Ryusuke Hamaguchi composes a symphony in three movements, each one daring into the most brutal, caustic, but also romantic, nuances of love. Fuelled by spectacular coincidences, a recurring trait in Hamaguchi’s oeuvre, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is a story of ‘what if’s’—the uneasiness to live with one’s own past and the impossible longing for having done things differently, perhaps. Meaningfully, every episode seems to find its centre of gravity around the opposite states of a physical mean of communication—a taxi reversing direction, a door kept open or closed, two adjoining escalators, one going up, one going down. But Hamaguchi’s triptych also questions, and somehow teasingly, around the theme of being and identity—what are we if not the idea of who we are?
Apart from the title, even more disheartening in the embellished international translations, this is a surprisingly layered piece of work which reveals its complexity and the uncommon bravura of its author one step at a time—and in this sense too, there’s no coming back.