Yutaka Suzuki

When Otomo Katsuhiro saw his manga Good Weather credited as the “original novel” he burst out laughing. There’s not an iota of his book anywhere in the film. Made in the same year as Sono Sion’s A Man’s Flower Road, Hirano Katsuyuki’s Happiness Avenue (where Sono plays a role) is madder and more abandoned, in both filmmaking and content. Lovelorn Masahiro goes on an odyssey to find fulfilment of his heart’s desire, and the sea he traverses are Tokyo’s open sewages.

A man (Masahiro Sugiyama), an idol otaku, picks up a monster fish and starts to raise it at home. At the same time, he moves in with a runaway girl (Yoko Oguchi), and the friction between them becomes more intense. The film was made at the end of the eighties, in response to the sense of stagnation in the provincial cities. It's a film with a darker side than my previous film "Love on the Street". It also has the strongest theatrical colour of all the films so far, but it shows the bankruptcy in a different way to "Street Corner of Love -".