Haruka, Nostalgia / Haruka, nosataruji (1993)

Ayase (Hiroshi Katsuno) is a successful writer of teen romances who returns to his parents’ hometown to attend the funeral of his old friend and illustrator and soon finds himself living one of his own novels. If I have understood the subtitling correctly, his books are a series called “Love is . . . “ and follow a consistent pattern that would be completely horrifying to our contemporary eyes – love stories of teenaged girls and older men.

When he slips in the mud, he is helped up by a teenaged girl who recognizes him and quotes passages from his stories. She tells him her name is Haruka and leads him on sight-seeing trips around to places he had actually used in his novels, all set in Otaru on Hokkaido but as described by his friend in letters, not as actually seen by him. Haruka (Hikari Ishida) is just so cute you want to slap her, and she has at her beck-and-call a young man who runs a cleaners, tutors her, and reads German philosophy, whom she wrangles into being their driver. However, in the distance is always a young man in the high school student uniform of Ayase’s youth, who eventually appears to Haruka and Ayase at the spot where the young student had fallen in love with Yoko, who just happens to look like Haruka. Eventually, their meetings will bring out the memory of Ayase’s past, his mis-treatment of Yoko, and the reasons he left town and never returned for more than two decades.

Katsuno was an extremely popular TV star but at this date was in his late forties, so the age disparity becomes more than a little disturbing; even he warns Haruka that the middle-aged men in real life are interested in teenaged girls for reasons quite different from the innocent romance in his stories. She however never tries to be a sex object but to dress and act much younger than her real age, or at least one hopes since that is never specified. However, the age at which girls get submersed in such romantic novels tends to be the early teens, before they get immersed in real boys, so she may not be pretending to be so young.

The movie has about six different possible ending points, with the last being Ayase’s return as a white-haired man to meet another Yuko on the hill overlooking the port where he last saw her, this one the child of Haruka, and give her a copy of the novel of his experience at last written under his real name.

The movie is based on a work by Hisashi Yamanaka, presumably his own attempt at a “real” novel in the midst of a prolific career of books on many subjects for children and young adults (if the covers shown on Amazon are to be believed).

In the eighties and nineties, Obayashi was one of Japan’s most prolific directors, turning out movies at almost the rate of a studio director of the fifties. Most of them focused on teen-aged girls, but of the ones I have seen, none are quite so creepily as this one. At one point, we begin to think that Ayase is about to go to bed with his own daughter, then things seem to change and the idea passes. Then we reach the ending and the idea returns. If Ayase was in fact a child in the war years as he says, sent into the countryside to escape the danger of bombings, then the story we see is actually happening in the seventies and the white-haired man at the end is “now,” which makes the happiness we see at the end even more creepy, as he meets his own grand-daughter.

Obayashi is careful not to give us any full nudity, and the two sex scenes are shoulder up on both participants, so we’re not into actual prurience. In movies as in real life, men in their forties or fifties have often had at least a moment of desire for a teen-aged girl but, at least in the modern world, that desire is rarely returned, with the girl usually saying, “But he’s so OLD.” After all, Lolita is essentially kidnapped and repeatedly raped by Humbert Humbert and she runs away when at last she gets a chance. Obviously to anyone who has seen Japanese movies, the pairing of middle-aged men and teen-aged girls was taken for granted for centuries, in significant part because no one ever bothered to ask the girl’s opinion, but we have rarely seen the girl initiate the relationship as does Haruka/Yuko. From a personal viewpoint, I think the disturbing part is that no one involved in the original story or the making of the film finds what is happening to be little more than just an attempt to find a memory.

Purely in a technical sense, this is the worst of Obayashi’s movies I have seen. There is constant narration even for scenes that need no narration, no particular imagination in the set-up of shots, and a music score by the usually dependable Joe Hisaishi that just never shuts up, as found in movies of the late forties-early fifties, not to mention its nearly three hour length. After I saw A Mature Woman, I thought I might need to re-assess my own attitude to Obayashi’s movies, but that seems to have been the exception in his career.

Though we have seen many movies in which characters come to face something in their past, actual nostalgic movies have been quite rare in the Japanese movies I have seen, at least until the late eighties.* One might have thought there was great nostalgia in the post-war era for the pre-war years, but if so it rarely if ever showed up in movies available in the west and many movies seemed to be designed to fight against any audience desires for such nostalgia for the thirties or forties. By roughly 1990, however, the past seems to have become a-political, for both audiences and film-makers. That and the continued strength of the teen-aged female audience for books and movies led to many lost-love stories featuring teenagers rather than the more mature women of earlier lost-love movies.

* The Japanese apparently do not have a word for this sense of nostalgia, as indicated by the title. The term kyoshu is more usually understood to mean “homesickness,” which is not quite the same thing. It is a question for philosophers and sociologists that nostalgia almost always appears when people are prosperous and look back on a much poorer time as better and happier. People who are impoverished tend to look back on better times with sadness or even bitterness.