Takahisa Zeze: Film-making in No Man's Land

Volume 31 DIRECTORY OF WORLD CINEMA JAPAN 3 YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Edited by John Berra intellect Bristol, UK/ Chicago, USA Directory of World Cinema Directory of World Cinema .::r~KA,HISAlEZE ''[fl~fu-mli~ in1~'~h•;i~ Heaven's In recent years, Takahisa Zeze has often seemed to resemble his characters, figures stuck between two worlds. While emerging from the realm of 'pink' cinema - he was one of the 'Four Pink Devils' celebrated in the 1990s1 he has successfully made the move to mainstream commercial cinema, helming even works such as Kansen Rettou/Pandemic (2008) and Antoki no inochi!Ufe Back Then (2011) with big budgets and major stars. But ever since directing his first non-pink film, the horror flick Kokkuri in 1997, Zeze has repeatedly and periodically returned to the world of pink or indie cinema, participating for instance in the Eros Sancho series with Yuda/Secret Journey (2004) and even independently producing the four-and-a-half-hour epic Hevunzu sutorii!Heaven's Story (2010), which won the FIPRESCIPrize at the Berlin Film Festival.2 Zeze has seemingly been living on the line between different modes of cinema. It is thus appropriate that liminality and various forms of in-between-ness have remained a dominant motif throughout Zeze's film-making. His first film, the pink Go to Haneda and You Will See Kids Dressed like Pirates Ready to Attack (1989),3 featured a motley bunch of nomadic youth from Korea, Taiwan and Japan challenging the borders of the nation. Minorities who have no homes are a staple of Zeze's cinema, ranging from ethnic Koreans (a real presence in Japan) to space aliens in SF Whip Cream (2001) and vampires in Moon Child (2003). But even the Japanese in Go to Haneda and You Will See Kids Dressed like Pirates Ready to Attack are offspring of suijou seikatsusha (urban poor). These marginal citizens, who lived on stilted homes over the water near Haneda Airport, people who one could say inhabit neither land nor water, were also the subject of an MXTV documentary that Zeze filmed in 1996, and are even recalled in the resolutely commercial Furaingu rabittsu/Flying Rabbits (2008), which had its plucky stewardess basketball players training on the tidal flats around Haneda. Such spaces, ranging from beaches to bridges, from swamps to railroad crossings, figure as the in-between space or 'no man's land' (also the title of his film from 1991) that haunts Zeze's cinematic geography. Zeze is fascinated by characters that straddle border zones, who are two things at once. Yuda in Yuda can seem both male and female; Ken in SF Whip Cream is human but defined by Earth authorities as alien; Shiro in Dog Star (2002) is a dog that 'becomes' human; the high schooler Mio in Kokkuri (1997) also moonlights as the sexy radio DJ Michiru; and the police officer Kaijima in Heaven's Story works underground as a hitman. Just as such characters must deal with a duality that was not always of their doing, the narratives of many of Zeze's films centre on difficult choices, such as whether to kill in revenge or settle for a normal life in Heaven's Story. Such decisions or related border crossings do not always turn out positively. Zeze may seem to counter the stereotype of a homogeneous Japan by populating his films with those who are not ethnically Japanese, but the result is not a utopia of multicultural harmony. The Japanese man Masaya and the Korean woman So Yong may fall in love in Rush! (2001), but their relationship is complicated by temperament and miscommunication even at the end. The proliferation of often unresolved doublings, 200 Japan 3 Story © 2010 Moviola repetitions, border transgressions and liminal zones can sometimes bleed into the narrative structure and the very materiality of the text. Tokyo X erotika: Shibireru kairaku!Tokyo X Erotica (2001), his first film shot on digital video, not only melds various real news events with multiple fictional temporalities, but also enthusiastically pursues the non-linearity of the digital. Yuda, also filmed on digital, even achieves a 'no man's land' of the image, when it becomes clear that moments that seem like personal documentary could not in fact have been filmed by anyone they were in effect shot by 'no man'. Linking a concern for liminality with an investigation of the borders of cinema is also evident in another contemporary Japanese director, Takashi Miike (see Gerow 2009: 24-43). It is then not surprising that one of the better analyses of Miike in Japanese was penned by'Zeze himself, who focused on such themes as the 'lack of a center', 'wandering' and 'mixed blood' (Zeze 1998: 58). But if Miike so thoroughly pursues the problem of homelessness that his images themselves seem to have no grounding, Zeze always investigates the materiality of in-between-ness, locating it between perspectives that are historical or ethnographic on the one hand and mythological on the other. Zeze's films are imbued with traces of post-World War II history, from the references to Tsuburaya Kokichi 4 in Showa guntouden: Tsuki no sabaku (1990) to the images of the first Gulf War in No Man's Land (1991). Documentary Zuno Keisatsu (2000) is as much an exploration of post-war history as it is a rock concert documentary. The ruins of Showa Era Japan (1926-1989) litter the Zeze landscape, especially the 'danchi' block housing that, while once representing the heights of high-growth Japan, is now reduced to the empty shells in Heaven's Story that become the site of almost Manichean confrontations. Zeze, however, does not construct a conventional history from these material traces. First, he is more concerned with marginal stories, focusing on histories that are not written, or that are confined to tabloid or crime journalism. Zeze is known for basing some of his films on somewhat sensational real killings, with Hysteric (2000), for instance, being based on a young couple's murder of an Aoyama Gakuin student in 1994, and Heaven's Story being inspired by the murder of a mother and daughter in Hikari in 1999, after which the husband promised to kill the murderer himself when he got life instead of the death penalty. Yet Zeze says he does not strive to narrate the truth of these crimes or divulge their social origins (author interview, 11 August 2012). He rather uses them to create alternative histories where what is unwritten in history Directors 201 Directory of World Cinema Directory of World Cinema complicates the supposed clarity of what is written, in effect creating a history that lies between fact and fiction, defined by its refusal to provide a conclusive account. At times, these alternatives can verge on the political, as Showa guntoden: Tsuki no sabaku, for instance, ends with a man rushing the National Diet Building with sword drawn. Any polemic of the narrative, however, is soon countered by the 'no man's land' of the image, as multiple interpretations refuse the reduction to a single politics. One could argue, as Abe Kasha has, that Zeze is engaging less in historiography than in ethnography (Abe 2000: 374), as he persistently locates his characters in space, in a landscape that threatens to define the characters through stagnation, but against which they struggle through movement (a number of Zeze's films are thus forms of the road movie). These struggles may be futile, however, and the repetition of social ties and acts, strongly evident in Heaven's Story, for instance, may ultimately pin the characters down. This, along with the recurrent images of water, enables some like Abe to call Zeze the 'Nakagami Kenji of the film world' (Abe 2000: 374). 5 Like in Nakagami, however, this ethnographic landscape does not completely account for either stagnation or the struggle against it. A mythical dimension hovers in the wings. Zeze's characters may flee to border spaces, declare 'Goodbye Japan', as in Go to Haneda, but often at the cost of death. Even the 'happy ending' at the beach in Shisei: Ochita Jorogumo (2007) seems more like the afterlife than a new life. Zeze, like many of the directors of his generation, has expressed the sense that it is impossible to escape Japan (author interview, 11 August 2012). The experience of liminality in his work is then less the free crossing of borders than a longing look from the limit towards an other side that cannot be reached, other than through death or, in his comedies, the absurd. As is particularly evident in Raigyo (1997), acts of violence and sex are less clear narratives of struggle or rebellion than extreme states of existence pressing the boundary of life in Japan, ones that occasionally turn inwards, returning, as Yomota lnuhiko notes, to infancy (Yomota 1999: 312), without a moment of escape outwards. This centripetal incursion into the other land, a realm often contiguous with the land of the dead, surpasses any realist pretence and gives Zeze's films a mythological tone. This is most apparent in Heaven's Story, where a mythic space ultimately serves as the only frame providing characters such as Sato meaning after the senseless violence and vicious cycles of revenge. Myth enables connections, in some ways explaining the coincidental relations between Heaven's Story's characters and offering something more hopeful than the cycle of fate and repetition. Th is is not a return to Japanese tradition, but rather another dimension in Zeze's long-standing effort to search for a way to bridge the straights between each island-like individual, one that refuses to take as a given interpersonal systems like society, race and the nation. Even on the level of form, the pans between characters in Life Back Then or the long takes in Heaven's Story try to establish cinematic connections when the diegetic narrative does not always enable them. For all its seeming pessimism about impenetrable borders, Zeze's cinema itself still hopes to see the other side. Over the years, Zeze appears to have successfully crossed to the other side, at least when it is defined as mainstream commercial film. One cannot help but feel, however, that Zeze's more commercial work is less able to express the sense of how fraught the no man's land is. That may have to do with the fact that, unlike Zeze's productive scriptwriting collaborations first with Kishu lzuchi and then with Yuki Sato, the scenarios of the bigger-budget films have been finalized by committee in the 'production committee' system dominating current film-making in Japan. A structure that easily seeks consensus easily loses sight of the boundaries that complicate such unities. While it may be cliched to celebrate the opposition between indies and studio cinema, especially when Zeze himself has spoken of getting used to big-budget production (author interview, 11 August 2012), one cannot help but see his periodic returns to marginal forms like pink, documentary and self-produced film as an effort to reconfirm the gaps, the spaces in between. That contemporary commercial cinema is making that increasingly difficult perhaps only further emboldens Zeze to look back at the forgotten ruins of Showa Japan and its cinema, and repeatedly revisit the no man's land not only of time, but of film as well. Aaron Gerow Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. For more on the pinku shitenno, see Sharp (2008). Both films were selected as the best film of their respective years in the magazine Eiga geijutsu's poll offilm critics and industry personnel. Zeze's pink films were often given appropriate generic titles by the company, even when they might have had a different original title. The release title of his first film, for instance, translates as 'Extracurricular Lesson: Rape'. I will provide the English translation of the original title. Tsuburaya was Japan's hope in Olympics track and field, but only finished third in the marathon in 1964. He committed suicide in 1968, complaining of fatigue. Nakagami, the most famous author to emerge from the 'outcaste' burakumin community, often narrated stories of the 'alley', a closed world of blood ties, fate and oppression. References Abe Kasho (2000) Nihon eiga ga sonzaisuru, Tokyo: Seidosha. Gerow Aaron (2009) 'The Homelessness of Style and the Problems of Studying M'iike Takashi', Canadian Journal of Film Studies/Revue Canadienne d'Etudes Cinematographiques, 18: 1, pp. 24-43. Sharp, Jasper (2008) Behind the Pink Curtain, Godalming: FAB Press. Yomota lnuhiko (1999) Nihon eiga no rajikaruna ishi, Tokyo: Chikuma Shoten. Zeze Takahisa (1998) 'Miike Takashi ga kakaemotsu dai-yon no meidai', Kinema junpo, 1258 (15 June), p. 58. Directors 203 202 Japan 3