In Another Room, from Another Time

1.

There is music in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Still Walking that arises from the home itself. It sounds like eddies of conversation around a kitchen counter, as persistent as the crackle of frying oil. It sounds like the patter, so similar to rainfall, of corn kernels tossed in a basket. (It sounds like the line “How many years did you watch me do this?”) Amid this domestic drift, or perhaps atop it like a cherry, there’s also a real song, one that you might encounter elsewhere—Ayumi Ishida’s “Blue Light Yokohama,” the lyrics of which lend the film its title. But despite such a distinct reference, “Blue Light Yokohama” is largely absent from the movie itself. For most of the film it is not sung, not spoken about, and—once broached—not returned to; for most of the film, it’s tucked away in a drawer.

What does it mean for a central detail to be so securely cached? And where, while “Blue Light Yokohama” is hidden in that drawer, might we find a hint?

The song is eventually unearthed by Toshiko Yokoyama, who is at once matriarch, maid, and conductor of memorial proceedings, a yearly undertaking that has brought the two younger Yokoyama generations—Ryota and Chinami, brother and sister, along with their spouses and children—on a quiet day trip to Grandma Toshiko’s house in seaside Yokohama. (Toshiko’s husband, Kyohei, retired and clinging to his stature as physician, commands the family mythology to the point of nausea, and yet: Grandma’s house.) Missing from the home is Junpei, the eldest son. The memorial is his.

Junpei died twelve years ago, drowning while saving a stranger at a nearby beach. Since then the Yokoyama family has slipped into comforting revisionism. Junpei is remembered as near-perfect, while his faults are assigned to Ryota. Younger than Junpei by several years and yet now older than Junpei ever was, Ryota remains defined primarily against this glowing memory of Junpei: the darling first-born son who, before the accident, was set to follow Kyohei in the family practice. Ryota tries to correct the record. Small frictions arise. While washing a watermelon in the bathroom, Ryota overhears a misattributed story, and calls out to the kitchen, “That wasn’t me. That was Junpei.” He goes unheard. A doctor of the wrong sort, Ryota earns a living restoring faded and damaged artworks, and at lunch tells his father of a similar dilemma from his field: “Restoration, not repair. There was a long dispute about whether to preserve the tomb as is, or to conserve that national treasure, that mural . . .” Meaning: relics can be left exactly as they are from a distance, or engaged with and altered in the process. With every correction, a blemish. This goes unheard, too.

Only after a brief and uncomfortable visit from Yoshio, the man whom Junpei managed to save from the water, does Ryota say plainly what is on his mind. “Stop comparing his life to others,” he says, as the family ridicules Yoshio for his shortcomings. “He’s doing the best he can.” The teasing continues until Ryota adds: “Who knows how Junpei would have turned out if he were still alive.” The room falls silent. Perhaps nobody had thought to ask.

A series of similarly tectonic frictions, which are shifting slowly on the mantle, eventually surface: Why on earth did Ryota marry Yukari, a widowed single mother? Is it noble to have been a doctor if you prove useless when it matters? And beneath it all: how much good, really, is forgiveness? Difficult questions, each left largely unanswered by Kore-eda—in this film, on today of all days, there’s just not enough time to delve. Stories wait to be retold, pictures wait to be taken, Junpei’s grave waits to be cleansed with cool water, and meals, both delivered and lovingly home-cooked, wait to be eaten. And though the larger motions of Still Walking creak with tension, these small details manage to intrude, tenderly concealing the rough edges of conflict like moss between cobble.

Preservation, conservation, friction, tenderness: these, each like a valve, form the film’s beating heart. Where is the song?

2.

“Blue Light Yokohama” eventually intrudes in the middle of dinner, seventy minutes into the film. Chinami and her lot have departed to catch the evening’s last train, leaving Ryota, Yukari, and young Atsushi to finish off some leftover eel. Kyohei and Toshiko, perhaps worn out from the long day, perhaps always worn out, trade criticisms while they eat. Yukari tries to steer conversation away from familial riptides toward safer and hopefully more benign topics. After one of several silent moments she asks the elders, “Don’t you two have a special romantic song?”

Kyohei thinks not. Toshiko offers one immediately. It’s here, in this moment of dissonance, that the drawer is opened and the titular song is played for the only time.

“Blue Light Yokohama” is, Toshiko tells Yukari as the sound carries in from an adjacent room, a record from the end of the sixties. In fact, it held the number-one spot on the Japanese charts through the spring of 1969. It and other songs of its kind marked the revival of Enka, a maudlin fusion of traditional Japanese instrumentation with Western harmonies. Trombone, trumpet, violin, plucked guitar and chimes all swell, ease off, then gently swell again, as Ishida sings of love in lilting Japanese—except for the title, which she protracts over the English-approximating syllables, buruu raito Yokohama.

It’s not hard to imagine the song was welcomed in ’69 as a comfort, a dulcet hybrid equal parts old and new. At the time Japan was in the twilight of an existentially fraught student uprising, and the violent protests, which had swept through campuses and college towns, were finally simmering down. In Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, a novel set amid these protests, a character riding the tram through a student neighborhood overhears “an Ayumi Ishida song coming from somewhere . . .” And it does sound like the sort of song you’d overhear: tender enough to play on a quiet morning, innocent enough to let slip through the crack of a window left ajar. But that short spring has long since passed, and now, brought forward three decades to fill a lapse in conversation, “Blue Light Yokohama” sounds a little corny. Yukari nods along politely. Ryota vaguely recalls the refrain from childhood. Kyohei says nothing to show any attachment, avoids all eye contact, and delights Atsushi by wolfing down the rest of his meal. Toshiko alone is deeply affected, turning inward and wavering along, aruitemo, aruitemo—still walking, still walking—until she stops, and the film moves on as the song is cut short.

Next we find a tired and bathing Kyohei, eyes closed, Toshiko parted from him by an opaque sliding door. Kyohei asks after the record’s origin and receives Toshiko at her most transparent:

“I carried Ryota, strapped to my back, all the way to that woman’s apartment. I could hear your voice singing from her room. Still walking, on and on. I didn’t want to interrupt you, so I went straight home. The next day, I bought it at the Canary Records by the station.”

It’s an oblique and bare explanation, delivered without malice and immediately followed with a return to routine—“Please leave your washcloth hanging out to dry,” Toshiko adds. We can only glean so much: a moment of infidelity, sometime near the spring of 1969, surfacing once more after a long stretch of dormancy. Even without an exact image, it’s clear that Toshiko hasn’t shared this with Kyohei before tonight. On his face we see, for the first time, a paroxysm of decades-old guilt. Perhaps he’s thinking of every time he heard those half-familiar lyrics being sung from another part of the house, always on the periphery. Perhaps he’s thinking: I might never have known. It’s tempting in this moment to think that the film will turn on this revelation, but that doesn’t happen. Instead, Yukari has the last word, sitting with Ryota elsewhere, quietly reassuring him: “Everyone has a song they listen to on the sly.” With that, an equally bare explanation, “Blue Light Yokohama” is left alone.