What compels a director to bring a short story of a renowned Japanese director to life. In Shuntaro Uchida’s case, it is the reflection of his own childhood – him being an anxious child – in Kaori Ekuni’s short story that persuaded him to bring it to life on the silver screen. He exploits the frame of the story not simply to work through some of his own childhood experiences, but to evocatively stage and share something of his own subjective truth.

Incinerator follows Kozue (Karin), a fourth-grade elementary school student. One day, while laying on bed in the nurse’s office, two university students, enter to ask treatment for a burn for one of them. One of the boys catches her interest and, upon hearing that they have come to introduce an event, she decides to return to her classroom. She learns that they will hold a shadow play during the summer holidays and that the student she is interested in is called Jinta (Taiki Shinozuka).

Not long after encountering Jinta again, she asks her father what happiness means. He tells her, despite affirming he does not really know, that one might use the signifier for moments where one feels warm and fuzzy inside. Despite his attempts to describe the feeling, she keeps saying that she doesn’t understand.

Shuntaro Uchida surprises the spectator by putting the dynamic of Nachträglichkeit (retroaction) effectively to work at the level of the structure of his narrative. He, first, lets his spectator wander along with Kozue through various narrative spaces (school, home, park), emphasizing that she, by remaining mute, installs an ‘unbridgeable’ distance between her and the other; she hides in a position of radical solitude.

The narrative seems to lack any direction. Kozue ‘wastes’ her time on the bed the nurse’s office, silently lies on the floor in the living room of her parental apartment, fills her days with what many would consider non-sensical yet inquisitive act, e.g. throwing her plastic dinosaurs from the balcony, dipping her noodles in her glass of tea before eating, carrying water within her hands to water plants. 

Yet, one subjective enunciation by Kozue – “What’s happiness?” – rewrites the ‘aimless’ first half an hour of the film and re-organizes its further unfolding. The introduction of the signifier ‘happiness’, first and foremost, impels us to re-evaluate the position of every subject within the family. Who can, within this familial structure, consider themselves happy or as having fleeting moments of happiness? Kozue’s father (Takuma Nagao) feels ‘forced’ by Kamiya, his superior, to join him to satisfy his drinking desires. Kozue’s mother (Akiko Kikuchi) is subjected to her manager’s reprimands for taking time off all of the sudden and also suffers from her daughter’s radical refusal to talk to her. The latter ultimately culminates in a subtle subjective unveiling towards her co-worker Yoko Saeki (-): “You wish you didn’t have one? (…) I’m kidding”.

In Kozue’s case, the enunciation of the signifier happiness invites us to reframe her flight from the Other, her flight into silence – she can talk, yet refuses to do most of the time, and the importance of her encounter with Jinta. That Kozue repeats to her father that she does not understand his answers to her question does not only imply that she does not consider her little inquisitive acts as a source of happiness, but that she, implicitly, wonders whether the encounter with Shinta produced a moment of happiness.

As the narrative unfolds, Uchida unfolds the idea that ‘happiness’ can only be understood in a nachträglich manner. In a certain sense, one can only grasp ‘happiness’ after it has passed, from one’s present situation – a situation where happiness remains unrecognized. Uchida, in this sense, inaugurates an ambiguous narrative space where the spectator, in a similar way as Kozue, cannot name or qualify the emotional feeling Kozue is feeling. Yet, at the same time, the spectator understands that certain moments might, from a later point in Kozue’s life, transforms into nostalgic recollections of fleeting happiness. 

Uchida also signals that happiness is a relational phenomenon or necessities a relational support. What Kozue misses within her own recounting of her memory – her memory of happiness – to Jinta is the fact that her subjective experience of the natural beauty is structured by the familial frame. It is the interplay between relational dynamics – Kozue and mother, father and mother, Kozue and father – that enables the blissful recollection of the moment she spends surrounded by natural beauty.

The spectator realizes, in this sense, that the mere re-finding of the same or similar natural beauty won’t generate the same experience of happiness. She lacks the relational frame to transform mere experiential moments, after they have passed, into moments of happiness. However, one cannot say that Kozue remains completely oblivious to the importance of the relational frame. What puts her on the path of this truth is the failure to replicate her moment of happiness with Jinta, the same failure that leads her to address her mother – “Where’s grandpa”? – and question, in a somewhat roundabout manner, what binds a man to a woman (Narra-note 1).

One act that stands out – an act that is implied by the narrative’s title – is Kozue’s repetitive act of incinerating plastic stuff in the school’s incinerator. Why does she feel the need to destroy objects of the Other? Why does she puncture a hole into the Other by burning something the other subject values – e.g. the plastic container her mother made for her, the plastic her classmate wanted to use as window in her artwork, her mother’s hair-clip? Shuntara Uchida refuses to offer the spectator a clear-cut answer, merely evoking that each theft and burning function as an act of subtle separation, an act that seeks to deflate the oppressiveness of what puzzles her: the Other’s presence, the little thing called desire, and the question of what binds a woman to a man. 

Shuntaro Uchida composes Incinerator with a combination of static moments and restraint dynamism and gives, by relying on long takes, the unfolding of his narrative a languid pace. While Uchida inserts some moments of cruder dynamism within his visual fabric, these moments are interwoven in such a way that the meditative pace and the emotional currents remain consistent.

While many shot-compositions are quite straightforward – serviceable to the unfolding of the narrative, Uchida also interweaves some truly pleasing visual moments within his composition (Cine-note 1). What makes these compositions so pleasing is their unforced quality, as if the camera merely happened upon the tension between the compositional lines, upon the ‘compositional’ features of the architectural environment and the interplay between the interior set-up and the architectural features of the building.

Uchida also pleases with his shots of nature. He does not only play with natural sunlight and the shadows it casts in an elegant manner, but also positions his characters within the natural space in such a way that the beauty of the surroundings can come it its full right and the subjective stance of the character within the frame can be elegantly evoked.

Incinerator is a meditative experience that plunges the spectator into the ambiguous field of emotional experience with poetic elegance. The way Shuntaro Uchida plays with the indeterminate element and the dimension of nachträglichkeit turns out to be the film’s biggest strength, a beautiful invitation to reflect on our own childhood, yet this play will also alienate spectators who seek something more tangible and need more direction.

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Notes

Narra-note 1: It would not be wrong to argue that Kozue unconsciously grasps the importance of the relational riddle by asking Jinta to take her to the area around the lake. 

Cine-note 1: Uchida dynamically plays with depth-of-field to give his imagery a certain pleasing softness.