragedy, whose shockwaves reverberate across the years. While soft-spoken Kyrie expresses her grief through song, Natsuhiko can't even express it much at all, and Ikko withdraws in another way, living a relatively carefree life without abandon. It's all told in the sort of dark fairytale Iwai's been known for, with quirky characters in the vein of Swallowtail, fractured temporally in the vein of his 2001 opus All About Lily Chou Chou, yet done as a musical chronicle of struggling artists, much in the vein of his 2010 screenwriting effort Bandage and examination of personal and national traumas as in his documentary Friends After 3.11 (2011). Indeed, this is perhaps Iwai's first true musical, with former idol group member Aina the End at times sounding like a huskier, vulnerable Chara with songs composed and produced by frequent Iwai collaborator Takeshi Kobayashi.

That said, this is perhaps one of Iwai's weaker contemporary offerings. The three hour cut of the film feels slight despite its length; some segues feel more like bloat rather than worldbuilding, and based on the impressions of the two hour cut of the film, it seems like the editing of the film was a persistent problem. 

Still, the last few sequences are magic, filled with the energy and emotion that I love so much from Iwai. Kyrie and Ikko travel to the beach where the tragedy began. "Are you afraid of the tsunami?" Ikko asks her friend. Kyrie says no. The grief is still there in some form, but the fear and anger has all but washed away.

Ever since I heard about Toei Kyoto Studio Park, I've always wanted to go. The theme park is also a large film set, used in many Jidai-geki (period dramas) and even music videos. Parts of the park were even used to film scenes from the live action Rurouni Kenshin movies. For a fee, visitors can dress up in colorful costumes and roam around the park and take pictures.

I'm not usually a fan of cosplay and dressing up, but I had to take this chance. There are also other attractions in the park, including a showcase of Kamen Rider costumes from the Heisei era onwards, a museum of Toei productions from the fifties onward, and an expansive movie library of Toei films. For movie lovers, it's worth a whole day trip.

Here's a costume worn by legendary actress Misora Hibari:

Here's a wall of posters

And finally, in the old Japanese capital of Kamakura, my wife and I watched some Noh and Kyogen in a small theater. Many of the readers of this blog probably know what Noh is: one of the oldest forms of theater in the world still being practiced today, it is a play based on traditional Japanese literature, often depicting a spirit, ghost or otherwise supernatural being. Kyogen is a separate art form to Noh, mostly comedic vignettes meant as interludes in between Noh performances.

The performance we watched consisted of one Noh play and one Kyogen performance. The Kyogen performance, Futari Daimyo, is a short tale about two Daimyo or feudal lords who go out on a walk. They force what seems like a hapless man to carry their swords for them, even though the man has his own business to attend to. As a sort of revenge, the man takes matters into his own hands in rather comedic fashion.

The Noh play performed was called Shunzei Tadanori. Taira no Tadanori was a poet and general during the Heian period of Japan. If you've read this blog a certain amount, or have some knowledge of Japanese history, you'd know that the Taira were all but annihilated by the end of the Genpei War by the Minamoto clan. The play recounts his defeat at the hands of Okabe no Rokuyata and the discovery of his body, identified by a poem attached to his quiver. Okabe visits Tadanori's teacher, the poet Fujiwara Shunzei, to deliver the news, when Tadanori's spirit visits him.

Noh plays often depict tragic events, and in my view, here it seems to be the fear of one's second death via forgetting, and living on via one's art. Tadanori begs Shunzei to include his poems, this time without the mark of anonymity, so that he can live on. In a way, even if the body has passed on and decayed, Tadanori will be remembered, just like in his famous poem:

In ruins now, the old capital Shiga by the waves,
yet the wild cherries of Naga still bloom as before.