In 2005, Yamazaki Takashi released Always - 3-chome no Yuhi (Always - Sunset on Third Street) a warm-hearted ensemble drama, based on a comic by Saigan Ryohei and set in a 1958 neighborhood in downtown Tokyo.
Yamazaki and his CG staff rebuilt this now-vanished cityscape with such attention to period detail that, for Japanese audiences, Always was like a history theme park. Better, in other words, than the often dusty, smelly and jerry-built reality.
The central characters, including a hot-tempered auto repair shop owner and a failed-novelist-cum-candyshop-proprietor, had a Dickensian vivacity and flair. Audiences laughed at their foibles, wept at their crises - and made Always a megahit.
The sequel, Always 2, is a revisit of familiar sights and faces. There are still crises to overcome, villains to defeat, but the film has a more relaxed, episodic feel than its predecessor. It’s similar to the way David Copperfield shifts from its hero’s intense early struggles as a child laborer to the more meandering later chapters about his tribulations and successes as an adult.
As the film begins, the year is 1959 and Japan is about to begin a decade-long boom, fueled by construction for the just-announced Tokyo Olympics.
On Third Street, however, the novelist, Chagawa Ryunosuke (Yoshioka Hidetaka), has all but given up his writing, as well as his dream of living together with his "adopted son," Junnosuke (Suga Kenta) - a street kid he reluctantly took in, then came to love - and Hiromi (Koyuki), an earthy beauty who ran a bar where Chagawa was a regular - and something more. At the end of the first film (spoiler alert), Hiromi closed the bar and took a more lucrative job as a dancer in a burlesque club, leaving a despondent Chagawa behind.
Meanwhile, the garage owner, Suzuki Norifumi (Tsutsumi Shin’ichi) has yet to achieve his goal of becoming a car-manufacturing magnate, though Rokko (Horikita Maki), the girl who came from the countryside for work for him in the first film, has become a great, grease-stained, help around the shop. His devoted wife, Tomoe (Yakushimaru Hiroko), and rambunctious son, Ippei (Koshimizu Kazuki), are still the delights of his life, though the occasional targets of that ferocious temper.
Then Junnosuke’s birth father, the wealthy, arrogant businessman Kawabata (Kohinata Fumiyo), arrives to claim him. Aroused from his slovenly despair, Chagawa vows to give Junnosuke a good life - and, after receiving Kawabata’s reluctant consent, begins to work in earnest on a novel he hopes will win a major prize and justify him in Kawabata’s eyes.
Meanwhile, the Suzuki family gets a new addition, Mika (Koike Ayame), a cousin sent to stay with them while her failed-businessman father is working as a laborer on a new dam. Raised in middle-class comfort, Mika is appalled by the backwardness of her relatives - they only have one TV and no piano!
There is more, including an awkward suitor for Rokko, a would-be sugar daddy for Hiromi and an eccentric doctor (Tomokazu Miura) whose antics scare but fascinate the local kids. The main plot thread, however, remains Chagawa's struggle to succeed - and keep Junnosuke.
How many Hollywood films would make a weedy writer with appalling dress sense the hero, with the whole neighborhood cheering him on? Maybe a 1930s Frank Capra film with Jimmy Stewart in the Chagawa role. Yoshioka Hidetaka’s performance is worth cheering, though. Many actors have played frustrated writers, but Yoshioka best portrays the life-shortening exhaustion of grinding out a book - and the quiet triumph when the completed manuscript is finally ready to mail. He has won two deserved Japan Academy Awards for this role - a case of real life not only imitating art, but going it one better.
Mark Schilling