All great old cities are built on the bones of the dead. Paris conceals miles of spooky catacombs beneath its streets. London sits on layers of plague pits, paupers’ graves, Roman-era burials, the forgotten dead from wartime conflagrations, as well as the ashes of its own ancient sacking. Tokyo, the main urban centre of Japan since the time of the shoguns, is no different. It has suffered countless mass casualty events during its 400-year history, due to repeated fires, accidents, earthquakes and finally, in March 1945, as a result of a campaign of firebombing by the US air force in which up to one hundred thousand Japanese civilians are believed to have perished. It now conceals much of its history of death and suffering beneath towering modern concrete buildings, the result of rapid economic development. The past becomes less and less visible and more inclined to slip from the collective memory with each successive phase of development.
This passage of time and loss of memory is what concerns Masakazu Kaneko, the Japanese director of Ring Wandering (2021), a quietly meditative and lyrical time travel adventure. His film, only his second full-length feature after 2016’s The Albino’s Trees, promotes human connection, remembrance of and connection with our ancestors, as well as a deep spiritual reverence for nature lost to a modern era more concerned with its exploitation and commodification.
“Back in the late 19th century, Japan started to modernize itself to catch up with the West and to raise its economic and military power. On the other hand, it made a significant impact on the country’s long-lasting healthy ecosystem. As a result, the alpha predator, the Japanese wolf, became extinct. Now that the next war is being whispered, our society keeps going forward without looking back at the past. I think the past memories are layered underground, lying one upon another, which should not be covered over, neither would they disappear.”
Masakazu Kaneko
Ring Wandering concerns an aspiring young Tokyo manga artist named Sosuke (Sho Kasamatsu) who is experiencing a creative block while trying to tell the story of a hunter’s confrontation with the Japanese wolf, an indigenous animal hunted to extinction by the early 20th century. We first meet Sosuke in a shimmering field of long yellow grass, encountering an odd young boy with a camera who won’t stop asking questions or taking snapshots of him. Sosuke isn’t really interested in the child or being interrogated, though. He’s looking for visual inspiration of his own. He feels he cannot draw the wolf in his story convincingly as he has never seen one, and obviously, never will. Nor does he feel able to develop the story beyond a fierce battle to the death between man and beast, rejecting constructive criticism from a workmate who tells him to try to include some actual emotion and humanity in his work, and to pay more attention to the lone female character’s tragic story. Sosuke, however, is only interested in valorising the obsessive, driven brutality and violence of his male hunter protagonist, and sees his gentle daughter’s life and death as nothing more than a useful fictional device in pursuit of that.
Meanwhile, Sosuke, a sullen and awkward individual who reeks of the emotional numbness and self-isolation that are clearly hindering his artistic expression, works unhappily on a Tokyo construction site to earn his living. While digging deep into the earth for the foundation for another concrete development he comes across what he suspects is actually the long-buried and nicely-preserved skull of the very Japanese wolf he has longed to see. Or is it merely the skull of a long-lost domesticated dog? He eventually returns to the site under cover of darkness to search furtively for more bones. The first hint of temporal dislocation is the announcement along the way that there will be a fireworks event that night. As fireworks are only used in Japan at summer festivals, never winter, it signals the uncanny, perhaps a Japanese version of a clock striking 13.
Then, while rummaging in the dirt at the building site, Sosuke meets a young woman named Midori (Junko Abe) who is plaintively calling for her lost dog, ‘Shiro’. Sosuke’s first instinct is panicked avoidance. He tries to run away from her, but in doing so, he knocks her to the ground, hurts her ankle, ruins her curiously old-fashioned shoe, and thus feel obliged to help her return to her home as well as find Shiro, whom Midori describes as having run off after being frightened by loud noises, which Sosuke interprets as those of the fireworks. A connection is forged as he courteously piggybacks the injured girl homeward. She directs him toward a torii gate – the gate that marks the entrance to Shinto temples in Japan – and instructs him to walk through it. Viewers with a little familiarity with Japanese culture will recognise this as the moment of transformation and transcendence, as the torii functions as liminal space that signifies the end of normal everyday concerns and the beginning of a sacred space, rich with nature spirits and gods.
Once across the threshold, things are both as expected; a flight of rough-hewn stairs with small, shimmering oil lamps lighting the way to a Shinto temple complex, a monumental and adorned sacred tree … and not. The pair disturb a couple of lovers – he in Imperial Japanese Army military uniform, she in traditional kimono. Midori leads Sosuke to her home, a traditional wooden affair, and introduces him to her parents, who invite him to dinner. There are multiple cues that Sosuke has time-travelled back to the wartime era that he in his incredible self-absorption fails to really take in, but which are obvious to the viewer; the brief glimpse of a wartime uniform, Midori’s wooden geta shoes and bare feet, nothing a modern Japanese girl would wear with western-style clothing; the old-fashioned camera equipment in her parents’ studio, their reference about the government taking the lenses for the metal, and another about sending their younger son to the countryside for safety reasons. The parents (Ken Yasuda and Reiko Kataoka) interpret Sosuke’s modern get-up – his trendy ripped jeans and hoodie – as evidence of dire poverty. They also express confusion at the very idea of drawing manga being a real job, unsurprising since the great boom in manga only really started in the fifties. Even the food is unfamiliar – a nabe (stew) of pond loach dug from the winter mud, popular long ago in Tokyo’s history, but something Sosuke himself has never encountered before.
After an awkward start, he gets on famously with the family, breaking the ice by drawing them a picture of Midori’s beloved lost Shiro to much praise and interest in his talent. The familial warmth and acceptance by Midori and her gentle family allows Sosuke to finally emerge from his shell, and seems to promote his creative urge to draw again. Only when he returns back through the torii gate and attempts to revisit Midori’s family’s photo studio the next day to reconnect with her does he start to comprehend that what he experienced was time travel to the era of the firebombing in 1945. He meets Midori’s family all right, but a different generation, who finally provide him with context for the strange meeting in the field at the beginning of the film.
Sosuke starts to experience profound sense of loss and deep emotions concerning both these events and the kind people he both met and lost within an evening. Breaking through his wall of indifference to human relationships, his creative block is resolved, and he finds a way to reinterpret his story in a much more mature, complex manner. He integrates the feminine into his story, allows his hunter a final epiphany about his dubious behaviour and actions, and ties the events of his story into greater trends in Japanese history. Sosuke, in leaving his self-isolation, passing through the looking glass where he allows himself to make deeper human connections and experience suffering, has finally become a true artist.
This might be a good time to point out that Shiro is Japanese for ‘white’, a colour used to denote death and mourning in Japan, possibly giving a hint to the dog’s actual fate. Midori, meanwhile, means ‘green’ – her name reflecting a connection to the natural world, while her parting gift to Sosuke is a twig of evergreen mistletoe taken from the sacred tree for him to forge into a new drawing pen. Kaneko connects the feminine essence to respect for and balance of nature, and the masculine to the urge to brutalize, dominate, and commodify it for self-enrichment. Sosuke’s hunter is despised by the poor villagers who know him – they exhibit visceral disgust with his obsession with killing the sacred alpha predator and with his outrageous financial exploitation of not just animals, but commodification of even his own dead child’s remains. Kaneko traces the shift in the attitude toward the natural world from that of reverence tinged with fear to contempt to the Meiji era’s rapid industrialization and then, its sinister militarization.
It’s in his depiction of the wild Japan, its mountains, fields and forests, that Kaneko’s film really shines and reflects the lost spirituality of a former era. The camera lingers across each landscape and allows its beauty and grandeur to speak for itself. There’s no swelling musical soundtrack to tell us how to feel, only the actual sounds of the natural world itself. He allows us to experience the roaring of a waterfall hitting the rocks below; the dry rustling of long grass; the wind whispering through the leaves of the forest trees; the sounds of birdsong, and the soft sounds of footsteps treading carefully through the deep, pure snow. Human figures are diminished in a greater landscape, shown as mere specks, man put in his place as merely a part of nature, not the centre of it. Although I have no idea of Kaneko’s influences, for me this cinematography was all slightly reminiscent of Terrance Mallick’s films, or maybe Alexandr Sokurov at his shimmering, spiritual height. Meanwhile, the overall delicacy, quiet, probing mysticism and interrogation of modern mores combined with the time travel motif brings to mind something of New Zealand director Vincent Ward and his underrated 1988 Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey. However, these are only minor reference points; the film is truly Kaneko’s own, and a confident, touching and thoughtful piece it is, its outstanding cinematography lingering in the mind’s eye and its depiction of fragility of human existence and its mourning for lost generations remain resonant long after viewing.
Ring Wandering (2021) featured as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.