Heroes who triumph over physical disabilities have become a staple of Japanese films, TV dramas and best-selling memoirs - most of which preach uplift and jerk tears as predictably as the waves lap at Kamakura.
Josee, The Tiger and The Fish does it differently. Yes, the disabled heroine is spunky and yes, she finds a measure of love and happiness. But her story will not make the audience snatch for its collective Kleenex - the genre’s nearly universal aim. Instead it plays with its own conventions, with an offbeat humor and style.
Though director Inudo Isshin was born in 1960 and starting making films three decades ago, Josee has a youthful feel. Also, though Inudo’s approach reflects the long years he spent making TV commercials - particularly in the scrumptious food shots - he has not made yet another TV drama for the big screen and the widest possible audience. The ending, for example, seems to contradict everything that has gone before - a violation of TV drama rules. But younger viewers, wiser to the ways of their contemporaries, may well find it more convincing. I was thrown by it at first, but later realized I should have seen it coming. It was a “Sixth Sense” moment - and made me appreciate the brilliance of Watanabe Aya’s script.
One morning, Tsuneo (Tsumabuchi Satoshi), a fresh-faced college kid, encounters an old woman who pushes a huge baby buggy around the neighborhood. Inside, he discovers, is a young woman (Ikewaki Chizuru) who is not happy at being exposed.
The granny invites him to her house, where her granddaughter Kimiko - the buggy rider - reluctantly prepares him an omelet. He finds the food delicious and the cook charming, despite her perpetual frown and her distressing habit of throwing herself from her stool onto the floor. Stricken by cerebral palsy as a child and unable to walk, Kimiko has been living under her grandmother’s care, while devouring books and accumulating a store of knowledge. A fan of Françoise Sagan, she has taken the name Josee (joh-SAY) after one of the writer’s characters.
As Tsuneo and Josee become friends, then lovers, her narrow world begins to open up. Tsuneo takes her to the zoo to see the tigers and to a hotel where holographic fish swim on the walls. Her happiness seems complete, but then...
Ikewaki Chizuru plays Josee as a tough, wary survivor who has built a private world and is not sure she wants to let anyone in. She is a prickly original.
It’s easy to see why Tsuneo keeps coming back and why fans filled theaters.
Josee, The Tiger and the Fish is as memorable as its title, if in some ways as puzzling. Where did granny get that enormous buggy? And where is that hotel where the guests sleep with the fishes?
Mark Schilling