Nobuhiko Obayashi left the building or, perhaps more appropriately, the house earlier this year. Diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in 2016, he outlived his prognosis by four years and managed to direct two of his longest feature films in that time. His final film,
Labyrinth of Cinema, premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival late last year and his penultimate,
Hanagatami, was released to acclaim in 2017 but has only now reached our shores thanks to Third Window.
It’s perhaps unsurprising that it took this long and more surprising that it has come to us at all, given the fact that only two of Obayashi’s features are available in the West – his debut,
House, available through Masters of Cinema, and
Making Of Dreams – a 2 ˝ hour documentary on the making of
Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, available as an extra on the Criterion release of that film. This is despite his popularity in his native Japan; in a 2009 poll of Kinema Junpo readers to determine the greatest Japanese films of all time, three of Obayashi’s films made the top 25. Only Akira Kurosawa himself had more. Interestingly, House didn’t make the top 200; those Obayashi films that did were
Exchange Students (#16),
Lonely Heart (#19),
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (#25),
The Rocking Horsemen (#64) and
Chizuko’s Younger Sister (#65).
Most viewers will therefore come to
Hanagatami with
House being their only prior experience with Obayashi’s work, and this is perhaps no bad thing. Obayashi initially intended for
Hanatagami, ostensibly an adaptation of Kazuo Dan’s 1937 novel, to be his debut but Toho would only go for House, which they saw as the more commercial option of the two.
Hanatagami opens with a quote, and we meet the young Toshihiko on top of a cliff overlooking raging waters. It’s black and white, the frame rate is as choppy as the seas. Obayashi obviously intends to evoke the silent film, Jean Epstein perhaps. Like House, Obayashi then uses every technique in the filmmaker’s arsenal, perhaps coming up with a few new ones along the way, over the rest of
Hanagatami’s running time. Whereas House was analog,
Hanagatami’s effects are very obviously digital. This might put some people off, as there is an element of Brechtian alienation with the artifice of the digital techniques; that is to say, it all looks obviously fake. Obayashi doesn’t care, and obviously hopes the audience doesn’t care either. I settled in quite quickly;
Hanagatami is not a film that requires realism, it’s a film about a time gone by, that may or may not be in the memory bank of the living – or the dead.
On the surface,
Hanagatami is about a group of young friends in the coastal town of Karatsu in the lead up to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Toshihiko lives with his aunt, whose husband died in Manchuria, and Mina, her younger sister through marriage, who is stricken with tuberculosis. He attends school where we meet Ukai, who likes to swim by moonlight and is seemingly burdened by having to live up to the memory of his older brother, and Kira, paralysed throughout childhood who has somewhat recovered but continues to live in relative hermitude, possessing a dishevelled, slightly sinister appearance and attitude. Kira has an odd relationship with his cousin, Chitose, who is Ukai’s girlfriend. Chitose’s friend, Akine, has a flirtatious attitude towards Toshihiko. This friendship group is challenged and unbalanced by Mina’s illness, the cultural attitudes of the society around them, and the drums of war past, present, and future that make them all acutely aware of their own mortality at even their young age.
Obayashi hasn’t cared about casting actors of the same age as their characters and, while some may be able to pass for teenagers, there’s a poignancy in seeing the characters played by actors of an age that they might not have the chance to reach, cut short by war – a glimpse into a future that they could have had. It’s not like he cares about realism in any other aspect.
War has always loomed large in Obayashi’s filmography; war is the reason that the aunt’s spirit in
House is unable to rest, an expansionist demi-god militarises schoolchildren in
School in the Crosshairs, children come of age in the lead up to the war in
Bound for the Fields, the Mountains, and the Seacoast, and
Hanagatami is the third entry in Obayashi’s late-career informal anti-war trilogy, preceded by
Casting Blossoms to the Sky and
Seven Weeks. While Obayashi had wanted to make
Hanagatami some decades before, and in some ways
Bound for the Fields, the Mountains, and the Seacoast is a dry run for his passion project, it is probably no coincidence that Obayashi’s anti-war trilogy coincided with the national debate over Shinzo Abe’s reinterpretation of Article 9 of the Japanese constitution. If
House was about the death of innocence in the coming of age of seven young girls,
Hanagatami is about the death of innocence of a nation. For those who came of age in the interwar years – for Japan, between the invasion of Manchuria and the attack on Pearl Harbor - was there ever a state of innocence? The spectre of death always loomed, corrupting and distorting the frame of Obayashi’s phantasmagorical vision of Japan. Barely was there time to mourn those who had given their lives before more young lives were taken in the name of the old lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
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Third Window's release provides a Making Of and a truly excellent interview with Obayashi, that I mentioned above. He talks about his father, who was a doctor, the war years, his early years as a filmmaker and influences from the nouvelle vague and Roger Vadim's
Blood and Roses. Interestingly, he cites Shinji Somai's
Moving as his favourite film made by a filmmaker younger than him.
Whether it be from Third Window or any other label, I hope that
Hanagatami is the harbinger of more Obayashi releases.
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