My Review of Miss Hokusai "百日紅" (2015) directed by Keiichi Hara (with references to Toni Morrison)

Alfred Hitchcock once said that cinema was life with the boring parts cut out. He obviously didn't count on the fact that some of us our very much entertained by the "boring parts." This movie is a slice-of-life look at the 19th century ukiyo-e artist Ōi Katsushika the daughter of the legendary Hokusai Katsushika. This women was an artist of great talent who has been obscured by history. This Movie is an adaptation of a manga by Hinako Sugiura--a manga artist also mostly-forgotten by history. Sugiura's manga and this film are poetic looks, not at the facts of Ōi's life, but the truth of it via what Toni Morrison called "the site of memory."

In her essay The Site of Memory, writer Toni Morrison explains how she tells the truth of her characters' daily lives. When looking at the interior life of a person, facts fall short because they don't have real emotional energy: 

 "When I hear someone say, 'Truth is stranger than fiction,' I think that old chestnut is truer than we know, because it doesn't say that truth is truer than fiction; just that it's stranger, meaning that it's odd. It may be excessive, it may be more interesting, but the important thing is that it's random--and fiction is not random. 

Therefore the crucial distinction for me is not the difference between fact and fiction, but the distinction be-tween fact and truth. Because facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot.

"The image comes first and tells me what the 'memory' is about." - From The Site of  Memory

 I encountered this idea straight-on when I watched Miss Hokusai (2015) for the first time and learning the scant facts in English about Sugiura has made this movie all the more mysterious yet personal, truthful.

We don't know much about the facts of Ōi. A lot of what we know about her come from the fact of her proximity to her father--given that she was his chief assistant. We don't know when she was born or when she died as women in the Edo Period were not considered important-enough to record that sort of information. In the movie, her and her father are often hanging-out with the artists Eisen Keisai & Kuninao Utagawa who were pupils of Hokusai. What the film's creators got from the original manga was not going to help because the late-Hinako Sugiura was just as obscure and eccentric as her subject. None of Sugiura's work, that I know of, has been translated into English so I have no way of knowing what the movie did differently from the manga myself. All of this meant that for the Sugiura, and later, the film-maker and screenwriter Miho Maruo was, that they had to abandon the hopeless search for facts and go for the truth in the process as Morrison said, "The image comes first and tells me what the 'memory' is about."

The movie opens with Ōi walking through town narrating about her father's exploits and encountering Kuninao Utagawa on a bridge; we are shown that it is summer 1814. She visits her mother who does not live with her and her father (or actually it may be the other way around), and her little sister who is blind and ill and lives in a Buddhist hospital of-sorts. Hokusai's fear of mortality keeps him from visiting this child. Hokusai himself is presented as almost fully-driven by his art, but also dependent on Ōi for organizing his work properly. She is in artist in her own right and we see artwork by her, her father, and their two friends shown or visually referenced throughout this film. 

There is no actual plot or narrative to this film. It is a series of vignettes of incidents that we drop-in on involving the artists--Ōi in-particular. Two of these episodes I want to touch on briefly. At one point Ōi, Hokusai, and Eisen Keisai go to the red-light district to sketch an oiran (Japanese courtesan during the Edo Period). They hear that she is semi-possed and that when she sleeps her neck "stretches" and tries to leave her body. The artists mange to convince the oiran into letting them observe this event and it is a visual stunner that really plays into almost magical realist territory. A lot of the vignettes are like that, we see artistic fantasy and reality blend together and we accept it for what it is. The other moment is the death of Ōi's sister O-nao. Hokusai had spent the film avoiding her, but is eventually convinced to see her and goes. She dies not long afterwards and it is a surprisingly emotional scene coming into the climax of the film.

The animation work of Production I. G is flawless and the voice acting was refreshingly naturalistic--especially Anne Watanabe as Ōi. This film should have been more celebrated, but it came out right before the juggernaut Your Name (2016). As the film ends and we leave the site of memory, we learn about what happened to the main cast after the events of the movie including "Miss Hokusai's" disappearance from the historical record. We get one more look at the walking bridge that the movie opened-on before it we cut directly to the same area in 2015 in which the foot bridge is now traveled by cars. It is a powerful-point that drives home that while maybe everything that happened in the film was fact, all of it was true.