The Inland Sea

The Inland Sea is a 1991 documentary-style film by Lucille Carra, adapted from Donald Richie’s 1971 travelogue of the same name. Only fifty-six minutes long, it is premised on Richie’s notion that “one is meant to wander, turning at random along these straight and open corridors filled with the rustling of the forest, the whispering of the sea.” We are taken on a journey that mirrors his travels, rich observations, and roaming contemplation. The film remains faithful to the spirit of the book while pursuing its own narrative and visual path, what Richie himself described as “a bit of shooting around.”

That independence is to be expected. Richie’s book was published twenty years earlier, drawn from journal entries written during his travels to the sea and its many islands. Much of what he saw and experienced, and many of the people he encountered, would have already begun to disappear. Even then, Richie understood how quickly things were changing, and how much would soon be lost or reshaped by a modernizing Japan and world.

What I particularly like is the film’s dreamlike atmosphere and tone. Several of the book’s most memorable passages are narrated by Richie, giving the imagery a loose, poetic cohesion. His gentle, slightly nasal voice, often plaintive in delivery, deepens the film’s languid, romantic quality and the sense that everything within it is in motion and passing: water, sky, landscapes, people, animals, architecture, culture. The past flows into the present, and into an inevitable but uncertain future, one that Richie might have seen as indifferent to what came before. It is a film one can drift into, carried along by its steady, unhurried current, back through decades, and further still, to the time when Richie himself wandered in search of something more.