Shoplifters

Mayu Matsuoka

Couple Osamu and Nobuyo, their adolescent "son" Shota, and Nobuyo's "sister" and "mother", Aki and Hatsue, live together in Hatsue's small and isolated house in Tokyo. Although Osamu and Nobuyo have legitimate blue collar jobs, and Aki works as an exotic dancer of sorts in a men's club, they largely exist on Hatsue's deceased husband's pension and through shoplifting whatever they may need, in addition to Nobuyo stealing from her employer. Osamu's outward belief is that if something is in a store and no one has yet bought it, it doesn't actually belong to anyone and thus shoplifting is not stealing from anyone. Osamu and Shota do the bulk of the shoplifting of their day-to-day goods, their shoplifting M.O. which they have perfected to pat routine. On their way home after a shoplifting run, they spot a five year old girl who they have routinely seen huddled outside what they assume is her house, she as usual looking scared and malnourished. This day, they decide to take her home with them, in the process over time learning that she is Juri, an abused child. Ultimately, Osamu and Nobuyo decide to keep her, eventually changing her name to Lin and cutting her hair to make her look different after they discover two months after the fact that her abusive parents are finally looking for her. As Shota ends up being Lin's most frequent companion in he not attending school - Osamu and Nobuyo who have told him that only children who don't have the luxury of being taught at home need to go to school - he involves her in his routine shoplifting, the only life he knows. This new situation of Lin in their lives has the potential to bring this makeshift family come tumbling down around them as each person begins to question their past actions. If this figurative house does come crashing down, the alternative may not be better in the options of what is one's choice versus what is one's circumstance, the latter quite often biologically-based.—Huggo