Lightness and Solidity: On Kiyoshi Kurosawa

We constantly encounter the weightless in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s cinema: newspapers fluttering across the living room at the opening of Tokyo Sonata; Jun Fubuki standing alone against a wall, brushed by a breeze, at the beginning of Seance; the philosophical zombies coated in smooth silver paint inhabiting a realm of consciousness in Real; or the spectral media ghosts suspended in midair, inching toward the living, in Pulse. Conversely, Kurosawa is equally obsessed with images of solid permanence. Nothing seems more grounded than the full silhouette of the home when it first appears in Tokyo Sonata, nor is there a ensemble more steadfast than the historical specters who consistently populate scenes in fixed postures in The Black Castle.

Figure 1《Seance》

Thus, Kurosawa’s cinematic universe operates on an ethics of coexisting textures: embedding lightness within the steadfast, or housing stability upon a weightless surface. Kurosawa frequently uses ritualistic staging (découpage) to carry out this dynamic. In Pulse, summoning spirits is accomplished by pasting red tape over spatial thresholds (doors, windows); in Journey to the Shore, Tadanobu Asano’s apparition is summoned through muscle memory—the physical gesture of making dango; while in Seance, the deceased are summoned directly through occult rites. The monotony and materiality of these ritualistic gestures are fundamentally absurd, yet the moment the weightless apparition materializes, they expand our perception of the world's underlying essence. Much like scientists who deduce the mysteries of the universe through precise, complex equations, these ritualistic moments awaken our primal sensory engagement with the world.

When a ghost in Pulse first appears as a human-shaped shadow lurking in a corner, dread completely shatters our perception of everyday safety, drawing us directly into Kurosawa’s process of "ghost-making." We observe how these specters, captured by digital media with blurred visages, invert the dynamic of representation: it is no longer the medium capturing the ghost, but the ghost residing within the medium. Characters then learn how to access this medium via scraps of paper printed from its output, releasing specters that invade the spaces of the living. As they close in on the living, their eyes and murmurings simultaneously reveal their truth as existential entities. Much like their endless whisper of "Help me," the specter's approach unexpectedly turns into a desperate bid for human empathy and communication.

Figure 2《Pulse》

Constructing specters means constructing new relationships—not only between the dead and the living, but between human beings and the material world. In those hollowed-out, desolate environments, there always exist transitional zones where characters walk from one point to another, alongside moments marking the end of the world. Pulse announces the apocalypse through the most deliberately artificial disaster-genre staging, whereas Retribution expresses cosmic stillness and desolation through a far sparser production design: deserted streets swept by debris. These unapologetically artificial moments provide the ultimate backdrop for character movement. The two-dimensional plane expands into a new dimension, where characters resisting the end times reach out to one another through tenacious physical gestures, striving to survive. Yet prior to Tokyo Sonata, it was hard to argue that these characters could ever be saved; wrapped in the world's fragility and hopelessness, they never managed to find a concrete mode of survival.

Figure 3《Pulse》

In Tokyo Sonata, Kurosawa’s impulse to construct a cinematic situation begins to anchor itself in the contemporary social reality of Japan. It appears to be his most harmonious visual system yet: images no longer summon specters, and reality becomes the substratum of the image. However, we are immediately unsettled by Kurosawa’s almost naked structural consciousness. For roughly the first 70 minutes of Tokyo Sonata, the camera dutifully and neatly depicts the members of a family, their daily hardships, and their suffocating, ossified relationships. If we allow the structural framing to channel our perception entirely into socio-economic realities—middle-aged unemployment, marital discord, youth political awakening, and the clash between a child's dreams and familial expectations—these societal issues construct a logically coherent thematic chain, assigning the film the duty of offering social critique and ideal solutions.

Figure 4《Tokyo Sonata》

Yet we quickly realize that Kurosawa offers no societal interrogation. There are no bitter lamentations, nor rage directed at macro-structures; there are only characters scattering in all directions when pushed to the edge. Then comes the gust of wind that belongs uniquely to Tokyo Sonata—recalling the gentle breeze at the film's opening that stirs the quiet living room, blowing up newspapers and magazines, granting these physical objects a momentary weightlessness like the wind itself. A intruder played by Koji Yakusho breaks into the house (which can barely be called a home anymore, as the family has disbanded and everyone is fleeing in their own way). Through his acts of rummaging and destruction, objects that once sat passively as inert props—the father’s teacup, the mother’s clothes, the kitchen's order—are uprooted from their fixed positions into a state of suspension. The characters are forced to re-experience these objects anew before placing them back where they belong。

Figure 5《Tokyo Sonato》

The characters' escape does not merely forge a path toward the future; it also serves to recollect the history of existence within a house laden with secrets and material belongings. Rising out of the desolate streets seen at the end of Retribution, the structure reveals its full form the first time the characters gather inside: a single-family Japanese residence, firmly rooted in the soil. If the characters bring a delicate emotional sensibility to the world, the house provides a grounding weight that prevents everything from scattering completely. This grounds the narrative built around the four family members, yet the question remains: how can one escape such an unyielding structure?

In Tokyo Sonata, there are no rituals to perform or learn, no specters to summon, nor spatial jumps across alter-realities like those in Pulse. The characters can rely only on the courage to "raise a hand" and the clarity of their gaze. When the father (Teruyuki Kagawa) visits the home of an unemployed friend, the friend skillfully pretends to be a busy executive in front of his family and guest. Yet in an instant, he is reduced to helpless embarrassment by his wife’s frozen posture and unmoving gaze. Later, when the friend's daughter remarks, "You and Dad must be working so hard," the vanity of this dinner-table performance is confirmed once more: under the subtle gaze of the wife, the grim truth spills out from beneath the mask of performance.

Similar moments recur around the father. We never witness how the truth is formally uncovered—perhaps the mother (Kyoko Koizumi) already knew the truth long before she saw her husband wandering among the unemployed with her own eyes. Reality in Tokyo Sonata does not exist as a logical object to be probed, but as a fluid phenomenon experienced through ephemeral, unknowable sensations.

This state of things is evident not only in how characters interact, but also in portraits of others and the gaze directed at objects, where unexamined concepts are replaced by a feeling of suspension. As Kagawa and his friend stand on a street corner lamenting their predicament, a crowd passes by. The friend quickly joins the walking throng. Due to the camera angle, we cannot see a single face; we see only human beings existing on the street as walking animals. In an instant, the earlier portraits of the unemployed shed their sociological weight. These definitive concepts—"the unemployed"—become ambiguous under the purest cinematic movement. Encased in grey streets and dim light, these living beings simply walk through a seemingly hopeless environment. Death does not arrive, yet the arrival of vitality seems to await the right catalyst. In Tokyo Sonata, the ghost-haunted street reveals its true face through the walking crowd.

Figure 6《Tokyo Sonato》

We also experience this unresolved ambiguity through repeated observations of the house itself. Once Kurosawa establishes the exterior of the house, its interior operates in stark contrast to the outside world. Time and again, the family of four gathers at the dining table. With this space at the center, Kurosawa shifts camera angles and distances—filming now from below the staircase, now from the living room looking through a kitchen cabinet. Rather than adhering strictly to the 180-degree rule to establish a coherent spatial layout centered on the kitchen, the erratic editing renders the kitchen strange and unfamiliar. Through the glass window lingering in the background, an eerie light shimmers from outside, while the sound of passing trains periodically invades the home. The house—the family's sole anchor—becomes deeply untrustworthy through these repeated framings. Moving from the kitchen to the living room, entryway, windowsill, second floor, and children's rooms, these spaces feel disconnected and indistinct. When the staircase connects the upper and lower floors, it acts as a site of rupture and destruction: an old electronic keyboard thrown down the stairs, and the youngest son accidentally tumbling down at his father's hands.

Figure 7、8《Tokyo Sonato》

The interior of the house, long since emptied and floating in space, foreshadows each character's eventual escape. The mother carries her own breeze as she flees the ruined house. Maintaining a steady pace, Kurosawa lets the camera ride with the wind, moving parallel to the convertible carrying her. It is hard to imagine a more tender farewell to a character. The father and youngest son undergo similar journeys, voicing their desperation and angst as they await their own sweeping breeze.

Figure 9《Tokyo Sonato》

After awakening from this dream, the mother is gently comforted by a ray of sunlight; the father gains a second life buried under dry leaves and a soft breeze; and the youngest son is freed from a dark room. Dragging heavy bodies marked by the scars of time, they return to that solid house, crossing the entryway into the living room and kitchen. For the first time—or perhaps once again—we see the entire space stirred by a breeze. From the living room to the kitchen and out to the entryway, the physical space, like the characters, finds stability through its own wind. Yet we know that only weightless things can be brought together by the wind's care.

Figure 10、11《Tokyo Sonato》

Inside, the characters can finally enjoy a meal—as if to soothe the wounds of their heavy bodies, or to affirm their existence within a floating state of consciousness. The film finds its own wind: from preparation to tasting, it reminds us that arduous labor without its due reward is unhealthy. Savoring the moment slowly, the cinema experiences concrete value at a steady pace. The wind then looks after the eldest son, and inside a cinema-like space, a breeze born of music and walking figures cares for the audience members who keep watching until the final frame.

Figure 12《Tokyo Sonato》

Tokyo Sonata is not an ode to the living, but an imitation of the slow, deliberate movement of ghosts at a uniform pace. The film reveals this ideal state early on: crowds walking down grey streets, cleaners changing into uniforms in an exposed shopping mall, and a neatly dressed cleaner stepping out from behind a restroom door after finishing work. These characters greet the first light of dawn as a brightening glow comforting the mother, and welcome the street breeze as a wind stirring all things. For Kurosawa, modern society is a society of specters. When solid structures can no longer be relied upon, maintaining the courage to form new relationships with things becomes the right of the specter—as well as its curse under the grey light hovering over the world.

Figure 13《Tokyo Sonato》

Are not the hollow historical specters of The Black Castle simply the conscious souls of modern ghosts? Trapped in their own histories, when these modern specters imagine figures who never existed in historical vacuums, are they fulfilling personal histories or rewriting grand narratives? For Kurosawa, the invisible can manifest only through artificial forms. Thus, we see the stylized texture of the ancient castle, the bizarre vines creeping through the dungeon, and the warm yellow light bathing the frame. Yet physical actions—slashing, combat, and warfare—are rendered with tangible authenticity rather than hyper-stylized spectacle. This produces a striking sensation: perceiving real human presence within a floating, artificial historical backdrop. This explains why the narrative balance shifts away from solving mysteries toward experiential moments, where solving a crime in the dungeon feels less like intellectual deduction and more like a shamanic ritual.

Figure 14《The Black Castle》

When Araki Murashige (Masahiro Motoki) uncovers the mystery before the crowd, our attention shifts away from logical exposition toward physical movement: standing, crouching, kneeling, Murashige's commanding presence, and his path through the room. Convincing truths spring to life visually long before our minds construct a logical explanation. These historical specters assert their place in history through swift, decisive actions. How can this be seen as anything other than an extension of Tokyo Sonata? When the light that nurtures specters lingers on the world, all characters must do is maintain their inner resolve, allowing weightlessness to soothe their bodies when external pressures become overwhelming. Thus, The Black Castle culminates in an escape: amid rustling wheat fields, the characters are carried to the end of their journeys by a soft, luminous light.

In the end, one still recalls the house in Tokyo Sonata, standing at the center of the world, gathering scattered objects and allowing them to exist freely, letting lightness fill its solid interior. Is this not reason enough for us, when picking up the things we love, to look at them with a gentler, more equal, and weightless gaze?