Magnus Bärtås

In Tokyo, a man named Johnnie Walker—a Jewish Japanese citizen—stages street provocations with his Irish wolfhound, seeking recognition in a society that marginalizes him. Meanwhile, the filmmaker traces the legacy of Kumiko Muraoka, muse of Chris Marker’s The Koumiko Mystery (1964), from Tokyo to Paris. Blending biography, fiction, and essay, the film explores identity, narration, and the politics of cuteness in a world shaped by memory, power, and performance.

In the 1950s and 1960s The African and Asian leaders from the Non Alignment Movement arrived to the Yugoslavian island Brioni with their cages in varying sizes and thus revived an almost 2500 years old tradition. Already in the Achaemenid Empire delegates from the remote provinces came with animal gifts to Darius the Great in Persepolis. The animals would portray the power and the extent of the empire. Brioni became a microcosm that represented an imagined widespread community.

A Jewish man in Tokyo named Joni Waka, who used to call himself "Johnnie Walker", is the model of a character in Haruki Murakami's novel Kafka on the Shore. Joni Waka also claims that he is the only Jew left in Japan descending from the old Jewish families in the country: a self-proclaimed outsider, a mythomaniac, a homosexual, and the natural center of every party. Confronted with a social pressure, he seems to ignore dominating norms and morals while using his outside position as a henna gaijin (the "strangest stranger") as a space of freedom to stage his life and create an everyday comedy.