Heaven Is Still Far Away

“A lot of journalists have asked me why my characters are always roleplaying […] If somebody wants to be or have something, the fastest way to make it happen is usually to lie. A lie can’t last, though – it doesn’t quite fit in with the realities that came before. It can only survive as fiction.” – Hamaguchi Ryūsuke¹

Common metaphors for the process of acting include ‘channeling’, ‘possessing’ and ‘embodying’, and writer-director Hamaguchi Ryūsuke has frequently mined these associations. While his performance-driven narratives often involve theatre, melodrama, live readings, and the day-to-day performance of social roles, nowhere is he more concerned with the ghostliness at the heart of the act of acting than in his Tengoku wa mada tōi (Heaven Is Still Far Away, 2016).

Running at a brisk 38 minutes, the film’s scenario is established quickly. Yūzō (Okabe Nao), a reclusive man in his 30s who works as a pornography pixelation engineer, is saddled with the ghost of school girl Mitsuki (Ogawa An), a murdered former classmate whom only he can see. When Mitsuki’s younger filmmaker sister Satsuki (Hyunri) contacts Yūzō with a proposal to interview him about his memories of Mitsuki, the lines between reality and fiction, as well as between the characters’ personalities, continuously slip, shift and change.

With Satsuki’s camera placed directly in-front of Yūzō, the manner in which she interviews him is not dissimilar to how Hamaguchi filmed survivors of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake in his series of four documentaries (2012–2013), co-directed with Sakai Kō. Focussing on the testimonies of the region’s people, Hamaguchi later reflected that the Tōhoku project helped him learn “how to use the camera correctly, which is to bring out the power of reality. Who the subjects are as people, as individuals”² and that “the body is honest […] when you put it on film.”³ These revelations became a turning point in his career. Initial explorations into how to apply it to fiction cinema led to the question “​​how can I make these two [actors] who don’t [in reality] have the relationship I want to portray seem like they do have that relationship?”⁴ His first fiction film made after completion of the Tōhoku documentaries, Bukimina mono no hada ni fureru (Touching The Skin of Eeriness, 2013), approached this through a blend of drama and modern dance. Reflecting on the process, Hamaguchi noted “something has to happen in the body, something real […] in order to make an audience believe in the fiction that I’m portraying.”⁵

The “Improvisational Acting Workshop” Hamaguchi ran in 2013 while an artist-in-residence at the Design and Creative Center in Kobe proved even more significant for the translation of this approach into fiction cinema. The program was intended for people of all ages and all levels of acting experience, with the director informing potential applicants that “the main purpose of this workshop is to research how ‘listening’ can facilitate improvised acting,” noting that only with a sincere attitude of listening can people start to “speak” and “move” – an insight he felt deeply while listening to people’s experiences of the earthquake in Tōhoku.⁶ The program featured seminars, interview exercises between participants, and movement workshops, and culminated in the development and filming of the 317-minute Happy Hour (2015), with a script by Hamaguchi, Nohara Tadashi and Takahashi Tomoyuki.⁷ When funds ran out part-way through that film’s shoot, Hamaguchi, with producers Takata Satoshi and Okamoto Hideyuki, crowdsourced the remaining budget, offering backers an exclusive new short film amongst other rewards.⁸ The short, Heaven Is Still Far Away, was made by a pared-down version of Happy Hour’s already-small crew before they returned to the main project, and with the blessing of backers was eventually publicly screened in various Hamaguchi retrospectives and made available online for limited periods.⁹

In contrast to the realistic day-to-day dramas of Happy Hour, Heaven Is Still Far Away began only with the vague idea of making a ghost story.¹⁰ The film’s process drew on findings from the Kobe workshop, albeit with professional actors already familiar to Hamaguchi: Okabe had appeared in Hamaguchi’s student film Passion (2008) and TV movie Eien ni kimi o aisu (I Love Thee for Good, 2009), while Ogawa and Hyunri had both previously expressed interest in working with the director. Explaining to the three that he had “nothing left” financially and mentally, Hamaguchi developed the narrative through rehearsal, with the cast repeating the same conversations as different pairs in order to explore what the characters’ relationships could be like. They eventually found that the most “thrilling” ideas came when the youngest actress, Ogawa, played the ghost.¹¹

The director admits to initially struggling with the concept: “I was thinking if ghosts could stand on the floor, or if they could sit down on a chair, but I couldn’t find an answer, because all of them were actors, real humans, I mean, not ghosts”.¹² With the idea in mind that “the screen images just exist as a record of how the actors performed”¹³ (a thought likely inspired by Jacques Rivette’s axiom “Every film is a documentary about the actor”¹⁴), the solution he found was to make the audience “experience how the lines can move”¹⁵ between the supernatural fiction of the story and the non-supernatural reality of the actors acting. In many ways, Yūzō’s occupation maps out this concern. While pixelisation of pornography in Japan removes the depiction of genitals, it also implies penetration that may not have actually occurred during filming. Making the visible invisible introduces an element of fiction.

The ambiguity of Mitsuki’s age – technically 34 though her ghost retains the appearance of a 17-year-old – means that the ‘creepiness’ of Hamaguchi’s ghost story results from an interplay of the supernatural and the sexual. A shot of Yūzō masturbating in the shower cuts to Mitsuki in the hallway, with the viewer not given enough information about the apartment’s layout to confirm whether she is looking at him. Later they share an uneasy sense of intimacy when Mitsuki lies on Yūzō’s back while he ignores her, or when the two dance together with their hands barely touching. There is, though, a deep sincerity in their relationship, helped by the delicate and organic plot delivery of the film’s screenplay and Okabe and Ogawa’s naturalistic performances. They are both outcasts of a society that delegitimises sex work (Japan’s sex industry, while highly prolific, is heavily regulated and exists only through elaborate loopholes), offers few social safety nets outside of employment, and harbours massively unaddressed issues of sexism and violence against women.

They also both occupy stereotypes common in Japanese mainstream media and social discourse, as well as in pornography and other erotic materials. While Mitsuki assumes the role of the submissive school girl, Yūzō embodies the hikikomori; a socially withdrawn young adult male. Albeit, both have arrived at their subjection through forces that remain difficult for them to grasp, with Yūzō seemingly falling through the cracks of Japan’s intensely competitive education system, and Mitsuki unable to move into the afterlife.

In the film’s central scene, occupying just over half of the entire runtime, Hamaguchi asks us to consider the potential for the two characters’ identities to overlap. Inspired by the explorations of the rehearsal process, he works with the possibility of each actor to inhabit one of the other characters. Satsuki, her camera poised at Yūzō, reveals the real reason for her interest in him: a month after Mitsuki died in 1998, Yūzō, while claiming to be Mitsuki, confessed her love to another classmate. To prove he wasn’t lying back then, Yūzō enacts another instance of this ‘possession’. However, Hamaguchi and cinematographer Kitagawa Yoshio’s simple choices of framing, in tandem with Hamaguchi’s choices as an editor, problematise any clear understanding of the narrative’s truth, and ultimately expose the real supernatural power at the heart of the film: the power of fiction.

Figures 1 & 2

Figures 3 – 5

Briefly opening with a shot of Mitsuki watching Satsuki prepare Yūzō through the monitor of the camera, the scene cuts to a three-shot (Figure 1) reminiscent of an earlier composition when Yūzō meets Satsuki at a cafe, with Mitsuki in tow (Figure 2). While Yūzō’s presence in the second instance is achieved through his visibility in the viewfinder, both shots serve a similar purpose of simultaneously showing characters listening and being listened to. As Yūzō introduces himself to the camera and describes his current life, the film cuts between the three characters in single-shots, establishing their separation at this point in the narrative (Figures 3, 4, 5). When he describes meeting Mitsuki’s ghost, the film returns to the three-shot, suggesting the truth of his statements by allowing us to see Mitsuki’s presence in the room and read her calm reactions.

Figure 6

Eventually, Mitsuki walks off-screen towards Yūzō to ‘possess’ him, and the film cuts to Yūzō with his head bowed in a shot over Satsuki’s shoulder not used elsewhere in the scene, thus signalling a possible change in his state of being (Figure 6). As Mitsuki, Yūzō is initially unconvincing. His voice and mannerism become exaggeratedly effeminate, his ability to recount family details and memories is flawed, and he says things for his own benefit (“Don’t be so hard on Yūzō”). The effect modulates between creepy and heartwarming. At first, we’re unnerved by the image of an adult man acting like a teenage girl. Yet, when Yūzō tells an emotionally revealing story about Mitsuki’s daily walks to school with her younger sister – the kind that Mitsuki didn’t live long enough to share herself – Satsuki becomes convinced, and so do we. The pathos of the situation for character and audience is too intoxicating, and Satsuki entering Yūzō’s frame from her initial position behind the camera signals this shift in her, and our, position from objective observer to involved participant (Figure 7). Then again, Yūzō stares at her while stroking her hair, introducing the eerie possibility that he is manipulating this intimacy out of her.

Figure 7

When Yūzō admits to Satsuki that he was only acting as Mitsuki, we begin doubting everything: not only have we seen the physical presence of Mitsuki’s ghost up until this point, but the screen language has suggested the movement of her ghost into Yūzō’s body. Yet, we didn’t see the spirit actually enter him, and it’s plausible Mitsuki exists only in Yūzō’s point of view. Satsuki, fascinated with how Yūzō’s role-play made him look “so alive… nothing like before” and realising its therapeutic possibilities, asks him to channel Mitsuki once more. Confounding matters again, the film cuts to another unique shot of possessor and possessed sitting side-by-side, with Yūzō’s closed eyes and deep breathing reading like that of an actor getting into character (Figure 8).

Figure 8

The fiction, as Satsuki sees it, gives her the opportunity to say goodbye to her sister and grieve the pain the murder caused her and her family. When she and Yūzō hug, the awkward framing and distorted audio caused by the characters’ (and actors’) microphones ruffling together reminds us of the various layers of construction involved (Figure 9): Okabe is playing Yūzō, playing Mitsuki, in-front of the camera of the character Satsuki, played by Hyunri, who is making a documentary within the world of Hamaguchi’s fiction film. As Satsuki turns her camera off, the image cuts to black, as though the film is ending. However, Mitsuki is seen again asleep on the couch, as her voice-over (saying “Thank you”, perhaps to Yūzō for helping her sister grieve, perhaps to Satsuki for saying goodbye) which also opened the film, reminds us that the whole story is from her perspective. Outside the building, Yūzō holds his umbrella over Mitsuki as she tells us that she can’t feel rain. Is Mitsuki’s ghost fact or fiction? And if it is fact, was the ‘possession’ her act, or was it still Yūzō acting? For Hamaguchi, “a shorter film can […] show something rare, events whose existence is not certain” and “the act of acting itself is ambiguous.”¹⁶ In the end, Yūzō seems to believe in it. And for a short while, we did too.

Figure 9

A culmination of the discoveries and experiments in Hamaguchi’s career up until this point, Heaven Is Still Far Away ultimately grapples with a world that increasingly distrusts imagination, and by extension, the possibility to confront our issues by listening to and making stories, like the narrators of Tōhoku’s recent history and ancient folklore. It also – even more so than its parent film Happy Hour – pre-empts the rest of Hamaguchi’s work, with the director calling the short “preparation” for his first commercial feature Nete mo samete mo (Asako I & II, 2018), while setting a pattern of alternating features with shorter films that led to the anthology project Gūzen to sōzō (Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, 2021).¹⁷ It is a major work at a minor scale.

Tengoku wa mada tōi/Heaven Is Still Far Away (2016 Japan 38 mins)

Prod Co: Kobe Workshop Cinema Project LLP Prod: Okamoto Hideyuki, Takata Satoshi Dir, Scr, Ed: Hamaguchi Ryūsuke Phot: Kitagawa Yoshio Mus: Wada Haru

Cast: Okabe Nao, Ogawa An, Hyunri

Endnotes