Trapped Words

Memories get distorted with time. Some details become blurry or disappear entirely, while others are magnified. Sometimes, nostalgia or disgust can color the narrative. And if those memories are filmed, the ability of TV and cinema to shape our expectations comes into play, defining what we consider plausible. The story that director Meiro Koizumi put forth in (2014) seems credible enough: a Japanese man explains how he joined the Foreign Legion because he wanted to know what it was like to experience war. But when he starts talking about his mission in Afghanistan, the camera pans away to a lectern on which we can see the screenplay for the action movie . Koizumi is more trustworthy in , which was shot at the same time as . Here, he gives Mr. Harada the opportunity to speak about how, as an eight-year-old boy, he survived the bombardment of the Japanese city of Maebashi. The man describes the claustrophobic underground air-raid shelter where he and about 30 others hid, a sea of fire raging above their heads. With closed eyes – concentrating as if watching a film projected inside his own head – he describes the traumatic event in rich and precise detail, along with imitations of the sound of exploding bombs and airplanes rushing overhead. But in the end, his story will evoke different images in the mind of each viewer.