Tag Archives: japan society

JAPAN CUTS — THE MOLE SONG: UNDERCOVER AGENT REIJI

Reiji Kikukawa (Toma Ikuta) goes undercover in Takashi Miike’s way-over-the-top yakuza flick THE MOLE SONG

THE MOLE SONG: UNDERCOVER AGENT REIJI (MOGURA NO UTA SENNYU SOUSAKAN REIJI) (Takashi Miike, 2013)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Thursday, July 10, 6:00
Festival runs July 10-20
212-715-1258
www.subwaycinema.com
www.japansociety.org

Multigenre master and cult legend Takashi Miike kicks off the annual Japan Cuts: The New York Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema with the U.S. premiere of his wild and wacky yakuza comedy-thriller, The Mole Song: Undercover Agent Reiji. Adapted from Noboru Takahashi’s popular manga series Mogura no Uta, the film stars Toma Ikuta (Hanazakari no Kimitachi e) as Reiji Kikukawa, a goofy but dedicated virgin cop (think a Japanese Dudley Do-Right) who is fired by Chief Sakami (Mitsuru Fukikoshi) so he can go undercover with the dangerous Sukiya-kai gang and ultimately capture its leader, Shuho Todoroki (Koichi Iwaki). Dressed in flashy clothes and sporting a ridiculous cockatoo-like mop of red hair, Reiji is soon taken under the wing of drug-hating made man and butterfly enthusiast Masaya Hiura (Shinichi Tsutsumi), aka “Crazy Papillon”; doing fierce battle with the short, bald, diamond-toothed, cat-loving Itsei Nekozawa (Takashi Okamura) from the rival Hachinosu-kai clan; cozying up to blonde MDMA dealer Shun Tsukihara (Takayuki Yamada); and being hunted down by tattoo-covered motorcycle-riding assassin Kenta Kurokawa (Yusuke Kamiji). All the while, Reiji keeps bumping into fellow cop and potential love interest Junna Wakagi (Riisa Naka), usually at the most inopportune of moments.

Written by Kankuro Kudo — who wrote Miike’s Zebraman films and wrote and directed another Japan Cuts selection, Maruyama, the Middle Schooler — The Mole Song has fun going way over the top, from Yuji Hayashida’s splendid production design to Nobuyasu Kita’s stellar cinematography to the actors themselves, who must have had quite a hard time trying to keep a straight face so much of the time. Miike, who references such previous cult classics of his as Ichi the Killer and Audition, does veer off course as he tries to figure out how to end the film, as the laughs start coming fewer and farther between, and the relationship between Reiji and Junna turns into more of an afterthought, but The Mole Song is still a blast, filled with zany surprises and unpredictable plot twists. A copresentation with the fourteenth annual New York Asian Film Festival, The Mole is screening July 10 at 6:00 at Japan Society.

PROJECT IX — PLEIADES

Thrilling collaboration between Kuniko Kato, Megumi Nakamura, and Luca Veggetti concludes Japan Society’s sixtieth anniversary season (photo by Julie Lemberger)

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Friday, May 2, and Saturday, May 3, $30, 7:30 PM
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

There was something serendipitous about Japan Society’s presentation of Project IX — Pléïades on May 2, the North American premiere of this exciting collaboration between Japanese percussionist Kuniko Kato, Japanese dancer Megumi Nakamura, and Italian choreographer Luca Veggetti. The finale of the sixtieth anniversary season of the cultural institution’s performing arts program — “a benchmark signifying longevity and rebirth,” artistic director Yoko Shioya has pointed out — Pléïades begins slowly, as Nakamura assembles Kato’s percussion kit at front right, from pieces that had been placed around the set. Soon, Hiroyoshi Takishima’s video is projected onto a horizontal scrim set at an angle on the stage. Takishima’s film shows six performances by Kato side-by-side, as if she is her own band; in each one she is playing one of the six different parts of Greek-French composer’s Iannis Xenakis’s percussive score. As Kato lies down behind the screen and Nakamura moves ever-so-gracefully in front of it, the projection shoots onto the ceiling above the audience, resulting in long, narrow abstract images that seem to form visual representations of Xenakis’s thrilling experimental work; meanwhile, Nakamura’s enlarged shadow can be seen on the right wall, giving further emphasis and beauty to Veggetti’s choreography. Although these appear to be purposeful extensions of the performance, it turns out that they are accidental bonuses that have occurred because of the shape and size of Japan Society’s auditorium. (At a reception after the show, Veggetti confirmed that they were indeed serendipitous accidents that everyone involved gave their blessing to.) The four sections of Pléïades are followed by Xenakis’s Rebonds, in which Nakamura continues her elegant movement and Kato situates herself at her percussion kit, playing her drums with a visual splendor that melds beautifully with Nakamura. Project IX — Pléïades, which continues May 3, is a wonderful conclusion to Japan Society’s sixtieth performing arts season.

PROJECT IX — PLEIADES

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Friday, May 2, and Saturday, May 3, $30, 7:30 PM
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

As part of the sixtieth anniversary of Japan Society’s performing arts program, the institution is presenting the North American premiere of Project IX — Pléïades, a multimedia music/video/movement piece. The “IX” in the title does not represent the Roman numeral “9” but the letters “I” and “X,” the initials of innovative Romanian-born Greek-French composer and musical theorist Iannis Xenakis. The evening is a collaboration between Japanese percussionist Kuniko Kato, who has released such albums as Cantus and Kuniko Plays Reich; Japanese dancer and teacher Megumi Nakamura, who has performed around the world with Jiří Kylián’s Nederlands Dans Theater, her own Dance Sangra, and other companies; and Italian choreographer Luca Veggetti, who has previously created works for the New York City Ballet’s Choreographic Institute, the Spoleto Festival, the Ballet of the Rome Opera, and the Kirov Ballet at the Mariinsky and was the 2011 resident artistic director of Morphoses. Kato will play Xennakis’s 1988 Rebonds, a multiple percussion solo in two parts, while Nakamura will dance to Xenakis’s 1978 Pléïades, a work for six percussionists in four movements. (“Pléïades” refers to the seven daughters of Atlas in Greek myth as well as the star cluster in the constellation Taurus.) “Why Xenakis, and why our interest in Xenakis? Xenakis had a strong interest in Japanese culture, and in Japanese theater in particular — which I share, by the way,” Veggetti, who is married to Japanese artist Moe Yoshida and has worked with Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa on several projects, says in the above promotional video. “In particular about noh theater, which for him represented some kind of supreme form in terms of theatrical tradition, which conveyed his ideas about theater so exactly. And so we felt that because of this connection it was natural to build a project that hereditarily comes from Japan and that we’re performing here with Japanese performers.” The program will take place May 2 & 3 at 7:30; the May 2 performance will be followed by a reception with the artists.

RICHIE’S ELECTRIC EIGHT — THE BOLD AND THE DARING: SUMMER VACATION 1999

Three boys mourn the loss of a friend in different ways in Shusuke Kaneko’s SUMMER VACATION

GLOBUS FILM SERIES: SUMMER VACATION 1999 (SEN-KYUHYAKU-KYUJU-KYU-NEN NO NATSUYASUMI) (Shusuke Kaneko, 1988)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Thursday, March 13, $12, 7:00
Series runs March 13-29
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

The first part of Japan Society’s tribute to Ohio-born writer, critic, scholar, curator, and filmmaker Donald Richie, who died in February 2013 at the age of eighty-eight, consisted of five classic dramas from Japan’s cinematic elite (Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, Mitsuo Yanagimachi, and Hirokazu Kore-eda). “Richie’s Fantastic Five” is now being followed by “Richie’s Electric Eight: The Bold & the Daring,” comprising eight cutting-edge works by emerging filmmakers. The seventeen-day festival begins March 13 with a rare screening of Shusuke Kaneko’s gender-bending Summer Vacation 1999. Based on Moto Hagio’s shōjo manga The Heart of Thomas, the 1988 film takes place in a boarding school in the near future, as three friends, Kazuhiko (Tomoko Otakara), Naoto (Miyuki Nakano), and Norio (Eri Fukatsu), who are spending the summer alone in their all-boys boarding school, try to recover from the suicide of Yu (Eri Miyajima), who jumped off a cliff after being rejected by Kazuhiko. When a new student, Kaoru (Miyajima), shows up, looking and acting just like Yu, the other boys are forced to face their innermost fears and desires.

Gender identity, homoeroticism, and young love are at the heart of manga-based yaoi film

Beautifully shot in a lush, dreamy 1970s-style palette by Kenji Takama, Summer Vacation 1999 is a prime example of the Japanese yaoi, or boys love, subgenre, focusing on homoeroticism among adolescent boys. Kaneko, who had previously made a pair of Nikkatsu Roman Porno films and would go on to direct monster movies featuring Godzilla, Gamera, and Mothra as well as Death Note and its sequel, explores the students’ growing love and attraction for one another in desexualized yet fetishistic ways, especially in a tender scene in which one boy gives mouth-to-mouth CPR to another, while incorporating elements of the Japanese ghost story as Kaoru continues to evoke Yu. Kaneko also twists the Noh and Kabuki tradition of men performing all the roles, as the four characters are played by females. “One watches these young people, so young that a degree of androgyny is expected, and it is as though one is watching adolescence for the first time,” Richie wrote in his 1988 New Japanese Cinema report for Japan Society. “Given the entire nature of the endeavor, it cannot but help to occasionally teeter on the edge of kitsch (the production looks too French, the music is too Faure, the whole idea also has a flavor of outré) but it never falls in, is never sentimental, and manages to increase its beauty (and our wonder) to the very end.” Plus, the hairstyles are worth the price of admission all by themselves. Summer Vacation will be introduced by MoMA film curator emeritus Laurence Kardish and will be followed by a yaoi party with Ideal Orkestra in which guests are encouraged to dress androgynously. (The Globus Film Series tribute to Richie continues with such other eclectic works as Yoshitaro Nomura’s Chase, Kazuhiro Soda’s Campaign, and Shohei Imamura’s Profound Desire of the Gods.)

RICHIE’S FANTASTIC FIVE — KUROSAWA, MIZOGUCHI, OZU, YANAGIMACHI & KORE-EDA: AFTER LIFE

Guides interview the deceased in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s AFTER LIFE

AFTER LIFE (WANDÂFURU RAIFU) (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 1998)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Wednesday, February 19, $12, 7:00
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

Japan Society’s five-film, five-month, five-director tribute to writer, critic, scholar, curator, and filmmaker Donald Richie, who died on February 19, 2013, at the age of eighty-eight, comes to a close on the one-year anniversary of his passing in appropriate fashion, with a screening of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s second narrative feature, After Life, Kore-eda’s eminently thoughtful film about two of his recurring themes: death and memory. Every Monday, the deceased arrive at a way station where they have three days to decide on a single memory they can bring with them into heaven. Once chosen, the memory is re-created on film, and the person goes on to the next step of his or her journey, to be replaced by a new batch of souls. The way station is staffed by guides, including Takashi Mochizuki (Arata), Shiori Satonaka (Erika Oda), and Satoru Kawashima (Susumu Terajima), whose job it is to interview the new arrivals and help them select a memory and then bring it to life on-screen. Some want to take with them an idyllic moment from childhood, others a remembrance of a lost love, but a few are either unable to or refuse to come up with one, which challenges the staff. Twenty-one-year-old Yūsuke Iseya declares, “I have no intention of choosing. None,” while seventy-year-old Ichiro Watanabe (Taketoshi Naito) is having difficulty deciding on the exact moment, reevaluating and reflecting on the life he led. (Ichiro’s wife is played by Kyōko Kagawa, who has also appeared in films by Yasujiro Ozu, Akira Kurosawa, and Kenji Mizoguchi, three seminal directors whose work was previously shown in the Japan Society series.) As the week continues, the guides look back on their lives as well, sharing intimate details, one of which leads to an emotional finale.

AFTER LIFE explores life, death, memory, heaven, and the art of filmmaking

Kore-eda, who previously examined memory loss in the documentary Without Memory and explored a family’s reaction to death in the brilliant Still Walking, interviewed some five hundred people about what memory they would take with them to heaven, and some of those nonprofessional actors are in the final cut of After Life, blurring the lines between fiction and reality. After Life is also very much about the art of filmmaking itself, as each memory is turned into a short movie created on a set and watched in a screening room. In fact, the film was inspired by Kore-eda’s memories of his grandfather’s battle with what would later be identified as Alzheimer’s disease; the director has also cited Ernst Lubitsch’s 1943 comedy, Heaven Can Wait, as an influence, and the Japanese title, Wandâfuru raifu, means “Wonderful Life,” evoking Frank Capra’s holiday classic. But Kore-eda never gets maudlin about life or death in the film, instead painting a memorable portrait of human existence and those simple moments that make it all worthwhile — and will have viewers contemplating which memory they would take with them. After Life is screening at Japan Society on February 19 at 7:00, concluding “Richie’s Fantastic Five: Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Ozu, Yanagimachi & Kore-eda,” and will be introduced by Yale professor Aaron Gerow. (In addition, Kore-eda’s latest film, the masterful Like Father, Like Son, has been extended at the IFC Center.)

RICHIE’S FANTASTIC FIVE — KUROSAWA, MIZOGUCHI, OZU, YANAGIMACHI & KORE-EDA: HIMATSURI

Tatsuo (Kinya Kitaoji) battles more than nature in Mitsuo Yanagimachi’s controversial HIMATSURI

HIMATSURI (FIRE FESTIVAL) (Mitsuo Yanagimachi, 1985)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Friday, January 24, $12, 7:00
Series runs monthly through February
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

There’s something always lurking just beneath the surface of Mitsuo Yanagimachi’s 1985 drama, Himatsuri, and when it finally arrives, it’s shocking and explosive. In the small coastal village of Nigishima, the fishermen are at odds with the lumberjacks. Someone is dumping oil in the water, killing the fish, and the chief suspect is Tatsuo (Kinya Kitaoji), a strong woodsman who chops down trees, raises dogs to hunt down wild boars, shoots monkeys, cheats on his wife with a former girlfriend turned hussy (Kiwako Taichi), and is the only villager who refuses to sell his property to a company intent on building a marine park there. He both cavorts with and defies nature and the local spiritual beliefs, at one point swimming naked in the waters leading to a sanctuary. “Only I can make the goddess feel like a woman,” he proclaims. Carefully watching and worshiping Tatsuo is young Ryota (Ryota Nakamoto), who also oversteps boundaries, using sacred branches in animal traps, and is forced to expose himself to the goddess in retribution. Soon a storm comes, transforming Tatsuo and leading to a horrific conclusion. Set in the area where the Japanese creation myth takes place, Himatsuri is a strange creature indeed, with confusing plot twists, bizarre transitions, and some very weird scenes, with a creepy score by Tōru Takemitsu and lush photography by Tamura Masaki. Yanagimachi’s tale, written by Kenji Nakagami, is no mere clarion call to save the environment; instead, it’s an examination of man’s inhumanity to nature, the disregard for the trees, the oceans, the animals (while also commenting on religion, homosexuality, and contemporary society). Yanagimachi (God Speed You! Black Emperor; Ai ni tsuite, Tokyo) mixes genres, from horror to thriller to romance to musical, as he tells the story of one man who just can’t stop himself.

Fire Festival doesn’t sit well for Tatsuo (Kinya Kitaoji) in Yanagimachi’s HIMATSURI

Himatsuri is screening on January 24 at 7:00 at Japan Society, introduced by Bard College professor Ian Buruma, as part of the monthly tribute series “Richie’s Fantastic Five: Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Ozu, Yanagimachi & Kore-eda,” which honors Ohio-born writer, critic, scholar, curator, and filmmaker Donald Richie, who died in February 2013 at the age of eighty-eight. Richie was a tireless champion of Japanese culture and, particularly, cinema, and the series features six works by five of his favorite directors. Here’s what Richie said about Himatsuri: “The power of Fire Festival has allowed the film to live on in the minds of those who have experienced it. It is occasionally revived in art cinemas abroad though it remains unseen in Japan. Its power is such that it is impossible to forget once seen. Not only does it reach beyond appearances to suggest a further reality, it also displays a seriousness of intent rare in any national cinema.” The series concludes on February 19 with Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life, appropriately on the one-year anniversary of Richie’s passing.

UNDER THE RADAR: THE ROOM NOBODY KNOWS

Kuro Tanino digs deep into the unconscious mind in THE ROOM NOBODY KNOWS (photo by Julie Lemberger)

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Through January 12, $28
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org
www.undertheradarfestival.com

Kenji (Ikuma Yamada) has quite a surprise in store for his older brother’s (Ichigo Iida) birthday in Kuro Tanino’s hyper-strange and fabulously entertaining The Room Nobody Knows. Running at Japan Society through January 12 as part of the Public Theater’s Under the Radar festival, the sixty-minute production is a surreal journey deep inside the subconscious and unconscious minds, a psychedelic Freudian trip through a phallic world built out of fear and desire, dreams and anxiety. A sculptor, painter, writer, and director from a family of psychiatrists who until recently was a practicing psychiatrist himself, Tanino (Frustrating Picture Book for Adults, Fortification of Smiles) sets his highly stylized, bizarre tale in a spectacular two-level horizontal apartment designed by Tanino and Michiko Inada. On the top, colorful Gaudí-style tiles line a room that a pair of worker elves with really bad teeth (Momoi Shimada and Taeko Seguchi) begin to furnish with penis-shaped chairs and flutes, while below, in a lablike white space too small for the characters to stand up in, Kenji, surrounded by scissors, experiment bottles, and four heads mounted on penises, studies for his university entrance examinations and awaits his brother’s arrival. When Kenji’s older sibling shows up, the two men give new meaning to the concept of brotherly love. Performed in Japanese (with English surtitles) by Tanino’s Niwa Gekidan Penino company — part of the name comes from his childhood nickname, Penino, which combines “Tanino” with “penis” — The Room Nobody Knows is a deeply personal and intimate piece, based on Tanino’s own life and memories. And what memories they are.