Okiku and the World: shit’s a wonderful life

• Reviewed at the International Film Festival Rotterdam

Sakamoto Junji’s latest film is excremental – literally. Set in the late Edo period in that era’s eponymous city (now known as Tokyo), when, as a textual preface informs us, “the country had gone to shit,” Okiku and the World focuses on two unlikely protagonists who make their living by collecting human waste from the outhouses of the better-off denizens of the city and reselling it to farmers in the countryside. As the film opens, the seasoned Yasuke (Ikematsu Sosuke) agrees to take the paper seller Chunji (Sato Kanichiro) under his wing after the latter realises there’s more money to be made in the manure-slinging business. The pair are soon joined by the beautiful young schoolteacher Okiku (Haru Kuroki), who is seeking shelter beneath the roof of the outhouse. Okiku’s attentions are clearly drawn to the handsome Chunji – but how can their love blossom when she is the daughter of a samurai, albeit a disgraced one, while he is an illiterate orphan?

This is but the point of departure for a narrative that alternates between Rabelaisian toilet humour on the one hand, and a cutting dissection of class issues on the other. Midway through the film, Okiku loses her father to an assassin’s sword and has her vocal cords severed, depriving her of the ability to speak – and hence, teach. Chunji, meanwhile, gradually uncovers the survival mentality animating Yasuke’s stoic attitude toward life as he witnesses, and eventually falls victim to, the abuse constantly inflicted by his social higher-ups; in fact, Chunji provides something of a mediating perspective, as his position of poor ‘townie’ places him a rung above his landless peasant peer. The underlying love story, meanwhile, remains a lingering subplot until the very end, given expression – in one of the film’s most beautiful and moving moments – partly through the art of calligraphy. What began as a bawdy comedy ultimately resolves itself with a profound truth about the cyclical nature of existence: when one loses everything, great fortune may indeed follow.

Rife with close-ups of the sludge that is ubiquitous throughout the main characters’ world, Sakamoto’s decision to shoot the majority of the film in black and white softens the visual impact, making for a less nausea-triggering experience than one might expect. Beyond this visual sublimity and Sakamoto’s fine writing, Okiku and the World is ensconced in the Marxist worldview that has translated into overseas success for so many Japanese and Korean films of late (Shoplifters, 2018; Parasite, 2019), and so it would not be a surprise if this film were to garner a large audience outside the festival circuit.