Kadokawa at Japan Society: W’s Tragedy

As early as the Elizabethan era, the play within the play has been a postmodern device for meta-truth-telling. Such is particularly the case for the ingénue actress toiling in a thankless supporting role in a stage adaptation of the Shizuko Natsuki mystery novel published in America as Murder at Mt. Fuji. The events on-stage add ironic resonance to the backstage intrigue of Shinichirō Sawai’s W’s Tragedy (trailer here), which screens as part of the Japan Society retrospective: Pop! Goes Cinema: Kadokawa Films and 1980s Japan.

“I’ve stabbed Grandpa to death” is the familiar opening line of the many television adaptations of Natsuki’s Daburyū no Higeki. Unfortunately, Shizuka Mita will not be reciting them—at least not yet. She auditioned for the role of apparent murderess Mako Watsuji (the “W” of the tragedy), but the company cast her as the maid, while also assigning her prompter and wardrobe duties. The early out-of-town try-out performances are often demeaning, but her former actor suitor tries to buoy her spirits—even while encouraging her to withdraw from show business.

However, Mita gets the kind of big break that could easily ruin her when Sho Hatori, the production’s grand dame leading lady asks the innocent girl to cover for her. Hatori’s rich married patron dies in the saddle so to speak, so she convinces Mita to dress the body and pretend he had been her caller. The resulting publicity will be a double-edged sword, but Hatori will keep up her end of the bargain, elevating Mita to the prime featured role of Mako.

At first, Sawai keeps the production of W’s Tragedy very much in the background, which must have baffled audiences already familiar with the novel and television adaptation just one year prior to the film’s release (at least four more TV miniseries would follow). In fact, the first act almost has a vibe like Fame, even including an ultra-1980s aerobics sequence.

References to Mita’s supposed plainness are a little baffling, given she is played by former idol and Sailor Suit and Machine Gun star Hiroko Yakushimaru, but she is terrific expressing all the aspiring actress’s insecurities and self-doubt. She is openly vulnerable, yet there is a dark edge to ambitious resolve. Yet, nobody upstages Yoshiko Mita, who commands the screen as Hatori, like Lauren Bacall in her Queen of Broadway days.

By today’s standards, Sawai is quite restrained with the self-referential business, obviously trusting in his mostly original screenplay and first-rate ensemble. W’s Tragedy has an ambiguous vibe that is sometimes reminiscent of Day for Night, which is high praise indeed. As dark as it gets, it is also reassuring that the show still must go on. Very highly recommended, W’s Tragedy screens this Saturday (12/17) at the Japan Society, concluding their edgy yet nostalgic Kadokawa retrospective.

Kadokawa at Japan Society: The Little Girl Who Conquered Time

Yasutaka Tsutsui’s 1965 time travel novel has inspired at least three features and one television series, but each one is substantially different. That seems oddly appropriate, given the space-time continuum issues involved. While Mamoru Hosoda’s anime film is the most acclaimed, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s original 1983 adaptation is a sentimental favorite, largely thanks to former idol Tomoyo Harada. She is a teenager rather than a little girl and it would be a vast overstatement to call her a conqueror, but her earnestness perfectly suits the nostalgic charm of Obayashi’s The Little Girl Who Conquered Time (trailer here), which screens as part of the Japan Society retrospective: Pop! Goes Cinema: Kadokawa Films and 1980s Japan.

This is Onomichi in the early 1980s, so Kazuko Yoshiyama and her friends still have class on Saturday mornings. Traditionally, it is a day of service, which is why Yoshiyama was cleaning the chemistry lab. Unfortunately, a weird lavender smelling concoction knocks her unconscious before her two loyal guy pals, Kazuo Fukamachi and Goro Horikawa arrive to help.

The good news is her fainting spell gets her out of gym. The bad news is she starts repeating fragments of the next two days, sort of like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day (but not to such an absurd degree)—and oh what fraught days they are, featuring earthquakes, fires, collapsing roof tiles, and teen angst.

Granted, the special effects look hopelessly dated, but Obayashi conveys a wonderfully vivid and wistful sense of Onomichi’s seaside hills and winding pathways. You can practically smell the lavender, which plays a significant role in the narrative. It starts to feel like the home you never knew but always missed.

In her feature debut, former idol (and coincidentally the star of the early 1980s Sailor Suit and Machine Gun TV series) Tomoyo Harada is just terrific as Yoshiyama. She portrays the time-jumping teen with tremendous sensitivity and pluck, yet she also coveys the girl’s stubbornness and even a little flakiness. Likewise, Toshinori Omi is shockingly poignant as the torch-carrying Horikawa. Poor Ryôichi Takayanagi often gets dissed for his awkward stiffness as Fukamachi, but you could argue it is perfectly justifiable—even necessary—within the film’s dramatic context.

Regardless, TLGWCT is intoxicatingly bittersweet, similar in spirit to Peggy Sue Got Married (which it pre-dates by several years, unlike Goodbye Mr. Loser), except everything does not work out so neatly perfect. Still, it is hard to beat its eighties nostalgia goodness, right down to the inclusion of the music video for Harada’s theme song before the closing credit. Incredibly sweet but still a lot of high school genre fun, The Little Girl Who Conquered Time is very highly recommended when it screens this Tuesday (12/13) at the Japan Society, as part of their ongoing Kadokawa retrospective.

Kadokawa at Japan Society: Virus

It is the sort of film that seems to go out of its way to sow confusion. Since its initial release, the original 156-minute cut and a truncated 108-minute international edition have both been widely circulated. There was also a Teo Macero-produced soundtrack, featuring funky tunes performed by 1970s jazz superstars, including Chick Corea, Ron Carter, David Sanborn, and Larry Corryell, but you will not hear those cuts during the film. Perhaps most bafflingly, Sonny “Streetfighter” Chiba appears in a largely passive supporting role. However, the narrative is clear enough. Thanks to the accidental release of a weaponized super-bacillus, all vertebrate life is pretty much doomed in Kinji Fukasaku’s Virus (trailer here), which screens as part of the Japan Society retrospective: Pop! Goes Cinema: Kadokawa Films and 1980s Japan.

You can blame us hawkish Yanks for developing MM88 and the East Germans for recklessly stealing it. However, it will rather unfairly be dubbed the “Italian Flu,” because that is where the first devastating outbreaks and consequential riots first manifested. Soon it is sweeping across the planet, masking its presence by amplifying existing viral diseases. President Richardson is quite disappointed in the situation, but his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs only has a mind to turn on our automatic nuclear retaliation system. This will loom large down the stretch.

Seven months later, humanity only survives on Antarctica, where the sub-zero temperatures force the virus into dormancy. It is a difficult situation, what with the eight women to three-hundred-some men ratio. It is particularly hard on seismologist Shuzo Yoshizumi. He was so obsessed with his research, he submissively allowed his pregnant lover Noriko Asami to break-up with him. It would be very Seinfeld-esque, if it were not so tragic. However, he develops feelings of protective affection for Marit, the sole survivor of the Norwegian station, and her recently delivered infant.

Directed by Fukasaku, the edgy studio hitmaker responsible for the Battles Without Honor and Humanity and Battle Royale franchises, Virus was the most expensive Japanese film of its era. Despite its considerable international distribution, it still bombed. A little distance was probably needed to appreciate how Fukasaku fuses the Western all-star disaster melodrama with a peculiarly Japanese foray into the surreal and the existential. At times, this film is just plain odd, but it also boasts a who’s who of late 1970s Irwin Allen and Alistair McLean movies, including the likes of Glenn Ford, Chuck Connors, Bo Svenson, Olivia Hussey (Zeffirelli’s Juliet playing Norwegian), Henry Silva, Cec Linder (Felix Leiter in Goldfinger), George Kennedy, and the recently departed Robert Vaughn.

Yet, far and away, the best performance comes from Masao Kusakari as the bereaved and neurotic Yoshizumi. The film really gets its heart and soul from his relationships with Yumi Takigawa’s Asami and Hussey’s Marit. However, most of his scenes were axed from the international hack-job, so you want to hold out for the long version (which of course, the Japan Society will screen).

There are a number of wonderfully over-the-top death scenes in Virus that really put it in a class by itself. Granted, it is hard to believe you could just saunter through the front door of a post-apocalyptic White House, even with 1980 security technology, but silly third acts come with the disaster movie territory. Arguably, Virus was way ahead of its time, staking a claim to pandemic territory before Outbreak, Contagion, and Twenty-Eight Days Later. It is also a lot of nostalgic fun to watch the so-of its-time cast, albeit in a rather pessimistic context. Recommended for fans of apocalyptic cinema, Virus screens this Tuesday (11/22) at the Japan Society, as part of their ongoing Kadokawa retrospective.

Kadokawa at Japan Society: The Beast to Die

In 1980, it was not Japan’s veterans who were a menace to society. It was their twisted war reporters. At least such was the case with Kunihiko Date. He captured images that were too gruesome for the staid Japanese press. In America, they could have made him a Pulitzer Prize-winner, but in Japan they made him a Dostoevskian outcast and eventually a Travis Bickle-like psychopath. One of several adaptations of Haruhiko Oyabu’s novel, Toru Murakawa’s The Beast to Die screens as part of the Japan Society retrospective: Pop! Goes Cinema: Kadokawa Films and 1980s Japan.

In the opening scene, Date ambushes a cop whom he seems to have some shared history. They are pretty evenly matched, but Date eventually kills the detective, taking his gun to rob a Yakuza casino. Again, the crime is not pretty, but Date survives, several million yen richer. Of course, there is a man hunt on, but they are looking for usual suspects. The quiet professional-looking Date is largely free to move onto his next target.

That would be a large commercial bank that takes the deposits of large several downtown department stores. As a dry run, Date sets up an innocent banker to be the fall guy. Based on the reaction times he observes, Date decides he needs a partner. Sanada, an angry counter-culture drop-out waiter who makes a scene at class reunion Date reluctantly attends looks perfect for the job. There are only two complications. Reiko Hanada, an impossibly sweet classical music fan Date meets at a concert might have a remote, outside chance of re-awakening his conscience. As a more pressing concern, lone wolf Det. Hideyuki Kashiwagi keeps sniffing around Date, based on a combination of intuition and eye-witness reports from the casino murders.

Until it runs off the rails in a spectacular third act derailment, Beast is a deliciously slick and groovy thriller in the tradition of The Man Who Stole the Sun that also portrays the not so latent violence of the 1960s and 1970s hippie movement. Frankly, during the second act, Date and Sanada are a map-to-the-stars’-homes away from being Charles Manson and the rush of the bank heist will send them hurtling over the edge.

Yusaku Matsuda (who tragically died shortly after filming his international break-out role in Ridley Scott’s Black Rain) is absolutely chilling as the sociopathic Date. He is truly an electric yet clammy and off-putting screen presence. On the other side of the spectrum, actress and recording star Asami Kobayashi is utterly heart-breaking as Hanada. Takeshi Kaga’s turn as Sanada basically illustrates Eric Hoffer’s True Believer, in the worst, most sullenly entitled way. Hideo Murota adds a further note of unpredictability as the ethically ambiguous Det. Kashiwagi.

Most of Beast to Die is a massively hard-boiled crime thriller, but viewers should be forewarned, it climaxes with some pretty tough stuff. Nevertheless, there is no denying its enormous style, especially the use of classical music and Akihiko’s funky era-appropriate themes. Enthusiastically recommended for suitably prepared viewers, The Beast to Die screens tomorrow (11/15) at the Japan Society, as part of their ongoing Kadokawa retrospective.

Kadokawa at Japan Society: Sailor Suit and Machine Gun

American publishers are still trying to catch up with Kadokawa. In the late 1970s, media mogul Haruki Kadokawa started a film production division and began cranking out hit after hit, based on his publishing properties. So, how’s Random House Studio doing? Oh right, sold to Freemantle Media. For Hiroko Yakushimaru, they developed one of the first and arguably still most successful vehicles for a Japanese Idol. It would spawn two television series (decades apart) and a sequel re-boot this year. It doesn’t have the cult following in America of other violent pop culture phenomena, but it is hard to miss its lasting influence of Japanese cinema when Shinji Sōmai’s Sailor Suit and Machine Gun (trailer here) screens as the opener of the Japan Society retrospective: Pop! Goes Cinema: Kadokawa Films and 1980s Japan.

Izumi Hoshi looks fragile, but she is surprisingly tough. She was already somewhat delinquent, even before she inherited control of her great-uncle’s Yakuza gang. Technically, he had named his nephew as his successor, but before the surviving Medaka gang members can find him, the traveling salesman dies in an accident. Logically, leadership of the gang then falls to Hoshi, as his rightful heir. Rather bizarrely, Hoshi also inherits Mayumi Sandaiji, her father’s lover, whom she never met. You can bet she has a secret or two.

Understandably, Hoshi tries to beg off leading the Medaka gang, but when she learns the remaining core group will launch a suicide attack against their rivals if forced to disband, she accepts her new position. Of course, her new fellow clan leaders do not take her seriously. They assume they can finish off Medaka at their leisure, but there is a limit to the disrespect and condescension Hoshi will take.

Sailor Suit and Machine Gun takes its title and iconic poster image from the climatic shootout that is basically what it sounds like, but the film in toto is far moodier and more ambiguous than the Noboru Iguchi and Yoshihiro Nishimura movies it subsequently inspired. Hoshi is not a cartoon. She is a confused kid, who quite logically grabs onto the support system being offered after the death of her father, her only family and sole support.

Yakushimaru is terrific as Hoshi evolving from slightly jaded but largely naïve kid into full-fledged gangster and finally we’re not really sure what. She also plays some powerful scenes with Yuki Kazamatsuri as Sandaiji, the profoundly damaged femme fatale.

There is something appealingly grungy about SS and MG. This is not a slick video-game-style gore fest. It is street-wise and world-weary, but with a sugary pop idol soundtrack. Nor does it glamorize the violence it inexorably leads up to (despite spawning the catch-word “kaikan” with Hoshi’s big gun-down). Innocence is lost in Sōmai’s film—and it’s a darned shame, but life goes on. Highly recommended for students and connoisseurs of misunderstood cult cinema, Sailor Suit and Machine Gun screens this Tuesday (11/8) at Japan Society as the launch of their Kadokawa series—and it is guaranteed to make happier viewing than anything on television that depressing night.