Japanese Story (Australian Film Finance Corporation, Fortissimo Films, Gecko Films Pty. Ltd., Showtime Australia, ScreenWest, Lotteries Commission of Western Australia, Film Victoria, Film Australia, The Australian Film. Commission, The South Australia Film Commission, Associantione, equinox, Footpreint Films, Premium Movie Partnership, Samuel Goldwyn Films, 2003)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (January 30) my husband Charles and I watched a quite good movie from Australia called Japanese Story, a 2003 production about an Australian woman geologist, Sandy Edwards (Toni Collette) – well, given that her job is to explore the Australian outback desert looking for deposits of metal ore, “Sandy” is an appropriate name for her – and Hiromitsu Tachibana (the boyishly handsome Gotaro Tsunashima), an executive with the Japanese company that owns the mining firm for which Sandy works. He flies in to Australia on a private jet – Charles got a kick out of the airport sign reading, “All Passengers Disembark,” when Hiro (as he’s called for short throughout the movie) is the only passenger – and wants Sandy to drive him around the outback to show him all the sites where the company is working. What follows is something Charles called “an extended meet-cute,” as Sandy and Hiro slowly let down their guards and end up making love at least twice, though after their second encounter Sandy spots in Hiro’s wallet a photo of him with his wife and their child, and she’s immediately guilt-ridden even though she had no idea he was married.

Then the two of them stop to swim in a nearby pond – only [spoiler alert!] Sandy gets out safely but Hiro doesn’t. At this point, about two-thirds of the way through the movie, it goes through a sudden change of tone much like that of Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby (released just a year later, in 2004). Just as Eastwood’s film turned about two-thirds of the way through from a drama about boxing to one about euthanasia, so this film turns from a romantic comedy into a tragedy. At first I couldn’t believe the filmmakers were actually going to kill off Hiro – I kept expecting either that he’d come to or Sandy’s CPR efforts on him would succeed – and from then on the film turns into a rather grim tale of how to process his sudden death. This means flying in a doctor from one of the more heavily populated parts of Australia to make the official pronouncement of death, and finding an icebox in the morgue to keep his body relatively fresh until the doctor arrives. Also, company executive Bill Baird (Matthew Dyktynmski) pisses off Sandy no end by boxing all Hiro’s belongings and sending them back to his family in Japan, thereby leaving Sandy literally nothing to remember him by. (We get the impression – or at least I did – that Bill is in decidedly unrequited love with Sandy.)

There are certainly intimations early on that the filmmakers have a dire fate in store for at least one of the characters; early on Sandy has a scene with her mother (Lynette Curran), who keeps a scrapbook about her life with clippings about everyone she knows who has died, and she’s leaving the last page blank for her own obituary. Later, after Hiro’s widow, Yukiko Tachibana (Yumiko Tanaka), flies in from Japan to claim his body, there’s a tense but quietly played confrontation between the two women in which almost nobody says a word, aside from a few brief phrases of condolence in Japanese that Sandy has learned for the occasion, but it’s economically made clear that Yukiko knows her husband and Sandy had an affair. The final scene shows Sandy reading the note Hiro had left behind for her, intending to give it to her after she saw him off on his flight home (which she’s doing as she reads it, albeit under different circumstances from the ones he imagined when he wrote it), and though she’s still been through a lot, his letter brings her a sense of closure.

I liked Japanese Story a lot better as it went on – early on Charles compared it to Gus Van Sant’s awful film Gerry, but I liked it far better (if I were to do a list of the 10 worst films of all time, Gerry would definitely be on it) even before the tragic turn of the ending. I did find some faults with it; during the 1980’s, at the peak of Japan’s economic boom when Japanese businesspeople were going around the world buying just about every company that would sell to them (a trend mentioned in the film via the character of Jimmy Smithers, played by Paul Young, who recalls growing up during World War II and how everyone was afraid of a Japanese invasion, and now “they’re buying up the whole country”), there were articles in the U.S. business press warning people that Japan was educating its executives in our customs and we weren’t educating ours in theirs. These stories specifically mentioned that Japanese companies were making sure executives they sent to English-speaking countries knew our language perfectly and we weren’t training our executives to speak Japanese – so it was hard for me to believe that a Japanese company would send a representative who spoke virtually no English to an English-speaking country. And yet Hiro had to know very little English for the culture clashes writer Tilson wanted to create. I also fault Tilson for way overdoing the “inscrutable Asian” schtick in Hiro’s character. But overall Japanese Story is a stunning piece of filmmaking, with finely honed acting and stunning cinematography of the red deserts of the Australian outback (the director of photography was Ian Baker), and a welcome continuation of the excellent record we’ve had from the North Park Lobrary’s giveaway DVD’s after Jersey Girl and The Wife.