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      ‘Modern Love’ Goes Global in New Television Series

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      The latest iteration of the “Modern Love” franchise, “Modern Love Tokyo,” begins streaming on Oct. 21.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Daniel Jones, the senior editor of The New York Times’s Modern Love column, remembers when, a dozen years ago, it was just him selecting stories from a stack of nearly a thousand monthly submissions and editing each one for the essay series. “It was kind of lonely,” he said.This week, he has plenty of company. He is in Japan to attend the premiere of the television series “Modern Love Tokyo,” the latest installment in Amazon’s global “Modern Love” franchise. The seven-episode show will begin streaming on Amazon Prime Video on Oct. 21. The episodes are set in Tokyo, feature the work of actors, of directors and of a creative team from Japan, and are based on essays published in the column that were reimagined to make them more familiar to Japanese audiences. (In a “Modern Love” first, one of the episodes will be animated.)“I love that the process includes all these other talented people who are interpreting stories and amplifying emotions, putting in music,” Mr. Jones said in an interview last week. “It’s just exploded the job into a whole new realm.”Since the original “Modern Love” show was released on Amazon in October 2019, three international spinoffs have debuted in three languages: “Modern Love Mumbai,” in Hindi; “Modern Love Hyderabad,” in Telugu; and the Tokyo series, in Japanese. A fourth series, “Modern Love Chennai,” in Tamil, is forthcoming, and a fifth, “Modern Love Amsterdam,” offered in Dutch, is set to be released in mid-December.Mr. Jones reflected on the television franchise’s expansion abroad, on the process of adapting American stories for each series and on the longevity of the Modern Love column. Read the edited interview below.When did the idea to create international versions of the show come about?The original series, set in New York City, came out in 2019, and pretty soon after that, we started talking about other cities around the world where we might be able to do versions of it. Of course, then the pandemic hit, which made everything harder and a little delayed. And so the international versions we began talking about several years ago are just now coming out.What is your role on the series?I’m a co-producer on all the international versions. I see the episodes as they’re being edited; I read the scripts. I try to maintain a sense of what Modern Love is and has been for more than 18 years now, meaning realistic love stories, not sweeping romances. No overt sex or Bollywood plots or anything that would push the boundaries and make it seem outside what the column does. But the people working on this at Amazon Studios know this and get it. In fact, that’s what they value most about these series and what makes the work distinctive in these markets. We’re all on the same page.Also, the Modern Love archive is enormous — it’s 900-some essays at this point. While the teams in different countries who are picking content completely reimagine the stories for their audiences, the shows’ creators often stick close to the plot, so I’m helpful to them if they want a certain kind of story; I know the archive better than anyone. But I’ve been so impressed with the local teams’ approach and research and passion for this project.Daniel Jones attending the “Modern Love Tokyo” premiere. Phoebe JonesHow does the process of adapting an American story for an audience in another country work?For one of the Mumbai episodes, the creative team in Mumbai took an essay about a woman in Brooklyn who had separated from her husband and who was feeling down in every way — she was in bad physical shape, emotionally wrung out. And she now needed to get herself to work by bicycle.She started riding across the Manhattan Bridge, but she didn’t have the stamina to go all the way up, so the story was about the empowerment — both physical and emotional — of building herself back up. It was a very New York story, but when they took it to Mumbai, they made her character a domestic servant in a wealthy family, highlighting the class divide there. There’s a bridge in Mumbai, called the Flyway, that goes from a gritty area to the gleaming city center, and it was the same basic process of her building herself back up. It speaks to the universality of these conflicts — you can get a divorce in Mumbai, and you can get a divorce in Brooklyn. The emotions and struggle and all that can be so similar.All of the versions of the show are available to stream on Amazon Prime in the United States, right?Yes. Now, with the success of series like “Squid Game,” it’s become clear that subtitles are not a barrier. I hope people check out the versions set in the other cities, too.What’s been the most exciting part of working on the international versions?When these teams discover stories that I’d long forgotten about in the archive, and then reintroduce me to them in a new way. It’s great to have other people look at the archive with fresh eyes, find such gems and see how to reimagine them for the screen.What’s next for the “Modern Love” television franchise?Our fifth international series, “Modern Love Amsterdam,” premieres in mid-December. Beyond that, stay tuned, because we have ambitions for all over the world. 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      in Music

      Les Rallizes Dénudés: Unraveling One of Rock’s Deep Mysteries

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      The Japanese band that emerged in the late 1960s was known for its rumbling rhythms and ear-shredding feedback — but almost nothing was known about its leader, Takashi Mizutani.Makoto Kubota is still amazed by the continuing appeal of his old band, Les Rallizes Dénudés.An accomplished producer and bandleader in Japan, Kubota spent just a few years in the early 1970s playing with the Rallizes, which by the usual measures of rock success barely made a blip. Led by the enigmatic Takashi Mizutani, the band emerged in the late-’60s haze of psychedelia and radical student politics with a scorchingly loud sound, though it ceased performing in 1996 and the handful of raw recordings the group released went out of print long ago. Yet decades later, younger musicians now press Kubota for any information about the band, and fans around the world who likely cannot understand Mizutani’s cryptic Japanese lyrics declare on social media that his music has changed their lives.“I never thought this could touch foreigners’ hearts so deeply,” Kubota said in a recent interview from his home in Tokyo.Les Rallizes Dénudés — known to insiders and acolytes as the Rallizes (pronounced “rallies”) for short — have long held a peculiar place in the annals of underground music as a group more heard about than actually heard, its reputation resting more on legend than fact. Through bootleg live recordings with rumbling rhythms and ear-shredding sheets of guitar feedback, which have been pored over and cataloged by fans, the Rallizes have come to symbolize both the sonic extremes of rock and the ways that online communities can nurture and amplify even the most obscure corners of global culture.David Novak, an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of “Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation,” describes the band’s influence by referring to an oft-misquoted remark by Brian Eno that relatively few people bought the Velvet Underground’s albums at the time, but each of them (seemingly) formed a band.“The Rallizes are like that, except there was no record to buy,” Novak said. “There was just this fantasy of some incredibly abrasive, mysterious group that created this wall of impenetrable noise. The power of that story drove a huge renaissance.”Now, after decades of intrigue — and almost three years since Mizutani’s death — Les Rallizes Dénudés are getting the archival treatment. Earlier this year, “The Oz Tapes,” a set of recordings from 1973 that were part of a compilation celebrating Oz, a short-lived venue in Tokyo, were remastered by Kubota and reissued by the American label Temporal Drift. “Oz Days Live: ’72-’73 Kichijoji,” an expanded version of the original compilation, with tracks by the Rallizes, Masato Minami, Acid Seven and others from the same scene, is coming out this month.Later this fall will come long-sought reissues of three CDs from 1991, the only albums the Rallizes released during their existence. And Kubota, working on behalf of Mizutani’s estate, has spent months combing through what he called “a suitcase full of master tapes” from Mizutani’s personal archive.The wave of new releases, and related curatorial work by Temporal Drift — “Oz Days Live” comes with a 112-page book with an oral history of Oz, a CBGB for Tokyo’s early psychedelic scene — offer a chance to contextualize the Rallizes for new listeners. They can also fill in the gaps for longtime followers who have subsisted on scantily labeled bootlegs and digital bread crumbs from fan sites.BUT GETTING A full picture of the Rallizes and its reclusive leader may be impossible. Mizutani, usually pictured in a uniform of black shades and black leather, almost never spoke to the media, and some former bandmates still adhere to an unspoken omertà. Maki Miura, a guitarist, declined an interview request about Mizutani and his former band with a statement that said: “During his lifetime there was a silent understanding that no one would ever talk publicly about him. Honestly, it makes me wonder if Mizutani is pissed off.”Still, interviews with former Rallizes members and other associates of Mizutani paint a picture of a man singularly devoted to his art, and perhaps just as obsessed with cultivating an aura of inscrutability. Even the meaning of the band’s name is obscure. It may be an inside joke about suitcases, or perhaps a reference to William S. Burroughs. Kubota said he never asked about it, but that the name was understood to mean something like the Naked and Stoned. “It’s too embarrassing to say,” he said, and laughed.The band was founded in 1967 at Doshisha University, an elite institution in Kyoto, by Mizutani and other students who were members of the school’s Light Music Club. At the time, Japanese rock was evolving beyond its Beatles-inspired “group sounds” era, and Kubota said that Mizutani’s influences in those early years included the Velvet Underground, Blue Cheer, the Grateful Dead and the avant-garde rock and jazz of the New York label ESP.Mizutani was also heavily involved in the student protest movement of the time. By 1970, the Rallizes gained notoriety that would last for decades when its original bassist, Moriaki Wakabayashi, was part of a Marxist group that hijacked a Japanese passenger plane and flew it to North Korea. After that point, any political dimension to the Rallizes’ music, or Mizutani’s public persona, largely disappeared.Kubota in July. The onetime Les Rallizes member has been working on behalf of Mizutani’s estate, combing through what he called “a suitcase full of master tapes” from Mizutani’s personal archive.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times“The Oz Tapes” — with Kubota on bass, Takeshi Nakamura on guitar and Shunichiro Shoda on drums — is a rough blueprint for the Rallizes’ sound, which would develop over years of shifting lineups, with Mizutani as the only constant. Songs like “Wilderness of False Flowers” and the 11-minute “Vertigo Otherwise My Conviction” are built over jagged, repetitive grooves that swell and recede as Mizutani plays long solos that resemble Neil Young crossed with Sonny Sharrock. Like the Velvet Underground, the Rallizes can toggle between modes of paint-peeling noise and surreal quiet, as in “Memory Is Far Away,” a mournful ballad with ambiguous lines about a lost love (“The flames of betrayal burn eternally/The shadow of redemption keeps chasing me”).“It’s almost like the people there were brainwashed by his vibrations,” recalled Minoru Tezuka, the proprietor of Oz, who went on to become the group’s manager.In time the group’s style grew more extreme, with peals of feedback, lasting 20 minutes or longer, that can be hypnotic or painful, though sometimes with intriguing reference points. In “Night of the Assassins,” those screaming guitars are juxtaposed with a bass line that closely resembles “I Will Follow Him,” Little Peggy March’s bubble-gum hit from 1963; whether Mizutani meant that as a joke, we may never know.EVEN TO HIS bandmates, Mizutani was a cipher. “Mysterious but lovable,” Kubota said.Acid Seven, a bandleader and prankster who was a regular at Oz, recalled Mizutani interrupting his stoic silence at jam sessions only to utter existentialist riddles. He described Mizutani once taking a drag from his ever-present cigarette and proclaiming, “The smoke coming out of my mouth is extinguishing my ego,” with no further explanation offered.By being totally uncompromising about the band’s sound, Mizutani effectively exiled himself from the Japanese music industry. Shime Takahashi, who played drums with the Rallizes in the mid-70s, recalled the band once working in a professional studio, only to find that the engineer never pressed record because he thought it was still rehearsing. Mizutani had been playing with the Rallizes for more than 20 years before releasing its three albums in 1991 — two sets of early recordings, and another double-CD live set of the band at its noisiest.“It’s that determination not to be commercial, to remain underground, which is the one constant the group had throughout its history,” said Alan Cummings, a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and a longtime chronicler of Japan’s underground music.Yet that stance bolstered the Rallizes’ legend, making the band a sort of early inspiration for the so-called Japanoise scene of the 1980s and ’90s — a catchall for a range of aggressive and noisy rock and electronic music that flowered in Tokyo, Osaka and elsewhere — and a symbol for the perseverance of music that was anti-commercial at its core.“You might assume this is just Orientalist reverie on the part of American fans,” said Novak, of U.C. Santa Barbara. “But it’s not, because that sense of mystery is shared by so many in Japan. Rallizes came to symbolize the unknowability of the underground music scene in Japan, for Japanese fans too.”Still, the lovable side of Mizutani comes through in some of his colleagues’ recollections. Kubota remembers him cooking Nagoya-style noodles when they got the munchies in their student days. The dour eminence of noise rock could even break character at times. Kubota sounded stunned when he relayed the story of his friend inviting the Orange County Brothers, a Tex-Mex-style Japanese rock band that Kubota worked with, to spend the night at his parents’ house while on tour.“This is like the Velvet Underground having a party with Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show,” Kubota said, referring to the goofy 1970s country-rock group that sang “The Cover of Rolling Stone.”Les Rallizes Dénudés onstage in 1971.Kyo Nakamura, via The Last One MusiqueTHE LEGEND OF Les Rallizes Dénudés was arguably kept alive through bootlegs — unauthorized recordings, mostly of live concerts, that circulated among fans online and sparked new interest in the band in the 2000s. The source of these tapes has long been a curiosity, with some insiders speculating that Mizutani, or at least someone very close to him, may have been involved, given the high audio quality of some of them.To Temporal Drift, founded by two former employees of the reissue label Light in the Attic who worked on its Japan Archival Series, the popularity of those tapes proves the existence of a broad international fan base, and a potential market for new releases.“The obsession that Rallizes fans have for the band is pretty incredible,” said Patrick McCarthy, one of the label’s founders. “They’re people that are extremely dedicated, in ways you see with the Grateful Dead, where they have to have every article, every version of every bootleg.”The road to the new releases began in 2019, when Kubota traveled to New York to help with a documentary about an old friend, the Japanese folk singer Sachiko Kanenobu, who was playing in Central Park. “Everybody who was there — musicians, radio people — they asked me about the Rallizes. So I said, ‘OK, something is happening. I’ve got to contact Mizutani.’”After leaving the Rallizes in 1973, Kubota went on to a successful career with his bands Sunset Gang and the Sunsetz, and as a producer. But he had not spoken with Mizutani in almost 30 years before that summer. To his surprise, his old bandmate said he wanted to do a “last tour.” Kubota said that Mizutani also denied any involvement in the bootlegs, and expressed a desire to finally release the Rallizes’ music officially. The two had frequent conversations for a month or two, Kubota said, before their text chain went cold that fall. Later, he learned that Mizutani had died in December 2019, at age 71.Kubota then began working with Mizutani’s estate to sort through Mizutani’s archive of recordings; he declined to identify who controls the estate, saying only that it is someone who had been close to Mizutani for many years.Around the same time, he began working with Temporal Drift; Yosuke Kitazawa, the label’s other principal, said that when they began work on the project, they had no idea that Mizutani had died. In October 2021, an official Rallizes site appeared on the internet, announcing that Mizutani had died almost two years before and that a new entity, The Last One Musique — named after a Rallizes epic — had been formed to represent the Rallizes’ music rights, and would begin releasing Mizutani’s work “with far more alive and striking sound than the bootlegs that have been circulating over 20 years.”In a series of interviews this summer, Kubota said he had been working for months to sort through Mizutani’s collection, including numerous studio and live recordings.“Now I have received the material for four full concerts and started working on it,” Kubota said. “It will be monstrous.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Inu-oh’ Review: Dazzling Anime Meets Medieval Epic

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      This modern riff on “The Tale of the Heike,” from 14th-century Japan, takes some confusing turns. But the animation is undeniably wonderful.Visually sumptuous and narratively tangled, the anime “Inu-oh” takes place in 14th-century Japan. The main story does, at least. It tells of two young, audaciously talented castaways — a blind musician and a cursed dancer — who meet one dark evening. After the usual how-do-you-do, they begin performing for each other and quickly slide into enchanted sync. Together, they frolic and jam and whirl, and before long they’re levitating, gyrating against an expanse of shimmery stars as they orbit each other like heavenly bodies.It’s fitting that these characters meet on a bridge, given that the movie spans past and present, reality and fantasy. It’s based on a novel, “The Tale of the Heike: The Inu-oh Chapters,” by the Japanese writer Hideo Furukawa that riffs on “The Tale of the Heike,” a foundational medieval epic about clans engaged in civil war. A font of innumerable interpretations, the original tale reaches a climax with the battle of Dan-no-Ura, during which the Heike clan is defeated, the child emperor drowned and a sacred imperial sword lost. That sword pops up periodically in “Inu-oh” — but good luck understanding why.What the sword — which at times drips blood — has to do with our two whirling strangers isn’t altogether clear. Those who’ve read Furukawa’s novel, which doesn’t seem to have been translated into English, may have no issue tracking the movie’s labyrinthine turns, its time shifts, storytelling elisions and fantastical flourishes. After the first hour or so and having forgotten much of the (confusing!) introductory exposition, I gave up trying to fit the pieces together. Instead, I just grooved along on the often-spectacular animation, savoring its watery hues, vivid character designs and recurrent, galvanizing embrace of near-abstraction.The director Masaaki Yuasa (“Ride Your Wave”) opens “Inu-oh” with a great whoosh of images that announce his visual ambitions and give you little time to establish your bearings. After a short, vivid sprint across time, the story settles on Tomona (voiced by Mirai Moriyama), a boy who lives in a fishing village with his parents. One day, two royal emissaries commission Tomona’s father to dive for a mysterious treasure. It goes disastrously wrong; the father is killed and Tomona blinded. He leaves home but soon finds a calling, becoming a biwa (lute) player and eventually meeting the stranger on the bridge.That would be Inu-oh (Avu-chan, from the rock band Queen Bee), and his background adds complications. A pariah born with severe deformities, including an arm that’s longer than his coltish legs — when he runs, it trails him as perilously as Isadora Duncan’s scarf — Inu-oh hides his face under a gourd mask. He also speaks with an adenoidal whine and scrambles about with feverish agility that evolves into a kind of superpower after he and Tomona meet. Together, they hit the road and refine their talents: Inu-oh becomes a performing sensation and Tomona a proto-rocker, complete with squealing biwa and admirers.Given the attention Yuasa lavishes on these passages, it’s clear that he loves the idea of 14th-century performers rocking out like modern-day arena gods. If nothing else, these interludes have a storytelling clarity and directness that’s otherwise lacking here. (The script is by Akiko Nogi.) Certainly it’s amusing to watch Tomona jam: He plays his biwa behind his head à la Jimi Hendrix (to be clear, the resemblance is strictly gestural), whips around his luxurious mane and bares his chest, lathering up the crowd. Yet while in time the performances reveal truths about the players and their lives, they rapidly grow tiresome.Still, sometimes beauty is enough (or almost). And “Inu-oh” is often visually arresting, starting with an early interlude that, with its washes of color, delicate figures, negative space and lateral movements, looks like an animated scroll painting. This sequence, like the rest of the movie, retains a strong trace of the human hand and shows a deep grasp of (and pleasure in) the medium’s plasticity, all of which are too often absent in contemporary commercial animation. Even as Yuasa’s approach changes from section to section — as he plays with texture, volume and hue and gently shifts the balance between the figurative and the abstract — his extraordinary touch remains evident in each line and in every eye-popping swirl.Inu-ohRated PG-13 for mild peril and death. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Movies

      For the Most Complex Heroines in Animation, Look to Japan

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      The girls and women of anime tend to experience the conflicting emotions of real life. That’s because the auteurs try to create “an everyday, real person.”At a time of widespread debate over the depiction of women in film, the top Japanese animators have long been creating heroines who are more layered and complex than many of their American counterparts. They have faults and weaknesses and tempers as well as strengths and talents. They’re not properties or franchises; they’re characters the filmmakers believe in.Like many teenagers, Suzu in Mamoru Hosoda’s “Belle” (released here this year and available on major digital platforms) has a life online that overshadows her daily existence: her alter ego, the title character, is the reigning pop diva of the cyberworld of U. In real life, Suzu is an introverted high school student in a flyspeck town — even her best friend calls her “a country bumpkin.” But she still wins sophisticated listeners, as her music reflects the love and pain she has experienced, especially since the death of her mother, who drowned saving a child from a flooded river.Suzu misses her, but she’s also angry at her for sacrificing herself for “a kid whose name she didn’t even know.” Suzu went so far as to abandon her impressive musical gifts because her mother encouraged them. American heroines may express a longing for a vanished parent, but not the deep, complicated emotions of this reworking of “Beauty and the Beast.” The protagonist of the Disney version misses her father when she agrees to become Beast’s prisoner, but she never mentions her mother. Nor does Jasmine in “Aladdin.”In a video call, Hosoda said he believed a major shift occurred in animation when the Disney artists made Belle a more independent, intelligent and contemporary young woman than her predecessors. She wanted a more exciting life than her “poor, provincial town” could offer — a desire Snow White or Cinderella never expressed. “When you think of animation and female leads, you always go to the fairy tale tropes,” Hosoda said through a translator. “But they really broke that template: It felt very new. Similarly, what we tried to do in ‘Belle’ is not build a character, but build a person: someone who reflects the society in which we live.”With Suzu in “Belle,” the director Mamoru Hosoda tried to create “someone who reflects the society in which we live.” Studio ChizuThe beast that Suzu encounters in U is not an enchanted prince, but Kei, an abused adolescent who struggles to protect his younger brother from their brutal father. To save the boys, Suzu discards Belle’s glamorous trappings and reveals herself to be the plain high school girl she is. When she sings as herself, she touches the boy she wants to help and her grieving heart, too. Because Japanese animated features are made by smaller crews and on smaller budgets than those of major American films, directors can present more personal visions. American studios employ story crews; Hosoda, Hayao Miyazaki, Makoto Shinkai and other auteurs storyboard entire films themselves. Their work isn’t subjected to a gantlet of test audiences, executive approvals or advisory committees.Shinkai broke box office records in Japan in 2016 with “Your Name” (now on digital platforms). It begins as a body-swapping teen rom-com but develops into a meditation on the trauma many Japanese still suffer after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.Mitsuha is bored with her life in the rural town of Itomori; Taki, a student in Tokyo, wants to be an architect. One morning, they wake up in each other’s bodies and have to navigate daily life not knowing where to find anything or who anyone is.Taki and Mitsuha are caught up in a body-switching tale in “Your Name,” but it is Mitsuha who must overcome her fear to save family and friends.Funimation FilmsAs the body-swapping recurs, they learn about each other through their surroundings, establishing a bond that transcends physical distance and time. Mitsuha revels in the sophisticated attractions of Tokyo. Taki draws the Itomori he sees through Mitsuha’s eyes, but that leads him to a shattering discovery: The town was destroyed three years earlier by a devastating meteor strike.Desperate to warn Mitsuha, he reaches out to her through Shinto-inflected magic. They meet briefly at twilight, when the boundaries between worlds become permeable in Japanese folklore. Like any awkward teenagers, they laugh, quarrel, shed tears and vow to be together again, but they also formulate a plan to save the people of Itomori.When Taki vanishes, Mitsuha acts. She’s not a princess on a quest to preserve her realm like Moana, or Poppy in “Trolls 2.” She’s a frightened girl trying to save her family and friends from a deadly threat. She defies her pompous politician father, and uses her intelligence and resolve to overcome her fear and save hundreds of lives. But any capable high school girl could do what Mitsuha does: She doesn’t need superpowers to save the day.“Ultimately, Mitsuha still loses her hometown; she moves to Tokyo,” Shinkai said in an interview via email. “Since the 2011 earthquake, Japanese people have been living with the fear that our cities may disappear. But even if that happens, even if we have to move somewhere else, we go on living. We meet someone special. That’s what I wanted Mitsuha to do, who I wanted her to be.”The trend toward complex heroines isn’t new in anime. Miyazaki’s Oscar-winning “Spirited Away” (released in Japan in 2001 and now on HBO Max) grew out of his dissatisfaction with the superficial entertainments offered to adolescent girls in Japan. “I wanted the main character to be a typical girl in whom a 10-year-old could recognize herself,” he explained through a translator in an interview. “She shouldn’t be someone extraordinary, but an everyday, real person — even though this kind of character is more difficult to create. It wouldn’t be a story in which the character grows up, but a story in which she draws on something already inside her that is brought out by the particular circumstances.”The protagonist, Chihiro, begins as a petulant adolescent: Her “skinny legs and sulky face” symbolize her overprotected, underdeveloped personality. The trials she faces in Yubaba’s Bathhouse, a spa for nature spirits sullied by human pollution, force Chihiro to develop untapped resources of strength, courage and love. By the end of the film, the sulky girl has been replaced by a more confident, capable young woman who cares about others. Her transformation shows in the animation: Early on, she runs like a fussy child, eyes half-closed. Later, when she goes to a save a friend, she runs all out, knees and elbows pumping.In Isao Takahata’s “Only Yesterday” (1991, now on HBO Max), Taeko has an unexciting job and a tiny apartment in 1982 Tokyo. But she’s 27 and single at a time when Japanese women were expected to marry before 25. Bored with her mundane existence, she decides to visit country cousins she stayed with years earlier.Taeko is surprised to discover her fifth-grade self has accompanied her on the trip. The spectral presence of the girl she once was triggers a flood of memories: School friendships, fights with her sisters, the onset of puberty. By exploring who she was, Taeko learns who she wants to become in a moving, understated portrait of a woman at a crossroads in her life.Like Greta Garbo, Chiyoko Fujiwara in Satoshi Kon’s “Millennium Actress” (released here in 2003 and available on the Roku Channel) retired from the screen at the height of her fame. After 30 years of seclusion, she grants a documentarian, Genya Tachibana, an interview. As Chiyoko reminisces, Tachibana and his jaded cameraman find themselves inside her tangled memories — and movies. As an adolescent in the 1930s, Chiyoko fell in love with a wounded artist who was fleeing the dreaded thought police.Kon effortlessly shifts the narrative from reality to memory to film. In Japanese-occupied Manchuria, bandits attack the train on which the teenage actress is traveling. A door in the burning railroad car opens into a fiery castle in a feudal period film: Chiyoko plays a princess determined to join her lord in death. As a 19th-century geisha, she shields the artist from the Shogun’s troops in Kyoto; as an astronaut, she goes on a mission to find him, knowing she won’t be able to return. The visual complexity of the film mirrors Chiyoko’s personality. Kon depicts her as an independent woman who made her own decisions: what profession to pursue, when and whom to marry, when to divorce, what roles to play, when to retire.Although almost all Japanese animation directors are male, more women have been moving into important roles in recent years as producers, writers, musicians and more. Their contributions are affecting the way girls and women are depicted onscreen.O-Ei, in Keiichi Hara’s “Miss Hokusai” (released here in 2016, and now on digital platforms), is based on a real person, the daughter of the great printmaker Katsushika Hokusai. Although only a few works can be attributed to her with certainty, O-Ei was an artist in her own right, and many historians believe she assisted her father when his abilities faltered in old age.Rapunzel in “Tangled” covered the walls of her tower room with paintings, but she shows little interest in art once she escapes. In contrast, O-Ei strides assuredly through 19th-century Edo, confident in her talent and her place in its vibrant artistic culture. She focuses on her drawing and can’t be bothered with the traditional female duties of housekeeping. “When the place gets too dirty, we move,” she says bluntly.O-Ei reflects the experiences of women in modern Japan who are escaping the sexism of its traditional culture, including the female artists who worked on the film. Hara explained via email: “I have no direct experience of O-Ei’s state of mind: I can only guess. But co-producer Keiko Matsushita, actress Anne Watanabe (who provides O-Ei’s voice) and singer-songwriter Ringo Sheena, who are very strong-minded, creative women pursuing their goals with great determination, may have related to O-Ei at a more personal level. The film reflects the love and dedication they put into it.” More

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      in Movies

      Chie Hayakawa Imagines a Japan Where the Elderly Volunteer to Die

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      The premise for Chie Hayakawa’s film, “Plan 75,” is shocking: a government push to euthanize the elderly. In a rapidly aging society, some also wonder: Is the movie prescient?TOKYO — The Japanese film director Chie Hayakawa was germinating the idea for a screenplay when she decided to test out her premise on elderly friends of her mother and other acquaintances. Her question: If the government sponsored a euthanasia program for people 75 and over, would you consent to it?“Most people were very positive about it,” Ms. Hayakawa said. “They didn’t want to be a burden on other people or their children.”To Ms. Hayakawa, the seemingly shocking response was a powerful reflection of Japan’s culture and demographics. In her first feature-length film, “Plan 75,” which won a special distinction at the Cannes Film Festival this month, the government of a near-future Japan promotes quiet institutionalized deaths and group burials for lonely older people, with cheerful salespeople pitching them on the idea as if hawking travel insurance.“The mind-set is that if the government tells you to do something, you must do it,” Ms. Hayakawa, 45, said in an interview in Tokyo before the film’s opening in Japan on Friday. Following the rules and not imposing on others, she said, are cultural imperatives “that make sure you don’t stick out in a group setting.”With a lyrical, understated touch, Ms. Hayakawa has taken on one of the biggest elephants in the room in Japan: the challenges of dealing with the world’s oldest society.Ms. Hayakawa with other winners at the Cannes Film Festival last month.Gareth Cattermole/Getty ImagesClose to one-third of the country’s population is 65 or older, and Japan has more centenarians per capita than any other nation. One out of five people over 65 in Japan live alone, and the country has the highest proportion of people suffering from dementia. With a rapidly declining population, the government faces potential pension shortfalls and questions about how the nation will care for its longest-living citizens.Aging politicians dominate government, and the Japanese media emphasizes rosy stories about happily aging fashion gurus or retail accommodations for older customers. But for Ms. Hayakawa, it was not a stretch to imagine a world in which the oldest citizens would be cast aside in a bureaucratic process — a strain of thought she said could already be found in Japan.Euthanasia is illegal in the country, but it occasionally arises in grisly criminal contexts. In 2016, a man killed 19 people in their sleep at a center for people with disabilities outside Tokyo, claiming that such people should be euthanized because they “have extreme difficulty living at home or being active in society.”The horrifying incident provided a seed of an idea for Ms. Hayakawa. “I don’t think that was an isolated incident or thought process within Japanese society,” she said. “It was already floating around. I was very afraid that Japan was turning into a very intolerant society.”To Kaori Shoji, who has written about film and the arts for The Japan Times and the BBC and saw an earlier version of “Plan 75,” the movie did not seem dystopian. “She’s just telling it like it is,” Ms. Shoji said. “She’s telling us: ‘This is where we’re headed, actually.’”That potential future is all the more believable in a society where some people are driven to death by overwork, said Yasunori Ando, an associate professor at Tottori University who studies spirituality and bioethics.“It is not impossible to think of a place where euthanasia is accepted,” he said.Chieko Baisho plays an elderly woman in “Plan 75.”Loaded FilmsMs. Hayakawa has spent the bulk of her adult years contemplating the end of life from a very personal vantage. When she was 10, she learned that her father had cancer, and he died a decade later. “That was during my formative years, so I think it had an influence on my perspective toward art,” she said.The daughter of civil servants, Ms. Hayakawa started drawing her own picture books and writing poems from a young age. In elementary school, she fell in love with “Muddy River,” a Japanese drama about a poor family living on a river barge. The movie, directed by Kohei Oguri, was nominated for best foreign language film at the Academy Awards in 1982.“The feelings I couldn’t put into words were expressed in that movie,” Ms. Hayakawa said. “And I thought, I want to make movies like that as well.”She eventually applied to the film program at the School of Visual Arts in New York, believing that she would get a better grounding in moviemaking in the United States. But given her modest English abilities, she decided within a week of arriving on campus to switch to the photography department, because she figured she could take pictures by herself.Her instructors were struck by her curiosity and work ethic. “If I mentioned a film offhandedly, she would go home and go rent it, and if I mentioned an artist or exhibition, she would go research it and have something to say about it,” said Tim Maul, a photographer and one of Ms. Hayakawa’s mentors. “Chie was someone who really had momentum and a singular drive.”After graduating in 2001, Ms. Hayakawa gave birth to her two children in New York. In 2008, she and her husband, the painter Katsumi Hayakawa, decided to return to Tokyo, where she began working at WOWOW, a satellite broadcaster, helping to prepare American films for Japanese viewing.“The mind-set is that if the government tells you to do something, you must do it,” Ms. Hayakawa said.Noriko Hayashi for The New York TimesAt 36, she enrolled in a one-year film program at a night school in Tokyo while continuing to work during the day. “I felt like I couldn’t put my full energy into child raising or filmmaking,” she said. Looking back, she said, “I would tell myself it’s OK, just enjoy raising your children. You can start filmmaking at a later time.”For her final project, she made “Niagara,” about a young woman who learns, as she is about to depart the orphanage where she grew up, that her grandfather had killed her parents, and that her grandmother, who she thought had died in a car accident with her parents, was alive.She submitted the movie to the Cannes Film Festival in a category for student works and was shocked when it was selected for screening in 2014. At the festival, Ms. Hayakawa met Eiko Mizuno-Gray, a film publicist, who subsequently invited Ms. Hayakawa to make a short film on the theme of Japan 10 years in the future. It would be part of an anthology produced by Hirokazu Kore-eda, the celebrated Japanese director.Ms. Hayakawa had already been developing the idea of “Plan 75” as a feature-length film but decided to make an abridged version for “Ten Years Japan.”While writing the script, she woke up every morning at 4 to watch movies. She cites the Taiwanese director Edward Yang, the South Korean director Lee Chang-dong and Krzysztof Kieslowski, the Polish art-house director, as important influences. After work, she would write for a couple of hours at a cafe while her husband cared for their children — relatively rare in Japan, where women still carry the disproportionate burden of housework and child care.After Ms. Hayakawa’s 18-minute contribution to the anthology came out, Ms. Mizuno-Gray and her husband, Jason Gray, worked with her to develop an extended script. By the time filming started, it was the middle of the pandemic. “There were countries with Covid where they were not prioritizing the life of the elderly,” Ms. Hayakawa said. “Reality surpassed fiction in a way.”Ms. Hayakawa at Cannes with two actors in “Plan 75,” Hayato Isomura, left, and Stefanie Arianne, who plays Maria.John Phillips/Getty ImagesMs. Hayakawa decided to adopt a subtler tone for the feature-length movie and inject more of a sense of hope. She also added several narrative strands, including one about an elderly woman and her tightknit group of friends, and another about a Filipina caregiver who takes a job at one of the euthanasia centers.She included scenes of the Filipino community in Japan, Ms. Hayakawa said, as a contrast to the dominant culture. “Their culture is that if somebody is in trouble, you help them right away,” Ms. Hayakawa said. “I think that is something Japan is losing.”Stefanie Arianne, the daughter of a Japanese father and a Filipina mother who plays Maria, the caregiver, said Ms. Hayakawa had urged her to show emotional restraint. In one scene, Ms. Arianne said, she had the instinct to shed tears, “but with Chie, she really challenged me to not cry.”Ms. Hayakawa said she did not want to make a film that simply deemed euthanasia right or wrong. “I think what kind of end to a life and what kind of death you want is a very personal decision,” she said. “I don’t think it’s something that is so black or white.”Hikari Hida More

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      Book Review: ‘The Twilight World,’ by Werner Herzog

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      In “The Twilight World,” the filmmaker Werner Herzog vividly reconstructs the personal war of Hiroo Onoda, who stayed in the jungle for years after World War II ended.THE TWILIGHT WORLD, by Werner Herzog, translated by Michael HofmannTwenty-five years ago in Tokyo, where he had come to direct the world premiere of the opera “Chushingura,” the German filmmaker Werner Herzog received an enviable invitation. At a dinner of the cast and crew, the opera’s composer greeted Herzog with the thrilling news that the emperor of Japan would welcome a private audience with him. “My goodness, I have no idea what I would talk about with the emperor,” Herzog responded. The room froze. “I wish to this day that the earth had swallowed me up,” Herzog recalls dramatically in his first novel, “The Twilight World” — a book in which, his epigraph explains, “most details are factually correct; some are not.” When a guest broke the silence to ask if there was anyone in Japan he would, in fact, like to meet, Herzog answered: “Onoda.” He elaborated: “Hiroo Onoda.”Unless you are a World War II buff with a passion for the Pacific theater, you may ask: Who? Hiroo Onoda was the Imperial Japanese Army lieutenant who landed on the Philippine island of Lubang late in the war, as Japanese forces were retreating, and hid in its jungles until 1974, refusing to believe the war had ended. Camouflaging his clothing and weapons with clay, leaves and bark, he emerged sporadically from the trees like “an ambulating piece of the jungle” to attack perceived foes. In December 1944, Onoda’s commanding officer, Maj. Yoshimi Taniguchi, had ordered him to “hold the island until the Imperial Army’s return” and to “defend its territory by guerrilla tactics, at all costs.” Onoda obeyed. “Your base of operations will be the jungle,” the major said. He added: “You will be like a ghost, elusive, a continuing nightmare to the enemy.” Onoda fulfilled that superhuman assignment.These details and quoted words come from encounters Herzog had with Onoda in Japan after he turned down the emperor’s invitation. Herzog understood the thrall that the jungle holds on a man who has entwined a fanatical mission with that treacherous terrain. Fifty years ago, Herzog entered the Amazonian rainforests of Peru to film masterworks about monomaniacal dreamers. First came “Aguirre: The Wrath of God” (1972), a historical fiction about a 16th-century explorer who led a doomed expedition to find a fabled city of gold. Next came “Fitzcarraldo” (1982), a drama about an opera-mad entrepreneur who hauled a steamship over a mountain to finance the construction of an opera house in the Amazon. In the early 1890s, the real Carlos Fitzcarrald transported a boat that weighed some 30 tons over a mountain in pieces. Herzog (and his cast and crew) magnified that feat beyond reason (and safety), hauling a steamship that weighed 10 times more — intact — over that same mountain to achieve Herzog’s cinematic vision.In “Burden of Dreams” (1982), a documentary on the making of “Fitzcarraldo,” Herzog mused on the “articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity” of the jungle. “The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing, they just screech in pain,” he said, continuing, “We are cursed with what we are doing here.” And yet, he affirmed, he loved the jungle, “against my better judgment.” With Onoda, he was able to share what Joseph Conrad called “the peculiar blackness of that experience.” In “The Twilight World,” Herzog explains, “I had worked under difficult conditions in the jungle myself and could ask him questions that no one else asked him.” This long-steeped book distills their conversations into a potent, vaporous fever dream; a meditation on truth, lie, illusion and time that floats like an aromatic haze through Herzog’s vivid reconstruction of Onoda’s war.In the jungles of Lubang, first with other Imperial Army holdouts, later on his own, Onoda subsisted on stolen rice, scavenged fruit and, on occasion, water buffalo meat (smoked under cover of fog). When a leaflet landed on the forest floor in the fall of 1945, announcing the war’s end, Onoda took it as forgery, “the work of American agents.” When one of his band, Yuichi Akatsu, surrendered to the Philippine Army in 1950, loudspeakers appeared on a mountaintop, playing a recording of Akatsu assuring Onoda that he was being treated well. Onoda decided that the voice was a simulation or that, if genuine, Akatsu had been tortured to produce it.As days melted into months, decades, Herzog writes, time slowed, congealed, evaporated: “A night bird shrieks and a year passes. A fat drop of water on the waxy leaf of a banana plant glistens briefly in the sun and another year is gone.” Michael Hofmann’s resonant translation conveys the portentous shimmer of Herzog’s voice. Sometimes, Herzog writes, Onoda had doubts; not of his duty but of the reality of his experience. “Is it possible that I am dreaming this war?” he asked himself. “Could it be that I’m wounded in some hospital and will finally come out of a coma years later, and someone will tell me it was all a dream? Is the jungle, the rain — everything here — a dream?”But more than a quarter-century into his campaign, when a plane looped above the island, broadcasting a direct appeal to Onoda from President Ferdinand Marcos, assuring him of amnesty, he suspected a trap. And when his own brother recorded a message that echoed across the treetops for weeks, begging “Hiroo, my brother” to come out of hiding, Onoda’s self-deluding mind recast it as a cryptic hint that the Imperial Army was about to retake the island.It was not until February 1974 that a hippie Onoda stan, Norio Suzuki, flushed the soldier out. Spotting Suzuki, Onoda leaped at him and pointed a gun at his chest. “How could I be an American agent?” Suzuki protested. “I’m only 22.” Many men in mufti had tried to take him before, Onoda responded. “I have survived 111 ambushes,” he said, adding: “Every human being on this island is my enemy.” Suzuki had to promise to fly in a commanding officer from 1944 before he would stand down.When Major Taniguchi arrived on Lubang two weeks later and told Onoda, face-to-face, “Lieutenant, your war is over,” Onoda still hoped it might be an elaborate ruse, a loyalty test. He handed over his rifle to a Filipino general nonetheless, and then his family sword, which he had preserved from rust with palm oil he had made himself. The general handed it back. “The true samurai keeps his sword,” he told Onoda. Later, Herzog writes, “he will admit that inside everything in him was bawling.”Onoda, who died in 2014 at age 91, lived in the jungle for almost 30 years; Herzog arguably has never left it. Only a few years back, he returned to the Amazon to induct four dozen budding filmmakers into his mythic practice. He told them, “It is the job of the filmmaker to jump out of the window into the boat even if he has no confidence there is water beneath it.” Onoda surely would have agreed. In “The Twilight World,” Herzog presents a kind of dual libretto to the operas both men conducted in their different jungles. They worked on different continents, in different eras and to different ends, but they served the same inexorable impulse: to lead a life of archetype in the modern day, outside of time, eternal.Liesl Schillinger is a critic and translator and teaches journalism at the New School in New York City. Her translation of the novel “Stella,” by Takis Würger, came out in paperback this year.THE TWILIGHT WORLD, by Werner Herzog. Translated by Michael Hofmann. | Penguin Press | 144 pp. | $25 More

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      Japanese TV Show “Old Enough!” Features Toddlers Running Errands

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      “Old Enough!,” a Japanese show that has been on the air for decades, recently came to Netflix. It features toddlers running errands without adult supervision.TOKYO — Three-year-old Yuka steps off the curb into a crosswalk that bisects a four-lane street. “Even though the light’s green,” a narrator says in a voice-over, “she still looks out for cars!”So begins a typical scene in “Old Enough!,” a Japanese reality show that began streaming on Netflix in late March. It is new to American viewers but has been running in Japan for more than three decades.The show’s popularity in Japan is a reflection of the country’s high level of public safety, as well as a parenting culture that sees toddlers’ independence as a key marker of their development.“It’s a typical way of raising children in Japan and symbolic of our cultural approach, which can be surprising for people from other countries,” said Toshiyuki Shiomi, an expert on child development and a professor emeritus at Shiraume Gakuen University in Tokyo.Short and sweet“Old Enough!” has been running on Nippon TV, initially as part of another show, since 1991. It was inspired by “Miki’s First Errand,” a 1977 children’s book by Yoriko Tsutsui that tells the story of a mother who sends her 5-year-old daughter out to buy milk for a younger sibling.The edited “Old Enough!” episodes that appear on Netflix are short (around 15 minutes or less) and upbeat. They track toddlers as young as 2 as they attempt to run errands in public for the first time, with a studio audience laughing in the background. Safety spotters and camera crews hide offscreen, with mixed results; they often stumble into the frame.As the children navigate crosswalks and busy public places full of adults, a narrator describes their incremental progress in breathless tones, like a commentator calling a baseball game in the ninth inning. And the toddlers strike up conversations with the strangers they meet along the way.Yuka, a 3-year-old girl in the Japanese city of Akashi, goes shopping by herself on the show.Netflix/Nippon TV“Mom said, instead of her, I would go to the shops today,” 3-year-old Yuka tells a shopkeeper in the coastal city of Akashi as she buys udon noodles for a family meal.“Really?” the shopkeeper replies. “Aren’t you a clever thing?”The errands inevitably go awry. Yuka briefly forgets to buy tempura, for instance, and another 3-year-old forgets what she has been asked to do because she is too busy talking to herself. In other episodes, children drop their cargo (live fish, in one case) or refuse to leave home in the first place.When 2-year-old Ao’s father, a sushi chef, asks him to take some soy-sauce-stained chef’s whites to a nearby laundromat, he won’t budge.“I can’t do it,” Ao tells his father, standing outside the family home and holding the soiled linens in a plastic bag.Eventually, Ao’s mother cajoles him into going, partly by bribing him with a snack. “It’s painful, isn’t it?” the father says to her as the boy ambles down the road alone. “It breaks my heart.”“You’re too soft on him,” she replies.A rite of passageProfessor Shiomi said that parents in Japan tried to instill a particular kind of self-sufficiency in their children. “In Japanese culture, independence doesn’t mean arguing with others or expressing oneself,” he said. “It means adapting yourself to the group while managing daily tasks, such as cooking, doing errands and greeting others.”In Japanese schools, it is common for children to clean classrooms, he noted. And at home, parents give even young children pocket money for their expenses and expect them to help prepare meals and do other chores.In a well-known example of this culture, Princess Aiko, a member of Japan’s royal family, would walk alone to elementary school in the early 2000s. (She was always under surveillance by the Imperial Household police.)The errands that toddlers run on the show inevitably go awry.Netflix/Nippon TVIn the Tokyo area, Wagakoto, a production company, films short documentaries of toddlers running errands, for a fee that starts at about $120. Jun Niitsuma, the company’s founder, said that the service was inspired by “Old Enough!” and “Miki’s First Errand,” and that clients paid for it because they wanted a record of how independent their toddlers had become.“It’s a rite of passage” for both children and their parents, Mr. Niitsuma said. “These errands have been a very symbolic mission for decades.”Room for debateBefore Netflix acquired “Old Enough!,” it had been adapted for audiences in Britain, China, Italy, Singapore and Vietnam.“‘Old Enough!’ is a reminder that unique storytelling can break down cultural and language barriers, and connect entertainment fans globally,” said Kaata Sakamoto, the vice president for Japan content at Netflix.The show does have some critics in Japan. Their main arguments seem to be that the toddlers’ errands essentially amount to coercion, or that the show could prompt parents to put their children in harm’s way.The toddlers on the show strike up conversations with strangers they meet along the way.Netflix/Nippon TVViolent crimes are rare in Japan. Still, some academics contend that common safety metrics paint a misleading portrait of public safety. They point to recent studies by the Ministry of Justice indicating that the incidence of crime in Japan, particularly sexual crimes, tends to be higher than what residents report to local police departments.“It’s a terrible show!” said Nobuo Komiya, a criminologist at Rissho University in Tokyo who has advised municipalities across Japan on public safety.“This TV station has been airing this program for years, and it’s been so popular,” he added. “But Japan is full of danger in reality. This myth of safety is manufactured by the media.”Even supporters acknowledge that “Old Enough!” was created for an older era in which different social norms governed toddlers’ behavior.Today, there is increasing debate in Japan about whether forcing young children to do chores is good for their development, as was once widely assumed, Professor Shiomi said. And parents no longer take public safety for granted.“I myself sent my 3- or 4-year-old for an errand to a vegetable shop,” he said. “She was able to get there but couldn’t remember the way back because she didn’t have a clear image of the route. So the shop owner brought her home.”Hisako Ueno More

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      ‘Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy’ Review: What We Talk About

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      In three stories, men and women circle one another as they casually and cruelly share intimacies, express desires and voice doubts.The geometry of desire is elegantly plotted in “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” a wistful, moving, outwardly unassuming movie. In three segments, men and women circle one another, talking and talking some more. As they exchange glances, confessions and accusations, their cascading words become either bridges or walls. Throughout these effusive roundelays, they yearn — for meaning, former lovers, lost intimacy, an escape.“Fortune and Fantasy” is among the latest talkathons from the Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, one of the more intriguing filmmakers to emerge in the last decade. If you haven’t heard of him, it isn’t surprising. The American market for foreign-language cinema has always been brutal, even before the pandemic, and his work has received scant theatrical distribution in the United States. But he’s a familiar name on the festival circuit, and both this movie and his superb “Drive My Car” were in the main slate at the recent New York Film Festival. (“Fortune” won a major prize at this year’s Berlin.)If Hamaguchi were another generic French filmmaker, or if he made gore-splattered genre movies or was just more obvious, he might attract greater distributor interest. Though maybe not: The length of some of his work likely presents a hurdle. While “Fortune and Fantasy” runs a crisp two hours, “Drive My Car” is three, and “Happy Hour,” an epic of minimalism, runs more than five. More challenging still, presumably, are his narrative choices and understated visuals, which don’t conform to the current template for American indie cinema with its dramatic problems, moral instruction and enough pictorial prettiness to make the emotional bloodletting go down smoothly.Hamaguchi’s realism is as constructed as that of any Sundance selection, but what distinguishes his work is his attention to ambiguity and to everyday moments, and his general avoidance of dramatic or melodramatic inflection. Things happen, terrible, heartbreaking things, though not necessarily onscreen. Instead, most of what you see has the flavor, rhythm and texture of quotidian life, which makes his artistic choices all the more intriguing and at times almost mysterious. You’re engrossed, but you may wonder why. (Hamaguchi cites John Cassavetes as a strong influence; the imprint of the French New Wave and the South Korean director Hong Sangsoo are also evident.)“Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy” is a perfect entry point into Hamaguchi’s work. Not every episode works equally well or hits as hard, but both times I watched this movie, I found something to admire, consider, argue with and weep over. The three stories are clearly separated with coy or cryptic or plainly descriptive titles. They have separate casts and each takes place in contemporary settings, though one has a modest, somewhat random splash of speculative fiction. Here, as in life, the most blandly familiar spaces — the back seat of a cab, a cluttered office, a living room — serve as unadorned stages for ordinary, existence-defining encounters.All the episodes feature a handful of men and women, but the secondary characters soon peel off — a photo crew disperses, an assistant hustles out of an office — leaving two people who serve as conversational and emotional foils. The middle and longest story (“Door Wide Open”) centers on a woman who’s persuaded, if not entirely convincingly, by her younger male lover to become a honey trap for his loathed former professor. She does, putting on makeup and visiting the professor at his office. Although he insists that the door remain open, danger seeps in anyway, through a probing, teasingly erotic and unexpectedly existential tête-à-tête that changes everyone’s life.Hamaguchi doesn’t move the camera all that much, which makes the moments when he draws attention to his visuals more noticeable, like the punctuating tilt up at a flowering tree that closes the first story. However subtly, he distinctly choreographs each episode, using the camera and staging to underscore eddies of harmony and dissonance, shifting moods and awareness. In some scenes, characters sit side by side in the same shot, which underscores their familiarity; in others, they are isolated in the frame to accentuate their detachment or antagonism. In several crucial instances, characters look directly at the camera, a jolt of intimacy — but now between you and them.Mostly, though, these men and women talk, revealing themselves as they also tease the story’s themes, fortune and fantasy included. They chat, confess, overshare, open up and lash out. In the first story, “Magic (or Something Less Assuring),” a young woman confronts a former boyfriend by sneeringly repeating some blandishments that he’d shared with another lover, wounding him and, in the process, exposing the miserable arc of their failed relationship. There’s more tenderness in the final story, “Once Again,” which beautifully brings the movie to a close through two women with faulty memories who, by opening their hearts to each other, quietly break yours.Wheel of Fortune and FantasyNot rated. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. In theaters. More