せかいのおきく 「Sekai no Okiku」
Release Date: April 28th, 2023
Duration: 89 mins.
Director: Junji Sakamoto
Writer: Junji Sakamoto (Screenplay),
Starring: Haru Kuroki, Kanichiro, Sosuke Ikematsu, Koichi Sato, Renji Ishibashi, Claude Maki,
Okiku and the World is the 30th work from Junji Sakamoto to grace the silver screen. Winner of a Japan Academy Award for Best Director for the movie Face (2000), Sakamoto’s newest title gives audiences a sweet love story set in a deeply atmospheric jidaigeki which is beautifully shot in mostly monochrome.
This period drama is set in Edo-era Japan. 1868, to be exact. It concerns two semi-illiterate manure collectors, Yasuke (Sosuke Ikematsu) and Chuji (Kanichiro). Their work is to turn the waste from the tenement and household toilets into fertiliser to sell to local farmers. Then there is the titular Okiku (Haru Kuroki), the only daughter of a fallen samurai named Genbei (Koichi Sato). She is reduced to teaching in a local school since he lost his place in the clan and they now live amidst commoners in a tenement. She may be resentful of their fall in status but it put her in touch with Chuji who she shows signs of liking. Chuji also harbours feelings for Okiku.
A story of romance and resilience unfolds in a world that, as some of the characters in the film say, is full of sh*t.
We watch the two manure men endure the harshness of their trade and the discrimination some people treat them with while Okiku and her father find themselves falling even further as old clan politics catch up with them.
However!
While the world threatens to collapse on the characters due to poverty and duty, the tone is hopeful.
Far from being pessimistic like other movies in a similar setting, such as Sadao Yamanaka’s Humanity and Paper Balloons (1937), this is more of a warm-hearted tale of a love slowly realised with nary a melodramatic love triangle or contrived drama to distract. The trial that the lovebirds endure is overcoming being from different social castes – a samurai’s daughter and a manure man being together? Impossible! And yet…
As the two face changing fortunes and society stands on the brink of massive change, caste boundaries are breached and their lives fatefully converge in such a way that they can be open with their love.
It is notable that the story is set in 1868 as that was the year of the Boshin war and the beginnings of the Meiji Restoration and the abolition of old feudal codes. Okiku’s character arc and her changing status matches how Japan will change as does Chuji’s actions as he seeks new opportunities in employment and education.
Intellectually, we get the parallels but what makes the film really touching and moving, what gets us involved, is the fine performances from the cast.
As Okiku, Haru Kuroki (The Bride of Rip Van Winkle) navigates her character’s transformations perfectly. Her initial appearance is that of a stuck-up princess storming around with a fiery tongue she lashes others with. As Okiku is initially all about propriety and showing superior moral behaviour, Kuroki plays her as uptight and even scary. As her character battles misfortunes, a certain softness enters Kuroki’s face and a gentleness and vulnerability enters her movement and we warm to her and when she uses food and education to convey love. It is really touching.
Acting as a solid foil is the single-named Kanichiro, son of Koichi Sato. He essays the good-natured and pure-hearted Chuji well. When he pines for Okiku you see it in his deep eyes and you can see discretion in his behaviour as he knows his place. When the two finally confess their feelings for each other, I found myself crying because I had become invested in their relationship and the way that each character expressed it – through cooking, through exuberant movements – after so much restraint from them, just, seeing it out in the open was powerful.
This may be a drama set over a hundred years ago but the purity of the emotion of love and the sense of conviction the actors deliver it with left me delighted and needing to convey it to my cherished person.
Helping viewers get invested are veteran actors Renji Ishibashi (The Bird People of China) and Koichi Sato (Starfish Hotel) who switch between delivering laconic comedy about getting old to wise paternal advice as they try to set the lovers on the right path. Claude Maki (A Scene at the Sea) is amusing as a sweet-loving priest whose muddle-mouthed dialogue provides amusingly confusing philosophy. Then there is Sosuke Ikematsu (The Tokyo Night Sky is Always the Densest Shade of Blue) who provides puckish humour as a peasant straining to change the world into something more equal while resisting the crushing forces of the class system. They and the other minor characters have dialogue that offers enough backstory that they feel three-dimensional and bring to life a sense of a community, from the most arrogant of samurai to the lowliest of manure man.
Everyone has a role to play in society and we watch the tentative love story between Okiku and Chuji plays out teasingly amidst the dirt and grime of life at the bottom of the social ladder in feudal Japan where all live life to the full no matter how much it stinks.
The locations are characters themselves and do as much as any amount of expository dialogue to tell us of this world and its social order, the gap between the upper and lower classes, and the dirty nature of Chuji’s job and the locales Okiku has fallen from. Indeed, Sakamoto is not afraid to show the nastiness that dogs the characters heels with shocking moments of bodily harm to the splat, plop, and slither of faecal matter that we often witness as we get the mechanics of the manure industry. Beyond feeling like a convincing journey into an earlier age, the film is beautiful to look at.
From the first frame until the last, viewers are transported back in time to an earlier period to watch an earthy, amusing, and touching romance taking place in locations made up of samurai mansions, rowhouses, a temple, a farm and the roads, forest paths, streets, and waterways that connect them. And toilets, too! With many locations provided by Kyoto Prefecture and Toei Uzumasa Eigamura, this feels like an authentic vision of the past as the overhanging branches of trees, thatched roofs of farmhouses, the narrow streets sheltered by crowded eaves and lined with a myriad of period-specific props like umbrellas, buckets frame the characters perfectly and act as a great backdrop for the romance. It is all told with black-and-white photography that livens up occasionally with glimpses of colour that reveal the beauty and the ugliness of the world.
Overall, I felt myself sucked into the past and witness to a sweet romance with the great performances and locations. It may be set in the past but love is timeless and easily felt here. Whenever the title of the film was worked into the story (and it is), the effect is really truly moving. Sakamoto really captured a sense of love. This wonderful work became one of my favourite films of the year and I urge people to see it.
Okiku and the World plays at the New York Asian Film Festival on July 16th, at 14:30. at the Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center. Junji Sakamoto will be present to receive the Lifetime Star Asia Award and introduce the film and take part in a Q&A.
