Aruitemo aruitemo

Hirokazu Kore-eda  (2008)

Still Walking is a true cinematic epiphany for me – a Japanese film to engage with.  The storyline and timeframe could hardly be simpler:  a family reunion in suburban Yokohama, the action beginning mid-morning on a burningly hot day and extending over the next twenty-four hours.  The picture is miniature in terms of physical and thematic scope but its psychological acuity and richness are a wonder; and the U certificate belies its emotional rigours.  Still Walking is on extended run at BFI as an illustration of the continuing influence in Japanese cinema of Yasujiro Ozu, nearly half a century after his death.  This new film is being presented as a homage to Ozu and to Tokyo Story in particular – but the people in Still Walking are a much more satisfying blend of individual and generational characteristics (the latter seem to dominate in Tokyo Story).  Hirokazu Kore-eda’s picture also brings to mind, and far surpasses, a Hollywood treatment of apparently similar material, Robert Redford’s Ordinary People.  In that film, the death by drowning of a favoured older son is supposed to explain almost single-handedly the relationships of his younger brother, mother and father.  Still Walking is much more convincing.  Here too the elder son has died:  Kore-eda makes clear that tensions already existed within the Yokoyama family but were intensified by the death, which occurred some years ago and which the gathering commemorates.   At the end of lunch, the father and his surviving son are left alone together.  We’ve already been made aware of the animosity between them and the father now puts down his reading matter as if the inevitable can be delayed no longer.  But, of course, it is:  there are a couple of fractious exchanges but things are never talked out and resolved.

The observation in Still Walking is incisive and perfectly judged from the very start.  Before anything appears on the screen, we hear a scratching sound.  It’s a kitchen knife:  the image that follows shows an elderly woman preparing food with a younger one.  The older woman is Toshiko, the younger her daughter Chinami, who’s come with her husband and two children to the family get-together.  We soon learn that Toshiko is well aware that people think that, because she’s always been a housewife, she’s never had a proper job.  We also immediately see that she discreetly despises the culinary cluelessness of her relatively modern and educated daughter.  Chatting to Chinami, Toshiko grumbles, in advance of their arrival, about the new family of her son Ryota:  his schoolteacher wife Yukari and Atsushi, Yukari’s son from a previous marriage (her first husband died), whom Toshiko calls ‘the unsmiling prince’.  Later on, when Toshiko and Ryota are on their own together, the mother slags off Chinami and her husband.   (Kore-eda is spot on about the duplicity of shared confidences within a family.)   There’s plenty of room at the parents’ house and would be even more if Toshiko and her husband were willing to throw out stuff they no longer use.  Chinami has ideas about her and her own brood moving in.  Toshiko doesn’t want to argue about this so she just ignores it.

Toshiko’s husband Kyohei is a retired doctor, who worked at a local clinic.  Ryota, a picture restorer, is currently between jobs – a fact that must be concealed from his parents, who are already disappointed in him professionally.  (At lunch, Chinami makes a clumsy attempt to cheer everyone up by announcing that she recently read a newspaper article that referred to people in Ryota’s line of work as ‘paint doctors’.)  For much of the time during the visit, Kyohei sits alone – and supposedly working – in his study, in a vain bid to convince his family that his professional standing is undiminished by encroaching old age.  The way in which this dislikeable old man – he’s most comfortable being scathing about other people, and to an audience – wants to cut himself off from the gathering but remain the centre of its respectful attention is extremely believable.  So too the suggestion that his and Toshiko’s sniping at each other is essential to their marriage.

Our awareness that the Yokoyama family gathering is missing one member and why it’s taking place emerge through conversation – there’s no sudden shock revelation.   Junpei drowned in the sea twelve years ago.  He lost his own life by swimming out to save a teenage boy who’d got into difficulties in the water.  The idea of trying to make a convivial event of the anniversary may seem odd to Western eyes but it seems that a memorial day of this kind is common in Japan (when a sushi delivery man arrives, he brings a gift to the family to mark the occasion).   A less conventional part of the Yokoyamas’ annual ritual is to invite to part of these proceedings the young man whom Junpei saved from drowning.   (I’ve forgotten this character’s name, which doesn’t appear in the BFI note or on Wikipedia or on IMDb.  I’ll call him Boudu for the sake of brevity.)  His appearance is one of the most upsetting episodes in Still Walking.  Desperately grinning and sweating, horribly overweight, Boudu hasn’t a lot upstairs or a proper job.  As he’s offering a prayer of thanks to Junpei, the usually solemn Atsushi can’t help sniggering at Boudu’s dirty socks.  When he clambers up from prayer, he loses his balance; after he’s taken his leave, the family remark with disgust the sweat marks he’s left on the floor.  Ryota, partly to reinforce his own negative feelings about his family, makes some effort to accentuate the positive about Boudu but he knows it’s a hopeless task.   The more Boudu is confirmed in the family’s minds as – in the father’s words – ‘useless trash’, the more secure the Yokoyamas can feel in their furious resentment of what he caused twelve years ago.  Watching this scene, I felt it was too much.  In retrospect, I think Kore-eda was right, and honest, to make it so unpleasant.   Later on, Ryota asks Toshiko why she continues to invite Boudu to the memorial event and she tells him that she wants someone else to feel bad.  ‘You’re cruel’, says Ryota, with a note of fear in his voice – a charge his mother matter of factly denies.

The complexity of Toshiko’s cruelty – you can hardly condone her inflicting punishment in this way but you understand why she’s compelled to do it – is typical of Still Walking.    So too are the very credible dynamics in the relationships of Ryota, Yukari and Atsushi – especially Yukari’s different partnerships with her husband and son.  When they stop in a café en route to the family home, there’s an exchange between Ryota and Atsushi which gets across the distance between them in a striking, oblique way – and a sense that the boy, so young when his own father died, has already developed an emotional hardness that’s a mystery to his stepfather.  They have a conversation about a rabbit, kept as a pet at Atsushi’s school; Ryota asks why the boy laughed when the rabbit died.  Atsushi says it was because the teacher had them write letters to the dead animal, which he knew was ridiculous.  When, later in the day, the pair visit Junpei’s grave with Toshiko and she pours water on the stone and talks to her dead son about keeping cool in such hot weather, you watch Atsushi’s face and know what he’s thinking.  Late in the evening, each member of the family takes their turn in the bathroom; when Ryota explains to Toshiko that he and Atsushi usually take separate baths she tells him they should bathe together and they do.   This sequence is extraordinarily well done in the completely unstressed way that it suggests both an unaccustomed closeness between the pair, and seems to show them as brothers – we’re overwhelmingly aware of Ryota as a son at this stage – as much as man and boy.

There follows an even finer scene when all three of Ryota, Yukari and Atsushi are getting ready for bed.   Yukari talks to Atsushi about how she and the boy’s dead father will always be part of him, he asks ‘What about Ryo?’, and she says that Ryota will become part of him too.  When Ryota joins them in the bedroom and asks what they’re talking and laughing about, Atsushi tells him.  Ryota asks how he’ll become part of the boy – ‘Through your toes – through your belly button?’ – and makes Atsushi laugh.  The movement in this scene – from Ryota’s relative exclusion from what’s going on between his wife and stepson to sharing in their private jokes, becoming part of the relationship, as all three lie on different parts of the bed, is beautiful.  In fact, everything about the bedtime preparation sequences is masterly:  Ryota has to decide whether to wear the T-shirt he packed or the pyjamas his mother has bought for him.  When Yukari is quietly distressed that Toshiko hasn’t bought pyjamas for Atsushi too, Ryota reassures her:  his mother had put three toothbrushes out.

Kore-eda is very good at conveying the changing tempo of the gathering and at connecting, in an unemphatic way, its emotional weather with the heat of the day.  Chinami and her boisterous, jolly family go home before nightfall.  At first there’s a palpable relaxation in the meal that follows – a sense, in the relative cool of the evening and with the volume of the house turned down (Chinami’s affable, feckless husband Nobuo makes as much noise as their kids, Satsuki and Mutsu), that most of a fundamentally painful occasion has now been got through.  Toshiko especially appears relieved – she eats greedily and chatters easily.   Then the conversation turns to favourite songs and Toshiko asks Ryota to put on the stereo (that’s what it still is) ‘Blue Light, Yokohama’, a pop ballad c 1970.   As Kyohei chunters derision of his wife’s lowbrow musical tastes (‘I take her to classical concerts and she snores through them’), she hums along to the antique 45 RPM in what seems blissful nostalgia. Later on, when Kyohei is taking his bath and Toshiko, from the other side of the frosted glass partition, is laying out his towel, she reminds him that she recalls ‘Blue Light, Yokohama’ playing when she discovered him with another woman.  This raises the question of why, if it evokes painful memories, Toshiko likes the song.  Kore-eda doesn’t provide a clear answer:  I understood Toshiko to be attached to it both because it sounds lovely to her – its loveliness counters its associations – and because, as we learn in her treatment of Boudu, Toshiko understands the importance of continuing to put yourself and others through the wringer.   (Music in Still Walking is used sparingly but effectively – as well as the pop song, there’s a pleasingly discreet guitar score by Gontiti.)

Kore-eda is tenacious:  he sticks with an element that looks destined to be predictable so that it moves beyond cliché.   In an early scene we see Kyohei taking his morning constitutional and meeting one of his neighbours, an old woman.  They talk about the enervating heat; the woman says she has a feeling her time is nearly up – she wants the elderly doctor to be there when she dies.  ‘I’ll have to outlive you then’, he jokes.  This is the kind of conversation early in a film that rarely counts for nothing but, when the payoff comes here, it’s not quite what you expect.  The old woman phones late in the evening to say she’s ill.  Kyohei tells her that he can’t help her and that she needs to be treated in hospital.  We’re reminded of the circumstances in which he met the woman earlier in the day, how pleased he was then that she continued to respect his professional status.  An ambulance arrives and the neighbours watch as the old woman is taken into it.  (Ryota watches too; Kyohei, still relying on insulting the nearest target to keep his horrors at bay, tells his son he looks ridiculous standing there in pyjamas.)   There are yellow butterflies at the cemetery where Toshiko, Ryota and Atsushi visit Junpei’s grave; the mother tells an old wives’ tale that these are white butterflies that change colour to cheat death and live another summer.  Late in the evening, a yellow butterfly flies into the house and Toshiko is distressed – she thinks it may be the soul of her dead son and she doesn’t want to let it go.   Kyohei derides her; Ryota carefully captures the butterfly, looks hard at his mother and says he’s going to release it.  We glimpse it flying into the dark outside.  This may sound trite but the scene is extended enough to give it an emotional arc that transcends triteness.  There’s a further reference to the old wives’ tale, brief and touching, in a return visit to the cemetery which forms an epilogue to Still Walking.

The sequences of various individuals or groups of members of the family walking are perhaps the most expansive example of a recurring element that accumulates power.  Again, this walking-along-the-road-of-life-and-death-together may sound obvious but Kore-eda always find something new to express through it and the motif becomes essential rather than repetitive.  When Ryota, Yukari and Atsushi climb the long flight of steps as they first approach the parents’ house, the man leads the way, carrying a melon.  The boy, holding a parasol, takes up the rear.   In between is the woman, laden with bags – she eventually asks Ryota to carry one.  I assume this is as much an illustration of the persistence of patriarchy in Japanese society (I was struck too by the order in which the family take their baths:  ladies last) as a description of these particular individuals or their relationships with each other.  Even so, the quick, lean Ryota’s striding on ahead is further evidence, following his conversation with Yukari on the train, that he sees this visit to his parents as his personal problem and tends to overlook the difficulties that it presents to his wife and her son.  Shortly before they leave the next day, Ryota and Atsushi go for a walk to the beach with Kyohei.   (The conversation is friendlier than it has been up to this point; there’s talk of father and son going to a ball game together.)  Kore-eda shoots their progress down the flight of steps in a way that stresses how physically rigorous for Kyohei his daily walk is getting to be.  As they continue towards the sea shore, Atsushi runs on ahead, Kyohei comes next, Ryota follows.  This may be because he doesn’t want to expose his father’s inability to keep up with the younger generations or because part of Ryota is resisting taking part in this family promenade (or both).  In the postscript to the film, which takes place some years after the twenty-four hours at the parents’ home, Ryota, Yukari and Atsushi – with the girl child that Ryoto and Yukari have had in the meantime – visit the family grave, then walk off down the hill from the cemetery.  It’s an essentially happy, hopeful sight but we notice too how the foursome pair off.  The mother and her son follow the daughter and the father who isn’t the son’s biological father.

I could read the actors in Still Walking in a way I’ve never been able to do before in a Japanese film and Hiroshi Abe, who plays Ryota, was crucial in helping me do this.  This strikingly tall, handsome actor is playing the pivotal character:  although Kore-eda doesn’t make this too emphatically clear, Ryota is the picture’s central consciousness.  Part of Hiroshi Abe’s job here is to draw the audience in – a Japanese audience included – but there’s no point pretending that his relatively Western looks didn’t matter in how successfully he opened up the story for me.  The experience of getting inside this film makes me uncomfortable in a new way about my resistance to Japanese acting.  Because Abe could almost be mistaken for a European or American I worry that resistance has been based on Asiatic physiognomy rather than Japanese acting style.  Whatever, the effect of Abe’s performance was liberating and I was soon getting much more out of nearly the whole cast, in which Kirin Kiki (Toshiko) and Yui Natsukawa (Yukari) are, with Abe, outstanding.   Kiki’s Toshiko and her home seem organically linked; Natsukawa is marvellous in the way she expresses the pressure Yukari is under to remain polite to her husband’s family.  Abe conveys Ryota’s immaturity strongly but subtly; and the extent to which this younger son grows up in the course of the story – he shares with his father that quality of wanting to be noticed even when he’s sulking – is highly persuasive.   I found the relatively singsong readings of You as Chinami harder to connect with the words she spoke (the dialogue is consistently excellent all round) but she suggests very well a woman who’s both kooky and mercenary.   All three children – Hotaru Namoto, Ryoga Hayashi and, especially, Shohei Tanaka as the thoughtful Atsushi – are excellent.  So too are Yoshio Harada as Kyohei, Kazuya Takahashi as Chinami’s husband, and whoever plays Boudu.  The cast is completed by Haruko Kato as the ailing neighbour and Susumu Terajima as the chattily respectful sushi delivery man.

Kore-eda uses a voiceover only once in Still Walking – as a bridge between the end of the main action and the some-years-later coda in the cemetery – and it’s at this point that the film wobbles.   On the bus taking them back to the station, Ryota recalls the name of a famous sumo wrestler which he and his mother have been trying to remember since Boudu’s bulk put sumo in their minds the previous afternoon.  Ryota muses that he always remembers things too late.  As Toshiko and Kyohei walk back to their house from the bus stop she remembers the name too (although – a good touch – she doesn’t tell her husband what it is:  this is secret information for her son).   When Ryota’s voiceover then announces that his father died three years later (and they never did get to a ball game together) and his mother shortly afterwards (and she never did get the ride in Ryota’s car she looked forward to), the words chime too neatly with what Ryota said on the bus.  The effect of suddenly introducing a new type of narration – a voice from outside the story, even though it’s Ryota’s voice – is to imply an autobiographical element to the material (confirmed by Kore-eda in interviews about the film) that is unnecessary.  Yet although this may be a misjudgment in relation to the dramatic scheme, it made me like Still Walking all the more:  by implicating himself in this way, the director makes clear that the film is not objective – because he’s still caught up in feelings about his own family life.   The film’s title translates from the Japanese as ‘Walking, Walking’ (this is the Japanese title of the ‘Blue Light, Yokohama’ song).   That title implies a perhaps pointless continuation.  The English one gets across better the expansiveness of Kore-eda’s material.  It shows how much there is to be gained by surviving and moving forward, how much you can be held in the past even as you do.

15 January 2010