There are two ways of getting to know this man—as Beat Takeshi the comedian, or Kitano Takeshi, the acclaimed filmmaker and favorite among arthouse film aficionados. One knows him as a comedian, a part of two-man team doing “manzai,” a kind of stand-up funny man show composed of one doing the straight, deadpan role and the other the “boke,” the fool or dimwit. As part of the Two-Beat, Takeshi Kitano shocked everyone by going outside the boxed Japanese tradition of manzai, which drew laughter from misunderstanding, pun and self-deprecation. On Japanese TV, Kitano with his partner Beat Kiyoshi developed a fast banter out of the miseries of the aged, the disabled, and even children. With the world outraged and his works subjected to censorship, he went on to become an actor and even acted opposite David Bowie in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, as a POW camp sergeant. It was directed by Oshima Nagisa, a director who carried the notoriety of two films, In the Realm of the Senses and In the Realm of Passion, works that blurred the line between art and pornography.
Takeshi Kitano wrote how the Japanese audience laughed at the sight of him doing drama. Not to be dissuaded, he began making films.
By the time Kitano released his film Sonatine in 1993, the world’s attention had been drawn toward him—he with those long shots, camera works that played with stasis, and acting that was non-acting. It was, however, in 1997, when his Hana-bi (Fireworks) was awarded the Golden Lion in the Venice Film Festival that Kitano was taken seriously as an artist. He would make more films. Takeshi Kitano would experience his lows but he persisted.
But why belabor this long intro into the life of Takeshi Kitano? The good news first: Netflix has started streaming Asakusa Kid, a film based on the memoir written by the man.
The bad news (for some with the highest of expectations): nothing about the arts of Takeshi Kitano are in Asakusa Kid. So, what’s the excitement then?
Asakusa Kid should be a wonderland trip for Japanese cinema buffs or anyone who is passionate about the many dimensions of a culture as depicted on-screen. That there are films about the beginning of a comedian that has nothing to do with the refined and rigorous aesthetics of Japanese culture. That one can perorate on the origin of Japanese cinema without the burden of anime and technology. That, perhaps, manga or Japanese comics did not originate from drawings but from the disturbances in the hearts of the artists.
Asakusa Kid tells the story of this man, Takeshi Kitano, a dropout from Meiji University, one of the oldest universities in Japan, who ventures into Asakusa, works as an elevator operator and janitor, and becomes an apprentice to a top comedian in a strip club. The film is also the tale of the last days of live shows in the “shitamachi,” referring to the low areas of Edo but evolved to become “downtown” in all its seediness.
Asakusa was the entertainment district during the Edo Period. This was the “ukiyo,” the territory of the floating world. Add the “e” to it to mean picture and you have ukiyo-e, the visualization of a fluid era where the courtesan consorted with the “ronin” or masterless samurai, a misnomer because during the Edo Period, the samurai as a class had all but disappeared, where the proto-yakuza dealt with the merchant, and where the “burakumin” or outcaste thrived, and poets like Bashō wrote of geisha, Kabuki actors, and other ephemera.
Asakusa begins with the nostalgia of the place, where a young man is initiated into an art form that is meant to kill the old art forms because that is the only highway to success. But this is Asakusa also where the debt of gratitude to a master is never forgotten. In a tender scene, Takeshi Kitano now a successful TV performer, visits his mentor, Fukami, and gives him the reward money he won from a contest. It is close to an insult—a pupil giving his master an allowance—but the master gruffly pokes fun at the benevolence, that act masking gallant defeat. The two go out to spend the money on food and drinks in a bar where they entertain the crowd with their banter. Hailing a cab, the master gives Takeshi a fare from the money he had earlier received from his protégé.
A treat in Asakusa Kid is the man who plays Takeshi Kitano. He is Yuya Yagira, the then 12-year-old actor in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Dare mo Shiranai (Nobody Knows), which won for him the Best Actor in Cannes, the youngest in the history of that film concourse.
Tender and brutal, vulnerable but daring, Yuya Yagira’s Takeshi Kitano pays tribute to a man who crosses over from comedy to drama, tracking how art mirrors the absurd and the lofty, a refraction, too, of the contradictions that projects about humanity inhabit.
There is another gift for fans wondering where Takeshi Kitano got his idea to make all his actors perform a kind of Busby Berkeley tap-dance show in his blustery “remake” of Zatoichi, the immortal series originated by Katsu Shintaro as the Blind Swordsman. In the final scene of Asakusa Kid, the master and his pupil do a tap dance, a nod to the magic of old Hollywood that gloried once in the underbelly of Tokyo’s Asakusa, affirming the inexorably inter-national character of cinema.
Asakusa Kid stars Mugi Kadowaki who, as the stripper aspiring to be a singer, is regret and bravado personified; Honami Suzuki, gritty and hopeful even when her partner, the master comedian, refuses to see the fall of their theater. Finally, behold Yo Oizumi as Senzaburo Fukami, the master comedian. He is the ultimate tragic figure, elegant in his look because as an entertainer in a world that is slowly fading, hunger is trivial compared to image and fashion.
Asakusa Kid is produced by Django Film and Nikkatsu, and distributed by Netflix. It is directed by Gekidan Hitori.