Discarding the Self for the Unknowable Other in “Drive My Car”
Janus Films
When Drive My Car was released a little over a year ago and I first started this essay, it was taking on a different shape, had a much different impetus behind it. I was preparing to go on a real trip, not a little weekend excursion, with someone I’d almost just started dating. I knew enough about him to think that inviting him to Hawaii with me would be a good idea, but as the trip crept closer and closer, the unpredictability of how we’d work together got more and more nerve-wracking.
Into that increasing trepidation landed Drive My Car, which instantly became my favorite movie of the year for a number of reasons, among them the questions it held about the essential knowability of one’s partner. Upon a first viewing it suggests, in a mode alternately troubling and reassuring, that on a certain level no matter how many years or decades one knows someone, and lives in the same house and sleeps in the same bed, one will never know the entirety of them. My worries were small potatoes, then—I’d never totally know my boyfriend anyway, what did a five-day vacation really matter?
But sitting with the film longer, doing a closer reading of its dialogue-dense scenes, director Hamaguchi has a more complex answer to the question of whether we can ever fully know the person we love, implying that it’s not impossible, but most people are too afraid to do so. That knowledge requires the disregarding of the boundaries of the self to uncover the certainly uncomfortable interior of someone else, which Drive My Car’s protagonist, not unlike most people, is unwilling to do.
Yūsuke Kafuku is a stage actor and his wife Oto a television screenwriter. Their personal and creative lives are intertwined: for his plays, Oto tape-records the other characters’ lines so that he can rehearse; for her screenplays, she comes up new plots while she and Kafuku have sex, which he relays to her the next morning after she’s forgotten them. But Kafuku isn’t the only one Oto is sleeping with, which he knows and has for a while, silently resigned to his wife’s flings with the actors she works with. He thinks finally she might admit this to him one night, when she asks in the morning if they can talk later. They never do; Kafuku comes home to find Oto dead of a brain hemorrhage, after he’d been stalling in the car from the dread of the admission he’s sure will come.
Janus Films
The story really begins there, as Oto’s life and death haunt Kafuku years later, preparing to direct a production of Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima. Last time around, right after his wife’s death, Kafuku played Vanya in an emotionally-draining performance where the character hit too close to home—but now, associating the play with that episode, he retreats to the safer ground of directing. Kafuku is still grieving deeply for a wife who not only was taken from him too soon, but who, he has a lingering feeling, was not fully known to him. Her secret affairs give her memory the feeling of an unfinished sketch, a person whose mystery Kafuku hasn’t yet unveiled. Vanya was the last play Oto recorded for him, and he plays the tapes endlessly in his car as his theater-mandated driver Misaki takes him around town. Oto’s voice echoes through scene after scene, often hitting some pressure point of Kafuku’s about love, or infidelity, or aging, through the combination of her vocal presence and the play’s words.
In this way, Kafuku submerges himself in Oto, filling his head with her voice as though by accumulating that dense fog of her words he might form a more concrete conception of who she was, that through repetition a truth unbeknownst to him might reveal itself. That exercise seems to be futile, ultimately, only driving home further the notion of Oto’s inscrutability. Her placid diction filters through the car radio in Vanya lines like “Oh, to flirt with a man like him, and to lose oneself in his arms!” reminding Kafuku of how she hurt him, while simultaneously twisting a phantom knife in just how unemotive her delivery is. She is, after all, just reading the other parts of Vanya for Kafuku to play off of; her original intention was to provide him a blank slate to embellish upon and now, unwittingly, she’s doing the same in a wholly different context.
Oto reads exactly as Kafuku likes his actors to read in rehearsal, emotionlessly, pounding the text into their brains for weeks until they can finally reach the dialogue’s emotional core. His ensemble for Vanya complain about his method of reading endlessly without affect, only understanding his point as the play slowly begins to reveal itself over the weeks and wooden performances become deeply felt ones. It is exactly what Kafuku cannot do with Oto’s performance, caught forever in its cold, perfectly enunciated stasis.
One of those actors is Takatsuki, a young TV star who’s had a fall from grace after a relationship with a minor. Takatsuki also happens to be the last man Oto had an affair with, Kafuku catching them in the act soon after Oto had introduced Takatsuki to him as a big fan. Not in spite of, but because of this, Kafuku casts him in Vanya as the titular role, pushing the younger actor past his depths. Takatsuki knows he doesn’t fit Vanya but stays anyway, having always wanted to get to know Kafuku better. They are both drawn to each other through their connection to Oto, but Takatsuki wants to bond with Kafuku over what he feels is their shared pain, while Kafuku wants to use him as a tool to unravel the mystery of Oto, not unlike one of those tapes.
He has a push-pull relationship with Takatsuki, wanting to mine him for information while at the same time knowing that bringing him too close will only trigger painful recollections of Oto. He realizes this in the audition, when Takatsuki forcefully kisses his scene partner, pinning her to a wall and prompting Kafuku to bolt up from his seat and tell them that’s enough. But he still hires Takatsuki, wanting to indulge the part of himself that wants to know who is this man Oto was sleeping with, why him.
Janus Films
They meet up in a bar one evening, Takatsuki’s idea. He’s forthright about his intentions, that he loved being in Oto’s productions and felt drawn to the idea of being in one of Kafuku’s. Up to that point uninterested, Kafuku’s interest is piqued. He wants to know why exactly Takatsuki feels that Kafuku and Oto were doing the same thing in their work, albeit in different ways, longing for his wife’s one-time lover to tell him that he and Oto really were in sync, no matter her infidelity.
In their conversation, Kafuku vacillates between assuming the cold, cutting posture he wants to present and slipping into introspection as he gets lost in thought over Takatsuki’s confessions. He lectures Takatsuki on his relationship that got him into hot water, asking if he has sex with total strangers all the time. “Sex isn’t the only way to get to know someone,” Kafuku says, attempting to wield the line as proof that his connection to Oto was deeper than Takatsuki’s surface level one, while surely knowing that it ironically applies to him in the same way—a great sex life with his wife didn’t necessarily mean that their relationship was unassailable.
Takatsuki tries to justify himself to the older man, claiming that there are just some things you can’t know until you have sex with someone. “Like what?” Kafuku asks with genuine interest; his unguarded face can’t wait to hear the next thing to come out of Takatsuki’s mouth. Takatsuki deflects, and their conversation soon ends when another bar patron realizes who he is and tries to take a photo. Kafuku is left with burning questions—how much deeper was Takatsuki’s knowledge of Oto than just casual sex? How might it differ from Kafuku’s, fill in certain gaps? From Kafuku’s perspective, not only did he have a healthy, mutually satisfying sex life with Oto, but she would come up with screenplay ideas during it: having sex with Kafuku was a font of inspiration, or at least it would seem so.
This conversation, and the one that follows, are Kafuku attempting to get to know Oto without leaving his comfort zone, with a sense of superiority that’s only partly earned. Surely Oto wouldn’t want him hiring and probing an actor she slept with to try to understand her better. And as such, these conversations are mostly circular, useless. Confident in his wronged-ness, as the rightful recipient of Oto’s love and Takatsuki as the interloper, he’s doomed to remain in his clouded, frustrated state of grief. Only when he gets into a mindset of questioning himself toward the end of his next dialogue with Takatsuki does he begin to reach the truth, dismantling his preconceived images of Oto and, especially, himself, to allow for the possibility of greater understanding of the other.
This time, he and the former TV star sit in the back of Kafuku’s car while Misaki drives them. He tells Takatsuki about the death of his and Oto’s daughter, which ended the good years of their marriage—until Oto began writing stories, telling them really, to Kafuku during sex. And not just sex, but during orgasm specifically. Kafuku says this with a frankness, bordering on smugness, as though he has the definitive answer to who Oto loved most deeply. He caps off his recounting by mentioning that Oto forgot her stories, and he’d have to recall them to her the next day. The linchpin in her creative process.
Janus Films
“Everyday living and our sex life were very fulfilling. At least for me,” he says, turning his monologue into a guilt trip. Hamaguchi furthers the effect by placing us in Takatsuki’s seat, transforming us from the spectator of the back-and-forth to the direct recipient of Kafuku’s accusatory look. Then we’re placed in Kafuku’s seat, observing from his position the young man’s indifference, the lack of any display of nervousness. Still hoping to draw an answer out of Takatsuki, Kafuku takes a different tack, admitting that, “Oto betrayed me so naturally as she loved me…she contained within her a spot that I couldn’t look into where something dark swirled.” He tells Takatsuki that he never asked Oto about this, because if she found out he knew about her affairs, their balance would have been thrown off. Though he’s reluctant to describe it in this way, he couldn’t bring himself to explore Oto’s unknown, protecting himself by not knowing his wife as fully as he could.
When Takatsuki suggests Oto wanted him to ask, Kafuku is taken aback. Could he have known something that Kafuku didn’t? Takatsuki finally smirks, the upper hand gained in an innocent question. The young man then recounts the story that we heard at the beginning of the film, of the high school girl sneaking into her crush’s house. While we saw Oto think up the scenario while having sex with Kafuku, she apparently got farther in the story with Takatsuki. He knows how it ends, or at least as close to the end as anyone will ever get now. Kafuku can barely process this, that what he thought was his one piece of Oto that no one else had, is gone. When Takatsuki finishes the story, he tells Kafuku that you can’t know someone, even if you love them deeply. You can only look into your own heart and deal with it to the best of your ability, “to look at yourself squarely and deeply.”
It’s the turning point for Kafuku, so adept at running from his emotions, wallowing in the what-ifs, in Oto’s voice, in safe creative projects that don’t require him to give much of himself at all. Not only has his understanding of his wife been shattered, but so too has the sense that he might finally figure her out: learning more about her only leads to more complexity, more cloudiness about who she really was. He needs a cigarette after this, finally allowing himself and Misaki to smoke in his precious car, holding their cigarettes up like lighters at a concert to let the smoke drift away above the sunroof. Seated in the front seat for once to smoke with Misaki at the wheel, Kafuku begins to take on agency in his life and work from this point forward, no longer resting on assumptions or comfortable routines.
Janus Films
Takatsuki continues to help Kafuku along this path of growth, dispatched from the production of Vanya when two police officers show up at rehearsal to arrest him for beating a man to death. He exits, bowing deeply to a stunned Kafuku, who now must put others before himself and take up the mantle of Vanya. He bristles at this suggestion from the theater’s directors, but knowing all the hard work of his actors will be lost otherwise, says he’ll take a couple days to consider it.
In need of the time and space to think, he tells Misaki of his predicament and she offers to drive him to her hometown in Hokkaido, about as far from Hiroshima as one can get. The two have slowly begun to let their guard down with each other, and here reveal their most intimate fears. Kafuku admits to Misaki that he believes he killed Oto by not coming home sooner that day, letting his fear of losing the balance of their marriage overtake his husbandly duty to know and accept his wife fully. Misaki has a similar confession—when her home was imperiled by a landslide, she escaped without rescuing her abusive mother from the wreckage.
When they reach Misaki’s desolate, snowy hometown, driving up to the mound of timbers that used to be her home, she tells Kafuku about her mother’s alternate personality, an eight-year-old girl named Sachi. Reminiscent of Kafuku’s earlier line about there being something else hidden within Oto that he couldn’t see, Sachi was a part of Misaki’s mother that she couldn’t quite comprehend, only play along with as a reprieve from her mother’s vindictiveness.
Thinking about the parallels between the two, she asks Kafuku about Oto: “Would it be hard for you to accept her, everything about her, as genuine? Maybe there was nothing mysterious about her. Would it be hard to think that she was simply like that? That she loved you dearly and that she sought other men constantly don’t seem to contradict each other or sound deceptive to me.”
While Kafuku can only see Oto in the context of himself, Misaki can see her more clearly—as a woman who sought satisfaction for the different needs in her life from different places. Similar to Takatsuki, Kafuku’s vision of his wife is clouded by just that, by thinking of her as ‘his wife,’ rather than taking himself out of the equation to see her as her own entity. It’s this that gets in the way of Kafuku, or anyone, in understanding their partner: seeing their thoughts and feelings and behaviors as a constant refraction of the self, instead of what they really are.
Janus Films
And that’s what falls away as he listens to Misaki. Immediately, there’s a recognition on his face, as though in the broad light of day, away from everything he knows, it dawns on Kafuku that his wife wasn’t an enigma, some code to crack, something unknowable. Maybe the unknowability was imposed upon her by himself, by a need to rationalize her in the face of his own being, through his own subjectivity. Maybe what he’s been searching for and avoiding, simultaneously, these inscrutable answers that will unlock the door, don’t exist.
In this moment he realizes that he should have allowed himself to be hurt by Oto, faced what he knew deep down was true about her, instead of running away from it and spending the years after her death searching for an answer that was right in front of him if only he’d asked. Finally breaking down, his grief subsuming him, his moroseness and intellect fall away, to be replaced by the simple pleading need he articulates to Misaki: “I want to see Oto…I want her back. I want her to live. I want to talk to her just once more. I want to see her.”
As Kafuku and Misaki embrace over their shared experience of grief, the film cuts back to Hiroshima. “I refuse! Wait, I’m not done yet!” Kafuku proclaims in his return to Vanya, the play’s words echoing Kafuku’s internal monologue as before, but here in a more positive light, reflecting his newly (re)found agency. He’s all energy as we see him tear through Vanya, then a deft, active listener as his scene partner performs the play-ending monologue. His story ends there, having found his emotional and artistic liberation, returning to the stage and coming to terms on some level with his forever-unfinished story with Oto. He’s absent from the film’s final scene, having given Misaki his car.
The play’s final words, spoken to Kafuku-as-Vanya, “When that time comes, we shall rest,” end his story on a note of peace, finally able to release his endless search to understand his wife after missing his chance to do so while she was still alive. He accepts the fact that he’ll never know Oto on his own terms, instead finding her on hers, as a frustrating and heartbreaking and eminently lovable partner. And as a person first and foremost, not a literary, ghostly enigma. To finally process her death and recover himself, he had to give up what he thought he needed, that pat answer, for an embrace of his wife’s contradictions.