Some auteurs start writing their narratives with the image of the ending. Others, like Gogatsu, the creative unit Yutaro Seki and Kentaro Hirase (Roleless (2022)) start from a formal idea. For Sai: Disaster, their second feature film, the structuring logic was nothing other than the following: a mysterious man causes disaster for a series of unrelated individuals.

The development of this logic into a narrative led them to instrumentalize the gap between what the spectator knows and what the characters don’t. While this gap allows psychological suspense to blossom for the spectator, Seki and Hirase’s thematical message can only be grasped by analysing another gap: the gap between what the victims know and the spectator doesn’t.

The narrative of Sai: Disaster commences when, in the aftermath of an earthquake, the body of a woman called Michiko is found drifting in the harbour-area in Chiba prefecture. While her untimely death is quickly considered a suicide, police detective Midori Domoto (Anne Nakamura) believes her death and the death of Others are the handywork of an elusive hair-cutting serial killer.

Gogatsu surprises the spectator by offering an opening sequence that, despite framing the discovery of a death body, keeps the spectator reaching in the dark. We are merely given fragments of sentences within a non-linear and a-chronological structure and our inability to bring them together into consistent overarching narrative fosters a sense of uneasiness and powerlessness.

However, we are not completely left to our own devices – we are not left drowning in a sea of disjunct narrative waves. Gogatsu grants the spectator a minimal narrative structure by introducing various places and the character(s) of importance: the body in Chiba, Yuri Kitagawa (Sena Nakajima) in Yokohama, Shin’ichi Kuramoto (Ryuhei Matsuda) in Fukuoka, Shin Minagawa (Kisetsu Fujiwara) and Iori Sakiyama (Chika Uchida) in Ishikawa, Fumiya Kishi (Jiro) in Miyagi, Midori Domoto in Kanagawa. Yet, the establishment of this minimal structure also confronts the spectator with the following puzzling question: what links all these people in different prefectures to the deadly event that happened in Chiba? Or to put it more evocatively and arouse the thematic dimension: why does death clings around these people in different prefectures?  

The spectator is invited by Gogatsu’s revelation that the violent threat within the societal field takes on a manly shape (Teruyuki Kagawa) – the shape that seemingly caused the death of a women – to assume that this manly presence will sort effects at all these different places. Yet, by introducing this threat in a distorted way and associatively link it with a sudden strike of a lightning bolt, Gogatsu leaves a subtle indication that the truth of this man’s passing lies at the level of the lashing out of jouissance, at the level of the subjective ‘distortion’ jouissance can cause.

By delivering a fragmented narrative structure, Gogatsu also invites the spectator to seek the logic of the various deaths in what is evocatively signalled within speech – we are tasked to find the subjective truth in the enunciated signifiers given to us. What immediately draws the spectator’s attention is that all subjects are, in some way or another, marked by relational fracture/disaster – a failure to establish a sexual relationship between the sexes – and the struggle with the Other, a struggle that signals itself most clearly by turning to intoxication (alcohol, drugs) or by jouissance causing bodily destabilisation and ego-fracturing (anger-problems, emotional-imbalance).   

High-schooler Yuri Kitagawa, for example, struggles with the way she is subjectively silenced by the parental Other – her demand to discus her future is buried under the motherly invitation to seize the moment. Shin’ichi Kuramoto is trying his best to stay off alcohol, yet, despite his effort, his former wife, Kana Kuramoto (-), refuses to meet him. Shin Minigawa has had struggles to contain his temper (towards women). Iori Sakiyama, a janitorial staff member working at a shopping mall, is silently frustrated by her romantic failures (Narra-note 1). Fumiya Kishi, the owner of a beautiful inn is troubled by his debt and the adulterous flight of his wife.  

Later in the narrative, the manly shape manifests itself in a non-distorted manner and presents itself to others under different names – e.g. Watabe, Tada, Shimu, Hashioka, Rekishima, Hiroki Daimon. However, the spectator quickly surmises that his sudden appearance in front of the characters – subjects who live in different prefectures – is linked to their unresolved struggle with the Other, a struggle that lingers silently underneath the protective image of their ego.

He appears, for instance, at the moment when certain subjects are confronted with the way the Other frustrates his wishes – Yuri cannot join the special courses at her cram school, Shin’ichi Kuramoto’s sobriety is not rewarded by his ex-wife. It is by introducing this ‘dynamic’ of frustration that Gogatsu underlines that the mere presence of this man signals the proximity of a not-yet verbalized and worked-through subjective turmoil – the effect of frustration on the subject’s unconscious, on his darkish desires, unsaid thoughts, and his unrealized fantasies. 

What this man does with his bodily presence is nothing other than allowing the other subject to realize the brutal finality of his unconscious fantasies and desires that lie in wait within his unconscious; he lets them stage the self-destructive finality of their unconscious response to the frustrating Other. He lets them brutally expose what the Other refuses to hear (e.g. Yuri’s self-hate) or what is radically dismissed by the subject himself (e.g. Fumiya Kishi’s refusal to question himself in light of his ex-wife’s infidelity).

Gogatsu utilizes the final forty minutes of his narrative to chronologically reorder the different narrative fragments – the deaths get explicitly dating – and to turn Midori Domoto’s perspective into the re-organizing anchor of the narrative. Yet, where does the finale of Sai: Disaster lead to? What is the ultimate result of Midori Domoto’s descent into investigatory enjoyment? What does her obsessive dedication to the hypothesis that a serial killer is at work, cutting the hair of his victims, ultimately lead to?  

Some spectators will be let down by the answers Gogatsu formulates to these questions, yet the way Sai: Disaster ends fits the elaboration of the central theme perfectly. By refusing to show the truth of the deaths and by keeping the main characters opaque for the spectator, Yutaro Seki and Kentaro Hirase force the spectator into a position that exposes the blindness and muteness of the Other towards the turmoil that plagues its subjects – and frames the manly shape as an ominous fertilizer that arouses the darkish phantasmatic truth of the subject and causes the flower of the death-drive brutally blossom. The Otherness of the subject lies in what we, as spectator, are not allowed to see (General-note 1). 

Sai: Disaster exposes the Japanese Other as a space that is unable to receive the subject’s suffering nor give times for the subject to verbalize his suffering. The turn to substances, for instance, can be viewed as a consequence of the subject who feels that, within the Other he wanders in, an address for his suffering cannot be found.

Domoto’s obsessive dedication to her own investigation, strange as it may appear, aims to keep the dismissive Other and the suffering of the victims and those around them at bay. This is touchingly exposed in a telling encounter between Domoto and Michiko’s husband. This encounter does not merely stage the way certain subjects seek to narrativize their loss, but also emphasizes the ease by which two subjects miss each other – misrecognition marks the field of the mundane.

The societal critique Sai: Disaster aims to deliver haunts Michiko’s husband turn to the image of the natural disaster to narrativize the death of his wife. By turning to the signifier disaster, he radically opts to qualify her untimely death as being beyond the moral calculations of the symbolic and the interpersonal failures instigated by the given organisation of the societal field. He flees from how the Other shaped him and those around him – and from the unsaid subjective truth of his wife that clings to her death. Yes, what is the point of framing death as Real when the source of the disaster of jouissance – the clash between two enjoying bodies – is to be found at the level of the Other and its tragedies orchestrated by its discourses? Does such choice not constitute a blindness from the increased superficialization of social bonds within the societal field, a blindness from what the imaginary structurally produces: rivalry, jealousy, hate, and so on?      

The composition of SAI: Disaster does not merely please the spectator with a compelling visual flow – a thoughtful combination of static and dynamic shots, but also by the fluid interweaving of many striking images – from well-composed shots of natural scenery, refined ominous imagery, to shots that evocatively stage the deadly effect of subjective threat that lingers within the societal field.

Yutaro Seki and Kentaro Hirase ensure that a certain ominous uneasiness lingers within the atmosphere by enveloping mundane interactions with disquieting musical decorations and threatening sounds – an unseen threat nested just underneath the safe fictional image of societal peace and interpersonal harmony. The deadly consequences of the fleeting materialisation of such threat are, in some cases, decorated with disconcerting musical accompaniment. These musical pieces re-emphasize the idea that the disharmonizing threat is internal to the harmonizing forces within the societal field – the disconcerting pieces signal the failure that is part of the mundane, of the field of imaginary.     

Gogatsu ensures that the spectator is kept engaged throughout the narrative by utilizing music and sounds to manipulating the flow of tension and play with the spectator’s expectations. By musically punctuating the threat the manly shape poses for the subject, Gogatsu emphasizes that what is most threatening is the fact that he, by fluidly inserting himself into the mundane fabric, remains unseen – he remains as unseen as the turmoil the subject refuses to engage with and work through; he can only be a threat, because the subjects he engages with are already under threat of what they repress. The decoration of mundane moments with disconcerting music, on the other hand, elegantly corroborate the idea that the threat within the societal field is linked to the imposed false ‘silent’ harmony. 

The presence of a threatening darkness underneath the fabric of the mundane is also signalled at the level of the lighting and colour design. Yet, one could go further and argue that the cold darkish colour-schemes evoke the fact that such unrealized darkness is characteristic to human subjectivity and is, thus, inherent to the societal field. 

With Sai: Disaster, Yutaro Seki and Kentaro Hirase deliver an engaging narrative that does not merely deliver its societal critique in an evocative way, but gently pushes the spectator, through narrative and compositional choices, in the position of what enables the various disasters to happen: the mute and blind Other. While this approach will surely leave some spectators frustrated, those spectators who succeed in engaging with what remains absent within the film will be reaping its thematical rewards and more fully appreciate the way it exposes the duality of threat within the societal field. Sai: Disaster has, in our view, everything to become a cult-phenomenon, so do not sleep on it.

Notes

Narra-note 1: Sakiyama and Minigawa succeed in forming a minimal social bond and inaugurate a space where something of subjective turmoil can be verbalized. Yet, one could say that the narrative underline that this establishment is a little bit too late – a flash of hope that quickly fizzles out.

General-note 1: Our desire to see and to know is frustrated to expose the way we deal with subjects around us – we reduce them to imaginary phantoms of appeasing similarity or repulsive difference.  

Acting-note 1: While there still exist controversy surroundingTeruyuki Kagawa, we cannot deny that he delivers a truly compelling performance as the mysterious man. The character he portrays is, in fact, a type that totally fits his ‘aura’ – see, for instance, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Creepy (2006).