“Tokyo is Tokyo,” states Ayako Fujitani.

It’s not a flippant comment, nor is it said with any sarcasm or bitterness. Tokyo is the city where she was born. A city that managed to turn Christianity into a theme restaurant. A city where buildings shape themselves into a facsimile of a television set’s insides. A city where fashion and the future get drunk and fuck in the neon lights of the Karaoke vendor carts that line Jingu Bridge. And now, from her home in L.A., she finds herself trying to encapsulate all that in a sound bite for a complete stranger.

So, “Tokyo is Tokyo.”

Actually, it’s an apt description for Tokyo!, playing next weekend as part of the sixth annual Calgary Underground Film Festival. A collection of unconnected short films directed by Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), Leos Carax (The Lovers on the Bridge) and Joon-Ho Bong (The Host), Tokyo! explores the Japanese city as a place metaphors go to become mundanely literal. A woman becomes a chair. A racist monster that eats flowers and cash terrorizes the city. A shut-in realizes he’s doomed a city to loneliness. It’s all bizarre and surreal, steeped in themes of alienation and anomie, yet you couldn’t imagine any of it happening in any other city.

Fujitani stars in the Gondry-directed “Interior Design” as the girlfriend of a pretentious film director who moves to Tokyo to live out her boyfriend’s big-city dreams. Based on the graphic novel Cecil and Jordan in New York by Gabrielle Bell (who also helped write this adaptation), Gondry strips the story down to its emotional core and transplants it into the heart of Tokyo.

“That story fit Tokyo very well, maybe even better than New York,” says Fujitani of the change of locale. “It’s based on very common emotions. Young people who move from the countryside, they think they can work and dream in the big city, but they still end up with this hole in their chest. I’ve felt that before. [My character] is different than me, but probably not by much.”

Fujitani and her character differ in two important ways: Fujitani is the daughter of Steven Seagal (yes, that Steven Seagal) and she became known in Japan for playing a thankless human role in the revived Gamera series, upstaged by a giant flying turtle that punches giant prehistoric birds and giant space bugs. Tokyo! is as far as you could get from that, and she’s all too happy to be there. Fujitani’s performance in the film is nuanced and grounded in the kind of neurotic dysfunction that defines all relationships between twentysomethings, even when the film gets all… freaky. Fujitani evades praise for her work, attributing her success in the film to the collaboration that occurred during shooting, especially between her and Gondry. And it all seemed to happen because of circumstance.

“Since I could speak English,” says Fujitani, “Michel and Gabrielle kind of came to me. They didn’t bring anybody from France or America, and they couldn’t find many people who could speak English. Before we started shooting, they’d call me on my cellphone or I’d go to their office and talk about my character. It was such a great experience. We’re all really good friends now.”

Unlike other films about cities, Tokyo! isn’t a love letter. The film is more interested in exploring how a city like Tokyo can alienate and disconnect its citizens, how people contort themselves to fit the cityscape they live in. To be fair, it’s entirely an outsider’s perspective of Tokyo and Japan, and one that Fujitani feels is more applicable to cities as a concept. As it’s illegal to film in Tokyo, the directors all had difficult shoots, but Carax seemed to suffer the most. His experience has led him to describe Japan and Tokyo as repressed, conservative and racist in several interviews. Fujitani is aware of Carax’s opinion, and though she has never confronted him about them, she feels his allegations are more universal than specific to her home country.

“I can see what he means,” she says, gravitating to Carax’s charges of racism. “I’m half Japanese, so when I was little I felt lonely and felt that Japanese people were racist. But I kind of figured out that they were more scared. Japanese people aren’t more racist compared to other countries. They’re just so shy. They see people who are different or who don’t speak their language, and they close up. It doesn’t mean they’re racist. They used to be racist back in their history, but that’s just like everywhere. Now they’re more curious about different cultures.”

During this discussion of race, she continues to refer to the Japanese as “they” as if to remove herself from the equation. She calls L.A. her home now, an ocean away from Tokyo and the rubber-suited baggage she left behind. The irony of making her first non-Japanese film debut in a film about Tokyo is not lost on her; Tokyo no longer means the same thing.

“For me, Tokyo is a place to hide,” she says. “People leave you alone, they don’t want to get close to you. That’s sad and makes you feel lonely, but at the same time, it has this strong energy that’s also very quiet.”