With Echoes of Motherhood, Ryutaro Nakagawa delivers what can be considered the concluding film of a trilogy of narratives dealing with loss and reconciliation with it – the other two films being Run, Faster Than Despair (2016) and April’s Long Dream (2018).
However, given the time that separates the second film and Echoes Of Motherhood, it is a given that Nakagawa’s perspective has shifted. While Nakagawa in his earlier work wrote about loss from the perspective of someone experiencing it and turned his main-characters as representation of himself, he became able with his latest work to approach it from a distance, as an observer.
The narrative of Echoes Of Motherhood commences with a rather distressing scene at an organisation that supports children. A boy called Antonio (-) has climbed the roof to create a ruckus. While others merely call him to order from below, Nakajima (Shiori Kubo) climbs and forcefully hugs him to prevent worser things from happening.
After the ordeal, Michi Noguchi (Momoko Fukuchi) approaches Nakajima to emphasize that a certain distance with respect to the children is necessary and warn her that direct physical contact might ‘put their hearts in a dangerous state’. Nakajima retorts that she prevented worse from happening in the future – ‘There is no place at home or school’. Matsui (Takahiro Miura) reminds her that ‘even patting on the head’ is not allowed.
The same night, not long after sharing her first ultrasound picture with her husband Toshi (Kanichiro) – the seed of motherhood planted, she receives a phone call that informs her that her mother (Naomi Kawase) has collapsed. She travels to Nara and learns, much to her shock, that her mother kept the uterine cancer she is battling with a secret. The reunion between them, however, is far from cordial, eventually culminating in her mother’s enunciation: “Even family can be strangers”.
Echoes of Motherhood begins by granting the spectator a glance at a logic that commonly defines Japanese organisations providing care for ‘struggling’ children. The whole ordeal underlines that a space is established where the subjectivity of the troubled Other is avoided, where the child’s speech is not taken seriously – “We hold them coldly, then push them away gently”. While the problematic social context of the child is known, the child is inaugurated in a cycle of activities that reduces him to his ‘label’, inscribed in a system that ignores that the child is, in many cases, the symptom of the parental Other.
The spectator quickly grasps, by witnessing the interactions between Michi and her mother, that she has, in a certain sense, been held coldly and that she, through dismissive signifiers and distancing acts, has been pushed brutally away – “You’re the selfish one. Suddenly showing up”. Even Michi’s husband, she brushes off with painful precision: “Her father (…) He seemed sincere, but in reality, he only thought of himself”.
What presents itself is a relational pattern full of subtle passive aggressive frictions and distancing attacks, a relational pattern, animated by subjective frustrations and complexes, where the subjectivity of the collocutor is dismissed and resorted to the grottos of the unsaid.
Yet, such tension on a what materializes itself as a verbal battlefield ultimately leads to brutal explosions of subjectivity, the seal of repression propels away by signifiers that cannot remain unsaid – e.g. “Michi’s explosion at the dinner table concerning her frustrated wish for signs of her approval, her love – “I’ve spent my life worried about your reactions”.
One easily surmises that the way she realizes herself at her workplace, the way she utilizes rules and ideals, rationalizes the problematic dynamic between herself and her mother. Her stance towards the children at her work forms, in a certain way, a rationalized escape or avoidance of the subject underneath the cloth of motherhood by shaping her presence in the image of her mother. It is by virtue of this unconscious rationalization and moulding that she renders herself deaf to the children’s subjectivity and readies herself to cancel out the echo of her own suffering within the signifiers the children enunciate.
Nakagawa, however, does not deliver one simple straightforward narrative thread, but a carefully interwoven structure of three intertwining narrative threads: the thread of Michi taking care of her mother is braided with Toshi supervising the rehearsal of his play and the visualisation of the auditive material upon which the play is based. As the latter narrative threads unfurl, the spectator slowly realizes that the play concerning Kanako (Sara Minami) and her piano teacher Mari (Aki Asakura) constitute a creative elaboration of the subjective position of Michi’s mother. The riddle that, nearly automatically, results from this intertwining is none other than the following: What kind of answer, what kind of closure/reconciliation will the play culminate in?
This intertwining narrative structure ultimately touches upon the idea of becoming a parent, of becoming able, due to the presence of a developing child – shifting needs and wants, to assume the signifier ‘father’ or ‘mother’. The child’s real does not merely challenge the subject and causes him suffering, but tasks him to fabricate a version of fatherhood and motherhood – a frail imaginary patchwork-vest to adorn in relation to one’s child.
The third narrative thread, the explorative visualisation of the signifiers of the auditive material – the exchanges between Kanako and her piano teacher, allows the spectator to grasp what Michi’s mother patched together is, in part, a hedgehog-like shield that defends herself from her own unresolved ‘grief’ and turns Michi into an object to attack someone who is radically absent (General-note 1).
What ultimately causes a shift within the relation between Michi and her mother – What pacifies the subject behind the motherly image – is not simple the imminence of death and new life, but the very concatenation of subtle signs of love from Michi towards her mother. Despite the verbal violence, she finds ways to underline she will remain present and remains open to her signifiers – a presence of acceptance (Narra-note 1).
Ryutaro Nakagawa’s compositional approach to bringing the narrative of Echoes Of Motherhood visually to life is quite eclectic – e.g. static long takes, documentary-like dynamism, still-life shots, pace of cutting, elliptic editing. Yet, he does not merely paint in various ‘styles’ to poetically please the spectator, but to impressionistically evoke moods that allow the spectator to qualify align himself with the state of mind of the various main-characters within Nakagawa’s narrative (Cine-note 1). Or to put it differently, Nakagawa plays with impressionistic evocation to give the spectator a taste of the experiential dimension of subjectivity, of the ‘evaporating’ and fragmentary way experience is inscribed in the field of recollection and the way it is rewritten and shaped by the recollecting subject in the present.
As the film unfolds, the wave of compositional eclecticism eventually washes out into a more straightforward documentary-styled approach – shakiness comes to mark nearly every shot, nearly every frame. Yet, Nakagawa fluidly interweaves more evocative moments (e.g. memory-fragments) to explore the subjectivity of Michi’s mother and highlight what she is unable to bring into play via the signifier, what festers within her because of having been left untouched. One might even be tempted, by what Nakagawa develops concerning Michi’s relation to her mother and her husband, to argue that some form of estrangement is structural within human relationships by virtue of the unsaid and the unfavourable subjective effects its sorts.
Nakagawa’s use of static or semi-static long takes (e.g. medium shots and wide shots) slows down the pace of the composition to create the possibility for the spectator to ‘read’, with care, the performances – i.e. bodily presence and facial expressions, the effects of enunciated signifiers on bodily presence, the shifting relation of moving bodies with respect to each other and to the narrative space.
Both Momoko Fukuchi and Naomi Kawase delivers incredible naturalistic performances that do not merely breathe life into the well-structured conversational exchanges, but also make the equivocal and communicative dimension of silences come to their full right. It would not be incorrect to state that they carry Nakagawa’s narrative and amplifies the emotional potency of his evocative narrative structure, of the interplay with the said and the unsaid.
At the level of the visuals, the toned-down vivacity of the colours and the softness of the lighting design stand out (Lighting-note 1). These two elements do not merely allow Nakagawa to give a certain poetic elegance to many of his shot-compositions – and elevate the emotional potency of many moments, but also creates a visual frame that subtly echoes the omnipresence of dismissive stance, either due to societal demands or unconscious motives, of the other’s subjectivity. The minimalistic accompaniment also plays an evocative role, instrumentalizing mono-no-aware in its true equivocal meaning.
Echoes Of Motherhood is a brilliant cinematic experience, a wonderful drama that stirs the heart of the spectator by approaching the dimension of loss, the dynamic of memory, and Otherness in a very poetic way. Nakagawa does not only visualize the fragmentary and subjective of human memory with great precision, but also exposes, at a structural and narrative level, that, beyond the pacifying dimension of imaginary reconciliation, lies on Otherness that cannot be bridged – our opaqueness is radical. The emotional potency of Echoes of Motherhood lies in the fact that this carefully constructed confrontation with this irreducible enigmatic dimension gives the spectator a taste of what subjectively truly means – He crafts true three-dimensional characters.
Notes
General-note 1: Mark Schilling argues, in his review of the film for the Japan Times that “the film (…) leaves plot holes that perplex. How did mother and daughter fall out?” (Schilling, 2026) Yet, we hope that our review shows that Nakagawa does answer this question in his lyrical and allusive style, exploiting the Freudian notion of falsche Verknüpfung and the role it plays in transference.
Narra-note 1: The attentive spectator will notice that the way Michi positions herself towards her mother is different from the way she made herself present to the children at her workplace.
Cine-note 1: The opening sequence of Echoes of Motherhood shies away from ‘explication’ to force the spectator to orient himself by feeling the moods and rhythms.
Lighting-note 1: The softness of the visuals is, generally, amplified by the use of depth-of-field and subtle film-grain.
References:
Schilling, M. (2026, October 22). An estranged mother and daughter face the music in ‘Echoes of Motherhood.’ The Japan Times. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2026/10/22/film/echoes-of-motherhood/