Letters / Tegami (2006)

There are many kinds of social prejudice depicted in Japanese films, and not all are based on race or wealth. Within the Japanese-born population, there are two “blood” stigmas that have continued to remain strong even in the 21^st century. One relates to the burakumin, who have been social outcasts for so long that no one seems to know why any more, yet the stigma remains though they are indistinguishable from the rest of the population. The other is the assumption that crime is also blood related. Tegami looks at the latter through letters sent to Naoki from his brother in prison.

When we begin, Naoki is reading a letter from his older brother Takeshi, who is serving a life sentence. The brothers were abandoned when Naoki was twelve, and Takeshi had worked to see that Naoki had his chance to go to university. After he was injured on the job and could no longer work, Takeshi broke into a house in search of money and when discovered by the old woman who lived there, had unintentionally killed her. As a result, Naoki has himself become an outcast. Unable to finish school, he has moved from job to job and apartment to apartment, each time because someone discovered that his brother was a murderer. Now working in a factory, he spends his lunch break with Yusuke, his only remaining friend from high school, working on a manzai routine, while watched from afar by Yumiko.

Chance brings the pair to the attention of a TV host and they become regulars on his show, until someone on the internet finds out about Naoki’s brother. He quits, though he manages to get them to keep Yusuke on as a single act. When Asami falls in love with him, Naoki has a chance to escape his past at last, since her father runs a large corporation. Her arranged fiancé does some digging and Naoki is exposed, shocking Asami. He is transferred at work and moves again; he also quits replying to his brother’s letters, only to discover that the faithful Yumiko has been answering them for him using a computer so the handwriting wouldn’t be noticed. He writes a final break-off letter to his brother and marries Yumiko, but their little daughter is soon ostracized at the playground because the neighbors have found out about Takeshi.

One of the most interesting aspects of the movie is actually the manzai act, which we see in some detail* when Naoki is convinced to revive the act for a show at Takeshi’s prison, so Takeshi will at least get to see his brother one last time after he has stopped writing. To a non-speaker, this is composed of incomprehensible patter based primarily on puns and misheard words. The fan subs on my copy make a noble effort to make these clear, but you would have to use the pause button a lot to have time to read all the explanations. Once read, they are not particularly funny, but then “Who’s on first” would make no sense at all to someone who wasn’t absolutely fluent in both English grammar and baseball. This all runs toward the maudlin when the routine starts to turn on a pun comparing “elder brother” to “rubbish,” but that is to be expected in any similar story.

Asami lives in a world of white, since the wealth of her father has bought her a sheltered life in a massive home. Director Jiro Shono perhaps over-plays the social distance with his camera work. When Naoki is asked to dinner with Asami’s father, he doesn’t even know the correct term to use for the toilet and has no idea how to eat the European-style food. Nevertheless, her father treats him with good manners, never laughing at his confusions. Father seems to actually like Naoko but tells her that he is fine for a friend but not a husband, long before he has found out about the brother. Food again emphasizes the social distance when Asami comes to cook dinner for him and can cook only pasta, not any Japanese foods.

Naoki does not live in squalor. His apartment is always neat and clean, as is he himself, but it is always tiny, for he really only can get manual labor. He eventually lands a job selling computers where he is the best salesman, for he was the smartest boy in his class, but that job disappears after someone breaks into the computer store and background checks on all the employees turn up his older brother. No one suspects him of being involved with criminals himself, but he is sent to work in the warehouse. The company bosses think they are being especially generous by not firing him completely, but they are afraid the store’s reputation will be harmed if anyone in the general public were to learn about his brother.

Certainly, Americans make similar assumptions of guilt by family association, particularly in small towns or tightly-knit neighborhoods, so we have no particular grounds for superiority. Yet it is striking how much this “stain” on Naoki continues even when he is far from his original home, and how quickly he is dumped by his TV show in particular. A good agent in the US or UK would have immediately spun the news into a rags-to-riches story about how Naoki had overcome adversity. Asami reacts to the news with much the same horror as did the teen-aged lover in GO when she learned her boyfriend was Korean, though they have not reached the sexual stage of the relationship.

Time’s passage is marked by the cherry trees, and Naoki is given no particular hope of a solution, so his choice to no longer write to his brother seems rather pointless. Though he goes off to work each morning in his coat and tie, he still works at the warehouse and his daughter still faces the possibility of growing up as an outcast among the other families. The best he can do is continue to try to do his best.

Based on a novel by the best-selling Keigo Hirashino, the story rather overloads its set-up. Everything is designed  to make Naoki the sympathetic perfect victim: he is cute, sensitive, the smartest boy in his high school, shy around women, and a model employee wherever he goes. Takeshi, too, is a model type we have seen often, the elder brother who has sacrificed himself for his family; in the flashback we see, the killing is accidental, and a life sentence seems quite unusual compared to the sentences we have seen in other movies. Yumiko is the very epitome of the faithful girl who loves from afar, and nothing about Asami suggests that she is snobbish herself. This make the whole sentimental rather than documentary-like.

* As far as I can determine, neither Takayuki Yamada (Naoki) nor Hiroyuki Onoue (Yusuke) were comedians, so the act we are shown is written especially for the film.