Film reviews: Soba restaurants, sumo wrestlers, and unwed mothers, as Toronto Japanese Film Festival streams here
Highlights include True Mothers, Mio’s Cookbook, and Sumodo—Successors of Samurai
A rare inside look at the rigorous world of sumo in Sumodo—Successors of Samurai.
The gentle historical tale of coming of age and food, Mio’s Cookbook.
The Toronto Japanese Film Festival streams across the country until June 27
JAPANOPHILES CRAVING a fix from across the Pacific, and cinephiles in search of something new, have access to this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival for the first time, as the fest streams nationwide June 5 to June 27.
The 10th-anniversary fest offers up a wide range of genres, from sensitive family dramas to anime, historical foodie fare, surreal spectacles, and sumo documentaries.
Here are a few Stir checked out:
Mio’s Cookbook
For some people, food is pleasure; for others, it’s salvation. The latter is the case for the titular character in Mio’s Cookbook, a gentle coming-of-age film by Haruki Kadokawa.
We first meet Mio (Honoka Matsumoto) when she’s around seven years old in her hometown of Osaka. She and her best friend, Noe (Nao), are inseparable; the endearing little girls adore each other and promise to be together forever. But after a disastrous flood wipes out their neighbourhood and Mio loses both parents, they’re forced to separate. They swear they’ll find each other when they grow up.
A decade later, Mio has been taken in at a soba restaurant in Edo called Tsuruya. Although at the outset her male customers describe her cooking as “interesting” at best, some spitting out the oysters she makes with soy sauce and ginger, food becomes her foundation. It “nurtures like heaven”.
She struggles to become accustomed to the flavours of Edo—which are far stronger than those she remembers from home—learning that labourers there crave bold tastes due to losing salt through so much sweat. The elderly restaurant owner imparts knowledge to her like why it’s important source the finest bonito flakes and how they balance the soy sauce.
As Mio discovers things like the simple beauty of clear mirin and creates a soup stock that combines the best of Edo and Osaka, she gleans life lessons. In perfecting slow egg custard and jelly noodles with washed red algae, she becomes stronger (and so does the restaurant’s reputation).
Noe, meanwhile, has led a very different life as a courtesan. The dear friends never give up on reuniting. Based on a novel series called Mi wo Tsukushi Ryoricho by Kaoru Takada, Mio’s Cookbook unfurls softly, Kadokawa giving it a throughline of warmth with so many scenes lit by candles or wood-burning fires. Matsumoto carries the film with her vulnerability and inner calm. Her Mio shows with selfless grace how food can be an act of love. GJ
True Mothers
Director Naomi Kawase brings a poetic eye to this deeply empathetic story of a couple who adopt a boy, and the unwed mother who comes looking for him.
In this Japanese Academy Award entry, meditative seaside sunsets and intimate handheld scenes bring life to a story told from two points of view. We meet the devoted parents of young boy as he’s starting kindergarten, and flashback to their fertility struggles. But the most compelling storyline centres around his biological mother—the sad, young Hikaru, who delivers newspapers and is being harrassed by some particularly menacing loan sharks.
Aju Makita puts in a strong, melancholy performance as Hikaru. The transformation is transfixing: when we first meet her she’s a submissive schoolgirl forced by her parents into leaving town at 14 to give birth and then turn over the baby to a new family; later, the young woman who shows up unannounced at her son’s upscale new home is aggressively demanding either her boy or money.
Kawase’s portrait is deeply empathetic without every being melodramatic, and it quietly questions an adoption system built on shame. Notably, the anguish is not just on Hikaru’s part, but on the couple mortified they can’t meet societal expectations to procreate; the wife is even forced to give up her job in order to adopt a baby. Though Kawase never takes these issues quite head-on, she asserts herself as an important and distinctive new voice for women’s stories in Japanese cinema. JS
Sumodo—Successors of Samurai
Watching this rare inside look inside the world of sumo wrestling will give you a new appreciation for the sport—and it’s no laughing matter. As one of the hulking heroes interviewed here says with only a slight grin, “It’s like having a traffic accident everyday.”
Eiji Sakata’s documentary gets unprecedented access to the notoriously secretive Sakaigawa and Takadagawa “stables”, and it’s fascinating to watch the training regimes, a mix of unthinkable physical punishment—just wait till you see the gruelling group centipede exercise—and sacred ritual. Through beautiful animation that draws on ancient Japanese watercolours, you’ll learn about how these men descended from samurai—and how many consider them still to be samurai.
As you might expect from such a larger-than-life subject, there are some surreal moments Sakata catches on film—most memorably the sight of three of these beefy lads, dressed only in silky kimonos, cycling on tiny-looking bikes through historic Japanese streets. It’s fun getting to know the unassuming young men who devote every minute of their day to sumo—and to find out how on earth they ended up at these stables. And there’s some killer ring action that shows you just how wild a following the sport still has. JS
School Meals Time: Final Battle
If the name makes you think of fistfuls of food being flung across a school cafeteria, think again: the war School Meals Time: Final Battle is a quiet one.
In director Maya Ayabe’s film, Mr. Amarida (Hayato Ichihara) is a stern, repressed middle-school teacher who only comes to life when school lunch is served. Although he’s clearly discontent during the rest of his work day, that changes once he sits down at his desk in class to eat, his students in front of him doing the same. The menu might be sukiyaki paired with beef or the mysterious whale in “aurora” sauce; whatever the kitchen staff has prepared, he consumes it mindfully, carefully, slowly, sensuously, delighting in every bite to near-orgasmic proportions. (We hear the thoughts going through his head via narration; one particular bite leads him to shout “Goooooal!” as if announcing an Olympics gold-medal hockey game.)
He meets his match in Kamino (Taishi Sato), a student who’s as much of a food enthusiast as he is, though the young boy has his own unconventional approach to enjoying his meals.
When it’s revealed that the school lunch program is going to be cancelled, things come to a head, each of the leads realizing that it’s not just dishes like soft noodles, clear broth, and raisin bread that they love so much; it’s the shared meals’ nontangible elements, the program’s very culture, that bring them so much comfort.
Ichihara’s role doesn’t quite gel, and it’s non-sensical that no one around him would blink an eye when the disgruntled gent begins dancing in his chair before diving into a bowl of budo mame (sweet-salty soybeans) or mandarin milk kanten (a dessert made of gelatinous seaweed). Despite the unevenness of Mr. Amarida’s character, food-loving viewers will appreciate seeing what’s on the menu—and parents who send their kids to school with cold cuts on a bun will lament the lack of hot-meal programs. GJ
Koji Yakusho is an ex-yakuza trying to adapt to life outside prison in Under the Open Sky.
Under the Open Sky
Another strong female filmmaker at the fest, Miwa Nishikawa takes a compassionate look at a middle-aged ex-yakuza chauffeur Mikami (Koji Yakusho) as he tries to adapt to life outside of prison.
As the striking opening shot through the bars of his cell window underscores, Mikami has been locked away for murder for 13 years; even on the day when he’s released, we see the extreme discipline he’s lived under, from marching through the halls with guards to stripping in front of them so they can give him his street clothes. Symbolically, his flashy watch no longer works when they give it back to him.
From there, the film becomes a story of the red tape, menial jobs, and discrimination the scarred and tattooed former inmate faces. In a subplot that feels less necessary to the film, the predatory media are also trying to build an exploitive story about him.
Under the Open Sky uncovers the problems in Japan’s rigid social-welfare system—no second chances here—but the reason to see it is really Yakusho, who manages to combine frustration, regret, insecurity, hair-trigger rage, and a disarmingly childlike naivetee. Some of the references to his troubled upbringing, abandoned by his geisha mother, are slightly oversentimentalized compared to the rest of the film. The most intense moments come with his rare releases of raw emotion—even un-yakuza-like tears—amid a system that stifles expression. Visual motifs often suggest that Mikami is still imprisoned, even after he’s been freed.
It’s a story of redemption that creeps up on the viewer, as the hard-knocks protagonist slowly opens to the kindness of others. JS
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