In 1988, Kore-eda, who had just graduated from Waseda University, wrote a script and made it into a movie for a full 15 years.
The movie is "Nobody Knows."
People's first impression of this movie is the clean and concise style of the film, the newly moved polite mother and son.
However, the style of the painting changes, and the mother and son who return to the apartment open the suitcase, and surprisingly, the trunk is not a daily necessities, but a child. It was a family of five, a mother with four young children.
One might think that this is a touching film story about how a single mother raised her children, but it would be a big mistake, and buried under the fresh background of this movie is actually the dark and evil side that has not yet been discovered.
Kore-eda told everyone the darkest story with the cleanest picture, this strong sense of contrast with the promotion of the movie's storyline, pushing people step by step to suppress the feeling of suffocation, and finally with the male protagonist obeying his mother to kill his grandmother and grandfather was caught, he resisted everything, when others asked him, he just said: Is there anything wrong with loving his mother?
Yes, is there something wrong with loving mom? Although this mother was the source of his tragedy.
This is a true story adaptation, yes, the most frightening thing is that the story is based on a real event, that is, the 1988 West Sugamo baby abandonment incident that caused a sensation in Japan.
Real events are always more heart-wrenching than movies.
The beginning of the story, the source of evil, begins with this mother. But in the beginning, this mother was just a victim.
The 20-year-old mother, the heroine, is madly immersed in a sweet and happy relationship, until the marriage is discussed, but it is strongly opposed by her parents.
But the heroine desperately lived with her boyfriend, and soon the two gave birth to their first child, but because they were unmarried and had children, the child was sent for adoption shortly after birth.
But this did not affect the heroine's feelings for her boyfriend, and then, the second child was born, and this child was another protagonist.
There is no marriage certificate in Japan, to get married must have a marriage certificate, the heroine has always thought that the boyfriend has sent a marriage application, so after the birth of the second child, she asked the boyfriend to go to the child to register.
But until the child reaches the age of elementary school, the enrollment notice has not yet come down, the heroine will ask, which knows that the boyfriend has not sent a marriage application at all.
In this way, the child cannot go to the hukou and becomes a "black household", and the school will not send him an enrollment notice.
The heroine did not know that the boyfriend she loved had been cheating on herself. What is even more heinous is that soon after the heroine learned the truth, he took the heroine to borrow 200,000 yen from her parents and completely disappeared.
Perhaps because the blow was too great, the tragedy began here.
The disheartened heroine did not seek help from the social worker, cut off contact with her parents, but began to have relations with different men.
Soon, the heroine gave birth to a daughter.
After two or three years, she gave birth to another son, but the child died not long after, and the heroine returned home from work to find that the body of her young son was cold.
The heroine put the body of her young son into a plastic bag, stuffed it with a large amount of deodorant and hid it. All this was seen by the eldest son
Later, the heroine successively gave birth to two daughters at home, all of whom came from different fathers.
Because they were not born in the hospital, none of the children had birth certificates, that is, no one in the world knew of their existence except themselves.
In 1987, the heroine took the children to live in the apartment of West Sugamo, and in front of outsiders, she was a poor single mother who was widowed in middle age, living alone with her son.
The neighbors in the apartment had only seen the appearance of the eldest son, and the remaining children and a baby carcass had been deliberately hidden by the heroine.
But the heroine did not live with these children for too long, she is 40 years old, tired of these drag oil bottles, she feels that she should have the right to pursue happiness.
Later, the heroine lied to her eldest son that she was going to Osaka on a business trip, but in fact she secretly went to happy with her lover. At the beginning, the heroine would also remit 20,000 to 30,000 yen per month to the children to live, and occasionally showed up to see her eldest son.
During this period, the heroine returned home, and after leaving 200,000 yen, she never came back.
Ke Ling's eldest son took on the responsibility of taking care of his sisters, but no matter how hard he tried, he was only an underage child who had not read a book.
So he had to buy diapers and junk food for his sisters at the convenience store downstairs.
After the money left by the heroine was spent, the eldest son could only rely on the expired box lunches and thefts at the convenience store to solve the problem of food and clothing for himself and his sisters, but this was not a long-term solution after all. Unable to afford the utilities, the house was cut off from water and electricity, and the children ate and drank in the house, and soon emitted a foul smell.
Only the eldest son knows, and their lives are not cared about, nor is anyone aware of them.
3 months later, when the eldest son was hanging out, he met two boys, because he usually had no friends and were all the same age, so he quickly played with the two boys, and they often skipped class to go to the eldest son's house. One day, two boys came to the eldest son's house as usual, one of the boys found that the instant noodles he bought the day before were missing, and then the eldest son found that the youngest sister had nori in her mouth, thinking that the younger sister had eaten the instant noodles.
After he told the two boys, the two boys punched and kicked the little sister. The little girl kept apologizing, and the two boys stopped. After a while, because the little sister peed, the eldest son put her on the cloth pile in the closet, and the little sister lay unsteadily on the cloth pile and soon fell down.
The two boys thought it was funny, so they played with the little sister as a toy over and over again, watching her fall over and over again.
At first, the eldest son also bullied his sister because of the dissatisfaction accumulated in his life, but later found that the situation was not right, so he stopped the two boys, but at this time, the younger sister was paralyzed and her breath was weak.
The eldest son hurriedly learned to perform heart compressions and artificial respiration on the little sister as he had seen on TV, but this did not help. The next morning, when the eldest son woke up, he found that his younger sister was dead.
He originally wanted to learn from his mother to deal with his brother's body, but he didn't have money to buy deodorant, so he had to put her in a suitcase, take a 2-hour tram to Chichibu Yangshan Park, and bury his little sister there, four months later, finally the landlord found a police officer because of the problem of the apartment arrears, and when the police officer came to the apartment, he saw two skinny girls lying on the ground, and the house was mixed with sweat and moldy stench, like a garbage factory. At first, the eldest son still said that his mother worked in a department store, as the female teacher did, and could not be contacted when he was currently hospitalized, and the two younger sisters were also the children of colleagues on the night shift, entrusted to his care.
The officer knew that the eldest son was not telling the truth, but could not force him to tell the truth, so he had to take them to the welfare center.
At the welfare center, the eldest son finally admitted that the two girls were not actually the children of any colleagues, but his half-sister, and the mother had left them, and he did not know who the father was.
According to the eldest son, the police officer learned that there were originally four children living together, but the police officers found only three children and the body of a baby.
Two days later, the eldest son told the police officer that another two-year-old sister was dead and that the body was buried in Chichibu Yangshan Park.
After saying the little sister, the eldest son was also relieved. Soon the heroine was also arrested, and was sentenced to 3 years in prison and 4 years of probation for evading parenting responsibilities.
The two boys who injured the little sister were transferred to juvenile court, and the main offender was finally sentenced to protective custody.
The eldest son, who died of injury and abandoned his body, was originally sent to a juvenile detention center, but due to special circumstances, he was sent to a child welfare agency for observation. The woman, who was given a suspended sentence, swore to the judge that she would marry her cohabiting boyfriend and take her two daughters back to her side to raise.
After the eldest son was released, his whereabouts are unknown.
The story ends here, it's cruel and realistic, but it's always in a corner of the world that we can't see, and there's a real life that happens every day.