Japan
India Lewis
Fifty Sounds is translator Polly Barton’s first novel, conceived as part of Fitzcarraldo’s annual essay prize. The book begins with listed Japanese words or phrases (katekanas), translated into poetic English, setting the reader up for the central conceit of the book – vignettes each under the heading of one of these katekanas. These katakana introductions are elegant and often funny (for example: “koro-koro: the sound your teensy little identity makes as it goes spinning across the floor”), offering not just a literal translation but a whimsical one, weaving this into the proceeding text. Read more ...
Abigail Young
February 2020: an item a long way down the agenda of the nightly news caused me to remark, fairly casually, “I wonder if that will affect me”. I had already heard about Covid-19, the new virus emerging from China; now it was spreading into places where I earned my living. I was beginning to worry.For the last 20 years or so I have been leader of a wonderful chamber orchestra in Japan, Orchestra Ensemble Kanazawa. It is a 50% job and I swing backwards and forwards between the Far East and London six or seven times a year, enjoying a richly varied life on Read more ...
graham.rickson
Yasujirō Ozu’s The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice and Tokyo Story were released in 1952 and 1953 respectively. Tokyo Story regularly features in critics' Top 10 lists and was voted Best Film of all time in a 2012 poll of film directors in Sight & Sound magazine. The two films sit well together as a pair, each one a perceptive examination of human relationships set in a rapidly changing post-war Japan.Tokyo Story still packs a powerful punch, this tale of a retired couple visiting their self-obsessed urban offspring unfolding with piercing accuracy. Watching it after a gap of some years, I Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Werner Herzog’s appearance in The Mandalorian paid for this deadpan, documentary-like slice of extreme Japanese life, suggesting how the director’s amusingly doomy Teutonic persona now dominates his own cinema.Family Romance is a real company which takes Japan’s cultural ease with simulacra – from reconstructed historic houses to plastic models of food – to its emotional limit, faking family members and friends to order. Boss Yuichi Ishii plays a version of himself, employed to be the long absent dad of 12-year-old Mahiro (pictured below left with Ishii). In between replacing a drunken father Read more ...
Charlie Stone
Keiichiro Hirano’s A Man has all the trappings of a gripping detective story: a bereaved wife, a dead man whose name belongs to someone else, mysterious coded letters, a lawyer intent on uncovering the truth. Together with a wilfully understated title, however, these features belie a deeply thoughtful novel whose mystery premise gives way to an examination of the most profound questions of identity and artistic creation. In a work so rooted in Japanese cultural history, the questions posed by the author become distinctly literary, moving ultimately to address the very practice of novel- Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
There is a memorable scene in Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses (1969), in which a group of stoned hippies and cross-dressers force each other, one-by-one, to walk the length of a line of tape that runs along the floor. Those who await their turn are seen crouched below, their flailing arms beckoning the walker down from their imagined tightrope. When they fall, as they inevitably and willingly do, they are punished – with the forced removal of their clothes.This unveiling of the naked body is a symbol for exposure, a metaphor for a film that seeks to shed light on “ Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: St Matthew Passion The Choir of King’s College Cambridge, Academy of Ancient Music/Sir Stephen Cleobury (King’s College Cambridge)Bach Collegium Japan/Masaaki Suzuki (BIS)Both Masaaki Suzuki and the late lamented Sir Stephen Cleobury have recorded Bach's St Matthew Passion before. I struggled to choose between these two new versions, so thought it best to include both. Overall timings for both sets are, amazingly, just a few seconds apart, though BIS manage to squeeze Suzuki’s version onto just two discs. His account was taped under studio conditions in Japan last April, and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It may offer veteran French star Catherine Deneuve as substantial and engaging a role as she has enjoyed in years, but the real surprise of The Truth is that it’s the work of Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda. The director, whose Shoplifters took the Palme d’Or at Cannes two years ago, has made a distinctive move away from his native environment – and, no less importantly, language: apart from a few scenes played in English, this is a French-language piece – in a film that catches the tone and nuances of French cinema with a finesse that’s as delightful as it is convincing.Occasionally it feels Read more ...
David Nice
Eyes watering, heart thumping, hands clenched: no, not The Thing, but a spontaneous reaction to the opening of Bach's St John Passion in the urgent hands of Masaaki Suzuki. How his Bach Collegium oboes seared with their semitonal clashes while bass lines throbbed with pain, before the chorus added a different, supernatural turn of the screw. Immediate indeed, but this Passion was never too fast, only continuous in its drama so that even the chorales, with every word illuminated as Bach so expressively set it, hit home like a Greek chorus reacting to the immediate situation rather than as the Read more ...
Owen Richards
He's one of Japan's foremost directors, and if you’ve witnessed one of his films before, you know what to expect from a Takashi Miike yakuza film. High-octane, boundary pushing fun from first frame to last. And that’s exactly what First Love is.The plot is simultaneously complicated and simple. The ambitious but hapless Kase plans on stealing drugs from his own yakuza boss and blame it on the triads. This involves his cop accomplice killing Monica, an escort prone to hallucinations. But when a young boxer, Leo, steps in to save Monica, the whole plan starts to fall apart.What follows is an Read more ...
David Nice
Not long after noon on Sunday, strange bells began ringing. In just 11 bars, Bach summons pairs of flutes, oboes and violas da gamba against pizzicato strings and continuo to tintinnabulate against the alto's recitative lines about a "vibrating clang" to "pierce our marrows and our veins". These hallucinatory sounds and harmonies could have been composed yesterday. Instead they're at the service of a 1727 lamentation mourning the death of a princess.That you can find such moments of sheer astonishment in just about every Bach cantata - there is another towards the end of "Laß, Fürstin, laß Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
When Sight & Sound compiled its “Greatest Documentaries of All Time” list five years ago, Kazuo Hara’s The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On came in at number 23 – proof, some three decades on from its 1987 release, that this remarkable film had stayed in the minds of filmmakers and critics alike. Its rerelease now by Second Run in a new director-approved HD remaster offers the chance to reappraise a groundbreaking work, one whose powerful – and undeniably strange – impact has in no way diminished over the years: it continues to shine an unexpected light both on Japanese society and on the Read more ...