Lee Sang-il, “Kokuho” (2025)
An ambitious and sumptuous work, paying homage to Japan’s kabuki theatre, its craft and performers, “Kokuho” centres around the conflicts and contradictions that exist within this cultural institution, with a particular focus on its traditions and how those may cause harm and stifle this art, particularly during periods of rapid political, economic and social change. Based on a 2018 novel by Shuichi Yoshida, who worked three years as a stagehand in kabuki theatres as part of his research, “Kokuho” follows the lives of two actors over a 50-year period. In Nagasaki in the 1960s, renowned kabuki performer Hanai Hanjiro (Ken Watanabe) is invited to a New Year party by the Tachibana yakuza family, where he watches an amateur performance by Kikuo Tachibana, the young teenage son of the yakuza family leader. Impressed by Kikuo’s performance as an onnagata (female impersonator), Hanjiro wants to speak to him but the party is ambushed by a rival yakuza gang and most of the Tachibana family, excepting Kikuo, is wiped out. Kikuo later tries to avenge his father’s death but fails. A year later, after Kikuo’s release from prison or community service, Hanjiro accepts the boy as an apprentice in kabuki over the objections of his wife Sachiko, on the basis of Kikuo’s yakuza background and his lack of family connections in kabuki.
Nevertheless, Hanjiro trains Kikuo in kabuki alongside his own young son Shunsuke and soon it is apparent that Kikuo has a natural flair for kabuki acting and is highly motivated to succeed. The two boys form a brotherly bond, but a rivalry also develops as there can be only one heir to Hanai Hanjiro and his title. Hanjiro pairs the boys as an onnagata duo for their debut performance which attracts the attention of the head of the Mitomo corporation, who arranges for the boys to star in an even bigger kabuki act in Osaka. The youngsters become an overnight sensation.
A traffic accident in which Hanjiro is severely injured leads him to choose Kikuo over Shunsuke as his understudy, leading to a rift between the young men (now played by Ryo Yoshizawa and Ryusei Yokohama) that more or less worsens over the next couple of decades. When Hanjiro eventually dies from diabetes, Kikuo inherits his title (and his debts) but his lack of family connections within the kabuki world leads to a severe career downturn. Public opinion turns against Kikuo once his yakuza background and an illicit affair, resulting in an illegitimate daughter, become known. Kikuo is reduced to performing kabuki for peanuts at hotels and almost loses his life at one such place when he is pursued by drunken thugs. While Kikuo is eking out an existence, Shunsuke (despite having walked away from kabuki for eight years) gets starring roles in kabuki from veteran onnagata performer Mangiku (Min Tanaka).
With the passage of time, Kikuo’s career fortunes take a turn for the better and he is reunited with Shunsuke as an onnagata duo; however, their time performing together turns out to be short-lived as Shunsuke suffers from diabetes which leads to his having his leg amputated. His condition worsens to the extent that after a performance he is rushed to hospital at the point of death.
Attempting to pack in 50 years of two individuals’ lifetimes, to say nothing of the political, economic and social changes in Japan that affect public perceptions of kabuki, resulting in the art form’s rise and fall and rise again in popularity, into a 3-hour film results in a patchy plot with uneven character development. The ups and downs that Kikuo and Shunsuke experience through their lives as performers and ordinary people seem to occur at random, with no historical context that might help explain why they experience bad luck when they do. Though Yoshizawa and Yokohama, playing Kikuo and Shunsuke respectively, do tremendous work in portraying two onnagata performers, their characters don’t appear very well developed: that may be in part due to Japanese cultural expectations that men – even men impersonating women for a living – must be stoic and keep their emotions in check even as their lives and personal relationships may be collapsing around them. Personal sacrifice and emotional self-repression come early to Kikuo: he makes a Faustian pact with the devil at a shrine to become the best kabuki actor in Japan, with his young daughter Ayano as witness. Years later, Ayano will remind Kikuo of what he has done, and the resultant suffering he has caused her and her mother in his quest and his consequent abandonment of the two. Whether Kikuo understands what he has done and feels remorse, we do not know, and his reaction (or perhaps non-reaction) becomes part of the film’s complexity as a psychological study.
Where the film truly excels and outdoes itself is in its lavish depiction of kabuki theatre, paying great attention to the performers and the details of their preparation and training, and the use of classic kabuki plays “The Love Suicides at Sonezaki”, “The Maiden of Dojoji Temple” and “Heron Maiden” to comment on incidents in Kikuo and Shunsuke’s lives and their psychological states. Viewers may get the impression that the two men (and others like them) find emotional release only through performing these and other kabuki dramas. The film also focuses on issues audiences outside Japan will readily recognise: the personal sacrifices an artist might make in pursuit of personal ambition, and the suffering this might cause to others; and the possibility that an art form may be in danger of becoming stale, impervious to change and thus irrelevant to contemporary audiences if it does not accept and embrace outsiders with natural talent.
A mini-series might have been a better vehicle for adapting the Yoshida novel, to take in a deeper exploration of the rivalry and bond between Kikuo and Shunsuke, and the historical circumstances that influence their careers and relationships.