Okiku and the World

It’s pouring rain, and like that man, Yasuke, who ekes out a meager existence selling human waste to farmers, she’s taken shelter under the awning of an outhouse. But just because they’re standing next to each other and he knows who she is doesn’t mean he should besmirch her good name by speaking it aloud in so undignified a location. That class conflict, much of it internal, is at the heart of Okiku and the World, which is as charming as a movie about the Edo-era manure business could possibly be.

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After beating out the likes of Perfect Days and The Boy and the Heron to be named Best Film of the Year by Kinema Jumpo, the oldest film magazine in Japan, Junji Sakamoto’s modest drama is now available to stream on Film Movement Plus. Plenty of jidaigeki (Japanese period dramas) have been set in the final years before the Meiji Restoration began in 1868, most of which have been grand tales of heroism and the last gasps of the samurai class. Sakamoto’s focus on a decidedly unglamorous aspect of the era makes for a worthy complement to those epics — as Tarō Gomi reminded us in his classic children’s book, everyone poops. Sakamoto continues that line of thought with a question in the form of a chapter title: Where Does Edo’s Poop Go?

Though the movie and several of its other chapters are named for her — The Invincible Okiku, Foolish Okiku — our heroine (Haru Kuroki) often recedes into the background while Yasuke (Sôsuke Ikematsu) and his apprentice Chunji (Kan’ichirô Satô) do most of the heavy lifting both literal and figurative. She loses the ability to speak after an attack by vengeful members of her disgraced father’s (Koichi Sato) former samurai clan nearly takes her life, becoming a silent observer to the world around her at the same time she realizes she might be falling in love with Chunji — a conflicting feeling she can’t express in words. Language only goes so far here, with images and gestures left to say the rest.

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At the center of it all is the tenement where Okiku and her father live, a leaky row house belying their formerly privileged status. The tenants are increasingly unhappy with the landlord, whose feelings on the would-be uprising spurred by the matter of how their waste is to be removed couldn’t be clearer: “It’s poor people’s fault.” That could serve as the film's mantra, which is very much about class divides — some of them unique to 1858 Japan and some of them no less relevant today.

Language only goes so far here, with images and gestures left to say the rest.

The tenement is also home to an aging coffin maker who knows he isn’t long for this world and hopes to be buried in one of his own creations when the time comes. Sakamoto’s world is one of oddballs and outcasts, with the black-and-white cinematography complemented by occasional bursts of color befitting the characters’ outsize personalities. Sakamoto never shies away from the earthbound realities of excrement — there are plenty of closeups of overflowing buckets complete with all-too-realistic sound effects — but some viewers might. (I almost did).

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Those who don’t will be rewarded for their hardiness. Okiku and the World is sweet, even heartwarming, without being the least bit sentimental. Okiku’s world isn’t our world, but at a few choice moments, you might wish it were.