松本 杏菜

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ANNA MATSUMOTO

Maiko

This is a documentary film that I observed and kept track of a 24-year-old woman’s life. Her name is Maiko who lives in Kanagawa prefecture which is right next to Tokyo. Currently, she is working at a hostess bar three days a week at night raising her seven-month-old baby. She divorced her husband while I was shooting this film, and became a single mother. She is now living in her parents’ home and her grandmother’s home in order to look after her baby. In her parents’ home, there are her father, her mother born in Philippine, her younger sister, a rabbit, and a bird. In her grandmother’s home, there are her grandmother and uncle on the father’s side and a bedridden cat.
For almost a month, I observed her life and figured out that there were serious problems about single mothers, working environments, and family system complexly intertwined in Japan, which consists of our desires and ideals. I felt she herself and her sense of values are formed by the relationship with her surroundings. There seems to be something inevitable that force us to follow a certain sense of values as if it was already defined. However, the sense of values is very vague, and actually nobody knows who made it. It’s just like ghosts. People are long for and jealous of the differences between oneself and others, which means that they want to be everyone. But, at the same time, they also have a desire that they want to be unique. For better or worse, contemporary consumption culture makes such our desires come true.
Her life exists in between ordinary life and mass consumption society. It seems like she embodies this country’s big problems.