How many Japanese have come from the countryside to find their fortunes in Tokyo? Millions, with most arriving in the postwar boom when jobs were everywhere and the future looked bright.
But many, like the punk rocker hero of Okita Shuichi’s off-beat, warm-hearted family comedy
Mohican Comes Home (Mohican Kokyo ni Kaeru), end up making a U-turn, however permanent or temporary. This has been a theme of Japanese films for decades, as indicated by the title’s reference to the 1951 Kinoshita Keisuke classic
Carmen Comes Home (Karumen Kokyo ni Kaeru).
The film, based Okita’s original script, has elements in common with not only these older films, but also the actualities of rural migrants’ lives. The Mohican-haired hero, Eikichi (Matsuda Ryuhei), has been trying to make it as a punk rocker in Tokyo for seven years, but ends up on a boat back to his beautiful home island in the Inland Sea, with his pregnant girlfriend Yuka (Maeda Atsuko) in tow.
On arrival, he gets less than a warm welcome from his irascible father (Emoto Akira), who tells him to cut his hair and get a job – demands Eikichi promptly rejects. Then Dad is diagnosed with terminal cancer and Eikichi, as the oldest son, feels obliged to take over the family liquor store. So far, so typical?
Not really, since Okita, who also filmed a rocky father-son relationship in his widely admired 2012 comedy The Woodsman and the Rain (Kitsutsuki to Ame) rejects standard genre tropes, including standard genre sentimentalism. This is the rare Japanese movie that makes inoperable lung cancer both funny and tragic, that presents its sufferer as both laughably silly and lamentably sad.
Also, though a standard-enough Japanese movie geezer, good-hearted under his prickly surface, Dad is a rocker himself. Since seeing real-life 1970s pop star Yazawa Eikichi at the Tokyo Budokan concert hall (and, as he proudly adds, locking eyes), he has been a superfan, year after year teaching the local junior high brass band a hit Yazawa tune (which the band’s latest iteration secretly thinks is dreadfully old). Cue gags about another clueless Baby Boomer.
But once Dad’s illness is discovered, the film takes a serious turn, while never quite losing its comic edge.
Also, everyone is a little goofy, from Eikichi’s fanatic baseball fan mom (Motai Masako) to his bubbly bride-to-be (who tells Mom that she and Eikichi is a good match because “I’m not so smart”), but no one is simply ridiculous.
Despite his spiky hairdo and slacker ways, Eikichi himself turns out to a gentle-spirited guy who wants to do the right thing by his cantankerous father, while stubbornly refusing to give up his dreams – or cut his hair.
The apple, we see, does not fall far from the parental tree. Kudos to Matsuda Ryuhei’s low-key, thoroughly grounded performance.
As Dad, veteran Emoto Akira does his by-now familiar crazy old man routine – cackling and howling and, in one memorable scene, madly chasing Eikichi around the family table. There is a reason for the high-volume of this performance, but explaining it would mean giving away the film’s rousing ending.
As he also showed in his best film to date, the quirky A Story of Yonosuke (Yokomichi Yonosuke, 2013), Okita can be both a stylistic miniaturist, meticulously shaping the look and mood of every scene, and a storytelling maximalist, taking on big themes with humane compassion and insight. And in Mohican Comes Home he is tackling two of the biggest themes of all – birth and death – and showing that they are not so far apart.
With apologies to Yazawa let’s close with a quote from Bob Dylan: “That he not busy being born is busy dying.”