‘Nagi Notes’ Review: Koji Fukada’s Gentle Study of Art and Fellowship

Nagi Notes, writer-director Koji Fukada’s latest, offers a thoughtfully modulated tribute to the communal coziness, haphazard beauty and organic shape of rural life in contemporary Japan. That all comes filtered through the eyes of two creative women, sculptor Yoriko (Takako Matsu) and her latest model Yuri (Shizuka Ishibashi), an architect from Tokyo, who reconnect at Yoriko’s place in the Japanese hinterlands. (Yuri used to be married to Yoriko’s brother.)

At the same time, through storylines that explore LGBTQ+ identity with a frankness that’s rare in Japanese cinema, this inclusive drama doesn’t sugarcoat how stifling, even soul-crushing, villages like the titular town of Nagi can be when traditional values are practically synonymous with menacing conformity. Think Brokeback Mountain meets La Belle Noiseuse but with both lesbians and gays and a more hopeful ending.

Cumulatively, it makes for an exportable slice of festival-friendly arthouse humanism that’s easy to consume but perhaps almost as easy to forget, less interesting than Fukada’s unsettling breakthrough Harmonium, which played Cannes Un Certain Regard strand in 2016, or his melancholy, elegantly structured exploration of grief, Love Life, a Venice competitor from 2022.

The titular town is a serene speck of a place in the west of Japan, near a mountain also called Nagi, a beautiful but raggedy landscape that patchworks swathes of virgin forest, farmed fields and twinkling solar panels. Around 5,000 people reside in the town, give or take the shifting sub-population of soldiers from the Japanese Self-Defense Forces who ship in and out for noisy munitions drills in the mountains nearby. The inconvenience of that military presence has brought certain compensations from the government, such as a strikingly modern, geometric contemporary art museum (Nagi MOCA) that draws visitors not put off by the arduous journey required to get there. (The town isn’t serviced by the national railway.) As one character observes, travelling to Nagi from Tokyo takes longer than it would to go abroad.  

Yoriko Endo, an unmarried woman in her early 40s or so, grew up in Nagi and went away to attend art school but came back to live on the family farm. Her brother Masato, seen only as a sculpture but never in the flesh, should have been the one to take over their family’s business according to the custom of primogeniture, which favors the eldest male child. But Masato went off to become an architect, married Yuri and went to live in Taiwan, so Yoriko is the one who’s taken over the family farmhouse and a large barn that she’s had converted into a rustic studio. In the mornings, she milks her neighbors’ cows and then spends the rest of her time working on her art.

Fukada’s attention to the artistic process here is one of the film’s great delights, and congruent with his interest, seen in his other films, in how people get things done, be it cooking, social work, pop stardom or car mechanics. Yoriko mostly makes wooden portraits of people she knows (the finished sculptures seen here are credited to Ami Yoshida), pieces hand-carved from blocks of wood donated to her by local forestry workers. But before she can pick up a chisel, she makes copious sketches of her subjects, and then maquettes made from clay, all of which require the subject to sit in the studio for hours chatting with Yoriko while she works. The better she gets to know someone, the better the final product. Crucially, Yoriko sees her process as a three-way collaboration between herself, the subject and the material, especially the wood — an approach that couldn’t be more different from the (mostly male) great artist-genius stereotype usually peddled in films. Indeed, one might even say that Nagi itself — its landscape, its people, its history — also informs and shapes Yoriko’s work as well.

As a trained architect, Yuri can appreciate her former sister-in-law’s painstaking technique. It’s clear that the two women liked one another back when Yuri was married to Masato, even if they weren’t close. Now that their legal bond as family has been dissolved, they have a chance to reimagine their relationship as intellectual equals, exploring their common interest in aesthetics, and their common experience as female practitioners in fields dominated by men. Without making a big song and dance about it, Fukada and co. quietly point out how the still dominant patriarchy of Japan warps things in all kinds of ways.

There are two teenage boys in the film, Haruki (Waku Kawaguchi) and Keita (Kiyora Fuiwara), whose inchoate erotic feelings for one another, a love that can still barely say its name in provincial Japan, forms a subplot here. At one point, Keita asks Yuri if she and Yoriko are lovers (they’re not); it’s as if he finds it easier to imagine that’s the nature of their relationship rather than that they might just be friends. And yet, Keita’s clearly picked up on something that no one has ever told him: that Yoriko is actually gay and was once deeply in love with Haruki’s mother Sanae (Sawako Fujima), who died years ago but still haunts Yoriko’s imagination.

Fukada stealthily shades in these subtleties of feeling into the story with exacting skill, creating a drama that touches on social issues but never feels issues-driven. The characters themselves are always at the forefront, and it’s obvious that Yoriko’s philosophy about the collaborative nature of her art applies equally well to Fukada’s cinematic practice. He may have written the words and devised the plot, but the film’s spirit only comes alive through the collaboration of the actors (the cast is excellent throughout), the craftspeople and the technicians.

It’s such a seamless, harmoniously composed work, effortlessly edited and elegantly shot, that it’s almost too easy to just drift along with it, like floating down a river on a canoe, letting its currents take control. This isn’t a grabby, attention seeker of a film, but a quiet, watchful sort of movie that whispers its secrets sotto voce.