Introduction

Despite only a few Japanese directors making it big internationally, there are many directors who keep creating great narrative that are mainly enjoyed by domestic audiences. Izuru Narushima is one of those directors. Yet, maybe his adaptation of Yoshinobu Kadoi award-winning biopic Ginga Tetsudo no Chichi can invite the international spectator to explore his filmic oeuvre and the literary works of Kenji Miyazawa.

Review

September, 1896, Hanamaki in Iwate prefecture. After a long night-train and a ricksha ride, Masajiro Miyazawa (Koji Yakusho) arrives home to meet his first-born son. Some years later, when Masajiro hears that his heir has been hospitalized with Shigella, he decides, against the pleas of his wife Ichi Miyazawa (Maki Sakai) and his father Kisuke (Min Tanaka)’s order to act like the master of the house and the business, to tend to him at the hospital. 

March, 1914. Kenji Miyazawa (Masaki Suda) arrives home after graduating from Junior High School. Yet, when his proud father announces that he will teach him the inn and outs of pawnbroking, Kenji promptly refuses. He does not want any part in exploiting the weak. Refusal or not, his father demands that he starts working in the shop. 

The Father Of The Milky Road might be a biopic about Kenji Miyazawa, but the rhythm by which we learn about the Hans Christian Andersen of Japan is solely dictated by the signifiers and the acts of the father. To put it more correctly, what Narushima explores is the shifting dynamic of the bond between Kenji and Masajiro. Kadoi, the writer of the original novel, and Riko Sakaguchi, the screenwriter, understood that the only way we can grasp something of someone’s subjectivity is by highlighting the defining moments within the relation between the subject and his Other.   

What marks the initial stage of the narrative is a conflict between Masajiro and his father Kisuke concerning Kenji. It is, on short, a conflict between Masajiro’s ‘modern’ desire for Kenji – a desire caused by the myriad of societal changes in the Meiji period – and his father’s small-minded patriarchal ways of thinking – the firm remainder of the medieval Edo-period. When Masajiro tells his father that he plans to send his son to a junior high school in Morioka, his father promptly warns him that getting addicted to literature and arts confuses a man and is worse than getting addicted to liquor and women.   

Yet, even though Masajiro wants to expose Kenji to culture and, by confronting him with the power of the written signifier and the joy of creation, invite him to grasp how wide the world is, he still wants his son to follow in his footsteps and take over the pawn shop. One can argue that, while Masajiro dresses himself into a more modern Meiji cloth, the kernel of this subjective logic is still defined by Edo-period thought (Narra-note 1).   

The second stage of the narrative explores the conflict between Masajiro and Kenji – a conflict echoing the clash between Masajiro and his father. Masajiro clashes with his son because he, despite being well-read and educated, lacks insight in the manipulative dimension of the signifier – he is easily duped by those subjects who will say anything to get some money – and because he still wants Kenji to take over the family business.

This merchant desire, in short, renders Masajiro blind for his son’s troubled subject – for him, the question of Kenji’s future is already answered. It is not that he doesn’t hear his signifiers – his angry retorts prove that he hears his son very well, but his fixed idea concerning Kenji’s future short-circuits his ability to hear the subjective struggle that fuels these signifiers (i.e. the idea to make fake gemstones and his turn to Nichiren Buddhism). Yet, how will this un-validated frustration impact Kenji as subject? Or, to put it differently, as he refuses to take writing as his subjective path, what will cause him to assume this path as his own (Narra-note 2)?  

The Father Of The Milky Way Railroad does not only focus on Kenji’s struggle to find his subjective space and his father’s difficulty to let Kenji find his own way in life, but on the tragedies that befall Kenji’s father and the Miyazawa family. In other words, the narrative also ends up exploring the dimension of loss and the impact this loss – expected as well as realized – has on the remaining family members. As the narrative is organized around events of loss – three in total, Narushima is able to give his narrative a pleasant emotional rhythm, a rhythm that will have many spectators in tears.  

The composition of Father of The Milky Way Road might be littered with static moments, it is Narushima’s rich use of dynamic movement that gives the visual fabric its engaging flow and its floaty feeling. Narushima succeeds to please the spectator with some well-structured floaty dynamic long takes. These long-takes, besides being visually pleasing, also infuse some realism into the interactions between our family members and the emotions they express.

While musical accompaniment is not absent when staging more emotionally charged moments, what makes these moments able to touch the spectator are nothing other than the performances of the cast. Because the emotion that clings to the vocalized signifier feels genuine, the music can reverberate it and heighten its impact on the spectator. The melo-dramatic moments do not feel forced, but are a ‘logical’ consequence of the great performances.  

Father of The Milky Way Road, despite being structured around the exploitation of loss for dramatic and emotional effect, is a narrative worth seeing. What allows this tearjerker to escape the fate of feeling like a ride of emotional manipulation is nothing other than the performances. By being able to rely on such talent, Narushima is able to deliver a narrative that gracefully moves the spectator and elegantly provokes spectator’s emotions and tears.

Notes

Narra-note 1: His desire to be different from his own father, to be modern in other words, is beautifully exploited by Kenji’s sister, Toshi Miyazawa (Nana Mori), to convince Masajiro to let his first-born son go to high school.

Narra-note 2: Without spoiling too much, the cause of his writing is not his father, but an impactful relational ‘event’. Something needs to happen to the other, so that his joyful fixation on his own turmoil can be broken.

Cine-note 1: Static shots are often used to establish the scene and provide some context to the spectator.