Unagi

[Frances Loden]

Anne--Much of what bothered you about "Unagi" also bothered me.  The
man-eel relationship was full of coy hints but very little development or
resonance.  The eel seemed to symbolize two different things: the captivity
and uncommunicativeness that Yamashita also suffers from; and the struggle
to procreate in nature.  The first one is never satisfactorily realized but
veers off into surreal silliness, with a tiny Yamashita running around
inside the eel's tank or him hallucinating (like in "Trainspotting")
swimming through the tank to retrieve a dropped letter.

The second one felt very tacked-on-at-the-end and even a little confused:
the eel has to go all the way to the Equator and return in order to
reproduce (I didn't get every single detail--help, Mark!).  Yamashita was
going off to prison again, but the pregnant Keiko would wait for him.  If
you wait nice and passive, what you want will eventually return or come to
you: eel, UFO (as with another ridiculous "kooky" character), Yamashita.
So although it's Keiko who is pregnant (and like the eel will endure quite
a struggle to give birth and raise the child while Yamashita is
imprisoned), the eel seems to symbolize Yamashita, who will eventually
return from far away.  So the eel symbolism kind of wriggles off, slippery.


I'm glad you cite Imamura's "Insect Woman"--it's the film I always
reminisce about when I get annoyed by lame characterizations of women in
contemporary Japanese films.  Maybe the connection of that character with a
clawing insect intent on surviving no matter what in postwar Japan is what
gives it so much more depth than anything attempted today.  In that film,
we get a strong background and motivation for the woman (necessarily
including the times she lives in).  Then we get a similar treatment for her
daughter, a new generation.  These women are not ornaments for
anything--they are struggling to survive.  In contrast, women in Japanese
films today are flabby, always limping or being bandaged, or long dead.

I did not see "Okoge," so I can't comment on that female character.  But I
have heard criticisms similar to those expressed by Jean.

The idea of nature as teaching, healing, comforting is very apt.  I think
nature is used to explain, and sometimes justify, human injustice or
oppression.  I once visited a "Saru no kuni" in West Izu and saw, in the
middle of hundreds of macaques running free, a dozen caged with a sign
explaining that they were "burakumin" who were caged so that they would be
protected from the bullying of the other macaques.  Maybe it's a kind of
"relentless innocence" to see parallels to human behavior and oppression in
nature and not to see the power mechanisms among humans that cause such
injustice.


Frako Loden
Tokyo, Japan
(03) 3247-5332
Keitai: 010-04-97072