Japan Cuts Review: Japan’s Tragedy (2012) - Essential Viewing

Cast:  Tatsuya Nakadai, Shinobu Terajima, Kazuki Kitamura
Director: Masahiro Kobayashi
Country: Japan
Genre: Drama
Official Site: Here

Editor’s Notes: The following review is part of our coverage for JAPAN CUTS: The New York Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema which runs from July 11-21. For more information of this film series visit www.japansociety.org and follow Japan Society Film on Twitter at @js_film_nyc.

Writer-director-producer Kobayashi Masahiro’s black-and-white Japan’s Tragedy is a quiet elegy of a film. It is stunning and moving in its sustained emotion of the (de)composition of a family examined in reverse chronology, set in Tokyo 2011. The opening scene has the camera significantly set in that communal space of the home that is the kitchen, unflinching and still, positioned to encompass in the middle ground the hallway that runs horizontally across the screen and opens onto the kitchen in the foreground and a room in the background. When Yoshio (Kitamura Kazuki) and his father Fujio (Nakadai Tatsuya) enter the kitchen from frame left, with a portrait of an elderly woman constituting a family altar in full view in the room in the background, Kobayashi has already revealed half of the story and drama of this family. While never leaving the house, Japan’s Tragedy manages to address the country’s recent history of economic recession, the 3.11 earthquake and tsunami, the number of missing persons, and, belatedly revealed, the staggering number of suicides in the country. It does so through the most basic, economical audiovisual means: long takes, off-screen space and sound, and the close-up.

 While never leaving the house, Japan’s Tragedy manages to address the country’s recent history of economic recession, the 3.11 earthquake and tsunami, the number of missing persons, and, belatedly revealed, the staggering number of suicides in the country.

In the opening scene, once Yoshio and his father enter the kitchen, Yoshio proceeds to settle in (preparing the bed in the room, making tea), while his father sits at the kitchen table. The latter will not get up from his chair for the duration of the scene and into the next one, while Yoshio will sit down, get up, go off-screen, and re-enter the frame, a contrasting magnet of movement. Over the course of this remarkable one-take of a scene, we learn that the father and son have just come from the hospital. Fujio has lung cancer and, following an operation several months ago, has refused further treatment; he is resolved to die. Yoshio takes all of this news half-seriously. With his own smoking habit, the tensions between father and son gradually surface among the banal conversation on sleeping and making tea. The next scene is another long take of about ten minutes, with the camera changing its location from the kitchen to the back of the room with the family altar, so that background and foreground have reversed. This scene is even more revealing of the father-son relationship and what Yoshio in particular has gone through in the last five-to-seven years. In what will be the first of several emotional breakdowns for Yoshio, he gives vent to the series of events that placed so much pressure on his shoulders, and incidentally narrates his family’s (and by further extension, Japan’s recent) history: losing his job; becoming estranged from his wife Tomoko (Terajima Shinobu) and their daughter; nursing his ailing and dying mother; the 3.11 earthquake and tsunami, the same day that Fujio collapsed and had to be hospitalised; the disappearance of Tomoko and their daughter, who had moved back with Tomoko’s parents in the northeast of Japan, precisely the epicenter of the earthquake; and lastly, tending to his father. Fujio listens to Yoshio’s words and sobbing with seeming stoicism, reinforced by the camera’s set-up so that instead of Fujio’s face one sees his back to the camera while remaining seated in his chair.

 Within Kobayashi’s own work, Japan’s Tragedy continues the pared-down element of focusing on two characters and their emotional dynamic as the narrative point of departure.

When Fujio locks himself in the room that contains the family altar for his late wife Yoshiko (Omoro Akemi), so as to die alone and of his own accord, the film develops into another stage of remembering. Seamlessly and still ever so softly, the film goes back further and further in time, ultimately to chart the dispersal of this family in this life and the next due to various circumstances. Through a series of close-ups of Fujio’s face remembering the past, the film presents scene-fragments of the time when his wife Yoshiko was still alive, when Yoshio’s wife Tomoko and their daughter stop by to say that they are returning to her parents after Yoshio has left them, and then towards the end, to the entire expanded family coming together just after the birth of Yoshio’s daughter. All of these scenes also take place solely in the kitchen. Such memories and scene-fragments are a wistful tug at life on Fujio’s part, even in the face of his desire to die.

Significantly, Kobayashi’s film is the third one to have the particular Japanese title of日本の悲劇, Nihon/Nippon no higeki. The two previous films came after the Asia-Pacific War and the two atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Kamei Fumio’s 1946 documentary that explicitly criticises the imperial system and capitalism, and Kinoshita Keisuek’s 1953 narrative that looks at postwar Japan through a mother’s eyes. Of these three, Kobayashi’s has the most indirect approach and is essentially a work of mourning. Within Kobayashi’s own work, Japan’s Tragedy continues the pared-down element of focusing on two characters and their emotional dynamic as the narrative point of departure. This element requires no less than committed performances from his actors; we get just that from Nakadai’s controlled balance of restraint and feeling, and Kitamura’s emotional nakedness in a performance of his life.

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Rowena Santos Aquino

Sr. Staff Film Critic

Film lecturer at CSULB. Transnational, multilingual, migratory cinephilia.

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