The film Sea’s Lid (Umi no futa, 2015) by the director Keisuke Toyoshima is the adaptation of the novel with the same title by Banana Yoshimoto, as well as inspired by the title of the nostalgic song by the charismatic singer and author Masumi Hara. Banana Yoshimoto took the entire song as an exergue or an elegiac prologue to her story, while the audio emotional picture in the text and film reproduces the nostalgic scene of the two friends at the edge of the open sea.
At the end of the summer, who was the last to come out of the sea?
The last to come home before the sea’s lid closed.
And since then sea remains uncovered.
The writer with the biological pseudonym Banana Yoshimoto (pseudonym of the famous Japanese haiku writer Matsuo Basho has the same origin - Basho means banana tree) places the dreams of her antisocial heroes, young girls (shojo) who cannot grow in the post-human environment, in other foreign post-family kitchens. The kitchen is their favorite place in the world, and the novel-metaphor Kitchen refers to Banana’s edible metaphors (as well as relationship to men who have something to do with plants). They feel nostalgia of a person at the first encounter: She hides behind hair, sweet voice and slender fingers that are playing the piano with overflowing nostalgia. Those who have lost their childhood know it well. Deeper than the night, longer than eternity, something remote.
From November 2003 until May 2004, Sea’s Lid was published in the newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun as a newspaper novel in sequels illustrated with Bokunen’s woodprints. In English translation (There is No Lid on the Sea) by Michael Emmerich it appeared in the newspaper The Daily Yomiuri. In the film, young girl Mari returns from Tokyo to her hometown Izu in the province Shizouka. She wants to start a new life by refurbishing an old shop into a retro pastry shop where she will prepare and sell her favorite dessert – the ancient kakigori – ice covered in different sweet syrups. That summer she meets Hajime, a girl that hides many traumas from her past.
This autumn’s program of Japanese films is focused on a decentered kitchen (let us remember Roland Barthes’ notes on decentered food in Empire of Signs) and return to hometown as a symptom of quest for lost dreams of nostalgia. The painful feeling of transience, “teardrop of things”, was often called by name coined by the esthetician Motoori Norinaga from the 18th century mono no aware, or the pathos of things, which was originally a concept used in his literary criticism of the first novel of the Japanese old literature from the beginning of the 11th century The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu. Two girls from the Sea’s Lid embody a momentary solace for the long nostalgic trail of ice, from preserving it in ice rooms himuro in Kanazawa, to transport to Kyoto and cutting it to thin transparent slices with a sharp knife, which was noted in the last millennium in u Murasaki’s Genji and in lists of things in Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book from the late 10th century in Heian period. Variation of the ice dessert: Kezurihi mixed with syrup made from a vine and served in a new silver dish was her third most favorite elegant offer at the time when ice was not available to everybody.
In the film about return and food Karaage USA (2014), directed by Naoki Segi, a young woman (teenage star Ai Takahashi), after a short marriage and with a girl, returns to her hometown Usa in the Oita province to take over her father’s kitchen where he prepares the famous traditional deep-fried dish called karaage. The only film with a historical theme is Beyond the Crimson Sky (Akanezora, 2007) by the director Masaki Hamamoto and (new wave) screenwriter Masahiro Shinoda. It is the adaptation of the first novel by Ichiriki Yamamoto about the life and dreams of a tofu master in the Edo period, which won the Naoki award in 2001. Eikichi arrives to town Fukagawa Hamaguri-cho and opens a tofu store in which he shows his skills; there he meets Ofumi, who joins him in the continuation of his dreams.
Film version of the manga and anime series with the same title Silver Spoon (Gin no saji, 2014) directed by Keisuke Yoshida is the adaptation of the manga with thirteen parts by the author (mangake) Hiromu Arakawa, which was published between 2011 and 2013. After the hit series Fullmetal Alchemist (Hagane no Renkinjutsushi), in the new comic about growing up Arakawa takes the lost city boy to a sentimental straightening in a fictional agricultural school in the town u Oezu on Hokkaido, where boys get prepared for their future lives on their families’ farms. Unlike other students, Yugo Hachiken does not dream about his future on a farm: “What the hell of an atmosphere is this – if you don’t have a dream, you are no good!” Silver Spoon borrows the moral from the Fullmetal Alchemist: “Without suffering learning is pointless, you cannot achieve anything if you don’t sacrifice anything.”
A Drop of the Grapevine (Budo no namida, 2014), second film from the Hokkaido Plan trilogy by the director and screenwriter Yukiko Mishima, deals with the return of an older brother after his artistic breakdown to his family’s farm in the mining town Sorchi on Hokkaido. Here he begins a new life and dreams of creating his dream wine. In the word of the author: The ground reflects the layers of history. People have soaked the ground with their tears. Those who will live ina hundred years will drink the wine made from grapes that drew the juices from the ground…o the taste of earth on which somebody is standing. Digging a hole in the ground, Erika is looking for past, and raising vines, Ao is reaching towards the future.
Art of memory was discovered after a catastrophe and it begins with the collapse of the house, Svetlana Boym, author of the inspired study about the future of nostalgia, reminds us. Japanese loanword nosutarujii, often used in theory of literature and culture of the former century, assumes the European history of illness of the modern time for whose pseudo-Greek coinage (nostos + algos) we can thank the Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer who lived in the 17th century. He is also to blame for drastic method of treating the yearning for home practiced on soldiers and foreigners in neighboring countries. Japanese historical virus of nostalgia took many forms, but the original poetic term natsukashii most often evokes different meanings connected to nostalgic emotions of painful attachment, transience, yearning for intimacy, recreation of lost objects and places of longing and remembrance. The term goes back to the oldest preserved anthology of Japanese poetry Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves (Man’yoshu) from the 8th century, believed to have been compiled by Otomo no Yakamochi.
Recently there have been many discussions about the meaning and consequence of the triple catastrophe “3.11” on Japan’s geology and geo-politics as well as on literary and film visuals of survival and instability after March 11, 2011 when a powerful earthquake and a tsunami in the Tohoko region, erased lives and the environment of the coastal towns and the nuclear radiation from Fukushima started to penetrate the air, earth and sea. Moreover pictures in media additionally de-territorialized zones of seemingly safe and unsafe life and observation, and a new the new point of periodization of Japanese film history, at a first glance short in its duration, exposed the inhabitants of Japan and film viewers to a metaphysical catastrophe of eternity. (Tanja Vrvilo)