Director Miyake Shō Offers Small Catharses in “All the Long Nights”

Some 10 years ago, the way people talked about the difficulty of life began to change in Japan. Where once the common term was something like ikinikui, meaning that living was a difficult task, free of any other nuance, talk now is often about the ikizurasa—the hardship—of life. This carries a nuance of stress and emotional pain that seems to reflect the times we live in.

Fujisawa Misa cutting Yamazoe Takatoshi’s hair at his house. Visits to the barber are a constant source of stress for someone suffering from anxiety disorders. (© Seo Maiko/2024 All the Long Nights Production Committee)

There are more than a few people who struggle with the hardship of living in modern society, for any number of reasons. In a time like this, what kind of stories can a filmmaker tell? And how? After long consideration and efforts to develop a thorough grasp of modern realities—without sneering at sentimentality—it seems director Miyake Shō has found an answer. Following up on last year’s award-winning Keiko, me o sumasete (released internationally as Small, Slow, but Steady), now comes his 2024 Yoake no subete (All the Long Nights).

Corporate Dropouts

Small, Slow, but Steady focused on the exceptional character of a woman pro boxer with a hearing impairment, but All the Long Nights is about a man and woman who work for a small local company—the kind of characters you can find anywhere. These ordinary people share troubles that those around them struggle to comprehend.

Sometimes, simply washing the car can offer refuge. (© Seo Maiko/2024 All the Long Nights Production Committee)

Once a month, Fujisawa Misa (played by Kamishiraishi Mone) is driven to attack coworkers by the irritation brought on by her intense PMS. She has developed a habit of buying them snacks in apology the following day.

Yamazoe Takatoshi (Matsumura Hokuto) hires on at that same company and unluckily triggers her rage, becoming the target of attack. Yamazoe’s attitude is so bad that her anger seems almost appropriate. But behind his apathetic, selfish face, he himself is struggling with a panic disorder.

One day, Fujisawa runs into Yamazoe’s girlfriend (Imou Haruka). (© Seo Maiko/2024 All the Long Nights Production Committee)

PMS and panic disorders are both conditions gaining increasing recognition in recent years, but it is difficult to say that the public in general grasps the difficulties they can cause in life. When symptoms appear, they often manifest as behavior that comes across as problematic in the eyes of others. That can have an influence on social life and might force people into frequent job changes.

The two people in this story have found themselves unable to work under the profit-driven philosophy of the corporate world. The employer they end up at is a small neighborhood company called Kurida Kagaku, which makes and sells home science project kits, like home planetariums and microscopes. Under company president Kurita Kazuo (Mitsuishi Ken), their coworkers do show some signs of coming to understand the pair’s problems.

The president of Kurita Kagaku, Kurita Kazuo is a kind man with his own difficult past. (© Seo Maiko/2024 All the Long Nights Production Committee)

As the two work together in this relatively safe environment, they begin to feel a desire to help each other. The audience recognizes the changes in their hearts through words and actions during the course of daily life and its minor events. It creates a transparency that resonates, without any overly intentional scenes or shocks.

Staring into the Darkness

Through this examination of regular peoples’ daily lives, we see that there is drama to be found in the background of every person. Recalling that you live with a darkness no one sees, that no one asks about, is exactly what leads to thinking of others.

Yamazoe’s old boss Tsujimoto Norihiko (Shibukawa Kiyohiko) introduced him to his new job at Kurita Kagaku. (© Seo Maiko/2024 All the Long Nights Production Committee)

Director Miyake displays here, unclouded and pure, his attitude of seeking to understand people and events to the very root. His filmmaking begins from that point, and even as it demonstrates a high level of technical capability, is never content to fall back on the standards of film theory. In the end, his curiosity leads him to examine, open-minded, all the many ways of living, and then convey the story of those lives to the audience in a way that resonates.

Fujisawa’s mother Noriko (Ryō) keeps warm watch over her daughter. (© Seo Maiko/2024 All the Long Nights Production Committee)

In an interview, the director has said: “In this film, I didn’t just want to tell a story about PMS or panic disorder and be done. I wanted to take it as a story about people who suffer because they’re unable to work due to irrationality beyond their control. . . . I didn’t want to turn this into a film aimed at critiquing real social system issues needing solutions. I was thinking that I could frame the interest as expressing the happiness and fun of people spending time together even as they struggle with instability at a level that is difficult to treat, even medically.”

It is not a by-the-book recipe that takes PMS and panic disorder as ingredients in a list, but neither is it an overblown piece proclaiming to convey the reality of them to the world. It shares a sense of the uncompromising principles of a director who counters the shallowness of cliches like “Every night has its dawn”—the yoake of the original Japanese title—by saying, “Rather than simply comparing the dawn to hope, I wanted to depict all the many meanings that ‘night’ can have.”

(© Seo Maiko/2024 All the Long Nights Production Committee)

The director changed the main characters’ workplace from Kurita Ironworks in the original novel to introduce into the story a company that makes planetariums, projectors for the stars of the night sky. These people who are constantly fighting a darkness inside them are also pushed to face an endless outside, and the sight of them released from their own spells, even just a little, offers a touch of catharsis.

The story of All the Long Nights is not about two people seeking mutual acceptance; it is a fresh look at a personal relationship between two individuals who just happen to be in the same place and start talking. Their hesitant, truly unexceptional interactions are warm. It is enough to make you think that true kindness lingers in common human thoughtfulness rather than anything one might call virtue. Nothing here touches the heart in a powerful way, but many watching this film might well have the rare experience of feeling the track of a single tear on their cheek when the curtain closes.

(© Seo Maiko/2024 All the Long Nights Production Committee)

Trailer (Japanese)

(Originally published in Japanese. Banner photo © Seo Maiko/2024 All the Long Nights Production Committee.)