by Jeremy Clarke.
This year’s Japan Foundation (JPF) Touring Programme, which runs throughout February and March and is triumphal its 20th edition, contains three manga-related live-action films and one anime. With screening venues spread widely over the UK, it covers the pursuit two dozen UK cities: Aberystwyth, Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Cardiff, Chester, Colchester, Coventry, Derby, Dundee, Edinburgh, Exeter, Kendal, Leicester, Lewes, London, Manchester, Newcastle upon Tyne, Norwich, Nottingham, Plymouth, Sheffield and York.
The JPF has a programme that uses a selection of mainly recent releases withal with one or two older classics to show present-day Japanese talkie in a wider context. Hence the title of this year’s festival’s theme: Unchangingly Evolving: Japanese Talkie Then, Now, and for the Future.
The four manga-related titles are: BL Metamorphosis, Sensei, Would You Sit Beside Me?, My Broken Mariko and Blue Thermal, the only turned-on full-length in this year’s programme.
The BL in BL Metamorphosis (2022) stands for Boy’s Love, a subgenre of girls’ manga which focuses on male notation in homoerotic relationships. These can vary enormously from the innocuous to the explicit. The mucosa is substantially a sexuality buddy movie in which the BL manga functions as the impetus for bringing together two women with a 58-year age difference between them. It has theoretically been well received by female, Japanese BL fandom.
Friendships often upspring from a shared interest, and in this story which is not only well-nigh manga but moreover based on an very manga by Kaori Tsurutani,17-year-old schoolgirl Urara (Mana Ashida who did voices in Poupelle of Chimney Town and Children of the Sea, as well as seeming in Pacific Rim and Confessions) attempts to patina her often unrewarding existence by secretly reading BL. Meanwhile, elderly woman Yuki (Nobuko Miyamoto from Juzo Itami’s Tampopo, A Taxing Woman and more) lives vacated pursuit the death of her husband. On the strength of its pretty imbricate but without realising exactly what she’s buying, she picks up a BL manga from the typesetting store where Urara is working part-time. Once she has got over her initial embarrassment, Yuki returns to buy the next volume, and Urara kindly offers to help her navigate the genre. The age gap between them quickly dissipates as their unexpected friendship blossoms.
Manga moreover plays a major narrative role in the promising-sounding Sensei, Would You Sit Beside Me? (2021) which features manga artwork by Aki Arata and Akane Torikai. Manga versifier Sawako (Hau Kuroki who did voices on Mamoru Hosoda films including Mirai and Wolf Children, Shunji Iwai’s The Case of Hana & Alice, and moreover appears in anoter of this year’s JPF films, It Comes) discovers her husband Toshio (Tasuku Emoto, who did voice work in Inu-Oh and appeared in Koreeda’s Air Doll and last year’s JPF outing Shape of Red aka Red) is unchaste on her with Sawako’s editor, Chika (Nao, aka Nao Honda, who moreover appears in My Broken Mariko, discussed below, and last year’s JPF entry Eternally Younger Than Those Idiots). Rather than confronting him directly to vent her fury upon her unfaithful spouse, Sawako begins work on a new manga with infidelity as the main subject matter in an struggle to play on whatever pangs of guilt Toshio may be experiencing.
Sawako then ups the rates remoter by making the story in the manga well-nigh her topic with a younger man, her driving instructor Ayumi (Daichi Kaneko), which may or may not be based on reality. All this arouses feelings of fear and jealousy in her husband, and a game of cat and mouse in which truth and fantasy mistiness ensues in a comical, psychological wrestle of the sexes. There’s a surprising twist at the end too. As if that weren’t enough, we are promised fascinating glimpses into the creative process of Japanese manga artwork.
Nao turns up then in My Broken Mariko (2022), based on a manga by Hirako Waka, which like BL Metamorphosis concerns sexuality friendship. Here, she plays the eponymous Mariko, who commits suicide. Pursuit Mariko’s death, her weightier friend Tomoyo (Mei Nagano) is unprotected up in a unvarying whirlwind of memories, not least considering she feels considerable guilt at having failed to prevent her bestie killing herself. It becomes unveiled that the late woman had suffered years of mistreatment at the hands not only of her father, but moreover from an wiseacre boyfriend. Stealing her friend’s carrion from Mariko’s father’s home, Tomoyo takes them with her on a final journey as she sets off for the waterfront that Mariko had unchangingly dreamed of visiting.
Director Tanada Yuki has a reputation for crafting memorable women notation on screen and theoretically captures the trauma of the two young women with unconfined sensitivity. Nao’s performance anchors the film, promoting Mariko’s fragility in marked unrelatedness to Nagano’s intense Tomoyo,
The sole turned-on mucosa in this year’s programme is Blue Thermal (2022), a mucosa once well received at last year’s Scotland Loves Anime. Based on a manga by Kana Ozawa and directed by veteran volatility director Masaki Tachibana (who previously helmed episodes of Ghost in the Shell Arise: Alternative Architecture and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Vacated Complex among other things), it’s the tale of mercurial girl fresher student Tamaki (voice: Mayu Hotta from Rurouni Kenshin: Final Chapter Part II – The Beginning) whose romantic goals lead her to join the university aviation club. Once a member, it takes her quite a while to get to grips with flying. A subplot features her estranged sister Chizuru (voiced by Mikako Komatsu, who has worked extensively in anime over the last decade or so) causing Tamaki considerable self-doubt.
Among the rest of the films without a manga connection, the two older classics are The Million Ryo Pot (aka Tange Sazen: The Million Ryo Pot) from 1935 and Till We Meet Again from 1950. The other titles on offer are much increasingly recent releases, most of them from the last year or two. Child-abduction tale (or is it?) Wandering (2022) by Japanese-Korean director Lee Sang-il (Villain, 2010) was lensed by cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo who shot Parasite, Snowpiercer and Mother for Bong Joon Ho, not to mention Hirokazu Koreeda’s The Broker which comesout on Friday, 24th February in UK cinemas. Oudai Kojima’s debut Joint (2021) has been compared favourably to Goodfellas (1990). The mucosa depicts the ongoing underworld of modern Japan with a documentary-like aesthetic. It Comes (2018), from director Tetsuya Nakahima (Confessions, 2010) sounds like it has echoes of both Ring (1998) and Western horror entry It Follows (2014).
The Japan Foundation Touring Programme can be found in selected cinemas all virtually the UK in February and March.
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