A Story of Yonosuke

Not to watch when you want to spend time, just when someone is feeling like having nothing else to do.

A story about a simple young man called Yokomichi Yonosuke and people who knew him back in college. His goofy friend and his girlfriend, his samba club, his job as a clerk at a hotel, mysterious neighbor who never turns off his/her alarm, a mature lady, his gay friend and eventually, Yonosuke's own girlfriend.

Every person who knew Yonosuke has a good impression about him. Although some of them already forget how they encountered Yonosuke at first place, but the stories continue as they impact every person in a positive way. But how about Yonosuke himself?! Does he lead a happy life?! Does he achieve what he was dreamt of?! Well, you have to see it until the end of second act to know it, and it was quite some time considering this movie has 160 minutes of duration. But it's worth it.

Make us remember 9/10

PS: Don't forget Shoko's maid scene stealer.

I found A Story Of Yonosuke striking, but for entirely the wrong reason. Put simply, ASOY is a case study in culture-specific humour, and is far more interesting to consider in this manner than as a light comedy biopic epic.

It was an effort to sit through nearly two and a half hours of this. Not that it was all that dull, but the laughs are mostly silly giggles, and there are often long stretches between laughs where not a lot happens. The narrative is structured as an epic, spanning sixteen years, told from several different viewpoints, with multiple flashbacks which sometimes confuse and irritate. This epic scale is stunningly at odds with the lightly comic examination of the life of one foolish man, and how he affected the lives of those he befriended.

The title character is presented like a younger version of Tora-san, a fool who stumbles through life with a sunny view of things, strongly projecting that quality much admired by Japanese, 'genki' (difficult to translate – a combination of lively, positive, optimistic, energetic). The laughter starts when he tells his name. Nearly everyone in the film giggles at the mention of his name. The Japan Film Festival audience was sharply divided on this. Japanese audience members got the joke, but we gaijin (foreigners) sat there po-faced and puzzled, until one of the characters thoughtfully explained that the alliteration of the name was the funny part.

Alliteration seems to have a more specific definition in Japanese. That his name is Yokomichi Yonosuke is what cracked up the characters and the Japanese audience. An English equivalent, such as Adam Addison, just doesn't do it for us. Not that Japanese names aren't funny to us. Any name including Fuk or Yuk, or the name Aso, can trigger more than giggles.

Perhaps this is the Japanese equivalent of rhyming names in English. Ridiculously contrived rhymes such as Richard Pritchard or Katie Tate are practically guaranteed to amuse. Japanese songs hardly ever rhyme. Indeed, it seems they are constructed to avoid rhyming at all costs. Odd, considering that the language has a much greater potential for rhyming (and punning) than English.

So, Japanese dislike rhymes but Westerners find them amusing. Japanese are amused by alliteration, but Westerner only raise an eyebrow at best.

We evidently have a clear difference between the humour of Japanese and Westerners. ASOY rests totally on this humour, which is why I found watching the movie a test of endurance more than a comedy. If ever ASOY were given a wider release, I heartily recommend shortening it by at least one hour, and I do not think the story will suffer for it.

The Japan Film Festival website classified this year's movies into a number of categories. I am puzzled that they failed to apply the category "Only In Japan" to ASOY.

There are a few bright spots. Yonosuke woos a rich girl. He feels very out-of-place in her mansion. There are several scenes where he has awkward dates, which are only semi-explicably always watched over by the family chambermaid. This actress never speaks, but when the camera cuts to her for a reaction, her expressions are simply hilarious. This is a combination of excellent editing and superb comic timing. Pity there wasn't more of this.

The ending is very puzzling. There is no explanation, stated or implied, as to why things worked out this way. For such an unnecessarily long journey, which examines Yonosuke's effect on a number of people and his near-relentless cheerfulness in exhausting detail, I expected something better, to not be left hanging. But I suspect that, like the humour, only the Japanese would ever truly get it.

With its 1987 setting significantly during Japan's economic boom years, THE STORY OF YONOSUKE would appear to use its 'student days' setting as a way to reflect on the past and indulge in a nostalgic outlook for more innocent and simpler times. Surprisingly however, while there would appear to be an exaggerated naivety to the characters here and a loving if subtly understated re-creation of the period, there is at the same time no indulgent attempt to recapture a lost idyll of youth in Shuichi Okita's gentle film, rather an attempt to capture its significance.

Much of the charm of THE STORY OF YONOSUKE inevitably rests on the character at the centre of the film. Although it may not be evident to outsiders, the very name Yonosuke Yokomichi has a particular, or peculiar, resonance in Japanese that amuses everyone who meets him. It's a joke name, the name a comedian would have, a name that could only come from rural Japan and sound ridiculous to the more sophisticated young people of Tokyo. Arriving in Tokyo to attend university, eighteen year-old Yonosuke (Kengo Kora) does indeed come from the sticks, from a little fishing village in Nagasaki, but he also has a certain naive charm and self-confidence and his open and engaging manner means that he makes friends easily. In essence, as we find out, it's the people he befriends who are just as important to THE STORY OF YONOSUKE as the nominal main character. Perhaps even more so.

Two of Yonosuke's fellow students on his Business Administration course, Ippei Kuramochi and Yui Akutsu, join him in the university's Samba club, but they both drop out of university altogether shortly afterwards. Yonosuke also becomes friends in a case of mistaken identity with Kato, the two of them going on a double date with two girls from their year. For Kato, looking back several decades later as an entirely different person, it was an unlikely situation for him, but even more so for the poor country-boy who is paired up with Shoko, the giggling, enthusiastic but shy girl from a very wealthy and prestigious family. Yonosuke however only has eyes for Chiharu, a sophisticated, glamorous older woman who preys on wealthy men. She's also clearly well out of his league, the young boy from Nagasaki having nothing to offer a good-time party girl, but Yonosuke remains undeterred.

Each of these interweaving stories is a relatively simple and heart-warming tale of youthful friendship. They seem remarkably straightforward, linear and perhaps even over-indulgent in terms of how they are drawn out in a long film that really doesn't seem to merit such elaboration. The story of Shoko and Yonosuke, for example, seems impossibly naive and unrealistic. Shoko is driven everywhere in a big car by her family's private chauffeur and lives under the watchful and suspicious eyes of her parents (and maid), yet she is allowed to spend part of the summer up in Yonosuke's home village in Nagasaki. In other circumstances the behaviour of these two innocent giggling children building up to making their feelings known to each other, drawing cartoons and dancing around in the snow would be close to nauseating and almost impossible to believe. In the context of the film however and in the context of the very specific short little present-day updates on how each of the characters are living now, it actually proves to be warmly beautiful as well as meaningful.

What prevents the film from slipping into nostalgia and a romantic idealisation of youth is the significant fact that we don't revisit Yonosuke Yokomichi at any stage in the future. By the end of the story we find that we are probably able to say and know much more about Yonosuke's friends than we do about him. His personality is barely sketched out, his reactions are mostly passive in deference to the needs of his friends, and his interest and his dedication to the afterschool Samba group - to give just one example - doesn't really tell us anything important about him. As such, the film runs the risk of leaving a vacant emotional space at the very point where it is essential to have one. There's evidently a narrative reason for Yonosuke's absence from the present-day scenes, but the low-key nature of where this revelation is placed and how it is mentioned only in passing would seem to imply that the film has a more important message or sentiment to deliver.

At the risk of reading a little too much into it, it's not so much that Yonosuke's barely defined character leaves an emotional void at the heart of THE STORY OF YONOSUKE as much as the fact that the enigma of Yonosuke in some way represents the elusive nature of youth itself. He's the touchstone to the fun, free and innocent days of the others' youth, something that they were perhaps unable to fully appreciate at the time, something that - as the last scene of the film suggests - is as elusive and impossible to recapture as an amateur photographer's attempt to snap a fleeing puppy, or as faint and unrelatable now as an underexposed portrait taken on a summer's day of a distant self. The people they are now are far removed from the youths they were then, but the memory of Yonosuke remains preserved, untouched and unspoilt in the past. Yonosuke is a memory of youth that holds no false idealism or sentimentality for the people he once knew, but rather he exists as a timeless reminder of how significant those days of youth and friendship were, a time that in some indefinable way gives context and meaning to the lives they lead now in a rather more harsh and unforgiving world.

A young man, Yonosuke Yokomichi, leaves Nagaski for college in Tokyo, makes friends and has some low-level adventures. Over 20 years later, we see the impact his short life had on the people he encountered.

Shuichi Okita directs this tale with some flair. He has a penchant for the hard geometric framing that Japanese interiors lend themselves to, placing Yonosuke within a square doorway seen through a round opening in an adjoining wall. There are some joyous reaction shots, evidenced especially by a maid who watches tenderly, if slightly aghast, Yonosuke's courting of dippy rich girl Shoko. There is comedy in the cut, such as when Yonosuke is invited to "a pool" and turns up in trunks and snorkel to a formal dress poolside party. Kengo Kora plays the gawky but affectionate Yonosuke, never overdoing the charm or melodrama. Yuriko Yoshitaka manages to take a role that could easily become annoying and infuse it with tenderness and just the right amount of quirk. The comic timing in the dialogue is well-worked at times, such as an awkward acceptance then refusal of leftovers from a new neighbour. Yonosuke does samba, helps out his cameraman neighbour, backs up a gay friend when he comes out... The film consists of these episodic moments, low-key everyday life, vignettes loosely strung together that give a flavour of Yonosuke the college student, who from beginning to end is the same awkward if lovable geek.

The flaw in Okita's scheme is, unfortunately, a massive one - a lack of self-discipline. The running time of this film is flagrantly self-indulgent. There is a good 90-minute film in here, but Yonosuke just does not do enough, or have enough of a journey, or in any way encapsulate the period setting (the late eighties, which is never invoked in an ironic or satirical sense) to justify such ponderous attention. At 160 minutes the film is 20 minutes longer than 'Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom.' This film could similarly be titled 'Yonosuke: Very Long Meander to, well, Nowhere Really.' There is a lot of dead screen time here that should have ended on the cutting room floor. For example, Yonosuke's neighbour is presumed dead. Yonosuke brings him chocolates. It leads to the neighbour holding a photography exhibition. Yonosuke attends and stares uncomprehendingly at the photos. The audience reaction to this is a shrug and mumbled 'So what?" Some play in the snow goes on and on, part of the romance between Yonosuke and Shoko that seems to be just a series of 'meet cutes.' As funny as some of the comedy is, as pretty as the frames Okita fashions are, the flab this narrative carries completely undercuts all that other good work and makes this film a slog to get through, never mind recommend.

It would be interesting to see what a hard-nosed editor with a brief to keep this film under 90 minutes would fashion from the footage. I suspect the answer is a far better film. If I were Okita, I would seek out such an editor as a matter of priority.