Desert of Namibia, and the Calm of Not Being Explained

Late at night, when nobody is asking her anything, Kana watches animals drink. On her phone there is a live stream from a watering hole in the Namib desert, running around the clock. Now and then something comes out of the heat, lowers its head, drinks, and goes away again. Nobody at the watering hole wants anything from her. Nobody there has a theory about her.

Everyone else does. The kind boyfriend who cooks for her believes she is hurt and pretending not to notice, and tells her he understands her very well. The clever one who replaces him tells her in the middle of a fight that she is out of her mind, and afterwards that they did not communicate enough. A doctor on a video call offers the names of two conditions within minutes, then says the name hardly matters. When the film opened in Japan, explanations of her piled up online. And Kana joins in. She asks the man she lives with whether she is strange, and she asks the doctor for a name, because, she says, she wants to understand herself.

Desert of Namibia is a portrait of a young woman who will not be made likeable, and it is also, quietly, a film about how strong the wish is to explain her anyway. This essay will not add a name to the list. It will say plainly what she does, including what she does with her hands, and plainly what is done to her. But it will not diagnose her, and the reason is the film’s own argument. In this film, being explained is not the same as being kept company, and the only calm Kana finds arrives when nobody is explaining anybody.

There are two such moments. One is a night in the woods with the young woman from next door, who shares a fire and a drink and talks about animals whose names are wrong. The other is the last scene, at a table, where two people who have fought through most of the film end up laughing at the words for “I don’t understand”.

Desert of Namibia, Namibia no Sabaku in Japanese, is a 2024 film written and directed by Yamanaka Yoko. Kawai Yuumi plays Kana; Kanichiro and Kaneko Daichi play Honda and Hayashi, the two men she lives with in turn; Karata Erika plays Hikari, the neighbour. The film premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes on 17 May 2024, where it won the FIPRESCI critics’ prize for a first or second feature in the parallel sections, and Yamanaka, then twenty-seven, became the youngest woman to receive it. It opened in Japan on 6 September 2024. It runs 137 minutes, shot in a nearly square frame with a light hand-held camera that follows Kawai wherever she goes.

It is Yamanaka’s first full-length feature since Amiko, which she made at nineteen. Kawai saw Amiko as a high-school student and handed the director a letter asking to be cast one day, and Kana was written with her in mind.

This essay discusses the whole film, including its last scene. It describes violence between the two partners, in both directions, and does not stage it. It mentions a suicide once, as the film does, and gives no detail. It follows Kana into a doctor’s video call and a counsellor’s room, and reports what is said there without adopting it.

The film opens on her walking. Kana crosses a shopping district in Machida, on the south-western edge of Tokyo, in thick-soled sandals that clack on the pavement, putting on sunscreen as she goes and hurrying for nobody. Yamanaka has said she chose Machida because young women like Kana rarely have much money; they may come into the centre to go out, but they live further out. Kana is twenty-one. She works at a hair-removal salon, and she finds almost everything boring.

In the first scene her friend Ichika tells her that a girl they were at school with has taken her own life. Kana barely listens. At the next table some men are telling a crude story, the film lets both conversations run at once, and her attention drifts toward the men. It is an unlovely first impression, and it is meant to be.

At home there is Honda, who works in property, pays the rent, cooks for her and never complains; he is the kind of man who sprays his cologne into the air and walks through it. There is also Hayashi, a self-assured young creator who still lives with his parents. One evening, while Honda is packing for a work trip and cooking meals ahead so she will not go hungry, Hayashi calls. Kana tells Honda it is Ichika, crying. Honda tells her to go to her friend. She goes to Hayashi, who asks her to leave Honda, and she says yes.

Honda comes back from the trip and confesses that his boss took him to the kind of club he had promised he would refuse. Kana moves in with Hayashi. They go to a tattoo parlour together, where she has her nose pierced and he has a dolphin she drew inked on his arm. Among his things she finds an ultrasound photograph, and she says nothing about it.

That is the set-up. After it the film stops moving in a straight line: fights, a fall down a flight of stairs, a doctor, a counsellor, a night in the woods, a last meal.

It would be easy to make Honda the good man of this story, and the film declines. He is gentle. He keeps house. When Kana comes home drunk he brings her water and gets her into bed. Most of what he does is care in the plainest sense, and none of it is fake.

But the care comes with an account of her attached. After she leaves him, he waits for her outside her work. He knows she hates this kind of thing, he says, but it is hard when someone just disappears. She is hurt, he tells her, and pretending not to notice; he understands her very well. It is the confidence that deserves attention. A man she has just left is explaining her feelings to her, and the explanation happens to require that she come home.

Yamanaka has named this moment herself. The young men of her generation, she has said, are kind, at least on the surface, and that matters; but the film shows the moments when something leaks through, and waiting for someone outside her work was her example. That kind of thing is genuinely frightening, she said, and because it happens inside a romance, the man doing it probably does not think he has done anything wrong.

Kana’s answer is the cruellest thing she does in the film, and it should be called that. She tells him, falsely, that she had an abortion while he was away. He breaks down in the street, crying. She looks at him, calls him a strange man, and laughs.

Nothing excuses it, and this essay is not going to try. It is worth seeing only where the lie is aimed. It goes straight at the part of him that wants to be the one who understands her and takes care of things, and it hands him, invented and designed to hurt, an account of her life in which he understood nothing. She answers his story about her with a story of her own. For a moment he is the one being explained.

Yamanaka has described the design of the film in two words that sound the same in Japanese, tōsō and tōsō: flight and struggle. Kana flees Honda and enters a struggle with Hayashi, until the positions turn and it is Hayashi who wants to flee. The essay “When Safety and Attraction Point to Different People” described a split many women know, between the man you could bring to your parents and the man who wakes something up, treating safety as a forecast and attraction as a reading taken in the present. The film follows Kana from the forecast into the present tense, and complicates that picture without contradicting it: the safe man’s safety arrives with a story about her that she did not write, and the exciting man soon has a story of his own.

Hayashi looks like the opposite: quick, ironic, sure of himself, working from home. On a camping trip with his parents, who once lived in New York, and his friends, who have done well, Kana stays at the edge of the group. Later, in a wheelchair after the fall described below, she goes up the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building with him to look down over the city, says in a voice still hoarse that she would not want to work in a place like this, and they both laugh. Outside, he runs into an old classmate who is now a government official, and introduces him with evident pride.

It is a small scene, and it holds a lot. For a moment the two of them are on the same side of a joke about the life everyone expects them to want, and then that life walks up to them in the street. Kana is not unwelcome among these people. There is simply no place for her in the picture.

Hayashi has his own account of her. In the fights he tells her she is out of her mind. After the fall he apologises, says he was rushing things and that they did not communicate enough, and he looks after her, pushing the wheelchair. What he lacks is an account of himself.

The ultrasound photograph is where that becomes the centre of the film. Kana finds him writing a screenplay about a jobless man who raises a baby, asks whether it is meant as atonement, and puts the photograph in front of him. He says he had forgotten it. The pregnancy ended in an abortion, he says, and he did not force it; and anyway it is none of her business. She demands that he call the woman now and apologise. He refuses, and the argument becomes a fight.

It matters what exactly Kana is angry about. Nothing in the film suggests the decision was not the woman’s to make, and nothing in this essay does either. What Kana cannot bear is the forgetting: that a man could be part of a pregnancy, see it end, keep the photograph among his things, lose track of it, and then sit down to write a tender story about a man raising a baby. Whatever else is wrong in that scene, her demand is the most serious one anyone makes in the film. She wants a man to give an account of something he did, to the person it happened to.

The woman in the photograph never appears. She has no name, and the call is never made. The film leaves her where Hayashi left her. But the scene completes a pattern. Everyone around Kana is fluent in accounts of her. The one account she asks for, from a man about himself, nobody gives.

The fights need to be described exactly, because the film makes them easy to misread. In the two that the story turns on, it is Kana who uses her hands first. Kept waiting for dinner while Hayashi finishes his work, she throws things at him; told that the photograph is none of her business, she attacks him. Hayashi uses force too, and that second argument becomes a physical fight between the two of them, until he runs out of the flat to get away from her. This is violence between partners, in both directions, and the film shows it as that.

The first of those fights ends with Kana storming out and falling down a flight of stairs outside the building. She is badly hurt, left in a neck brace and a wheelchair, and Hayashi nurses her. What follows is the rhythm of their life together: fighting, then tending, then fighting again.

Yamanaka has been open about how she filmed this. Stunt performers did the dangerous parts, including the fall, and the fights were rehearsed with the action department and steered deliberately away from violence that looks cool or frightening, toward something ridiculous and closer to wrestling; she showed the cast scenes from Jacques Doillon’s Love Battles to make the idea clear. She has also said she did not think it right to film a violent woman without thinking it through: cinema is full of men’s violence without reasons, and violence should not be filmed without some ethics of one’s own.

The comedy is real, and it does something. It refuses to make the violence glamorous, and it catches how fights between people who live together harden into a routine with its own moves. Critics saw both sides. One found the scuffling devastating in moments and numbing the longer it went on, straying into comedy when filmed from a distance. Another called it less domestic violence than a fight between children.

This essay does not take the second view. A fight can be absurd to watch and still be violence. A woman’s violence against a man is still violence when it is played for laughs, and his force against her is still force when she threw the first thing. Neither of them is safe in that flat, and both of them know it: after one fight Hayashi says he cannot take any more and tries to leave, and Kana says she will be the one to go. If fights in a reader’s own life have become physical, or leave anyone afraid, in either direction, that belongs with someone qualified and outside the relationship, a doctor, a counsellor or one of the public consultation services for violence between partners, rather than with an essay.

The strangest image in the film belongs here. In the middle of one fight the picture shrinks into a corner of the frame, and Kana is somewhere else: in a pink room full of cheap lamps, on a treadmill with a snack in her hand, watching the fight on her phone. Repeated fights turn into routine, Yamanaka has said, until you wonder what you are doing and can see yourself from outside. She calls the pink room an abstract space for consumer capitalism, and she kept the treadmill, her cinematographer’s idea, because modern life so often feels like being made to run.

It is a strange and exact image. Kana is inside the fight and watching it at the same time, and seeing it clearly does not make it stop. She keeps running.

One morning a new colleague at the salon is chatting to her before work. Kana says goodbye in the middle of the conversation and walks off in the other direction. Not long afterwards she books a video consultation with a doctor. The scene is short and exact.

The doctor, on her laptop screen, offers the names of two conditions as possibilities. Then he tells her that the name matters less than easing her anxiety, and that since she has stopped working she has no need of a certificate for an employer, so the name hardly concerns her. Kana disagrees. It does concern her, she says; she wants to understand herself. He refers her to a cheaper clinic, since his own would be expensive. The film’s publicity describes him as a doctor who does not try to face her.

This essay does not repeat the two names. They were offered in a few minutes, on a screen, by a man who then said they did not matter, and repeating them here would give them a weight the film withholds. The film never confirms either one. What it keeps is the exchange: a doctor sizing a name to what a doctor can do with it, which is to write a certificate for an employer, and a young woman asking for the name for another reason altogether.

That difference is the one drawn in the essay “A Feeling Gets Its Name From Whoever Is Listening.”, which argued that naming a feeling is not looking it up in a private dictionary but something done for a listener, so that the precision of a name is set by what the listener can do with it. The doctor’s names are shaped for an office that issues certificates. Kana wants a name for a room nobody has built for her yet, one in which she could understand herself.

Her wish should be taken seriously, not waved away as naive. For many people a diagnosis is not a cage but a door. It can bring care, words and company, and sometimes a relief so large it is hard to describe. Kana is not foolish to ask. What the scene shows is a door offered as a label and closed again, in the same breath, by the person holding it.

The wish to name her did not stay inside the film. The critics’ jury that gave it its prize at Cannes praised its “intrepid exploration of contemporary shades of neurodivergence”, and the Directors’ Fortnight’s own note on the film said that unconvincing doctors diagnose her. In Japan, explanations of Kana multiplied online, one of them by a psychiatrist; several chose one of the doctor’s names, and some supplied a cause in her past that the film never gives. A prize citation has to be short, and a critic is entitled to a view. The speed is the point. The film withholds a verdict for 137 minutes, and the verdicts arrive anyway.

The counsellor at the cheaper clinic is another kind of listener, and the film’s publicity says so: she faces Kana properly. She does not offer a name. She asks questions. Kana has a habit, she suggests, of thinking she ought to be a certain way, and thoughts are free. Kana answers with the fear she carries around the city, that people everywhere think one thing and do another. The counsellor does not reassure her. She asks what, exactly, is frightening about that, and encourages her to put what is inside her into words.

Kana tells her about her father: that he was the worst of fathers and did many things she cannot forgive, and that she still feels she ought to respect and forgive him as a person. The film does not say what he did. Viewers have filled the gap in many ways, some of them with the worst possibilities; the film gives no ground for choosing among them, and this essay will not guess.

In one session she is given a tray of sand, and she plants a small green tree in the middle of it. It is the title of the film, made with her own hands: a desert, and one living thing.

Then there is Hikari, the young woman next door, whose voice comes through the wall as she practises English out loud. After a glance across the balconies and a moment in the lift, Kana tells Hayashi that the woman knows everything about the two of them. One night Hikari finds Kana alone in the woods. They sit by a fire and drink, and Hikari tells her that things look hard, that she will not claim it will all be forgotten in a year, but in three years Kana will hardly think of it, and in a hundred years everyone will be dead. You hate it when people say they understand, she adds, but secretly you are glad.

Then she talks about animals. There is a creature people call a panda ant because it is small and black and white, she says, and it is really a kind of wasp. There is a bird whose Japanese name makes it sound like a bee and a bear. The black-tailed gull is called a sea cat in Japanese and is not a cat, and if it were, she might have been able to love the sea. Then the two women sing a camp song round the fire and jump over it, again and again.

It is the calmest scene in the film, and it is made of wrong names. A panda ant that is a wasp. A bee bear that is a bird. A sea cat that is a gull. The speech comes not long after a doctor has offered Kana two names on a screen, and whether or not the film intends the rhyme, the rhyme is there. A name tells you what somebody decided to call a thing, and very little about what the thing is. Hikari does not tell Kana what she is. She tells her about gulls.

Yamanaka has said that Hikari is someone who says what you want to hear: a real neighbour, not an imaginary friend, though the scene is shot so that it does not quite look real. She has also said that the new colleague at the salon could be Kana’s past and the neighbour her future, and that a dead end now does not decide who you will become.

Distance is also where the title comes from. Yamanaka took it from a real live stream she once watched herself, from a watering hole in the Namib desert that turned out, when she looked into it, to be man-made, kept so that animals come and anyone anywhere can watch. What struck her was the comfort of watching from somewhere safe, without a thought for what lies outside the frame. Kana, she said, is rough with the people closest to her and listens well to people a little further off, the counsellor and the neighbour, perhaps because distance spares her responsibility. The desert on her phone is the furthest thing from her life, and it is what soothes her.

The film ends where it has so often been, at the table after a fight. This time the fight begins without any cause we are shown. Afterwards they sit down and eat hamburg steaks that Honda made and froze for Kana back when she lived with him. The kind man’s cooking turns up on the other man’s table, which may be the quietest joke in the film.

Her phone rings. It is a video call from her relatives in China, gathered round a meal of their own, all talking at once. Kana, who has only a few words of Chinese, says hello and then keeps repeating one phrase, ting bu dong, which means roughly: I hear you, but I don’t understand. When the call ends, Hayashi asks what the phrase means. Her answer, the Japanese for “I don’t understand”, works both as a translation and as a shrug. He says the Chinese words himself. They look at each other and laugh. The film ends there, with nothing resolved.

Yamanaka has said she wanted something from outside to come into the room. The two of them had spoken the same language all film without understanding each other, until they fought with their bodies; a language neither could follow would put them, for once, on the same ground. In a world overflowing with meanings and words, she said, a language Kana does not understand is a kind of relief, like landing at a foreign airport and feeling oddly at ease among voices you cannot follow. She wrote the scene on instinct, and nobody was sure the film could end there until they saw the two actors play it.

She calls it a happy ending, though not a simple one. A darker final scene in the script was cut during the shoot because she felt the two of them should not end badly; they may part one day, perhaps soon, but they will carry on like this for a while, and a time like that is allowed in a long life. The flat has also been quietly mirrored for the last scene, to show, she has said, that something has decisively changed.

Kaneko Daichi has said he played the meal as a man privately resolving to make Kana happy, and that audiences do not seem to read it that way at all. Even the people inside the scene cannot be read from outside, and the film has made its peace with that. Over the closing credits it finally shows the stream Kana has been watching: oryx at a watering hole in the desert. Nobody explains anything there either.

Set this beside the essay “Her and the Seduction of Feeling Perfectly Understood”, which argued that the fantasy of being perfectly understood can be a way of never being encountered, and that friction is how you know someone is there. That film offers a lonely man total understanding and shows him what it costs. Yamanaka’s offers a young woman something close to the opposite, a failure to understand that is shared, and treats it as the nearest thing to intimacy these two have managed. Not understanding each other is nothing new for Kana and Hayashi. Not understanding together, for once on the same side of it, is.

Kana is not a portrait of a generation, and the film is careful not to make her one. Kawai has said she decided during the shoot that Kana could step down from the stage of speaking for anybody, as a woman or as someone with mixed roots. Some viewers, Yamanaka has said, found Kana wild and strange, and others said she was just like a friend of theirs. To the director she is an ordinary girl in a very ordinary state: at around twenty you are thrown into society, with more information and choices than anyone can sort through, and it is hard to feel what you actually think.

But the film is set somewhere, and the setting is not neutral. When Yamanaka asked Kawai and younger members of the crew how it felt to be living in Japan now, they described something like an end-of-the-world mood, and she has said nobody she knows still believes that working hard will lead to a better life. Kana puts it in one line after she loses her job: the country is going to end in falling births and poverty, so her goal from now on is survival. In the same breath she asks Hayashi whether she is strange.

The line is not only a mood. In a February 2024 survey of seventeen-to-nineteen-year-olds in six countries, the Nippon Foundation found that 15.3 percent of the Japanese respondents expected their country’s future to get better, the lowest share of the six, and that falling births topped their list of its most important problems. A survey of teenagers is not a portrait of Kana, and it explains nobody in particular. It suggests only that the sentence she says out loud is one many people her age may be carrying in silence.

Her work belongs in the same picture. Yamanaka has said the hair-removal salon was chosen on purpose, as one of the many things people are persuaded they must do when they need not. There is a quiet irony in how Kana says she lost the job: she tells Hayashi she was fired for telling a customer who really wanted the hair gone to go to a clinic instead. In Japan, destroying the hair root with laser or other strong light counts as the practice of medicine and is reserved for doctors, so her advice was simply true. A salon cannot sell what she told the customer to go and get.

Yamanaka has also said that someone described the film to her as the flip side of We Made a Beautiful Bouquet, and that she thought they might be right. Both films are about a young couple sharing a flat in and around Tokyo. The couple in the earlier film live on shared culture, the same books and films and bands, until work pulls them apart. Kana has no use for any of it; at one point she snaps at Hayashi to ask what anybody gets out of watching films. The two portraits are not rival verdicts on a generation. They are two of its rooms.

For a reader living in Japan across a language line, the ending may land somewhere particular. Yamanaka, whose mother is Chinese, gave Kana mixed roots late in the writing, after talking with Kawai about the sense of not quite belonging anywhere that can come with them; Kawai has said that the feeling of not getting through, of knowing some things will not cross however you phrase them, is one almost everyone has had. A woman who learned Japanese as an adult may know the fatigue of being half understood all day. The film proposes something that can sound strange from inside that fatigue: that a language nobody at the table follows can also be a rest, because for once nobody is being read.

Seen from outside Japan, it is tempting to make Kana a symptom of her country. One international review wrote that Japanese conformity is killing her and her generation as they twist themselves into shapes that do not fit. The second half of that is exact. The first is less so: the pressure to fit shapes that do not fit is not a Japanese invention, and the film is precise about which shapes it means, the kind man and the clever one, the salon, the tower of offices she laughs at from a wheelchair. The Worst Person in the World follows another young woman drifting between two men; it calls her the worst in its title and then makes her lovable. This film does not take the trouble, and it may be the more honest for it.

There are five objections worth answering, and the last is aimed at this Library rather than the film.

First, the film raises the question it refuses to answer. It stages the consultation, lets the counsellor’s questions circle Kana’s father, and puts a tray of sand in front of her. One critic thought it stops just short of diagnosing her yet still risks reducing her to a cluster of symptoms. It is possible to find the film too vague about her distress and too interested in it at the same time, and an essay that praises it for withholding a verdict has to admit that it keeps the question open on purpose, and may want it both ways.

Second, and more important: for many people a name is a relief. Someone who has lived for years with moods nobody could account for may recognise herself in Kana and want the doctor’s word for it, and an essay that treated every diagnosis as a way of managing a person would be insulting to her. This essay does not mean that. It declines one thing only, the diagnosis of a fictional woman by people watching her from the dark. And it holds that a name offered in a few minutes by someone about to pass her on is not the same as a name arrived at with someone who stays.

Third, the comedy of the fights. A film that plays a woman’s violence against a man as slapstick may make the real thing easier to laugh at, and harder for the man on the receiving end to talk about. In the Japanese government’s 2023 survey of violence between men and women, among people who had been harmed by a spouse, 57.2 percent of the men had told no one, against 36.3 percent of the women. Kana and Hayashi are not married, and these figures do not describe them. But the comedy has a cost the film does not fully count, and neither the director’s stated ethics nor this essay’s description pays it.

Fourth, the people Kana hurts. This essay has given most of its sympathy to her, and Honda did nothing to deserve that lie. Hayashi, for all his forgetting, looked after her when she could not walk. The woman in the photograph, the one person whose side Kana takes, never gets a scene. A reading that asks for patience with a volatile woman has to be careful not to spend all of it on her.

Last, the objection aimed at this Library. This house sells private companionship. An essay that finds the only calm in a film among people at a little distance, who ask nothing and explain nothing, is making the kind of argument a house like this would like. Weigh it accordingly. The one claim made here is narrower: that nobody should have to accept an account of herself as the price of being looked after. That is a standard, and it applies to this house as much as to anyone else.

Not that explanations are bad. Kana wants one, and the account she demands of Hayashi is owed. What the film shows is a difference between two kinds of attention. One reaches for an account of you: what you are feeling, what is wrong with you, what you need, and very often what you should therefore do, which tends to be to come home. The other stays in the room without one.

Being explained is not the same as being kept company. In this film the first is everywhere and the second is rare, and it comes, when it comes, from people a little way off: a counsellor who asks what frightens her, a neighbour who talks about gulls, and, at the very end, a man she has just been fighting with, who asks what a Chinese phrase means and laughs when the answer is “I don’t understand”.

There are reasons a woman becomes the person everyone explains, and some of them are hers. She may be hard to live with. She may lie, and hit, and laugh at a man in tears; Kana does all three. But some of the reasons belong to the people doing the explaining. An account of someone is a way of holding her still, and a person who will not hold still can be frightening to live beside. None of this makes her cruelty kind. It does make the hurry to name her look less like care than it sounds.

So, once, to you. If you have been the one everybody explains, whose moods were diagnosed over dinner and whose silences were interpreted by people who never asked, you do not have to accept their account in order to deserve company. You are allowed to want to understand yourself, and to look for someone qualified to help you do it, without taking the first name offered on a screen. And you are allowed to find, as Kana does for one evening, that some of the best moments are the ones in which nobody knows what anything means and nobody minds.

Yamanaka has said that in ten years she expects to look back and think she understood nothing now, and that she will probably die thinking she never understood anything, and she laughed as she said it. It is not a bad place for a film like this to come from. It is not a bad place to live, either.

Who in your life has an account of you, and when did you last hear it said out loud?

Is there someone you listen to more easily because they stand a little further away? What does the distance make possible?

When you asked someone to answer for something they had done, what did you get instead?

If someone offered you a name for what you feel, what would you want it to open?

When did you last share not understanding with someone, and did it feel like distance, or like company?