Matsumoto Seicho Special: Yubi

Matsumoto Seicho Special: Yubi is a ridiculous Japanese TV movie from 2006. It features a “mystery” with no mystery and a lot of convenient revelations. What it doesn’t feature is any positive representations of WLW characters. It’s objectively bad. But honestly, I had a pretty good time watching this nonsense.

The film follows rising actress, Fukue Yumiko and television reporter, Suzuki Kaori. Kaori initially becomes interested in Yumiko when she catches her disposing the corpse of a dog. Kaori discovers that despite the sanitized backstory Yumiko has been telling the press, her life is pretty nuts. Yumiko’s mother was a prostitute and for a time, Yumiko herself worked at a lesbian bar/brothel. Here, she meets an older woman who acts as her sugar mama for a time. Yumiko also has a relationship with a woman named Miho from her theatre troupe. Both of these women eventually turn up dead as Yumiko’s career rises. Did Yumiko have something to do with the deaths of her ex-female lovers? Yes. Of course she did. Yumiko also kills a dog because the dog witnesses her doing lesbian activities. This leads to the best shot in the movie.

This film reminds me of another Japanese movie, Helter Skelter. Both are about rising celebrities who are also terrible people. The leads use sex with either gender as a tool for manipulation. Ultimately, I decided Helter Skelter wasn’t gay enough for this site. Any relationships the lead had with women could be read as just manipulation. This is similar to Yubi. Every person Yumiko sleeps with helps further her career goals. She also claims that she slept with men and women despite liking none of them. On the other hand, Yumiko has a lot of lesbian affairs in this so I think she has at least some lesbian interest. She pretty much creates opportunities to engage in lesbian affairs. There are a lot of paths to stardom that don’t involve sleeping with any women. Yumiko chose not to follow any of these paths.

This movie has a lot of queer female characters but zero positive representation. The lesbians in this film are criminals, desperate or just pathetic. Kaori also has a lesbian subplot. A bartender at the secret lesbian bar Yumiko worked at offers her information is Kaori sleeps with her. Many of the queer characters in this are predatory. And the overall group they belong to is this seedy, lesbian underworld. I don’t want to let lesbians off the hook for being able to be sleazy and do crime. But I don’t think the seedy lesbian underworld is a thing.

In keeping with my theory that this movie has only heard about lesbians but never met one, this movie is crazy focused on fingers. I think what happened is the creator heard some comment about lesbians having short fingernails for sex reasons and ran with that. Short fingernails and a focus on fingers is a major focus of the queer characters in this movie. They talk about short fingernails constantly and and every lesbian has a low-key finger fetish. There’s a surprising amount of instances of plot-relevant fingernail clipping here. Hell, even the crime hinges on the clipping of fingernails.

Yubi is not a successful mystery by any stretch of the imagination. For starters, there’s no real mystery. The way the film reveals Yumiko’s backstory, crimes and motives is a mess. There’s a lot of Kaori randomly realizing very specific information about Yumiko without any evidence. Kaori ultimately breaks the case because she clips her fingernail, goes to vacuum it up and finds it has landed on a stuffed dog. From this, she realizes that Yumiko killed her lover and then vacuumed up the fingernail clippings which would have evidence on them. That’s a reach. But it’s true! As far as a mystery goes, the only mysterious thing is how Kaori keeps coming to these elaborate but correct conclusions without evidence.

Matsumoto Seicho Special: Yubi is a mess. I don’t think the writer of the film has ever met a real lesbian and as such, there’s no lesbian representation. There’s also a very stupid mystery and an overly intelligent investigator who keeps jumping to insane but correct conclusions. This movie is too stupid and homophobic to be called good. And yet, it’s a pretty fun sit. Matsumoto Seicho Special: Yubi is the rare WLW movie that crosses from just being bad into being so bad it’s kind of good.

Overall rating: 3.2/10

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