Unlike the antihero protagonist in his movie, “Mouse,” director Kenny Oiwa Riches is gregarious and as transparent as glass. Where his principle character, Denny, is a brooding misanthrope, Riches is amicable and energetic. Surprisingly, his well-crafted script with its themes of darkness does not reflect his sociable personality at all.
In contrast, Riches’ character, Denny, is a loner. A petty thief with Asian and Caucasian parentage, Denny lives with his Japanese mother. Working menial jobs, he envies people who seem to live luxurious lifestyles replete with spacious homes, spectacular cars and other material accoutrements.
With 2007 Salt Lake City as the backdrop, Denny skulks about, stealing bicycles and groceries. While at home, he only interacts with his mother by speaking to her in Japanese and reading aloud letters from their relatives in Japan. A photo of his white father in a military uniform is the film’s only reference to his dad, besides mentioning his death when Denny was a young boy.
When his loneliness becomes unbearable, Denny seeks a relationship with a woman through a pen pal service. Unbeknownst to him, she turns out to be a scammer along with her unscrupulous boyfriend.
Riches said the inspiration for “Mouse” came from a personal encounter he experienced.
“I have a filmmaker friend, and I have never met him in person,” he explained. “He found my email address, and we were telephone friends for years.” After discovering they shared similar tastes in films, they became close. “We talked for hours about what we were working on, what we liked in movies.”
But at the time, Riches’ romantic partner was suspicious. She pointed out that although his newly found friend had films available online, he had no online presence. She wondered if Riches’ unseen buddy was catfishing him.
“I don’t know what he looks like,” said Riches. “I never met the guy.” But their unconventional connection got Riches thinking about making a film regarding a similar link: “Can you have this really rich relationship with someone you never met?”
Riches developed an interest in movies at an early age. As a teenager in the 1990’s, he would watch Blockbuster videos that his father would rent every Friday to wind down following a week of work.
“He had a rule that we couldn’t get Disney movies,” Riches said with a laugh. Instead, the adolescent found himself watching adult movies like Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange.”
Because his father had grown up with conservative values, Riches says he wanted his kids to be freer. “He didn’t want to impose those types of rules on us,” he explained. “We had zero rules. We could make our own decisions.”
As he got older, Riches realized he could also make movies and not just watch them. After studying painting and drawing in college, he began making films about skateboarding and enlisted friends to help him. “By the time we were in our 20’s, I kind of had a familiarity with what a film set is, and we started making our movies,” he said.
Riches’ real-life mother, Hiroko Oiwa Riches, reluctantly agreed to play the role of Denny’s mother Nobuko. She is nothing like the gentle, naive lady she portrays onscreen. Instead, Hiroko is ambitious and filled with purpose.
Hiroko arrived in the U.S. via Mexico after moving there from Japan in pursuit of romance with a Mexican national. However, she soon discovered that he was married with children. In spite of that, Hiroko lived with the man’s aunt for a few months before meeting Riches’ father, a white American, who was studying abroad.
Hiroko didn’t speak English and he didn’t speak Japanese, but both could communicate in Spanish. The two ended up moving to Riche’s father’s hometown in Utah. While in law school, the elder Riches, who grew up in humble beginnings, moved them into a trailer home on a farm. “My mother was having major culture shock,” Riches said.
The couple then moved to Salt Lake City to complete their educations, and Hiroko became a computer database engineer. However, both their son and daughter were born in Toyota Aichi Prefecture Japan. Because his parents were poor college students working on masters degrees, they couldn’t afford to have their babies delivered in an American hospital. “She flew back home to have us in Japan,” Riches explained.
Hiroko’s family was tightly knit, and she and her mother were very close. But her parents have passed away and trips back home are now infrequent. Riches said he often accompanied his mother on her visits to Japan.
“We used to go there a lot more when I was a kid,” he said. “I try to push her to go see her siblings. She’s retired, but she thinks she’s too busy.”
In “Mouse,“ Hiroko as Nobuko speaks only Japanese with her son, who responds in kind. But Riches noted that Japanese was not the family’s primary language. “She was really trying to assimilate, but would speak Japanese around the house.” He confessed that he can understand more of the language than he can speak. “On set, she was correcting me,” Riches laughed, adding that she was especially focused on his pronunciation.
Although Japanese culture in Utah was rarely displayed in public, Riches said his mother familiarized him with some of it. For instance, their family attended the Japanese Buddhist temple in downtown Salt Lake City. His mother also waitressed at a Japanese-themed restaurant for 10 years and wore a kimono every day. “She made friends through the restaurant,” Richie added. “She would put me in after school math lessons, located above another Japanese restaurant in Salt Lake,” all of which enhanced his understanding of the culture.
Still, he struggled with his mixed-race heritage. “In school, I was always searching out other Asian peers,” Riches said. “Being half white, I was sitting in that middle zone—too Asian for white kids, too white for Asian kids.” His best friend is a Korean adoptee in a white family. “That’s what makes America, I guess,” he reflected. “There’s such a mixture.”
Getting his mother to appear in the film took “some negotiating”, Riches admitted: “She really didn’t want to do it in the beginning.”
But Riches wasn’t actively seeking out anyone else, because he thought she would be great in the role. “I knew she would do it, but she kept saying ‘no.’”
Then, before filming began, he told her that it was going to be a lot cheaper if she would help out by performing as Denny’s mother. That’s when Hiroko agreed. “She never acted before,” Riches said. “It definitely was not her comfort zone.”
Like Riches’ character, Denny, Hiroko’s character, Nobuko, is nothing like her true personality. “In real life, she laughs a ton. She’s a very silly person,” Riches said. “In the movie, she does a good job of being stoic, a very comforting voice in the movie.”
Other than correcting his pronunciation of Japanese words, Hiroko got along well with Riches on set. “Growing up, if you said anything in Japanese in the house, she would say, ‘Your Japanese sounds good’,” he said. “But, as soon as we got on set, she would say, ‘That’s not how you say that!’”
Riches said that he would answer her, “But I’ve been saying it like that for 40 years!”
It meant a lot to him to make a movie with his mother, and he was thrilled that they were able to create something together.
During the Covid pandemic, Riches began writing a lot of scripts and, for the first time, considered making a film that he could also act in, despite not being an actor. Although he hadn’t initially planned to star in his own film, he chose a scene in “Mouse” with a lot of dialogue, recorded himself, and sent the tape to his producers who were sufficiently impressed.
“We talked about casting someone else before we went into production,” he said. But his audition proved he could handle the role.
Riches said all his favorite films contain sinister scenes. “I really like dark films,” he said— “I like mobster films.”
When considering other movies that he’s released, Riches feels he made them only because of a strong interest in a particular thing. But “Mouse” is the first movie that he actually wanted to watch.
“It’s a fun challenge to write somewhat despicable characters in a way that you fall in love with them,” he said. “You also empathize, but disagree with them.” He said he wanted that to be the case with Denny’s character as well as the scammers Tess (Sarah Coffey) and Maury (Kimball Farley).
Recently, Riches has been attempting to get more involved in the horror genre. “I’m hoping that we can cast an Asian protagonist and a grandmother role,” he said about his next film which he describes as “dark and morbid, but socially relevant”.
“All of my films have at least one Asian character in it,” he said.
Hopefully, his mother, Hiroko, will agree to continue acting and appearing in all of his future films.
The Seattle Asian American Film Festival runs from May 29–31 at in-person venues, and on June 1 for virtual showings. More information online at: https://www.seattleaaff.org/
