A social allegory and romance built around literal pits of human excrement, Japanese filmmaker Junji Sakamoto’s Okiku and the World isn’t for the squeamish, but it still manages to be thoughtful, resonant, and emotionally impactful.
Set in Edo in the late 1850s, Okiku and the World tells the story of three people struggling to make ends meet while hovering around or below the poverty line. Okiku (Haru Kuroki) is a teacher, currently caring for her disgraced, aging samurai father in a run down row house. Chuji (Kanichiro), on the other hand, is a poor man who agrees to partner up with an other enterprising young upstart to collect and sell buckets of poop from the city to farmers as fertilizer, after his hustle recycling used paper fails to pay off. It’s not a glamorous job, with Chujo and his partner, Yasuke (Ikematsu Sosuke), facing any amount of degradation, but an the former paper seller and the teacher start to develop feelings for one another that cross class boundaries.
It’s rather obvious (and somewhat unsubtle) that Okiku and the World is less about Edo in the mid-1800s and more of a metaphor for how people are living in the world today. For this thirtieth film, Sakamoto – shooting predominantly in a black and white style that looks slick and modern amidst all of the period production design – has a lot to say about the exploitation of the poor. There’s a lot in here about predatory/ineffectual landlords, the old and wealthy looking down upon the young, and how easily one can become jaded and cynical witnessing inequality on such a wide scale.
It works, and once Okiku and the World moves from looking at literal shit to emotional shit, Sakamoto’s story becomes a lot more intricate, via a midpoint twist that changes the dynamic between its titular character and her crush. It’s a tender story about a world where the have-nots are treated with senseless cruelty and salvation can be found in the most unlikely places.
But – and I can’t stress this enough – squeamish viewers might want to look for their social commentary and romance someplace else. When I say there’s a lot of shit to wade through in Okiku and the World, I mean that very literally, complete with plenty of goopy, ploppy sound effects. But if you, like Chuji, can get past that, Okiku and the World is quite a treat.
Okiku and the World screens as part of the 2023 Reel Asian Film Festival on Thursday, November 9 at 8:00pm at TIFF Bell Lightbox.
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