Vibrator, and the Quiet That Came Later

Snow is falling on Tokyo, and a woman is standing in front of the wine in a convenience store, unable to pick a bottle. The choice is not hard. Her head is loud. Voices run over one another in there, commenting and advising, and underneath them she cannot hear what she wants. Her phone buzzes against her and she does not answer it. The bottles stay on the shelf.

She is Rei Hayakawa, thirty-one, a freelance writer. She has not been sleeping. She drinks, and she eats and then makes herself sick. A young man with bleached hair comes into the shop, and within minutes she is following him out into the snow, toward the long-distance truck he drives.

From here on, this essay discusses the whole film, including its last scene.

Ryuichi Hiroki’s Vibrator, made in 2003 from Mari Akasaka’s novel, is usually told as the story of what happens next: a woman coming apart, a stranger’s body, a few days on the road, and a heart that has healed by the time she gets home. Synopses of the film say something close to that. The film is more exact than its synopses, and the exactness is in the order of events.

The first night, in the berth behind his seats, gives her a few hours, and they do not hold. By dawn she is being sick in the road, and the next day the voices come back to her through the truck’s radio. The quiet the film ends on comes later, and it is plainer than a night. A man who stays when she hits him, and afterwards bathes her without wanting anything for it. Two lies about having someone, told and taken back over bowls of noodles. The wheel of his truck, handed to her.

And what she carries back into the shop at the end is not a man. It is a way of ending a conversation, borrowed from him, and the ability to choose a bottle of wine.

Vibrator was directed by Ryuichi Hiroki from a screenplay by Haruhiko Arai. Akasaka’s novel first appeared in the literary monthly Gunzo at the end of 1998, came out as a book the following January and was a candidate for the Akutagawa Prize; it has since been translated into English by Michael Emmerich. Shinobu Terajima plays Rei, and Nao Omori plays the driver, Takatoshi Okabe. The film runs ninety-five minutes, was shot on digital video, and opened in Japanese cinemas on 6 December 2003.

It was noticed before it opened. That November it played in competition at the Tokyo International Film Festival, where Terajima shared the best actress award. Later, at the Yokohama Film Festival, it headed the year’s list of Japanese films, and Hiroki, Arai and Omori all took prizes. Terajima also led Akame 48 Waterfalls that autumn, and several of the season’s best actress awards named the two films together.

Hiroki and Arai both began their careers in Japan’s adult cinema, the low-budget pink films and the studio erotica of the 1970s and 1980s, and some of the argument about this film starts there. This essay comes back to it.

A note before reading on. This essay describes, plainly and without detail, a woman who drinks, who eats and makes herself sick, and who at one point hits her own head. It gives what Rei hears no clinical name. The film gives it none, and a name would only be one more voice talking over her.

The film does not explain the voices, and it does not ask the audience to decide what they are. It lets us hear them. Some of what goes on in Rei’s head arrives as a murmur on the soundtrack, a running talk about which wine is best, about diets, about the fashion pages. Some of it the film sets down as written titles cut in between the shots, her thoughts in type. The effect is less like reading a doctor’s notes than like standing in a room where too many radios have been left on.

Listen to what the murmur is made of and it is not all strange. A good deal of it sounds like magazine copy: what to drink, what to eat, how to look. The film does not say where it comes from, and this essay will not guess. It is enough that it is there, and that it does not stop.

That it does not stop is the whole of the difficulty. She cannot sleep. She drinks. She eats and then makes herself sick, and later, on the road, she will tell Okabe that being sick is what lets her feel calm enough to sleep. That is her account, and this essay takes it as what it is: a reason. A reason is not a remedy. What the reason costs, the film shows without comment, in the road at dawn and at a petrol station the next day.

There is a plain reason this essay is careful with names. Diagnosis is not a critic’s work, and a woman in a film cannot be examined. There is a subtler one too, which the film itself seems to understand. Rei’s trouble, as the film shows it, is voices that will not stop telling her what to want. A label would be one more of them. What the film offers instead is a body, a night, a road and an order of events, and those are what this essay reads.

The first touch between them is his. In the aisle his hand passes across her from behind, lightly and on purpose. She has not asked for it. The film makes it a spark all the same: something in Rei wakes, and the thought that comes to her is startling in its plainness. She wants to eat him. She follows him out of the shop.

For a long time her hunger has been aimed at her own body. Here, for a moment, it points outward, at a person, and the film is frank that the wanting is hers. She climbs into the cab of his truck. He offers her shochu and she drinks it. She tells him she is afraid of people. Then she whispers, desperately, that she wants to touch him. He takes her into the berth behind the seats, and they make love to the vibration of the idling engine.

Consent here has to be read exactly, because the film offers two kinds of touch in one night, and it would be easy to let the second tidy away the first. The touch in the aisle was not asked for, and nothing that happens afterwards reaches back to make it asked. What the film does show, and deserves credit for, is the asking in the cab. It is Rei who says what she wants, in words, to him, and he answers her. That is what makes the second touch different from the first. Not her loneliness, not her fear, not the drink, the snow or the hunger, though all of them are in the scene. They are the weather around the yes. The yes is the sentence she whispers.

The essay “I Want Touch. I Don't Want a Relationship.” drew a distinction that fits this cab closely. Wanting to be touched is a physical desire, and it is not always a request for a relationship; and yes to one thing is not yes to the next. Rei asks to touch him. She does not ask for a future, and when she asks for more, the next morning, it is a separate request, made in daylight, for the road.

None of this makes a stranger’s truck a safe place. A woman who follows a man she does not know into his cab on a snowy night is not in a room with rules. Rei is lucky in the man, and the film knows how thin that luck is: within a day he is telling her, with some relish, about the things he did when he was a yakuza. The film is not a recommendation, and this essay will not read it as one.

At dawn she climbs down from the truck and is sick in the road. Then she comes back and asks him to take her with him. He does, and the truck heads out of Tokyo toward Niigata.

That morning is where the cure story first fails, and it is worth stopping on. The night gave her something, and the film lets it: a few hours in which her body could feel something other than panic. It did not hold. The body that felt that is the same body that empties itself onto the asphalt at first light. What changes between night and morning is not her condition. It is that she asks again. In the dark she asked for touch; in daylight she asks for the road. They are two requests, and the film keeps them apart.

On the road they talk, and what each of them says is the next thing to read with care. Okabe tells her he is married and has a child. He tells her that a woman is stalking him. He tells her, cheerfully, about the bad things he did when he was a yakuza, and he signs off his chats with other drivers on the radio with a whistle. Rei tells him about the drinking and about being sick.

His stories are his account, and the film gives us no way to check them. This essay passes no verdict on him because of them, and it will not make him more interesting with them either. A married man who sleeps with a stranger is a figure people like to condemn; a former gangster with gentle hands is one they like to admire. Both are stock characters, and the film seems to know it, because the next day it lets Rei call the marriage a lie, and he nods.

What the talk in the cab does show plainly is Rei telling a man she met the night before about the drinking and the being sick. He does not know who she was last year, and he will have no say in who she is tomorrow. Whatever else the cab is, it is a room in which nobody keeps a record of her.

The truck’s radio is a room full of voices too. Drivers talk to one another across the distance about the road and the weather, and Rei talks with them. Then the voices in her head come back. It is one of the film’s quieter cruelties that what brings them back is company: other people’s chatter, friendly and harmless, and a little more than she can hold.

At a petrol station it breaks. She hits him, and then her own head, sobbing that she feels sick. He does not leave. That is all he does, and it is a great deal.

At a motel he bathes her, gently, and she cries against his chest. This is the touch the film seems to care about most, and it is worth being exact about what kind of touch it is. It comes after her worst hour. It asks nothing back. It is care, given to someone who has just been hitting the person giving it.

It is also a touch the film does not show her asking for, and an essay that has just insisted on the asking should say so. She lets it happen, and then she cries. Letting is not the same as asking. What can be said is narrower: nothing is wanted from her in return, and he touches her at her worst without flinching.

If the film has a theory of touch, it is here and not in the berth. When a woman’s body has become a place she cannot live in, desire may not reach her, however welcome it is. What may reach her, for a while, is being handled carefully by someone who has seen the worst of it and stayed.

The next day they stop for noodles, and Rei tells him that she has a man. Then she says that it is a lie. His wife and child, she says, are a lie too. He nods.

It is a small scene and the most honest one in the film. Two people who have shared a bed, a day on the road and one very bad hour each admit to having invented somebody. Why would you tell a stranger you are taken? One reading, and it is only a reading, is that each lie was a limit, made out of the only material to hand. I have someone means: this ends. Expect nothing; I will expect nothing too. Nobody had agreed any terms for these days, so each of them put up a wall made of a story, and the walls let them be close.

The essay “A Carefully Bounded Stranger May Hear What Familiar Life Has Stopped Asking” argued that familiar people carry archives, and that someone with no history has fewer corrections prepared in advance, so that honesty need not become a referendum on the rest of your life. It also drew a line that matters here. A chance encounter and an agreed one are both finite, but they are not the same kind of finite. When the limit is agreed, both people know from the start that the time is bounded, and either of them can stop. When it is left to chance, the limit has to come from somewhere else. In Vibrator it comes from the road, which runs to Niigata and back, and from two lies.

What the noodle shop shows is what happens when the lies are put down. The limit does not go away. They are still going to part, and both of them know it. But the ending no longer rests on a story. It is simply true, and they can look at it. The essay on touch made the same point from the other side: touch that makes no claim on the future cannot reassure anybody about the future, so it can settle the body without settling the question. Over the noodles the question is set on the table between them, and neither of them pretends to answer it.

After the meal he puts her behind the wheel. She is frightened at first; it is a big truck. Then, a little way down the road, she is smiling. The voices have gone quiet.

Notice where the film puts that quiet. Not in the berth, and not in the bath, but at the wheel. The voices stop when she has somewhere to put her attention that is hers: a road ahead, a heavy machine answering her hands, a direction someone has trusted her with. It would be too much to call this a cure, and the film does not. It is only the place where the quiet arrives.

The truck brings her back to the convenience store where they met. They look at each other without a word, and he drives away. Nothing is said, so nothing is promised. Left alone, Rei whistles softly, the way he used to sign off on the radio. Then she goes into the shop and chooses a bottle of wine without difficulty.

The whistle is the last thing the film gives her, and it is worth being exact about what it is. On the radio it was his way of ending a conversation: a small signal that the talk is over, which hurts nobody and needs no explanation. The voices in her head never had one. They began without her leave and did not end. So what she takes from him is not him. It is a sign-off, a way of closing a channel. And the first thing she does with it is walk into the same bright shop where the night began and make the choice she could not make then.

The film does not say whether it lasts, and it would be dishonest to add what it withholds. The last image is ordinary, and the ordinariness is the point: a woman choosing wine.

The novel and the film need keeping apart where they differ, and the first difference is who is speaking. Akasaka’s book is told in the first person, from inside Rei’s head, so that the noise is the prose itself. A film cannot do that. Hiroki’s answer, the murmur on the soundtrack and the titles on the screen, sets her thoughts a little away from her, where we read them as she hears them. Readers who come to the film from the book point out that the novel gives Rei more of a past than the film tells, her mother among it. This essay reads the film, and it borrows nothing from the book that the film does not show.

The world around the two of them is ordinary, and the film treats it as ordinary. A convenience store is open all night and lit like a stage; it is where a person goes when the night has no other door. A long-distance driver’s cab has a bed behind the seats because the work needs one. The talk between drivers on the radio is how people who spend their days alone on the road keep one another company and pass on the weather. None of it is exotic, and an English-speaking viewer loses nothing by taking it as plainly as the film does.

Nor is Rei a portrait of Japanese women. She is one woman in one winter. Some of the structure around her will still be familiar: freelance work with no office to go to and nobody to notice whether she slept; a city where wine can be bought at any hour and there is still nobody to call; a steady supply of advice addressed to women that is never quiet for long. These are the setting, not the explanation, and they belong to many cities.

In the same year, 2003, a very different film about strangers and loneliness in Tokyo reached cinemas. Lost in Translation keeps its two strangers in a hotel high above the city and ends with a whisper we are not allowed to hear. Vibrator puts its strangers in a cab at street level, drives them out of the city into the snow, and ends with a look and no words at all. Both refuse to tell us what passes between two people at the end. Only one is told from inside the life of a woman who lives there.

For a reader who lives in a second language, the whistle may land harder than the plot. The essay on touch observed that in a second language the words for declining run out before the words for agreeing do. The words for ending run out early too: how to close a call, leave a conversation, say that is enough without hurting anyone. Rei is not living in a second language, but on the road she picks up a little of one, the drivers’ talk, and the phrase she keeps is the one for goodbye.

There are strong objections to all of this. Some are aimed at the film and some at this essay.

First, the cure story may be the film’s story after all. The voices do go quiet by the end, and they go quiet after a few days with a man. An essay that leans this hard on the order of events may be special pleading, and the film may simply be a gentler telling of the oldest plot there is, a woman saved by a man, done with more patience than most. The order is suggestive. It is not proof, and a viewer who sees a rescue in the last reel is not misreading it.

Second, the men who made it. The director and the screenwriter both came up through adult cinema, and a film in which a woman in distress is drawn out by a stranger’s uninvited touch and eased by his body can be read as that cinema’s fantasy in better clothes. There is an answer, and it is partial. The story, even the hand in the aisle, comes from a novel written by a woman in a woman’s voice, and when the film was first shown one critic wrote that the sex in the cab, filmed at very close quarters, rang true. But the choice of what to film, and how, belonged to the men who made it. And a gentle stranger who turns out to be safe is a fantasy, whoever writes it.

Third, the ending may be too kind. Snow, a whistle, a bottle chosen: it is a lovely last minute for a film that has shown a woman being sick in the road and hitting her own head. Someone who lives with noise that does not go quiet in a few days may find it hard to watch, and she would not be wrong. The film at least claims no more than it shows. It does not say whether it lasts.

Last, the objection aimed at this Library. This house sells private companionship, and a film about a few days of touch and talk with a stranger, ended without a word, sits close to its subject, close enough that a reader should discount what is said here. So it should be said plainly what the film is not evidence of. It is not evidence that a stranger’s touch quiets anybody’s distress. It is not evidence that an encounter with an end built into it helps, or that it is safe: nothing in the film is agreed in advance, nobody is paid, and Rei’s safety is luck. It is not evidence for any arrangement, this house’s included. It is the story of a woman who does not exist, and it proves nothing about anyone who does. And if this essay’s reading, that the night was not the cure, suits a house like this because it spares us a claim we should not make, that is one more reason to weigh it with care.

Not that touch heals. The film is more careful than that, and so should this Library be. What it shows is narrower and more useful. A body can sometimes be reached by being handled with care by someone who has seen the worst and stayed. A small honesty, like owning up to an invented wife, can do more than a night of closeness. And being handed the wheel, being trusted with the direction of something, may do what being held cannot.

It also shows two people making a limit without any words for one. Rei and Okabe build their ending out of lies, then out of a road, then out of a look. In the film it holds. It is fragile, and it is not a method.

There are good reasons a woman might follow a stranger out into the snow. A stranger has no archive. He will not remember who she was last year, will not tell her mother, will not be at work on Monday. For someone whose head is full of voices that know her far too well, that can feel like the only quiet room in the city. That is not foolish. It is a reason.

So, once, to you. If you are reading this at the hour when the noise is loudest, and a stranger’s warmth has ever looked like the switch that would turn it off, wanting that was not a failing. What you wanted may not have been the stranger at all, but somewhere the voices could not follow, and someone who would not flinch. Those are reasonable things to want. The film’s quiet suggestion is that they can come in plainer shapes than a night: being looked after without owing anything, a true thing said across a table, a turn at the wheel of something. And if the drinking, the eating and the being sick, or the voices, are close to your own nights, that is worth taking to a doctor. It is not something you have to carry alone until it stops by itself.

This is a reading of a film. It is not clinical, and it diagnoses no one, fictional or real. It gives no name to what Rei hears, or to her drinking or her being sick, and nothing in it describes any reader or anyone who made or acted in the film. It says nothing about the private lives of Shinobu Terajima or Nao Omori.

It keeps the novel and the film apart. Where it describes a scene, it describes the film, not the book, and it makes no claim about how the novel ends. Okabe’s stories about his marriage, a stalker and his past are treated as his account. The essay takes no position on whether they are true beyond what the film shows: that when Rei calls the wife and child a lie, he nods.

It is not advice about strangers, trucks or nights, and it does not suggest that getting into a stranger’s vehicle is safe. It does not claim that touch, or companionship of any kind, treats anything.

If any of what Rei lives with is close to your own life, a doctor is the right person to tell, not an essay. In Japan every prefecture and designated city has a public mental health and welfare centre that takes consultations by telephone or in person, and local public health centres take them too. The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare describes these consultations as free and confidential.

No director, writer, performer, festival or publisher named here has any connection to this house, and none was consulted. No line of dialogue is quoted, and no passage of the novel.

When the noise in your head is loudest, what is it saying, and whose voice does it sound like?

Have you ever built a limit out of a story, a partner who was not there, a plan you did not have, so that closeness could not ask you for more? What would the true version have sounded like?

Who would stay with you at your worst, and who would hand you the wheel? Are they the same person?

What is your way of ending a conversation that hurts nobody, and who taught it to you?