> Interviews

With Each Passing Breath
Kawakami Atiqa (Director)

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Inserting oneself between mentor and apprentice

Sato Hiroaki (SH): In this film, there is a sense of the improvisatory as associated with the classical art of rokyoku performance as well as a sense of the improvisatory as associated with shooting a documentary, and then we also feel a sensitivity to the distance between filmmaker and subject, and these elements really seemed to me to form a three-way tension with each other. Your characteristic camera position, which people call the “Atiqa shot,” also seemed to me to give expression to the depth of the relationships among your subjects, and I sensed that knowing how you used the camera to insert yourself into this relationship, between mentor and apprentice, might be key to interpreting this film.

Kawakami Atiqa (KA): I think the sensitivity to distance in this film can be explained by the fact that I had to think about what I could do to gain entry into the world of rokyoku (a form of solo musical storytelling accompanied by shamisen). People of the master rokyoku performer Minatoya Koryu’s generation do not put up their guard when presenting themselves to the camera but tend to show themselves as they are. I thought that if I could get Koryu to see me as she saw Kosome, as one of her apprentices, that I would be able to insert myself into the relationship between Kosome and Koryu and Tamagawa Yuko (Koryu’s shamisen accompanist). And so, like Kosome, I took care when I was meeting with the two senior performers to greet them formally, bowing to the ground with my middle three fingers pressed together on each hand. When we were backstage, I followed what Kosome and the other young apprentices were doing and kept to positions that were out of the way. When I was holding the camera, even when I was right next to the two senior performers, I created some distance so as not to bother them. You could probably say that the camerawork was not about bringing the camera in to show something so much as just being there together with them. Creating a very thin sense of distance.

SH: There really is a sense of “being there together.” What was it that initially led you to want to make a documentary about rokyoku?

KA: Initially this goes back to my earlier film Koryu Minatoya IN-TUNE (2015). When I first encountered Koryu, I was surprised by the fact that I was hearing her perform alongside only about twenty other people. The starting point was the idea that if I filmed Koryu onstage and got her out there, more people would go to see her perform live. So in that vein, I made a couple of programs for the live streaming channel DOMMUNE, and in the process there were more opportunities to do things like have Koryu perform rokyoku in front of young people, in a “battle of the bands” with the singer Tomokawa Kazuki, for example. From Koryu’s perspective, she probably came to trust me as someone who could bring in audiences. But as much as I wanted to film Koryu’s artistry, it turned out to be something not so easily filmed. I wanted to capture her performance in the flesh, but it seemed to end up evading me. Feeling that what I had filmed was not what I had seen, I thought that if I went to film her rehearsing I could maybe get a little closer to her rokyoku. So I asked Kosome to bring me with her to a practice session and that’s how I started going out to Tamagawa Yuko’s home in Akabane.

SH: As the filmmaker, what would you say was particularly impressive about Koryu?

KA: This is just my own personal impression, but in a word, I would say her rokyoku itself. Koryu narrates stories through her body, and when she does, the scene emerges like magic. Before you know it, you find yourself standing there in it, across time and space. It even seems like you can feel the sensation of rain or snow on your skin. Of course, the expressive power of the shamisen performer as the shamisen engages in a tense back-and-forth with Koryu’s singing also plays an important role here. In any case, despite being the master that she was, Koryu for a long time lived the life of an itinerant entertainer, and as a result there was basically no coverage of her. I thought that someone, at least, should record her for posterity.

But still I was avoiding something. I didn’t just dive in with shallow determination to take on her life. That resolve was something I felt take hold of me gradually. Actually, in 2015, I got sick and was bedridden for three months. After that, I felt that I wanted to dedicate the life I had regained to this work, and I completely changed my approach. Instead of me telling a story, I began searching for ways to use myself as a tunnel, to yieldingly transmit a story that was out there on the other side.

SH: In terms of the order in which you met them, Koryu was first, and then her apprentice Kosome came next, right? But you were closer in age to Kosome for one thing, and I felt that your relationship to Koryu was depicted with a different sensitivity to distance. How did you go about forming these relationships?

KA: I think that, as Koryu’s apprentice, Kosome also really wanted to see as much of her work as possible recorded for posterity. Kosome imagined in her own way what I wanted to ask, and she and Yuko would drink tea with Koryu and would try together to get Koryu, who in ordinary life was not very articulate, to share stories about her past. Later I learned that Kosome liked to go to the public baths, so I invited her, and we would go together. The two of us were differently positioned, but we shared the feeling of wanting to know more about Koryu’s rokyoku, and it seems to me that our relationship quite naturally grew deeper.

The world of rokyoku

SH: Basically, I think you started out with the intention of filming the transmission of artistic craft from mentor to apprentice, but partway through you ended up having to document Koryu stepping back from performing, lying bedridden at home, and in states of advancing illness. What were your thoughts as the project proceeded?

KA: The day we filmed the scene of Koryu in her sickbed, I was feeling despair over the fact that her body still held so many rokyoku stories but that none would be left behind. Kosome was probably experiencing exactly the same shock as me, but in the scene, she is unable to give up hope and says, “it may be too difficult for you to go all the way to Asakusa, but we can get a shamisen player and you can perform one more time in Inuyama” (where Koryu lived). In reality, even that was unfeasible.

This is something that occurred to me later, but although there was sadness in seeing Koryu step back from performing at the Mokubatei Theater and in no longer being able to hear her rokyoku, these were probably necessary developments for the growth of the rokyoku community. Respected mentors upon whom people come to depend are a part of any field, and when those mentors depart, others have to find the determination to step up in order to begin to fill the gaps left in their place. This is how the new stories that begin to work on me come about. It’s also why I don’t resist the things in front of the camera but have instead turned my camera yieldingly toward what I see in front of me.

SH: I like that scene, when the cassette player comes out next to her sickbed and Kosome plays one of Koryu’s own performances, and Koryu reacts in a way that says, that’s craft!

KA: I also like this part, when the sound of Koryu’s rokyoku fills the room from the cassette player while white light shines in through the window. One understands that what is being filmed here is the arrival of a special time, a time of sanctity. Kosome also did not expect to hear Koryu’s voice coming out of the tape player and became agitated herself. I was concentrating at that moment on whether the person lying in the bed was Iwahashi Toshie, which is Koryu’s real name in ordinary life, or the rokyoku master Minatoya Koryu, thinking that if it was Iwahashi Toshie I wouldn’t show her face. When she asked if the story we were listening to on the tape recording was “Osome and Hisamatsu,” I was convinced that she was still Koryu and I brought her face into the frame for the first time. This situation was not unlike the experience that I had had previously when I had filmed the butoh dancer Ohno Kazuo late in life.

I think that even in his bed Ohno was probably still dancing the whole time, but there were only some moments where he started dancing in a way that an amateur like me could recognize as such. That moment occurred in much the same way that Koryu starts moving her hand while listening to the tape, so I experienced a sense of déjà vu here, which probably also brought me a kind of calm.

In rokyoku, there is no method or textbook. The story is just transmitted, from the body of the singer to other bodies, and from mentor to apprentice. Here, the living organism of a rokyoku story residing within Koryu’s body undulates forth, as waves, from the movements of her hand into the waves in the sheets. Watching this, I thought to myself, “oh, she’s really singing.” A rokyoku performance usually lasts about thirty minutes. Koryu was such a breathing expert that it was difficult to tell where she was taking breaths during her performances. But when I saw the movements of her hand, I felt I could read her breathing like a dance. It struck me that if I were her apprentice, this would be a really valuable lesson. I thought that perhaps she was offering one last training session to Kosome, that she was perhaps on stage.

SH: After this, the film climactically depicts Kosome, now without her mentor, as she undertakes her rokyoku stage debut. This sequence is very well crafted as a document of the day of her debut and also conveys the sense that, as the director, you took on the filming with a high degree of determination. Did you shoot this sequence by yourself?

KA: Yes. That’s why there aren’t any shots of the stage taken from the front. The reason I shot it this way, from the side of the stage, is that here Kosome has taken the position that Koryu used to occupy, while another young apprentice is standing at a position in the wings where Kosome used to stand to open and close the stage curtains, so there is a dramatic changing of places. Shooting from this position also clearly shows the relationship between Kosome and her new mentor Yuko. So I deliberately chose not to film the stage from the front.

SH: It seems like what you set out to shoot as a documentary about Koryu expands along the way into a documentary about the world of rokyoku itself. How were you thinking about this while you were filming?

KA: Honestly, I don’t really know. I wasn’t really intending to capture the rokyoku world in panorama. But you can glimpse a lot of worlds from Yuko and Koryu’s small apartment complex rooms. Rokyoku is an artform that is said to have started as a kind of lowly street entertainment, and a lot of the stories take the side of the weak. When I saw the finished film, it struck me that the film itself was like a rokyoku story about human nature and emotions (a ninjo banashi).

In the world of rokyoku as a traditional performing art, people call each another “older brother” or “older sister” even though they are not related by blood. I was sometimes a little envious of this. I found it moving that people sharing the same objective could form relationships constituting a quasi-family. I think the connections there are strong. In the rokyoku world, there is a rule that “apprentices must not be sent home on an empty stomach,” and the young initiates all end up gaining weight (laughs). The curtain raisers and attendants probably don’t make any money, but their mentors at least see to it that they are well fed. They have a way of socializing that generally incorporates this kind of lifestyle, and I was really grateful that they brought me into it and extended the same warmth to me, saying, “you eat too, Kawakami.” Sometimes I would think that Kosome was getting a lecture, but then they would turn to me and say, “I’m talking to you too,” or Yuko would say, “take some umeboshi home with you,” or “take some manju cakes with you.” They really treated me like one of their grandchildren.

SH: Now that you mention it, Koryu and Yuko lead pretty modest, humble lives. I think one of the appealing things about this film is the way that you capture the space of the apartment complexes where they live.

KA: I really wanted to include a scene where Yuko says, “there’s nothing here.” She’s feeding everyone homemade sandwiches and giving us tea, and she says, “I let my daughter take all my teacups, so all that’s left are odds and ends.” There’s nothing, but there’s still love. Then there’s the scene where she’s preparing sashimi for the cats. She’s gone out and bought sashimi for cats, not for herself. When she’s cutting up the sashimi, she says, “I have to cut it into small pieces for granny or she won’t be able to chew it,” but she’s talking about a cat. It struck me that her family extended even to the cats in the park. When I shot this scene, I felt I had succeeded in capturing this world. When I was filming Kosome’s rokyoku debut, I had the uneasy feeling that the film was not finished, but that feeling ended when I shot this scene. It ended up being the last thing I shot.

Editing sessions

SH: I’d like to talk a bit more about the making of the film. You were struggling a little with the editing, but what made you start to feel a kind of sense of direction was your experience participating in the 2021 Yamagata Documentary Dojo residency program, right?

KA: That’s right. At first, I was approaching this as a project with more than one storyline. When the rokyoku star Kunimoto Takeharu died suddenly in his fifties, Tamagawa Nanafuku really made a tremendous effort to try and fill the substantial gap he had left behind. The masterful Sawamura Toyoko, who had served as Kunimoto Takeharu’s shamisen partner, also backed up Nanafuku on the shamisen. Meanwhile, Toyoko’s own apprentice Sawamura (now Hirosawa) Mifune was supporting Toyoko while working hard to come into her own as a shamisen player. At the shooting stage, I had followed these developments with the idea of portraying this other loss within the rokyoku community as another storyline, but in the editing stage, I decided that it would be easier to get the message across if I just let one story drive the film and dropped this other material.

It was during the Documentary Dojo residency that I realized this was best. But the Dojo itself didn’t just give me the answer. I heard that Fujioka Asako, who organized the Dojo, had told the film practitioners participating as mentors not to just give answers, but to help draw our own answers out of those of us working on films. With the help of the mentors and the other participants, I felt like I was able to draw out a solution that satisfied me.

A rokyoku film festival held at EuroLive in Shibuya provided another occasion for progress in the struggle to determine which scenes to keep and which to drop. One of the event organizers, Horikoshi Kenzo of Eurospace, gave me the opportunity to exhibit a cut of the film as a work in progress and I put together a short version of about thirty-forty minutes. This process enabled me to see clearly what it was that I wanted to retain, and to proceed while remaining faithful to the elements that I absolutely did not want to let go. It brought me these realizations as I was editing.

SH: And what kinds of sessions did you have as you were bringing the film to completion?

KA: As I was working toward the two-hour version, the editor Hata Takeshi, who was one of the mentors from the Documentary Dojo, came onboard and told me that he was going to start by assembling the film’s skeleton. But when he sent me what he had done, I was shocked. None of what I had thought was important was there! I sent a flustered message on the spot, saying, “this is no good, none of what I wanted to keep is in there.” Hata was apparently shopping at the grocery store when he read this, but he replied quickly to my hasty message, saying, “I know, I expected you to react this way.” Hata’s plan was apparently to assemble the course of events up to the point of Kosome’s rokyoku debut as a skeletal framework, a hollow structure consisting of just the bones, and then from there to go about restoring the flesh in discussing with me what was missing.

SH: That’s his process?

KA: I don’t know if he always does things this way. This was the first time that I had worked with someone else on editing, so I was quite anxious. Hata was also a veteran, and I was not sure how much I should assert my own opinions or how I might change things. I was feeling anxious, and then I just saw the skeleton cut without understanding his intentions and was shocked.

From there, Hata inspected each scene really closely one by one, and I also tried to give up any unnecessary investment of ego and my sense of wanting to control the film. He tried everything that he could try and worked really carefully to find the best story for the film. I would get things and review them after a period of time, and then we would go back and have another session, and we continued this way for what ended up being almost one year.

SH: Do you have any thoughts about the fact that, starting from your experience in the Documentary Dojo, you took something you had worked on by yourself and completed it in drawing on the help of others?

KA: Ideally, even at the shooting stage there would have been a camera crew and a sound recording crew. That would have been best. But there was no budget for this film, and Koryu was already eighty eight, so there was not time to wait. I started at a point where there was no choice but to go in alone. Other people getting involved made things feel fresh, like my film had become “our film.” This was something I felt happy about.

SH: In closing, I would like to go back to the camerawork. People talk about the sensitivity to distance in your camerawork, and about the “Atiqa shot.” You are of course thoughtful about camera position as it relates to the situation, but what do you think it means that people say this sensitivity to distance is a characteristic of your work?

KA: You mean the “Atiqamera” (laughs)? In the interview with Kosome, for example, she was actually talking at about that distance from me, and I thought that it would be good for people watching to feel like they were sitting right next to a friend and talking, or to feel like they were being spoken to. Personally, while I am conscious of the act of filming, I don’t think about it from a so-called theoretical angle. I think that one of the key points this time around was something like being together or being alongside other people and the thinness of boundaries that this entails. Of course, people in the roles of mentor and apprentice, or filmmaker and subject, do draw boundary lines as a matter of convenience. But when I think about whether there are actually boundaries there in reality, I find myself wondering whether they actually exist. Of course, there are people who are hard to get along with, but in the end those people also lead lives within society.

SH: In other words, a sensitivity to distance that is attuned to a borderless world. Thank you for taking the time to talk with me today.

Compiled by Sato Hiroaki
Translated by Ryan Cook

Photography, Video: Oshita Yumi / 2023-10-11