For America’s only major annual exclusive celebration of Japan’s latest, Japan Society again shares with the earlier eighth New York Asian Film Festival. Its third annual Japan Cuts takes in eighteen sometimes way-out feature lengths, introductions by and after-sessions with directors and actors, contests and raffles, theme-costume parties, gala atmosphere and enthusiastic audiences. One of nine co-presentations at both, marking the close of the NYAFF while ushering in the thirteen days of Japan Cuts, Fish Story/Fisshu sutôrî is the audience favorite in voting so far in its première on this continent and has one of the most ingratiating ten-minute flashback wrap-ups around.

Yoshihiro Nakamura’s tenth film derives from a Kotaro Isaka novel and, after seemingly irreconcilable complications, its plot coalesces around another book, one that bankrupted its publisher to survive in one single copy lifted by his female accountant and, title of Fish Story and all, was in the first place mistranslated by a desperate father masquerading as bilingual who worked word-for-word from a dictionary.

What that terribly botched rendering has to do with a meteor about to smash into Earth decades later, in 2012, is only one of a couple disparate threads ingeniously knotted together in the winning coda.

Up to that connecting of explanations, more sedate audiences may have trouble sitting still, for, although not without humor, the stories each seem from different planets. Younger-minded viewers cheered throughout, but, like the film, all sorts smiled together in the end.

Names are difficult and not clear in what threatens a shaggy dog story more than a fib about the fish that got off the hook. As interplanetary destruction grows in the sky and promises tidal waves “twice as tall as Godzilla” swamping Mount Fuji, only two Coconuts Disk/Buy-Sell music freaks are oblivious, listening to vinyl of the pre-Sex Pistols punk band Gekirin Boys, its four members long since gone to day jobs. In a motorized wheel chair with a urine bag breathing tube, a paraplegic who is not paralyzed glories in the hundred-percent death of mankind, while a doomsday prophet and his acolytes harangue campers on a beach.

The film’s hopping around in time as well as tale is at first a distraction which soon makes no difference. A meek young man seeks approval by chauffeuring two Lotharios in his car but is fearful of the minute of silence on the cassette of the proto-punk group’s song, “Fish Story,” during which those who are attuned can supposedly discern a scream. Told by university student Haruko that his sixth sense can make him a “champion of justice” à la Go Rangers/Masked Rider/Yellow Rider superhero, provided he assert himself, he hears a scream but turns in fear from the woman and her would-be rapist.

Another scenario is of a Yamana High schoolgirl who sleeps through classmates’ disembarking at Tokyo and finds herself stuck on the ferry continuing on to Hokkaido. The science major’s distress is calmed by a delicate ship’s waiter who resembles Michael Jackson and tells her of an unhappy childhood, friendless because of a father’s determination to prepare him as a champion of justice, training brought into play when the beach prophet and henchmen commandeer the vessel.

Thirdly is the background of the unsuccessful quartet of rockers who dive into audiences to fight, attract Okazaki as manager, and, except for singer Goro, are to be dumped by producer Tani and the recording company. Its lyrics plagiarized from a book of the manager’s dead aunt, their final studio session cut is so much to their own liking that they refuse to downtempo, redub or redo it and agree only to replace an impromptu admiring comment with integrated silence.

SPOILER ALERT

These apparently unrelated relations play out against record-shop media interruptions for the countdown to impact. A last-ditch effort goes awry when an Indian space crew cannot locate the asteroid where Bruce Willis left unexploded U.S. nuclear bombs in Armageddon.

To discover how a forgotten 1975 song brings them together in saving Planet Earth, you have to see Fish Story. Though brief and hokily easy, the ending makes it worth bearing with some silliness before. 

(Released by Showgate; not rated by MPAA.)