Time goes by…in Kyoto

The post- Meiji Restoration author Nagai Kafu (1879-1959) used to say that the women in the lower classes –sometimes even “indecent woman” like geishas, bar waitresses and prostitutes- had a better heart than those of the middle class. Well, the main female character at Lost Paradise in Tokyo seems to completely prove his assertion. Former オーエル office lady (Satoko Nishimura), mediocre idol consoling mediocre サラリーマン salary man (Fara) and call-girl by night (Marin); three names for the 3 faces of this complex character who becomes emotionally attached to a 2-member family (Mikio and Saneo) when she is hired to release the autistic elder brother’s sexual impulses.

No recent movie showing the world of Japanese salary man can avoid depicting them as XXI century slaves and this one is not an exception. Here, the real state company in question is leaded by a military-type subordinate-harassing self-confidence-destroyer man who can’t stop shouting to a young Mikio: “Kokoro kara warae!” “Smile from your heart!”. What a paradox (the psychological term would be cognitive dissonance): even though the sellers are under a very malignant pressure, they must not only smile but also feel happy inside. It’s then when the spectator understands the role of idols as an escape from a stressing, tedious and strict world to a more playful, even childish existence, free from the responsibilities and problems of the adult life.

Two more aspects of Japanese society are implicit in the story: one of them is the concept of 義理 giri (social, family obligation), much stronger than in any other culture. When the mother dies, the young office worker must take care of a mentally handicapped お兄ちゃんoniichan (elder brother). Instead of leaving him in the hands of the social services, he deals with him after work at the cost of his own mental health and eventually his physical integrity. The other aspect is voyeurism lato sensu. Apart from the dark side that most Japanese men hide and some of my J female friends often tell me about, in this case is just the desire to know about other people’s lives, especially the sordid and covert nooks. As a society where most emotions are secret but latent and nobody talks openly about personal matters, the need to peep is represented by documentary director (an alter ego of Kazuya Shiraishi, the own movie director, still in his thirties?) who pays a high amount of money to film a mixture of AV (adult video) and reality show with the former 3 characters as protagonists.

This is a story about altruism and about the search for emotional attachment and commitment in a hostile society for the individual. If on the way to happiness your survival costs you a turquoise-blue ocean island in Ireland, it doesn’t really matter. Maybe that is the price to expurgate your past sins and start a new life as a “decent woman”.

No doubt historical science fiction is now popular in Japan. Last year, Ohaku depicted a woman-controlled Edo Japan due to an epidemic that decimates the male population. Men had become just as valuable as a male bee in a beehive. In the case of Princess Toyotomi, a time-bridge is open between the 17th century and the present day, and the last descendant of the Toyotomi family from Osaka who manages to escape from a bloodshed by Edo’s army happens to be a 14-year-old girl who lives as a normal middle-schooler in nowadays’ Osaka.

This apparent feminism a la japonaise is just a mirage, because both films, and especially this last one, actually show a men’s world and depict women as weak human beings willing to be protected by a paternalistic and hierarchical society. In Princess Toyotomi the absurdity of the three official accounting auditors from Tokyo acting like cool secret agents is rounded off by the only woman in the pack’s naïveté, bordering cute stupidity.

And if we add the nonsense of a hidden passage that takes to a Masonic-like Osaka Parliament and an actual Osaka prime minister who at the same time works at an okonomiyakiyasan (cheap Osaka restaurant specialized in Japanese-style pizza omelets), the nonsense reaches its zenith.

At least, on the way to the end we are given a tour of the Kansai capital, its streets, its commercial districts, its typical food, Namba, Umeda, Osaka’s castle and of course, the omnipresent Osaka’s obaachan, who are stereotypically reputed for being the noisiest and most frivolous beings in Japan. Ah, and I had forgotten the cross-dressing, so beloved by the Japanese, incarnated in a male teenager who insists on attending school wearing a girl’s uniform and is bullied by his yakuza-to-be classmates (for venues in Kyoto try Metro and one of its Rafflessia’s parties) .

This movie owes much to Alejandro Amenabar’s Abre los ojos, with those scenes of the city completely deserted and the characters drifting around in search of an explanation; and also to the old chivalry books (I guess Japan has many of their own) and the hero’s anagnorisis, representing an innate quality in the individual –usually a lost baby prince-, who even if raised by a commoner’s family, would be showing off his character’s nobility and would eventually be recognized as prince or king (in this case, princess).

As for the actors, Tsutsumi Shinichi can’t avoid his usual and congenital histrionics –take a look at Always-, and the young Okada Masaki and Ayase Haruka could well have remained as teenage magazine idols because acting is not for them. Only Nakai Kiichi, even in the schizophrenic role that has been punished with, shows some art.

To end this diatribe against the insult to the audience’s intelligence and good taste that this commercially successful movie represents, just a comment about its ideology: the apology to the difference and the cult to past glories contained in it is just an example of a ridiculous and local nationalism promoting tension among people even from the same country.

Though I spent a good time at the cinema.

Hankyu Densha, based on the homonymous novel by Hiro Arikawa, is a story about solitude, about deceived characters themselves who can’t find a way out of their problems but struggle to get rid of them. Paradoxically, an old and crowded Japanese train marching from Takarazuka to Nishinomiya Kitaguchi station is the setting for the intertwining solitary lives of a thirty-something bride-to-be, just abandoned by her boyfriend; of a school girl who suffers from isolation and incessant bullying by her classmates; of an obaachan (granma) who lives on remembrances from immemorial times; of a college student, victim of her boyfriend’s choleric fits of rage and jealousy; of a pusillanimous housewife trapped in a world of hypocrisy and sense of obligation; of two “otaku” Kwansei Gakuin students completely out of the fashionable and intolerant trend of the Japanese youth’s clothes and sheepish behavior; and of a high-school girl who sees her longed-for dream vanishing and feels guilty.

They all have things in common: they feel lonely, deluded and betrayed. Maybe the most stunning character is the one played by the once-awarded and many times nominated to best actress by the Japanese Academy Miki Nakatani, whose boyfriend justifies his leaving her for another woman –her 後輩！ (her more junior colleague)- because she is strong enough to take care of herself but the new (and pregnant) one really needs him; although revenge is best served cold and she forgives them on the condition that she is invited to the wedding.

But this is also a story of solidarity, about people who see themselves in another person’s sufferings. It’s what we call empathy, that concept so well explained by modern neuroscientists through the construct of “mirror neurons”.
Those who are not capable of experiencing empathy are either stupid, or autistic or pathologically selfish and egomaniac.

The characters, one after the other, advice and interfere positively in one another’s lives. And through this process, each of them becomes aware of their own issues.

The message is clear at the end of the movie: as Shoko claims, “世界でいい部分もある”, in the world there are also good things. Let’s go and take them, no worries about impossible dreams and social conventions.

When I was in my late teens my recently deceased grandmother used to advise against women in search of a young, handsome and professionally promising husband through disloyal means. Be extremely careful –she would tell me in the terrace of my parents apartment in Madrid and far from my mother’s ears-, when you go with a woman take your own condom -“globito”, little toy balloon, was the word she preferred-, don’t allow her to give you one, because she will have pierced it with a needle and that will be the end of it”. How wise my grandma was and how universal life is, no matter be Spain in the 80’s or Japan nowadays.

Toshiko, the protagonist’s best friend in the recent Japanese movie Konzen Tokyu, Express wedding or Rushing to get married, confesses Chie that she intentionally punched a hole in his boyfriend’s condom so that she could get pregnant and marry him. 24-year-old Chie gets shocked by the wedding announcement, even annoyed; but not so much for her friend’s behavior but because she has gotten a marriage before herself. And she eventually mimics Toshiko; but before that, she must decide which one of the 5 guys she is dating is the most appropriate to do so. In a comedy tone and emulating the infamous Bridget Jones, she writes in her agenda-diary her men’s merits and demerits. There is all kind of ages –from 54 to 19-, personalities –although most of them the 優しい kind type- and professions –from a hairdresser’s owner to a college student who is so young that he is cute (「若くて可愛い」, wakakute kawaii). This is the most hilarious part of the film, I must confess.

On the other side, the depiction of a multidating Japanese young woman might look hyperbolic but it’s not that far from reality in this present society of freedom, fast cell-phone-Facebook communication and lack of specificity: 用事がある, “I already have plans” can be a very effective an enough excuse to reject a date with your boyfriend-girlfriend. If s/he asks for more details, that would be considered rude and nosy, indeed.

The funny part of the story is that the supposedly liberated female protagonist is more traditional than what she believes she is herself and when she hears from one of the guys that he doesn’t consider her as a girlfriend but just as a sex-partner, she is finally aware that she is being used by the 5 guys the same way she is using them: the utilitarian sense of life and our actions many times also have an exact opposite. And she rushes to get back to a more conventional relationship.

Some interesting points and/or script lines in the movie are also stimulating for a good thinking or discussion: a female character tells one of the 5 guys about Chie that since she is beautiful she is allowed everything by everyone and because of that she grew up as a spoiled brat. How true is that and how unfair nature can be sometimes –I can’t stop thinking of Natsuo Kirino’s Grotesque and the story of the two sisters, the beautiful and the ugly one-. Connected with this is how an older person can lose his/her dignity to be with a younger and beautiful one, like the 54-year-old Masayoshi. As a Canadian colleague and friend of mine used to tell me: “Never beg a woman or she will not respect you”. But at the same time, like the writer Bernard Malamud says: “the source of youth is the presence of youth itself”. And that has a price.

There is also the topic of the selection. Which one is finally the chosen one? I won’t be an ending-spoiler but… when I asked a few female friends who haven’t seen the movie yet about it their answers were far different from what implausibly happens in the movie; it’s just a comedy, isn’t it?
The last image of a train leaving with the happy and married couple inside is just a metaphor of their future personal and material life.

A serious man, from the Coen Brothers, finally made it to Japan, 京都シネマのおかげで, thanks to Kyoto Cinema, one of Kansai’s independent cinema circuit’s movie theatre. While seeing the movie I wondered what kind of reception would be having in this country.
The film shows life in a small Jewish community in rural Minnesota in the late 60’s. Larry is a forty-something devoted husband and father awaiting for his university tenure position to become a fact, when everything in his life starts to collapse: his wife asks him the divorce so that she can marry (through the Jewish rite) their best friend; he has to move from the house to a nearby motel along with his gifted but socially retarded elder brother who eventually gets arrested for gambling and sodomy; his spoilt children actually despise him and just use him as a means to get a more comfortable life; a student tries to bribe him and subsequently threatens to sue him; anonymous letters start flooding into the tenure committee strongly criticizing him and his moral principles; the community rabbi ignores him; his attorney bill exceeds his budget; and so on.
Male middle-age crisis is said to be a disturbing event but for this poor man seems to be the end of his life. The theme the Japanese audience will be more receptive and sensitive to, I guess, is the marital issue. Strong woman –equivalent to the new 肉食女性 (”carnivore woman”) type in present Japanese society- who demands divorce and kicks the husband out of the house but at the same time asks for pension and mortgage payments.
Relationships in the long term are always difficult and marriage is like a marathon with good moments and also moments of crisis but here in Japan the stories I hear in my surroundings are quite discouraging, whether is an intercultural marriage or one between two Japanese spouses.

Case A: Young couple, both Japanese professionals in their 30’s, married after 2 or 3 years but without knowing each other quite well. Indeed, his family gets to know her only at the engagement party. He introduces her as “こちら、結婚する人です” (This is the woman who is going to get married). They buy a nice house in Osaka using a bank loan and move after the wedding along with the bride’s father, a sixty-something retired widower. Soon after the beginning of cohabitation the couple start living separate lives, he with his computer and game-boy, she at her chores and going out to cafes. The spark that provokes the final quarrel has to be with the finances. The wife expected that after marriage she would have full control of the home economy along with her husband’s salary, which he should religiously hand her every month so that she can decide how much to give him back for his everyday expenses. He refuses to give her his salary and they stop talking to each other. The father-in-law enters the dispute and states that he can’t stand to witness such miserable treatment to his daughter. The divorce is the only way-out. Since there are no kids and both are young and have jobs, separation is fast and easy.

Case B: A senior Japanese colleague of mine tells me the story of the Japanese woman he was married to for quite a few years. Since his salary was higher than hers, they both kept a common bank account where he had all his salary sent to and from which all the home expenses were paid. After almost one year he noticed that, even though they didn’t have many expenses and he hardly withdrew money from that account, it was always close to zero. He finally checked all the movements and found out that his wife had been switching every month considerable amounts of money from that bank account to another one on her name. She got scolded and lost access to the bank account although they would remain married a few more years until later quarrels were to take place.

Case C: An American young womanizer married to a Japanese woman has two kids with her but after his repeated infidelities he is thrown out of the house with all his stuff (indeed he finds one night when coming back home from a binge that the lock has been changed and there are two suitcases outside the door with his things). Afterwards he is forbidden to see his children and told by the woman to forget about them and fly back to America. He decides to stay, hires a lawyer and after 2 years he gets a weekly visit to his 7 and 5 year olds. Eventually he marries again and repeats the ritual of infidelities with consequences still to be seen. Presently he is seeking to have another baby with the new wife.

Case D: A couple by an American young guy and a Japanese young woman is formed in Hawaii while both of them are studying at the university. They get married, move to Japan and everything is happiness until a baby is born. He claims that she has changed completely since then, not paying attention to him anymore if only to scold him for small things and neglecting home despite being a homemaker. He dreams of a new job a hundred of miles away so that he can escape the intra-marital bullying during the week. Recently, they started talking seriously about divorce.

Case E: A hard-working and still attractive Japanese mother of 4 kids at 36 has to deal with a violent and jealous Japanese husband who sporadically assaults her in front of the children. Those times she arrives at the gym where she works as an aquagym trainer with bruises but nobody takes action. She finally follows friends and co-workers’ advice and divorce the guy. Now she works overtime in different places and with the economical help of her parents she can live without the husband. With 4 kids from a previous marriage it’s materially impossible for her to find a new husband if even a partner.

Case F: A Western guy, after a relatively long engagement marries a professional Japanese woman he has met at the university. Just a few weeks after marriage she abruptly comes home one day and states: I quit my job. Against the husband’s will, she becomes a 主婦 (housewife) at 27 and the husband reluctantly ends up being the only earner in the household. After 11 years of marriage, including a few episodes of reverse domestic violence (from the woman towards the man) and no kids, they finally get divorced. Now they are good friends.

Case G: An ex-NOVA Japanese student complains to her Spanish teacher about his good-for-nothing Japanese husband. They have a very small house and her husband salary is very low. Besides, he has the terrible habit of reading and often buys books. She is a home-maker and claims she should have married a man with a higher salary.

Case H: A young and nice Japanese couple is dating for two years. He finally proposes to her and when she is introduced to his family, she is rejected by the mother. They break up and she never gets to know why she was not worthy of the woman’s only son.

Case I: A young university Japanese professor from Kyoto, after obtaining a tenured position, proposes his girlfriend, who lives in Tokyo. Her parents refuse to let her go because she is the youngest and they want her to remain single and take care of them in the future. She rebels, breaks with her parents and marries the guy. They don’t celebrate any wedding ceremony because of the family argument.

Case J: In some Japanese families, when a divorce takes place and there are baby children, sometimes the husband is prevented to see them anymore –as in C, the womanizer’s case- and if the woman manages to marry again, they are raised in the supposition that the woman’s new husband is their biological father. If the children are over 3 years old at the time of the divorce, they might be told that the father has died in an accident. Everything is “for the good of the children”. In a few cases, the divorced woman, due to the stigmatization of divorce, leaves the kid with the grandmother and acts as if she is single with no children, as in Kitano Takeshi’s movie Kikujiro’s Summer, and forms a new family. Well, it could be worse, in some parts of China, baby girls used to be abandoned in train stations due to the one-child policy and the desire to have a baby boy.

Case K: Young couple formed by an American young woman and a Japanese young man, both English teachers, meet at Peace Boat while working as staff there. They start dating and eventually get married. Presently, they live happily in Kyoto sharing interests and friends.

Moral of the stories? You tell me.

I recently saw Shion Sono’s last film, Tsumetai nettaigyo, translated into English like Cold Fish –they forgot the “tropical”-, and provoked me an immeasurable uneasiness. Every time this Japanese cult-movie director releases a new title, it seems that he has reached the top of his career in terms of blood, violence and mental instability, but then it comes the next one, as is this case, and you feel emotionally overwhelmed in the armchair of the small movie theater filled with middle age men plus the young woman that you regret having invited. It’s been shown at film festivals like Toronto, Venetia and Sitges, with considerable success: some people left disgusted in the middle of the showing, and some others reacted with a standing and resounding ovation at the end. There is also some comedy in this 18+ rated movie, though, indispensable ingredient to psychologically deal with many of the hard scenes that it contains.
Here is the plot: an apparently normal but actually dysfunctional family starts hanging out with a successful businessman who happens to be a thug and eventually takes the whole family to an extreme situation. The character of the husband, a henpecked pater familias can tell from the very beginning what’s going on and what’s going to happen but his fainthearted personality prevents him from rejecting Murata San, one of the most evil rogues and psychopaths of the recent Japanese cinema. Gradually, the ugly, pushy and disgusting but funny and trickster Murata –sublime the Japanese actor Den Den in the role- takes his wife and daughter from him and the spectator can feel the husband’s anxiety in a crescendo of tension that eventually ends up as an orgy of violence, sex and blood. He suffers himself a radical transformation – a Tetsuo but without the cyborg stuff- in his character and becomes what he had been most afraid of. Based on a real story that took place in Saitama a few years ago, in Japan cases of killings with dismemberment seem quite common exceptions, as we can also see in Out, based on the novel with the same name by Natsuo Kirino based on a related true incident, although in this case it’s housewives the ones who do the butcher’s job.

Hiromi is a countryside girl from Saitama who dreams of becoming an actress. Young, cute and determined, she finds a job at an airport in Tokyo and has a dull life in an apartment with her boyfriend from high school. The next in the story is a sequence of steps that eventually takes her to star in AV, i.e., porn movies.
Japan is a contradictory country when it comes to porn and sex in general. In some aspects, it’s so liberal that it could surprise a Western neophyte: transgressive adult magazines and videos are available at any 24-hour shop; love hotels can be counted in tens close to any train station, and prostitution is easily accessible through Internet, cell-phones or pink saloons. But on the other side, there tends to be an interest in suppressing explicit reference to real sex, as a way of justifying themselves, even though it’s obvious that it is there. One example is the blurred images of sex organs in magazines and videos. Another example is the issue that this movie tries to deal with: the contradiction of a society that condones and consumes porn massively but at the same rejects those ones who produce it.
One of the plot lines of this film shows how easy is for a Japanese young women to enter that AV world, but the theme is not treated in a Manichaean way of black and white, good and evil ones: everything is blurry, as some images in the Japanese AV movies. Hiromi has a dream and gradually realizes that she needs to adjust her aspirations for them to become true. She pays a price but in the end she is happy with what she has: actually she becomes a famous actress, although a porn one (this is not a spoiler, in the movie it is shown at the beginning). The price she must pay is the rejection of the society she has been part of before her new occupation. Family, friends, boyfriend, all of them eventually vanish from her life, who is filled by the morally ambiguous manager Enomoto San, character convincingly played by Mitsuishi Ken. Maybe the saddest moment is the break-up with her twin soul and best female friend Saya chan. Her school friend represents her childhood and attachment to society conventions. Told by common male friends, Saya rents one of Hiromi’s video and cries for hours in fetal position. But that separation is necessary for Hiromi –now Mihiro, her artistic name and the new person she eventually becomes- to find her own path in a world of onanists in search of the ideal female idol. The film’s music, matching the tone of the story, its artistic and sometimes silent shooting that shows Hiromi’s evasion from reality, and Watanabe Naoko’s fresh and moving performance, rounds off this indispensable movie.

In the Japanese culture, Aburakusasu is referred to both sides of the sacred, good and evil, altogether, as an indivisible characteristic of life and human beings. Chosen as the title of the film, it depicts the ups and downs of Jonen, a Budhist monk in the middle of his own 40-year-old crisis. Apparently with a happy family and appreciated by the villagers for his job at the temple, he is psychologically unstable and dependant on antidepressants. The remembrance of his past years of college student and amateur musician becomes an obsession, until he decides to perform a hard-rock live concert in the small village, with the consequent astonishment of family, superior monk and people around him, youngsters and obaachan included. This movie deals with the stale themes of high expectations- deception, societal rules, suicide, and so on, but with an original approach, from the point of view of a Japanese monk, showing his humanity in terms of weakness -bordering on mental illness. There is quite an artistic photography and a well achieved scene –my favorite- of the main character, naked, in ontological search of himself and multiplied by many mirrors in the room. With many points in common with last year’s Solanin, this one gives us a slightly more optimistic view of life, with its good and its not-that-good things. The final message is unclear, though. But I wonder if it intends to be: do as you please even if your dreams don’t become true.

One week after the New Year’s Eve is enough time to recover from the hangover of bonenkais (friends and colleagues dinners), shinnenkais (New Years’s banquets) and commemorative celebrations at Christmas time in Japan; and maybe to talk about them. After a dinner with friends on Kiyamachi St. –when I found out how important is for a Japanese woman her future father-in-law’s scalp- and some salsa dancing at Rumbita, the Joya no Kane -108 tolls on the Buddhist temples’ big bells to celebrate the New Year and clean the same number of human sins- got me on Shijo Street on my way to Yasaka Jinja, the most frequented Shinto shrine in Kyoto on those days. Of course, since Japanese like to do most things together at the same time, the street was blocked by flocks of Japanese young people willing to pay homage to Shinto gods asking them for a year of pecuniary success and love or just to hang out around there. I decided not to wait what at freezing temperatures plus snow could be considered a Japanese purgatory and headed for my next destination, an electronic music club in the northern part of the city.

On my way to Metro, I happened to pass by a small tera (Buddhist temple), where a few people were eating toshikoshi soba, (buckwheat noodles, longer than usual and consumed on New Year’s Eve) around an improvised bonfire. My curiosity was stronger than my fear of finger frostbite and I stopped by to take a look at what was going on. Ipso facto I was invited by the friendly priest’s daughter to join a line of Japanese neighbors and stoically wait my turn to toll twice by myself the big bell with a heavy piece of wood. When I finally threw a few coins to a box and gave two small sticks –given previously to me by the young woman- to the very yasashii (kind) priest, I felt that neither my mistake with the name of the train station and the subsequent walk in the cold nor my curiosity-killed-the-cat peeping at the temple were accidental but with a purpose.

And I was in those high thoughts while holding the wood to hit the bell when something inside my left pocket started to vibrate like crazy. As if waking up from a mystic ecstasy, I realized that it was my cell-phone receiving a call from a dear one and decided that our dependency on technology to communicate with others is ruining our lives; but I interpreted the disrupting phone call as a sign of good fortune, hit the bell twice, thanked the Shinto priest and finally went to the disappointing, smoky, dark and noisy cave.

A few hours later I would wake up at home to drowsily connect to the Internet and have via Skype the you-know-which 12 grapes with my family in Madrid.

On January first I finally made it to a jinja, Shimogamo, where I bought an omikuji (a written fortune), just to laugh at myself because I got the worst possible one: bad luck in everything imaginable for the coming year. I refused to hang it on a pillar next to the altar in order to get rid of the bad omen: actually I just don’t believe in them; and it makes such a great memento!

Shitsurakuen was such a big hit in Japan as a novel in 1997 that the same year was adapted into a movie and a TV series. Junichi Watanabe’s story, same as the movie by Yoshimitsu Morita, deals with the concept of infidelity in the Japanese society and its consequences as for marriage and the group. In the movie, Koji Yakusho, perfect in roles as a salary man with unexpected interests –as we could see in Shall we dance (1996)- is a 50 year-old newspaper editor who finds himself feeling for the first time what we can call passionate love, but outside marriage. Married, himself, since very young and always chronically devoted to his job, he hadn’t been even able to visit his wife at the hospital when she gave birth to their daughter, now a young woman. His marriage is just a series of rituals like having dinner, exchanging meaningless sentences and avoiding direct questions and answers. The role played by the still very attractive and now 50 –at the time character and actress were 38- Hitomi Kuroki, shows the tedious life of an arranged marriage without children. Shoichiro and Rinko meet on the weekends at romantic hotels by the sea or even at love hotels during the week, and their relationship fulfils the void nurtured by their present marriages. Passion, sex, desire, but also tenderness and mutual understanding ends up ruining their lives. Rinko’s husband is not Tanizaki Junichiro’s Kaname –character from Tanizaki’s 1929 novel Some prefer nettles who even promotes his wife’s adultery- but a rancorous and miserably intelligent man whose pride receives the last hit in the form of an infidelity. The rest is quite predictable.
Apart from the themes of love and sex outside marriage, movie and book deal with the apparently rigid rules of the Japanese society, which mixes personal and professional life as an only entity, and promotes a hypocritical survival of the group –in this case, the artificially created family- at the cost of their member’s happiness.