Kiyoshi Kurosawa exhumes the heart of a Japanese family in TOKYO SONATA

(Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa and actor Teruyuki Kagawa, during the shooting of Tokyo Sonata, above.)

By Terry Keefe

This article is currently appearing in this month's Venice Magazine.

For filmmaker Kiyoski Kurosawa, it wasn’t that big a leap from the horror genre to the domestic-style terrors of a family melodrama. Kurosawa made his bones on horror-based stories such as 1997’s Cure, but his newest, Tokyo Sonata, follows the dissolution, and partial rebirth, of a Japanese traditional family, with no supernatural elements in play. Kurosawa’s trademark evocation of creeping dread and anxiety remain, however, and you still are never sure about what is around the next corner in his new work. Says Kurosawa about stepping outside his more familiar realm of murders and the supernatural, “Obviously, since this wasn’t a horror film, one change was that I didn’t have to make it deliberately frightening. But the part of my process that was similar [from horror] is that I wanted to see how outside elements could affect the characters. And those elements could still be represented by motifs like wind and shadows.”

(The family unit a'crumble in Tokyo Sonata: Kyoko Koizumi, Teruyuki Kagawa, Yu Koyanagi, and Inowaki Kai, above.)

In the first act of Tokyo Sonata, a businessman/father named Ryuhei (played by Teruyuki Kagawa) loses his office job because of outsourcing to China and joins the ranks of what are known as the “secretly unemployed,” recently downsized Japanese men who pretend to go to work each day in order to save face with their family and friends. Ryuhei whittles the work day hours away in parks and libraries, with scores of other downtrodden, but well-dressed, men who are engaged in the same deception. Part of the inspiration for the inciting incident of the story came from Kurosawa’s own childhood curiosity as to what his father did when he left the house in his work suit each morning, as the particulars of a father’s job weren’t discussed at home in a traditional Japanese family then, and in many cases, now. Recalls Kurosawa, “I really have no idea what my father did outside the home. I have faith that he did something useful, but it was possible that he was unemployed. This was never brought into the household though.”

Although the first portions of Tokyo Sonata follow the downwardly mobile journey of the father of the family, the story quickly expands to show the ripple effects of his actions on his wife Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi) and two male children Takashi (Yu Koyanagi) and Kenji (Inowaki Kai), and by the end of the film, it is Megumi who has become the true protagonist of the story. After running into her husband, who is now clandestinely working as a janitor in a shopping mall, Megumi falls into a period of melancholy, but is jolted out of her malaise when she is abducted by a knife-wielding male house thief (played by longtime Kurosawa acting collaborator Koji Yakusho) who ultimately turns out to be a fairly pathetic character driven by frustrations over his impotence in the grand scheme of society, much like her husband. Kurosawa explained to us that this mid-film switch of which character is the lead focus wasn’t his original intent, and that it came as sort of a surprise to him during the writing process, “I realized that, other than the mother, the other family members carry problems which are external to the family. But her problems are internal, in the family. I wanted to go further and further inward into the family and it was the Megumi character that allowed me to do that. Her story ultimately gets to a point where she must confront the question, ‘Who am I?’”

(Downsized and unemployed: Teruyuki Kagawa in Tokyo Sonata, above.

The shot compositions of Tokyo Sonata are so precise and seemingly fine-tuned, that it was a surprise to find out that Kurosawa works fairly loose on the set and doesn’t even storyboard, nor has he really ever used storyboards. “I just like to go into the locations and talk to the cinematographer and I find that storyboards can be more restrictive than anything.” Another interesting revelation was that Kurosawa also isn’t a big fan of rehearsals, although the performances in Tokyo Sonata feel as precise as his shot selection. He further explains, “I prefer to film the actors while they’re still free. Rehearsals start to lock down what they’re about to do and then they go through the motions. I like to capture the surprises of what they might do in a new situation.”

Tokyo Sonata is currently in theaters via Regent Releasing.