In many ways, Masahiro Kobayashi explains the film through its title. It is a story about being different, its complications, struggles, and perhaps irrationalities. Fusako Urabe’s presentation of these elements in Yuko takes us far into the mind of someone who has always felt different since she was a child. As an adult, Yuko makes a bold decision to volunteer as an aid-worker in Iraq, which clues us into her sense of empathy, that somehow her personal struggles have conditioned her to feel the struggles of other people miles away from Japan. Unfortunately, fate is not on Yuko’s side in Iraq. She is caught in a hostage situation. Her family’s worries become Japan’s.
Soon, Yuko is released, and returns home from the Middle East. This part of Yuko’s life is where the film starts, bleak, hopeless, hard to watch. Her return is not filled with happy faces, but rather with insults, jeering faces, and condemnations that she has disgraced a country for being hostaged. As hostage, she brings down an entire race, and makes it look weak. Thus, her co-workers, former boyfriend, and neighbors do not want to be associated with her. Being in public spaces becomes a personal threat. Store owners harass her. Strangers want to hurt her. She is not wanted in Japan. Even her own father loses his job, as though he is bad blood for the company, that he has failed as father to raise Yuko.
Now does Yuko give in? Yuko’s situation only drives her to open her eyes, wider, beyond the realms of Japan, to a point where her hopes and struggles to live and be alive becomes highly personal. Perhaps in her silence she is bashing fate itself, that no matter what, she is in control of her own life.
Directed by Masahiro Kobayashi
Monkey Town Productions, 82min, Japanese, 2005
Fusako Urabe,Nene Otsuka,Ryûzô Tanaka.
