The ‘Rashomon’-style narrative behind Hirokazu Kore-eda’s tragic ‘Monster’
Time and time again, Hirokazu Kore-eda has proven himself to be one of the greatest contemporary Japanese movie directors. With several works of genuine cinematic brilliance to his name, including After Life, Nobody Knows and Still Walking, the Tokyo-born filmmaker is standing proud next to the likes of Shunji Iwai and Rysuke Hamaguchi as one of Japan’s modern greats.
Kore-eda continued his streak of success in 2023 with the psychological mystery drama Monster. This marked the first time that he had used a screenplay not written by himself since his debut, Maborosi. Instead, it was written by Yuji Sakamoto. Monster focuses on an incident of potential teacher-student abuse following a mother’s confrontation with one of her son’s children after she notices a stark shift in his mood and behaviour.
What’s most interesting about Monster is the way that it eschews telling the audience exactly what happened, using a method of storytelling similar to that used by Akira Kurosawa in his 1950 drama Rashomon. Kore-eda presents a series of different perspectives surrounding the abusive incident, including that of the mother, the teacher, and finally, the son.
In an interview with AnOther magazine, Kore-eda explained that the is indeed a mystery at the heart of his 2023 film, noting, “You have three chapters where things become clearer as you go on. We wanted the viewer to have a limited amount of information to begin with, and then you realise you’ve been seeing things wrongly.”
During the first chapter of Monster, we immediately seem to root for the mother, Saori Mugino (played by Sakura Ando) and her son Minato (Soya Kurokawa), perceiving the film’s title to be relating to Minato’s teacher, Mr. Hori (Eita Nagayama). However, as the perspective shifts to that of Mr. Hori, we quickly realise that the abusive incident is not as straightforward as we initially thought and that our first convictions had been far too hasty.
Speaking with A Rabbit’s Foot, Kore-eda noted the kind of preconceptions we have of abusive relationships. “What we don’t understand, we make into monsters,” he said. “This huge enemy lurking in the dark. But the monster isn’t there. It doesn’t exist. When you realise that, your relationship with people can change.”
Finally, by the time the narrative perspective shifts to Minato and his classmate Yori (Hinata Hiiragi), we realise that not only is Mr. Hori not the “monster”, but that the cause of Minato’s change in behaviour is actually a result of an awakening of his homosexuality, or as Kore-eda puts it, “The boys are coming to terms with the monsters that they believe are rotting inside themselves.”
After all, Minato’s potential homosexuality is not something that is exactly celebrated, being surrounded by homophobia in the classroom and an adult culture that is still largely straight. In fact, in the original screenplay, before Kore-eda spoke with a number of LGBTQ+ groups, Minato had tried to mask his homosexuality by intentionally leaving a photo of a bikini-clad woman on his phone lying around for his mother to find.
Perhaps that’s the most alluring thing about Monster, then, as well as the way that it poses its mystery narrative to its audience. We are quick to believe that Minato’s superiors are to blame for his initial “abuse” and eventually tragic demise, but the truth is that the real “monster” is something that he believes resides within himself, and this is something that makes Kore-eda’s effort all the more touching.
