Tag: 1950s

Age of Nudity (素ッ裸の年令, Seijun Suzuki, 1959)

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Stylistically speaking, Seijun Suzuki’s Age of Nudity (素ッ裸の年令, Suppadaka no Nenrei) is one of the least interesting of his early phase and features only brief moments of innovation such as using the cameo effect for Sabu’s flashback and elements of his taste for surrealism with unexpected cutting between events. It does however have something a little more interesting to say about the world of 1959 through the eyes of someone in the process of becoming an angry young man.

The film opens with Sabu (Saburo Fujimaki) in his school uniform gazing at motorbikes and exclaiming that adulthood must be wonderful because you can ride a bike whenever you want. Ken (Keiichiro Akagi), the leader of a group of mainly orphaned delinquents, shows him that he could do that now. His gang make a habit of “borrowing” bikes and makes money through reckless drag races. Ken’s instructions that the bikes must be returned afterwards is symbolic of his desire to live a more honest life. When Sabu gets involved with actual crimes such as robbing a local food stand, he becomes very angry with him for compromising his more noble vision of what this group should be. 

But Ken is also working with a newspaper reporter and selling him insider stories about pre-teen “delinquents” . It seems as if every day is a slow news day in the Japan in 1959, and the reporter continues to plant scare stories in an effort to create a moral panic about feral children. Ken seems to think that he’ll keep them out of it and not actually report on anything too back that directly involves them, but of course his conviction is naive. Nevertheless, he convinces himself that he’s doing it all for the group so he can get money to buy a fishing boat and support everyone through honest work. But at the same time the fact that it’s the newspapers echoes the ways in which these children have been pushed out of society, while also ironic in that the reason Sabu loses his pair round is because he’s unfairly called a troublemaker when trying to get a reluctant customer to finally pay her bill.

The newspaper round incident bears out the ways in which Sabu is unable to control his temper and his frustration often turns to violence. The reporter asks a friend of his at school hoping he will badmouth him, but the only says that he’s not a bad kid, it’s just that his family’s poor. What Sabu most wants is to stay in school, but his parents won’t pay and his mother even says that he’s getting above himself. Poor people like them don’t go to school they just work. But Sabu’s desire to break that barrier is thwarted by social prejudice and the frustration it arises in him. He first looks up to Ken as a role model, but is also the most betrayed on realising that it was Ken who leaked info on them to the press and that he’s planning to take their share of the loot and make a new life for himself alone in the country.

Humiliated after having been betrayed by the newspaper man, Ken then reverts to Sabu’s way of thinking, that as old as he gets this society won’t respect him. So perhaps he no longer needs to respect it or to stick to the nobility he was trying to teach the kids. Adulthood won’t be what we expected, he tells Yoko, as if he had thought that on turning 20 he’d suddenly be more respected and that he’d be able to forge his own future by buying a boat and becoming a fisherman. The film’s title does not translate particularly well, but the nuance is more like “the naked age” where age refers to that of a person rather than to an era. Sabu goes to the beach and marvels that everyone is “naked”, or rather that they’re all scantily clad in swimwear, and are therefore all the same with the divisions of class and wealth temporarily dissolves. But at the same time it’s more that he himself is naked in that he’s at his most raw and vulnerable. He feels himself to be alone, and has no role models to look to for how he should live his life. Resenting his father for bowing and screaming and his mother for her lack of ambition, he wants more for himself but also can’t find a way to get it. 

The fact that Ken is eventually killed in a fiery crash signals him out as a false prophet. The person the children should have been listening to was the homeless old man (Bokuzen Hidari) who appears in a vision of beatific pastorally at the film’s conclusion posed on a green hill with the sun behind him. Though the children sometimes make fun of him for his disability and what they see as a failure at life, the old man laughs it off and is constantly happy living in a tent with his little dog. He encourages the children and gives them helpful advice that helps to overcome the failures of their birth parents, while his presence suggests that true happiness is to be found only on escaping contemporary capitalist society. Sabu too perhaps comes to a similar conclusion, realising that their “independence” is an illusion when they have to compromise themselves morally in order to earn money. Ken may have given them false hope, but perhaps the old man is different in living his own “independent” life defined by humanism and simplicity free from the constraints of a society which only values and status.

The Mother Tree (怪談乳房榎, Goro Kadono, 1958)

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An amoral ronin worms his way into the home of a famous painter with the intention of stealing his wife in Goro Kadono’s eerie tale of ghostly revenge, The Mother Tree (怪談乳房榎, Kaidan Chibusa Enoki). As might be expected, it doesn’t go particularly well for him. He is, though, perhaps a symbol of the latent fear of social interlopers and those displaced within the Edo-era class system. Namihei (Asao Matsumoto) claims that he was let go by his master for being too interested in painting, though is otherwise focused on short-term gains and causing destruction.

Shigenobu (Akira Nakamura) is said to be “the greatest artist in Edo”, and is certainly very much in demand. He is father to an infant son, Mayotaro, and husband to devoted wife Kise (Katsuko Wakasugi). He appears to be a good man, if a little scatterbrained and hugely overworked, which is one reason why he was grateful to take on a pupil. The irony is that both Kise and the family’s maid Hana (Keiko Hasegawa) remark on what a nice guy Namihei is and how glad they are to have him in the household. He’s even good with the baby who apparently likes to be held by him. All of which suggests that he might have actually had talent for painting and could probably have succeeded Shigenobu, in time, if hadn’t been such a terrible person. 

Unfortunately, however, Namihei reminds Shigenobu that he promised to paint a freeze for a temple some distance away and had sort of forgotten about it. An impulsive soul, Shigenobu decides he’d better leave right away if only to shake off this sense of unfulfilled obligation that’s been plaguing him. He entrusts the women of the household to Namihei in his absence and has no reason to fear any harm may come to them while he’s away. Namihei, however, attempts to rape Kise as soon as he leaves. Though she resists him, he threatens to kill her son and she is forced to give in to a prolonged period of sexual exploitation.

This is actually quite a dangerous move on Namihei’s part considering that the penalty for adultery under Tokugawa law is death, which might be why he finally ends up killing Hana after she witnesses Kise being abused and tries to help her. Namihei evidently doesn’t have a long-term plan for how all this is supposed to pan out and panics on hearing that Shigenobu will be returning much earlier than he expected. The irony may be that Shigenobu intended to paint eyes that might see into the next world and eventually becomes a vengeful ghost after being brutally murdered by Namihei, though was unable to see his treachery. Evidently never having read a ghost story himself, Namihei dumps the body in a pond, which is all but guaranteed to come back and haunt him. “Though you kill me, I will not die,” Shigenobu curses, vowing that he cannot pass on while his dragons lack eyes. 

What might be surprising is that neither of the vengeful ghosts blame Kise for her plight or seek revenge against her. The rage of a vengeful ghost can often be indiscriminate, but both Shigenobu and Hana seem to understand that Kise has been abused by Namihei and only submitted to him out of maternal devotion in the desire to have her son. Namihei’s transgression aims at straight at the concept of motherhood and with it the entire social order. Having displaced Shigenobu, Mayotaro now seems a nuisance to him. He believes he’s conquered Kise by fear and no longer needs this leverage to control her now her husband is dead.

It is mainly fear that causes people to behave in strange ways. Namihei orders their servant Shosuke (Hiroshi Hayashi) to kill Mayotaro, telling Kise that he is to be sent to a noble samurai family that will assist in his social advancement. Kise seems to go along with this, despite having sworn to raise Mayotaro to take revenge. Shosuke is unable to resist after Namihei threatens him with death, but places Mayotoyo by the Mother Tree which had once nourished him. Following her husband’s murder, Kise’s milk had dried up in shock as if echoing this attempt on her maternity which was then restored by the ancient natural authority of the tree. 

That it’s the Buddhist priest that becomes a figure of moral authority and goodness positions Buddhism as the counter to the amoral nihilism of men like Namihei. Having been struck by Namihei, Kise leaves her son in the priest’s care who will raise him not for revenge but peace and forgiveness. This might run counter to the Shinto-inflected role of the Mother Tree as a symbol of the power of nature, but ultimately suggests that true righteousness is found in Buddhism and its values. Namihei pays for his amoral venality after being tormented by spirits appearing as flaming orbs. Japanese ghosts rarely harm humans directly, but cause them to hurt themselves through fear and madness. That he ultimately kills Kise despite Shigenobu’s telling her to raise their son suggests that she is being punished too, though none of this was her fault and it is really she who puts end to Namihei’s reign of terror. With his death, order is, in a sense, restored as Shigenobu returns to put the eyes on his dragons who can indeed see a better world free of greed or cruelty. 

Pure Emotions of the Sea (海の純情, Seijun Suzuki, 1956)

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Directed under his birth name Seitaro, Seijun Suzuki’s second film Pure Emotions of the Sea (海の純情, Umi no Junjo) is essentially a vehicle for pop star Hachiro Kasuga who plays a character with the same and sings several of his popular hits including Otomi-san which eventually sold over a million copies. Perhaps precisely because of its nature as a 45-minute programme picture, Suzuki was able to get away with quite a lot of the nonsense that would become his signature style in an otherwise anarchic tale of a romantically troubled whaler and the improbable number of women who love him.

Hachiro is the harpoon operator on a whale boat, but it’s mainly women’s hearts that he seems to be piercing. While he seems to have feelings for captain’s daughter Kazue (Toshie Takada), he also attracts the attentions of Miyoko (Tomoko Ko), daughter of the head of the shipping company, local sex worker Yumi (Miki Odagiri), and “judo-geisha” Suzugiku (Kyoko Akemi). His various encounters encourage him to swear off women, but this is quite a small town and he can’t avoid them entirely. Eventually, Miyoko suggests that perhaps she, Yumi, and Suzugiku could divide Hachiro in three with Yumi taking his money, Suzugiku his heart, and Miyoko his throat for his singing voice. After some rather macabre discussions about how to get his heart out of his body, they settle on a time share arrangement instead with each of them having Hachiro for eight hours of the day, though Hachiro’s thoughts don’t seem to enter into it.

Conversely, ambitious rudder-operator Goro is interested in all these women too, though for largely cynical reasons. With the captain’s position weakened he’s angling to take over, though is unpopular with just about everyone except Yumi who feigns taking her own life to get his attention when he starts trying to woo Suzugiku, who doesn’t like him at all. He seems to be a kind of parody of the ambitious salaryman, even giving hair tonic to his balding boss in the hope of currying favour. The other sailors, however, seem to see Hachiro as a natural successor, though the captain isn’t so sure and particularly hates his habit of singing all the time. There’s a minor irony in the fact that Suzugiku often carries a portable radio to listen to Hachiro’s songs, making her a representative of modernity rather than the emblem of traditional culture one might expect a geisha to be. She even plays records of Hachiro rather than playing the shamisen much to Captain Eizo’s (Jushiro Kobayashi) consternation. According to him, geisha aren’t what they used to be. Not only are there “judo-geisha” but dancing geisha and mahjong geisha too.

Eizo’s grumpiness and harsh treatment of his men is one reason given for the boat’s declining fortunes, with Hachiro posited as a more cheerful presence who could boot their morale, though he’s more dopey than anything else and preoccupied with his romantic difficulties. Thus it’s not surprising that Eizo’s position is under threat or that he mildly resents Hachiro though picking up on his daughter’s obvious fondness for him. Nevertheless, he will eventually have to make way for the next generation, handing his captain’s jacket over to Hachiro in addition to accepting him as a potential son-in-law.

Suzuki, however, takes a rather roundabout route to get there embracing an absurdist sensibility and sense of cartoonish fun. He opens the film with an ethnographic voiceover reminiscent of a travel programme and then cuts to Miyoko away at university studying whales and introducing herself to the camera as a kind of guide to the weird fishing village, though she is not the protagonist of the film and only resurfaces halfway through as a love rival. He also adds in surrealist touches such as frequent cuts to classical statues during Suzugiku’s judo routine. When she shows off her techniques, she throws Goro straight through a wall leaving a man-shaped hole behind, while she later deflects his romantic attentions by punting him right to the top of a tall tower at the beach. Suzuki also uses small stretches of whale-themed animation to add to the childish sense of fun while simultaneously ignoring the bloodiness of Hachiro’s job as a whale hunter. Probably, he could only get away with all this precisely because it was a 45-minute kayo eiga pop song movie intended as a programme filler, but still there are hints at what would become his signature style in his distinctive composition and absurdist sense of humour.

Disobedience (親不孝通り, Yasuzo Masumura, 1958)

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After finding out his older sister has had an abortion after her lover tells her he has no interest in marriage, a college student vows revenge in Yasuzo Masumura’s Disobedience (親不孝通り, Oyafuko Dori). The film’s Japanese title translates as something like “lack of filial piety street” and refers to an area where youth congregates to misbehave, bringing shame on their families with their debauched behaviour. It’s into this world that the cynical hero attempts to drag the sheltered heroine as part of his revenge plot while she apparently decides to stick with him even after he raped her during a college camping trip.

It is though notable that neither of them have much parental input to begin with. Kaneko’s (Hitomi Nozoe) mother has died and we’re told that their father spends all his time with a mistress and never comes home leaving her in the care of older brother Shuichi (Eiji Funakoshi), a salaryman. It’s not exactly clear where Katsuya’s (Hiroshi Kawaguchi) mother is, only that she lives somewhere else and occasionally writes while he is technically in the care of his older sister Akie (Yoko Katsuragi) who works as a tailor in a boutique store selling western fashions. Akie had been carrying on an affair with Shuichi she assumed would lead to marriage and was initially happy about the pregnancy only to be blindsided by Shuichi’s reaction. When he tells her that he has no intention to marry, she realises that the relationship is at a dead end and that an abortion is her only real option given the situation.

The irony is that Katsuya resents Shuichi for failing to take responsibility as a man and vows to take revenge by doing the same thing to his sister and seeing how he likes that. Though Akie points out that it’s nothing to do with Kaneko and tries to stop him, Katsuya is hellbent on playing the cad to make a point. Of course, he may also resent Shuichi, an executive salaryman, precisely because of the position he is in. There has been an economic downturn and he’s having trouble securing a job for after his university graduation. Some companies have halted recruitment entirely and another of Katsuya’s friends has already been through 11 unsuccessful interviews. Other young men have taken to politics, protesting new authoritarian legislation and investing in socialism. Katsuya and friends find this to be disingenuous, assuming it’s just another shrewd move to get on the ladder by finding employment in government or unions. The salaryman dream is a fairly new post-war invention, but it seems to be dying already and Katsuya can’t even really see what his education was for. He tells Kaneko that he only studies well enough to pass so that he can get a good job and the point of life is to figure out how to make money. If he can’t do that, then his life is meaningless and futile. That might be why he spends his time scamming entitled Americans (the only people with money), beating them at bowling, and hanging out in jazz bars. Though the Occupation is long over, the film has a strong but subtle sense of anti-Americanism as symbolised by the aeroplane flying above as Katsuya rapes Kaneko out in the mountains. 

But for Kaneko the situation is not much different. The young women complain it’s even harder for them to secure employment. Katsuya dismisses Kaneko’s university education by calling it a bridal academy, though most of the women lament that marriage is the ultimate job and perhaps the point of university for them is meeting a husband, just as it’s securing employment for Katsuya. Later, when he confronts Shuichi, Katsuya describes Kaneko as damaged goods now that she’s no longer a virgin and is currently carrying a child for which he accepts no responsibility. That may be one reason that she decides to stick with her rapist, realising that her situation is now impossible given it may be difficult for her to marry someone else while supporting herself financially as a single woman is not yet a viable option. By pursuing a relationship with Katsuya, she reasserts control over the situation along with the narrative of what happened between them on the mountains. 

On learning the truth, however, she makes a different decision from Akie in declaring that she will drop out of university and move to Osaka to live with an aunt and raise the baby alone there, declaring that she has decided to go on loving Katsuya no matter what he might think about it. Kaneko’s decision prompts a reversal of Akie’s thinking too. Though she had decided to be independent, starting her own business rather than planning for marriage, she returns to Shuichi and suggests they should get back together. To her the idea of running her own business and being married seem incompatible. Chastened by this whole affair, Shuichi’s thinking seems to have reversed too, to the extent that he decides to marry Akie after all, while Katsuya also decides to accept responsibility and go to Osaka with Kaneko where they will marry and stay together forever. It’s a strange “happy” ending, though it’s difficult to see how these marriages could ever really be happy given the circumstances that led to them and the discordant music that strikes over an ironic Merry Christmas sign as the film comes to an end suggests they probably won’t be. Nevertheless, the ending reverses a lack of filial piety in the shift toward conservatism through heteronormative marriages and the formation of new families as Katsuya, at least, takes responsibility for his paternity and exits the nihilistic world of clubs, bars, and bowling alleys in which his friends remain trapped.

Murder on the Last Train (終電車の死美人, Tsuneo Kobayashi, 1955)

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Rather than the hard-boiled tale the title may suggest, Murder on the Last Train (終電車の死美人, Shudensha no Shi Bijin) seems to be one of a number of films made in the early post-war era designed to improve the reputation of the police force. Just as in Bullet Hole Underground, we’re shown several scenes showcasing police technology and depicting detectives as men of science rather than an authoritarian force extracting confessions and pressuring suspects. The film went on to inspire a long-running series of police procedurals, and is shot in the style of a documentary lending an air of realism to its tale of murder, desperation, and spiralling debt.

Yet all the police know in the beginning is that a young woman has been found dead on the last train out of the city at its final stop of Mitaka. Times being what they are, they don’t even know who she is, and have only slim leads to go on such as the possible sighting of a middle-aged man running away across the tracks, though it was dark and raining so no one can be quite sure. Nevertheless, we quickly see the law enforcement machine spring into action. The call centre is alerted and arranges for detectives from the top murder squad to attend the scene. The narrator tells us that they are ready to respond at any time of day or night, and that, like a pack of wolves after their prey, they will not rest until they’ve apprehended the guilty party. The way this and the closing statement are phrased makes it sound a little like the squad is sort of eager for a murder to occur to have something to do, which probably isn’t the intention but does make them seem a little blood thirsty. Especially as one of the policemen we’re introduced to is said to care about nothing other than murder. 

Nevertheless, the narrator introduces us to all of the squad members who each have their quirks from the henpecked husband to the former monk. There’s a running gag that they can’t get anything done at their office because of constant noise outside from advertisements, festivals, and children singing. Despite all of their technological advances, all they can really do to begin with is wander round Mitaka with photos of the victim along with one of a man found inside a locket she was carrying, asking local people if they know them. They can only assume the woman must have lived in Mitaka because she was presumably killed between the previous stop and the train’s final destination, but there are other reasons she may not have alighted earlier. 

The trail eventually leads them to a land broker, Hayakawa (Eijiro Tono), who has a solid alibi but is acting in an incredibly suspicious way. He also turns out to be in mountains of debt, and may have been acting recklessly trying to right himself financially, while a young man he’s acquainted with, Saburo, may have equally been hooked on the idea of living the high life on stolen money. Another man has been embezzling from his company with no real explanation given as to why save possibly trying to get himself into a financial position appropriate for marriage. The implication that this economy is still a crime factory filled with desperate people who do anything they can either to escape their straitened circumstances or protect what they have.

That might be one reason the police, who all seem very nice and, in general, treat suspects and witnesses kindly and with respect, are keen to get away from the idea the murder may have been a random crime perpetrated by someone trying to ease their frustration or strike back against society. People can feel reassured that this young woman’s death can be explained because it means they are in less danger from a threatening world. The policemen are also there to provide that reassurance, suggesting that any crime that occurs will be swept away neatly, without really dwelling on the other implications of a super-powered police force. The narrator explains that most crimes are committed simply, and for simple reasons, which is comforting, in a way, but also not. In any case, the central message is that modern law enforcement is scientific and compassionate, and the police force a well-oiled machine designed to protect all citizens from the threat of crime wherever and whenever it may arise.

Sisters (姉妹, Miyoji Ieki, 1955)

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Two sisters find their paths diverging amid the changing society of post-war Japan in Miyoji Ieki’s adaptation of the autobiographical novel by Fumi Kuroyanagi, Sisters (姉妹, Kyodai). Updated to the present day and co-scripted by Kaneto Shindo, the film paints the sisters as representing a generational divide with the older, much more conservative of the girls is drawn to a traditional lifestyle while equally corrupted by the city in her conversion to Christianity, while the younger is a truth-telling free spirit deciding that she doesn’t want that kind of life and will find a husband for herself if indeed she ever decides to marry.

The Kondo family is evidently quite progressive in that they are not wealthy but have chosen to send both of their older daughters to study at middle and high school in the town where they lodge with their mother’s sister (Yuko Mochizuki). They also have three younger brothers who have stayed with their parents in the village, while their father (Akitake Kono) works at a hydroelectric dam. The fact that he works at a power plant aligns him with the post-war recovery which is largely built on the back of these new engineering endeavours, but there is little discussion of the ways in which they’ve changed and disrupted rural life. 

As New Year approaches, everyone is looking forward to them meeting their end of the year challenge so they’ll get a 1000 yen bonus only for a sudden outage to occur on the deadline day. The older sister, Keiko (Hitomi Nozoe), becomes fond of a worker named Oka (Taketoshi Naito) who is part of the labour movement and often sings Russian songs but is an economic migrant from another town living frugally while sending most of his pay back to his mother and siblings. He is already supporting a family, and therefore has no prospect of marriage for the foreseeable future. Even if he and Keiko have taken a liking to each other, they each accept the practical reality and agree that it is better that Keiko accept an arranged match her parents have set up for her with a young man who works in a bank. The groom’s occupation echoes the increasing urbanisation of the nation, as the parents clearly believe the marriage will buy Keiko a much more comfortable life in a higher social class even if Keiko seems to want to stay in the village.

While they lived in the town, Keiko converted to Christianity out of loneliness because she could talk to God any time she wanted. Toshiko (Hitomi Nakahara), the younger sister, points out it might have been a better idea to make friends who were a bit more local, but despite appearances Keiko seems better suited to a more old-fashioned way of life. Christianity reinforces her conservatism in that she hopes to always be pure and correct and takes against those she does not think to be. On their visit home, the girls witness a young woman they know be beaten by her husband who is much older than her. Keiko takes against the woman and rudely leaves her home. Later the woman is beaten again because her husband discovers a young man in their home. No additional explanations are sought, the woman is assumed to have been involved with another man more her own age, but surprisingly some of the villagers speak in her defence telling her husband he’s being unreasonable and raising the double standard that men do this sort of thing all the time. The woman tells Keiko to be careful whom she chooses for a husband. She came to this village never having met the man she would marry, and now she’s stuck here with a child. Her only ray of light is that she will raise her son to be a better man than his father. 

Keiko’s future happiness depends entirely on the nature of a man she doesn’t know. In the town, the girls had been somewhat disillusioned when their long-absent uncle Ginzaburo (Jun Tatara) returns home from working away and they catch him drunk in the street cavorting with geisha. This is really a double betrayal, not only stepping out their aunt, but selfishly spending what little money they have on trivial pleasures for himself. But like an inverted picture of village life, their aunt seems not to mind and accept it as just something men do. The same uncle is also picked up for illegal gambling, which is more of problem in a practical sense aside from additional evidence of this moral failings. 

All of these experiences have certainly soured Toshiko’s view of marriage, and most particularly of arranged ones which are something that belongs to the older Japan that Keiko still inhabits. A worker at the plant asks Keiko if she’ll be going to university, but she replies that girls in her family don’t and that she’d rather be married. Toshiko, meanwhile, on witnessing the suffering of those around her and most particularly the poor decides she’d rather be a doctor or politician to try and change society. She supports the strikers at the plant who are protesting against job cuts, but also says they should have resisted more when the protests fail as if they were somehow at fault in their lack of commitment. Her father’s reaction to failing to stop the lay-offs is to stop Toshiko going on her school trip because the other workers’ children can’t even go to school now their fathers have been let go, which doesn’t really make sense and is not really fair, though he is also worried about his job amid this very changeable society. 

For Toshiko’s part, she remains staunchly of the village but is ironically more suited to life in the town, which is to say the future. People are always telling her that she speaks her mind too often and that people in the town aren’t as forgiving as those in the village, but she continues to speak as she finds and indifferent to censure. Keiko criticises her for behaving like a boy, wearing rustic work clothes and chopping wood while they’re home for New Year and not helping out with the domestic work like cooking and cleaning which she thinks of as a daughter’s duty. Toshiko develops a friendship with a wealthy girl from school who apparently likes her more than a friend and asks her to be her first kiss, lending a queer-coded dimension to Toshiko’s rejection of traditional gender roles and desire for a more independent life in the town. 

She recognises both that greater class disparities exist in the urban environment than they did in the village, but also feels sorry for her friend who shares the same name but is trapped by her privilege. When Toshiko visits their home, it’s clear the girl’s mother looks down on her because she’s not of their social class, while Toshiko’s friend has an older sister and younger brother with apparent disabilities that the family keeps hidden away in shame. Meanwhile, the sisters become aquatinted with an elderly couple who are both disabled themselves while their daughter is ill with TB. Without thinking, Toshiko uses a slur word to describe a disabled person when talking about her friend’s family without thinking about the fact that the father is also blind. They don’t mind at all, but if even Toshiko is thoughtless enough to use a word like that it only reinforces the prejudice of the world around her.

The implication is that if the old couple lived in the village, there would be people around to help them, but in the town everyone is anonymous and indifferent. The state should be filling in for the community, but it isn’t and there’s no one to help the vulnerable in the increasingly capitalistic post-war society. The irony is that Uncle Ginzaburo says everything was better in the war and that Japan can’t survive without conflict, while the fact the economy is improving in the mid-1950s is entirely due to the stimulus of the Korean War. Even so, Toshiko remains generous of spirit. She doesn’t agree with her sister’s decision and is worried for her, but also agrees that they can only be true to themselves and follow their own paths. This is what Keiko has chosen, no matter how it might turn out, while Toshiko has rejected it, insisting she’ll find her own husband if she wants one and vowing to be useful and fight injustice in the wider world whatever form that may take. She wishes her sister good luck as she watches her disappear over the horizon, and sets off on her own path into a future that’s equally of her own choosing.

Passport to Darkness (暗黒の旅券, Seijun Suzuki, 1959)

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Another of Seijun Suzuki’s early Nikkatsu noirs, Passport to Darkness (暗黒の旅券, Ankoku no Ryoken) starts out like The Lady Vanishes and then turns into the 39 Steps while drawing influence from hardboiled Hollywood movies such as The Big Sleep. It is, however, very much about the confusing landscape of late 1950s Japan in which nothing is quite as it seems and shady forces are constantly operating in the background out of view. “Darkness can descend on our lives just like that, can’t it?” the hero remarks, “there’s only so much an individual can do,” he sighs, “who’s going to protect us?”

Probably not the policeman, who replies that that’s just how Japan is now. Though, in general, the police are doing something even if there are hints they’re also mixed up in this swirling darkness. They don’t really hang on to jazz trumpeter Ibuki (Ryoji Hayama) as a suspect for very long, though they do keep him under a watchful eye just in case. Ibuki marries the singer from his nightclub band and is about to depart on his honeymoon, an all expenses paid gift from his bosses, when he gets off the train to look for a friend who’s running late, Moriwaki. When he gets back on the train, his new wife, Hiromi, is nowhere to be found.

Rather than thinking she may ironically have got off the train to look for him and not made it back on, Ibuki jumps to the conclusion that she’s got cold feet and jilted him before their honeymoon. Though he gets off at the next station, he’s too embarrassed to call any of his friends fearing they’ll make fun of him for being a guy whose wife left right after the wedding. It’s this sense of insecurity that makes him a little less sympathetic, thinking mostly about himself rather than seriously considering something may have happened to Hiromi or that she’s just on the next train. That’s probably why he doesn’t do anything sensible, like going back to their apartment to see if she’s there, and only makes cryptic phone calls before asking a friend to meet him in a bar and explaining the situation. He spends the evening on an endless pub crawl supposedly looking for her while drowning his sorrows. When does eventually get home, he discovers Hiromi dead in their flat having been strangled with a tie. Obviously, this makes him the prime suspect, though the police are unusually open to the idea someone else was involved.

Ibuki turns private detective trying to work out what happened to Hiromi and who might have wanted to hurt her. The police tell him there was heroin in her handbag and they therefore suspect the crime has something to do with drugs, but that doesn’t add up with the Hiromi that Ibuki knew. Either they’re wrong, or Hiromi was somehow hiding a massive drug problem from him and maybe he didn’t know her at all. This sense of uncertainty is echoed in Suzuki’s dreamlike aesethetic which already leans towards the surreal. When the club MC announces Ibuki’s marriage onstage, he dissolves to be replaced by Moriwaki who hands the pair their honeymoon tickets suggesting that sudden appearances, disappearances, and missing time are common in this world. Later Ibuki listens to a secret conversation through a wall of jagged glass echoing the confusing nature of the story he’s beginning to trace.

That story itself largely revolves around drugs and displacement. Hiromi had been looking for her missing brother with the police suggesting he’d probably become a yakuza and might not be worth looking for. Others are motivated solely by a determination to liberate their loved ones from a drug addiction that has been forced on them as a means of control by an organisation that’s dealing drugs from bar called Tsubo on which Ibuki stumbled during his drunken pub crawl. One of the ringleaders, Ishimaru, is said to be from a zaibatsu family, which the heir to a large conglomerate and a member of the economic elite. He mentions a past in the navy and his conversation steers toward the nationalist, lending a nasty flavour to his already shady activities.

Eventually the trail leads back to a Frenchman named Franc and a “gay boy”, to use the parlance of the time, named Kenny who is also trapped due to being a drug user. It’s not particularly unusual to see places like these, essentially host bars where men pay to drink with effeminate male hosts, in films of the time, but Passport to Darkness is particularly sympathetic towards the community. It’s clear that the evil is drugs and that Kenny is an innocent who’s been swept into intrigue. Gay bars and gay people are just normal parts of life, not evidence of a seedy underbelly or the moral turpitude of the post-war society. What is rather surprising is that the film features a kiss between two men, which is pretty progressive for 1959.

Nevertheless, as Ibuki says, there’s not much the individual can do defend against the forces of darkness and even some of his closest friends turned out to be no good, while those he doubted were actually on his side. He keeps getting mysterious letters warning him off all signed “K” which is inconvenient, because most of the people he knows have a claim to the initial, and really it could be anyone. There doesn’t seem to be a clear answer to the question of who is going to take responsibility, but Ibuki simply goes back to his life, deciding music is the best way to honour Hiromi’s memory by playing American jazz in a bar that’s mainly frequented by an international clientele hinting at the nation’s new global ambitions.

Undercurrent (夜の河, Kozaburo Yoshimura, 1956)

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Is it possible to be both married and personally and artistically fulfilled? Marriage hangs over Kiwa (Fujiko Yamamoto) like a looming cage in Kozaburo Yoshimura’s sensuous melodrama Undercurrent (夜の河, Yoru no Kawa, AKA Night River). Scripted not by his regular writer Kaneto Shindo but frequent Mikio Naruse collaborator Sumie Tanaka adapting a novel by Hisao Sawano, the film finds its heroine caught between tradition and modernity while struggling to maintain her position as an independent woman and rightful heir to her father’s kimono dyeing business.

Everyone also keeps telling her that kimono itself is dying out, a relic of a bygone past now that everyone wears Western dress. Even Kiwa’s younger sister Miyoko (Michiko Ono) dresses exclusively in Western fashions and moves to Tokyo on her marriage. An ancient capital, Kyoto is the centre of historical elegance and the last bastion of these “outdated ideals”, yet several shops in their area have closed recently and people do things differently now. A wealthy woman comes to the shop with some fabric directly, cutting out the middlemen and haggling for a discount while cheerfully asking for her cab fare to be covered when Kiwa refuses the job. The young man they’ve taken in as an apprentice, Toshio, leaves to work in an electric factory complaining that “master” and “apprentice” are outdated concepts and that it’s against the Labour Law to force him to work overtime. Kiwa’s father Yujiro (Eijiro Tono), meanwhile, thinks this is just an expression of Toshio’s lack of commitment and that it’s only right that an apprentice should be applying himself to learning his craft every waking moment of the day. 

He was after all once an apprentice himself, but is both proud that his daughter has surpassed him in skill and guilty, fearful that Kiwa has sacrificed her own life and happiness to devote herself to kimono dyeing which is why she has never married. On one level, he’s happy if she’s happy and willing to leave marriage up to her, but also wary of the social censure of the neighbours including his kimono dyeing mentor who gives him a telling-off for his failure as a father to find a match for his daughter. When rumours arise that Kiwa has entered an affair with a married professor, the lady who helped Yujiro get started in business more or less tells him he should get her married to keep her in line. If hadn’t been for the war, she says, Kiwa would have been safely married off long ago and would probably have a gaggle of children to look after which would obviously prevent her from pursuing her art as a kimono dyer though the lady herself has obviously gone on working. 

Kiwa is drawn Takemura (Ken Uehara ) firstly because he’s wearing a tie that features one of her signature dyes which implies some kind of affinity between them. That the fact that he was touring a Nara temple alone with his daughter may have suggested he was a widower, though in truth Kiwa always knew he was married and that may have been a key part of what attracted her to him. She is after all, as Yujiro’s mentor said, a woman and experiences romantic desire even if the mentor is wrong to say that Kiwa sublimates her loneliness through art when in reality the reverse is true. After meeting Takemura even Yujiro remarks that she seems more like a woman, implying that her industry and forthrightness lend her a masculine quality as does her determination to get on in business. She first strikes up a business relationship with the sleazy Omiya (Eitaro Ozawa) whose wife is always watching him like a hawk though she manages to rebuff his attentions while establishing herself as business woman and in demand kimono designer. In pursuit of Takemura she is the one bringing him gifts and inviting him out for walks while Takemura remains somewhat conflicted and pulled along her wake.

Yet for all that, none of her family members really question the fact that she’s been carrying on with a married man and rather seem slightly relieved that she’s discovered an interest in romance or perhaps just anything outside of kimono dyeing. Even Takemura’s daughter suspects they’re romantically involved and doesn’t seem to mind. Yujiro remarks on Kiwa suddenly using the colour red which she never previously liked and it does seem to echo her reawakening passion. Takemura is also researching red fruit flies, which is less romantic, but also hints his barely suppressed longing. The film seems to align him with yellow flowers and Kiwa with pink. When they’re caught in a rainstorm and refuge in an inn owned by Kiwa’s childhood friend, the entire room in bathed in the glow of the Daimonji fire festival as their passions finally, and perhaps unwisely, overtake them as Takemura announces he’s thinking of moving far away perhaps to avoid this forbidden romance or otherwise for the health of his ailing wife who has been a Kyoto hospital for the last two years.

It’s finding out about Mrs Takemura’s likely terminal illness that seems to implode Kiwa’s romantic fantasy. After they’d made love for the first time, she had told Takemura that if she became pregnant she’d raise the child alone without intruding on his family life, which is to say she wasn’t really envisaging one with him. Her horror is on one level framed as guilt, that she now sees she’s committed an act of betrayal and resents Takemura when he tells her “it won’t be much longer” as if he were counting down the days until his wife passed away. Or worse, that he or others suspected that Kiwa willed her dead. But in reality the reverse is true. Mrs Takemura’s death is an existential threat to Kiwa’s independence. She doesn’t want to get married, even if loves Takemura, because if she did she wouldn’t be able to maintain her independence or career as a kimono dyer. She really does mean it when she says that likes it best when it’s just she and her father in their “cramped” old-fashioned dyeing shop without even an apprentice. 

A tortured art student who seems to pine for her tells her as much, disappointed in her for her relationship with Takemura not out of moral censure but because he fears she’s betraying her art. Okamoto is much younger than her and she’s not interested in him romantically even if he’s painting slightly lewd interpretations of his mental image of her. At one point he appears with a bandage around his neck that implies he may have tried to take his own life and eventually announces he’s leaving Kyoto because he can’t secure his identity there. Ironically he’s happy that Kiwa and Takemura are now free to love each other when the opposite is now true. Now that he’s no longer a married man, Kiwa can no longer love him and is denied the possibility of having both romantic and artistic fulfilment. She is perhaps free in another way, backed by a deep red cloth hanging up to dry as she watches the May Day parade pass by with all of its waving red flags having embarked on a life that is defiantly of her choosing and fulfilled by the passion of art.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Okuni and Gohei (お國と五平, Mikio Naruse, 1952)

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“It’s a rough and difficult road.” The heroes of Mikio Naruse’s Okuni and Gohei (お國と五平, Okuni to Gohei), adapted from a kabuki play by Junichiro Tanizaki, are two displaced between the old world and the possibility of a new one if only they were brave enough to step away from the beaten path. Unbeknownst to them, they are being followed by the man they are seeking whose shakuhachi playing haunts them wherever they go as if taunting them with its presence. 

In this iteration of the tale, Tomonojo (So Yamamura) takes on a slippery quality almost if he were some supernatural devil sent to torment Okuni (Michiyo Kogure) and Gohei (Tomoemon Otani) leading them either towards or away from their salvation or damnation. In Okuni’s flashback, which is obviously coloured with her own nostalgia and regret, he’s a sensitive young man who promised himself in marriage to Okuni. But she is forced to refuse him. Her father rejects Tomonojo because he is without standing or prospects, and instead demands she marry a wellborn man of his choosing, Iori (Jun Tazaki). Iori is then killed in the street, uttering only Tomonojo’s name before he dies. It could then be that this is Tomonojo’s revenge on a society that has rejected him and robbed him of his love, yet the Tomonojo we later meet is much different than this idealised version in Okuni’s memory. He never denies killing Iori and offers no justification for it, but corners Okuni when she’s alone to tell her to free herself by dropping her quest for revenge. He’s also subtly blackmailing her, implying he heard her having sex with her manservant Gohei the previous night and in reality wheedling away pleading for his life.

For her part, Okuni seems torn in her motivations, uncertain whether she’s looking for Tomonojo to reunite with him or kill him, or perhaps is deliberately avoiding finding him at all. She was not married to Iori for very long and he was at the very least an insensitive and emotionally distant husband who spent most of his time at his friend’s house, claiming that it was “boring” to stay home with her. She has no great emotional desire for revenge, but has been told she must accomplish it in order to return to the samurai world, having been condemned to a kind of limbo as the widow of a murdered man. Even so, she has tired of her quest and asks herself what’s to become of them if Tomonojo is already dead. She repeatedly hints to Gohei that they should give up on finding him and on returning home, instead contenting themselves with their life on the road or else find somewhere to settle together in a new world in which a lady and her retainer could live as man and wife.

The film is both coy and somewhat transgressive in its depiction of the growing sexual tension between Okuni and Gohei from his taking hold of her injured foot and tender care for her when she falls ill, to the way they draw closer and then instinctively move apart. Passion later gets the better of them and it’s heavily implied that they sleep together, but Gohei instantly regrets it and cannot accept his class transgression. Given this development in their relationship, Okuni asks him to stop calling her “madam” but as she does so she is on one side of the fusuma and he on the other, so they remain in separate rooms divided by the ridge in the tatami. Gohei cannot let go of the old ways and is desperate to complete their quest so that his debt to Iori will be repaid and he can return in glory to be rewarded with position and the esteem of being a true samurai. Even if he tells Okuni that this quest has been his happiness in being on the road with her and knows that killing Tomonojo will end it, he does not turn back.

But the implication is that they can never escape Tomonojo who will, in fact, forever be following them. He taunts the pair with his shakuhachi and visits them in disguise. When they catch up to him, he tries again to convince them to give up their quest and live quietly together in a place free from the constraints of the samurai world, but Gohei cannot do it. Okuni first picks up her dagger and one wonders whether she about to use it on herself, but then turns on Tomonojo though it’s uncertain whether she now does so out of resentment or as revenge of herself for the way Tomonojo has again ruined her life. Just as she was a pawn of her father married off against her will to an indifferent man, she is further imprisoned by patriarchal social codes as Tomonojo needles Gohei that he had slept with her before her marriage. She has in fact already confessed to this to Gohei who transgressed by asking her what exactly Tomonojo was doing with his “shakuhachi” when they were courting, though she did so obliquely in telling him to remember his place and that he should “forget about the past.” Nevertheless she denies it now, but Gohei continues to see her as a “loose” woman with Tomonojo’s words ringing in his ears as a final revenge on the morally compromised lovers.

Their inability to let go of the quest, to do as Okuni suggests and continue on as they are along the rough and difficult path to a more egalitarian future spells their damnation. You can’t go back again. Their “home” is already lost to them. As a pedlar tells the pair along the way, they’ve already been forgotten and the village is filled with other gossip, but now they really have nowhere to go. The message may be for the coming post-occupation era that they shouldn’t try to turn back but keep moving forward into the new Japan or else risk becoming lost in a purgatorial world of confusion like Okuni and Gohei haunted by the choice to betray love for the outdated ideal of samurai honour. Haunted alternately by Tomonojo’s shakuhachi and the words of the villagers who told them they couldn’t be accepted until they fulfilled this quest, they find themselves displaced, unbalanced and uncertain amid the shifting power dynamics of class and gender, their duty and their feelings, but ultimately trapped by their cowardice in their unwillingness to cross the threshold to claim their freedom and happiness.

Floating Weeds (浮草, Yasujiro Ozu, 1959)

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An oft-repeated criticism of the work of Yasujiro Ozu is that it is all the same. The similarity of the English-language titles with their ubiquitous seasonality doesn’t help, but you have to admit there is some truth in it. On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that Ozu was not so interested in uniformity or repetition as he was in dialogue with himself. Thus Late Spring becomes Late Autumn and the abandoned father a conflicted mother, the two boys of I Was Born But… who rejected their father’s descent into corporate lackydom become arch consumerists seceding from society until their parents give them a TV set in Good Morning. Ozu refrained from remarking on the repurposing of old plots for new dramas, but did expressly regard his 1959 Floating Weeds as a “remake” of the 1934 A Story of Floating Weeds updated to the present day and filmed in the, by then, classic Ozu style. 

As in the 1934 version, the action centres on the arrival of a theatrical troupe to a small town which they have not visited in some years, in this case 12. This time around, the troupe is a little more exulted, performing kabuki-style narrative theatre rather than rustic entertainment, but is subject to many of the same problems. Kihachi is now Komajuro (Ganjiro Nakamura), a much older man though cheerful and energetic. He has chosen this town because it is home to an old flame, Oyoshi (Haruko Sugimura), who is the mother of his adolescent son, Kiyoshi (Hiroshi Kawaguchi). Kiyoshi thinks that Komajuro is his mother’s brother and that his father is long dead. He recognises Komajuro right away and is pleased to see him, though they evidently have not met in many years. 

The 1934 version had revolved around Kihachi’s corrupted paternity in his shame regarding the stigma of being a travelling player. By 1959 that is simply no longer so much of an issue, but whereas the financial difficulties Kihachi’s troupe faced were partly a symptom of the depression and partly of their misfortunes, those of Komajuro take on a more melancholy quality because it is obvious that this is a way of life which is coming to an end. When Kihachi says he’s going to start over, it seems futile but he is still young enough to have a credible chance. Komajuro is already “old” and it’s clear that he will struggle to support himself as a travelling actor simply because it is no longer a viable occupation. 

Thus Komajuro’s story is less one of frustrated fatherhood than of melancholy resignation to the vagaries of a lifetime. “Life is an unknown course”, he tells Oyoshi, “the only constant is change”. Like Kihachi he doesn’t want his son to see the show, though perhaps more out of embarrassment. Kiyoshi complains that the character in his play is “unrealistic” because he doesn’t relate to the modern world. Komajuro objects but explains that he is “a character from another era”, making it plain that he is talking as much about himself. Komajuro is a man left behind by time and incapable of understanding the world in which he now lives which may be one reason he seems to hang on to an intense desire to save Kiyoshi from being affected by the stigma of being the son of a travelling actor even though that is no longer something he would need saving from. 

This slight disconnect, along with Gajiro Nakamura’s cheekily comical performance, adds to the genial comedy which characterised the majority of Ozu’s colour films though this one is admittedly slightly less colourful owing to being produced by Daiei as one of a handful of films made outside Ozu’s home studio of Shochiku. Komajuro becomes a tragicomic rather than purely tragic figure, a man suddenly realising he has become old and facing the decline of his patriarchal authority. Like Kihachi he turns violence on both his mistress, Sumiko (Machiko Kyo), and the young actress Kayo (Ayako Wakao) who has fallen for his son, but it’s futile and born of desperation. A more sympathetic figure than 1934’s Otaka, Sumiko seems to genuinely like Komajuro and is hurt as well as jealous and threatened by the existence of his “secret” family. Her petty revenge is taken in response to Komajuro’s bitter claim that his son “belongs to a higher race” moments after bringing up her past as a sex worker. Rather than a simple desire for chaos and upset, she intends to pull Kiyoshi down to her level through getting him to sleep with Kayo, but Kayo falls for him for real only to worry she is perhaps ruining his bright future. 

“One can’t suddenly show up out of nowhere and assert one’s parental authority,” Komajuro eventually realises. His hopes are dashed by Kiyoshi’s relationship with Kayo not because of her proximity to the world of the travelling actor, but because he fears it means that Kiyoshi is just like him, an irresponsible womaniser. He wanted to save Kiyoshi as a means of saving himself, pushing his son into a more respectable world he had been unable to enter. Kiyoshi, however, rejects his sacrifice, describing his parents as “selfish” for keeping the secret all this time only to drop a bombshell now. He complains he’s been fine these 20 years and does not want or need a father beyond the one he already thought to be dead. Rather than the nobility Komajuro’s of paternal sacrifice, the focus is pulled back towards the son and his filial responsibility to live up to it by becoming a fine and upstanding young man while Komajuro is once again exiled back to the moribund world of the travelling actor. 

Of course, the world of 1959 was very different to that of 1934. The economy was at last improving and consumerist pleasures were very much on the horizon, meaning that for many life was comfortable at last. Japan was at peace if not completely free of political strife which removes the constant anxiety felt by those trying to survive the mid-1930s. But Ozu himself was also 25 years older and had perhaps reached that sense of resignation with the world that allowed him to sigh and laugh where before he may have trembled with fear or rage. Komajuro is as he always was, a floating weed, a man without a home, but now perhaps one of many rootless wanderers off the post-war landscape.