‘The Taste of Fish’ gets a potential franchise rolling

Shingo Matsubara’s The Taste of Fish (Tsukiji Uogashi Sandaime) comes out this Saturday after already having premiered at Cannes back on May 15th, and with a sequel already in the works it looks like it will become a franchise of yearly films if it’s even moderately successful. It all seems a bit odd to me, mostly because I can’t picture Takao Osawa ever being known as “that fish dude” in the way Kiyoshi Atsumi became synonymous with Torajiro in the Tora-san series, but I guess time will tell.

The story is based on a 21-part manga series originally published in Big Comic. Osawa plays Shuntaro Akagi, a successful businessman who works in the human resources department of a general trading company. His life is going well both financially and personally, and marriage to his girlfriend Asuka (Rena Tanaka) may be on the horizon. One day Shuntaro’s superiors put him in charge of a large-scale corporate restructuring, and the list of people being axed includes an old boss who taught him the ropes. Shuntaro is extremely conflicted, but his attention is diverted when he has to help out at “Dragon Fish”, the fish trading company normally run by Asuka’s now-ailing father. Shuntaro is initially overwhelmed by both the characters he meets at Tsukiji Fish Market and the traditions that have been passed down through the generations of people that work there, but over time his sense of taste becomes more of an asset than his business savvy ever was and he starts to enjoy the quirkiness of his new job much more than the cutthroat nature of his old one.

Here’s a subtitled trailer followed by a different, non-subtitled one.

Links:
Official website
Eigapedia

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Tags: akira emoto, food, rena tanaka, shiro ito, takao osawa, the taste of fish, tsuyoshi ihara, yoko moriguchi