The title of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's film — and of one of the three source stories by Haruki Murakami, all from Men Without Women — expresses its moral/psychological thrust: Let someone else in; open your small world up to another. That is, eschew the despairing self-pity that doom the characters in the Chekhov play that hero Kafuku directs, Uncle Vanya.
This flies in the face of the self-absorbed TV star Takatsuki’s counsel: “So in the end, what we should be doing is to be true to our hearts…. If you really want to look at someone, then your only option is to look at yourself squarely and deeply.” This self-centeredness led Takatsuki into an affair with Kafuku’s wife Oto, into skirmishing with fans for taking his photo — i.e., appropriating his image — and ultimately into the fatal fight that ends Takatsuki’s career.
Against the young actor’s egocentrism Kafuku declares Chekhov “terrifying. When you say his lines, it drags out the real you. Don't you feel it? I can't bear that anymore. Which means I can no longer yield myself up to this role….The text is questioning you. If you listen to it and respond, the same will happen to you.” Kafuku walked out of his first Vanya performance when his own despair — his wife’s death adding to their unaccommodated death of their four-year-old daughter — made bearing Vanya’s as well intolerable.
Both parents had failed to confront their grief. Oto abandoned acting for screenwriting and deflected her engagement into erotic storytelling (which derives from the Murakami short story, “Scherezade,” adding the murder). Now Kafuku the isolate is staying on an island an hour from the theatre, which is in — Hiroshima. That city provides a national version of Kafuku’s rising from the ashes of his tragic experience.
Kafuku revives through relationships with three characters. By engaging Oto’s known lover Takatsuki he works through her infidelities, her loss and his guilt at having distanced himself from her. (His adultery discovery scene comes from Murakami’s short story, “Kino.”) By casting young Takatsuki as old Vanya, Kafuku responds to their sexual rivalry and unconsciously prepares to slip into the role.
Casting the mute, signing actress Lee Yoon-a as the despairing Sonya amplifies both the character’s difficulties and her heroic resolve: “My hardships might even be greater than yours but I don't give in to despair.” She embodies the determination that Kafuku eventually draws from the Chekhov: “Those who survive keep thinking about the dead. In one way or another, that will continue. You and I must keep living like that. We must keep on living. It'll be OK. I'm sure we'll be OK.”
The mute Lee Yoon-a adds force to the Sonya resolve that ends the play: “Even if we can't rest, we'll continue to work for others both now and when we have grown old. And when our last hour comes we'll go quietly. And in the great beyond, we'll say to Him that we suffered, that we cried, that life was hard. And God will have pity on us. Then you and I we'll see that bright, wonderful, dreamlike life before our eyes. We shall rejoice, and with tender smiles on our faces, we'll look back on our current sorrow. And then at last, we shall rest. I believe it. I strongly believe it from the bottom of my heart. When that time comes, we shall rest.”
Because these characters deal and live in theatre — i.e., reaching out and into other minds and souls — this film is more optimistic than the play. The characters don’t wait for death to bring them ease. The production gives Lee Yoon-a a fuller life than she’d expected and an even richer marriage.
The primary agent in Kafuku’s liberation is the young woman Misaki Watari whom he is compelled to accept — against dramatic reluctance — as his driver. He prefers to be alone, to rehearse his lines as he drives, continuing his risky detachment. Watari is — like Sonya — a plain girl, living an efficient but empty life.
At 23 Watari is the age Kafuku’s daughter would be. That doubles her role in Kafuku’s life. The director and his driver fulfil each other’s need for a lost daughter and parent, respectively. By letting her drive his car he lets her into his life. He recovers his trust in someone else. With her he can indeed relax more completely into rehearsing the text.
For her part, Kufuku’s growing warmth and openness being her to terms with her own mother’s death. He lets her feel trusted again. Kafuku indeed helps her more deeply than her father could have: “If I were your father, I'd hold you round the shoulders and say, ‘It's not your fault. You did nothing wrong.’ But I can't say that. You killed your mother, and I killed my wife.”
Of course, neither did but in their new understanding they both move beyond their reflex of guilt. Both consciences are salved when they visit the site of her mother’s death, confronting their suppressed memories and moving beyond them.
Kufuku’s prized car is an emblem of the misfit. In a left-side driving country this old Saab has the driver on the left side. It’s red — more exciting than the (jaundiced?) yellow of the source story. And it’s small, like the solitary driver’s initially tight shell.
Like the Hiroshima setting, the loner’s letting another in to drive his car has a national or cultural amplification. This richly Japanese film admits the mainstream of Western theatre, specifically the powerful dark drama. Kufuku directs two productions of Uncle Vanya and a Waiting for Godot. The pants-drop in the latter scene provides a bathetic bit of absurd existentialism.
There may also be a theatrical mix when the cast reads through the script. Each actor marks the end of his lines with a thump on the table. I don’t know whether this is a convention of Japanese modern theatre, but it evokes the clacking rhythm of the Kabuki tradition. Yet it also recalls the periodic rattle of Vanya’s watchman. In this film the traditional Japanese admits the modern classic West. Drive My Stage.
Finally, a note on the structure. The opening credits don’t appear until about 30 minutes into the film. That is, the initial drama around Kufuku and wife Oto seems a prologue to Kufuku’s resurrection in/with Hiroshima two years later. The film could end on the glowing lantern that concludes his triumphant Chekhov performance.
But there’s an epilogue. A spruced up Misaki Watari goes grocery shopping in Kufuku’s Saab and with Lee Yoon-a’s dog. The covid masks provide another echo of Kabuki. This prosaic scene — following the poetic Chekhov close — is jarring. Perhaps it serves as a kind of curtain call. In that convention the actors appear outside their character, to interact directly with the audience, to ease their return from the stage to their real lives. The Watari performer is perhaps singled out for this function because she represents the outsider whose inclusion brought the clenched director salvation.The non-theatrical driver represents the living theatre to which the taut director and self-absorbed actor need to open themselves.
