The Cats of Mirikitani: A Review

We have all heard the adage, and perhaps have even repeated it to others, that good comes from bad and that some of life's most precious lessons emerge from loss and/or failure. Sometimes when we hear people say this we want to slug them because it can simply be an expression of unwillingness to face up to some difficult and intractable problems in life. In other words, it can be more of a glib nostrum than a helpful observation.

But it is also a statement which perfectly characterizes the realistic but buoyant documentary The Cats of Mirikitani, which served as a fitting valedictory to the Salem's "Docuweek" at the Salem (OR) Cinema. And, by breathing new and fresh life into this popular adage, director Linda Hattendorf puts a different construal on the tragedy of 9/11 than which is popularly portrayed. Rather than 9/11 solely being a time of unremitting loss, or of a triggering cause to launch the war on world terrorism, 9/11 is seen as a stimulus to redefining relationships and recovering one's past.

The "Story Line"

Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani is a homeless artist living in the vicinity of Hattendorf's SoHo, NYC, apartment. She no doubt passed his way, observed his work, and even filmed some of his style of street-living and artistry for some time before the tragedy of 9/11 struck. In its wake, Lower Manhattan was all but evacuated, and the normally teeming streets of the Big Apple were abandoned. Hattendorf invited Jimmy to move into her apartment, to share her crackerbox-sized home with her and her cat. So began her odyssey with Jimmy and, more important, Jimmy's odyssey with his past. An act of friendship, which probably was also motivated by a desire to see if the idea could mature into a film, provided the context for Jimmy not to take his artistic work any less seriously, but to, as it were, paint his life on the larger canvas of memory, familial integration and confrontation with the ghosts of his deep past.

What was that past? As the film unfolds, we learn the facts of Jimmy's life. Born in Sacramento, CA in 1920, he was brought up in Hiroshima and returned to the states in the late 1930s before he could be conscripted into the Japanese army. He knew, from age five, that he was an artist; he knew that an artist must have nothing to do with war. But his return to America in the late 1930s was anything but smooth. By virtue of FDR's Executive Order 9066, signed on February 19, 1942, military commanders were authorized to designate military areas from which certain people, citizen and non-citizen, might be excluded. Japanese people (62% of which were American citizens) living in these excluded areas were subject to relocation to a series of internment camps placed in the interior of the country. In an order given in May 1942, about 18,000 Japanese people residing in many sections of the West Coast were moved to the remote Northern CA town of Tule Lake, just south of the Oregon border. Jimmy was among that number.

The bitterness he felt at the US Government for the relocation, the privation, the uprooting of life, the suspicion in which the Government held its own citizens, still flowed freely from his lips in the wake of 9/11. To televised reports of the Government's plans to retaliate against "terrorists," Jimmy almost spat, "Government! Evil Government!" The simmering hurt of 1942 was still boiling, the wound unstanched, the blood still oozing.

But then the skillful and gentle influence of director Hattendorf took over. While he was living at her apartment, he became not simply her guest but, in a sense, her "project." Undeterred by his rebuffs, she consciously took pains not only to see what kind of public assistance could come to Jimmy, but also to reconnect him with people in his family whom he hadn't seen for 50 years (his sister) or whom he never had met (a cousin who was poet laureate of San Francisco in 2000). Then, Hattendorff skillfully connects Jimmy with a community of retired people, who not only supply him with an apartment but also provide the context for him to show them his art. He is no "commercial artist"; he is a great master artist following in the refined Japanese tradition of figure painting.

The Culmination

Lest we think, however, that the last word of the movie is Jimmy's reintegration with people from his family or with a retirement community (as Jimmy becomes more comfortable with this community of people, he begins to "dress up," even wearing a tie and white shirt), we are privileged to see the 60th reunion of the Tule Lake "veterans" through his eyes. Something about re-treading the hated ground 60 years later had made it almost sacred to him and the hundreds of others present for that 2002 occasion. On the bus back north, he says that he is now very happy and that the ghosts, which seemingly stalked that land for so long (and, we are led to believe, the landscape of his mind) have now disappeared. Peace was made with is past, and the director was the agent of that reintegration.

But one thing stays curiously "unintegrated" for me about the movie. And that is the major driving force of Jimmy's life--his art. We see his brilliant colors, careful depictions of cats, haunting memories of Tule Lake before the personal "integration" takes place. We wonder, and are left to wonder, whether the personal "healing" that takes place will re-shape his art. I don't think that Hattendorf asks that question. But it is an important one for an artist, especially since, as we know, the inner struggles of the heart are often played out on the big screen of life.

Yet this shouldn't detract from a film that is brilliant in its conception and execution. We are enriched by the art, but even more by the spirit, of Jimmy Mirikitani.

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