My Secret Cache / Secret Garden / Himitsu no hanazono (1997)

It has often been said that casting is everything in making a movie, and few better examples exist than My Secret Cache, though the director and editor’s skill play a large part as well in making what could have been a very off-putting storyline into a charming, delightful comedy.

Sakiko is a young woman who has always been fascinated by money; as a child, her greatest pleasure was sitting on the floor and counting money. Eventually, she becomes a bank teller, where she can count money all day, though she eventually realizes it is far less fun if it is all other people’s money. One day, she is kidnapped by bank robbers who drive off a mountain road; when the car blows up, she and the suitcase full of 500 million yen are blown out into a lake where, unconscious, she floats for hours until at last the suitcase sinks in an underground cavern. Somehow she survives, but she determines to do anything possible to find that spot and get her hands on that suitcase full of money again.

She never goes on a date because she always tells any male who asks her that she would rather have the money than the dinner or drinks. Her money, money, money attitude is a lot like making Scrooge the heroine of the movie, but Naomi Nishida is just so cute. Yet she seems utterly unaware of her cuteness and, despite her constant pursuit of money, she never turns to sex or to men to provide it. The troubles she faces in her quest are so remarkably demanding and entertaining that we soon forget that this is all rather like a story of a member of a heist trying to get all the loot for himself or perhaps an updated twist on the oft-filmed  Konjiki Yasha.

She only has a rough sketch map of where she thinks the money is, based on the memory of scattered bits of consciousness as she floated downstream, so she seeks the only authority on the area. But he is a geology professor, so first she has to get into university. She attracts the attention of the professor’s aide, making an enemy of his old girlfriend along the way, but has no interest in him as a lover. All her savings go to tuition, geological survey equipment, lessons for a driver’s license and for swimming, scuba diving, and rock climbing and to buy a small SUV so she can get into the deep mountains. Forced to drop out of school because she has gone broke with all those purchases, she rebuilds her savings by working in a lingerie bar, robs her parents (unsuccessfully), and even robs a bank security truck, though she gives the money back immediately once she finds the equipment she thought had been lost when the floor of her apartment collapsed under its weight.

Along the way, her single-minded focus earns her a scholarship for a graduate program and makes her a champion swimmer (swimming the entire length of the pool without breathing because she is about to throw up) and rock climber, pretty much by accident for she hardly notices, so intensely is she concentrating on the suitcase at the bottom of the water. (Her jealous competitor herself becomes an Olympic level swimmer in her desire to beat Sakiko at something.) Without the least intention to do so, Sakiko changes from the lazy lay-about daughter of the family into an extremely successful independent go-getter of a young woman, but even so, she doesn’t seem to notice or cherish this new maturity.

Sakiko has no use for the money.  She sees it as money for its own sake. She makes money from her jobs only as a means to finding the big treasure, and when she does find it, she hides it again. But the urge for money itself is still so strong that we last see her heading for sailing lessons so she can go hunt for sunken treasure ships in the Bermuda Triangle. We could twist the movie into a satire of modern materialism, but we would have to do some torturing to do so, for the tone is so light-hearted.

Shinobu Yaguchi would later make a very successful career directing comedies in which he manages to get the audience to root for characters who ought to be unlikable, best known to Americans through Swing Girls. He keeps the tone light with sharp editing, dead-pan visual comedy, and a soundtrack of Irish folk music that seems to have wandered in from a Chieftains album but which nevertheless is remarkably apt and effective. And of course there is Naomi Nishida, who projects exactly the right balance between single-mindedness and simple-mindedness to make us root for her ultimate success.