Nobody Knows
Kore-Eda Hirokazu, Japan

by Jay Kuehner

If the films of Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu are intrinsically memorial, his fourth feature, Nobody Knows, is less concerned with the risk of forgetting than that most primal of fears: being forgotten. And for Kore-eda, concern is the operative mode. The story of Nobody Knows—the plight of four children abandoned by their mother in a Tokyo apartment—is taken from the headline news (an event historically known as ”The Affair of the Four Abandoned Children of Nishi-Sugamo”). Kore-eda is careful not to loot the story for sensational effect, but instead he reconstructs it with magnanimous curiosity.

Judgement, pace Kore-eda, is withheld. So tempered is his sober, documentary-like approach that one can even overlook an establishing sequence that augurs ill for the kid’s future: a young mother, Fukashima Keiko (You), arrives at her new apartment with her 12-year-old son Akira (Cannes Best Actor, Yagira Yuuya), then waits for the movers to leave before literally unpacking more of her family—two smaller children who’ve been stowed in suitcases to evade the landlord’s notice. Yet another child, daughter Kyoko (Kitaura Ayu), presumably too large for luggage, is fetched from Tokyo’s streets and promptly snuck in. Giddy in their new home, this family—evicted from their last apartment—gathers happily over a meal of noodles as mom spells out the house rules: no loud voices; no going outside; Kyoko does the laundry; Akira is in charge. It’s an odd but not unlikely domestic set-up, given the trials of single motherhood (and perhaps Tokyo real estate). Nor is it entirely uncaring; mom lays her children to rest on fresh tatamis that smell of “leaves in nature.”

It’s clear that once mom heads off to work (the film alludes to a job in a department store) these children have little trouble fending for themselves. Unpacking, cooking, and cleaning all appear routine, certainly testament to their sheer ingenuity, but also evidence of mom’s frequent hiatuses. It’s little surprise then when Akiru matter-of-factly announces he’s going shopping, after discovering a terse goodbye note and a handful of yen from his mother. ”Your mother’s going away for a while,” reads her valediction, proffering no explanation, though it’s no real mystery. “Again?” wonders Akira, when his mother, in an exchange that’s both a tender confessional and a bracing parting shot, tells him she’s in love. “If he promises to marry me,” she confides to Akira, “then we can all live in a big house, and you can all go to school.” It’s a painful irony that her hopes for a future are concomitant with her betrayal.

Absence, then, becomes the film’s defining factor, which Kore-eda, attentive to the mundane, seems intent on redeeming—in spite of encroaching signs that the children have nowhere to go but down. Where mother was, the director now is. This, naturally, implies a kind of surrogacy on behalf of Kore-eda, who spent a year filming these children, yet such involvement also begs an unforeseen paradox: does Kore-eda effectively remove these actors from natural maternal care? The quandary bears more immediately on the film’s mise en scène. The children’s home life is recorded with acute spontaneity, yielding a naturalistic feel which Kore-eda then mines more obliquely, intimating displacement by framing the children’s hands or feet, or lingering on forlorn objects and empty spaces. Outside—a space glimpsed from their balcony and privy now to Akira—is rendered in more distant shots and recurring locales, such as the emblematic bank of stairs Akira seems to climb more often than descend. Tokyo is seen as a kind of orderly plan in which people become increasingly invisible.

Akira’s forays into a benign but indifferent city, while purely practical, amount to an appeal for visibility, borne out in the film’s indefinite title: nobody knows these children have been abandoned. It’s subtly disclosed that they each have different fathers, and Akira’s attempts to track any one down when money gets scarce prove risibly futile. One, a security guard in a pachinko parlour, bumbles on about his bad credit while trying to wring a can of soda from a vending machine, and offers Akira little more than some teasing jabs about puberty. It’s funny, considering that the 12 year old appears to be the biggest man-of-the-house his family has yet seen. There is something affecting about watching Akira survey his resources: negotiating an atm machine for cash deposits; making trips to market (“Shall I buy persimmons?” he wonders); searching for his youngest sister’s favourite candy. Indeed, Akira’s frequent recitations act as litanies, telling of need but also providing an inventory of an unspoiled world: ”rent, electricity bill, phone, and gas...and also tissues.” One particularly memorable sequence has Akira sneaking his five-year-old sister Yuki out of the apartment on her birthday. She marvels at the sheer abundance of things at the market, and then contents herself with some chocolates. It’s a precious moment, her emptying that box of Apollo Choco, as Akira looks on, his worry momentarily eclipsed by affection. Listen too for comic relief: the chosen shoes Yuki wears just for the trip squeak each step of the way.

Just as inexplicably as she left, mother reappears, bearing gifts. Waiting has left the children wary, evidenced by the reluctant reception she receives. Her charm seems at once loving and shamefully exploitive, a palliative that nurtures the children long enough for her to gather some belongings before disappearing again. More than the haircuts and manicures she dashes off, these children just want to go to school—in spite of mother’s specious claim that without fathers, they’ll only be bullied, and that plenty of famous people never went to school either (hard pressed by Akira, she names...a wrestler?). In their penultimate moment together in a coffee shop, one succinctly realized gesture reveals the fragile bond between mother and son: she tries wiping the sugar from his face, and he pulls away. Promising to return for Christmas, mother then disappears through the subway turnstiles.

Akira’s hermetic universe is infiltrated when he temporarily befriends a couple of school kids, who import video games and soda pop into the apartment (to the initial excitement, but eventual dismay, of his siblings). Lamenting the increasingly dissolute Japanese family may not be Kore-eda’s intent, but the fact that these school kids, bored into shoplifting, can’t equate the squalid state of the apartment to an absence of parenting speaks volumes. Akira finds the most support from a local convenience store: receiving handouts of dated sushi at the back door, and enlisting the sympathetic checkout girl to forge cards from mother, which he dutifully doles out to his family for the new year. If Akira becomes father to this brood, then the intuitive relationship he develops with a shunned schoolgirl, Saki (Kan Hanae), implies the possibility of a substitute mother. Her attempt to help Akira, however—by entertaining a salaryman for money—only weakens his faith.

The film bides its time, as if patiently holding out hope, while the children inexorably fall into desperation. Their emancipation from the apartment, compelled by Akira’s waning tutelage, lends the dour proceedings some buoyancy, but proves only so liberating. At the least, it affords the children an opportunity to bathe in the local park after the water supply is shut off (by this point, utility bills have become mere scratch paper for Yuki’s drawings). In the film’s boldest ellipse, Kore-eda collapses two narratively opposing strands, doting on Akira’s fortuitous placement in right field for the local baseball team while tragedy, until then miraculously averted, quietly strikes at home. That Akira’s joy is commensurate with such dire circumstances seems to anticipate his character’s fate, which Kore-eda otherwise handles with more prudence.

The film derives much of its restrained power in hindsight, as moments and objects are indelibly transfigured by the knowledge that this mother is never returning. The shot of Kyoko’s left hand resting on the laundry machine, her fingernails newly polished; the three minutes it takes for instant noodles to cook; a tilted red toy piano; Yuki tugging imploringly at Akira’s shirt; the glass of milk Akira drinks before discovering his mother’s goodbye note; Shige sitting in that damn suitcase, watching television; Akira expectantly dialling the telephone…everything seems fraught with the potential for loss. Even the sappy pop song that accompanies Akira on a symbolic monorail ride chimes with a bittersweet irony: the lyric ”I’m growing up” punctuates a shot of Akira, backlit by morning light, looking as if childhood had completely escaped him. The song likewise invokes his mother’s own aspiring, but ultimately unrealized, career as a singer.

However austere, Nobody Knows, by attempting to honour the children’s dignity over their degradation, inevitably surfeits in sentimentality (the plaintive score, for one, is at times cloying). For a heartbreaker though, the film remains oddly inscrutable. Kore-eda has spoken of the need to keep a distance from his characters, suggesting that when you hug someone, you can no longer see what they’re seeing. If that distance precludes the sort of emotional payoff we expect from the movies, it is Kore-eda’s sense of engagement—his films are moral inquiries—that persists. Appraising Nobody Knows is a bit like peering into the bucket of day-old sushi collected by Akira: ”No salmon?” laments his younger brother. ”No, just what’s there,” suffices Akira. Adapting a cruel story of youth, Kore-eda makes fair with what’s here.

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