The story of my solitude
If my solitude were a fish
It'd be so enormous, so militant
A whale would get out of there
In 1975, a bad English to Japanese translation of an obscure novel (called Fish Story) inspires Gekirin, a Japanese proto-punk band, to write a song called Fish Story. The band's first and only album (also called Fish Story) flops, the band breaks up, fades into obscurity having missed the punk revolution by just a few years. Yet Fish Story, the song that is the one true expression of their artistry, lives on. It echoes through the decades to the year 2012 when a comet on a collision course threatens to destroy the world.
But there is one last hope: Fish Story.
That, my friends, is the premise of a bold, enthralling Japanese film also called Fish Story.
Only it's even bolder than that, because it's not the song that might hold the key to salvation, it's the curious moment of silence in the middle of the song. Tracing the origins and after effects of that moment of silence (the film's McGuffin) is the thread Fish Story follows to an amazing conclusion.
Directed by Yoshihiro Nakamura and written by Kôtarô Isaka and Tamio Hayashi, Fish Story is the type of movie that makes Netflix streaming worth it, one of those little masterpieces that you stumble upon when perusing the oddly genre-specific suggestions the streaming service throws at you. (My recent favorite: "cerebral independents crime thrillers." Say that three times fast.) Sadly it's not streaming anymore, but you can still order the DVD.
Like many of my favorite films, Fish Story, plays out as a puzzle.
With this necessary exposition out of the way, the film embarks on a journey through time, hopping from decade to decade, eventually spanning fifty years to tell the story of the song. In 1975, we encounter the members of Gekirin as they struggle to find a place for their radical new sound in an uncaring world.
In 1982, we meet an obnoxious and abusive rich kid who's obsessed with "occult songs." Fish Story is one of the most famous occult songs of all time, due to that unexplained moment of silence. Legend has it, if you listen carefully, you can hear a woman scream during that silence, murdered by the band in a bizarre cult ritual during the recording itself. His "friend" and driver, whom he verbally abuses every chance he gets, tries to find the strength to finally stand up for himself. There's also a fortune teller involved. I mean, why not?
In 2009, the Japanese Harold Camping (you know, the guy who's always predicting the end of the world) hijacks a commuter ferry boat. His last end of the world prediction failed to pan out and he's looking to make headlines (and some money) with this latest crime. Arrayed against him is a sensitive young woman who fell asleep and missed her stop and a waiter with seemingly superhuman martial arts skills.
In the late 60's, early 70's (memory fails me here) a young man working at a publishing house struggles to translate an American novel (called, of course, Fish Story) into Japanese, utterly botching the job.
What's great about the film isn't what it tells you, but what it waits to tell you. The viewer knows all these story elements go together, but they just don't know how. It's questions, questions, questions with gloriously delayed answers.
One of the lessons any narrative artist should learn early and often is that, in drama, questions are better than answers. Don't give it all away right up front. Introduce a mystery that will hook the audience and then let the answer be revealed over the course of the film. Enthralling dramatic questions, a professor once told me, are seat glue.
For a shockingly obvious example, think of the opening scene of Pulp Fiction. An LA coffee shop. Small time crooks Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer have a long philosophical discussion about robbery techniques before deciding to rob the very coffee shop they're sitting in. Freeze frame, opening credits. We come out of the credits to find John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson talking about buying drugs in Amsterdam.
Where's Tim Roth? What did that opening scene have to do with the rest of the movie? Questions. Hooks. What happens in that coffee shop and how it relates to the rest of the movie isn't revealed for another two hours.
Questions create an incentive for the audience to keep watching or keep reading because it is a natural human urge to want to know the answer. How many time have you sat through (or fast-forwarded through) a crappy movie just to find out what happened at the end? That's the natural desire to seek an answer to a question and shows that those incompetent filmmakers got at least that dramatic element right.
Fish Story takes this principal of questions without immediate answers and Godzillafies it. Unlike other puzzle-piece movies, (such as Soderberg's The Limey,) which you put together as you go, the story pieces in Fish Story seem only marginally related. Each is entertaining in its own right, but it is the assemblage of them into a final, cohesive whole that makes the film so damn satisfying.
As a film, it's well acted, well shot, overall well made. The pace may be a little slow for Western audiences who've been trained by hyper-paced action epics, but stick with it. It pays off.
But it's more than a clever puzzle, the band that is the core of the film faces a struggle every human faces, big dreams that crumble in the face of reality. How they deal with that is one of the central elements of the film. It is a story that anyone who has ever dreamed then failed can appreciate, a universally human message that gives the film its emotional foundation.
More importantly, it sends the message that sometimes failure can pay off in the most spectacular and unexpected fashion.
Now how do we get Netflix to start streaming it again?