Director Sotoshi Miki made his debut in 2005 with In The pool, an adaptation of Hideo Okuda’s excellent best selling novel of the same name, which followed five neurotic characters on their road to recovery with the help of the equally deranged and larger than life psychiatrist Dr. Ichiro Irabu. His latest film Adrift in Tokyo, which played to sell out crowds at this year’s Raindance Film Festival, has confirmed his position at the head of the pack of Japan’s new wave of comedy auteurs. However it is his 2005 follow up to In the Pool that will be the first glimpse of this eclectic talent for the majority of UK viewers: Turtles are Surpringly Fast Swimmers is released 23rd February by Third Window Films, and is sure to delight with its breezy charm and quirky narrative.

The film centres around the “extraordinarily” ordinary young wife Suzume ‘sparrow’ Katakura (played with aplomb by Juri Ueno), whose only contact with her businessman husband is a daily long-distance call to remind her to feed the turtle, Taro. Despite having a brightly painted shell Taro
           

the turtle is not a fast swimmer; nor is this particularly surprising, although just about everything else in the film is. Aside from Taro the only person in Sparrow’s life is her best friend Kujaku and mirror opposite ('Peacock'), who has beaten her at everything including being born first (cue Amelie-esque flashback of the two girls building sandcastles on the beach; whilst Sparrow’s is a disappointing hillock, a camera pan reveals Peacock standing triumphantly next to her three tiered oriental pagoda).

One day, after diving to avoid a cartload of runaway apples on the Cliffside staircase of her seaside town, Sparrow notices a poster the size of a postage stamp with the words ‘Spies Wanted’. Perhaps in a bid to break her routine, or to do something that Peacock hasn’t, Sparrow follows the directions on the poster (as Alice followed the White Rabbit) to an anonymous house where she is ‘interviewed’ by a middle aged couple named Etsuko and Shizou, claiming to be sleeper agents for a foreign power whose call to arms they have been awaiting for twelve years. Sparrow eagerly joins their ranks, which, she gradually discovers, includes the owner of her favourite ‘So-So’ ramen shop and the old hag who has sat in the park feeding the ants for as long as she can remember. Sparrow is told she makes such a good spy because she is so inconspicuous, and her initiation includes going into a supermarket and buying $30 of groceries without raising suspicions, whilst very obviously shadowed by her new mentors.

After being employed as a spy Sparrow returns to her life, which although being essentially the same, suddenly feels totally fresh. Everything around her has changed, and even the plumber who unblocked her drain at the beginning of the film works as a wire taper for the shady Department of Public Safety who have began to show an interest in the insignificant town. Aside from being an utterly wacky comedy Miki’s film, therefore, has some clever insights into how individual perception can transform the nature of the reality we find ourselves in, which essentially makes it a rather shrewd work of magical realism not unlike the novels of Haruki Murakami. If that weren’t encouragement enough this film has the funniest toilet gag I have ever seen and is worth the price of admission alone.

Words > Andrew Wensum