Robinson’s Garden / Robinson no niwa (1987)

The “counter-culture” in Japanese movies has usually been shown through the lens of Shinjuku, of left-wing politics, or of punk rock. Robinson’s Garden takes us into a “hippy” counter-culture, some 20 years after it appeared in America.

When we first meet Kumi, she lives in some sort of commune, with people from various ethnic backgrounds and a tendency to use and sell psychedelia. One night, stumbling back alone and drunk, she climbs a wall and finds inside a huge abandoned industrial site, with several large buildings and lots of unused land. She decides to move in, to paint and furnish as she wishes from trash left on the street, and to grow her own food. Her friends reappear for a day on the roof, but it is their last time together.

As she is told later, her closest friend Maki has gone to Thailand, the others have been busted for drugs or just disappeared, but she is not concerned, finally living the way she wants to live.

But there are two forces that threaten that new existence. One is modernity, in the shape of a little girl who wanders through at random. She stomps on the plate the meditators are trying to levitate, she has a toy gun that shoots some kind of pellet that actually breaks things, she observes Kumi’s gardening problems while eating her KFC bucket, and just generally calls everyone an asshole. Tokyo itself is after all just beyond the wall, and how so much land has gone undeveloped is as mysterious as anything else in the movie.

But much more powerful is nature itself. As Kumi is digging her garden, she discovers a tree root and in following it up she finds it goes to a mysterious tree hundreds of yards away. The director Masashi Yamamoto will return to images of this tree constantly, somehow impossibly silhouetted against the horizon and always accompanied by mystical Indian music. Weeds take over the garden and the rains wash off all the paintings.

We never see Kumi using drugs of any kind, but she is visited by one of her many lovers (free love, after all), who wanders around the building looking for mosquito repellent and hallucinates a magnificent Samurai shrine. Kumi herself seems to have found complete inner peace, but she eventually begins to hallucinate, especially after she grow ill, seeing her friend at the foot of her bed, her grandfather on the subway, and eventually a long scene of her grandfather carrying her on his back.

Yamamoto was the Independent’s Independent, with movies that often seemed more like documentaries than dramas, often shot on 16mm. The photographer here was the American Tom DiCillo, and the cast seems to have been all amateurs. Kumiko Ota (Kumi) was a punk rocker who had been featured in Yamamoto’s earlier Carnival in the Night that explored the underground Shinjuku scene. Though there is no attempt to introduce or define the other characters or to provide any motivation, Yamamoto does put together a sequence of events that are not merely casual. The dialogue often feels improvised, but the scenes in which it occurs are obviously part of a plan. There are moments of humor from more than the little girl’s appearances – Kumi studies a Japanese book that roughly translated would be “Gardening for Dummies,” or runs in the world’s strangest track and field event, for example. But there are also some completely inexplicable scenes, such as when Kumi steals a bicycle and then rides and rides and rides it to total exhaustion. Obviously, there is some intended reference to Robinson Crusoe, but other than Kumi’s isolation there seems little actual connection.

The last we see of Kumi, she disappears down a hole she is digging that grows ever deeper while the little girl watches. After this, Nature takes over completely. Rains flood the building, grasses grow so tall that the hole she dug might as well be the same one in Onibaba, the buildings themselves are buried under vines, while a magnificent flower garden blooms in a nook and the little girl plays with her radio-operated model airplane around the tree. Set in the countryside, this would be a parable of the power of Nature and the Earth seeking its balance. Set in the middle of Tokyo, it seems just weird. But it is always at least interesting.