Still Walking / Aruitemo, aruitemo (2008)

A lot of Japan's movies seemed to say that the Japanese family was dying in the early 21st century . For Kore'eda, at least, it was Still Walking, though perhaps only just barely, like Dr. Yokoyama, who shuffles out at least once a day for a walk down the hill to the beach and back. …

Adrift in Tokyo (2007)

The road movie is not unknown in Japan, nor is the buddy movie, but it is still rare to see an example of a genre that has now become a cliché in American movies. Though Adrift in Tokyo is the story of two mis-matched people who become friends as they find their true self in …

Sway / Yureru (2006)

One of the most persistent aspects of Japanese movies is that a plot summary does not often tell you what the movie is like or even what it is about. That is especially true of Miwa Nishikawa's Sway. In summary, the plot seems simple. Two brothers go to visit an old holiday spot along a …

Maison de Himiko / Mezon do Himiko (2005)

According to the film's narrator, Maison de Himiko was a famous gay bar in Shinjuku, later taken over in the eighties by a second man who also adopted the name of Himiko, until it closed suddenly in 2000. Maison de Himiko, however, is not about the history of the bar but about life in the …

Wild Berries / Hebi ichigo (2003)

Early in Wild Berries, elementary school teacher Tomoko is giving her class a lecture on lying, but the little girl who has been lied to is the very last to understand that she has been tricked. For the rest of the movie, Tomoko will learn all the ways her family have lied to her and …

Blue Light / Ai no hono-o (2003)

I'm not sure how Blue Light ended up in my movie list, but I am certainly glad that it did. The first of only four movies directed by fabled Japanese stage director Yukio Ninagawa, it follows the senior year of a high school boy who while trying to protect his mother and sister finds himself …

Happiness of the Katakuris / Katakuri-ke no kofuku(2001)

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 …

Hush! (2001)

Homosexuality has appeared openly and with sensitivity and acceptance in Japanese movies since at least the early sixties, and the nebulous sexuality of the onnagata has provided hints of such relationships back into the silent era.  From its title, Hush! would seem to be about the difficulties for a gay young man trying to keep …

Mohohan / Copycat / Copycat Killers (2002)

Copycat is the story of a serial killer who wants to be absolutely original, using Japan's intense media environment to make him a star first as a killer who is never caught and then as a spokesman for the victims. As is so often the case in Japanese story-telling, we do not even meet our …

Man Walking on Snow / Aruku, hito (2002)

Every morning seventy-year-old Nobuo wakes up, dresses, has a cigarette, and goes for a walk, stopping even in the middle of winter for an ice cream cone that he eats on his way to the salmon farm in Mashike, his small town on the north-west side of Hokkaido. He has his reasons for going to …