Coming of Age in the Cinema of the Lost Decades

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

Abstract

This paper examines two films that take very different approaches to representing the experience of coming of age in Japan’s lost decades: Love Exposure (Ai no Mukidashi, 2008) by Sono Shion (b. 1961) and Bright Future (Akarui Mirai, 2001) by Kurosawa Kiyoshi (b. 1955). While both films focus on restless youth who are mired in delinquency and dead-end jobs, the radically different vision of a future beyond these problems that each film presents reveals conflicting views towards postwar metanarratives of progress. On one hand, Love Exposure revives the pre-bubble social order by normalizing youthful angst in the 2000s as part of a process of reestablishing the continuity of the familial structures that sustained Japan in the decades after the war. Bright Future, on the other hand, envisions a future that is not a product of the linear trajectory of development represented in Love Exposure as it tells a story of two freeter, youth who languish just outside of Japan’s full-time employment system. Through a disorienting style of cinematography, editing, and narrative development, the film disrupts the synthesizing impulse of the teleological coming-of-age story and in the process re-imagines pre-bubble views of development and the stabilizing function of the family. The contrasting treatment of the coming-of-age genre in the work of these filmmakers, this paper argues, reveals the way lost-decade cinema does not just represent the process of moving beyond the stagnation of the 1990s and 2000s but can also transform the very way Japanese culture visualizes a future in relation to its past and present.

Author

• Marc Yamada, Brigham Young University