This blog post examines how House of Himiko delicately reveals life and death, family and prejudice, and the possibility of reconciliation through the space of a gay nursing home, focusing on scenes and symbols.
Around the time I was discovering and becoming engrossed in Japanese dramas, “House of Himiko” was the catalyst that drew me into the charm of Japanese cinema as well. While director Itsuki Inudo has the more famous film “Josee, the Tiger and the Fish,” in my memory, “House of Himiko” remained far more vivid. Since it was a film I loved in middle school, I feared it might feel mediocre upon revisiting it now. However, while the emotions differed slightly from back then, long-forgotten memories surfaced naturally, and new elements I hadn’t noticed before began to appear one by one.
This film deals with the story of gay men who are sexual minorities. It makes me wonder why the protagonist, Saori, was brought to a nursing home where elderly gay men live together, rather than to a gay bar filled with handsome, young gay men.
Just hearing the word “nursing home” somehow evokes a pang of pity and a sense of melancholy. The thought that one might end up in such a place someday is so unsettling that it becomes something you’d rather not dwell on. This feeling is likely even stronger for younger people. Imagine how Saori must have felt. The director invites both Saori and the audience not to an ordinary nursing home, but to House of Himiko, a nursing home specifically for elderly gay men.
Upon entering, the audience experiences considerable shock. They see elderly gay men, their faces wrinkled and skin sagging, wearing dresses and large bows in their hair, watching TV dramas. Saori is also deeply shocked and tries to leave the nursing home, but Haruhiko, a handsome young gay man and her father’s lover, stops her. Ultimately, due to money troubles, Saori has no choice but to work at the nursing home once a week.
From day one, Saori’s job at the nursing home proves anything but easy. The man she calls father belatedly realizes she’s his daughter, the chatty Ruby takes offense at Saori’s expression and hurls insults, and the playful Chubby gropes her chest – it’s one obstacle after another. Saori’s furrowed brow doesn’t smooth easily. Yet she doesn’t back down, speaking her mind and standing her ground. As a result, she gradually grows closer to them.
In this process, the audience naturally feels a sense of familiarity too. Ruby, talkative and overly nosy about others’ affairs, brings to mind neighborhood grandmothers. Yamazaki, who fears wearing women’s clothes and says he’ll make a dress in advance to wear when he enters his coffin. Masaki, who considers his experience dating a woman the most precious memory of his life. Each character’s personality makes you want to linger in the nursing home for just one more hour. But this warmth is fleeting. Two farewells, reminding Saori that this is ultimately a nursing home, force her to leave House of Himiko.
Ruby, now in a vegetative state, has no one to care for her because House of Himiko lacks proper hospital facilities. The residents decide to send Ruby back to her family. But they send Ruby to his son, who knows absolutely nothing about Ruby being gay. In this scene, Saori explodes in anger at the nursing home staff. When people retort that Ruby might die, Saori finally reveals her true feelings. She says that if he dies, it’s punishment for abandoning his family and living as he pleased, and instead speaks of the anguish and torment Ruby’s son will face. At this moment, Saori still doesn’t fully understand them. Simultaneously, she feels deep disappointment at the situation where Himiko’s house—a place called a haven for gay people to find happiness—has callously left someone she was closer to than family all alone. That very day, Saori leaves Himiko’s house.
Crucially, Himiko’s death becomes the catalyst for Saori to settle her affairs at the House of Himiko and leave. Living with the gay men, she comes to understand them, reconciles with her father, and grapples with life and death. Thus, the film carries such complex themes that it could easily appear to be a work trying to convey multiple stories simultaneously. I, too, have always thought this film carries multiple messages and that this approach is effective. However, reflecting on it now, I wonder if trying to pack in so many stories at once—fatherly love, discrimination against sexual minorities, first love—might have caused it to overlook important scenes.
In the film’s latter half, after Saori throws an ohagi—a rice cake wrapped in red bean paste—at Haruhiko and leaves, the nursing home residents eat the holiday food they had prepared in advance. At this moment, a scene appears where gay grandfathers sing in chorus by the window, accompanied by the sound of a wind harp. This scene features Japanese holiday customs that may feel somewhat unfamiliar to Korean audiences. Ohagi, made by covering rice cakes (a mixture of glutinous and non-glutinous rice) with red bean paste, and decorations like cucumbers and eggplants skewered with wooden chopsticks to form animal shapes, are elements associated with the ancestral rites performed during Obon, Japan’s harvest festival.
The fire appearing at the beginning of the scene is meant to welcome ancestors, serving as a beacon to guide them home without getting lost. This is followed by lanterns floating in the pool, and then the grandfathers introduce and sing Dvořák’s song, calling it “the song Mother taught us.” As the song plays, the ox and horse made from cucumbers and eggplants placed on the stairs are illuminated. The cucumber horse embodies the wish for ancestors to return home swiftly, while the eggplant ox symbolizes the hope they return slowly and safely, laden with burdens.
The next scene features a dimly lit living room with lights softly blending blue and red hues, illuminating numerous photo frames on the table and the holiday feast laid out before them. The choral song transitions into a low monologue by Odagiri Joe, interspersed with a scene of Saori engaging in a relationship with the company executive. The film then returns to the grandfathers’ chorus scene, followed by a pan across Himiko’s face as she sleeps in her room, illuminated by the blue lamp. The final shot features a close-up of Saori’s mother’s photo among the frames in the living room.
This scene clearly conveys the film’s core theme, even without the protagonist Saori appearing. It feels like a scene implying that Saori’s mother rides an animal made of cucumber and eggplant to carry Himiko’s soul to the afterlife. The song “The Song My Mother Taught Me,” sung by the gay grandfathers, contains the message of passing on a song taught by one’s mother to one’s own child. This symbolically shows that Saori has reached the same level of understanding as her mother, who accepted her husband’s homosexuality. This is why it can be interpreted that Saori’s mother planted the seed of reconciliation between the two women.
The evidence for this was already scattered throughout the film. It was simply something the audience might not have noticed. When Saori first visits the nursing home, the scene where the camera pans across the photos hanging on the wall includes a picture of her mother. About a quarter of the way into the film, Saori discovers her mother’s photo on the wall, and later in the middle section, she asks Haruhiko about that photo. It is revealed at this moment that the hat her mother wears in the photo is the one she gave her. Around the three-quarter mark, we see Saori looking at a portrait of her mother placed inside a purple cloth, then carrying that photo to Himiko’s room. Himiko tells Saori about her mother visiting her shop, and Saori opens her heart, coming to understand her father’s true feelings. In that moment of mother-daughter reconciliation, Saori’s mother was present in the room, embodied in the photograph. It was none other than the mother who reconnected the severed bond between them. This naturally leads to the thought: perhaps it was Saori’s mother who took Himiko away after she had reconciled with her daughter and fallen asleep.
Director Itsun Inudo likely had multiple reasons for setting the film’s central backdrop in a nursing home. He may have wanted to make the residents feel like familiar figures, like the elderly neighbors next door. Or perhaps his intent was to view them, as people facing death, not as gay men but simply as human beings. All these elements coalesce to complete the film “House of Himiko,” but among them, the photograph of Saori’s mother remains the most intriguing device.
Saori’s mother had understood her gay husband during her lifetime and even occasionally visited the gay bar he ran. Saori must have felt profound betrayal upon learning this. Yet, because her mother was the person she loved most, Saori gradually begins trying to understand her father and gayness. After her mother’s death, left alone, Saori finds a new family at House of Himiko and even develops feelings for someone. She escapes the repetitive daily grind of merely paying off debts, confronts a new world, and grows.
Her mother’s seemingly mysterious attitude may ultimately have stemmed from her deep love for her husband. She may have even wanted to understand the fact that he was gay, and her visits to gay bars might simply have been because she loved her gay husband and wanted to see him. These emotions overlap with Saori’s own process of indirectly experiencing her mother’s feelings through her relationship and emotions with Haruhiko. Like the gay grandfathers’ song, Saori learns reconciliation through her mother. And the audience, too, naturally comes to accept the gay grandfathers as one family through this film. We reconcile with our own prejudices. While the combination of a nursing home and gay themes might seem incongruous at first glance, under Inudo Itsuki’s direction, that sense of dissonance transforms into a warm embrace, quietly welcoming the audience.
