Kadokawa Haruki, who served as chief director on the film Hoshi no Kyoshitsu ("Classroom of the Stars"), which opened on the sixth, has spoken about the stroke he suffered last summer and the paralysis it left on his left side. He gave the interview to Sports Hochi.
The film stars Sakurada Hiyori and was directed by Nakagawa Ryutaro. Kadokawa, 84, was hospitalized in August last year and at one point was told he might not survive. He described the night it happened and the reason the illness pushed him toward what he has called his last film as chief director.
'The odds were stronger that I wouldn't make it'
Kadokawa said the stroke came without warning, at around 2 a.m. on August 16 last year while he was in bed. He felt the left side of his body go weak and could not reach his wife in another room.
“I thrashed around for more than four hours before I was taken away by ambulance.”Kadokawa Haruki, chief director, Hoshi no Kyoshitsu
He said he had been boxing every week, going to a gym and even swinging a wooden sword until then. Now, he said, walking is about all he can manage.
At the hospital, staff asked him his name and date of birth repeatedly, and a doctor told him he might die or lose consciousness and end up in a vegetative state. He was made to say something like a last will to his family.
“In other words, the odds were stronger that I wouldn't make it.”Kadokawa Haruki
The diagnosis, he said, was that his left side might never move even a millimeter again. He kept up rehabilitation for 150 days and continues it after moving to a nursing home, and his movement has improved considerably.
Emotions harder to control
The effects go beyond the physical. Kadokawa said part of his brain was covered by blood and no longer works as it did, and that he finds it harder to control his emotions, sometimes crying or growing angry without meaning to.
He said he can feel new synapses forming to compensate for the damaged brain, and that a line in the final scene of the new film came to him in that state. The words for his haiku no longer come as they did, and his titles — adventurer, martial artist, religious figure — are falling away as his body slows.
Asked about a haiku he wrote at age 9, he could not recall it at first, then recited it: "In the smoke, a saury being grilled looks at me." He said the word for smoke is read "kemu," not "kemuri." He thought of giving up the title of haiku poet, but the people he had worked with gathered from around the country to worry about him, and he could not say he would quit.
A son, and a handover
Kadokawa said he had always wanted to be loved by his father, Kadokawa Genyoshi, who founded Kadokawa Shoten and died in 1975 at 58. Affection was scarce, he said, but it drove him to do what his father could not.
His relationship with his own son, now in the second year of junior high school, is the opposite, he said. He had assumed Kadokawa Haruki Office would end with him, but he now wants to hand it to the boy, passing it from himself to his wife and then to his son.
He said his son recently spent two days working at a Tsutaya store as a learning experience and found it interesting. Hearing that made him happy, he said, and he began seriously considering a handover. Asked whether his son is what keeps him going through rehabilitation, he answered: "I can say without a doubt that it is."
His son has barely watched his films and probably has not read his books, Kadokawa said, and that is fine. The boy seems busy, and sometimes turns down invitations to eat out, which leaves him a little lonely.
No more set pieces
Kadokawa said the new film is quieter than his past hits, and that the change surprises him most of all. Where The Inugami Family is remembered for two legs rising from the water, Hoshi no Kyoshitsu deliberately has no such set pieces.
He said he had clung to set pieces throughout his career but came to want to portray human drama, which he called his starting point. The illness changed him, he said. Many people say they cried at the film, but he had no intention of making them cry, and shot it as if making a nonfiction film, with acting as an extension of daily life.
The media mix he built 50 years ago, with hits including The Inugami Family, Proof of the Man, Never Give Up and Sailor Suit and Machine Gun, would not work now, he said. More than 5 billion people are estimated to use smartphones, social media carries far more force than word of mouth once did, and the power of film criticism and TV has faded.
His past blockbusters, he said, carried a calculation aimed at that result. The new film has none of it.
'A film AI absolutely cannot make'
At a stage greeting after a preview screening, Kadokawa called the film a confrontation with AI. He said AI has neither life nor soul, while almost everything he now works on belongs to the world of life and soul, and that he called on cast and crew to put their souls into it.
With an original work, AI can turn out footage quickly at about a tenth of the cost, and he has heard of manga adaptations being produced that way in China. The film industry will change, he said, but he believes he has made something AI could never make.
Hoshi no Kyoshitsu follows a woman who, bullied in junior high school, could not attend classes and grew up without a full compulsory education. Carrying the shame of her lack of schooling, she works part-time jobs until she learns of a night junior high school — a school for people who missed part of their education — and enrolls. Through meeting classmates of different ages and circumstances, her stalled life begins to move.