Films, like tunes or poems, spring from strange encounters, from odd associations that can be completely incongruent but full of magic.
In the case of Map of the Sounds of Tokyo, I "saw” the story (I don't want to sound like some kind of visionary, but this is how I felt it happen) at Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo. I suppose the smells of fresh tuna, seaweed and oysters, the shouting of the auctioneers, the scraping and shuffling of thousands of fish boxes dragged across the market floor and the peculiar effects of the fluorescent lighting at four o'clock in the morning had a great deal to do with it. Or perhaps it was the miso soup and eel makis I had for breakfast that did it. Or the stony face of the girl neatly hosing the floor who was so adamant in her refusal to let me photograph her, showing a determination that is unusual for Japan.
However, I remember that on my way back to the hotel on the crowded underground, sleepy after having got up at three in the morning to see the fish being auctioned, that girl was still on my mind and I couldn't help wondering why she was so emphatic in her refusal. I thought of her rubber boots among the melted ice and the blood of the freshly butchered tuna fish. When I closed my eyes and heard the child-like female voice announcing the next stop, Shinjuku, I knew I would tell this story of a woman – a hard, solitary, mysterious, wounded woman – who leads a double life: a fish market worker who cleans, hauls crates and occasionally carries out jobs as a hit-woman. And the story of a man, whose obsession are sounds, and who is silently in love with that woman, even though he knows that the very most he can expect from her is the sound of her breath, the sound of her heels down an empty alley and her conversations during her meetings with a man, of Spanish origin, towards whom she experiences an attraction that endangers the life she has led up until then as a loner.
To this initial idea, my "vision" or whatever you want to call it, I added he story of a man who is unable to cope with the loss of his daughter, and is on a blind search for revenge that eventually leads to a tragic end.
This is how Map of the Sounds of Tokyo was born.
I was also influenced by the fascination I feel for contemporary Japanese culture and the atmosphere I find in the novels of Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto as well as by my unconcealed addiction to wasabi and the almost tangible vibrations emanating from Tokyo during the night: a mixture of expectation, mystery, darkness and tenderness that leaves an indelible mark.
I see the sound tracks to my films as a further character, like the lighting, the scenery, the movement of the camera or the actors' performance. Map of the Sounds of Tokyo doesn't have a conventional sound track. Instead, I have put together a collection of songs that accompany the characters in their passion, solitude, joyfulness, melancholy or suffering.
It is a thoroughly eclectic sound track, with songs by Misora Hibari (the traditional Japanese song Genka), Max Richter, the Dutch duo "Kraak & Smaak" or the beautiful "One dove" from Antony & the Johnsons' latest release.
Isabel Coixet