Aesthetics of Realism in Chikuma Yasutomo’s Now, I… and The Ark in the Mirage

• In Event: Imagining a “Post-Bubble” Japan in Lost-Decade Cinema

Abstract

This paper explores the shift in modes of representation in director Chikuma Yasutomo’s two films, Now, I… (Ima, boku wa, 2008) and The Ark in the Mirage (Shinkirō no fune, 2016). Both films address the breakdown of the family unit in a “relationless society” and various manifestations of precarity inherent to Japan’s lost decades while also alluding to future possibilities of hope. Now, I… takes up the theme of hikikomori (socially withdrawn) with Chikuma playing the role of the protagonist in a script he wrote influenced by a friend. Working in the mode of social realism, the film at once produces affective responses from the viewer through an immersive aesthetic, and yet manages to maintain a critical distance from the subject. However, The Ark in the Mirage attempts to function in opposing directions, evoking the Deleuzian time-image of “pure optical and sound situations”, it utilizes fragmented spatio-temporalities and symbolic imagery that punctuate the realism mode to present a “floating” existence of the characters involved in the exploitation of homeless entrapped in the shady “enclosed room” (kakoi-ya) system of the so-called “welfare business” (seikatsuhogo bijinesu). Here I discuss how kakoi-ya functions figuratively, as a motif throughout both films vis-à-vis the notion of “going forward”. Moreover, while this paper investigates the discursive themes in both films, I question the cinematic “affectiveness” of the director’s move from a raw docudrama style to a meditative poetic cinema, a shift to re-evaluate definitions of realism that, he claims, reflect his own difficulties in coming to terms with the contemporary world.

Author

• Luke Cromer, Waseda University