Word: noriko
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...woman walking down a street: We hear the click of her heels, see men’s heads turn, and at the same time know through her facial expression or a voiceover what’s going through her mind. Films like Yasujirõ Ozu’s Noriko trilogy of the ’40s, New Wave features starring Monica Vitti and Anna Karina, or the defiant ’80s flick “Thelma and Louise” prove that it’s possible to represent the inner life of a woman with complexity and grace...
...opens in the early summer of 1992, with Noriko hanging laundry in the backyard of the Shito family mansion in Koganei, an airy suburban Tokyo neighborhood of delightful tree-lined streets. She is serenely happy and in love with her new husband, Kazuhito, and his tanned arms and adorable round ears. Her new extended family, moreover, loves her. They welcome and dazzle her with praise, and appear in many ways to be typical of large, conservative, close-knit, multigenerational families. They eat dinner and watch TV together. The men are breadwinners (Kazuhito and his father Takeo manage a rice mill...
...that thought doesn't come until the end of this odd page-turner, when Noriko has been effectively brainwashed. In the meantime there are plenty of exquisitely perverse intimations and hard evidences rolled out to rebut it. The flawless family portrait starts to crack after Noriko, while on a brief visit back home to visit her parents, sees a TV news report about the death by home gas explosion of a raspy old ice vendor and his family - tenants of the Shitos, who happen to own and lease several residential properties. Murder-suicide, the police conclude. But an overheard midnight...
...Unsettling hints accrue - of incest, narcotics and faked illnesses - and Noriko finds herself increasingly unable to avert her eyes and continue believing in her fairy-tale in-laws. Their cloying, plastic adulation begins to suffocate. Occasional outings with her blunt-spoken high school friend Tomomi, who enjoys a Sex and the City lifestyle as a single woman working in central Tokyo, living alone and puffing cigs at noisy cafés, heighten Noriko's sense of entrapment. Her life is like a pachinko game: she's the silver ball, pinging between her once happy but now cultish family...
...which was originally published in 1993, as divorce rates in Japan were soaring, is also high-wire social commentary. It's a parodic rebuke of traditional cultural attitudes that subsume individual welfare for the sake of a family unit, no matter how dysfunctional (or possibly, in Noriko's case, homicidal) they...