Ghost Town Review
Kamaishi was one of the places that suffered the heaviest loss of life from the devastating 2011 Japan Tōhoku earthquake – more than a decade on, the weight of that loss still haunts the city. In Ghost Town, taxis prowl the nighttime streets, and Kamaishi citizens talk with the taxi drivers about their memories of that awful day, the strange events they’ve witnessed since, and the business of living on after such a catastrophe.
Katharine Round’s documentary is richly evocative, extracting an eerie and yet also oddly cosy atmosphere from the images of cars driving along the empty city (one of the passengers refers to it as a ‘Ghost Town’, giving the film its title), and the intimate discussions happening within the safe enclosures of the vehicles. There’s an old adage about car journeys being the best place for having deep conversations because the people talking don’t need to look at each other, and that rings especially true at night, and when the people involved aren’t even sitting beside one another.
The conversations that make up Ghost Town are full of fascinating, often haunting details, like the woman who says of the tsunami, “It didn’t look like a wave, it looked like a black wall”. There are reminiscences of how a dream two days beforehand saved someone’s life when she was trying to plan her escape route; of driving to a crematorium with five bodies in the car. Although the film was shot more than a decade after the earthquake, it’s clear from the looks on the faces of those recounting their nightmarish experiences that the events of that time are still vivid for them, and will probably be until their dying days.
The different personalities of the taxi drivers also add a memorable texture. Though they’re all men in their late fifties and older with long ties to the city (one returned after a decades long absence on the actual day of the earthquake), they range from one who immediately divulges his personal struggles to his passenger, to another who barely speaks at all. Journalist Shiori Ito, familiar from her searing documentary Black Box Diaries, acts as their questioner, gently teasing out stories of what life has been like for them.
Much is made of the ethereal aspect of the catastrophe, with the masses of deer that roam nocturnal Kamaishi seeming to stand in for all the people that were lost, and the taxi drivers tales about the uncanny events they experienced in the days and month after. Yet what makes Ghost Town so affecting is the way these stories of the spiritual are combined with the mundane stuff of a life, like the mid-disaster reminiscence of a meal in the freezer which would now never be eaten, and the man who hasn’t been able to sing karaoke since the earthquake struck. The documentary is only an hour long, but it carries the whole spectrum of life and death and what comes after within it.
★★★★
