Eijanaika

The film’s title Eijanaika translates directly to “Why not?”, referring to a collective popular movement marked by singing, dancing, and the chanting of “eijanaika” across Japan in the third year of Keio (1867). Emerging at the cusp of epochal change, these ecstatic uprisings came to signify the waning of the Edo period, the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate, and the onset of the Meiji Restoration amid the intensified influx of Western influence.

In characteristic freewheeling Imamura style, the film adopts an insect’s-eye view of history, privileging the perspectives of peasants, prostitutes, and the dispossessed as they are swept along by the tides of history. A sprawling, carnivalesque epic, Eijanaika unfolds through multiple narrative departures: Genji, a farmer who returns to Japan from the United States after being shipwrecked by an American naval vessel; Ine, his wife, who is sold into sex work following his disappearance; Itoman, a Ryukyuan man who travels to mainland Japan seeking revenge for his family’s murder; Furukawa, a samurai who abandons his family to live in Edo with his lover; and Kinzo, a small-town pimp who exerts power over the village as an arms dealer.

Though shaped by Imamura’s characteristically nihilistic worldview – one that unsettles any rosy preconceptions about the promises of modernity and the opening up of Japan to the West – Eijanaika is also a relentless and darkly comic spectacle. Its unruly cast of characters, at once loutish and vital, move with the abandon of those who recognise they have nothing left to lose.

Eijanaika (ええじゃないか), dir. Shōhei Imamura, Japan 1981, Japanese with English subtitles, 151 min