Whenever I am back in Tokyo, I have two priorities – to see my friends and to go to the cinema. The last two years I lived in Tokyo I went to the cinema on average about three times a week, and the independent theatres there form a huge part of my emotional map of Tokyo.
I am going back to Tokyo this weekend, and after letting my friends know, the first thing I did was check movie times. And that was when I learned that my absolute favorite cinema, Yujiku, is closing this Friday.
So I want to talk about Yujiku. I want to talk about my memories of the cinema, and to say thank you.
I found Yujiku when I first moved to Suginami ward and was sitting in my new apartment googling “things to do in Suginami ward”. I lived in Koenji, and the cinema was in Asagaya, so I could easily walk there, and at that time there was nothing I loved more than movies. It was perfect.
The first movie I saw at Yujiku was Toni Erdmann. I had heard about it in the news since it had made a big splash at Cannes but hadn’t planned to see it until a coworker of mine recommended it. This coworker, Mr. K, became a really important person to me, and that, too, is because of movies. He taught math and I taught English, and demographically we couldn’t have been more different. But somehow we heard that we shared a love of cinema, and once we started talking about movies we didn’t stop. He was one of the absolute kindest people at my old job, and always encouraged me to live life outside of our school.
So I saw Toni Erdmann, and I loved it. It’s easy to remember firsts, but as it happens, I also remember the second movie I saw at Yujiku. This is where I have to tell you something a little bit far-fetched. Yujiku changed my life. My reasoning may be a little bit tenuous, but bear with me please.
The second movie I saw was The Man Who Fell to Earth, starring David Bowie. This will probably surprise anyone who knows me now, but back in 2017 I didn’t really know much about Bowie. I could name exactly one song of his, and that was because it was used in Frances Ha in a scene that was itself a nod to Mauvais Sang, by Leos Carax. But I had nothing to do one Saturday, and Yujiku was playing The Man Who Fell to Earth, so I went.
It’s not my favorite movie, truly. I can’t say I even liked it. As much as I have come to appreciate Nicholas Roeg, I wouldn’t call myself a fan. The movie itself didn’t rock my world.
But Bowie did. After the movie, I started listening to his music, and that became part of my routine – walk to Asagaya while listening to Bowie, buy a movie ticket, wander around the secondhand shops, see a movie, wander back home. That was my ritual every weekend for about two years.
To give you some context: I had realized around the end of 2017 that I needed to change my life. I wasn’t happy with my job, and my job took up pretty much all of my time and energy, so I started looking for new hobbies. I bought a guitar and started writing songs, I took up painting, I dedicated more time to photography, but nothing really clicked. Nothing made me think, this could be a path into the future.
And then, I was reading one of Bowie’s biographies while waiting in line for bread at this amazing little bakery in Koenji. I don’t remember, but I’m sure I was buying a snack to take to the cinema. What I do remember is reading that Bowie had studied mime for many years. I know now that he studied pantomime, not corporeal mime, but nevertheless, I went home that night and searched “mime classes Tokyo”. Why not? I’d never tried theatre, or dance, or anything physical before. If Bowie liked it so much, it was worth a shot.
That would have been a Tuesday or a Wednesday I guess, because the next open class was Thursday.
A small digression: last night I watched Julie and Julia, which is a movie I could watch a thousand times over, and when Paul Child talked about how he fell in love with Julia, he said something like, “We were eating in a restaurant, just as friends…. and it turned out to be Julia.”
Well, reader, I went to this mime class on a lark because of a line in a book about Bowie… and it turned out to be mime. I like to think that in any possible universe I would have found corporeal mime, but when I trace things back – I had to be in Japan, I had to be unhappy with work, I had to have moved to Koenji, and I had to have walked into a little cinema in Asagaya to see this movie with a singer I didn’t really care about to set me on this path.
I told you the logic was a bit tenuous… but the first time I ever performed in front of people (last year! Can you believe that?) I had to talk about what mime meant to me. I had to tell my story. And I told my teacher I really didn’t want to talk about it, and he said: this is your life now. You have to get used to telling it.
So this is my life now. And when I have the space to tell it, I start my story with a cinema.
But to step back from such a grand scale – I had so many smaller, yet important moments at Yujiku.
Yujiku was the place where I first saw Emir Kusturica’s movies, which got me really interested in Eastern European history. His movies also reminded me how wildly fun cinema can be. Cinema can be a party. I also saw the six hour uncut version of Underground, which taught me that cinema is also a marathon, but one that will leave you exhilarated and transformed.
It was the place where I finally learned to appreciate Godard. I had seen Alphaville and liked it, but wasn’t that moved by his work. When I was having a particularly bad week at work, Yujiku was playing Le Mepris and a few other early Godard films, and they played a huge role in getting me out of my head and into a cleaner, brighter mindspace.
It was where I saw Smoke, which made me miss New York powerfully and reminded me of how much I love Paul Auster.
It was where I saw Deep End, which I didn’t even like, but which got me on a huge 1970s British film kick. Incidentally, I also ran into one of my other favorite coworkers at that movie. In the last year I lived in Tokyo, we often went to the cinema together, and we’d get dinner afterwards in Asagaya and talk about film, history, work, philosophy… she was one of the other hugely important people I worked with, and we so often found common ground at the movies.
There were movies I saw for the first time, like Battle of the Sexes, God’s Own Country, How to Talk to Girls at Parties, and there were movies I’d loved for ages, like Chungking Express, Call Me By Your Name, and In the Mood For Love. I saw documentaries about the Jomon period and Okamoto Taro. I saw odd little Spanish films, Italian movies that I never learned the English titles for, and old Russian animated shorts. One very early movie I saw, Baron Munchausen, became a big source of inspiration for a mime piece I worked on earlier this year.
You might think that what I’m mostly talking about is a love of cinema, rather than a particular theatre. But I’m both very picky and very habitual when it comes to watching movies at home. I need a movie theatre to kick me into watching something I’d never normally consider. And I need a movie theatre to hold me in place with no distractions for the whole length of the movie.
That’s why it’s cinemas like Yujiku that mean so much. It’s not just about movies. It’s about putting certain kinds of movies in front of an audience. So much of our lives and our worldviews come from the media we consume, and if all you do is watch the latest big release at Toho or io9, or whatever is playing on TV or in Netflix’s “currently trending” category, you end up with a very narrow universe in which to live.
Yujiku shattered a lot of boundaries I had put up and showed me parts of the world I had never thought about. It chose movies that weren’t necessarily popular or easy to understand, but that would leave you thinking about them for weeks, even years, afterwards. It chose movies that looked so unassuming, even dull, in summaries, and that would leave you breathless.
I’m not sure how they decided their programming, but I know it wasn’t by an algorithm that would sort a person’s tastes and keep them travelling along in the same cinematic rut forever. I can’t even count the number of times I checked the weekly schedule, thought, man, there’s nothing good on, and went anyway and always, always, always saw something interesting.
If I don’t stop writing now, I never will, so let me just say: it was a privilege to be neighbors with Yujiku. I will never forget the days I spent and the movies I watched there. And I’m going to hope, and hope, and hope against everything that this isn’t permanent, and that one day I’ll be able to go up Tokyo and walk through Yujiku’s doors again.
Presently Kate 