Hige vs. Otaku

Tokyo Sonata is about a modern Japanese family that’s falling apart. Sasaki, the father and patriarch, is made redundant at the beginning of the film and spends much of it hiding his unemployment to his dutiful wife, Megumi. She presents an image of domestic perfection going about her duties as a mother and wife with a diligent grace, unquestioning of the authority her husband exerts over the household. Her resolution in this role is shaken, however, as the family she works so hard to maintain rapidly begins to unravel.

Their son Kenji is a quiet, slightly awkward child with a very adult ethical sense. He gets caught passing a manga anthology around in class and is scolded by his teacher, only to respond with the accusation that he previously saw the teacher hiding a porno manga while pretending to work. This makes him a hero to his classmates, stunning the teacher into silence, but ultimately serves to demonstrate how his maturity sets him apart in a school environment. He finds an outlet in piano lessons, taught by a beautiful divorcee who discovers a prodigious talent in his musical ability, but one that’s stifled by his father’s insecure suppression. Sasaki tries desperately to enforce the power he once exerted but without the security of knowing he can provide for his detainees, and this leads to pride-driven outbursts that breaks the already-tenuous relationships he has with other members of the family. The cast sound very archetypal and superficially they are – right down to the rebellious elder son who decides to join the military to protect the family in ways he feels his father is failing to do. Yet the performances have such a natural grace that rather than being clumsy stereotypes they seem real and genuine.

The film itself glides along in a very staid, Japanese way and we’re introduced to the instability of these roles, particularly Sasaki and his wife, with convincing ease. There’s a scene where Sasaki comes home, having walked the streets to waste away the hours and maintain the pretence being employed, to find his wife asleep on the couch. There’s a brief, detached exchange between the two and Sasaki goes to bed, leaving Megumi still half asleep on the couch. She holds out her hands to be pulled up and after realising there’s no one there to help her she symbolically keeps her hands raised, asking the world to, ‘pull her up’. She has another scene later in the film where she shops around for a new car and is shown a very sensible people carrier only to be lured away by a sporty convertible. But rather than this being cliché Kyoko Koizumi imbues her role with a naive curiosity that makes Megumi more listless about her lack of experience rather than being on the verge of a crazed midlife crisis. These restrained performances foster a verisimilitude that I was completely enamoured with. They overcame the rigidly traditional social roles presented and gave the characters a real sense of humanity.

Which leads me to one of the most resiliently excellent things about this film – its depiction of Tokyo as an actual city. I think our excessive anime watching paints a very disingenuous picture of Japan; everything is a domestic ideal or a dystopian nightmare, all built around vaguely recognisable cultural signifiers. Tokyo Sonata is the first example of a convincingly real, modern Tokyo I’ve seen in a fictional work. You get a proper sense of its tiny claustrophobic suburbs, of its decaying city streets and plain-clothed school children. It doesn’t romanticise or criticise any of it, it merely uses the real world as-is without a hint of stylisation. I can’t describe how refreshing this is to watch. People often use film, literature etc to gain a window into cultures and societies they’d otherwise never experience firsthand and most of the Japanese fiction I’ve experienced rarely gives you this with any purity. You often get a very definitive sense of Japan and its society, but it’s so wrapped up in magic realism, idealisation or straight fantasy that a solid factual depiction hardly ever happens. Tokyo Sonata is a very potent remedy to this and I’d say, for folk like us, it’s worth seeing purely on this merit.

But there’s more to it than that. Tokyo Sonata isn’t necessarily an outstanding film – there’s a Dramatic Twist towards the end that somewhat buggers the careful tone employed up to that point – but there’s something about it that makes me want to recommend it to those interested in Japan as a real country rather than a setting for crazy sci-fi wank fantasies. It has a couple of bumps in the road, but as a critique of Tokyo and Japanese society it feels so vital and profane. There’s also an amazing sense of humour bubbling beneath the weightiness – one that enhances an already-masterful handle on pathos. Definitely worth watching for those who fancy a break from their usual anime-based escapism.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 1st, 2009 at 6:58 pm and is filed under Film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.