If you thought trains meant a lot in blues songs, consider how much metaphysical freight they pull in Japanese film. Donald Richie was one of the first westerners to write about Japanese cinema. His new collection Viewed Sideways (Stone Bridge Press) includes a 1993 piece on the importance of trains in Japan’s films.
Richie mentions the passing trains that bracket Ozu’s Tokyo Story. He could have also spotted that amphibian ghost-train in Spirited Away. Represented as toylike miniatures, hurtling locomotives, or the proud bullet train, they’re humanized to a point that would surprise even Thomas the Tank Engine.
Three films at the Pacific Rim Film Festival show how much Japan loves its trains.
None are more loving than Yoskinari Nishikori’s charming if Capra-corny Railways. Forty-nine-year-old Tokyo exec Tsutui Hajime (Kiichi Nakai) is imploding with overwork. He’s estranged from his family, and he’s cut deeply by the shame of participating in corporate layoffs. When his mother falls ill, he joins her in the remote and lovely Shimane prefecture. There he fulfills his smothered childhood dream to work on trains.
It’s not easy—even the small railroads are sticklers for timetables and white-gloved protocol. And his wife stays behind in Tokyo. But the trolley-sized wooden train, coursing past emerald paddies and edging summer backyards, is beyond picturesque. It’s a train as Paul Theroux described it: a machine in the garden.
The steel-clad train in Shodo Girls!! by Ryuichi Inomata takes one of these self-same girls away from her friends when the economy has tanked. It’s a Japanese version of the common British movie plot (Full Monty, etc.) in which a dying industrial town is revived by performance. In this case, it’s the new fad of calligraphy as a sport, using music, crowds and brushes as heavy as dumbbells. When the sumi ink starts flying, it looks like action painting to the Westerner.
A schoolkid’s movie, Shodo Girls!!, but the anime Summer Wars by Mamoru Hosada is much more like it: a mashup of the candy-coated artist Murakami and Kore-eda’s Still Walking. Those who don’t care for the flying caped bunny-rabbit avatar King Kazma will prefer Summer Wars’ other side: a look at an extended family reuniting in the sweltering rural Nagano for the matriarch’s 90th birthday.
Grandma is the head of a samurai clan with more pride than money. The reunion is disturbed by crisis: in the virtual realm of Oz (the core of the Internet, populated by millions of cartoony avatars) a rogue program arrives, stealing identities and threatening the grid. This family (led by granddaughter Natsuki’s sort-of boyfriend Kenji) will get inside and fight them off. Some 20 minutes pass before the first battle scene. Director Hosada (a vet of Spirited Away’s Studio Ghibli) seems committed to flesh out a tale that’s both eye-popping and intelligent.
And the link between the two worlds—the fertile green countryside and the cramped city where Natsuki lives? It’s a train ride, of course, where Kenji and Natsuki are at last free from their families and their duties, free to share a shy moment together.
SHODO GIRLS!! screens Monday, Oct. 17 at 7:15pm
SUMMER WARS screens Monday, Oct. 17 at 9:45pm
RAILWAYS screens Tuesday, Oct. 18 at 1pm
All at the Del Mar, all free.
