Introduction

While Shinzo Katayama’s oeuvre is small, the two narratives he unleashed on the public did not miss their effect. Siblings Of The Cape (2018) dared to touch upon the sexuality of mentally disabled subjects and Missing (2022) offered a highly effective blend between societal critical piece and an emotional thriller full of twists.

For his third narrative, he joins hands with the more experienced director Eiji Uchida, who delivered beloved indie narratives like Lowlife Love (2015) and Love and Other Cults (2017). While his more recent output is somewhat more mainstream, like Midnight Swan (2020), Shrieking in the Rain (2021) and Offbeat Cops (2022), his work still remains as interesting as ever.

So what can the collaboration of these two directors result in? Will they merely deliver a mainstream narrative or will the use this opportunity to give expression to their more eccentric impulses?

Review

One night, a hostess and her male customer discover a strange shaking box in an alley way. As they approach it, the lid opens and the box lights up. What they see does not merely surprise them but evaporates them. Not long after the sudden evaporation, the owner of the thing in the box, Hideko Amamoto (Shohei Uno), picks the box up. While leaving the alley way, he apologizes to the thing inside for leaving it unattended.

At bar Karl Mohl, run by detective Mariko (Sairi Itoh), her loyal costumers, Ayaka (Shiori Kubo), Sadami (Momo Shimada) and Shigemi (Kanan Nakahara), are puzzled by the sudden presence of police officers around Kabuki-cho. Little do they know that their presence is related to the string of strange disappearances within the night-life district. Later that night, after closing time, Mariko is approached by three FBI agents and is offered a lot of money to locate the man who runs around Kabubi-cho with the mysterious and deadly box.

Life of Mariko in Kabukicho might confuse some spectators as the many characters and side-narratives seemingly obfuscate the narrative’s aim. In fact, due to the many narrative strands intertwined together, the main narrative strand of a female detective seeking an abducted alien is reduced to the level of side-narrative. So what is the narrative’s aim? What can the combination of an abducted alien, a serial killer roaming the streets of Japan’s most famous night life district, a struggling ninjutsu teacher (Yutaka Takenouchi), who is a descendant of the Iga Omi Hattori ninja clan, Bazooka Tozuka (Yukiya Kitamura), a gangster who has hit rock-bottom, two female assassins, and an underground information network run by immigrants ultimately amount to?  

Life of Mariko in Kabukicho might seem, at first, like a narrative where one cannot see the wood for the trees, but that is only true for those spectators that do not see that the wood is the societal space of kabuki-cho as such. The various chapters of the narrative (Love in Kabuki-cho, The Other Side of the Mirror, Cross Over the Crossing, The Sister’s Secret, Female Child), besides furthering chapters Mariko’s search for the man with the stolen alien, deliver self-contained stories to highlight, albeit fragmentary, the seedy (shooting of pornography, love hotels, …) and the artistic sides (e.g. the Situation theatre, K’s cinema dedicated to indie films, … etc.) of the famous district of Kabuki-cho (General-note 1). The true focus of the narrative is thus not the trees (i.e. the characters as such), but the wood (i.e. Shinjuku’s night life district) they inhabit.

What Eiji Uchida and Shinzo Katayama ultimately show with their rich but somewhat disjointed narrative is grant the spectator a glance at the relational ravages and subjective tragedies, caused by  and the blind indulgence in pleasure and consumption, that remain hidden behind the bright neon-lights. While some storylines feel less grounded, the focus of Life of Mariko in Kabukicho always remains on the exploration of relational dynamics within this space of imaginary love, sexual debauchery, and creative utterances. All three kinds of expressions – and this might very well be the ultimate point of Uchida and Katayama’s narrative – account for the impossibility for the subject to write The sexual relationship.

It is therefore not surprising that Life of Mariko in Kabukicho allows the spectator to grasp the function of the hostess as well as the host. The function of the hostess, as the opening sequence so elegantly reveals, is to seductively exploit the phallic insufficiency the male subject is socially confronted with. For a fee, she will turn herself into the lack that allows the male subject to feel as if he possesses the phallus – i.e. what the female subject desires. What thus keeps the male subject coming back is the thirst to fleetingly forget, within a phantasmatic structure, his own castration.

Ayaka’s infatuation with Seiya (Akira Takano) reveals that the function of a host follows a more complex dynamic. The trap the host lays out for the female subject is function of an interplay between a phallic parade – the host offers the female subject a peek at the phallus he, in fact, does not have – and seductively exposing his own castration, by which he turns the female subject into the very phallus he possesses. So while the hostess only needs to turn herself into the male subject’s beloved, the host needs to juggle between the position of lover and beloved to entrap the female subject’s desire.  

Of course, as the phantasmatic relation is only established through spending money – one must invest into this often-conscious lie, it is not surprising that the dedication of the host/hostess goes to the biggest spender, to the one who invests the most into one’s addiction to the established mendacious mirage. This capitalistic dynamic installs a competition that, as Ayaka’s trajectory shows, can drive certain subjects to take desperate life-threatening measures.  

As the narrative combines a myriad of narrative strands together it is also not surprising that the narrative delivers a genre-blending experience. While Life of Mariko in Kabukicho is first established as a sci-fi narrative, many elements of other genres come to enrich the experience. There are not only surges of comedy and light-heartedness (e.g. FBI-agent James’s child-like interest in the ninja wandering around kabuki-cho, the contrast between what the Americans agents truly say and its brief translation, thriller-like moments and sudden instances of soft-eroticism – e.g. the one way-mirrored van used to shoot adult videos, but also many moments of familial drama, which, for example, explore the destructive impact of the organized crime exclusion ordinances on those small-time crooks who inscribed themselves into the family structure of the Yakuza

While there are, of course, static moments within the composition of Life of Mariko in Kabukicho, Uchida and Katayama heavily rely on a variety of dynamic shots (e.g. floaty dynamism, subtle shaky framing, … etc.) to bring their narrative to life. This reliance on dynamism allows them to give their visual composition a flowing and inviting rhythm – a rhythm that keeps the spectator engaged throughout the narrative.

While most shot-compositions are pragmatic – fulfilling their aim to further the story, Uchida and Katayama do sprinkle their narrative with some pleasant shot-compositions and utilize colour-contrasts elegantly to elevate the impact of certain visual moments.

Life of Mariko in Kabukicho is a genre-blending hodgepodge that could have gone wrong but ends up working truly well. Katayama and Uchida does not merely offer a glance at the relational drama that hides behind the neon-lit night-life and pleasure district, but also delivers a narrative that hits all the right emotional notes.  

Notes

General-note 1: There are some city-pop songs featured within the narrative, like Mariya Takeuchi’s plastic love.

Some songs, like Akina Nakamori’s Shoujo A, are used to name chapters. As this choice is of course deliberate, one could argue that, for those chapters, the lens through which we explore Kabuki-cho is determined by the lyrics and the moods and mental states they evoke.