Yoshiaki Umegaki

Hana used to sing in a drag bar, calls herself a mother without a womb, and treats the abandoned baby in Tokyo Godfathers (2003) as a parcel delivered to her personally. Yoshiaki Umegaki plays her enormous: all gesture, poetry and self-pity, the loudest person in a cardboard shelter she shares with a drunk and a runaway. For the first half hour we laughed at her and then felt slightly ashamed of ourselves, which we suspect is the order Kon wanted. Later on, in a scene we will not describe, she goes quiet for about a minute and the film stops joking with her. It is the quietest Umegaki gets, and it is where the comedy turns into something kinder.

The loud half of that performance has a long history. Umegaki joined the WAHAHA Honpo comedy troupe in 1984 after failing auditions elsewhere, and has been its songstress ever since, impersonating female singers on stage, including a Chiemi Eri act in which he sings 'Rokudenashi' while blowing green beans from his nose. Television came in the mid-1990s, with a regular part in the Hamidashi Keiji dramas from 1996 to 2001, and films came in supporting doses: a riot police platoon leader in Gamera 2: Advent of Legion (1996), a part in Gakko II (1996), a rascal in Samurai Fiction (1998). His reputation at home is as a comedian and a character actor, the eccentric in the corner of the frame. He is still doing stage, television guest parts and live chanson into the 2020s.

So Hana is not a stretch. A man who has spent decades singing as a woman for laughs knows exactly where the laugh lives and, more usefully, where it stops. The poetry and the self-pity are the stage performer working a room. The quiet minute is something else, and it is the reason the film stayed with us. What we cannot tell you is whether that quiet is something Umegaki does often or something Kon got out of him once, because his screen work has barely been written about outside Japan and we have reviewed only the one film.

He has said that what makes the stage interesting is a living person in front of you, trying as hard as they can, rather than an image. There is a small irony in that: the one performance the rest of the world knows him for is one in which his body never appears. See Tokyo Godfathers, and listen for the moment she drops the act. The rest of his work is a stage career in Japan, which we cannot review, and which on his own account is where he would rather be.