Fish Story

It took about two-minutes for my brain to fire; I’d seen Fish Story (2009 – dir. Yoshihiro Nakamura) before. Yes, I am so antiquated that I still get discs sent to be through the post by a rental service and in years gone by it would have been one of those, one slightly lost to the mist of cinema in the intervening years, but as the film opened, with its empty streets navigated by a lone man on a mobility scooter memory threatened to bloom. Coming up a sign, our scootered man finds himself in a record store, where the owner and one music lover seem not to care that in the sky above them a comet is coming crashing to earth, ready to obliterate the planet.  

Yet there is always hope, hope in the shape of a song from 1975, an obscure song by a forgotten band called Gekirin, who once released a punk song from before punk was a thing called Fish Story. And just perhaps this one lost song, Fish Story, could save the world?

Fish Story is one of those films that could be an utter mess. Episodic in nature as it skips through time: the story of how Gekirin cut their one and only record; a womanising collector of cursed music and his put upon driver who might just discover the woman he’s destined to meet that night; a schoolgirl who oversleeps on a boat trip that is held up by terrorists, terrorists who find themselves up against a cook who also happens to have prepared himself to be a hero of justice; those three men in a record store, one a badgering git.

For almost the entire film you never quite understand how all these stories fit together though there is always an undercurrent in the narrative that suggests an unseen continuity as opposed to stories entirely in isolation: the man who lectures the record store owner also appears earlier in the apparently fractured narrative as a religious fanatic on a beach as does the collector of haunted recording, that same collector earlier hears a tape of Fish Story; throughout we see other elements that weave together, which really matters because otherwise structurally the film might have seemed lazy, instead, watching Fish Story more than anything what comes across narratively is a sense that the script knows exactly how everything fits together, and it drip feeds us enough to allow us to see hints of the overall picture but recognises we probably cannot put it all together.

This keeps us intrigued, but that in and of itself is not enough and so it’s a good thing that most of the stories and the characters that inhabit them are well defined: the before their time Gekirin, suddenly finding themselves in a corporate music world that wants them to become bland popsters is sympathetic and relatable to, regardless of who you are and what you do, because these are young guys with dreams who are seeing any sense of authenticity being ripped away from them. Yet it’s also tremendous fun at the same time, such as we find ourselves witnessing the cook-cum-hero-of-justice take on a boatful of terrorists, which is wonderfully playful. Unsurprisingly, this is a film with a tremendous sense of fun, with hints of darkness at time but one that when it segues away from the main story always remains intriguing. In some ways it made me think a little bit of Tampopo, except avoiding any of the digressions that are in Juzo Itami’s film, and Fish Story is all the better for it, as it ensures that the film even if sometimes it may seem a bit meandering it never loses focus or like the weakest parts of Tampopo feel as if they had been cut the overall film wouldn’t be any the less for it (and don’t get me wrong I think Tampopo is a great film). 

You’ll find a lot of fractured narrative films that fall apart at the seams, but Fish Story handles it deftly while creating a series of stories and characters you can genuinely relate to and root for, as well as knowing when to tune into light touch entertainment mode. And Fish Story the song, with or without its mysterious silence, is pretty damn good, as is the film.

Could this song save the world?