21 May 2024
Posted by Kelly Fleck 
Loading ...
Kenji Sawada as Tsutomu Mizukami and Takako Matsu as Machiko in director Yuji Nakae’s The Zen Diary.
TORONTO — In The Zen Diary, Tsutomu’s editor/love interest, Machiko, delights over the foods he makes for her. Tender bamboo shoots simmering in stock, cooked chestnuts, or grilled taro with a little of the peel left on for flavour, still steaming as she takes a bite. The audience shares Machiko’s delight as she savours each meal—mixed with a bit of jealousy—for foods they can only enjoy with their eyes.
And that is what the film is: a feast for the eyes. Told through a slow and quiet pace, The Zen Diary is a beautiful meditation on the natural cycles of life, reflected through the changing seasons and the different foods they provide.
Cooking these scrumptious meals is reclusive essayist Tsutomu Mizukami (Kenji Sawada), who lives deep in the Shinshu mountains of Nagano with his dog, Prickly-ash, and the ashes of his late wife, Yaeko, who died 13 years earlier. Tsutomu’s story moves forward through the seasons between and beyond summer, fall, winter, and spring, each bringing new vegetables to plant, tend to, harvest, forage, preserve, and cook. Content with his routines, he is occasionally interrupted by his editor/love interest Machiko (Takako Matsu), who pesters him for a manuscript and savours his food as he savours her company.
The script is adapted and based on last essayist Tsutomu Mizukami’s 1978 non-fiction book by screenwriters Tomu Uchida and Yuzo Kawashima. Director Yuji Nakae creates a film that is a visual delight, a treat to audiences’ eyes and souls, and a reminder of what it’s like to live in nature, smell the earth, and savour the richness of life.
Director Yuji Nakae will be in attendance to introduce the film and answer questions during an encore screening of The Zen Diary at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre on May 23. Nikkei Voice spoke with Nakae about creating and telling an authentic story with The Zen Diary. Answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Director Yuji Nakae. Photo courtesy: Momo Films.
Nikkei Voice: What inspired you to explore Tsutomu Mizukami’s book as a film? What elements or themes were important to carry over from the book?
Yuji Nakae: The book is an essay and there’s no story or narrative. In one year, the author Tsutomu Mizukami, would pick some ingredients every month and show how to cook them.
In the book’s postscript, he wrote that he decided to write this book because he was writing this essay for a female fashion magazine called Missus. He wrote that a Missus female editor told him to write an essay about his lifestyle in the mountains. So that’s how Machiko’s character came up in my mind, and by using Mizukami as a model, his story started to grow in my mind.
I thought that if the editor and the writer fell in love, it would be interesting, but I came up with this in my imagination because the actual writer, Tsutomu Mizukami, was a very popular playboy.
But what’s important in this movie is that it is about Japanese people living together with nature in four seasons, making and eating their own food.
NV: This film had an unusually long production run. Tell me about the decision to film over 18 months to capture each season in the movie.
YN: Before I made this film, I discussed it with the producer, and we decided not to plant anything unseasonable just to film the scenes. So we decided to plant everything in the film for those scenes during the right seasons because I know that a film is basically made up things, and it’s all kind of lies in a way. But to make a big lie and make the audience believe in those lies, we had to stop making small lies.
Kenji Sawada as Tsutomu Mizukami in The Zen Diary. Photo courtesy: Momo Films.
NV: The ingredients used by Kenji Sawada were grown and harvested by the film crew. What kinds of challenges did that create, and why was it important for telling this story authentically?
YN: The most important thing was to make the vegetable field very close to the house because I think the current people’s problem is having a workplace so far away from your home, so often people have to commute via car, and it’s very separate. For this movie and Tsutomu’s lifestyle, having his house and where he works very close to each other was important to me. This is why I wanted to have the vegetable field in front of the house.
Actually, there was no field before the shooting, so the staff had to cut down trees and make the field just for this movie. When we opened the field by cutting down the trees and removing the roots, we found many round rocks. My guess is there was some kind of house before, many, many years ago. And it was basically left and turned into a forest again. But because those rocks are round, I imagine they were brought from the riverside, which is about a kilometer away.
So whoever used to live there probably spent a lot of time bringing those rocks for the house, so if you think about the person’s effort, making the field is not so much of an effort—that’s what I was telling the staff.
NV: Audiences cannot taste or smell the foods or feel or smell nature themselves, so how did you try to capture those experiences for viewers through the film?
YK: I discussed with Yoshiharu Doi, who was the food coordinator for this film, and we agreed that probably we don’t need too many eating scenes for this movie because eating scenes can be not so nice to watch, and so we wanted to avoid as much as we could. Instead, we focused on where the food came from.
In terms of cooking, we focused on a lot of scenes of washing and preparing, especially some kind of wild vegetables. Those procedures and preparations are quite important, and by showing that, the audience can imagine the taste and smell of the food.
Kenji Sawada as Tsutomu Mizukami and Takako Matsu as Machiko in director Yuji Nakae’s The Zen Diary. Photo courtesy: Momo Films.
NV: In this film, Tsutomu is confident in the seasons and cycles of nature yet unable to let go and spread his wife’s ashes. What can be learned from this film about the cycles of life and moving on?
YN: I didn’t want to depict Tsutomu as a perfect person who can live well with nature and its cycles because if you depict him that way too much, you lose his humanity. I didn’t want to depict him as a Buddhist monk, so that’s why I needed his girlfriend and his attachment to his wife’s ashes, and to me, it was important to make him like a normal person to make this film.
NV: What do you hope audiences will take away from this film?
YN: The film is about two hours long but depicts one year of Tsutomu’s life, so I wish audiences can experience one year of Tsutomu’s life and enjoy it.
In the scene where he pickles vegetables, he puts a stone on top, which I picked from the stones we found in the field. There were thousands of stones, so the assistant director and I went through all the stones, looking at the shape and weight to choose the best one for the scene, so I basically auditioned the stones as well.
***
There will be an encore screening of The Zen Diary at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre on May 23 at 7 p.m., and screenings at Revue Cinema on May 24 and 25. For more information, visit www.momofilms.com.
