Director – Fran Rubel Kuzui – 1988 – US, Japan – Cert. 18 – 99m
****
A girl singer, fed up with being sidelined by the music business in New York, relocates to Tokyo and falls in with local rock band hopefuls there – select UK cinema screenings from Friday, April 25th prior to its Blu-ray release on Monday, May 5th
“Hey, Mike, when do I get to use my song?” asks the band’s disgruntled, leather-clad back-up singer, feeling redundant as she stands on stage holding a tambourine. Her music career in New York stalling fast, Wendy (Carrie Hamilton from Cool World, Ralph Bakshi, 1995; Shag, Zelda Barron, 1989) receives a “Wish you were here” postcard from her friend Jane in Japan and shoots back a reply: “Hope you meant it – ‘cos I’m coming.”
In Japan, a band does an English language cover of Blue Suede Shoes. When Wendy arrives in Tokyo, her girlfriend has moved on to Thailand. Barely speaking any Japanese, Wendy winds up in a cheap hotel in Itabashi the space of a small Japanese apartment where footwear is removed on entering and, as an Aussie resident tells her, everything operates on credit card and a shower is Y100 for ten minutes. “Alice will fix you up with a job,” says another girl, and soon she’s working for Alice (Constantina Bilanas) looking after men in a hostess bar – and singing an embarrassing karaoke version of Home on the Range.
The leader of the Blue Suede Shoes band, meanwhile, after debating with his grandpa (Taiji Tonoyama from The Ballad of Narayama, Shohei Imamura, 19843; In the Realm of the Senses, Nagisa Oshima, 1976; Onibaba, Kaneto Shindo, 1964; The Insect Woman, Shohei Imamura, 1963; Ohayo / Good Morning, Yasujiro Ozu, 1959; The Human Condition I: No Greater Love, Masaki Kobayashi, 1959; Drunken Angel, Akira Kurosawa, 1948) at home, decides at a band meeting at the local food bar that singing in English isn’t enough. “We need… a gaijin.” Wendy, having problems getting a taxi home from work, winds up at the same food stall where the band are eating chasu ramen. One of the other band members bets the singer Y20 000 he can’t pick her up. Speaking barely any English beyond simple one-line catchphrases and pick up lines, Hiro (Diamond Yukai, from Dangan Runner, Sabu, 1996; Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola, 2003; the vocalist for the Japanese rock band Red Warriors) manages to get her to come with him to a hotel for a night by offering to pay, however his amorous intentions – backed up by sexualised images of women on the room’s walls – are swiftly thwarted when she sleeps apart from him in the bath.
In their separate lives, both have money problems – he can’t persuade his dad (Makoto Fukuda) to part with Y30 000 for a leather jacket he saw, she turns down Alice’s offer of upping her income by working as a bunny girl. She is hanging out on the edge of a park which serves as a gathering point for musicians and singers, when Hiro spots her again. With his bandmates suspicious that he didn’t actually sleep with her before, Hiro manages to get Wendy to give him her work number and come with him to a music venue (“gaijin don’t have to pay”). They talk music and bands, and she suggests a hotel, relishing the fact she can bathe without watching the clock. The room has in your face TV porno, with black squares obscuring genital activity as per Japanese censorship custom. She sleeps with him.
The others try to talk him into having her join the band, thinking that he worries that he won’t be the star. As the pair become an item, with Hiro taking her to see a religious shrine, he tells her of his admiration for Western singers like Mick Jagger, John Lennon and Frank Sinatora (sic). She decides to find a band on her own, as she has sung in boyfriend’s bands before, and it generally doesn’t work out. After trying various groups, including a heavy metal band doing Home on the Range, she finds herself in bed with Hiro and his guitar and sings You Make Me Feel (Like a Natural Woman), later trying it out in rehearsal with the whole band, which seems to work.
The band, meanwhile, have been trying to get their demo tape to the attention of make-or-break music producer Dota (Tetsuro Tanba, who famously played Tiger Tanaka in Bond movie You Only Live Twice, Lewis Gilbert, 1967) – hiding in his corporate toilet to ambush him, or dressing as a gorilla-suited, singing telegram to drop the tape off with a front office secretary (who promptly bins it after they’ve left).
Their newly recruited gaijin singer cuts through all this, getting the tape to Dota by announcing, “tell him it’s Wendy – Wendy from New York.”. This results in an offer to play support to a wrestling gig, something she is far more enthusiastic about (“it’s exposure”) than the indigenous members of the band, who feel it will lead precisely nowhere.
After she is photographed at the gig, fame arrives swiftly in the form of a top-end, minimalist hotel room for Wendy and Hiro, a brief appearance by her in a Japanese lavatory TV ad (“your tush will be… beautiful”) and a spell where the band, with her as gaijin singer, is the flavour of the month. Sitting on the harbour’s edge, she persuades Hiro to play her his own composition. And after that, it’s only a matter of time until she encourages him to play it at a gig before she decides to return to the States and, brimming with new-found confidence, build a viable career as a singer.
Essentially a Japanese-American indie production with a US lead and a mostly Japanese cast shot largely in Tokyo, this is a lot like the current crop of Asian language movies made in various American-Asian subcultures and languages in the US, but about thirty years older when such films weren’t quite so commonplace. It has a nice feeling and respect for Japanese culture, but what really sells it is its mixture of naivety about the music business – this is a long way from either the British, warts-and-all approach of Slade in Flame (Richard Loncraine, 1975) or the Japanese portrayal of home-grown punk bands in Burst City (Sogo Ishii, 1982) – and its sheer charm. The plot creaks a lot and the romance is scarcely credible, but both the American Wendy and the Japanese Hiro are so extremely likeable that you find yourself wanting to spend time in their company.
While it might not top a list of essential films about Japan or the Japanese, three plus decades on, it remains highly watchable and plays out as a lot of fun. It’s certainly a curiosity which anyone interested in post-punk era Japanese movies will enjoy, albeit as more of a pleasant side-dish than a full-blooded, main course.
Hiro’s mother is played by Hasumi Harukawa (The Insect Woman). Director Kuzui would go on to direct Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) and executive produce the TV series of the same name (1997-2003) as well as that of Angel (1999-2004).
Tokyo Pop is receiving select UK cinema screenings from Friday, April 25th prior to its Blu-ray release on Monday, May 5th.
Trailer: