Hirokazu Kore-eda | 怪物 (Kaibutsu) Monster / 2023

the train to paradise

by Douglas Messerli

 

Yuji Sakamoto (screenplay), Hirokazu Kore-eda (director) 怪物 (Kaibutsu) Monster / 2023

 

Somewhat like Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon, Hirokazu Kore-eda and Yuji Sakamoto’s 2023 masterwork Monster presents three versions of the same tale, but it this case it is closer to a peeling away of an onion, wherein as each layer is removed we come closer to what we might describe as reality, yet discover that the reality is even more mysterious and wondrous than the truth we first thought we comprehended.

     At the center of this confusing world are two fifth-graders Minato (Sōya Kurokawa) and Yori (Hinata Hiiragi). Inexplicably, the two have begun feeling joy and comfort in each other’s presence which, as we later discover, might almost be described as a kind of romantic love that deeply troubles Minato, a boy who has father has died and is attempting to grow up, as his mother Saori Mugino (Sakura Andō) has taught him, to be worthy of the memory of her husband.

    Early in the film we observe a sign of the difficulties to come when a high-rise building near the Mugino home suddenly is discovered to be blazing in fire. Mother and son watch the blaze in wonderment from their balcony, which neighborhood gossips later explain held sex bar several stories up and where, they claim, the boy’s teacher Mr. Hori (Eita Nagayama) was a regular visitor.

    As a single mother, Saori works hard in a local shop, arriving home late some nights with groceries as she attempts to live life as both mother and financial support, a role that many women like her sometimes find difficult to balance. But basically, she has what appears to be a good rapport with her son. That is until she begins to observe strange signs. One night she returns home to find several strands of her son’s hair chopped off and left in the sink. Why is he cutting away his own beautiful head of hair?

    At another point she finds that he has returned home with only one of his shoes. Another evening, her son does not return home at all. She desperately goes on a search for him, finding his bicycle parked by the side of the road. She explores the path to find an abandoned train tunnel where she finally discovers her son, embracing him and bringing him home, but troubled about the evidence she appears to accumulate, after questioning the fairly incoherent boy, regarding his former favorite teacher Mr. Hori, who appears to be physical and mentally abusing him, calling him a “monster” and other terms that do not seem at all appropriate.

    Visiting the school, she attempts to have a full conversation with the female principal (Yūko Tanaka), who seems cold and removed as Saori recounts what she has perceived. Indeed, after she has made her accusations apparent, she is met up with others on the faculty, who excuse the principal’s absence by simply suggesting she has other obligations.

     In the second meeting with faculty, Hori makes a hasty and seemingly enforced confession of sorts, but still with no explanation of the facts and without at all directly responding to Saori’s own fears and questions.

     Confronting Hori alone, he suggests that Minato has actually be bullying the fellow, effeminate student, Yori, having for no seeming reason tossed the boy’s books and bookbag to the floor and later, locked him in a bathroom stall. Neither Saori or Hori connect this with a homophobic fellow student who, at one point, the mother even challenges.

     Confused by this new information, Saori visits Yori’s home, only to find the boy alone without any adult in this house. The boy invites her in, serves her a drink, and expresses his caring and worry for her son, far from suggesting any sense of fear or distress. He even sits down to write her son a letter of caring, while, she notices, he reverses several of the Japanese kanji, which she quietly corrects. She may find the young boy somewhat strange, but he evinces no feelings that suggest her son has been abusing Yori.

   Meanwhile, so that the school can save face, Mr. Hori is fired. He has discovered, as we later discover, a paper by Yori in which the Kanji are reversed in order spell out the name of Minato, and rushes back to the school, pushing his way past his fellow faculty members who attempt to restrain him in order to tell Minato that he now realizes that he has been wrong in his assessment of the boy’s behavior, realizing in fact that the two are close friends. But Minato terrified of yet further punishment rushes up the stairs and back down again, finally falling down the staircase.

    Having lost his job and his girlfriend, Hirona (Mitsuki Takahata), Hori now is ready to jump off the elementary school roof in despair, but a strange noise of horns below stops him, and he ceases his suicidal attempts. He attempts again to visit Minato at his house in order to explain to him that he now knows of his innocence, but as a tropical monsoon begins to hit the city, Saori finds her son missing.

     We now witness an abbreviated summary of the events through Hori’s point of view. The same high-rise fire we observed with Minato and his mother from the balcony, is now being observed by Hori and his girlfriend. The gossips were entirely mistaken about the gentle Hori who is the kind of man to visit the sex club the building may have held. In this version of reality he enters a classroom to discover Minato throwing other students’ books and bags around the room, never bothering to perceive that it is both a reaction to the homophobia shown to his friend Yori and his own attempt to momentarily dissociate himself from Yori when he meets up with the classroom bully’s actions against his effeminate friend.

     Similarly, it is the bully who has locked Yori in the bathroom stall, yet when Hori goes to check out what is happening, he finds Minato leaving the room, and even returning to watch him as he helps Yori escape the stall locked at the top. What else can he presume but that Minato is bullying Yori?

     When Hori visits Yori’s hope, unlike Saori’s visit he meets up with Yori’s father who, it becomes immediately apparent, is an abusive alcoholic, disgusted by his son’s girlish ways and apparently beating him to cure his effeminate ways.

      To the faculty, it is Saori who is the “monster, an overprotective woman who requires the principle to force Hori to resign to protect her institution. She, meanwhile, has just recently seen her grandson hit by a car her husband was driving; even worse, we later realize, she herself had been driving the car, hence her inability to properly deal with the situation at hand. A public hearing is demanded, Hori let go, and later hounded by the press who declare him a monster for his nonexistent abuse of the boy. His girlfriend simply packs up her suitcase and never returns.

     In this version, it appears that Hori is the tortured one, made as the scapegoat by his fellow faculty members and hounded by an uncaring press and a mother who simply doesn’t comprehend the details that she begins to perceive.

     It is at this point, finally, that Hori rediscovers Yori’s school paper and realizes that the boys are not at odds with one another, but in love. After attempting to explain his mistake to Minato at the school, he rushes to his home, trying to call him out, only to discover he is missing. Together he and Saori, despite the storm, attempt to visit the old railroad station, but are told by police, now barricading the location that with the rains the area is at any moment about to be enveloped in a landslide. They rush to the site only to discover an old railroad car, now covered over almost entirely with mud, observing only Minato’s book bag.

     Within the car are the two boys, whom, in the third peeling of the onion skin, we discover have created and decorated a private world within the old train, escaping there together after Minato has befriended Yori upon observing that other boys taunt him again and again for his effeminate behavior and his almost endless sense of joy in his simple difference from all the others. We now discover that Minato slices off parts of his hair only after Yori has delightfully played with it, the doubts of his sexuality already creeping into Minato’s own mind as he finds Yori so appealing. Yet the young fifth-grader remains torn in his increasing love for Yori, fearing that he is not living up to the visions his mother has painted of his father.

    Nonetheless, the boys grow even closer, and one night when Minato visits his friend, he encounters Yori’s father, who tells him that Yori has been “cured” (of what he doesn’t say, but we know he means of his “sissified ways), and that Minato should leave him alone. As the truth becomes more and more apparent, anyone with even a shred of empathy can now hardly hold in the tears for how much these children have been forced to suffer. When Yori appears to tell his friend that what is father has said is not so, we know there will now be further punishments for the child.

    Back at school, Minato himself encounters the principal, as discovers a room for of brass instruments. This basically unsympathetic tyrant now explains to the young boy how she formerly conducted a brass band, and encourages him to try playing a trombone. He blows into the mouthpiece with no result, but she takes up the French horn and together they blow out the brass bellows that Hori, about to jump off the rooftop hears, saving his life. This formerly failed leader is now also given a second chance in Kore-eda’s totally forgiving story, as she advises Minato to choose happiness instead of fear.

     Called out of the house during the storm, Minato rushes to Yori’s house only to find him fully clothed in his own bathtub, covered with bruises inflicted upon him by his furious father. And together they hurry off to their hideaway where they wait out what they realize may be their death, and a possibility to be “reborn” into a world of normality where they were no longer perceived as “pig-brained monsters.”

     As the rain ceases, Minato is able to push open one of the car windows from which they escape. Even they are not sure whether they are still alive or have been “reborn,” particularly when they rush off along a now green pathway where before they a gate closing off their entry. But now that gate is missing, the path open for their further adventure.

     Several gay critics complained that Kore-eda had simply once more killed off the two gay heroes. But I didn’t at all interpret it that way. Nor, apparently, did the director who argued in a dialogue with Mizuki Kodama in “Film Monster: Queer Criticism and Director Hirokazu Kore-ed’s Response; A Three and-a-half-hour Dialogue” that “he intended the ending to be one in which Minato and Yori choose life, and directed it as a celebration of their being alive, while admitting that he now anticipated that about 20% of the audience would interpret it as depicting an afterlife.

     What we can be certain of is that most of the adults in this film sadly suffered for this misapprehensions about children and their lives and loves. Caring as they all were, they could not imagine the true complexity of these two boys relationship and their reliance on one another for survival.

     As the unnamed writer of the blog Medium (going under the moniker “Justsomethingg”) reminds us, the story begins with fire and ends with a rainstorm, both signifiers of death and renewal. These boys found a way to transform the old, failed world around them into a new experience for themselves that offers gay boys and the entire LGBTQ+ community new hope.

    This work is greatly enhanced, finally, by the last score of the great musician and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died two months before this film was released.

    I have always been an admirer of Kore-eda’s transformative works, but this is now my favorite of his oeuvre to date.

 

Los Angeles, June 15, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).