In Kindergarten, making friends was the first practicum. It became an empirical affair leaning on a trial-and-error approach we’d picked up earlier in life, when we stumbled into playing with other kids in Mosholu Park. We’d eye them judiciously, study their every feature, decision, and expression. Then we’d go in, probing, posing diplomatic questions, never pushing too hard. “Is that your sister in the stroller?” “Why does she cry so much?” “Does your grandma speak English?” “Can I play with your dump truck until the Good Humor truck comes?”
In Kindegarten, we applied these curated transactional skills with added complexity. May I borrow the red crayon when you’re done? Can you come to my house for lunch? Will you be my ‘Jesse Polka’ partner? I have ballet today upstairs from that billiard parlor near The Oval. Do you want to come?”
In my Kindergarten class, there was a girl named Alice. No one walked her to school in the morning. No one picked her up after school. She was on her own. When our mothers took turns supplying cookies for Milk and Cookies, Alice had none—neither a mother, nor cookies. She had no apparent friends. Yet, Alice was outgoing, practical in her exchanges, and always the first responder to a catastrophe such as a spill, an injury, or both, expressed graphically in bodily fluids. Somehow, Alice had the first-aid kit in hand to press into the harried teacher’s, who was the second responder. Alice would close her eyes to gather her wits, only to recite a protocol tailored to fit the situation: “Robert, hold your head back and pinch your nose with this tissue!” “Geraldine, wash your hands and don’t touch it.” “Basil, throw up in this empty can, not on the floor!” Alice seemed to belong to no past and no future. She gave no reports of siblings’ derrings-do. She was one hundred percent a creature of the present. During Show and Tell, Alice presented with a repertoire consisting of one story. We would beseech her, in unison, to tell it: The Story of the Little Red Wagon. Do I remember the story? No. I can remember with exactitude Alice’s plausibly Chinese eyes, presumed Irish palor, faded plaid blouse and slate blue sagging skirt, a size too large that draped haphazardly from her wisp of a frame, her dishwater brown stringy hair with bangs hanging limply, and her insistent voice ringing out The Little Red Wagon in perfect bell-like cadences.
The rest of us were creatures of our post-immigrant families: Kids like me, whose parents had their own parents living with them chock-a-block in three or four-room apartments; hazel-eyed Nancy, whose Dutch Merchant Marine father had jumped ship and taken an under-the-table superintendent job in Pickwick Arms, an entire square-block apartment building at the end of the Grand Concourse. Its basement was the perfect hide-and-seek warren of nooks harboring ancient machinery. Then there was an entire cohort of Jewish-identified kids who had been extruded, thanks to unnamed “connections,” from Displaced Persons camps in Italy, Sweden, Germany, or some other Slavic-sounding village in the storybook forests of Europe. All were kids beholden to families. Alice was not. She was her own person. By first grade, Alice had faded into oblivion—lost to us. At Show and Tell, we reminisced about “The Story of the Little Red Wagon,” but none of us could credibly reconstruct it. You thought maybe you glimpsed Alice hurrying along from the Grand Concourse, turning west on East 204th toward Villa Avenue. Impossible, you’d think to yourself. Only Italian kids live on Villa.
Watching “Shoplifters,” it was as if after 72 years, I’d found Alice in the film’s gamine protagonist, but her name is Yuri, and then it changes to Lin. If your notion of Japan comes from Marie Kondo reels, or skiing powder-dusted mountains, or soldiering through Shogun re-runs, or more modern depictions such as “Shall We Dance?” where interiors are impossibly subordinated to right angles and bare surfaces, and inhabited by high-functioning salary men, you may be shocked by the Shoplifters primary set. It’s a tiny hovel, where an assortment of adults, unrelated, literally lay about on tatami mats or whatever floor surface is handy, in a living space that offers none. They tease, prod each other, and mostly eat. Much of the food is filched by an older man and his young apprentice. Their quotidian shoplifting regimen supplies the all-of-a-kind clan with the necessities and the occasional deluxe gluten-cake tidbit.
Shota (Jyo Kairi), the pre-teen boy, is nothing if not resourceful. He and his mentor (Lily Franky) come upon a girl of four (Miyu Sasaki), who is hungry and cold. They take her in. Shota sees no applicable virtue in this project, but his mentor who he never calls Dad (because that would be a lie), convinces Shota of the worthiness attendant to calling Yuri, now renamed Lin, “Sister.”
To spare both reviewer and reader the humiliartion of spoilers, simply know that it is well worth it to follow the action that climaxes when the State intervenes appartatachikally to reconfigure the landscape and inscape of Shota and Lin’s lives to shoehorn them into a more traditional if degrading yoke.
In Shoplifters, each character emerges as a storyteller, with a “Little Red Wagon” of his or her own to immortalize. In their day-to-day interactions, no lies are told, and candor is the coin of the realm, even as oblivion resorbs them like so many spare parts lying about after a government repo. The actors, young or old, transform themselves fully to make what some may regard as their “unexamined lives” worth living, worth recounting, and for observers, worth admiring for their internal fortitude, honesty, and resulting sagacity. There is no room here for bogus sentimentality, but plenty of time and space is given over to a sentiment that has no name under this setup. It binds with an integument of adventure and reflection, genuine empathy, backbone, and acknowledgment of what it takes to thrive in a disingenuous society. Could its name be “Alice”?
Toba Singer
