Lost in a dream: Hamaguchi Ryūsuke’s Asako I & II

The prologue of Hamaguchi Ryūsuke’s Nete mo samete mo (Asako I & II, 2018) is imbued with the adrenaline-inducing intoxication of love at first sight – what Roland Barthes describes “as the very sign of suddenness (what makes me irresponsible, subject to fatality, swept away, ravished)”.¹ The film’s protagonist, Asako (Karata Erika), follows a handsome and slightly dishevelled man named Baku (Higashide Masahiro) from the Nakanoshima Museum of Art onto the streets of Osaka. As a roguish group of schoolboys set off a sequence of firecrackers in the street, Asako and Baku’s gazes meet through the dreamy haze of smoke before Baku approaches Asako, asks her name and kisses her to the clichéd soundscape created by the last remaining pops of the firecrackers. It is the ultimate romantic encounter, so fantastical that, in the next scene, Baku’s friend, Okazaki (Watanabe Daichi), questions the veracity of their meeting, exclaiming “Nobody meets like that.” 

The idealisation of Asako and Baku’s union is further emphasised in a subsequent scene that features them riding a motorcycle along the coast set to tofubeats’ “The Sweet Love Song”. After a brief cutaway, Asako and Baku are filmed sprawled on the road, surrounded by debris from an unseen crash. When they regain consciousness, Baku pulls Asako towards him and they kiss passionately while still lying on the asphalt, oblivious to the passengers from the impacted car and passersby staring at them in stunned silence. Everything that Barthes evokes – the abandonment of responsibility, the flirtation with death and the all-consuming rapturous thrill of being crazily in love – are compressed in the first 17 minutes of Asako I & II. However, Barthes also regards love at first sight as akin to an apparition or a memory. By the time the ghostlike emergence of the opening title appears in the film, Asako has narrated in voice-over, “Six months later, Baku said he was going to buy shoes and never came back.” In an instant, Baku is transformed from dream man to absent spectre, and love at first sight is recast as the haunting of lost love. 

As Hamaguchi’s first commercial studio film, the seemingly vapid adherence to the conventions of the romance genre in Asako I & II’s prologue feels like a departure from the naturalism of his previous works. However, Hamaguchi plays with expectations when the film jumps forward over two years and Asako, who has relocated to Tokyo, meets Baku’s double, Ryōhei (also played by Higashide). Although they are physically identical, Ryōhei’s gentle dependability is the polar opposite to Baku’s wayward mystique. As a tentative courtship blossoms, the attraction between Asako and Ryōhei cannot help but raise questions about whether she is actually in love with him or chasing the lost image of Baku. When the film jumps forward another five years, Asako and Ryōhei have settled into a comfortable routine of cohabitation that appears to put these questions to rest. That is, until Haruyo (Itō Sairi), one of Asako’s old friends from Osaka, reveals that Baku has become a model and “lives in a completely different world now.” As if summoned by magic, Baku’s image appears on a billboard overlooking Asako and Haruyo, symbolically keeping Baku’s promise seven years ago that he will return to Asako. 

While The Guardian’s review labelled Asako I & II as “an odd doppelganger romance of YA earnestness,” it can equally be regarded as a ghost story that subtly weaves the uncanny into the quotidian aspects of Asako’s daily life.²  In adapting Shibasaki Tomoka’s novel, which has a Japanese title that loosely translates to “whether I’m asleep or awake,” Hamaguchi was concerned with embedding the coexistence of “realism and surrealism” in the film.³ To this end, Baku’s reappearance – at first in images and then eventually in the flesh – has the illusory quality of a dream. In one sequence, he appears at Asako’s apartment and yells through the closed door for Asako to leave with him as she cowers in the corner of her kitchen with her hands covering her ears. However, when the door opens and a man enters the apartment, it is Ryōhei and not Baku, casting doubt over what the viewer has just witnessed. Regarding this scene in particular can shed light on why Hamaguchi has intriguingly described Asako I & II as being closer to a “horror film” than a ghost story.⁴ Although this genre reference is jarring at first, Hamaguchi goes on to explain that he wanted to capture the “fear” inherent within “everyday life”.⁵ Specifically, he defines fear within this context as “anything that threatens […] our very stable situation and something that even subverts us”.⁶ From this perspective, Asako experiences several emotional disturbances in the film – from the original disappearance of Baku to his sudden reappearance, which undermines the security of the life that she has created with Ryōhei. Indeed, Watanabe Kazu contends, “For Hamaguchi’s characters, the human experience seems to consist of preparing for or recovering from catastrophe, the potential for disaster hovering over every frame”.⁷ Conventionally, horror films often deal with supernatural threats; however, the insidiousness of the horror in Asako I & II is that it is hidden beneath the veneer of romance. 

The fact that Asako I & II can be regarded simultaneously as a romance, a ghost story and a horror film speaks to the layers of ambiguity and multiplicity that Hamaguchi threads through the plot. As Dora Leu perceptively comments, “Hamaguchi’s films are often about perspectives, about how one person, one place, or one story can be looked at from multiple angles”.⁸ The significance of perspective and the act of looking is foregrounded from the very start of the film when Asako attends an exhibition of Gochō Shigeo photographs. As the slow pan of the film camera replicates her gaze drifting between Gochō’s black and white photographs, the film pauses on an image of two identically dressed girls holding hands. Before Asako’s attention is diverted by the presence of Baku, she will meet the gaze of the camera, which stands in for the photograph that has captivated her. The twin presence of the girls in the image notably echoes the duality of the film’s title and the mirror images of Baku and Ryōhei. Significantly, Asako will frequent another exhibition of Gochō’s work later in the film when she is living in Tokyo. This time, her gaze lingers even longer on Gochō’s identical girls. What the image means to Asako is left unspoken but, by structuring the film through a series of repetitions, Hamaguchi cleverly replicates the numb loop of desire within which Asako is trapped.

For a filmmaker such as Hamaguchi who asserts that his main focus is “emotion”, Asako I & II could be dismissed as an emotionally distant work.⁹ For example, after Asako discovers that Baku has become a model, she watches a television advertisement for a credit card where he urges the viewer to “Discover a new you.” While Haruyo and Asako’s roommate, Maya (Yamashita Rio) discuss the visual similarities between Baku and Ryōhei, Asako’s reaction is decidedly blank. Although it may appear at odds with Asako’s obvious pining for Baku, her impassive characterisation is a deliberate choice. Drawing on the film’s Japanese title derived from Shibasaki’s novel and its reference to being both asleep and awake, Hamaguchi creates little distinction between Asako’s conscious and unconscious realities within the structure of the film. This emotional disconnection is echoed in the ethereally washed out and minimalist tones of the cinematography and Asako’s somnambulistic response to the events that unfold around her: she is a mere spectator in her own life or a dreamer with no control over the narrative that she inhabits. Indeed, towards the end of the film, Asako fleetingly reunites with Baku and has an epiphany in which she reveals, “I feel like I’m dreaming right now. No. Everything up until now feels more like a long dream. It was a really happy dream. I felt like I’d matured. But now I’m awake, and I…haven’t changed at all.” By blurring the distinctions between surface and depth, looking and seeing, and waking and dreaming, Hamaguchi extends far beyond the limits of genre to create an enigmatic and elusive cinematic space that asks the viewer to make sense of the tangled fragments of Asako’s reality and fantasy.

Nete mo samete mo/Asako I & II (2018 Japan/France 119 minutes)

Prod Co: C&I Entertainment, Bitters End, Comme des Cinémas Prod: Teruhisa Yamamoto Dir: Hamaguchi Ryūsuke Scr: Shibasaki Tomoka, Tanaka Sachiko, Hamaguchi Rysūke Mus: tofubeats Phot: Sasaki Yasuyuki Ed: Yamazaki Azusa

Cast: Higashide Masahiro, Karata Erika, Seto Kōji, Yamashita Rio, Itō Sairi, Watanabe Daichi

Endnotes