HIROMICHI NAKAO: MICHIYUKI - VOICES OF TIME 道行き (2024) JAPAN CUTS 2025

Preserving the past and thinking about time in Japan

This is a wonderfully sui generis short feature film, a blend of fiction and reality, which reminded me of Jem Cohen and his memorably unique 2012 film Museum Hours, set in Vienna and revolving around a woman in a coma and her Ameican friend who comes to keep her company and befriends a tall, learned museum guard at the Kunsthistorisches Museum with its overflow of old masters. In the same way Hiromichi Nakao, like Jem Cohen, puts together his film from his own collected elements, for his own special ends. The effect is to give a taste of time and Japan you won't get on the tour.

Voices of Time was shot in Nara, pop. 367,353, which was Japan's capital in the 8th century. "People of Kyoto overspend on clothes, Osaka on food, and Nara on houses," an old man (Umemoto) tells Komai was a saying. Correspondingly, the grounding of this black and white film, shot in Nara, is houses, and one house in a neighborhood of elaborately conceived and interwoven old and partly dying houses, on streets free of vehicular traffic, silent in the evening because people are old, or absent. Komai is a young man who buys a house from an old man. It is full of stuff, but he has cleared away enough to work on the house, testing the foundation (wooden columns underneith) from 150 years ago when it was built. It is a traditional Japanese house. He plans to live here. But first he must work on the house.

Some people are living in traditional Japanese houses. Some young people, not many, are returning to live in such houses, usually not in urban areas. I found a YouTube channel about a couple, a German man and a Japanese woman, who came after several years of living in Germany to live in her grandmother's former house in Japan. It is an immaculate traditional house, with small but perfect very modern kitchen and bathroom and what seems like plenty of rooms. They show it to us and explain some of the main elements of such a house, especially the tatami-floored minimal rooms, the shoji screens, the entrance with the genkan barrier and agari kamachi step up to keep out dirt and the layers of exterior walls, the shoji and fusuma, that can be slid back ech day, to reveal the outside, while the futon is folded away, and a bedroom turned into a work room or living room. There is nothing about this process in Nakao's film, but he makes you feel the love of the traditional house and the wish to preserve it and live in it.

Komai talks to several old local men, and walks-and-talks with one. He talks to someone who unfolds a very old map to show Komai that the area where the house he has bought is located is substantially unchanged, the streets and water sourcing along the same lines. So Komai isn't just buying an old house; he is buying into the remnants of a social and geopolitical structure that goes back to the eighth century or so. Komai also talks to a woman responsible for the house next door, which may be two houses, and she says her daughters are not interested in moving there, and the whole thing must be torn down. But Komai offers to help her preserve and restore the property, and she thanks him and may be interested.

There are other strains in this film that serve to give it a more leisurely pace, a less obsessive drive than, say, the YouTube couple. And while the YouTube couple are relentlessly, ingratiatingly, talking to us, Nakao's film lets us listen, and observe, and think. One strain is railroads and trains, and the camera rides along looking forward down the track. We learn from several old men that the best way to see a certain scenic valley is to take the train ride through it. Not by other means. We take a memorable train ride with three men, two older and one younger, through this valley. Two of the men are friends, the others only acquaintances, and we sense this from how they salute on departing. There is also a discussion that brings out this: older people - and Japan famously has an aging population - reach a point when they stop driving, and when they do that, small local train lines, which therefore become worth preserving, become their way of travel even for something as simple as shopping for groceries. So aging people, and trains, a thing in rural Japan.

The other theme is of time itself. In Heian Japan or up to a certain point, in Japan temporal time was used as the system. This is a varying system, also known as the seasonal time system or temporal hour system, that divided the day into unequal intervals based on sunrise and sunset, unlike the modern fixed hour system, into six "toki" or "koku," with the length of each toki varying by season.

Here, we are in a wonderfully immaculate room full of old clocks and at one end in front of us is an old man repairing them. On the wall to the right is a very well behaved and attentive boy. I thought of French children; but this is a boy of the past, and this scene is from memory. The boy sits in a special child's chair. At times he goes up and listens to the man, who tells him stories about time and clocks, some of them probably very fanciful. What shall we make of the idea that before clocks Japanese people used cats to tell time, by their eyes, which change color by the time of day? But this is a clock that, when you dropped it, would not break, the old man says. The boy, in on the game, jokes about this.

These sequences are memories of the old man, now a grandfather, who then was the boy listening attentively to his own grandfather, long gone. Like so much of this film, they are delicately conceived and require only our attentiveness, like the boy's. They don't explain or announce. They just are. For the attentive, curious, and patient, like the little boy who is now a grandfather, this is a fine little film that creates its own memories and spaces, as Jem Cohen's do.

Michiyuki means a journey from one place to another. The term has two components: michi refers to a road as a space, and yuki means going, a continuous human movement during traveling. Together, michiyuki links three elements—human beings, space, and time—into a single unified concept.

The Next Generation competition, featuring emerging directors competing for the Obayashi Prize, this year includes Michiyuki – Voices of Time, See You Tomorrow, Promised Land, and So Beautiful, Wonderful and Lovely.

Michiyuki - Voices of Time 道行き("The road less traveled") 79 min., in Japanese with English subtitles. With Daichi Watanabe, Kanjuro Kiritake, Hiromichi Hosoma. Screened for this review as part of Japan Cuts, July 10-20, 2025.
SHOWTIME:
July 13
3 pm

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.