The Japanese film industry loves medical melodramas, but not much ones with intellectually disabled characters. Director/scriptwriter Yamada Yoji’s enduringly popular Tora-san series featured one such character in its seventh installment, Tora-san, the Good Samaritan (Otoko wa Tsurai yo: Funtohen, 1971), a spinning mill worker (Sakakibara Rumi) who dislikes her job and becomes enamored of the feckless hero. Yamada later included an intellectually disabled student to class taught his night school teacher hero in his drama A Class to Remember 2 (Gakko II, 1996), which he both scripted and directed.
Based on Takuma Takayuki’s hit play for the Tokyo Seleccion Deluxe theater troupe that is in turn based on a true story, Tsutsumi Yukihiko’s drama Angel Home (Kuchizuke) focuses on the intellectually disabled residents of the Himawariso (“Sunflower House”) group home and their caregivers and families.
Though best known as a commercial hitmaker – he directed the money-spinning 20th Century Boys (20-Seiki Shonen) trilogy, among many others, Tsutsumi is also a veteran stage director (though he did not direct the stage version of Angel Home) and his film version of the play is frankly stagey, taking place almost entirely with the confines of the group home, which is quite roomy for a Japanese dwelling, with actors projecting to the third balcony.
As the play did so successfully for audiences around Japan, the film focuses on specific individuals, from their unruly emotions to at time tragic fates, rather than document the problems of the intellectually disabled in the larger community. So we are told that residents leave the home to work, but we never see them on the job.
Instead the story focuses on the friendship – and inconvenient love – that develops between the sweet, demure Mako (Kanjiya Shihori) and the loud, volatile Uyan (Takuma Takayuki). Since Takuma not only wrote the play, but originated the role of Uyan on stage, it’s no surprise that this character is key to both the story and the film’s view of the intellectually disabled.
It’s not a view that everyone will easily accept, since Uyan hardly fits the “innocent” and “pure” mold of the disabled heroes found in films from Hollywood and elsewhere. Instead, he gesticulates oddly and behaves rudely, at times even violently.
Instead of a harmless eccentric with a child’s mind, he is an angry man who understands his situation – and resents it when he realizes his well-meaning minders, as well as society as whole, will never allow him to function fully as an adult, including the adult experience of love.
So when his relationship with Mako turns romantic and he proposes marriage, he creates a dilemma for those around him, especially Mako’s father (Takenaka Naoto), a former manga artist who has kept his pen name Aijo Ippon (Rough translation: All for Love). After the early death of Mako’s mother, he gave up his career to raise her – and now he can’t bear to see her hurt. He also fears for Mako’s future when he is gone.
Thus the film, which begins as group portrait of life in Himawariso, with leavenings of broad humor and pointed reminders about the outside world’s prejudice, narrows to the triangle of Uyan, Mako and Ippon. Some may find the film’s resolution of their dilemmas hard to swallow, reflecting as it does attitudes that seem to belong to another era.
But the play, which packed theaters when it toured four Japanese cities in 2010, started a long-overdue conversation in Japan about the intellectually disabled that the film, which distributor Toei will release widely in May, will continue and hopefully expand.
Mark Schilling