His Motorbike, Her Island

And thus the legend of Riki Takeuchi is born: in the unlikely form of a breezy, rebellious romance from Obayashi…

Many major Japanese actors had rather modest beginnings, with roles where they hadn’t yet found their voices and show little sign of their post-stardom images. For examples just among gangster movie stalwarts, see Joe Shishido or Bunta Sugawara’s inconspicuously innocuous early turns. Yet the fresh-faced Riki Takeuchi’s first major role set a clear course; who better a man and what better a film to have introduced the avid biker youth than Nobuhiko Obayashi? Through the 1980s, the overlooked underground legend underwent by far the most mainstream phase of his career. This was the period when he cranked out several movies for the decade’s biggest commercial juggernaut, Kadokawa Pictures, who specialized in shamelessly direct marketing cycles where they’d publish tailor-made, mostly youth-targeting books for bigger pre-planned movie releases. But it wasn’t really about that for Obayashi, as he clearly believed in such material from a creative perspective — even if this time (only) his youth picture was fully rooted in here-and-now reality.

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Kou Hashimoto (Riki Takeuchi, Dead or Alive; Fudoh: The New Generation) is living the fast life in every literal and figurative sense. Having already grown weary of his college life and overly sweet, passive, budding homemaker girlfriend Fuyumi (Noriko Watanabe, Ninja Wars), Kou is on a trip on his beloved Kawasaki motorbike (“autobike” as they say) to Tokyo just to break up with her. To Kou’s good fortune (or at least as it initially seems to be), on the way over — then again at the hotspring — he comes across the inquisitive Miyoko aka Miiyo (Kiwako Harada, Hana’s Miso Soup). Beyond the warm, ultra-coquettish reception Miiyo gives, Kou senses a free-spirited, free-roaming rebel girl after his own heart the likes which he thought he’d never find and might not have even existed in Japan (as she’s also an eye-catching anomaly to the biker gang clique Kou hangs out/spars with). But Miiyo is really eying Kou’s ride. 

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Of course, the seasoned rebel rider Kou who’s travelled far and wide on his bike has some kinds of special feelings about it himself. But Miiyo takes her interest to yet another level, voicing all kinds of compliments, admiration and vague arousal towards everything from its design to the sounds the engine makes. She’s not just into riding motorbikes, but closes her eyes as she caresses them and moans when embracing and pressing up against them. More than once she even expresses jealousy towards Kou’s love for the bike (or is it the bike’s love for Kou?) — though not without begrudged understanding as she has a more palpable crush on it.   

It’s clear then: Miiyo is an autosexual. But that’s only the beginning of Kou’s challenges with winning over Miiyo and finding himself.    

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Throughout its runtime, His Motorbike, Her Island takes a simplistic but eventful narrative course around all four titular nouns and pronouns, while enriching them with a steady stream of thematic allusions. The movie not too subtly, sometimes quaintly but still effectively and poetically uses the eponymous dialogue as metaphor on the nature of the leads’ relationship and the dual impenetrability of each other’s hearts and minds (if at least not their bodies). With the vast and winding roads of Japan (in fact, he’s even dreaming of New Jersey) to roam so freely, how can His Motorbike possibly know commitment, and how much would he have to lose and forfeit seeing by making any? And with Her Island so tightly protected from outsiders, can she really be trusted to welcome anyone on it beyond the status of a brief visitor?  

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Concurrent with his origins in short experimental films but meshed with his preoccupation with the youth, no other fully mainstream Japanese director was as accessibly playful with the medium of filmmaking as Obayashi was. A recurring occurrence in his films was having it shown in black and white then having some outside force jolt it into colour temporarily or for the long run. But this time around is probably the only one among them where sex seems to have that effect (some deep metaphor about knocking the colour into/out of their lives?). He’s also as playful as ever in the editing, with jump cuts that you can miss if you blink and stylish camera techniques. The love for motorbikes actually shows more strongly in the camera’s sharp angles of the bikes and the styles of those who ride them than in the surprisingly abundant technical jargon and name-dropping of models the story and its characters engage in. 

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The most recognisable trademark of the director’s work is what I call the Obayashi Slide during major scene transitions; an even more memorable variation on his friend Akira Kurosawa’s trademark.  

The music — and there’s barely a single minute passing without it — plays another vital part in helping bring and keep the movie alive. It comes in quite a few forms: orchestral during exposition, idol ballads at the cafe, folk ballads from the leads, Chopin in the apartments, traditional bon dancing music on Her Island, or smooth jazz during the romantic dialogue (but surprisingly no rock music as Westerners associate with bikers). Even when not especially complicated, the combined story, soundtrack and visuals do a wonder in taking you into its world; not just the mindsets and lifestyle of its characters but its time and place. For that, Island gives just as enchanting of a feeling as Obayashi’s other work from the period that actually involved enchantment of one type or another.  

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Island’s warm but rebelliously freewheeling nature from nearly every aspect is quite thematically appropriate but perhaps not entirely so elsewhere. In one scene, Kou’s buddy tells him that if he doesn’t go to comfort his girl (who he doesn’t know), he’s going to take her immediately for himself that night (and she seems receptive to whoever comes out for it that way). Girls indeed appear to be for the taking in one way or another here (except for the case we’d least expect). But on by far the most problematic part, after taking one girl to an isolated road [WARNING MILD SPOILER], Kou quite aggressively browbeats her into removing her clothes and surrendering her body on the first night (and when she starts crying, Kou then yells at her to give it a rest). 

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As that’s anything but typical content for Obayashi’s around 75% girl-centred filmography up to then, it’s a reasonable assumption that was already in the adapted novel from Yoshio Kataoka (who wrote a few other Kadokawa tie-ins) or perhaps even more likely the screenplay from Ikuo Sekimoto (Rope Torture; Double Rope Torture). Regardless, thinking about that scene — even in the context of its own time — can border on appalling. Of course, it needn’t even be said that Japan had all kinds of delinquent, salacious and questionable content in various kinds of exploitation genres like pink, Roman Porno and yakuza; but for those who understand the terms of what they are and don’t hide being, those cases can reasonably be accepted or at least gotten used to. 

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Yet to see content like this in Japan’s designated lighthearted youth movies (even when the ones here are slightly older than most) was extremely rare — even rarer than in its Hollywood equivalents. It was least of all to be expected in an especially mainstream entity like Kadokawa (its CEO’s only later uncovered infamous endeavours notwithstanding). Equally shocking to some viewers could be the male leads’ petty crime run to randomly frighten people and bust up their cars on the road for the most perplexing of reasons (with one particular dialogue exchange that sounds like a tutorial on how to do it!). 

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But on that note, Island was also serving (or at least cashing in on) a more niche demographic: the bōsōzoku (“reckless driving” or “speed” tribes) motorcycle gangs that were at their peak popularity and notoriety when it was made. As such, the times when Kou is not channelling his energy into biking, babes, or business with other biker boys, he’s out punishing squares for annoyances or just for the fun of it — exactly as news headlines of the time sounded alarms about. In a way, this was their movie — but through a different, wider mainstream filter than hyperbolic/underground punk biker movies from Sogo Ishii or Norifumi Suzuki could provide. While clearly made to try to appeal to wide audiences down to those who never even rode on a motorcycle, Island is presented in such a way that we’re totally to root for Kou when he’s terrorising poor yuppies or hitting-and-running on somebody’s sister.  

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In most such equivalent movies, by the end, a bad boy biker youth like this would be portrayed — and partially exposed — as being powered by bravado that after much struggle gives in to a softer kid who’s really just misunderstood. But Kou is given no such background or “awakening”. In fact, in something unthinkable for a Western film, the youth protagonists aren’t shown to suffer any real consequences at all for their quite casually-presented lascivious, immoral and illegal doings. Nor is there any moral message against them or that the characters are shown to learn. Only in Japan could a film industry and government have been that comfortable with such material and resultant messages (whether intentional or not) being fed to their youth with no caveat. 

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Ultimately, however, being able to have enough faith in their society that such phenomena could go unchecked was more of a tellingly good thing. Curiously enough, it all seemed to work out in Japan better than most Western countries with more stringent/meticulous censorship, as Japan maintained far less common juvenile delinquency, gang membership, unplanned pregnancies etc. (though all of those things have risen somewhat in more recent years). Obayashi indeed had a habit of tinging his youth films with unusual doses of heavier themes, but on all of the others, it had a less shakable innocence in treatment. But hey, in retrospect, that gives the impression Obayashi already knew something others didn’t in regards to Takeuchi’s dormant ultra-wanton tendencies — or at least those of his image. (That’s not surprising, since it doesn’t get any more clairvoyant than sensing the formula for a hit movie from one’s preteen daughter as “producer” as Obayashi did with House.)

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But naturally enough for Kadokawa, there’s also a certain heartthrob quality to Takeuchi’s bad boy-ism that wouldn’t be stressed so explicitly in the future. Then again, despite his actions, Kou cannot really be considered a true “rebel” by Western standards, as he still shows remarkable deference towards traditional culture and his elders (don’t worry; the people he terrorises are just richer peers). Even his biker culture is infused with a samurai spirit  — or more specifically, ronin spirit — that’s proven to be surprisingly compatible. At one point Kou and a rival joust from their bikes with samurai warrior stances (or “sits” I suppose). These scenes show Island at its most conceptually creative while also highlighting the thematic versatility of a movie that can shift gears from romantic ballads to vaguely erotic drama all around its core bike theme.    

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C’est bon — bon dance, that is. 

Speaking of the latter, the very few who might actually have bothered with both movies (modest, local hits) may notice strong conceptual similarities between this and the 1968 Alain Delon-Marianne Faithfull vehicle The Girl on the Motorcycle. Its only claim to fame outside the UK/France was being the first “X” rated movie in the US (even that soon to be overshadowed by Sonny Chiba’s Street Fighter shock among others). Links include the movies’ motorcycle lover-lovers theme; their obsessions with mechanical and brand details (but in a solid show of patriotism or maybe just convenience, Girl’s Harley Davidson fixation is changed to Kawasaki here); the prevalent sexual content; and a too-similar-for-coincidence link later in. Yet while the bikes are much the same, they take quite different roads. For its younger target audience, Island significantly tones down the female lead with how much they actually show for all the sexual content/nudity; they also expunge her drunkenness and drug usage (which Kadokawa would’ve thought to be too much — very ironically).  

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HERE IT IS: Cinema’s historic first documented instance of Takeuchi calling someone “bakayarō”!

On the subject of Harada, her debut here goes back to Obayashi’s keen eye for finding and directing youth performers from toddlers to teens to twenty-somethings. (At least, we may as well consider this her debut despite the Z-grade Italian-pretending-to-be-American war movie Days of Hell ending up releasing just a few days earlier.) Dancing around and playfully posing even when in normal conversations, Harada lends her role an appropriate zest. It’s no coincidence Miiyo is shown back-to-back bathing in the buff before bedecked in a beautiful kimono: Jumping from cute/bubbly/innocent to luscious/lusty at a moment’s notice, she’s tailor-made too good to be true in having it all. Hence right from the beginning we’re given a sense there’s something beneath Miiyo’s veneer far less sunny than her personality exudes. As Kou gives the very opposite impression that much of his toughness and nonchalance is inflated for a way of living he’s perhaps not as fully prepared for nor even fully wanting, the two leads play off of each other as a dream match looking ever more fearfully as just that.    

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Oh so warm, pleasant, quaint and sentimental yet somehow simultaneously sensuous, edgy and degenerate — the kind of thing that couldn’t even have found an audience elsewhere — one can’t say that Obayashi, Takeuchi, Harada and author Kataoka didn’t manage to strongly place their own stamp on something as otherwise formulaic as a Kadokawa youth movie (riffing on an older British movie on top of that). But things are just as interesting from a historical perspective. From Takeuchi’s behaviour and style throughout, you could tell that this wayward youth was headed straight down a road of cinematic depravity, as before long, the mitigated mischief, misogyny and misdemeanours seen here would spiral into the yakuza mayhem he would become infamous for in movies like the Dead or Alive and Tokyo Mafia series. But if you give His Motorbike, Her Island a look, you can come to understand and more deeply empathize with him from the troubled love story that started this wretch onto such a nasty path.

“Don’t say she’s my girl. Both of us are just trying to escape boredom.”

His Motorbike, Her Island is available now as part of Third Window films’ Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 80s Kadokawa Years Bluray collection.

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Side notes 

If there’s one thing that didn’t change at all about Takeuchi, it’s his legendarily questionable English that can already be heard loud and clear here. He ends his romantic ballad with Harada as if he read it on sight from a katakana transliteration with “ai rabu yuu” (and even when singing English in unison with Harada, her’s is noticeably a higher level). And things wouldn’t get much better from there. All of that, of course, only helps to make him a yet more authentic Japanese icon.

Real-life Japanese biker rebels and “gangs” have been more prevalent than many would think. But with very few exceptions, they actually make biker rebel/gang culture into more of performance art than anything else, copying a lot of the mannerisms, language and imagery of the American variety. The Hell’s Angels even had a chapter established in Japan. But it stops at the heavy surface dressing, as they may regularly pick up some traffic violations, but unlike pretty much every other Angels chapter in the world (especially the US and Canada’s) and gangs to follow in their tracks, bōsōzoku don’t even tend to get arrested for aggravated assault, meth dealing, murder etc. And you certainly never hear about anything like the Waco Biker Gang Shootout there. It sure would be cool if they really jousted from their bikes with makeshift samurai weapons and techniques, though.