In 2011, Tsuyoshi Inoue made a tv-film called Surviving the Quake that offered the spectator a glance at the lived experience of a variety of people after the great Hanshin Earthquake. Now, 14 years later, Inoue returns to this disaster by bringing a selection of stories from Haruki Murakami’s short story collection Kami no Kodomotachi wa Mina Odoru (2000) to life on the silver screen.
1995. Five days after the Great Hanshin Earthquake, Komura (Masaki Okada) comes home to discover that his wife Mimei (Ai Hashimoto) has left him. Not long after her flight, her uncle (Mitsuru Fukikoshi) presents him the divorce papers. To work-through the failure of his marriage, he decides to take a long leave from his company and, to fulfill Sasaki’s request to deliver a box to his sister Keiko (-), travels to Kushiro.
2011. One day, Junko (Yui Narumi), who works at the local supermarket, happens to see one of their loyal customers, Miyake (Shinichi Tsutsumi), foraging wood on the beach to build a fire. At night, leaving her boyfriend Keisuke (Kodai Kurosaki) alone in her apartment, she seeks the man out on the beach.
2020. While Yoshiya (Daichi Watanabe) wants to attend the wake of Tabata (Kiyohiko Shibukawa), the sudden remembrance of his words – “What you did was to test our Lord” – and the stares at the cult-like religious congregation, ultimately make him retreat. The split between him and the religion of his mother (Haruka Igawa) occurred after the Tohoku earthquake when he (Soya Kurokawa), called by his mother “the only son of our Lord”, refused to travel to the stricken areas to help the people. Some time later, he has a strange encounter on the metro.
2025. One day, security guard Katagiri (Koichi Sato), who got shot thirty years ago just after the the Great Hanshin Earthquake hit Kobe, encounters Kaeru-kun (Non) in an alleyway. While Kaeru-kun happily greets his old friend – she has been searching for him all over the place, Katagiri has no clue who or what she is.
After The Quake, as an anthology film, has a clear structure – a concatenation of four narratives. The various narratives are, like similar narratives, thematically linked together. In Inoue’s film, the narratives are not only linked by the fact that all the stories take place after the great Hanshin earthquake, but also by letting certain signifiers reoccur. Via the repetition of signifiers, Inoue establishes a frame where the varied effects of a Real disaster on subjectivity are explored. Every segment within After The Quake touches in its own way on the following dimensions: death/absence, desire/love, emptiness/void, father/failure. The final segment, however, offers something different as it returns to the surreal dream-like opening in the first segment to reveal a surprising meta-structure, a surreal twist that sews the three first stories together and delivers an evocative societal critique.
The title of the film is well-chosen as it confronts the spectator with the fact that the real event of the earthquake sorts creates a before and an after. The infraction of the natural Real rips the material support – the bricks, the flesh, … etc. – of the societal field and its subjects apart and forces the subject, whether he is a survivor or not, to narrativize this loss and re-stabilize his own ego. After the Quake underlines that the traumatic event, to undo it from its existential threat, must be, in one way or another be, narrativized.
This general statement allows the spectator to perceive, in the first segment, that Mimei’s struggle to narrativize the devastating Real – the brutal proximity of death, the frailty of life -causes her frozen state in front of the television as the names of the deceased are called out (Cine-note 1). We would even argue that, subjectively speaking, she temporarily joined the realm of the dead, the realm of those who do not speak.
When she does speak – the letter she addresses to Komura, her signifiers reveal that this intrusion of the Real confronted her with the deceptive mirage of her romantic relationship – “There is nothing inside you that you can give me (…) it felt like I was living with a chunk of air” (Psycho-note 1). Or, to put it differently, the proximity of death made the absence of what would allow her to write a sexual relationship with him explicit: love.
In Kushiro, while conversing with Keiko’s friend Shimao (Erika Karata), he divulges to her that Mimei utilizes the signifier chunk of air to denote that he lacks substance. Yet, is that not the structural state of the subject? Is the subject not akin to a box – an enclosed bodily space around a symbolic void, an absence that force us to keep speaking? A present absence that, without the intervention of love, can become unbearable.
The second segment, taking place in 2011, begins by re-introducing the problematic nature of the figure of the father (See psycho-note 1). Junko, for a reason yet unknown, avoid mentioning her father in her speech and rejects anything marked by a fatherly shadow – i.e. she refuses Keisuke’s invitation to Yakiniku because he would treat her with his father’s money.
However, seated around the fire the middle-aged man Miyake made, Junko finds herself able to talk about her father – “He began looking at me like I was an alien”. She begins to talk about the failure of the father figure to a subject who, whether she realizes or not, is put in the place of the erased father. Junko, in a certain sense, re-installs a minimal fatherly bond, yet with a subject who is plagued by guilt ever since the brutal infraction of the Great Hanshin Earthquake (Narra-note 2).
In the second segment, the subject as abyss rears its head again – Junko’s complaint of being empty. The contrast between Keisuke’s celebration of the now and Junko’s affirmation of her subjective void underlines that what she lacks is nothing other than desire, the flint to enflame the trajectory of her drive, the circular circuit that would provide her with some pleasure in life (Narra-note 3).
The third segment approaches the question of the father in a different light, exploring the way a subject relates to the religious creation that compensates for the fatherly failure. Yoshiya comes to doubt the fatherly fiction of God not merely because his mother refuses to tell him who his biological father is, but also because the inefficiency of prayer – the fatherly God abandons and neglects (Narra-note 4). The third segment delivers, in a certain sense, the ultimate affirmation of structural failure of the father, yet also highlights the role faith plays in fixating the fatherly fiction and providing a conciliatory frame of meaning for the ego.
The fourth segment offers the spectator Haruki Murakami’s surreal mythology of the logic of the earthquake – if Worm continues to consuming black soil soaked with people’s misery and hatred, he will turn his suffering into a violent counter-attack, a destructive earthquake. The spectator can easily perceive that Murakami’s answer goes beyond the father and that what happens to Katagiri points out the capitalistic and consumerist ills of society – i.e. the ravages induced by the fixation on profit, the silent glorification of narcissism, and the impoverishment of social bonds.
To bring the four narratives visually to life, Inoue creates a straightforward visual frame – a balanced concatenation of static and dynamic shots – that allows him to leverage the effect of visual contrasts. This play with contrasts allows him to heighten the impact of more refined moments of visual beauty, amplify the effect of the moody visual decorations, and breathe a sense of intrigue into the more evocative imagery (Cine-note 2).
Inoue delivers, in other words, a composition that echoes the mundanity of the societal field, but also lets the subtle surrealistic turns and occurrences, elements trembling the mundane atmosphere, come to their full right. One can, however, also argue that the visual frame allows Inoue to highlight the surrealism that pervades the mundane, the fabric of every-day life.
The composition of After The Quake is, moreover, littered with beautiful composed shots. Inoue does not only leverage the beauty of natural scenery, he also thoughtfully approaches geometry, utilizes colour-schemes effectively, and elegantly exploits the interplay between light and shadow for compositional purposes (Cine-note 3).
Inoue utilizes musical accompaniment – jazzy, mystical, tensive, … etc – masterfully not only to smoothen the flow of his composition, but also to establish a sorrowful mood – the mood of the aftermath – and amplify the impact of the Realness of the signifiers related to the earthquake (i.e. the deaths, the missing, the destruction) on the subject and on the spectator.
With After The Quake, Inoue delivers an engaging cerebral experience that traces out the effect of the great Hanshin Earthquake on subjectivity as well as the state of the father within a capitalistic and consumerist society. Inoue, moreover, pleases audiences by supporting the intriguing segments with a composition that breathes a seductive moodiness into the thematical fabric and visually pleases the spectator at every turn.
Notes
Narra-note 1: The main characters of the first and the second express a similar complaint -Komura says “Even though I’m here, it doesn’t feel like I’ve come very far at all”, and Junko remembers thinking, after leaving her parental home, “This isn’t very far, considering the time it took”. In our view, these statements underline thatyou cannot escape your own neurosis. However, such flight can lead to the opening of a minimal path of change.
Another narrative element that echoes throughout the first three narratives concern the emphasis onthe now – the now is important as death can come at any time. This statement, reformulated in different forms, does not only highlight that certain subjects are imprisoned by their own (traumatic) past, but also that the confrontation with death leads to an embellishment of the act of living. In the third narrative, however, the importance of the now is contrasted with a gamble of faith on the future.
Narra-note 2: One could say that Junko, in her conversation with the fire-building man, comes to realize that the subject who takes up the signifier father can only fail their function.
Miyake’s nocturnal fantasies as well as the signifiers he addresses to Junko clearly underline that his lingering guilt pushes him towards death and self-inflicted punishment.
Narra-note 3: The spectator is invited to read the bonfire as the representation of what Miyake and Junko, our two depressed subjects, do not have – desirous fuel to keep their drive burning.
Narra-note 4: Tabata, on the other hand, believes in a testing God – Our Lord tests us by subjecting us to suffering, accepting suffering is repaid with salvation.
In any case, the third narrative impliciely puts the question to the spectator: are subjects better off by giving the infraction of the real sense through religion or should they accept the brutal hors-sense of the event?
Cine-note 1: The shot of Komura’s wife staring at the television is, in our view, an example of a shot of subjectivity. The spectator is, as he witnesses her mute presence, unable to grasp what is going on in her mind; the spectator’s passion to interpret hits an obstacle, an indeterminate element evocative of subjectivity.
Psycho-note 1: We must contrast Mimei’s signifiers with Lacan’s famous aphorism ‘Loving is to give what one does not have to someone who does not want it’. Putting another one of Lacan’s metaphors to use, we can argue that Mimei discerned that she, faced with the hand of her husband reaching out to her as ripe fruit – the object of desire, could not become a hand reaching back to him. She could not respond to his lack with her own lack.
A bit later in the narrative, the spectator surmises that what rendered love impossible is his failure to give Mimei her real name. Mimei, which roughly means “[does] not yet [have a] name”, has been waiting for someone, a father, who could finally give her her name and, thus, her definite symbolic existence. The names of death people, being read out loud on television, echoed her own sense of being non-existent, of lacking a proper name to function within the symbolic.
Cine-note 2: In the sequence titled 1995, for instance, Inoue relies on a restrained zoom-in and a threatening auditive decorations to add a subtle horror-flavour to the imagery depicted on the television screen.
Cine-note 3: Inoue also utilizes mirrors effectively within his shot-compositions.