Cambodian Taxi Driver - monochrome zine edition

Cambodian Taxi Driver — a photo-essay film that began as a novel, twenty years on, remade as a monochrome zine.

How did Cambodia come to be where it is today? What do the people who live here now carry inside them? What does this society still leave unresolved? And where does that smile, that richness of spirit, come from? Out of those questions came Cambodian Taxi Driver, released in 2010 — a photo-essay film built from still images of my own unfinished novel, set to music. This zine is my own attempt, looking from where I stand today, to revisit Cambodian Taxi Driver and reassemble it in monochrome.

The work premiered at the Cambodia International Film Festival 2011. Music direction by Isao Yamazaki. It was screened, with an accompanying photography exhibition and sale, at an event in Waikiki hosted by e-mail foster parents — a volunteer organization supporting Cambodian orphans. DVD booklets were sold at several shops around Siem Reap. After a series of gallery showings in Japan, the work eventually came to a quiet pause.

In 2025, fifteen years after the work first appeared, I returned to Siem Reap — my first visit in twelve years. The pandemic had thinned the Japanese crowd to almost nothing. Korean capital, once the dominant presence, had given way to Chinese; the West has come back in force, and around Angkor it's Western visitors you see almost everywhere. Guides who once spoke fluent Japanese now move more easily in English. Across the country, crackdowns on the scam compounds keep coming, though how clean things will really get, no one yet knows. Tensions along the Thai border have surfaced again.

The world, this country, Japan — none of them are what they were. Some things have changed. Some things haven't. And some things, it turns out, were only ever what I had imagined them to be. Age makes visible what younger eyes could not see. The goodness of this country has not yet reached the world. That is what drove me to make this zine. Twenty years since that journey. The search continues.

Story

Cambodia, 2008. Thirty years after the civil war, Siem Reap is riding high on the Angkor tourism boom. Son, thirty, lost his father to the war. His mother stayed behind in the countryside. He lives with his two younger brothers and makes his living as a motorbike taxi driver. Sa — his childhood friend, his best friend's younger sister — left her family a year ago and has been working at a karaoke club ever since. When Son drops off a customer there one night, the two come face to face again. The same day, Sa loses her place to stay. She turns up at Son's door, and with her comes Takuto, a Japanese backpacker who had been Son's fare that morning, now stripped of everything he owned. An unlikely household begins. Somewhere along the way, Son and Sa fall in love. But the tuberculosis that has been quietly hollowing Sa out begins to show. Son puts her on the back of his bike and starts riding into the dark, heading for Takeo, where her family lives. A reunion that came too late — and from here, their fates begin to bend.