December 10, 2026 at Brooklyn Academy of Music

“People often say my work is about death, but that’s not true. It’s about walking the tightrope of living, not dying.”

- Shinji Somai

The Program

Gassan

Dir. Shinji Somai

2001. 52 mins. Digital.

In Japanese with English subtitles.

At the twilight of his life, a man spends the winter in a village at the foot of Mount Gassan, a holy site venerated for millennia. Finding refuge in a snow-buried temple, he has a mystical experience on the frontiers of the living and the dead. 

The Theater of the Matters is proud to present the first North American screening of Shinji Somai’s rare and deeply personal final film, completed shortly before the director’s death from cancer in 2001. Produced as an installment in “Reading Journey: Masterpieces of Japan,” an experimental public television series, Gassan is a marvel of spare means: shot in just four days with an HD camera, one performer, and a small crew. In a series of painstaking long takes, actor Akira Emoto recites the text of the eponymous 1974 novel by Atsushi Mori, a fictionalized account of the writer’s travels in Northern Japan, suffused with the region’s folk songs and traditions.

Originally broadcast on NHK for a few seasons, “Reading Journey” was the brainchild of producer Naonori Kawamura. It was conceived as a new way of presenting the written language on television—as dramatic readings rather than traditional adaptations—making use of the then-new technology of HD broadcasting. Each program paired an actor and a film director with a work of contemporary Japanese literature. Beyond the 50-minute runtime limit and the stipulation that the text must be read verbatim, filmmakers were given free rein to work with their chosen material. At his first meeting with Kawamura, Somai selected Mori’s novel without hesitation, chose a cadre of close collaborators as his crew, and insisted on shooting in remote Tohoku province, the real location of the story.

As the text demands, Somai spent the final time on set hovering over a porcelain bowl with his camera rolling, waiting patiently for a stinkbug to crawl out and escape. After three hours, the bug flew away. It was the last thing Somai ever filmed.

followed by:

Woman of Tokyo

Dir. Yasujiro Ozu

1933. 47 mins. 35mm.

Silent. No accompaniment.

Japanese intertitles with English subtitles.

In Ozu’s shadowy, furious, and hyphenated film of the Depression era, a student discovers that his older sister has resorted to sex work to support his education. Originally titled Her Case, For Example, the first draft of the script—by Ozu’s regular screenwriters Kogo Noda and Tadao Ikeda—had the sister contributing her leftover earnings to the Communist party. A shoestring work that ultimately spills out onto the sidewalk beyond the theater, we’ll present it in silence with no musical accompaniment.

Special thanks to Naonori Kawamura (Kazumo); Mako Fukata; Matías Piñeiro; and Jesse Trussell (BAM).