‘Ichiko’: Hana Sugisaki transfixes with career-high performance

Seeing Akihiro Toda’s “Ichiko” at this year’s Tokyo International Film Festival, I was deeply impressed by Hana Sugisaki’s totally committed performance as the titular character, an inscrutable woman whose entire life becomes a deception. After seeing the film a second time, I realized that non-Japanese viewers may be deeply confused by a key plot point: how Japan’s family register system leaves Ichiko a non-person.

Based on Toda’s award-winning 2015 play, this episodic and enigmatic film briefly explains why she finds herself in this predicament. For Japanese viewers, that may be enough, though “Ichiko” ends with mysteries that even they (and I) find hard to parse, if online comments are any indication.

To be brief myself, Ichiko’s birth in Osaka in 1987 was within 300 days of her mother’s divorce from an abusive husband, making him Ichiko’s “official” father according to the family register system. Anxious to keep the ex out of their lives, Ichiko’s mother, Natsumi (Yuri Nakamura), did not register the child’s birth, meaning that as an adult Ichiko would live on the social margins, unable to get a health insurance card or find regular employment.

As of 2017, according to a Ministry of Justice survey, there were about 1,500 unregistered Japanese, though the actual number is believed to be far higher. “Ichiko,” however, is not a drama about this social problem. It is closer in spirit to Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 classic, “Rashomon” in which various characters relate their versions of the same incident. In “Ichiko,” acquaintances, friends and lovers recount their brushes with Ichiko, from girlhood onward, to an impassive Detective Goto (the always reliable Shohei Uno), who is investigating her disappearance following a marriage proposal from her live-in boyfriend, Yoshinori Hasegawa (Ryuya Wakaba).

We soon realize she did not just have second thoughts about marrying this earnest, uninquisitive man with whom she spent three blissful years. As Goto tells a shocked Yoshinori, “Ichiko doesn’t exist.”

Rewind to 2000, when Ichiko was a girl named Tsukiko, living in a squalid public housing apartment with Natsumi and her volatile boyfriend, Masao (Daichi Watanabe). She confides to a new friend that her real name is Ichiko but doesn’t have time to explain before the friend, a proper middle-class girl, beats a hasty retreat from the apartment — and Masao, who is angered by her presence. What’s his problem?

Fast forward to 2008, when Tsukiko (Sugisaki) is a teenager with a punkish boyfriend (Yuki Kura) who is frustrated by her seeming coldness. But when she suddenly drags him behind a building and thrusts his hand between her legs, he is startled. What’s wrong with her?

Less put off by her strangeness is Hidekazu Kita (Yuki Morinaga), a high school classmate who befriends Tsukiko but wants to be something more. Then he happens upon a disturbing scene that illuminates her hidden life and he is forever changed.

Toda, who co-wrote the script, is not out to assign innocence or guilt. Ichiko is neither a trampled angel nor a heartless devil. By fate and dark deeds, she sees herself as apart from the general run of humanity, exiled from ordinary happiness.

As played by Sugisaki, who has been recognized as an extraordinary talent since her days as a child actor, Ichiko is quiet but watchful, happy to be liked and loved but wary of revealing her truth. It is a performance that is riveting and haunting, all of a piece and one of a kind. Justice for “Ichiko” is armloads of awards for Sugisaki.