Kore-Eda's Maborosi: Showing Only What Is Necessary (Movie Director Kore-Eda Hirokazu) (Critical Essay‪)‬

Kore-eda Hirokazu's first films were television documentaries, ones that are still remembered for their honesty and insight. These qualities were those he brought to this first feature film, an adaptation of a Miyamoto Teru novel he admired, Maborosi no hikari (1995). As the director himself has said, he suggested to his cameraman Nakabori Masao that they use techniques from both fictional and documentary films without distinguishing between them (Gerow and Tanaka). The finished film rests on the following narrative: "Light of an illusion" is the literal meaning of maborosi no hikari, and it is the effects of this illusion that interested both novelist and director. Kore-eda, however, felt it necessary to shape the original novel into something more personal: "I deliberately eliminated a lot of things," he has said. "If you heard only the story--a woman loses her husband to suicide, takes the child she is still breast-feeding and remarries [...] you'd expect to hear enka [old-fashioned emotional songs] on the soundtrack--like something Shochiku [Company] would make. Even though I liked the novel itself, when it came time to turn it into a film, I thought about what to do to make it into something I would want to see. [...] I wanted to express the sense of loss that one woman carried within her [because] for my generation there is a universal undefined feeling of loss" (Gerow and Tanaka).