The title of Juichiro Yamasaki’s latest feature is at once the name of its teenage protagonist and an unassuming Japanese flower which grows best in the shade, as well as a word that was once traditional slang for gold coins. This multiplicity of meanings fits Yamabuki well, as the film could be interpreted as a schoolgirl’s rite of passage into adulthood, a subtle snapshot of simple working-class lives, and also a gritty portrayal of the effect of depopulation on Japan’s rural hinterlands.
The latest entry in Osaka-born Yamasaki’s decade-long exploration of the past and present of Maniwa, a small town in western Japan where the filmmaker has lived and run a small tomato farm for 15 years, Yamabuki is a humane and heartfelt ode to a community struggling to get its bearings in one of the many forsaken corners of a theoretically prosperous country.
Devoid of any overt drama – its most dramatic scene features a valise of cash falling in slow-motion off a quarry face – Yamasaki’s film will reward patient viewers with a glimpse into Japanese life away from the dominant narrative perpetuated by both mainstream directors and arthouse cineastes. It is entirely shot on 16mm stock and its gritty portrayal of down-and-outers on the margins of Japanese society mirrors that of the equally grainy The Kamagasaki Cauldron War by first-time filmmaker Leo Sato, which like this film was produced by Terutarô Osanaï.
Then again, Yamabuki is first and foremost a testament to Yamasaki’s growing stature as an auteur with a single and singular theme – that is, small town tales which serve as a microcosm of the ills and malaise of Japanese society as a whole. Just like Yamasaki’s previous two Maniwa-set films – his raw debut Sound of Light (2011) and the black-and-white period drama Sanchu Uprising: Voices at Dawn (2015) — Yamabuki should bloom after its premiere in the Tiger competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.
Yamabuki (Kilala Inori) is a high-school student seeking to find meaning in her humdrum existence, one in which adults seem largely absent. Her journalist mother died several years back on the job somewhere in a foreign war zone, and her jaded police detective father (Yohta Kawase) spends most of his time working at the precinct.
The plain and quiet girl simply goes through the motions of everyday life, and even the affection of a classmate (Hisao Kurozumi) is unable to shake her out of her lethargy. That is, until the day she runs into activists staging street protests. Trying to “make use of every second in life and think about those who struggle”, she begins to join the silent “stand-in” demonstrations, much to her father’s chagrin.
Yamabuki may be the titular character, but she isn’t the core of this ensemble drama; in fact, her existential crisis seems peripheral to the director’s career-long interest in chronicling the changing fortunes of her ageing, depopulated hometown. His first film, The Sound of Light, told the story of a young man’s return home to run his father’s dairy farm; now, a decade onwards, the burden is on the migrants who props up Maniwa’s lifeline, while contending with an acute sense of geographical and psychological displacement.
There’s Jin (Riho Shamura), the half-Japanese, half-Chinese sex worker whose meetings with Yamabuki’s father always end in melancholy reflections by the pair on their own roots. There are also the many Vietnamese men earning a living in the local quarry, labourers trying to get by on their meagre salary while contending with racists determined to run them out of town.
But Yamabuki’s beating heart is Chang-su (Kang Yoon-soo). A former Olympic equestrian, the Korean man has since fallen on hard times and is now working at the quarry and trying to rebuild some sort of family with a single mother (Misa Wada) and her daughter. Tragedy soon strikes, however, and he’s forced to contend with a past he’s trying to suppress and a future he’s no longer in control of.
Yamasaki refrains from showing on screen the fateful moment which drives Chang-su’s downward spiral, a subtlety which actually adds to the intrigue and tension in a story where characters struggle to communicate with each other, or even with their own inner demons. Olivier Deparis’ percussive score heightens this ambience, while Kenta Tawara’s camerawork highlights the individual characters’ struggle in Maniwa’s vast spaces – a visual reference to their challenges in maintaining some kind of agency and defying their fate.
While serving as the latest entry to Yamasaki’s quest to document the travails of rural Japan, Yamabuki also contributes to a growing genre of Japanese independent films – ranging from Kazuhiro Soda’s Oyster Factory to Akio Fujimoto’s Along the Sea – aimed at giving voice to the increasingly indispensable (1.7 million and counting) foreign workers in a country where myths of cultural homogeneity still hold strong. Yamabuki is a delicate and powerful addition to this list.
Director, screenwriter, editor: Juichiro Yamasaki
Cast: Kang Yoon-soo, Kilala Inori, Yohta Kawase, Misa Wada, Masaki Miura
Producers: Terutarô Osanaï, Shoko Akamatsu, Takeshi Masago, Juichiro Yamasaki
Director of photography: Kenta Tawara
Production designer: Rishi Nishimura
Music composer: Olivier Deparis
Sound designer: Takao Kondo, Masami Samukawa
Production companies: Film Union Maniwa, Survivance
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Tiger Competition)
World sales: Survivance
In Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese
97 minutes