Kishibe Album (1977)

One of Taichi Yamada's masterpieces

In Taichi Yamada's works, there are no people who are totally good or absolutely bad. What all people do and say is more or less reasonable and makes sense in a way, but at the same time, sometimes ridiculous and disgusting. They don't easily change their attitude, even though others tell them to. In many movies or dramas, people understand what others say in a heartbeat, deeply reflect on what they did, realize that it was wrong, and change their whole behavior. Then, they get all happy. In fact, however, the real world is not like that. The boundary between good and bad is blurry. Things can be good from one point of view, but can be bad from another. In his dramas, people don't know what they really want. They do what they know is not good to do, and do not do what they believe they should do.

The theme of this drama is not cheap, cliche one: like "truly important thing is not money or any materials, but love" .

Yamada's themes are the contrasts between hope and failure, pride and disgrace, envy and desire, discipline and freedom, shame and curse, interfering and attentiveness. They torn between the two different and opposite feelings.

The characters here have a complex about their failure, environment, and appearance, and always try to blame others for them.
They always feel they need to change something about themselves, but they can't change, and try to think it is because of others or the environment, not themselves.

He also often shows confrontation between a woman who wants to escape the ordinary world and a man who tries to stick to an average life.

Like, a woman looks down on a man who is satisfied with just a decent but ordinary life. The woman urges the man to change and jump into something new, but the guy doesn't. The guy says something back—that they have to keep their life and they think it's fine. But for them, at the bottom of his heart, he knows he has to do that but feels scared and doesn't want to accept it, so they try to believe they don't want to change.

When Yamada wrote this, Japan was going through the period from its biggest economic growth to the bubble economy period, decades after the war. People had started to seek new lifestyles and concepts, pursuing more meaningful and cultural ways of life.

Characters in this take time and put effort into making decisions and never get perfectly satisfied with their decisions after all, getting torn between whether the decision was good or a mistake. What they do are different from what they say. There are obvious inconsistencies between their beliefs and behaviors. Some people laugh over the same thing right after they got furious over something they said couldn't stand. Also, there are others who get really frustrated when they see those kinds of people. They can't stand their contradiction. That is what people in the real world are like.

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