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Toshihiko Tanaka (director), Rei 莉の対, 2024. 190 min.

Toshihiko Tanaka, an actor and photography enthusiast, crafts a compelling narrative in his minimalist yet emotionally resonant debut, Rei. The story explores the significance of human connections and the transformative power of fleeting, ad hoc encounters—moments capable of upending our entire sense of reality and shaking it to its core.

The film follows Hikari (Takara Suzuki), a thirty-something single woman from Tokyo who is tired of the repetitiveness of her everyday life. She balances its monotony with regular, albeit lonely, visits to the theatre. When she meets a long-lost former university classmate, now a housewife and mother, she suggests they go to a play together. While debating which one to choose, Hikari’s eye is caught by a photograph illustrating one of the theatre’s programmes—snow-covered trees looming in a winter landscape. Fascinated by the power of this enigmatic image, she contacts the photographer in charge, the deaf outsider Masato (Toshihiko Tanaka), who has chosen the mountainous landscape of distant Hokkaido as his safe haven. Their meeting, spontaneously initiated by Hikari, who asks Masato to do a photo shoot, develops into a budding romance based on exchanging notes in emails and notebooks. Hikari’s long-awaited visit to Hokkaido strengthens the bond between the protagonists, but a serious accident in the mountains that lands her in hospital shatters their previously idyllic relationship, which from that moment on is marked by an inescapable fatalism.

Tanaka’s storytelling is skilfully balanced, with just the right amount of detachment and involvement. Using a polyphonic narrative, he divides the screen time to highlight the micro-stories of the minor characters, each struggling with their own hardships. Asami (Maeko Oyama), Hikari’s colleague, meticulously feeds the flames of the domestic hearth and truly enjoys the presence of her husband and daughter in her life. The blemish on the relatively perfect image of the happy family, however, is the noticeable distance that Asami’s husband Kohei (Shogo Moriyama) maintains from both his wife and daughter. Exhausted by Japan’s corporate drain and crushed by his breadwinner role, Kohei seeks solace in the embrace of his lover, a nurse who dreams of children and whom we previously saw caring for Masato’s dying mother. Hikari herself gives the impression of being somewhat emotionally adrift—before Masato came into her life, she had developed a relationship with one of her favourite actors, the charismatic Mitsuru (Katsumata Keita), who, disillusioned with the state of contemporary theatre culture, is now in the twilight of his acting career. Another character introduced is Shinya (co-producer and cinematographer Ikeda Akio), a long-time friend of Masato’s from Hokkaido who, as an employee of the local municipal government, often helps Masato financially when he has problems with his ongoing commissions. The subtle, initially incomprehensible tension between Hikari and the man gradually dissipates as it becomes clear that Shinya’s feelings for Masato go far beyond platonic friendship.

When looking at the fates of the individual protagonists, one cannot help but notice the extent to which Tanaka’s biography laid the foundations for the construction of the film’s male characters. After studying business administration in the United States and then working for a Japanese company, he abandoned his promising office career for acting and took up landscape photography as a hobby. Lived emotions and experiences deepen the realism of the story so that we feel the characters’ helplessness, their growing frustrations, sorrows, obsessions, and passions quite viscerally. Despite the bonds they have formed, it is difficult for them to maintain this state—they all suffocate in this strange dichotomy of attraction and rejection, pouring salt on freshly torn mental wounds. Through all this emotional suffering, however, one can sense that they truly need each other. This echoes the film’s title, which is explained in the opening scene—a single kanji character that only takes on more meaning when combined with another. After all, no man is an island. So Hikari and Masato circle each other relentlessly, like planets in separate orbits that think they will meet on the way, but get bogged down by the parallax effect.

 ^{Takeshi Kitano‘s Dolls}

The spirit of Ryūsuke Hamaguchi seems to hover faintly over the film—the resemblance can be seen in the skill of keen observation and the sensitivity of cinematic language. The dramatic fate of Hikari and Masato is also reminiscent of the tragic love that accompanies the protagonists of Takeshi Kitano’s Dolls. All in all, however, it is the authenticity of the story that makes it such a memorable watch, with each scene carefully crafted to give voice to the protagonists, suspended in a state of not-quite-love, yet desperately longing for closeness.

How to cite: Jaśniak, Marianna. “The Parallax Effect: Toshihiko Tanaka’s Rei.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 3 Dec. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/12/03/rei.

Marianna Jaśniak balances her days working in international security from 9 to 5 with evenings spent indulging in the rich cultural offerings of the Polish capital. An avid reader and film enthusiast, she is always on the lookout for new cinematic and literary gems, particularly from Eastern Europe and SWANA—regions she explored in depth during her studies—as well as East Asia, a lifelong source of fascination. She has a special fondness for long walks, during which she captures her surroundings through analogue photography and composes spontaneous haiku, preserving moments both visually and poetically.

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