10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World

Turkish-British novelist Elif Shafak's novel entitled 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World (2019) is two series of events connected in the middle, at which point the brain of our protagonist ultimately shuts down. In the first part, “Tequila Leila" has just died (right from the beginning) and has been tossed into a dumpster, where her brain, gradually shutting down, recalls her life from birth right up to the present. A lot of bad has happened to Leila over those years; multiple times she has been the victim of sexual violence and was stigmatized by Turkish society for being a sex worker. There is love in the book, as well as her five friends, who are regarded as social misfits for various reasons too.

The second part is an account of these friends' actions to make at least a small bit of the wrong right for Leila, who has been buried in Istanbul's Cemetery of the Companionless (a real place).

I thought the book was very good but slightly disjointed, and perhaps it was intended to be this way. In the end I felt that I knew Leila's friends better than I'd known her in the first half, which didn't seem fair to her somehow. But I suppose that if the whole book were those ten minutes and 38 seconds of her slipping away from this (strange) world, it would have been too sad to read, and perhaps would've lacked the capacity to hold a plausible life-affirming ending. Also, the adventure and occasionally comic elements in the second half felt true to human nature, as irrationality and humor and joy can spring forth from grief and mourning. This, we come to understand, is what Leila would have wanted. But what I wanted was for more justice from the story! Then again, Shafak surely wants this too, and hopefully her book will serve as a device for inspiring change against the real-world injustices faced by Leila, her friends, and all those they represent.

In the Realm of the Senses

Never seen anything like this. Intensely disturbing, sexually explicit, beautifully framed and shot, and based on actual events, In the Realm of the Senses is considered a masterpiece by some and extremely controversial filth by others. This 1976 French-Japanese art film was written and directed by Nagisa Oshima, one of Japan's masters of cinema. It has been cut into various, less graphic versions in some countries, it was edited in France and listed as a French production to evade Japan's strict censorship laws, and it was banned in Belgium until 1994 (the only film to be banned there since).

Ian Buruma, in his 2018 book A Tokyo Romance, remarks: "No filmmaker had ever pulled off anything like this before. The movie was both hard core and tender, a cinematic blow for sexual freedom, especially for women."

I've never seen or read anything that inspires so much pity for a man's penis, due as much to its having to constantly service the insatiable Sada as to its ultimate dismemberment. Sada Abe (Eiko Matsuda), a maid at a Tokyo hotel frequented by geisha, but a prostitute in her past, falls hard for the hotel owner, Kichizo Ishida (Tatsuya Fuji). For most of the film the camera is focused on their sexual experimentation and fast-growing mutual obsession. This coupled with Oshima's unique artistry makes the film not like pornography and, along with those miscellaneous onscreen observers to their sexual acts, we're forced into the role of voyeur and then finally of witness to murder and a bloody emasculation.

According to Buruma's book, the real Sada (pictured below) was arrested four days after the actual killing and seemed as happy as could be. The news of her crime and arrest swept the nation. Apparently the public felt deeply sympathetic for her and she was let off the hook. Buruma also mentioned that she opened a bar somewhere in Tokyo afterwards and, according to American author and long-term Tokyo resident Donald Richie, who had been to her establishment, the regulars there would stand up and cup their hands over their genitals each night when the infamous mama-san came in.

The real Sada Abe immediately after her arrest (May 20, 1936 at Takanawa Police Station)

Our Little Sister

I watched Hirokazu Kore-eda's Shoplifters (2018) earlier this year and really enjoyed it. Our Little Sister (2015), also written and directed by Kore-eda, is a drama starring Haruka Ayase, Masami Nagasawa, Kaho, and Suzu Hirose. It has an Ozu feel to it along with the Japanese awareness of impermanence, or mono no aware.

Three sisters live together in an old house, which once belonged to their grandparents, in Kamakura. Their father left fifteen years ago and, with another woman, lived in Sendai and then further north in Tōhoku. He's described by one of the daughters as being "kind but not good."

He had a fourth daughter with the other women, and after he dies the three sisters from Kamakura attend his funeral up north and meet their teenage sister for the first time. They invite her to come to Kamakura and live with them, and she keenly takes them up on the offer (in many ways she's more mature than her older sisters, as she had been left to take care of the father in the years before he died).

What follows is pure Japanese emotional "human drama" without the resultant tragedy that ends many other Japanese films. Using the Japanese scale for tear-jerkers, this one would probably be a one (out of three) tissue movie. Most of the heartache arises out of family problems (the father leaving, the mother leaving, the sisters having had to bring each other up). Although those painful events are long in the past, their new sister and other matters bring them back to the surface; together they come to terms with what happened and how it has changed them. There is also the realization among each of them individually that, as much as they need their sisterly love, their living together and dependence on each other are unlikely to last for very much longer (mono no aware) as they pursue romantic relationships and consider their careers as well as families of their own.

Hirokazu Kore-eda with the actresses who played the sisters