Japon

In Carlos Reygadas’ magical 2002 film, Japon, a crippled man lurches awkwardly on his walking stick across an arid plateau randomly studded with huge agave plants, each succulent a cluster of pointy fingers, each finger laced in rows of sharp threatening thorns.

From nowhere, a young boy scuttles from plant to plant, yelling at the man to duck down. Guns fire. A bird falls to the ground mortally wounded but not yet dead. The boy runs to retrieve the small trophy. Frustrated and ashamed that his young hands cannot wring the animal’s neck- as hunters do to end the now pointless and painful struggle for life- the boy hands the bird to the unknown man admitting his weakness. The man tears off the bird’s head and tosses it, still blinking, onto the ground.

The boy’s father, the hunter, arrives with his group and offers a ride, asking where the stranger is going and why- family? No family; to kill myself, he replies. The noisy carload of mostly younger men takes him half way to his goal. He must walk the last leg of this journey down into the valley through baking sun to a remote village where, once he has centered himself, his final act can be accomplished. The intention is to achieve disappearance without a trace.

There is ample evidence as the tale unfolds that he has been led to this particular spot to encounter a specific woman, Ascen, who provides him a makeshift room. She wonders what has brought him here, but quickly accepts his presence, for whatever reason. Her willingness to house him gradually widens into those rituals of shared daily life as of an old married couple: his tea awaits him after the daily walk; his clothes are handed over to be laundered; a dish of fruit is simply present, as if it were manna.

The man has brought farewell tokens of culture: an illustrated history of modern art, a portrait, music and a gun. Purpose and focus seem present enough. Will he jump from a precipice, shoot himself or both? Though he has talked himself into believing that living on holds no interest for him, this is pure rationalization. As he familiarizes himself with this strange environment, he cannot deny that life continues and he remains a willing participant.

From the moment that he takes out his gun maneuvering it to point at his heart and then putting it away, it grows apparent that he is still wedded to this plane of existence. He comes face to face with the difference between the desire to be dead and the ability to act. The word ’cowardice’ partly describes his dilemma but, more importantly, he continues to recognize an inner pull toward new experience and an inexorable attraction to the mysteries of life and the living.

Ascen, because she wants nothing for self beyond her utterly humble life, reveals in her character a form of action that contrasts with, and is clearly superior to, his imagined resolve. She meets the moment with whatever decision corresponds to an appropriate human response. The culminating example of her potency comes to fruition when she accepts his proposal (old and long widowed as she is) that they once have sexual intercourse before he proceeds on his way somewhere, never to return.

The intercourse scene is a moment of pure poetry, totally not about lust, passion, or anything ordinarily thought of as relationship. She accepts him because of an expressed need that she has no reason to reject. Like all her little actions, this most personal one remains, in essence, impersonal. Her power is as incontrovertible as it is quiet, fully selfless, awesomely present.

Ascen’s nephew, released from jail, wants to claim his supposed patrimony by dismantling stone by stone the one solid structure in her physical world. She knows that her shambling shack cannot survive the fierce April winds without the shelter of the stone barn. Her only reaction to this aggressive demand is to see it as proof that he must need them more than she does. Ascen assents.

After the men have destroyed the entire structure, extracting the huge chiseled stones and placing them onto the double beds attached to a tractor, the nephew’s young son tells his father that the driver says they must make two trips; the stones are too heavy. All the men, and Ascen too, have been drinking, celebrating the event and the end of their intense labor. “I pay, I command- one trip only” the father roars and the tractor starts the slow downhill progress on the narrow winding dirt road. The men are lounging on top of the stones as if on a hayride, singing and shouting.

The film ends by showing the inter-connected resolution of these stories. Ascen knows her future cannot exist in the humble home that will be torn to shreds in the spring storms and she moves toward the only open place there is. Cloaked in the much too large jacket of the man she has sheltered, Ascen joins the merry group, climbing onto the already over-loaded vehicle transporting the stones to their new home. Predictably, it overturns. The stones tumble every which way and the passengers are strewn all over, crushed and dead.

For Ascen, it is totally natural to allow her life to find an appropriate ending. She has not chosen suicide; rather, she accepts impartially that her earthly story has been completed. Meanwhile, the man who ostensibly came to end his life stands in the doorway of her hovel, which has been as though willed to him as a home. Ascen has shown him the way into death, by giving herself fully into life. As never before, he has gained the strength and viewpoint to stand exactly where he is, ready to respond to the diurnal tasks without judgment or fear. He is the new Ascen.