Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) has mostly been known for Japanese horror films Cure, Pulse, and Doppelganger, but with his last few movies he’s been moving more into the dramatic. Tokyo Sonata explores a Japanese household, led by a father who is laid off from his job and is too embarrassed to tell his family. He leaves home every day, but instead of going to work he visits parks and libraries until it is time to return. Meanwhile, his rebellious older son wants to leave Japan and go to the United States to join the military, and his youngest son is secretly taking piano lessons, which he has been forbidden to do. It’s a stark look inside the family culture in Japan, and the rift between generations. We sat down to ask Kurosawa about the film, and learned that he’s pretty definitively left the genre with which he’s most associated behind. More after the jump.
Tokyo Sonata feels similar to Bright Future, your other film, except the family members in Bright Future are much younger and this more revolves around the father, and to some extent the family as a whole. Is this an evolution from that film?
I think your theory is probably more or less correct. In between the horror films, I have made several more or less what you would call “family” type films and different versions. I’m sure you remember License to Live. But this time what I did, I portrayed a super-duper ordinary family, at least in shape, at least in form. So in a sense maybe I’m going back before Bright Future, back in time when there is such a thing as a family, if just barely functioning.
The attitudes of the family in the film, do you feel like that’s particularly Japanese, or could it apply to any family in the world?
You know, I really wasn’t sure. What I did was really try to stay true to the problems that a typical Japanese family would meet up with. I had no idea or any intention to portray kind of universal problems, but based on the reactions that I got at Cannes, it seems like I had hit on something that seems to be fairly universal, or at least traveled outside the borders of Japan.
Certainly it goes without saying that Japan is hardly an isolated country. Contemporary life in Japan today is deeply intertwined to that of the world. Also film, I really believe, has a universal power and has a universal impact. So as a medium, borrowing that power of film language, I felt really confident that I would be able to reach a large audience.
The traditions of honor and shame seem to be inherent traits that the Japanese have embraced and continue to find to be strong, especially the older generations; the younger generations, maybe not so much.
In this film there seems to be a disconnect between the father and the oldest son. The oldest son wants to go to the USA to join the military. The father is meanwhile concealing the fact that he has been let go from his job. The younger son is also concealing that he is taking these piano lessons. Are these all signs of a larger disconnect and problem within modern day Japan as a whole?
Yes. I think in some ways they do symbolize Japan. But I think if anything, much more is always that I sort of tried to portray what has always been a family. In other words, if there are internal problems that have always been internal to the family, then each member of the family then has their own problems that are outside of the family. You can’t resolve those problems within the context of the family.
So I think if anything, I was really much more aiming at the precarious balance that has always characterized Sonata.
I think Bright Future was the first film that you shot digitally. Are you continuing to shoot digitally?
This one I shot on film. I was intentionally wanting to shoot this movie on film because of the drama.
Do you have a next project lined up? Are you thinking about ever returning to the horror and thriller genre?
I doubt I will go back to horror. If I have a good idea I will go back to it, but probably not in my next film. But neither am I interested in another family drama. This film was something quite unexpected.
If you were asked by an American studio to do an English language film, would you be interested?
I am interested in making an English language film. I would be perfectly happy to, but I somehow doubt that the Hollywood system would allow me to make the kind of movie I want. So I think of them as two separate things.
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