Shortly after the appearance of the Korean Quiet Family, Shochiku Studios decided to do a Japanese version, which they handed to Takashi Miike. The Korean film had been a Joe Orton-esque black farce in which a series of unexpected deaths at a country inn had gradually turned the family themselves into mass-murderers. This was the kind of story that would have been right up Miike’s alley in the nineties, and presumably the studio expected another splatter-fest full of dark humor and in-your-face violence. What they got was something else entirely, yet another entry into the long list of Japanese movies unlike those made anywhere else.
As in Quiet Family, we begin with a family that has built a country guest house at which their first guest commits suicide and a second couple also die, leading the family to bury the bodies rather than report them to the police because the deaths might be blamed on the family or scare off future customers. Then it parts its way into a story that concludes with a Sound of Music celebration of the importance and indestructibility of the Japanese family.
To be more precise, we begin with a woman in a restaurant who discovers a claymation demon in her soup that rips out her uvula and flies away, only to be caught by a crow, resurface to be born again and caught by another crow that is killed by a live-action Tetsuro Tanba throwing a log at it. Then, at last, we meet the family – Tanba’s son (Kenji Sawada) and his wife (Keiko Matsuzaka), their wayward son (Shinji Takeda) and their daughter (Naomi Nishida), who has brought along her own daughter following a divorce. The movie is narrated by the little girl.
Dad quit his dead end job and bought the inn in the mountains on the assumption that a road was going to be built, but it was not, so they are left with only a hiking trail to reach them. A group of women on a spiritual walk pass them by, so they are thrilled when a man appears in the middle of a storm, but less so when they discover he has shoved their room key into his neck. But their first response is a song, for this is also a musical of sorts, with the family breaking into song and dance regularly throughout the movie. The body is wrapped up and buried beside the lake.
Next up is a sumo wrestler and his girl friend, so eager for sex they start before the door is closed. He has a heart attack and dies, crushing her under him. Then there is Richado (Kiyoshiro Imawano), with whom Nishida falls in love during an attempt to leave the family. In his white uniform, he tells her he is a British naval officer who is also an illegitimate member of the royal family and a confidant of Charles and Diana, and she is thrilled when he later shows up at the guesthouse. But Tanba realizes he is only after Nishida’s money, hits him over the head, and both fall off a cliff while fighting (in a return of the clay-mation). Richado somehow survives his Wily Coyote fall to return to die in the house apologizing to all the women he knew and forgetting Nishida’s name.
At this point, the Katakuris have so come to expect disaster that when a family arrive in another rainstorm and ask for some strong twine, they start digging a mass grave before they even go up to wake the family for breakfast in the morning. But they only wanted the twine for the little boy’s belt. Almost the moment they disappear, another man stumbles out of the woods and into the grave. He turns out to be a real murderer on the run, but the son rescues his Mom and Dad during the police standoff, proving he will still sacrifice himself for love of his parents.
And then the volcano erupts.
I did say there was nothing quite like it.
I haven’t even mentioned the strange appearance of Naoto Takenaka on a TV show in drag, the zombie dance, the disco-ball duet for Mom and Dad, the audience sing-along, Richado’s flying scene, the paper airplanes, the sumo wrestler dropped from the window, or moving the bodies when the road work starts up again.
But as the little girl tells us, her grandpa says, “anything can happen in life.” and we should “never give up,” long a mantra in Japanese movies. Family will see you through whatever happens. The movie is a poem to the family, in its odd way not all that different from Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of our Teeth, with the addition of the Japanese elder being cared for by his son and daughter-in-law.
From at least my point of view, the movie’s weakness lies in its songs, credited to Koji Endo and Koji Makaino, some of which are little more than fragments and none of which stick in the ear. Nor are they particularly well sung. At the time the movie was made, Imawano was arguably the most famous rock star in Japan, but like many rock stars he seems uncomfortable with typical pop music. And of course, his rock star image did not allow anyone to cut his hair, so his “disguise” as a British naval officer and James Bond-like secret agent is so absurd it is hard to believe even the most gullible young woman could believe him (and Nishida’s character is certainly gullible). Nor, on the basis of this appearance, was he much of an actor, though he may have been hoping to transition to film now that he was about the same age as Sawada. On the other hand, Sawada had been one of the earliest male teen “idols” in the sixties, using the name Julie, and still knows how to handle the kind of soppy pop song he had sung for years in his youth, but the rest of the cast were not singers. The dances are simple, the kind designed for non-dancers, so we never see the kind of explosively vibrant production number we see in Kitano’s Zatoichi
but there is no doubt that the cast, including Tanba now almost eighty, are performing the dances themselves.
This wouldn’t be Tanba’s last appearance, for he continued to work until his death in 2006, but it would be his last large role, and it reminds us of his great versatility that was often wasted during his long career. Only when Matsuzaka puts on her slinky dress and lets her hair down for the flashback duet do we recognize one of Japan’s great screen beauties under the frumpy mom housewife.
Just as Mizoguchi’s middle name might have been Restraint, Miike’s could have been Excess. Katakuris was released just after the peak of Miike’s excessive violence, Ichi the Killer, and the transgressive excess of Visitor Q, but it was probably shot earlier and delayed because of the time needed to complete the clay animation, a very slow process, and the CGI work.* Miike’s reputation probably contributed to the Euro/American ad campaign that tried to sell the movie as a horror film with music, a sort of Rocky Horror Show, but it is nothing of the sort. Nor is it The Addams Family, simply inverting the concepts of niceness and fun for humorous effect. The Katakuris certainly have their ups and downs, but they are normal people, just trying to make a living; no matter how far the bands that tie them are stretched, they snap back and the family unit comes together again. It is absurd but not absurdist, surreal but not surrealistic, full of death but not violent. It is certainly excessive in its stylistic mix of songs, fantasy, and animation, but it is at heart exactly the same kind of celebration of the Japanese family as any movie by Yamada.
* Miike’s work load was phenomenal, even by the standards of studio directors in the thirties. He released five movies in 2001, including Ichi, Visitor Q, and two yakuza films, then another five in 2002, including the last DOA and a remake of Graveyard of Honor, plus two TV movies as well. The stylistic inventiveness and variety of all those movies indicate that, though he was not credited as a screenwriter or editor on any of the movies that made him famous, he did more than just show up on the set to say “Action” and “Cut,” like Masahiro Makino had done with his formidable output.
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