Maiko Haaaan!!! review

Bowl-coifed Onizuka (Sadao Abe) has been obsessed with maiko (apprentice geisha) ever since one took the time to help him during a school field trip 12 years earlier. He even runs a maiko-related website where he posts photos of maiko, background information on geisha houses, and tips for prospective clientele. One day, after annoying all his coworkers at a Tokyo ramen company, Onizuki is informed that he’s being shipped off to his company’s Kyoto branch. Of course he’s ecstatic over the move because he can finally live in the city known for having the densest population of maiko in all of Japan. However, as one of his coworkers quietly explains to another, it’s actually a significant demotion; they only make ramen toppings in Kyoto.

Onizuka’s next order of business is coldly dumping his girlfriend Fujiko (Kou Shibasaki) for claiming to be a Kyoto girl even though she’s actually from Mie, just outside of Kyoto. Besides, if he’s going to go through with his lifelong ambition of marrying a beautiful young maiko, he certainly can’t be tied down by some boring Mie girl. In a fit of rage she ends up stabbing him right through the hand with a box cutter—a light sentence, considering where she was actually aiming.

Because of the “no first-timers” rule at most geisha houses, Onizuka is basically on the outside looking in when he first arrives in Kyoto. That is, until he discovers the owner of his company is a regular. After a desperate attempt to gain his boss’s invitation, he’s told that the only way to gain his trust is to make his company rich. Thus begins Onizuka’s journey on the path of spastic overachievement. Nothing can stand in the way of Onizuka and his maiko, so he immediately begins working toward his goal of making Kyoto ramen bowl toppings the best in the business. Meanwhile, Fujiko decides to move to Kyoto herself to secretly train as a maiko and hopefully win Onizuka’s heart one day.

Within days, Onizuka has earned enough money for his boss to get invited to Gion for a night of maiko-related entertainment. However, when he finally starts to have fun there, he discovers a drunken pro baseball player, Kiichiro Naito (Shinichi Tsutsumi), is having much more fun than him. When Naito mysteriously refers him as “sysop”, Onizuka puts 2 and 2 together and realizes that this is the same guy that’s been flaming him on his own message board under the nickname “Naiki”. Now, with any normal male rivalry, a heated argument or fistfight might do the trick—but not for these two immature doofuses. Onizuka immediately begins training to become a professional baseball player simply for the chance to hit a homerun off Naito in the playoffs.

As over-the-top as Onizuka is, Naito is not above egging him on. In fact, he actually revels in driving him insane by moving on to bigger and better things whenever it seems as if Onizuka is catching up in status. Soon they move briskly from baseball to K-1 kickboxing to movie stardom—all in the name of one-upping each other. This pattern reaches the pinnacle of absurdity when Naito decides to open up his own successful ramen shop, causing Onizuka to hastily start planning his own ramen venture before having to be reminded that he’s already done that. But no matter—by the time he discovers this twist of irony, Naito is already running for mayor.

The competition between these two ridiculously petty, immature men takes center stage for the bulk of the film. And for the most part, that aspect of it is good silly fun. Unfortunately in the 3rd act things slow down a bit as the Fujiko side-story comes into play and the mysterious nature of Naito’s relationship with a certain maiko is revealed. I realize there’s a formula for most absurd comedies wherein they usually include some sort of sweet or endearing thread that ties everything together—but do they really have to? Kankuro Kudo (Ping Pong, Drugstore Girl) penned the script, and as a fan of his work it’s hard to question a writing style that’s been successful so many times over. And yet I have to think there was a less clumsy path to the very obvious conclusion. Perhaps he could learn something from two men he tends to work with a lot: Suzuki Matsuo and Satoshi Miki. That is, goofy stories don’t always have to be laced with a contrived endearing quality—sometimes it’s enough just to make people laugh without injecting sentiment. That nitpicky point aside, though, “Maiko Haaaan!!!” still has more than enough laughs to go around.

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Availability:

US distributor Viz Pictures released “Maiko Haaaan!!!” on region 1 DVD with English subtitles on June 24, 2008. Picture quality is pretty good on the main feature, but the making-of featurette and trailers are over-compressed beyond belief, causing all sorts of weird artifacts and other telltale signs of video shrinkage. For full specs, see this link.

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