Dare mo shiranai
Hirokazu Kore-eda (2004)
International accolades for his latest film Shoplifters – the Palme d’Or at Cannes, the César for Best Foreign Language Film, Oscar and BAFTA nominations in the same category, and plenty more – have earned Hirokazu Kore-eda a well-deserved BFI retrospective. It’s an opportunity for this viewer to catch up with his work pre-Still Walking (2008). Nobody Knows makes clear that family life and relationships, the dominant theme of Kore-eda’s recent work, were no less a preoccupation back in 2004.
The film starts on a train, where the camera pays attention to two passengers, a woman and a pre-adolescent boy, and their luggage. Keiko Fukushima (You) and her son Akira (Yuya Yagira) are en route to their new home in a Tokyo apartment block. On arrival there, Keiko explains to the landlord (Kazumi Koshida) and his wife (Yukiko Okamoto) that, with her husband working away, it’ll be just her and twelve-year-old Akira in residence. The landlord is reassured: younger children, he says, are noisy and cause complaints from other tenants. Once they’re on their own in the poky flat, Keiko and Akira open their luggage. Out of one suitcase emerges a little girl, Yuki (Momoko Shimizu), and out of another a little boy, Shigeru (Hiei Kimura), aged around five and eight respectively. Kore-eda cuts to a railway station, where a fourth child, Kyoko (Ayu Kitaura), perhaps ten or eleven years old, is making her way independently to the new family home.
Shigeru’s and Yuki’s unorthodox method of travel to the flat serves to foreshadow their living conditions there but Kyoko’s journey doesn’t: their mother doesn’t allow any of these three of her children out of doors. Akira does go out but not to school. (When he queries this, Keiko assures him that plenty of celebrities never had an education.) Each of the four children has a different father though the identity of Yuki’s is uncertain. The husband working away is a fiction but Keiko is herself soon doing that. She leaves her eldest in charge of the other kids and some, but not much, money for housekeeping. While she’s away, Akira unsuccessfully approaches for financial help a couple of his mother’s ex-lovers (Yuichi Kimura and Kinichi Endo), possible candidates for paternity of Yuki. After a few weeks, Keiko returns with presents for the children but she tells Akira she now has a new boyfriend and soon goes off again. This time she doesn’t come back. On her birthday, Yuki seems to expect Keiko to return and wants to go to the railway station to meet her; Akira takes his sister to the station where they wait for their mother in vain. Akira promises Yuki that one day he’ll take her on the Tokyo Monorail to watch aeroplanes take off at Haneda Airport.
Akira makes friends with a couple of boys his own age, video games fanatics who, for a short while, come to the flat to play their games with him. He falls out with the boys when they dare him to steal from a mini-mart, which he refuses to do – though he does come to an arrangement with an employee there (Ryo Kase), who regularly supplies him with leftover sushi. Akira also takes his younger siblings to play in a public park, where they meet Saki (Hanae Kan), a secondary school student from a middle-class family, who plays truant in order to avoid bullying. The Fukushimas, especially Akira, offer welcome friendship to Saki and their cramped flat is a kind of safe house for her during school hours. But with no means of paying bills Keiko’s children soon find the phone, electricity, gas and water turned off, and have to use the park facilities to keep themselves clean. Eager to help but unwilling to involve her own parents, Saki gets hold of some cash by going with a man to a karaoke lounge but a shocked Akira refuses to accept the money. This seems to be the end of their friendship until he renews contact with Saki in terrible circumstances. Following an accident in the flat, Yuki dies and Akira is determined to keep his promise to her. With Saki’s help, he buys Yuki’s favourite chocolates to place beside her in her suitcase coffin. He and Saki then take a short train journey with the suitcase. In a field near the airport, Akira buries the suitcase in a grave that he and Saki dig with their own hands.
Kore-eda makes clear in text at the start that the Nobody Knows derives from a true story but that the individual characters are his inventions. The real-life events in question, referred to on Wikipedia as ‘the Sugamo child-abandonment incident’, took place in Tokyo in 1988 and involved a mother’s leaving her underage children, each one of whom had a different father, to fend for themselves. (The children weren’t identified by name: the Japanese media referred to them as ‘Child A’, ‘Child B’, etc.) If the Wikipedia summary is accurate, the Sugamo events were considerably grimmer than this fictionalised version. When authorities eventually found the five children, three were malnourished and two were dead. Of the latter, one child had died soon after birth, some four years previously, and the other as a result of injuries inflicted by the friend of her older brother.
Kore-eda’s humanism is rarely sentimental but reliably benign: he likes to see the best in people. In Nobody Knows, he lets Keiko off lightly enough for Derek Elley’s Variety review, used as the BFI programme note, to describe the character as ‘loving but wacky’ and ‘a ditzy, incurable romantic’. As the film presents her, Elley’s interpretation isn’t as ludicrous as it might sound. There are strengths to Kore-eda’s calm, matter-of-fact style. It helps demonstrate how a way of life, however warped and extraordinary, becomes, through routine, normal life to those living it, especially if they’ve known or can remember no other kind of existence. His account of the children’s experience is well observed and the score, written and played by the Japanese acoustic guitar duo Gontiti, serves the narrative admirably. Poised between zany and plaintive, the music also hints, however, at the limitations of Kore-eda’s approach. He wants to show the sadness of the Fukushimas’ circumstances and the children’s often eccentric charm. He succeeds in doing so yet the lack of a sense of outrage on his part feels like a moral deficit.
This isn’t the only problem with the film. At 143 minutes, it’s not only actually a bit longer than any of the other seven Kore-edas I’ve seen but feels considerably longer (each of the others is around two hours). For well over half its running time, Nobody Knows concentrates on domestic detail so minutely that it’s soon a struggle to stay interested. When a director spends much of a film majoring in quasi-documentary description, the eventual shift into more conventional dramatic incident and shaping can seem forced – and that’s what happens here. The introduction of Saki is the first sign of this: Kore-eda has written her as a kind of kindred spirit but the reasons for her isolation are, besides the Fukushima children’s, vague and generic. Yuki has her fatal accident while Akira is out playing baseball (with a team of kids that finds itself a man short and whose coach invites him to join in) – an awfully ironic (and pat) conjunction of events that belongs in a drama less wedded to the scrupulous verisimilitude that has seemed to be this one’s hallmark.
A more persistent issue is the landlord’s incredible incuriosity about his tenants – who also appear to be his only tenants (just as well, when it emerges the family had to leave their previous accommodation because high-spirited Shigeru made such s racket). When he bumps into Akira with one or more of the other children, the boy explains that they’re cousins on a flying visit and the landlord repeatedly accepts this. When Akira has fallen behind with the rent, the landlord’s wife goes to the flat, where she finds an assortment of kids and domestic chaos. There’s no follow-up to this. The couple seem to represent society more largely – they’re a means of demonstrating that nobody knows, or cares, about the Fukushimas. It’s possible the landlord’s disregard is an accurate reflection of how the Sugamo case was able to happen yet it isn’t convincing within the supposedly realistic framework that Kore-eda has devised.
Seeing Nobody Knows for the first time in the light of Shoplifters increases admiration of the latter, which successfully fuses similar themes of social concern and insight into the dynamics of a singular family whose lives are hidden from view, and balances naturalistic observation with dramatic incident. It’s good to realise how Kore-eda’s storytelling gifts have developed over the years. One talent he seems always to have had, though, is for sensitive and highly effective direction of children, and Yuya Yagira’s portrait of Akira is one of the very best. (Only twelve himself when filming began, Yagira was fourteen when, in 2004, he became the youngest-ever, as well as the first Japanese, winner of the Best Actor award at Cannes for this performance.) At the start, as Keiko rather proudly introduces him to the landlord, Akira is bright-eyed and socially assured. Later, he tells one of Yuki’s potential fathers there was a time when he and his siblings were separated and temporarily placed in care: as de facto head of the family now, Akira is determined that won’t happen again. The sense of determination never leaves him but his responsibilities gradually age and weary the boy. Yuya Yagira achieves, most naturally, a physical and a spiritual transformation.
4 April 2019
