[1] The film stars Matthew Smiley as Ken-Antoine, a young Canadian man of mixed Japanese and European descent from Montreal who is distraught over the recent death of his father, and who is sent to live with his uncle Takuma (Tatsuya Fuji) in Japan after a suicide attempt.
Smiley toned down a sculpted physique to play the initially surly Ken, and his performance is a quiet jewel of unarticulated grief augmented by dawning confidence.
Fuji, star of Nagisa Ōshima’s twin landmarks In the Realm of the Senses and Empire of Passion, as well as Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s recent Bright Future, gives a marvelously nuanced and mischievous reading of Takuma.
"Gone are the strange two-dimensional stereotypes so favoured by patronising, prejudiced and, it has to be said, racist Hollywood production teams, and in are the complexities, nuances, weaknesses, and plain humanity of ordinary Japanese.
Thus, while recognising that Takuma is considerably older and wiser than Ken, the film is not tempted to descend into orientalist fantasies of portraying him as an eastern mystic.