Japanese directors have, in recent years, crafted some truly engaging filmic experiences about boxing. Yoshiyuki Kishi delivered an impressive two-part adaptation of Shūji Terayama’s novel with Wilderness: part 1 (2017) and Wilderness Part 2 (2017). Masaharu Take created the beloved boxing film 100 Yen Love (2014)and the 4-hour boxing epos Underdog (2020) and Keisuke Yoshida delivered his creative vision on the boxing-genre with Blue (2021).

To tell their story and organize the unfolding of their boxing narrative, each director relied on the well-established thematical elements common to the boxing genre, like perseverance, courage, and personal struggle/growth. Sho Miyake’s adaptation of Makenaide!, the memoir of deaf pro-boxer Keiko Ogasawara, cannot but rely on these themes, yet the auto-biographical support for his boxing film gives these themes a special poignance.

Yet, while Sho Miyake’s film follows the emotional thread of Keiko Ogasawara’s autobiography faithfully, he and Masaaki Sakai choose to set her narrative ten years later, right when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out and governmental guidelines advice against social intermingling. By introducing such temporal change, Miyake crafted a societal frame that only further strengthens the emotional impact of Keiko’s subjective trajectory on the spectator.

The first thing that Small, Slow But Steady serenely traces out is the interactional difficulties that arise within the societal field from being deaf. By not hearing the voice of the Other, Keiko Ogawa (Yukino Kishi) is transformed into a silent presence that confuses and, in certain cases, even agitates the o/Other. Yet, the confusion in the other subject is not simply due to her unresponsiveness within the societal field but also due to the Other’s understandable assumption that she is fully capable to his voice and his signifiers. As Katsumi Sasaki (Tomokazu Miura), the chairman of Akawara boxing club, explains an interviewer, these difficulties naturally extend to boxing – “she can’t hear the referee or the bell. She can’t hear her seconds”.

Yet, Miyake’s narrative is not only about the challenges a deaf subject has within and outside of the boxing ring, but also about her personal struggle – the phase of subjective inhibition and urge to flee from one’s desire. In Keiko’s case, a fear of getting hurt slowly supresses the flame of desire, short-circuiting her will to fight and making her unable to extract pleasure from punching. What Keiko’s fear makes her lose sight of is what formed the foundation of her pleasure in boxing: the social bond with the chairman and the coaches, Hayashi (-) and Matsumoto (Shinichiro Matsuura).

Other elements that supress her desire is the chairman’s sudden avoidance of training her and the sudden news that her boxing gym will close. Keiko’s use of the signifier ‘alone’ in her conversation with her brother (Himi Sato) underlines that boxing was not merely a way to release stress from her work, but a way to establish a social bond and inscribe herself, as subject, more neatly into the societal field (Narra-note 1).

The importance of the social bond serves as a reminder that even with the voice doused, Keiko remains a perceiving subject – experiencing and interpretating the Other via the eye and responding to the acts of the Other via her body, establishing interpersonal connections along the way. Yet, a subject, who is cut off from the Other’s voice is and thus from mundane societal interactions and must, as Small, Slow but Steady illustrates, force or invite the Other to establish a bond in a different way (e.g. via sign-language, via writing, … etc.).       

While Small, Slow But Steady mainly focuses on Keiko’s trajectory, Miyake also takes some time to sketch out the negative impact of the corona-pandemic and the governmental guidelines to curb it on businesses that are structured around interpersonal contact. While there is be no doubt that the gym’s closure was already on Katsumi Sasaki’s mind due to his deteriorating health, the sudden decline in members due to the pandemic forces him to accelerate his plans, even if he is not mentally ready for it yet.      

Sho Miyake has, obviously, taken great care in composing his individual shots. Small, Slow But Steady is full of shots with pleasing compositional lines and geometrical tensions. The visual impact of these compositions is heightened by the subdued and often darkish lightning-design and the subtle use of film grain.

While there is some measured camera movement present in Miyake’s visual fabric, his composition is quite a static affair. The static nature of his composition does not merely him to invite the spectator to appreciate the elegancy of many of his shot-compositions but also to draw his attention to the rhythmical movements and sounds during training and the emotional expressions of the characters. The visual motive of trains, rivers and bridges infuses, besides emphasizing the passing of time, a subtle sense of desolation into the atmosphere of Miyake’s film.

The performance of Yukino Kishii is simply unforgettable. With an incredible naturalism, she breathes life into the subjective trajectory of her deaf character – from focused resolve to forlorn vulnerability and back again. Yet, it should also be said that Kishii’s performance heavily benefits from the supporting cast. Their performances offer Kishii the necessary stepping stone to deliver her tour-de-force.

Small, Slow But Steady is an incredibly powerful boxing-narrative carried by Kishii and supported by her fellow cast-members. By framing Keiko’s subjective trajectory in a solemn and restrained visual composition, Miyake ensures that emotional flow of the narrative, as brought to life by Kishii, touch the spectator deeply and profoundly. Highly recommended.  

Notes

Narra-note 1: The importance of the bond between her and Hayashi, Matsumoto, and Katsumi Sasaki is, in our view, the main reason why she is so reluctant to transfer to Goto Boxing club. Her enunciation “It’s a long way from where I live” obscures the fact that the Other (of Arakawa boxing club) plays an instrumental role in her desire to box.