Many films, many creative projects, are born from the subject crashing into to question that needs elaboration. For Yoshitaka Kamada, the attempted suicide by his mother a few months after his father died of cancer and the psychological and financial toll caused by having to travel back and forth to deal with the situation led to the confrontation with the following questions: How do people who live in cities come to terms with a parent who is approaching death in a far away place? What is a good life? How to respond to one’s mother after such a suicidal act? Yet, as he wrote the script, another thematical dimension slowly appeared: How to deal with ‘failure’ in the face of the impeding death of a parental figure? How does the imminent reality of death impact one’s relation to one’s own subjective impasse? (General-note 1).
Kamada’s Ranshima Bound begins at nighttime, in the streets of Tokyo. After having received a call from his younger brother Satoshi (Tomomitsu Adachi), a drunk Yoshio (Tomoki Kimura) pukes from a bridge and happens to see a female shape in the water below. He runs down the bank and pulls Maki (Yuki Kii), who is still alive, out of the water with all his might.
The following day, they board the train to Ranshima station without speaking a word to each other (General-note 2, General-note 3). They visit an Antique shop called Bonbon where Yoshio buys two rings – one for him and one for Maki – and a polka dot dress for her. Upon getting together with Satoshi, he introduces Maki as his wife.
What makes Ranshima Bound so intriguing – what pulls the spectator into the narrative – is Kamada’s play with signifying elements and the way he renders the spectator unable to combine these elements in an orienting signified. We are, in a certain sense, given puzzle pieces that do not yet fit together. The spectator is confronted with a strange call from his younger brother Satoshi asking about his knowledge of certain events, the woman on the riverbank, a trip to Ranshima, the utter silence between the man and the woman, the purchase of rings and a dress.
And, as can be expected, Kamada’s unfolds like the enunciation of a sentence; Every new (visual) element helps fixating the meaning of the previous signifiers, every new piece allows the other pieces to fit together better. Kamada, eventually, allows a simple opposition to appear – the suicide attempt of Toshio’s mother Michiko (Yukiko Takee) with Toshio’s need to introduce a woman as his so-called wife to his brother – by which he inaugurates his thematical space and allows the spectator to formulate three central orienting questions: Why does Toshio intoxicates himself after his brother’s call? Why does he feel the need to procure him a ‘fake’ wife? And, why does she readily accept his proposition?
Thematically speaking, Kamada does not explore the tension that exists between the subject and the Other, but the way the subject relies on the Other’s ideals – the establishment of his ego ideal – to evaluate himself. Satoshi’s deceit is born from his realisation that he cannot produce the evidence of conventional individual success to his mother, the representative of his ego ideal, and to his brother, who has, in his view, realized said ideal-of-societal-success.
Kamada opens up this space of failure within his narrative not to reprimand nor to glorify ‘societal failures’, but to put the societal pressure to attain the mundane ideal into question. As we, as human beings have only a limited time – everyone eventually dies, we should not mindlessly chase societal ideals, but find a way to defuse the pressure of societal discourses, which informed and inform our ideal ego, and to decide, in collaboration with the Other and by radically accepting one’s own finitude, the path we want to carve into the societal fabric, the ideal ego we want to chase until death realizes itself. The perception of societal failure, amplified by societal discourses, mystifies the great variety of atypical personal success.
It is evident from the way Yoshitaka Kamada composed his narrative visually that his composition is in service of the performances – the frame tries to ‘capture’ the performances without stylistic garnishes. Kamada relies on long takes, static framing, and fleeting moments of dynamism. In some cases, the director turns to spatial movement to allow himself to ‘skip’ a cut – a flourish of dynamism within a long take to add some ‘variety’ to the compositional whole.
What stands out in the composition is Kamada’s use of naturalistic colour and lighting design, However, as the images and spaces concatenate, one can easily discern that he continually seeks to emphasize the shadowy darkness that pervades his narrative spaces and clings to his characters – the shadows reflect their burden. Kamada, moreover, relies on naturalistic sound-scapes throughout his film.
Due to its composed visual rhythm and its reliance on static moments, Kamada’s composition is highly suitable in staging the equivocal quality of speech and the inherent misrecognition that marks speech interactions. Kamada’s film opens not merely by introducing the dimension of the lie, but by showing that, despite the truth – Maki and Toshio are radically strangers – echoing in their limited enunciations, prolonged silences, and the way they position their bodies with respect to each other, Satoshi nevertheless seeks to extract information – he poses questions – to fabricate narrative that supports the lie by infusing it with the value of truth.
As the narrative unfolds, we also realize that Toshio, within the speech-interactions with Satoshi, seeks to avoid exposing his subjectivity. While Satoshi does an attempt at presenting an image ‘normality’ – his signifiers establish a productive inscription within the societal field, Toshio deflects any appeal to divulge something of his life. Their speech, one could say, is held prison within the confines of the practical and the objective. Yet, such stance of avoidance, a sign of a tension between the brothers, is bound to falter and fail. The question is not ‘if’ it will happen, but what kind of signifier will call forth Toshio’s subjectivity in its ‘violent’ glory and break the mutual facade of pretences.
Another dimension of speech-interactions is touched upon as Toshio, Satoshi and Maki set out to decide where to scatter the ashes when the time comes: signifiers sort effects, signifiers can penetrate the ego as defence and arouse subjective turmoil. Maki’s breakdown on the beach, the sudden bursting forth of her own subjectivity, is very clearly an effect of the signifier, of Satoshi’s recalling his and Toshio’s familial past. This breakdown, however, is also linked to the circumstances in which Toshio found her. Within the narrative, this puzzling event allows Maki and Toshio to overturn their subjective silence and inaugurate speech-interactions that, by puncturing societal expectations, allows something of their subjectivity come into play.
Ranshima Bound offers an understated drama that beautifully shows that ‘failure’ is deeply relational – One can only fail in the eyes of the (m)Other. Yoshitaka Kamada exploits this ‘realization’ to underline the importance of loosening one fixation on the Other and his ideals and sew together an ideal ego that is worth chasing until death’s door is reached. With the impressive performances of Tomomitsu Adachi and Tomoki Kimura, Kamada has little struggle to make his message come across. Recommended.
Notes
General-note 1: One can easily surmise that ‘failure’ is also a theme that has subjective relevance for Kamada. Toshio echoes, at a certain level, his own failure of making his involvement with a band and a theatre troupe into a success. His flight from Hokkaido did not only end in failure, but pushed him to the art of filmmaking.
General-note 2: Ranshima is part of Otaru, a city in Hokkaido. The name Ranshima is a bastardisation of the Ainu sentence of ran-oshimak-nai – “the river behind the downhill slope”.
While not many will know Ranshima, the place is considered by many the birthplace of beach-going culture in Hokkaido. In the seventies, the place was so popular that the nearest seven-eleven recorded the highest sales of any Seven-Eleven in Japan. However, as the spectator can see within the film, that flourishing time has long passed – the railway line will be discontinued and the station building will, in all probability, be destroyed.
General-note 3: The original title of the film was Futari. Yet, graphic designer Kentaro Chiba proposed to insert the name where the film takes place into the title and suggested the song Chicago Bound by Yuka-dan, a song whose narrative resembles Yoshio’s subjective position. Due to these two interventions, Kamada ultimately decided to give his film the title Ranshima Bound.
References:
映画秘宝公式note, & 映画秘宝公式note. (2025, September 8). 「うまくいかない人間を微笑ましい気持ちで見つめてもらえれば」さいはての地をさまよう者たちの物語『蘭島行』が9月20日公開。鎌田義孝監督と主演の木村知貴に作品への向き合い方をうかがった。. note（ノート）. https://note.com/eiga_hiho/n/n278f025c7e6b
第七藝術劇場／シアターセブン, & 第七藝術劇場／シアターセブン. (2025, November 28). 2025年12月号ロングインタビュー掲載. note（ノート）. https://note.com/7gei_seven/n/n3577a6e36cee