My Runaway Life

Looking back, my life has been one of constant escape. This may sound negative, as most cultures view fleeing as the ultimate irresponsibility, something irreparable. To my knowledge, only Thailand tolerates escape. (I once saw a Thai friend who had gone missing for several weeks just before a shoot return without any apology. When I asked the other Thai people around if it is a normal behavior, they said this kind of thing is quite common in Thai society. They believe anyone can feel the need to run away sometimes, and as long as the person comes back safely, that’s all that matters.) Everywhere else, performing assigned duties and facing daily challenges as a modern individual is expected. Particularly in Japan, where Western individualism has been imported in a distorted manner and conformity pressures are strong, fleeing equates to social erasure.

Yet, I have fled. By the time I became aware of my surroundings, I was already on the run. I disliked the school environment, where we were forced to perform the same tasks, even if I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what bothered me. So, despite being only three years old, I went on strike: I stopped going to school and barricaded myself at home for two years. My mother tricked me into going back to preschool, but I fled again soon after. When I was eight, my family moved to Nishinomiya in western Japan from Yokohama, eastern Japan. Maybe feeling lonely or isolated in the new town, I quickly ran away again, taking my New Year’s money and boarding a Shinkansen (Bullet Train) by myself. I called my grandmother in Yamato (close to Yokohama) from the train, and without any sign of annoyance, she came to pick me up at Shin-Yokohama Station, after a three-hour journey. Listening to my reasons for escaping, she would always take me all the way back to Shin-Osaka. It’s hard to believe now how much she loved me and cared for me. I continued to flee through junior high, avoiding supplementary classes meant for the lowest-performing students, skipping baseball team practices and dodging fights with bullies. Sometimes I was even tied to the baseball coach’s belt to prevent me from escaping.

I returned to Yamato for high school, but I could only gain admission through a recommendation, due to my poor middle-school grades and attendance. During the interview, I just smiled, wondering how long this meaningless life would continue. I remember on that same day that Nishinomiya, where I’d lived the year before, was ablaze from an earthquake. From my first day in school, I never understood why I had to keep attending. Dogs, cats and insects lived freely, were given life spontaneously. Was merely existing not enough? I decided to stop escaping and just exist. This didn’t mean becoming a recluse; I simply wouldn’t attend high school, work or do anything for society.

One day, though, on a whim, I showed up at school. My homeroom teacher had fallen ill and a part-time teacher replaced him. This teacher taught modern literature, which I now realize bridged sociology and philosophy. For the first time, I found joy in being at school and studying. I confided in the teacher about my feelings of mere existence. He suggested that the answer might lie in continuous learning. From then on, studying became incredibly enjoyable. I still attended school infrequently and spent a lot of time with my non-school-going gangster friends, listening to American rock ’n’ roll music and playing mahjong. We often went to the center of Tokyo to watch live shows and made fake IDs to sneak into the horse racetrack, but after all the hanging out, I studied until dawn daily and improved my grades. Eventually, my parents and the school began expecting me to enroll at the University of Tokyo, the most prestigious and historically significant university in Japan. Many people who went to the school become a bureaucrat or a politician. I thought it would suffice to continue my studies anywhere, though I acknowledged that more difficult schools tend to have better teachers. My encounter with the part-time teacher had clearly steered my life in a positive direction, culminating in the pivotal moment of me taking my university entrance exams.

On exam day, I boarded a train from Yamato to Tokyo, where the exam was to take place. However, when the train reached Yokohama, I got off without any hesitation. It was probably an action born from a mixture of my innate tendency to escape and a fear of failure, but looking back at it now, it felt like pure fate. In front of the station, there was the historic movie theater Movil. Back in kindergarten, I took my first train ride to watch Gremlins there, but I ended up watching a Jackie Chan movie instead. More than a decade later, the theater had stopped showing popular films, and that day featured a double feature of B-grade horror movies. In the almost empty theater, I curled up to watch, initially glancing at the clock, anxious about the exam time. The feeling that “there’s still time, there’s still time” flew away at some point and then shifted to the realization, “there’s no more time left.” Before long, I was immersed in the film, forgetting my obligations to my parents and teachers — perhaps I wanted to forget because I didn’t want to become a decent person.

Looking back, I think it was the worst timing and choice I could make. As a result of this action, I was disowned by my family and became a day laborer working at a baseball stadium for a year. But somehow, my entrance exam escape led me to the movies. I started making films at the university I enrolled at after all this and finally entered a film school when I was 24. For the past 20 years, I’ve never fled from film. I pray that was my final escape, and today, I continue to confront films without running away.

As a side note, life works in strange ways: the creators of those B-movies became my instructors at film school, and one of them eventually became the producer of my recent runaway movie, Plastic, which opens through Metrograph today.

Featured image shows An Ogawa and Takuma Fujie in Daisuke Miyazaki’s Plastic.