Tokyo Decadence

Ah, Tokyo Decadence (1992), the last time I tried to watch it years ago, it got right on my tits. (Best opening line ever - Ed). I remember finding it turgid at times, especially in its melodramatic moments, but the 88 Films release gave me a chance to revisit it. I know just how at times my mood can totally eviscerate a film for me.

And of course we all change, the old cliche of if we walk into a river, at the same spot as years before both us, and the water, are different.  

So did I find Tokyo Decadence improve with age, or with my aging?

Twenty-two-year-old, Ai (Miho Nikaido), works as a prostitute in early 1990s Tokyo. Here she sees the worst of the city and even worst of its desires, yet starts to remember her own, in the shape of the artist Satouh (Tenmei Kano) with whom she had had an affair and who is back in Japan.  

Maybe my reaction to the film wasn't helped when I read one of the writer-director's (Ryu Murakami) novels, where the publisher described him as a “renaissance man for the modern age”, as this is the kind of phrase that sets my hackles up and makes me shout “oh fuck off”, involuntarily whilst in the open street or in a bookshop or on a train. The novel was fine, but the description... anyway, Ryu Murakami in my limited exposure to him always tends towards the underbelly, and Tokyo Decadence is no exception at all, Ai being a character who is almost doll like, fragile, submissive and credulous. At the start she is read her fortune by a teller (played, remarkably, by the great artist Yayoi Kusama – and as an aside if you want a print of hers don’t, buy a handkerchief with her design and frame it, the colour is so much better – pro tip... or OK if you are rich buy an original but sadly I’m no obscenely wealthy oligarch), who tells Ai nonsense but she laps it up, leading to her buying an expensive pink ring later on that causes Ai some considerable risk to have returned.  

The film in many ways has no strong narrative, because the first 80-minutes or so follows Ai through her experiences in Tokyo, of her time with others who, like her, make their money via sex work and these moments are far and away the best parts of the film. What’s interesting is that while the film is explicit, it is never gratuitous and its tone if anything often veers towards the absurdist, even at its darkest, and when at its sharply dark, it hints rather than tells which is effective, for it leaves much to roll over in the mind of the viewer.  

Each of AI’s encounters are different and are used to strip away aspects of culture and masculinity: the yakuza who is all about control; the rich businessman who wants to be humiliated; the wannabe necrophiliac, etc.; each sequence has its own tone, but what is interesting is how each tends to focus on the impact on women, such as when in a threesome Ai’s friend thinks she’s strangled their client to death; or the dominatrix who has become wealthy living off Japan’s wealth (as she puts it). This is Murakami using sex to break down society. Arguably the best sequence of all is the shortest and most oblique: Ai returning to the yakuza and his masochistic girlfriend to rescue the pink ring that is one of the three things she needs to be happy (so says the fortune teller). The scene is broken down into images lost in near darkness and proffers sounds that suggest the most awful happenings, but we are finally left without any actual knowledge of what is going on. However, this again puts the viewers imagination in the driving seat to run the gamut of levels of awfulness... this ambiguity is what gives the moment power.

Though to be fair each of Ai’s encounters has its own almost hypnotic power, and is fascinating in its own right, mainly because none overlap.  Where the film arguably starts to lose focus and also pace is in the last 20-minutes, wherein Ai goes after the man she loves. All we know about him is that he is an artist, often abroad and Ai has known him. Whether they had any serious affairs is never explicit, leaving us to wonder if this is in her mind or not, but as she searches the well-to-do suburbs, wearing perhaps the most absurd yellow high-heels, the film feels a bit aimless. Yes, as she wonders lost and under the influences of drugs given her by a dominatrix to give her superpowers, in her wine splashed dress, she looks utterly lost, but the film just seems to lose its path and purpose here. It seems like Murakami feels as though he needs to give Ai a more overt drama and in doing so makes the film less dramatic, less intriguing and less engaging. (OK, there is a post-credit sequence, but...)

Yet what goes before is never quite undone by this, yet it makes me realise how I might have felt about it as I did the first time I watched it. The melodrama of the end, though it has a point to an extent, still just felt laboured. There are nice moments, like the old singer she meets who is not quite in her right mind and eventually comes to Ai’s aid, but it’s all a bit woolly and less intense than what we’ve otherwise witnessed.

It's worth considering Ai’s character as she is quite submissive – and fool that I am I had not realised I’d seen her in many films before, having married and starred in those of Hal Hartley, including his gloriously odd The Book of Life, of which someone must release a Blu-Ray – but not a walkover. Yet you feel her character exists to be a vehicle to investigate the dark desires of a city and in that she is excellent. As noted, the film is relatively explicit but more in the context of what it conveys than what it physically shows. It is not eroticised; yes there are sexualised images but it is not meant to be pornographic and often focusses on emotions and reactions as opposed to pointless nudity. The film’s absurdist tone you could argue make that necessary.  

Should you watch Tokyo Decadence? In short: yes. Is it perfect? No. Nevertheless Ai’s encounters are curiously engaging even if when looking into her personal life in the film it all comes across as a bit flat.