Another Decade with Takashi Miike is a series of essays on the 2010 films of the Japanese maverick, following Notebook's earlier survey of Miike's first decade of the 21st century.
After Lesson of the Evil in 2012 Takashi Miike was a different filmmaker, maybe a different man. He’d chased the ultimate in orgiastic pain and pleasure, the righteously profane with gusto unparalleled, and then suddenly he had said all he had to. When you not only murder children but do it simply because and have fun doing it, it’s because you hope never to have to again. Violence has recurred since—he wouldn’t be Miike without it—but his attitude changed. Ideas and symbols appear that are alien to his cinema and yet suddenly fit right into the new scheme. A man with a wooden sword throwing himself into combat against men with steel blades, a fight he knows he can’t win in Hara-Kiri. A man so sickened by the idea of harming a child in Shield of Straw that he walks away from his life of crime and punishment. Blood replaced with beads in As The Gods Will. Gangsters singing and dancing instead of just shooting each other in For Love’s Sake. And then there’s The Lion Standing in the Wind, the film in which, after decades of bloodshed, Miike can hardly stand to look at violence.
The first image of the film speaks volumes about the man who rebuilt himself. An African traveler stands in the rubble of the Japanese tsunami and hurricane of March 2011 in a faded but nevertheless strikingly bold yellow coat (against the rubble he might as well be Angie Dickinson in Point Blank). He has a fistful of seeds in a pouch (which we see in gentle close-up of his lovely hands) and he looks ready to spread them before he says the Japanese phrase “Ganbare,” which loosely translates to “Hang tough.” We then cut to a hospital run by the Japanese in Kenya, 24 years earlier where Dr. Kōichirō Shimada (Takao Osawa) is lost on his way to begin his new life as a surgeon for child soldiers.
It’s likely obvious just how vastly different a film The Lion Standing in the Wind is even before the little grammatical tics are factored in. It was Miike’s second film not obviously set in Asia, one of his only films about someone with no direct connection to law enforcement or criminal activity, his first film about a character whose mission to help other humans isn’t complicated by corruption or ends with him in combat. The movie was based on a novel by Masashi Sada, which was initially based on a song, which was itself based on popularized letters from the real Dr. Shimada. The only source in English online about this material says it was Osawa himself who suggested that Sada adapt the song into a book in hopes he could get someone to make it into a movie in which he could star, and that someone was his Shield of Straw director, against all odds. Miike adapts the popular idiom of “foreign” countries being shot in a yellow filter and shoots the war between child soldiers with shaky cam, but beyond that it’s all him. His usual perspective, blocking, composition, and sense of humor survive, even if for once he’s resolutely condemning the violence on which his cinema was built.
Shimada finds his life’s true calling when healing child soldiers—Miike resists Othering the African patients, exalting their ritual, dress, dance, and the hundred ways in which they differ from the Japanese (Shimada is called “Daktari” by his patients like in the Art Arthur-Ivan Tors TV program, which, while likely accurate also feels like Miike slyly joking about the history of colonialist narratives). Instead, he focuses on the resolute good nature of a protagonist who wants badly to bridge the gaps between himself and his Kenyan hosts as he’s tested by increasingly unfriendly patients and incurable wounds. He accidentally teaches a room full of kids to swear, in one of the most joyful sequences in all of Miike’s cinema. It’s a film about translation, not least of the director’s own diction. Not even Kiarostami had this kind of success with the same subject. Shimada begins by laughing during surgeries, just happy to help people. A few weeks into his tenure he’s having crises of confidence only smoothed over by winning over his most surly patients. When we meet him, Shimada hasn’t ever worked on gunshot wounds, let alone amputated limbs lost to them. “What am I supposed to say to the kids who’ve lost limbs?” he implores of a British supervisor. “I don’t know.”
Miike seems to have been drawn to the project to answer the question. The wounded bodies start coming and they never stop, and that’s the pattern of Shimada’s life, broken up by fits of torment as he tries like hell to understand his purpose, and that of the war that creates child soldiers. Real-world violence boggles Miike’s mind in a way that movie violence never did. When it’s a woman garroting the leg off a hapless suitor, or a man cutting his own tongue off like theatre for Yakuza higher-ups, he’s at home. It’s not real, it can be dealt with. Here he’s a little lost, and his discomfort with the reality is part of the exercise. Even he, the man who made snapping bones, mortified flesh and sex with corpses his trademark, can’t quite handle the psychology of a child soldier. His and Shimada’s confusion and frustration are one and the same. He never draws the obvious conclusions about the steadfastness of his usual heroes with those of his child soldier characters. He knows the difference and fiction has no place exerting its influence over something with a basis in fact.
The closest Miike comes to the outlandishness of fiction is risking vulgarity in the way he depicts the budding friendship/romance between fellow physician Shimada and Wakako Kusano (Satomi Ishihara) and his mentorship of child soldier Ndung'u. In seeing the gentle warming of Shimada and Wakako to each other, Miike approaches the best of Merchant-Ivory’s war-adjacent narratives of love interrupted by duty and position. In building the relationship to Ndung’u, he flirts with but never takes home a very American style of taming African characters. It’s medicine, not anything as fatuous as nationalism, that links Ndung’u and Shimada. The idea of reaching across continents to do good, whether planting corn in irradiated Japan (which, with no irony needs the help Shimada promises to bring to Kenya in the early part of the film) or performing surgery on soldiers who’d as soon bite you as accept your help. Making the material work would have been easy. Making it his was rather a more difficult task to the perpetual insomniac genre specialist. Miike, who once directed like he had a short sword in his teeth, lets his guard down and that’s as beautiful and disarming as anything in the movie. A long take of Shimada teaching his wounded charges to say “itadakimasu” and then smiling as they eat, a moment which also counts as non-denominational grace. Making hundreds of hours of films writhing around in the open wounds of Japan, Miike gets to revel in the healing some that have nothing whatever to do with his violent characters or their place in history. “Hang tight,” it’s worth it.