What used to be the standard model of childhood in Japan - kids playing outside for hours at a time without adult supervision - is now under threat, if not yet extinct. In cities like Tokyo kids are often shuttling between school and various lessons and screens (computer, television, game arcade), with fresh-air limited to their commutes.
To these kids Fukagawa Yoshihiro’s When the Show Tent Came to My Town (Okami Shojo) will seem as exotic as Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain’s classic of 19th Century Americana, though its setting and period- a provincial town in the early 1970s - are familiar to millions of their parents. The ten-year-old protagonists don’t float down the Mississippi (or even the Tonegawa) on rafts, but they do spend most of their down time outdoors, living in their own world and playing by their own rules.
Sounds idyllic, doesn’t it? But Fukagawa’s debut feature, based on Ogawa Tomoko’s award-winning script, also has its dark, hidden side, bordering on the fantastic. Its insights into the delights and fears of childhood, at least as it once commonly was, also run deep and true, however.
Its hero is Akira (Suzuki Tatsuya), a dreamy boy who speculates about beings in the center of the earth and flees for his young life across fields and streams from a gang of bullies, but mostly lives a mundane, middle-class life with his dour journalist father (Go Riju) and perky housewife mother (Otsuka Nene).
Its heroine is Rumiko (Ohno Mao), a transfer student in Akira’s class who is bright, personable and fashionably turned out, by contemporary fourth-grade standards. Popular with the other girls and an idol to more than a few of the boys, Rumiko seems to have it made from the get go, but she has an almost frightening (for Akira) strong character and sense of justice.
She leaps to the defense of not only Akira, as he is beset by two of the aforementioned bullies, but Hideko (Masuda Rena), a big, blossoming girl scorned by her classmates for her wild hair and tattered clothes and, as the boys soon note, lack of a bra. Rumiko makes Hideko her cause, in which she enlists a reluctant Akira, who has a crush on Rumiko but is in no hurry to become a martyr.
He is curious, however, about a carny show that has set up for business on the grounds of a nearby temple - and been declared off limits by his parents and teacher (Mabuchi Erika). Its feature attraction is the “wolf girl,” a human girl raised in the wilds of Hokkaido by wolves who, as the show barker (Taguchi Tomorowo) insists so hypnotically, is one of the wonders of the age.
Led by Koichi (Araki Daigo), a lout and bully, the class mocks Hideko as the wolf girl, though her only job outside class is delivering newspapers to support her poor mother and two younger siblings. Outraged by this and other insults, Rumiko vows revenge on Koichi and his crew, with Akira and Hideko as her allies (or rather foot soldiers). Her plan leads to unexpected consequences, though the story stays true to the characters as we know them, including their eventual fates.
Ohno Mao is a stand-out as Rumiko - confident and mature beyond her years, but never the preening child star. By contrast, Suzuki Tatsugi’s Akira is a kid of the old, uncool school, whose every emotion is as readable as the comics he sleeps with.
Director Fukagawa, winner of the Pia Film Festival Award for two straight years, as well as numerous other prizes for his non-feature work, may not know the film’s period personally - he was born in 1976 - but he poignantly evokes its pre-digital air of freedom. Can he be Japan’s Mark Twain for the new millennium?