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Masayuki Suo (director), Shall We Dance? 1996, 136 min. 

At college, I once romanced a young lady by agreeing to take ballroom dancing lessons with her after her boyfriend declined. Or should I say she romanced me by asking? Either way, his refusal was a grave miscalculation. Despite my two left feet, I relished every moment. Fast forward three decades, and I now commute once a week on the Seibu Ikebukuro Line for my university teaching post—the very same train that Kōji Yakusho (Perfect Days) rides in Masayuki Suō’s Shall We Dance?, which ought never to be confused with the markedly inferior 2004 American remake starring Richard Gere.

Yakusho gives a masterly performance as Shōhei Sugiyama, a weary salaryman trapped in the suffocating rhythms of Tokyo life. He becomes captivated by a graceful young dance teacher, Mai Kishikawa (Tamiyo Kusakari), whom he glimpses from the train as she stands, ethereal, in the window of a dance studio. Kishikawa possesses a withdrawn, haunting beauty, yet this is no conventional meet-cute. Sugiyama is married, with a teenage daughter, Chikage (Ayano Nakamura), and his wife Masako (Hideko Hara) is hardly absent from his life. In the hands of a lesser director, this might have descended into a sordid tale of an ageing man’s predations. Yet Suō—who began his career, ironically enough, in Japanese softcore cinema—resists that route. His film is less about the male gaze than it is about suburban ennui, repression, and the longing for self-expression.

At the same time, Shall We Dance? serves as a poignant time capsule of mid-1990s Tokyo: the uneasy years following the collapse of Japan’s economic bubble, the Hanshin earthquake, and the Aum Shinrikyō sarin gas attacks. Yet for all this, the film is light of touch and often genuinely funny. Suō’s apprenticeship in documentary filmmaking, including on the career of satirical director Jūzō Itami, clearly bore fruit. The film gently lampoons Japan’s rigid sense of propriety, blending this with superb physical comedy from the less adept dance students. Chief among them is Naoto Takenaka (26 Years Diary), who plays Sugiyama’s eccentric, balding colleague Tomio Aoki—a man who, with the aid of a woefully ill-fitting wig, transforms himself at night into a self-styled Latin lothario.

Shall We Dance? exemplifies how Hollywood, in attempting to remake a foreign gem, so often loses the very spirit of the original. Suō’s film is serious where it must be, its subtlety finely balanced; the American version, by contrast, is brash, obvious, and unsubtle. Kusakari brings to her role the poised delicacy of the ballerina she was in real life, while Jennifer Lopez offers little beyond her customary diva persona, delivering lines such as, “The rumba is the vertical expression of a horizontal wish.” Gere (American Gigolo) is rather implausibly cast as a man shy with women, while Stanley Tucci—Takenaka’s counterpart—plays with verve but is given a fraction of the comic material. Even Susan Sarandon, an Academy Award winner, is squandered in the role of Gere’s “ordinary” wife, Beverly.

For all the humour, when Suō’s musical romantic comedy turns to dance, it is ravishing—elegant, restrained, and suffused with grace. The film may also be read as a reflection of Japan’s cultural anxieties in a moment of national self-doubt. One truth, however, is indisputable: if someone asks, “Shall we dance?” the only proper answer is, “Yes!”

How to cite: Dutch, Jeremiah. “Forget the Remake, Masayuki Suo’s Shall We Dance? is in Perfect Step with Japan.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 7 Sept. 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/09/07/shall-we.

As an American who has called Japan home for over 25 years, Jeremiah Dutch’s writing crosses both cultures. He’s written about such diverse topics as horror films and climbing Mt. Fuji. While still an undergraduate, he wrote for The Haverhill (Massachusetts) Gazette and The Portsmouth (New Hampshire) Herald. In 1997, he graduated from the University of New Hampshire and moved to Japan to teach English the following year. In 2007 he earned a MS.Ed in Education from Temple University and for over seventeen years taught at the post-secondary level while continuing to write academic articles, fiction, and non-fiction. He currently teaches at Rikkyo University.  In 2022, his short piece, Zen Failure in Kyoto won an Honourable Mention in the Seventh Annual Writers in Kyoto Competition. This was excerpted and adapted from his then novel-in-progress, Gaijin House. Another adapted excerpt was published this year under the name “Transported Souls in the Motel of Regret” in the anthology Mono no Aware: Stories on the Fleeting Nature of Beauty. These days he calls Yokohama home and lives there with his wife and two daughters. When not writing, teaching, or spending time with his family, he enjoys reading, exercising, and following baseball. Some more information about Jeremiah and his writing can be found on his website and Instagram. [All contributions by Jeremiah Dutch.]

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