In several blogs entitled Like Someone in Love (With Japan) I have undertaken to consider how non-Japanese directors have variously viewed, engaged with, thematized, experienced and/or appropriated the land of the rising sun. I have considered a range of different films: from post-WWII Hollywood to biopics to contemporary extrapolations from significant auteurs like Ozu Yasujiro. A host of films in a host of genres. However, I have opted to consider Tokyo! (2008) separately, not because it is an especially significant or singularly great film, but because it is an interesting one in which a number of factors pertaining to Japan onscreen are presented, explored, refracted in a way that sees their efficacy as markers and arbiters of perceptions of Japanese-ness foregrounded and problematised.  

The celebratory exploration of and extrapolation from the iconic city space – usually (but not always) the capital city – has seen but a few portmanteau narratives over the years. Tokyo! takes both its cue and its point of departure from said films – films like New York Stories (1989) or Paris Je t’aime (2006) – but it is far less eager to map out any physical or even affective trajectory of its terrain. It offers instead an experiential dive into a darkness, by turns whimsical, fantastical, potentially allegorical and romantic. Composed of three films from three notable directors – Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and Bong Joon-ho – the film is in fact something of a riposte New York Stories or Paris Je t’aime. It is not really a celebration. It is only symphonic in the mould of, say, Mahler rather than Mozart or Haydn, and finds in the city of the title something on an almost inhuman scale. Rather than being lionized, it is probed and problematised. It presents a microcosmic narrative that is intent on peering into crevices, interstices, subterranean passages and claustrophobic spaces, and simultaneously noses its way into very private lives, cramped quarters and disturbed minds. We go through a glass darkly here, and if nothing else the engagement with the city of the title is apt to suggest a range of ideas about space in, and indeed for (perceptually, imaginatively), Japan and its major cities.

Of course, there is an argument that cities themselves exist on an inhuman scale. The modern urban metropolis – the growth of which coincided with that of cinema. Here, both offer narratives, both present a canvas upon which a myriad stories can be painted and indeed re-painted. Gondry’s opening film even begins with storytelling, as in the midst of a rainstorm and traffic one of the two protagonists (a young couple moving to Tokyo and staying with an old school friend) dreams up a story of an outbreak of disease and of consequent human monsters. The city is immediately a tabula rasa – a stage for human drama and an adjunct to imagination – as thereafter (and typically for Gondry) real emotion and realistic substance are given a wry, subjective and fantastical makeover. Here, though, it feels like something of afterthought to a film that picks at its characters’ prospects of finding a place to live and space away from the confines of the tiny flat in which they quickly outstay their welcome. This segment, entitled Interior Design, is most akin to Gondry’s kooky but eternally endearing The Science of Sleep (2006), and fairly seamlessly transplants a New York-set source story (by Gabreille Bell) to concern itself with problems facing many young Japanese. It asks potentially complex questions of the relationship between exterior and interior spaces and emotions; and between young people who need to strike out on their own but find numerous obstacles in their path, many of which pertain to living in a major metropolis. And then the female protagonist turns into a chair! OK, there are possible readings of this (literal or otherwise) development that fit the timbre of the story. But it nonetheless still comes across as a way of concluding a narrative that feels like it is straining its short film leash somewhat. Perhaps the tension between physical space at a premium (very much a concern in Tokyo) and the more expansive space of the imagination (the characters’ and the director’s) is the key tension in this film, in which case its position at the entry point in this portmanteau is crucial.

The idea of imaginative space and human monsters is taken up again as a departure point in the second story. Cinema du look luminary Leos Carax’ Merde finds this director’s frequent collaborator Denis Lavant as the eponymous Mr Merde (Mr Shit) arising from the sewers and terrorising citizens. He first steals materials and food (he eats flowers) from those on the streets, before finding old WWII hand grenades in his underground ‘lair’, which he then explodes in a striking rampage of murder in and around the capital. Following this he is arrested and, through an interpreter who speaks his strange language, talks about being sent to places he hates by his God, before which he is tried, found guilty and sentenced to being hanged.

If the conceit of a creature running amok through downtown Japan sounds familiar, then Carax fully intends his intertextual nods and winks to Godzilla. The use on the soundtrack of Ifukube Akira’s mighty theme to the progenitor of the Kaiju film stresses this reference point, though it is not the only such marker. Mr Merde finds, beneath Tokyo, an underground WWII bunker replete with messages about the infamous Nanking mission and massacre alongside an imperial flag and the aforementioned hand grenades. In a sense, then, the violence that he inflicts on the Japanese capital is, like Godzilla’s, born from the devastation and violence of the Pacific conflict. Carax offers few further textual correspondences, but the above are deeply enough embedded (spatial pun intended) to suggest a return of a historic repressed: not simply the trauma of war but also of cultural appropriations thereof. Given the recent return to ground zero in re-thinking the (Japanese) Godzilla narrative this is a particularly instructive and prescient picture.

That Merde ultimately seems an ephemeral figure is suggestive. It alludes to the primacy of ideas, of something beyond flesh and blood (from whatever creature). Given its intertextual lineage it refers to the concrete foundations yet perennially transformative, insubstantial status of such cultural imaginings: the fact that they reflect real concerns yet change, develop, disappear and re-appear as they speak to successive generations where meaning lacks any fixity or stability, is perennially adaptable. The international scope of this particular story – the French interlocutor for Merde and allusions to worldwide interest in what transpires – reinforces the sense of a specific Japanese-ness at the confluence of transnational points of view. With this in mind Godzilla is a very apt reference point.

Bong Joon-ho takes for his story the Japanese figure of the Hikikomori – those who have retreated from the world into their own homes, abnegating any social or familial responsibilities and existing entirely within the confines of their homes. A response to the social pressures of Japanese society – here the 1990s recession following the bursting of the bubble economy at the beginning of the decade – the protagonist here has not been outside for years, living as he does within the structures of a precise routine, even down to pizza takeaways on Saturdays after which he hordes the boxes. Bong takes a somewhat touristy look at this character, and his trajectory wherein a fascination with a delivery girl following a minor earthquake seems like the most obvious path for a character such as this, though the physical immediacy of being in the outside world for the first time is nicely conveyed. It is a sympathetic picture, Bong being both curious about the realities of this figure and intent on extrapolating therefrom. It doesn’t add up to much, but its shortcomings are interesting to the extent that they foreground an outsider’s point of view, so that if the Hikikomori is not necessarily understood through the film (not in itself a negative except that Bong has recourse to a voice-over that seeks to explain the character’s finer physical and psychological make-up) he is nonetheless replete with meaning. This is arguably a patronising and facile exploitation of a difficult, complex and fractious social phenomenon, but let’s allow creative license. The fact that this segment is called Shaking Tokyo suggests a metaphorical imperative (the romantic notion of the earth moving) yet obviously it has salient ramifications for a country perennially beset by earthquakes. Again, the tension between reality and imaginative flights of fantasy is writ large, and Japan, Tokyo, is the perfect focus for such a tension.