Between Stops: Non-Places in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

A woman steps onto an escalator in Sendai Station. She believes she recognises someone on the ascending side – a face from 20 years ago, a friend she has not forgotten. The woman on the other side seems to recognise her too. This misrecognition on a moving staircase between strangers becomes the spatial imprint of Hamaguchi Ryūsuke’s Gūzen to Sōzō (Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, 2021). Across three independent episodes, transit systems, corridors, and escalators – spaces that are, by definition, nowhere – become sites where Hamaguchi’s characters express what they cannot say anywhere else. The film’s title in Japanese (偶然と想, Gūzen to Sōzō, literally “Chance” and “Imagination”) is more precise.¹ “Fortune” and “fantasy” suggest fate and desire as forces acting on individuals, while “chance” and “imagination” are grounded in space and action. Taxis, buses, trains, corridors, and escalators are what anthropologist Marc Augé calls “non-places” – spaces that, unlike places rooted in history and social relations, are defined by transience, anonymity, and the suspension of settled identities.² Hamaguchi builds his triptych around these spaces, where the absence of relational, historical, and identity-bearing qualities leads to confessions.

In Transit

What Augé calls “places of memory” – sites listed, classified, and formally consecrated as bearers of historical identity – are what Hamaguchi’s transit spaces are not.³ His transit systems, corridors, and escalators have no institutional memory. For Augé, this absence is what non-places do: strip away the relational and historical anchors that ordinarily fix social roles, loosening identity in the process. The film’s characters find themselves temporarily unmoored, where confessions become possible.

In Episode 1, “Magic (or Something Less Assuring),” Meiko (Furukawa Kotone) and Tsugumi (Hyunri) talk about a recent date in a taxi as it moves through Tokyo. As an enclosed and anonymous space used for departure and destination, the taxi loosens the social scripts governing what Tsugumi can say about her romantic encounter. She describes her date with a candour that surprises even herself, re-counting the erotic quality of his restraint and the supposed honesty they exchanged. Their banter ends when Tsugumi gets home. Meiko asks the driver to return to their previous route, suspecting that the man in question is her former lover Kazuaki (Nakajima Ayumu). By retracing the route, Meiko prolongs the suspension, extending the non-place because there is no settled space she can return to. A shot of Tokyo’s elevated expressway follows, as melancholic piano music threads through the darkness. At night, the city is an indifferent landscape with cold infrastructure, absorbing her anguish silently. 

Episode 2, “Door Wide Open,” introduces another non-place located in a university building. Married mother and a mature-age student Nao (Mori Katsuki) arrives at the office of Segawa (Shibukawa Kiyohiko), an Akutagawa prize-winning French professor. Nao attempts to seduce Segawa, coerced by her young lover Sasaki (Shōma Kai) to exact revenge after Segawa fails him. She enters a space defined by protocol. Segawa instructs her to leave the door open, a decisive spatial act that converts the office back into institutional non-place, reinstating codes of professional conduct that Nao’s plan requires her to dissolve. She then reads aloud from Segawa’s novel. Her voice weaponises its erotic passages, but Nao fails to seduce him. However, Segawa admits that her voice moved him, followed by Nao’s admission of her own feelings of worthlessness, fear of being hated, and need for recognition. In this scene, the non-place does not produce what either of them planned, leading to unguarded moments. 

In Episode 3, “Once Again”, the non-place is literalised. Natsuko (Urabe Fusako), attends their high school reunion, from which she feels detached. On an escalator, she encounters a woman she mistakes for a lost friend. Natsuko chases the woman, later revealed to be Aya (Kawai Aoba), a stranger. The accidental loop on the escalator briefly suspends both women outside the ordinary flow of their lives. Neither belongs to the other’s world, inciting the conditions that lead to the unravelling of their stories. Imagination follows as the two women agree to re-enact their first meeting, using the escalator as a stage for was the non-place was never designed to hold – a deliberate act of emotional repair.

Conditional Mobility

All three episodes of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy follow women moving through urban spaces. In each case, their movements are shadowed by a man’s refusal or coercion, an institution’s protocols, or the pull of a past that will not stay in place. The women in Hamaguchi’s film are only conditionally mobile.

Three days after the taxi ride, Meiko finds herself in a café with Tsugumi, who mentions her date is on his way. Kazuaki appears through the window. The café becomes the site of an imagined confrontation, wherein Meiko confesses she still loves Kazuaki and asks him to choose between her and Tsugumi, waiting for an answer that does not come. She steps outside before the scene turns into what she feared, letting Tsugumi say goodbye through the glass. Her movement afterwards is slow and unhurried: she walks under the warm sun, stopping to photograph a vista of construction and moving trains as the camera tilts upward. The city continues its indifferent activity around her. Meiko’s slow withdrawal into this urban corner shows the non-place absorbing what she cannot say.

Nao’s movement in Episode 2 operates across Sasaki’s apartment, the city’s transit system, and the university’s hallways. While Nao’s journey is scripted by Sasaki towards a destination he has chosen, Segawa redirects the encounter as the space resists Nao’s efforts. A bus ride five years later, where Nao and Sasaki reunite by chance, reprises the taxi’s function from Episode 1 as an enclosed space that generates unexpected contact. Sasaki now has a fiancé, while Nao is divorced and works as a copywriter. A self-assured Nao leaves on her own terms, kissing Sasaki before she gets off and waving from outside as the bus rolls on. The camera returns to Tokyo’s tunnels and highways at night. Once more, the city continues its pace. Nao, once routed by Sasaki, now determines the route herself.

In Episode 3, Natsuko travels from Tokyo to Sendai towards unresolved memory, attending a high school reunion in a city she once belonged to. Unlike the dense social infrastructure of Tokyo in Episodes 1 and 2, Sendai appears quieter.⁴ The episode’s fictional Xeron virus – forcing people offline and back into analogue contact – becomes a geographic irony in a city known for its digital ambitions, where the return to face-to-face feels both chosen and imposed. Where Episodes 1 and 2 move their characters through transit infrastructure and institutional space, Episode 3 moves Natsuko through Aya’s domestic geography as a partial stranger: residential streets, a neighbour pausing to chat, a kitchen where tea is made, a large window where the afternoon light pierces through. Natsuko’s detachment let Aya speak, and allows Natsuko to listen without the weight of shared history pressing down on the conversation. In the living room, a confession plays out. Both women open up – postures softening, voices quieting, the distance between them narrowing – as they pretend to confront someone they know. The city of Sendai frames their parting as they walk back to the train station. In this scene, walking replaces the non-place. The home and shared route have become a space for confessions.

Chosen Non-Places

Augé reminds us that “the space of non-place creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude, and similitude.”⁵ The non-place is a machine for constructing anonymous, interchangeable individuals, each alone among others. The recurring highway shots in the first two episodes confirms this notion: Tokyo’s elevated expressways appear after Meiko’s angst and Nao’s humiliation, with the same infrastructure, indifferent luminescence, and absence of responses. Here, the city does not distinguish between their pain, offering solitude and similitude precisely as Augé suggests.

Episode 3 complicates this idea when Natsuko and Aya sit together in Aya’s living room. Hamaguchi frames their vulnerable exchange through one compositional detail: a metal divider in the window shot holds them apart and together at the moment of greatest intimacy. The film stages interiority as geometry.  The non-place’s logic of separation is replicated inside a domestic space, at the moment where the two women drop their guard entirely. Natsuko speaks of Mika, her only true love as a student – the woman who left her for a man. Natsuko asks Aya to re-enact their first meeting at the escalator, repeating the spatial choreography of chance. In this spatial act, they transform the non-place from a site of chance into one of choice. This is where Augé’s formulation pauses: the escalator that was transitional, carrying no institutional memory or historical identity, returns as a deliberately chosen stage for emotional repair. While Augé’s non-place produces solitude, Hamaguchi’s site produces a tender act of recognition. Similitude allows the two women to temporarily feel less alone.⁶

Augé concedes that non-places never exist in pure form, that “places reconstitute themselves in them and new relations are formed.”⁷ The re-enactment is the film’s precise illustration of how a non-place is reconstituted by an act of will. In the episode’s final scene Aya runs back up the escalator, chasing Natsuko across the bridge, with the city’s buildings as a backdrop. The urgency is caused by Aya recovering the name of her lost friend – Nozomi. This pivotal moment is framed by the city. 

Throughout the film, the cities of Tokyo and Sendai have been impassive witnesses. Highways, lights, cranes, and tunnels exist regardless of what their inhabitants sense. At the bridge, the city opens up beneath a moment of genuine reconnection. In Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, Hamaguchi advances a spatial argument that the city of supermodernity is stripped of historical identity and relational meaning, making unguarded human contact possible through its indifference.

Between Stops

For Augé, non-places produce neither singular identity nor relations. Hamaguchi reworks this idea through non-places between active sites, where the suspension of social identity loosens personal restraints. Meiko and Kazuaki disclose their reluctance; Tsugumi and Segawa affirm desire. Sasaki concedes to anger; Nao confesses feelings of worthlessness; Natsuko and Aya release a distinct longing, carried for 20 years. These disclosures inform the film’s subject, unfolding between stops. 

Chance encounters emerge from urban density and transit infrastructure, while imagination redirects the routes that allow such chance encounters. The taxi turns around. The office door stays open. The escalator loops. Each space holds them momentarily. In reality, these seemingly romantic structures are geographic conditions reproduced by a supermodern city whose non-places suspend identity, long enough for truth to pass between strangers who the escalator will not remember.

Gūzen to Sōzō/Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021 Japan 121 mins)

Prod Co: NEOPA, Fictive Prod: Harada Shō, Tokuyama Katsumi, Takata Satoshi Dir, Scr: Hamaguchi Ryūsuke Phot: Iioka Yukiko Mus: JōnoNaoki, Suzuki Akihiko Prod Des: Nunobe Masato, Seo Hyeon-Seon

Cast: Furukawa Kotone, Nakajima Ayumu, Hyunri, Shibukawa Kiyohiko, Mori Katsuki, Kai Shōma, Urabe Fusako, Kawai Aoba

Endnotes