Tohru Emori has the deep, steady voice that gets an actor cast as generals and magistrates, and his best-known screen part spends it on a drunk in a Tokyo shelter. A Shakespearean by trade, he is most interesting when the authority is taken away.
Fi1m perspective
Gin, in Tokyo Godfathers (2003), has a red nose and a story about the family he says he lost, and the story changes depending on how much he has had. That is the part in one line, and Tohru Emori voices it without asking for sympathy. He plays Gin as a man who has told the tale so often he no longer checks it against the truth, and who is a little surprised, each time, that anyone is still listening. It is the opposite of what he is usually hired for.
What he is usually hired for is authority. Emori trained at Bungakuza from 1962 and has stayed with the company since, playing Othello on stage in 1972 and directing and performing Hamlet in 1981, and Shakespeare has remained his home ground. On screen he turns up in more than sixty films and in NHK's taiga historical dramas, most often as the man in charge: the official, the officer, the man whose word settles things. The voice does the work. It is low, unhurried and carries without effort, which is why it is also heard in narration and dubbing, telling us what to think of the picture.
Satoshi Kon used him twice, and used him against that grain. Gin is the lead voice in Tokyo Godfathers, and the film moved us more than a plot this contrived has any right to; a good part of that is Gin's account of the lost family, which shifts with every drink until we stopped trusting it and found we cared anyway. Three years later Kon cast him as Seijiro Inui, a scientist at the centre of Paprika (2006), a part closer to his usual line. His live-action credits include Tokunaga in Shaso (1989) and an appearance in a Takeshi Kitano film of 2007.
The caveat is the one that follows any actor with an instrument this useful. Directors reach for the voice and get the general, and there are fewer Gins than there should be. Emori has written that "It's more important to express how the person lived than expressing the moment of death," and Gin is the proof that he means it: a man defined by how he has lived, told badly, in a cold city, on Christmas Eve.
Start with Tokyo Godfathers, where the film and the actor are both at their least official. Then try Paprika, and listen for the difference.
Biography
Tōru Emori is a Japanese actor, voice actor and theatre director. Born in Tokyo on 25 January 1944, he entered the acting school of the Bungakuza theatre troupe in 1962 and came to prominence with the 1964 play Ōmugiiri no chikin sūpu. He has worked in film and television since the mid-1960s and began directing theatre in 1981.
Emori is known for voice performances including Gin in Tokyo Godfathers (2003) and Seijirō Inui in Paprika (2006). His other credits include Doraemon: Nobita's Great Adventure in the South Seas (1998) and the television series Legal High (2012). He has appeared in more than sixty films.
