Tokyo Sonata Teruyuki Kagawa, Kyoko Koizumi, Yu Koyanagi, Kai Inowaki Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
For the first time in a decade, Kiyoshi Kurosawa - a master of the J-horror genre - has produced a film that doesn't have murderous individuals and vengeful ghosts. But that doesn't make Tokyo Sonata any less scary. Instead, it possibly ranks as one of the most disturbing films Kurosawa has ever delivered, with its portrayal of the unforgiving nature of Japan's stifling patriarchal conventions and the damage they inflict on the lives of the nation's middle class.
The centre of Tokyo Sonata's universe is a nondescript family of four, headed by Ryuhei Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa), a dour salaryman who is abruptly sacked one day (to be replaced, he is told, by cheaper Chinese workers). Humiliated, he becomes even more of a sulking tyrant at home, which only spurs his family to react in kind. His eldest son, Takashi (Yu Koyanagi), leaves home to join the United States army while the younger son, Kenji (Kai Inowaki), starts taking piano lessons secretly, in defiance of his father's orders.
Then there's Sasaki's wife, Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi), whose silent resignation to the domestic chaos is tested when she is abducted by a bumbling burglar (Koji Yakusho, below with Koizumi). Forced to drive him to the seaside, Megumi briefly awakens to the absurdity of her humdrum life. Returning home after being freed by her captor, she meets the rest of her family, all of whom have had ordeals of their own: Sasaki's near-death experience; Takashi's despairing spell in Iraq; and Kenji's arrest after running away from home.
Above all this hovers the spectre of Tokyo, the city's neatly delineated terrain offering scant solace for the desperate. Kurosawa, a sociologist by training, situates all his characters' tribulations within a marked set of social circumstances. It's as if he has unleashed a set of test subjects into an environment (a hostile one here) to see how they will cope or react. The filmmaker has succeeded in capturing the most heart-wrenching reactions: from the soul-crushing queues at the employment centre to the self-denial and deceit deployed so as to keep 'family values' alive.
But unlike his other films, Tokyo Sonata offers hope at the end. The jarring denouement aside, the film is a visually beautiful and subtle family drama about unravelling lives.
