“Nobody Knows”: Childhood on the Margins
In 1988, a child abandonment case that occurred in Tokyo’s Sugamo neighborhood came to light and shocked the world. A mother abandoned her four children—each of whom had a different father and three of whom were not legally registered—in a small apartment with hardly any money. The siblings fended for themselves for nine months, and when authorities investigated the apartment on a tip, they found three malnourished children and one corpse.
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 2004 film Nobody Knows is a fictionalized and significantly less grim retelling of the case. Kore-eda is less interested in the trauma and violence of the event and more in the children’s inner lives and coming of age as their mother deserts them. The film comments on the societal systems that fail the children, but above all else, it is a celebration of their resourcefulness and resilience.
From the switched-at-birth dilemma of Like Father, Like Son to stolen children in his Palme d’Or winner Shoplifters, Kore-eda’s films examine the ways that makeshift families function outside of conventional social structures. Nobody Knows is no exception, following a group of children living on the margins of society. They are forced to raise themselves as the world moves on with no concern for their suffering and turmoil.
The film opens with single mother Keiko (played by pop star You) moving into a small Tokyo apartment with her 12-year-old son Akira (Yuya Yagira). She tells their new landlords that it’s just the two of them because her husband works abroad. Once the landlords are out of sight, they open their suitcases, and Akira’s younger siblings Shigeru (Hiei Kimura) and Yuki (Momoko Shimizu) climb out. Akira then rushes to the train station to pick up his other sister Kyoko (Ayu Kitaura) and sneaks her back to the apartment. Keiko sets the rules: only Akira is allowed outside, and the children must be quiet at all times to avoid being discovered and evicted. Despite the sketchy circumstances, the family members clearly love one another, as seen when they joke around and enjoy their dinner together in blissful oblivion.
The family settles into their new residence and we settle into their lives. We learn that the children have no schooling; they’re living entirely for each other with no prospects beyond survival. Keiko doesn’t get home until late, supposedly working long hours although no one can prove it. Akira spends his days shopping for groceries and cooking for the family. He starts tearing up while dicing onions, but when Yuki asks if he’s all right, he masks his pain and says, “I’m fine.” Not only must Akira provide for his siblings materially, but he must also put on a brave face and support them emotionally. Akira is forced to take on many responsibilities and grows up fast, as do many marginalized children.
In some ways, Akira’s maturity is a result of his mother’s lack thereof. We initially see a reversal of parent-child roles when Keiko asks, “What’s for dinner?” and Akira responds, “Curry.” This becomes more apparent when Keiko comes home drunk—Akira and Kyoko must give their mother water and put her to sleep. On another occasion, Keiko attempts to teach her children math but gives up within moments, exclaiming: “I hate math.” She is quickly distracted by a phone call—possibly from her new boyfriend—and gets invited to karaoke. She refuses because “it’s too late,” but her voice is hesitant, longing for the free, no-strings-attached lifestyle she knows she’s missing out on.
While Akira has accepted his circumstances, his mother desires to leave the margins and assimilate into the mainstream. Keiko confides in Akira that she’s fallen in love. Akira’s response is blunt but telling: “Again?” The word connotes a history of false hope and broken promises, suggesting that Akira knows better than to get his hopes up. Keiko verbalizes her fantasies of getting married and moving to a big house, promising that they’ll move as a family. The next day, Akira wakes up to find a stack of cash and a note from his mother saying she’s “going away for a little while,” leaving Akira to assume the role of a parent.
We are introduced to the other adults in Akira’s life who are cut from the same cloth of irresponsibility and incompetence, leaving Akira with no choice but to step up and take their place. When the children start running out of money, Akira reaches out to two of his mother’s past lovers. The former is a sloppy taxi driver who doesn’t bother to look Akira in the eye. He focuses more on his video game than their conversation and is clearly both unqualified and uninterested in being a father figure. The latter works at a gambling arcade and rejects parental responsibility by emphasizing that he used a condom every time he slept with Akira’s mother. When asked for funds, the man reveals that he’s drowning in debt, but he manages to give Akira a few thousand yen for survival.
The film’s title Nobody Knows is not representative of the children’s situation because multiple adults are aware of it. They know that something’s wrong, but worried glances and one-sided questions are the extent of their concern. This can be said of the convenience store employees providing their sustenance, the high school girl witnessing them do laundry at the public park, and the landlord stumbling upon their filthy apartment. Perhaps it’s easier to turn a blind eye than to get involved in a situation far outside of social norms. Everybody knows about the children on the margins, but nobody wants to know.
Despite Keiko’s obvious ineptness as a mother, Kore-eda humanizes her as a victim of circumstance. In 2004, the year of the film’s release, Japan’s fertility rate was at a record low of 1.29 children per woman. The social norm of one-child families is enforced by Keiko deceiving her landlord that Akira is her only child and refusing to tell her boyfriend about her children. For Keiko, a single mother of four children born out of wedlock, perhaps leaving this life behind is the price she must pay to be accepted by the rest of society. Yet Keiko clearly does not hold herself accountable for her children’s hardship. When she returns home over a month after her initial departure, Akira calls her selfish, and she defends herself by saying “your father’s the one who’s selfish, disappearing like that. What is this? I’m not allowed to be happy?” In failing to fulfill her parental responsibilities, Keiko forces Akira to become a surrogate adult. Keiko gives her children some money before leaving again and promising to return for Christmas. On Christmas Day, Akira gives his mother a call. Keiko answers from a new home with a new surname. She’s gone for good.
Akira, played with heartbreaking restraint by Yuya Yagira—who won the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival for his role—has no choice but to survive. He is jaded yet must remain resilient, carrying a burden that no child should have to bear. He must ensure his siblings are fed while maintaining an illusion, deceiving them into believing that their mother cares. For example, Akira asks a convenience store clerk to write them New Year’s cards to pass off as their mother’s doing, and he takes from his limited pool of spending money to give gifts to his siblings. When Yuki gazes with wonder at a passing train, Akira says, “It goes to Haneda airport. Someday, let’s go see the planes.” He then glances at his sister with a tinge of sadness in his eyes, remorseful for the life she’ll never get to live. Akira does everything he can to shield his siblings from the fact that they are alone in this world.
Akira and his siblings’ exclusion from the rest of the world is reinforced through cinematography and sound design. The siblings are often visually separated from their surroundings, walking on bridges instead of main streets and removed from the bustle of city streets via shallow depth of field. Akira is always solitary when running errands, yet we hear noises of children playing in the background, a reminder of the childhood he can’t have. The world moves on around him and his siblings while they are stuck in limbo, barred from leaving their circumstances without any chance at social mobility.
The siblings exist in their own world, not by choice but because of conventions of social class and order that exile them from the status quo. In an attempt to break into a different world, Akira makes a few friends at the arcade and brings them home to play video games for hours on end. Yet his lower social class leads to his eventual ostracism. When Akira shows up at his friends’ school to invite them over, they claim to be busy with extracurricular activities and turn him down. The instance he’s out of earshot, they call his apartment a “real mess” that “stinks of garbage.” Akira’s poverty is a smell that can’t be washed out, permeating every aspect of his life and signaling itself to the people he meets. Olfactory indicators of class are central to Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, in which a poor family’s scent is frowned upon by their rich employers, no matter how hard they try to appear privileged. Much like the child in Parasite who remarks that his driver and housekeeper smell the same, Akira’s peers can sniff out at their young age that Akira doesn’t belong. His poverty is also detectable in the clothes he wears: there is a clear contrast when his raggedy T-shirt and beat-up sneakers are compared with the other boys’ pressed uniforms and bright white shoes. One’s class is indicated not only by economic worth; it manifests in appearance, scent, and countless other tacit factors. For this reason, it is all the more insurmountable. Akira’s acceptance into the group—and by extension, a higher social class—is obstructed by the unspoken signs of poverty that relegate him to the outside.
Kore-eda depicts the children’s realization of their circumstances and resignation of their dreams in subtly heart-wrenching moments. Shigeru snacks on paper and looks in vending machines for spare change. Kyoko gives Akira the money she saved up for a piano to buy groceries instead. Akira tries to find a job at the convenience store but isn’t old enough to do so. The clerk asks him: “Shouldn’t you contact the police? Or child welfare?” Akira answers in the film’s only bit of explicit social commentary: “If I do, the four of us won’t be able to stay together. That happened before and it was an awful mess.” In chronicling the lives of these children, Kore-eda tears down Japan’s seemingly prosperous and peaceful appearance, exposing a culture that ignores social issues as well as the systems that fail the marginalize. The siblings’ need to navigate hardship on their own is a result not only of inadequate parenting, but also of insensitive state welfare systems and intolerant social attitudes toward single-parent families.
After managing adult responsibilities for most of the film’s runtime, Akira finally gets to experience a “normal” childhood in one brief scene. A baseball coach invites him to cross a prison-like fence and put on another child’s jersey to fill in for a missing player; here, Akira is offered a way out of the margins of society by taking on another child’s identity. While his usual holed T-shirt marks him as an outsider, this baseball uniform allows him to trespass into a world where he is equal to other children and has a father figure to coach him. He becomes somebody else for a moment, pushing his responsibilities to the back of his mind and losing himself in the game. Yet it is precisely when Akira temporarily abdicates his parental role that Yuki injures herself at home, leading to immeasurable tragedy.
Kore-eda’s works exist on the boundary between documentary and fiction. When tragedy strikes, it’s far from sensational or exploitative. Instead, it happens wordlessly without any tears or dramatic outbursts. The naturalistic style of the film mirrors Kore-eda’s methods: he entered production on Nobody Knows without rehearsals or a detailed script, choosing to shoot and edit the film based on the actors’ own idiosyncrasies. His direction results in one of the most realistic, organic, and nuanced portrayals of childhood in contemporary cinema.
After the film’s emotional climax, life goes on for the children. In the final scene, we see Akira collecting expired food from the convenience store, Shigeru finding change in a phone booth, and the children walking off into the distance. Nothing has changed, and the children will continue living their impoverished, unsupervised lives.
The film’s ending reveals a disquieting truth about children on the margins of society: if left to their own devices, they are destined to enter a cycle of struggle and survival. No matter how strong or mature they are, they cannot break out without the presence of parental figures or attention from the wider community. At its core, Nobody Knows explores how personal, social, and political issues create and exacerbate hardship for children. Keiko’s incompetence forces her children to fend for themselves, but indifferent adults and inadequate state welfare systems fan the flames. Nobody Knows makes the case for society’s responsibility toward marginalized children, urging those who know about their struggles to act on their knowledge.
Illustration by Myriam Louise Taleb