Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis (1988)

Original title: Teito monogatari

Yasunori Kato (Kyusaku Shimada), a horrifyingly powerful, deathless onmyoji who looks as if he stepped right out of a Suehiro Maruo manga, has a burning desire to destroy Tokyo.

Beginning in 1912 and continuing through the next decade, he makes various attempts at awakening the vengeful warlord Tairo no Masakado, whose head is buried somewhere below Tokyo to protect it, but who’d destroy everything around him once awoken. Kato’s main enemies are the good – or at least not batshit insane – onmyojis of the Tatsumiya line. As Masakado’s descendants they are, ironically, also the ideal mediums to wake up the grumpy old sleeper if controlled by Kato.

In a myriad of side and parallel plots we witness the plans of cigar-chomping millionaire Shibusawa (Shintaro Katsu) to drag Tokyo into the modern age via the dubious magic of urban development, listen to scientists and mystics espouse wild theories and just as wild exposition and witness a city changing at lightning pace.

It’s all rather confusing, which probably has a lot to do with the fact that this is an adaptation of several volumes of Hiroshi Aramata’s influential “Teito monogatari” series of fantasy/horror/weird fiction. A body of work which has alas not been translated into a language I speak or even dabble in. Basically, this often feels like several seasons of a modern streaming show pressed into a two hour runtime, with frequent leaps in time and space, and subplots and characters that disappear before you can blink.

I suspect full comprehension of the film would need a better understanding of various aspects of Japanese philosophy and religion than I have as well as actually having read the books.

It’s all very Lynch’s Dune in this regard, and even though this approach certainly isn’t the most obvious approach to filmmaking, one might even call it somewhat perverse, I can sympathize with a film just not wanting to compromise with its audience in any way whatsoever. Either you’re getting on board, or this thing is simply going to roll over you.

At the time this was made, it was apparently one of the highest budgeted Japanese movies ever produced, and you can indeed see every yen spent on it on screen. While the plot – and the clearly huge amounts of philosophical and social subtext – can fly over a Western viewer’s head, one can’t argue with the intense visual power of the film, full of memorable shots that do more for the emotional understanding of the film’s content than another hour of detailed plot or characterisation, its intense aesthetic mixture of historical authenticity and late 80s neon, nor the way its star-studded cast (including favourites like Katsu and Shimada, the incredible Mieko Harada, Jo Shishido and dozens of other Toho stalwarts) fills the underwritten characters with life by the sheer power of their presence. Well, returning to the subtext, even I understand that this is very much a film about the pace of the changes to Tokyo and Japan in the first three decades of the century, and the toll this took on the national psyche, the difficulty of reconciling the traditional and the new without falling into insanity and sick dreams of empire.

That this is portrayed, among other things, via duelling magicians, wonderful stop motion creatures, and a steam-driven (I believe) robot just makes the whole thing even more wonderful, obviously.

Responsible for this astonishing, overwhelming film is Akio Jissoji, well known around here as a director at home in pink cinema, arthouse about matters sexual and spiritual and tokusatsu TV – if I had actually seen more of his stuff, he’d be a patron saint around these parts, that much is clear.

Even having seen perhaps half a dozen of his films (and a few tokusatsu episodes), it’s clear that Jissoji managed to get his personal handwriting and a focus on certain core interests into whichever kind of project he worked on – Last Megalopolis certainly isn’t some disinterested work for hire bit, but something created with full artistic focus and passion.

That I have the feeling I’ve barely understood half of it, and even less of the intricacies of its plot, doesn’t make Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis less of an achievement.

Summer of Ubume (2005)

Original title: Ubume no natsu

Japan in the early 50s. When visiting his former war compatriot, the private detective Enokizu (Hiroshi Abe), writer Sekiguchi (Masatoshi Nagase) stumbles onto a very curious case. A girl named Ryoko Kuonji (Tomoyo Harada) tells the strange tale of the impossible disappearance of her sister’s husband, and a the woman’s now twenty month pregnancy. Enokizu, who has the ability to see other people’s memories, doesn’t want to have anything to do with the case at all, for reasons he isn’t too willing to share with Sekiguchi. Sekiguchi can’t get his mind away from Ryoko and her tale, something about her tale and herself haunts him. Quite literally so, for after their meeting, he starts to fall into trancelike states, in which he encounters the original Chinese version of the yokai known as the Ubume. The Ubume is one of several female spirits accosting passersby with the request to hold her baby (depending on the local version of the Ubume, it may be bad to agree or to disagree), whereas the Chinese original kidnaps children.

Disturbed, Sekiguchi goes to his old school friend, bookseller/Buddhist priest/onmyoji Kyogokudo (Shinichi Tsutsumi). Looking for some kind of help, one supposes, but Kyogokudo has a hard time stopping his endless monologues about the nature of reality or tone down a rudeness that makes Sherlock Holmes look personable. Eventually, both Enokizu and particularly Kyogokudo will become involved in the case too, opening up a sordid tale of secrets of the past Sekiguchi may know more about than he thinks, baby murders, multiple personality disorder, angry mobs, an old family, and other markers of the Japanese Gothic mystery movie.

This adaptation of Natsuhiko Kyogoku’s novel (one of only a few actually translated into a language I understand, so hooray) was directed by Akio Jissoji, a man working in tokusatsu TV, pinku and arthouse films imbuing all with the same sort of deeply personal sensibility and strange sense of humour, as well as the willingness to dig deep into artificial filmmaking techniques. So, obviously, when making a film whose central tenet and several important plot points are based on the subjectivity of perception and memory, he went all out on sometimes alienating filmic techniques, starting the film – more or less – off with Sekiguchi’s visit with the for my tastes pretty insufferable Kyogokudo (who knows everything and is right about everything and never stops talking), not marking the scenes with Ryoko and Enokizu as flashbacks, and from then on never leaving out a single peculiar camera angle, theatrical bit of lighting, and so on and so forth. We are, after all, just seeing our brains’ interpretations of reality and not reality itself. One can find this approach a bit exhausting but it is also admirable in its consequence, for in the end, every visual peculiarity and every visual metaphor actually has meaning and sense here, Jissoji not being weird for the sake of being weird but to let the audience experience the themes of the movie through more than just its plot.

While he’s at it, the director also turns the potboiler-y elements of the book up to eleven, often suggesting a man deconstructing a Japanese Gothic Mystery (that’s indeed a sub-genre one can encounter quite often in Japanese cinema, probably in books as well, but that stuff never seems to get translated into any language I can understand) by overcooking it terribly. Which is somewhat ironic seeing as Kyogoku himself is – at least in the handful of books of his I’ve been able to read - a rather cerebral writer who doesn’t wallow much in the sensationalist elements of his novels but prefers to philosophize for chapters (though his characters would probably say it’s not philosophy but science), demonstrate his admirable knowledge of yokai and uses the extremities of his plots sparsely.

Summer of Ubume is quite the experience to go through, taking the approaches Kon Ichikawa used in his Kosuke Kindaichi mystery adaptations but cranking them up to a degree of controlled insanity.


I appreciate the film a lot, yet even more so I appreciate that this is a piece of art which tries to convince its audience there’s nothing truly strange in the world through a story so strange it borders on the absurd particularly when it rolls out its “natural explanations”. It’s fantastic.