So last night Jeff and I went to the only theater in LA showing Tokyo! the movie.

It was a Triptych by three different directors, with three stories about Tokyo.

The first was about a woman and a man who move to Tokyo. The man tells her that she has no ambition, and she takes this to heart, and wonders why her hobbies can’t be counted as ambitions. This bothers her, and as she thinks more and more about it she becomes upset. One morning, she walks up with a gaping hole in her chest, and she ends up turning into a chair. She turns from human to chair, seemingly at will, and someone brings her home and she lives her life as a human when this person is out, and is a chair for him when he’s home. It was a beautiful story, and I really enjoyed this one.

The second was weird. It was about this sewer-dweller, Merde, who comes out of the sewers and terrorizes people. Eventually, he finds a stash of grenades underground and brings them up and throws them into the crowds of Tokyo. He is caught, and brought to trial. The only person who can understand him is this French lawyer. Apparently, only three people in the world speak his strange, strange language. What pursues is many scenes of translation from his language to French to Japanes and back again. It was interesting, but creepy, because for a lot of the scenes you are following the creature and have his perspective, rather than the crowd’s perspective, which is almost creepier.

The third was one about a man, a hikikomori, which is a Japanese word for someone who never leaves his house. He has not left his house for 10 years. He has everything delivered. Then, one day, he looks up at a delivery person, making eye contact for the first time in 11 years. The whole scene shakes, and the delivery woman falls into a coma. He instantly falls in love, or infatuation?, with her, and seeks her out again, leaving his home to find her.

The movie/movies were wonderful. The middle one was strange, but I was so interested in the mini stories that twisted reality and the surreal, almost fantasy. It reminded me a bit of Pan’s Labyrinth, in the sense that the surrealism seemed realistic to the situation.

I reccomend renting this one on Netflix when it comes out.