A young bookstore employee befriends two strangers, walks around town with her headphones on, learns to make omelettes and dabbles in art. Offering a slice of everyday life unfolding in a neat and defiantly non-descript Japanese city, Following the Sound (Kanata no uta) is a soft, soothing visual experience in which ambience reigns supreme over those oh-so-worldly matters of characterization, narrative or meaning. With his fourth feature, Japanese filmmaker Kyoshi Sugita has delivered something akin to the cinematic equivalent of a Muji-manufactured monochrome jigsaw puzzle.
Following the Sound is the latest of a recent string of Japanese independent productions in which emotionally suppressed individuals attempt to establish some kind of human connection with new acquaintances in a small Japanese town. Bowing at the alternative Giornate degli autori sidebar at Venice, Kyoshi Sugita’s latest film – one that is set nearly entirely within the confines of one small, single precinct in the provincial city of Ueda (population: 152,904) – joins the ranks of Hiroki Kono’s J005311 (grand prize winner at Tokyo’s Pia Film Festival), Yui Kiyohara’s Remembering Every Night (Berlinale Forum) and Tatsunari Ota’s There Is A Stone (international competition winner at Jeonju) as proof of a certain minimalist strand in Japanese indie cinema today.
Some might scream sacrilege, then, if similarities are instead drawn between Sugita’s film with Midnight Diner, that studio-backed, long-running juggernaut which has spawned a five-season TV series, two blockbuster movies and a tsunami of adaptations across Asia and beyond. Strip away its indie pedigree and Following the Sound resembles Midnight Diner in its appeal towards those seeking convenient, cuddly comfort through the smooth resolution of its monotonously melancholic characters’ largely unexplained personal traumas. Perhaps inadvertently, Sugita has produced something which chimes with the maxims of iyashikei, a subgenre in Japanese popular culture aimed at bringing “healing” to its audience.
Just like Sugita’s previous three features, Following the Sound is a piece of beautifully packaged balm: cinematographer Yukiko Iioka, a long-running collaborator of the director’s and also the DP on Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, is again in top form in bringing a pristine sheen to the proceedings. For the first time in his short career, however, Sugita has allowed style to outflank substance altogether: unlike in his previous work, notably his understated yet heart-rendering 2021 feature Haruhara-san’s Recorder, the director has hollowed his latest film of the details and nuances one needs, making the characters and the story itself incomprehensible and irrelevant.
Following the Sound revolves around Haru (An Ogawa), whose slow-moving daily routine comes across like a hipster’s dream life. In between her shifts at the local literary café, she spends her time either learning to make films and paint at a community centre, or playing flâneur along her hometown’s quiet streets with her headphones plugged into a Walkman. But Haru seems to have a bigger purpose in life too, as she gradually ensconces herself into the lives of two perennially sad-faced and slightly older individuals in her neighbourhood.
Haru’s two new friends are never mentioned by name in the film, and it’s through publicity material (and some notes Sugita submitted to the FIDMarseille project market in 2021) that we get to identify them as Yukiko (Yuko Naramura) and Tsuyoshi (Hidekazu Mashima). Haru pretends to ask Yukiko for directions and suggestions of good diners around, and ends up eating scrambled eggs at the latter’s home. The pair meets up time and again to wander around the city, looking for nice restaurants and, perhaps more importantly, the source of the sounds Haru’s deceased mother recorded on a cassette tape.
Meanwhile, Haru is first shown stalking Tsuyoshi, only for the man to appear at her workplace later to ask her why she’s doing so. Upon hearing Haru’s cryptic answer – that she was a high school student when they met years ago on a train station platform – he bursts into tears. Sometime later, Haru visits Tsuyoshi’s home and meets his daughter Saki (Kaya), a homebound teenager who aspires to become a screenwriter. Haru brings Saki out of her seclusion and into a small journey of self-discovery and emancipation.
And that’s basically it. High drama – or drama, fullstop – is conspicuously absent throughout the entirety of Following the Sound, with Tsuyoshi’s brief breakdown and a mild-mannered row at a drawing class (in which a pensioner questions why Haru is constantly staring at her) being the sole moments in which emotions seem to run a bit high. Both episodes are resolved quickly without rhyme or reason, an opaqueness which Sugita employs ceaselessly throughout the film.
While there are films which work just fine as fuzzy tone-poems, this simply isn’t one of them. Far from being an experimental treatise about human alienation, Following the Sound is clearly a humanist exercise in which the characters’ hidden motives and suppressed emotions are supposed to be gradually revealed. Ogawa’s performance is a case in point: compared to her heartbreakingly engaging turn as a mysterious wanderer in There Is A Stone, the young actor is left with no nuances to play with here, her blank expressions revealing nothing about either her fragile emotional state or her naïve determination to make other people’s lives right.
By holding so much back and offering scant gestures which hint at the things shaping the characters’ past traumas and current predicaments, Following the Sound rings perilously hollow, a pretty picture undermined by its deafening lack of feelings.
Director, screenplay: Kyoshi Sugita
Cast: An Ogawa, Yuko Naramura, Hidekazu Mashima
Producers: Misaki Kawamura, Nanako Tsukidate, Jun Higeno, Kyoshi Sugita
Director of photography: Yukiko Iioka
Editor: Keiko Okawa
Music composer: Skank
Sound designer: Young Chang Koh
Costume designers: Yoshiko Kosato, Yuki Abe
Production company: Nekojarashi
World sales: Iha Films
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Giornate degli autori)
In Japanese
84 minutes
