Fūon (The Crying Wind)
Director: Yoichi Higashi
Scriptwriter: Shun Medoruma
Cast: Muneo Uema as Seikichi Toma
Haruko Kato as Shiho Fujino
Miho Tsumiki as Kazue Shimazaki
Tomoya Iju as Masashi Shimazaki
Toei Video, 2004, 106 min., DVD
A kamikaze pilot's skull, placed high on a cliff ledge next to the seashore,
makes a crying sound when the wind whistles through a small hole made by a
bullet. Many Okinawan villagers living near the skull find spiritual meaning in
its crying. This fictional story, which includes many documentary elements,
relates the happenings in this unnamed village when three visitors arrive about
the same time from mainland Japan and stay there for one week. Kazue, along with
her 4th-grade son Masashi, unexpectedly visit her mother's home. Shiho Fujino,
about 70 years old, visits the village and stays at a seaside minshuku inn in
search for some information about what happened to her boyfriend who perished in
a kamikaze attack near Okinawa. Fūon (The Crying Wind) explores the continuing
influence of WWII on two of the main characters and also touches on modern-day
concerns such as domestic violence.
Okinawa's beautiful beaches and sea, along with native animals such as hermit
crabs, praying mantises, and sea urchins, get displayed throughout Fūon. The
film, shot entirely on location in Okinawa, also depicts Okinawan traditions
such as spear fishing and an open-air burial ground. The film's writer, Shun
Medoruma, won the Akutagawa Prize for literature in 1997. He based the film's
plot on his previous short stories, but he also wrote a
novel entitled Fūon that
was published at about the same time the movie was released in 2004. The novel
provides many more details regarding the background and motivations of the
film's main characters, but the plot for both is almost the same. Medoruma
uses extended flashbacks to give details regarding the history of the main
characters.
The movie starts with the unannounced arrival of Kazue and her son Masashi at
her mother Makato's traditional home in which she was raised. Makato guesses
that their unplanned arrival with little luggage means that she has
experienced domestic problems with her husband. Masashi quickly gains a friend
and playmate in Akira, a 6th-grade boy who lives with his grandfather Seikichi
since his mother died and his father works away in mainland Japan. Akira
introduces Masashi to four other boys, and they quickly become friends although
they sometimes tease him since he is slightly younger and smaller. They fish
together with Masashi catching a small fish that Akira puts in a water-filled glass jar for
him. Next they go to visit the place where the kamikaze pilot skull sits on a
protected shelf on a cliff. Masashi and Akira bet the other boys that the fish
can live for one week next to the skull, and Akira climbs up the cliff to place
the jar with the fish next to the skull. This jar causes the skull to stop
crying.
Shiho Fujino has been coming to Okinawa for several years in remembrance of
her boyfriend who had died during WWII in a kamikaze mission toward Okinawa.
Fujino asks Seikichi, an older fisherman in the village whose father had
recovered the body of a kamikaze pilot during the war, for any information about
him. He says nothing during her initial visit and just continues sharpening his
spears for fishing, but during her visit the next day he asks her boyfriend's
name. She replies Shinichi Kano, and he says that he knows nothing about him.
However, after she leaves his home, he pulls a fountain pen from his drawer with
the name of Shinichi Kano on it. While Fujino rests in her room at the
minshuku inn, she appears to be suffering and takes some medicine as she
remembers in a flashback when her doctor told her that she had cancer and did
not have long to live.
|
|
Shiho Fujino shows Seikichi
a photo of her former boyfriend,
Shinichi Kato, who died near
Okinawa as a kamikaze pilot
|
|
|
|
Seikichi goes at night to the cliff where the skull is located, and he sees
the jar with the fish placed next to the skull that has stopped its crying. He
then remembers in an extended flashback the time when he and his father found
the dead kamikaze pilot washed up at the water's edge after his plane had been
shot down. Seikichi's father carried the corpse to
an open-air burial ground, and he prepared the body for its final resting place
by cleaning it. Seikichi noticed that a fountain pen dropped on the ground when
his father was carrying away the pilot's clothes. On the way back to the cave
where they had been hiding from American bombardment, his father gets hit with
shrapnel from a bomb dropped from the air. Seikichi later goes out alone from
the cave to forage for food, and he returns to the burial ground and retrieves
the pilot's pen. He notices that hermit crabs have covered the corpse and are
eating the flesh.
In a humorous scene Kazue receives gifts of food from two local men competing
to show her their hospitality. Meanwhile in another amusing event, the boys get
chased by a bicycle ridden by an older man nicknamed Old Cut-Ear after he finds
them playing around his property. He catches Masashi, who runs the slowest being
the youngest of the group, and brings him back to his home. Old Cut-Ear
barbeques some delicious eel (unagi) for the boys to eat, but then he tries to
fool them into thinking that they have eaten a local type of venomous snake
(habu). Despite these humorous incidents, the film's overall mood remains
ominous as Kazue keeps getting phone calls from her husband.
Fujino goes alone to look at the skull, and then she reads a letter given to
her by her boyfriend when they met together for the last time prior to his
suicide mission. She remembers in a flashback this last meeting when she sang a
song to him and he gave her the letter to read the next day as he was leaving to
catch a train to return to his unit.
Masashi and Akira are playing along the shore, but Masashi blacks out when he
sees cobalt blue tropical fish in the water that remind him of those in the
aquarium at his home in mainland Japan. At his grandmother's home he lies
resting on the futon mat with a fever, and he remembers in a dream how his
father physically abused his mother and him. He dreams of the time when his mother tried
to take her life by swallowing pills with alcohol.
Seikichi and Fujino meet together in front of the skull later in her
week-long visit, and he tells her that the skull has been waiting for her all
these years, which seems to imply that the skull must be Shinichi although he
never directly says so. At her mother's home Kazue receives a phone call from
her husband, who has arrived from Okinawa and wants to meet her. They meet
together at the beach, where Kazue says that she wants to leave him. He pushes
her down, pulls out a knife, and rapes her. Afterward, Kazue sees the knife next
to her in the sand, so she picks it up and stabs her husband twice. He falls
dead into the water.
Seikichi comes out on the beach and sees Kazue right after the murder.
Without saying anything, he takes her back to her mother's home in his pickup truck. He returns
to the beach and disposes of the body. He then comes back home to tell his
grandson Akira that Masashi must go away immediately. Akira asks his grandfather
to wait 20 or 30 minutes, and he runs to the cliff to see whether the fish in
the jar has survived. As Seikichi is about ready to leave with Kazue and Masashi
for the Okinawan capital Naha, Akira returns with the jar and tells Masashi they
have won the bet since the fish lived for the week.
Fujino places flowers below the skull as she is leaving, and she finally
hears the skull's crying for the first time since the jar has been removed. When
leaving by taxi, Seikichi politely tells her, "Please come again." He then returns to
the open-air burial ground and buries both the knife used by Kazue in the murder
and the fountain pen from the kamikaze pilot. While riding the taxi, Shiho
carefully tears Shinichi Kanō's letter that she has kept for over 50 years. She
throws the pieces of paper out the window as the taxi passes over a bridge. They
go floating away in the wind with one piece, which has Shiho Fujino's name on
it, falling next to the skull.
Kazue walking with her son Masashi
to visit her mother's home
The kamikaze pilot Shinichi Kano typifies the difficulty most young men had
in telling their families and friends that they had been assigned to a kamikaze
squadron that would carry out a suicide mission against enemy ships. In the film
Shinichi cannot bring himself to tell Shiho directly what will happen, so he
gives her a handwritten letter as he is leaving her home. Even the letter does
not explain explicitly that he has become a kamikaze pilot but only that he will
go to Okinawa in order to fight. In the letter he mentions his strong feelings
for Shiho, but he makes clear that they will not share their lives together when
he writes at the end that he wants her to remain alive and to have a family with
which she will have good fortune. The film's characters in present-day Okinawa
all seem to respect the actions of kamikaze pilots, represented by Shinichi's
skull, for what they did to protect them. Although the movie strongly suggests that the
skull must be Shinichi's, the flashback to WWII shows Shinichi's bullet hole on
the right side of his head whereas the skull has the small hole from the bullet
on the left side.
The DVD also includes two special short features. The first describes the
filming on location in Okinawa between August and September 2003. The second
feature shows the 2004 Montreal World Film Festival, where Fūon received the
Innovation Award for its poetic quality.
This high-quality Japanese film by a native Okinawan writer allows viewers to
get a glimpse of rural life on the island and the influence that the tragic
events of WWII still have
on Japan's oldest generation.
|
