Vacation 7

An engrossing, oh-so-Japanese indirect reflection on the death penalty, told through the story of prison guard Toru Hirai, who volunteers to assist at the execution-by-hanging of prisoner Kaneda the day before his wedding. I was confused by the intercutting of his two worlds: the prison drama unfolded in orderly fashion, but the world outside proceeded at a different pace, jumping ahead of the “present” at a point I couldn’t discern, to a point I couldn’t detect. Still, there were effective touches: keeping us ignorant of the prisoner’s crime, so he remained an abstract concept, allowing us to focus, interestingly, on the guards, not the usual focus of a death-penalty discussion. A solitary ant, representing, I suppose, “life” in the Buddhist cosmology, reappeared on several occasions; and there were directorial touches, like the straphanger nooses on the train, and the parallel drawings of the child and Kaneda, that deepened the experience – and reminded one of how the Japanese esthetic concentrates on a solitary object.