Suwa is a timid, ordinary-looking man in his late forties, a computer freak. One day his wife Sayoko disappears with all his money, passport and credit cards. She has only left a mysterious note stating: ‘Everyone was moon, I can’t take it any more, farewell.’ Suwa got to know his wife through an arranged encounter and then married her. He never had another woman. He believes that they had a good marriage, even though there weren’t any children. Suwa doesn’t feel like involving the police, but he does want to get Sayoko back. Then her younger brother Dan offers to help him. To take his mind off things, Dan puts Suwa in contact with the prostitute Yumi. Suwa and Yumi get on well and live together. One day Suwa, Yumi and Akira leave for a small fishing village on theJapanese coast, named Minazuki, that literally means: ‘everyone was moon’. That is where they can expect to find Sayoko and her lover…As part of ‘Film-makers in Focus’ Rotterdam showed last year a complete retrospective of work by Mochizuki, one of the hidden treasures of the Japanese film industry that is dominated by genre films (in his case porn and Yakuza). This ‘superior pragmatist’ made films like Another Lonely Hitman and Onibi. Rotterdam is proud to be honoured with the world première of his latest film, Minazuki.
