When I was there, it was winter. It was quite a cold view. The locals would tell me, “Winter is not the season to experience this place. In spring, summer, and fall, it is really beautiful.” We were seeing these bare branches and a lack of human presence. This matched very well with Ishibashi’s music, where there’s very few senses of life within the landscape except for a bit of falling snow or a little flash of movement from the wind or an animal. There are layers and layers of subtlety in her music.
What is your relationship with Japan’s natural world? Did you grow up in a rural or urban environment?
Because of my parents’ work, we moved around a lot between municipal towns and cities. There’s nature there, but there was not a closeness to nature. In fact, I had barely gone camping myself—perhaps a little in elementary school. My closest relationship to nature was through man made parks in urban environments. It wasn’t until I made this film that I spent much time in nature. My father used to work in the Ministry of Construction, working with a lot of dams. So I will say that, wherever we moved there was always the presence of the river.
One of the characters in this film runs an udon noodle shop, and moved to the village from Tokyo because the quality of the water makes all the difference in the food she prepares. Can you tell me where this idea came from?
It was true that the water in Fujimicho and Haramura really tasted great—if you tried making coffee with the spring water there, it just tasted delicious. I encountered a baker who used this water—he had gone and opened a shop out in Tokyo but realized that his bread tasted entirely different when using water from this place where he was born.
