Strawberry Shortcakes is a sometimes quirky, touching and shocking look at the lives of four women in modern-day Tokyo. Satoko (Chiziru Ikewaki), unlucky in love, works as the secretary at an escort agency, where she isn't as glamorous as her co-workers, but she hasn't given up hope that she might find a man who finds her special. Akiyo (Yuko Nakamura) who is one of the prostitutes working there (who sleeps at night in a coffin in her apartment) has found the man she wants to be with, an old college friend who, like her, hasn't made much of his life – but he only sees her as a friend. Saddened by this, Akiyo increasingly humiliates and abases herself, taking on even the most revolting of clients. Humiliation is also the fate of Chihiro (Noriko Nakagoshi), a pretty but superficial young woman, scorned by her colleagues at work for her pleasant but servile manner with the management. She is also heading for disappointment by putting too much faith in a casual relationship she is having with a young co-worker. Chihiro lives with Toko, a graphic artist, designing covers for book publishers. Toko (played by the original manga artist Kiriko Nananan herself), seems to be successfully getting over a broken relationship, but she's blocking the pain through bouts of bulimia and by throwing herself into her work.

The film certainly manages to involve the viewer in the lives of its characters, putting them through all manner of humiliation, disappointment and resignation as well as a few moments of self-revelation, but the depiction of these women's lives is superficial and their outlook is limited and essentially the same - each of the women are ultimately just looking for love. The film has an episodic feel, never really finding a flow, skipping from one character to the next without really developing their situation or being realistically representative of life as it is lived by most modern women in Japan.

I let this one sit in queue too long. The title, Strawberry Shortcakes, led me to believe it would be a silly slapstick chick-flick about young women engaged in madcap antics which is second only to adolescent comedies about the sexploits of silly young men on my list of film genres I hate, Asian or otherwise. Turns out, Strawberry Shortcakes is an engaging indie film that takes a rather bleak look at the lives of four (at times I thought there were five, read on) young women who live mostly on the margins of life in contemporary Tokyo.

Toko Iwase is a bulimic, intense, sometimes bitchy, but very true to her art, artist, who makes a living doing illustration and designing book covers. Her on screen, very visceral scenes of binging and purging are frighteningly realistic. Very painful to watch. She masturbates while lying on the bed, and reading the "secret" diary of, her superficial roommate. She also folds her roommate's clothes, fixes her alarm clock, makes sure she gets to work on time, and she takes care of the funeral arrangements when her roommate's pet hamster dies. Her roommate is:

Chihiro. She is a beautiful, perhaps naive, perhaps sheltered office worker who sucks up to her male superiors to the disgust of her female colleagues. She's the type of woman who doesn't have any girl friends. She tries and she hopes, in the face of all things pointing against it to have a meaningful and lasting relationship with some punk loser from her work. She buys herself a pair of shoes and has them gift wrapped for her birthday because no one else is going to honor it. When her boyfriend is too busy to see her on her birthday, she calls some dude, presumably from her past, who does nothing more than deposit his manhood on her face.

Satoko is a kind-hearted, sweet, plain, but very cute, charming and adorable dreamer (sigh) who works as a receptionist at an escort agency named Heaven's Gate. When her boss asks her why she doesn't put herself on the market she says "I am not pretty like the other girls, no one would pick me." Her boss, who turns out to be falling for her responds, "Our customers like all kinds, even ugly girls. You should think about it." Ouch. She eats at a local shop where the noodles suck and the cook and sole proprietor is a young Chinese man. His "Japanese is no good" so she answers the phone for him and takes orders. She ends up working there after her boss at the escort agency treats her to an expensive dinner and makes his feelings for her known, causing her to quit. She's the type who is attracted to, and befriends, other loners such as:

Akiyo sleeps in a coffin at night and works as an escort at Heaven's Gate. She has a suitcase full of cash, saving up for a condo. It has to be fifth story or higher, for when her body fails her but before she's senile. "Anything below five stories and the fall might not kill you." She's in her late twenties and the other girls, in their early twenties, don't like her because all the customers do. She has a certain Lena Olin tough beauty and submits to all kinds of sexual degradation in her job because it nets her more customers and more money, and because her long-time crush on an old college friend remains unrequited. Here's where the mysterious, non-existent fifth woman comes in.

Akiyo wears high heels, her hair down, a lost in space demeanor, and other escort garb to work at Heaven's Gate. When she jumps on her bicycle to meet her old college friend, a self-described late bloomer (i.e., he doesn't have a full time job yet) for beers at a local dive sushi bar, she wears Converse gym shoes, frumpy ripped up blue jeans and t-shirts, puts her hair up and dons a pair of very bookish glasses. She appears very sharp, happy and focused when she is with him. It isn't meant to be ambiguous, or a secret that this is the same woman, as a second screening of the film revealed to me. I just missed it first time through.

There are many, many more subtle and poignant events that make up the complex portraits of these complex women. For me, and I don't think I'm alone in my opinion, Toko is the centerpiece, the rock, the glue that holds this film together. The t-shirt she wears throughout most of the film has the Led Zeppelin lyric "TO BE A ROCK" on the front and "NOT TO ROLL" on the back. Turns out she is the artist/writer of a very popular manga, of nearly the same name, that this film is based upon. She is not an actress but her presence gave this film a realism I don't think it would have had without her. Strawberry Shortcakes is not an accurate portrayal of all women in contemporary Tokyo, not even a majority, but I think Toko, real name Kiriko Nananan who writes under the pseudonym Toko Iwase, put her heart and soul into painting a wonderfully authentic portrait of a segment of that population.

Having said all that about a picture I clearly enjoyed, the director's signature is all over this film as well. It's very episodic, sometimes unsatisfying in nature; many scenes are captured in an almost documentary fashion; I think the person who adapted the screenplay put in the stuff about God and Hope in an attempt to give the film a meaning others could talk about (successfully, I think, it just didn't appeal to me); and the ending was too happy and abrupt. I can't wait to watch it again.