Third Window Films released their second edition of boxsets collecting the work of unsung cult Japanese cinema icon, Toshiaki Toyoda, following their previous “early year’s” collection. I previously talked about the 2nd collection yesterday, specifically around the first three movies – Hanging Garden, Day of Destruction and Monster’s Club. The three titles show a director with an eye for satire as much as staging and the dramatic potential of punk rock. However, that is far from all the release has to offer, even before talking about the remaining movies most if not all of the included titles have some degree of making-of feature. With those extras, Third Window has inserted a landing screen that highlights that the visual quality may be lacking due to their age. The screen hopes that you enjoy the extras regardless of their visual obsolescence, and I have to say, personally, it was never an issue – one of the joys of collecting Japanese movies has always been their contemporary predilection to produce making-of documentaries, so more is a good thing; visual fidelity, be damned.

Back to the movies with the shortest title included in 2019’s Wolf’s Calling which runs to around 17 minutes and functions as the stylistic statement for what becomes the Mt. Ressurection Wolf trilogy (completed by Day of Destruction & Go Seppuku Yourselves). It opens with a young girl finding an antique pistol, surely a reference to the director’s arrest for finding a similar antiquated firearm, at which point events jump back in time to the age of the samurai. Once there, a troupe of 20 or so samurai slowly and dramatically gather as scored by the brilliantly named Seppuku Pistols, who marry together traditional Japanese music and modern noise-punk – Jambinai is a Korean band with a similar MO. Among those 20 are Tadanobu Asano, as well as Toyoda regulars Kiyohiko Shibukawa and Ryuhei Matsuda as well as the ‘Pistols themselves.

Of all the featured film’s, Wolf’s Calling is the most missable with it fundamentally playing out as a proof of concept for what is to come. On a more core level, it doesn’t actually lead anywhere nor does it have anything substantial to say besides the intersection of modernity and traditionalism. Think of any scene scored by the Battles without Honor of Humanity theme by Tomoyasu Hotei (or, that music from Kill Bill) stretched to 15 minutes albeit with samurai and small anachronistic details and you have a pretty complete picture of everything that Wolf’s Calling offers. It’s a cool stylistic exercise done by a master of staging, still, that’s all it is – a stylistic exercise.

In yesterday’s article, I remarked that this set included a short that instantly became one of my absolute favourites and that honour goes to 2021’s Go Seppuku Yourselves, a short that concludes the Mt. Ressurection Wolf trilogy. Day of Destruction was packed with scenes where the camera slowly crawled towards or passed something of historical Japanese significance with punk rock. In this 2021 short, it does the same only adding an expertly employed smoke machine and tribal drumming which slowly builds to a noise rock cacophony to create one of the most unforgettable and transcendent scenes I’ve seen in a good while. I can comfortably say I lost myself for 6 minutes and from there, it only got better.

Like Wolf’s Calling, Go Seppuku Yourselves is set in the age of samurai and it stars Shibukawa as an unnamed retainer who is investigating anyone who has anything to do with a spate of murders occurring around town – murders so vicious that the only possible perpetrator could be a demon. A little while later we are presented with a scene in which Yosuke Kubozuka is sitting on the floor in ceremonial white robes ready to commit seppuku (ritual suicide for dishonour among samurai) with Kiyohiko Shibukawa functioning as his second or the person who decapitates the man carrying out the seppuku to make sure the job is done correctly, cleanly and according to tradition. And what follows is an incredibly impassioned monologue from Kubozuko that is candid in its parallels to frustrations over COVID. With the build-up of emotions, unbroken eye contact of the camera, the curiosity of intent and the performance of its actor there have only been a few short films that have ever held my attention captive this completely. This was the short that validated my fandom of Toshiaki Toyoda and its leading man unconditionally.

This all leads to the last title and the only other traditional feature film, I’m Flash. This 2012 film stars Tatsuya Fujiwara as Rui, a charismatic leader of a prominent cult on Okinawa, who gains local notoriety after being in a car crash that kills a young man and puts the woman he is was driving with into a coma. Between tracking his failure of faith and the empire built up by his family, the film follows an ex-gangster turned bodyguard (Toyoda regular), Ryuhei Matsuda and two more cohorts. This inevitably leads up to a shootout through the grounds of the picturesque mansion and island retreat when everything finally crumbles underneath the current leader.

There’s a degree of non-linearity in the make-up of I’m Flash, with the narrative returning to the drive which ended with the crash that sets events thundering into action, with the full picture of the sort of man Rui is only gaining any level of clarity once credits roll. Upon first viewing him outside the car wreck, we see a popular and very rich man who espouses a religious diatribe that attacks the very sanctity of death. It’s not the end, it’s just a challenge, he says. A philosophy that passes from grandfather to father to Rui and can only be passed down through the men of the bloodline, a chalice so poisonous that Rui’s brother has had a sex change and suggests that his sibling does the same too to get out of the inescapable responsibility he was born into. Like every other film in this impressive Third Window collection, I’m Flash has something in its crosshairs, this time – organised religion.

Another of Rui’s religious pearls of wisdom sees him equate the deep dark of the sea as the closest thing to God on earth, queue many sequences of him deep-sea diving with a harpoon on the hunt for fish. Sequences which have a level of textual relevance, but more important than any of that, these scenes also give the cinematography team ample opportunity to create something visually impressive deeper than the surface appeal of the picture-postcard beauty of Okinawa. That surface depth is also close to my opinion on the 2012 film, or at least it was for a while – again, like so many other films I’ve talked about in the last 2 days, it all comes together with the conclusion. So to conclude there’s the last running narrative to find without digging much deeper into each of the titles – Toshiaki Toyoda also really knows how to land the finishing blow.

Rather unintentionally, this is coming very close to being a 3,000-word write-up on a director who deserves much more respect from the wider movie community than he currently has. The only thing I can close by saying is this – thank you third window, for taking such a chance on a director that is relatively unknown internationally. Here’s hoping that releases like this give Toyoda the capital to kick his career up to the next level and really leave his stamp on the international film community. It’s the least he deserves.

THANKS FOR READING ROB’S REVIEW OF TOSHIAKI TOYODA – READ PART ONE HERE

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