Tag: Akira Oizumi

The Killing Machine (少林寺拳法, Norifumi Suzuki, 1975)

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“As long as somebody like you is around, there’s hope for Japan,” an oddly sympathetic prison warden says to the last patriot standing in post-war Osaka. The title of Norifumi Suzuki’s Sonny Chiba vehicle The Killing Machine (少林寺拳法, Shorinji Kempo) maybe somewhat inappropriate or at least potentially misleading as the film is deliberately constructed as a martial arts parable emphasising the spiritual philosophy of self-improvement and compassion that is inextricable from its practice.

To that extent, the hero, Soh Doushin (Shinichi Chiba), is trying to fight his way out of the miasmas of the immediate post-war era. As may be apparent, Soh has taken a Chinese name, though Soh was apparently his along and belonged to a former samurai family whose nobility has been crushed by militarism. As the film opens, however, he’s a Japanese secret service operative in Manchuria blindsided by the news of Japan’s surrender. Soh is it seems a nationalist and a patriot, but a fairly revisionist one who stands up to the abuses of the Japanese army. He later says that he protested the way that the local Chinese population were often treated and he does indeed raise a fist toward an officer who wants to sell a young Japanese woman to a Chinese soldier in return for a guarantee of their safe passage to a boat heading out of the country. The young woman’s mother protests that she is an innocent virgin, a fact that has some later relevance. Soh refuses to let the officers take her, though evidently separated from her later.

When he meets the young woman again in the bomb-damaged backstreets of Occupation Osaka, she is dressed in Western clothing as opposed to the smart kimono she wore in Manchuria and is about to become a “pan pan” or streetwalking sex worker catering to American servicemen. Of course, Soh can’t let this happen either, but as she later tells him, she was raped by Russian soldiers during the retreat and now feels herself to be despoiled. She never wears kimono again and becomes a kind of symbol for a despoiled nation that Soh is reluctantly forced to accept he cannot save in part because his philosophy, which is still uncomfortably rooted in the philosophy of militarism, only valued strength when it should have valued love. The kind of love that Kiku (Yutaka Nakajima) had for her brother that made her willing to sacrifice herself for his wellbeing. 

Even so, Soh is doing his best to issue a course correction by caring for a small group of war orphans and helping them support themselves by running a rice soup stall so they won’t end up becoming dependent on the yakuza or the black market. It’s the yakuza and their increasingly corporatising nature that become Soh’s chief enemies, though standing right behind them are the Occupation Forces. They are, of course, just the biggest gang, as we can see when one of the kids steals a few tins from the gangster’s crate which is marked with text making it clear it came from the mess hall at the American base. The backstreets are full of sleazy soldiers and pan pans or otherwise the starving and dejected, sometimes violent demobbed soldiers filled with despair. It’s these men that Soh wants to buck up, telling them to rediscover their fighting spirit and giving them the opportunity to do so through learning Shaolin martial arts.

Of course there are those who don’t want to learn Chinese kung fu in the midst of their defeat, but what Soh is advocating is something that has a greater spiritual application even than karate can also have. It’s a kind of humanitarian riposte to the futility of the post-war society that might sometimes fail to recognise the depths of the impossibility faced by many in insisting they can be faced by discipline and moral fortitude but at the same time is not really judgemental except toward those who have deliberately abandoned their humanity, such as the trio of goons who rape a school for amusement (the girl is later seen among the students at Soh’s school along with the children from Osaka). The girl’s father reports it to the police, but the police and the gangsters are in cahoots, so nothing gets done. Soh cuts the guy’s bits off so he won’t be doing that again. Strength without justice is violence, he realises. But justice without strength is inability. Strength and love like body and mind should never be separated. The closing shots show an entire mountain covered in white-clad figures practising Shaolin kung fu and joining the humanitarian revolution rather than the cruel and selfish one represented by the gangsters with their red-light districts and black markets. It may be a simplistic solution, but it is in its way satisfying and at least a rejection both of the militarist past and the capitalistic future.

*Norifumi Suzuki’s name is actually “Noribumi” but he has become known as “Norifumi” to English-speaking audiences.

Let’s Have A Dream (九ちゃんのでっかい夢, Yoji Yamada, 1967)

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Convinced he’s dying of a terminal illness, a young nightclub singer yearns for death in Yoji Yamada’s romantic farce, Let’s Have a Dream (九ちゃんのでっかい夢, Kyu-chan no Dekkai Yume). In fact, the Japanese title is “Kyu’s Big Dream,” directly putting the name of the star into the name of the picture though he does in fact play a character called “Kyutaro” whose music career is starting to take off just as he convinces himself that his life is hopeless. Best known for “Ue o Muite Aruko”, Kyu Sakamoto was a huge singing star throughout the 1960s until his death in a plane crash at the very young age of 43.

Based on a novel by Nobuhiko Kobayashi who was working with Sakamoto on a television show at the time (and asked for a pseudonym because he wasn’t sure how the movie would turn out), the film is however partly an exploration of the nation’s growing internationalism. Indeed, the film opens with the Pan Am logo and then immediately travels to Switzerland where an elderly lady is dying having apparently never married or had children but still attached to the memory of her first love, a man from Japan. Accordingly, she decides to leave her entire fortune to that man’s grandson, Kyutaro (Kyu Sakamoto), which comes as a total shock to her closest living relative, “The wicked Mr Edward Allan Poe.” Her butler then vows to travel to Japan to tell Kyutaro the good news, but ends up sitting next to the hit man Edward Allan Poe hires on the plane.

But Kyu has already hired a hitman to take himself out because he thinks he’s suffering from a terminal disease and feels nothing other than fear and hopelessness. Though all he wants to do is die, he is unable to take his own life and so has decided this is the best way. He’s also in love with a childhood friend who works in a diner at the docks, but unbeknownst to him Ai (Chieko Baisho) has just got engaged to their other friend Kiyohiko (Muga Takewaki), a sailor. To add to the sense of European romanticism, Kyu writes long notes to himself about his sadness and melancholy all while the countess’ right-hand man continues to refer to him as the luckiest man in the world. 

In a running gag, the hitman speaks mainly in French and the Countess’ butler in cod German hinting at a new kind of internationalism. The hitman Kyu hires through shady local guy Pon (Kanichi Tani) is, however, much less sophisticated. He can’t afford a gun and fails to kill Kyu several times in other ways usually injuring himself in the attempt which again makes Japan look somewhat inferior to the rest of the world just as the opulent vistas of the Countess’ castle contrast so strongely with the down and dirty nature of the docks where Kyu lives and works. 

Despite being so desperate to die, Kyu pulls away when the hitman he hired tries to kill him which along with his inability to take his own life may suggest that he really does want to live after all. Though she evidently does not return his romantic feelings, Ai clearly cares for him deeply describing Kyu as like oxygen for her while trying to get to the bottom of what’s with wrong with him but it takes Kyu a little longer to figure out that people care about him even if not quite in the way he was hoping they would. Even so, there’s no denying the farcical quality of all that’s befallen him as he finds himself “the luckiest man in the world,” caught between two hitmen, and staving off eventual romantic heartbreak.

Still, even this plays into the melancholy sense of romanticism and elliptical ending as Kyu eventually gets to fulfil one of his big dreams by going to Europe and getting to live the life of a heartbroken count from a 19th century romantic novel. As a vehicle for Sakamoto, the film also features several of his songs along with dance routines and some otherwise goofy clowning while Chieko Baisho also performs a short but sweet rendition of My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean. It’s all undoubtedly very silly but somehow heartfelt and wholesome for all its buried melancholy and deeply felt romanticism. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Circus Boys (二十世紀少年読本, Kaizo Hayashi, 1989)

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“There’s bad cheating and good cheating,” according to a little boy who will later become “a magician of words and juggler of lies,” in Kaizo Hayashi’s ethereal fable, Circus Boys (二十世紀少年読本, Nijisseiki shonen Dokuhon). Set in early showa, though the early showa of memory in which many other times intertwine, the film positions the transient site of a circus tent as a roving home for all who need it or are seeking escape from the increasingly heightened atmosphere of the early 1930s. Yet where one of the titular boys chooses to stay and earnestly protect this embattled utopia, his brother chooses to leave and seek his fortune in the outside world.

In fact, it’s Jinta (Hiroshi Mikami) who first becomes preoccupied with their precarious position realising that they’ve been hired to look cute riding the elephant, Hanako, but will soon age out of their allotted role and if they can’t master some other kind of circus trick there may no be a place for them in the big tent. For this reason he’s been training in secret with the idea that he can pass off the skills he’s perfected as innate “talent” so the circus will want to keep him on. Wataru (Jian Xiu), his brother, doesn’t quite approve of his plan. After all, aren’t they essentially tricking the people at the circus into thinking they’re something they’re not? But Jinta assures him it’s like “magic,” the kind that will allow them to stay in their circus home which later comes to seem a place of mysticism or perhaps make-believe on its own.

Thus Wataru walks a fine line. His name means “to cross over,” but he never does. He tries to walk the tightrope before he’s ready and is unbalanced by a storm. Jinta breaks his fall, but also in the process his own ankle. Along with it go his dreams. His foot never heals, and he’ll never fly the trapeze with Wataru like he planned though he keeps his injury a secret from his brother. While Wataru flies with new girl Maria (Michiru Akiyoshi), Jinta becomes a clown, a position he’d previously looked down on and later leaves the circus altogether using his talent for magic and performance to become a snake oil salesman tricking what appear largely to be poor farming communities into buying things like miracle soap and coal that burns for a whole month. This is clearly bad cheating, though he tries to convince himself it’s not while essentially remaking the world around him through his lies. 

But he retains his integrity in other ways. After being press-ganged into a yakuza-like guild of street pedlars, he gently excuses himself when invited to dine with a boss and confronted by an odd situation in which his wife has purchased another young woman to be his “plaything.” In a comment on contemporary patriarchal norms, the young woman is referred to as “Omocha,” which literally means “toy,” but also sounds a like a woman’s name because it begins with the character “O” which was used as a polite prefix for female names until the practice faded out after the war. The boss of course treats her like a doll, and even the wife refers to her as an “erotic instrument” she got as a way of managing her husband’s sexual appetites fearing he’d otherwise be seeing sex workers and bring a sexually transmitted disease into their home (and also possibly because she simply doesn’t want to sleep with herself any more than she has to). Referred to only as Omocha the woman has almost no agency and finds a kindred spirit in Jinta (whose name contains the character for “humanity”) because like him she also escapes the hardships of the world through lies and fantasy. “Can two lies make one big truth?” Jinta muses, breaking the codes of Guild as he prepares to rescue another man’s plaything, only it may be more like she rescues him. 

Meanwhile, Wataru tries to save the circus even after their ringmaster dies with visions of Jinta on his mind. They plan a wall of death to bring back the crowds, but Wataru’s plan backfires with tragic consequences and it becomes clear he can’t protect their circus family even if it brings back veteran trapeze artists Koji (Yukio Yamato) and Yoshiko (Maki Ishikawa) who agree there’s no other place for them out in the big wide world. The sense of the circus as a safe space was echoed on Maria’s arrival when Jinta had cruelly said she looked a little foreign with the ringmaster assuring her that in here they’re all artists and do not classify people in terms of their race, appearance or nationality. Its unreality, however, is reinforced by the constant backing of Wataru’s shadowplay which sometimes shows things the way people wish they were rather than the way they are. Omocha is later seen holding one of these puppets just as she and Jinta decide to die to free themselves of this hellish existence before Jinta’s surrogate brother figure Hiroshi (Shiro Sano) is forced to kill them for breaking the rules of the guild.

In the ambiguities of the final sequence, we might ask ourselves if they are actually dead and the glowing circus tent they see on the horizon is a path to the afterlife or a kind of heaven represented by the utopia to be found inside it. Then again, perhaps Jinta is merely rediscovering the way home, a prodigal son who now understands he already had a place to belong and there is a place to which he can return. The Great Crescent Circus is now the Sun & Crescent Circus, reflecting the way the two boys inhabit the world like and dark, idealism and cynicism, but comprise two parts of one complete whole. Hayashi waxes self-referential, playfully including a reference to his first film in that the movie playing at the cinema Jinta passes is The Eternal Mystery with Black Mask on his way to rescue Bellflower while indulging in an intense nostalgia for a lost world of travelling shows and hidden magic. Shooting in a beautifully balanced monochrome, he lights on scenes of heart-stopping beauty that are somehow poignant and filled with melancholy but ends with a moment of resolution in which, one way or another, Jinta reaches the promised land as he said with magic.

Circus Boys screens 12th October at Japan Society New York.

Tokyo Lullaby (東京夜曲, Jun Ichikawa, 1997)

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A meditation on lost love and middle-aged regret, Jun Ichikawa’s Tokyo Lullaby (東京夜曲, Tokyo Yakyoku) weaves a melancholy path through a lonely city but finds in it a sense of comfort or perhaps serenity in the gentle rhythms of ordinary lives that somehow become something greater. A diffident translator in love with an unhappily married middle-aged woman slowly uncovers a deep well of unresolved longing largely thanks to those around him who will remember for those who do not wish to speak. 

Ichikawa signals his intentions early on, transitioning from a nighttime shot of the city to a small cafe where a woman is sitting in the foreground looking forlorn while customers behind her discuss the reappearance of Koichi (Kyozo Nagatsuka), the son of the man who owns the electronics store opposite, who had walked out on his family several years previously but has abruptly returned. From this short scene, we can perhaps infer that there is some connection between Koichi and the woman, Tami (Kaori Momoi), though we aren’t quite sure what it is. In any case, the cafe, which bears the name of her late husband Osawa, becomes a kind of nexus uniting the lives of the various community members who each come there to play go and discuss the past. 

Like Tami, Koichi is reticent and melancholy. He says nothing of where he’s been and his wife, Hisako (Mitsuko Baisho), asks him no questions. She later tells the writer, Tei, whose affections she does not return, that she doesn’t really care about how Koichi is living his life because she is busy living her own and likes to do as she pleases. His sister asks him if he plans to stay this time, but Koichi can’t answer her seemingly uncomfortable in himself and unable either to stay or to go. Walking on crutches his injured foot seems to symbolise his emotional unsteadiness literally unable to find sure footing or move forward with his life. 

Piecing the tale together, Tei figures out that Koichi and Tami were once together but she suddenly married someone else who had a terminal illness and passed away shortly afterwards around the time that Koichi first went walkabout. Hisako, meanwhile, had been in love with Osawa though he loved Tami who did not love him. Somehow it’s all very complicated and incredibly simple, the way they’ve sabotaged their own lives and happiness though it couldn’t have been any other way. Tei watches something similar play out in the neighbourhood. One of the young men who works at the electronics shop had been dating a girl who worked at the record store, but he abruptly begins pursuing Ng, a Chinese woman who works at the cafe, and eventually marries her leaving the record store girl heartbroken. 

Things change and they stay the same. Ng takes over the cafe, Koichi’s foot heals while he also manages to resurrect the family business by turning it into a shop that video games as if taking a symbolic step into modernity that suggests this time he’ll stay just as Tami decides it’s time for her to leave. Paths cross endlessly, Ichikawa frequently cutting away to tiny vignettes of other cafe goers as their stories weave through each other, each one note in the great symphony of the city without which life would be impossible. Yet what’s more important is what is not said, the silences that exist between people and perhaps within them too. Things that are understood, and those which are not. 

Tami explains that she looked for answers but all she found was junk until the relief of boredom became her only frame of happiness. Only by escaping the city does it seem that she’ll be happy while Koichi seems as if he’s getting itchy feet and Tei, joining the cycle, decides to move on rather than remain in painful proximity to Hisako who as she said has her own life and does not seem to want to share it with anyone much less him. The pain of the past cannot fully be healed, only borne amid the cheerful scenes of city life, children playing, people doing business, the sun shining and elderly couples meeting in cafes. Pain and loneliness seem to be the natural conditions of urbanity, but Ichikawa paints them with a kind of rosiness, merely the sadness that unpins the lullaby of a city which is always changing yet remains the same in its unwalled alleyways and those that exist only in the deepest recesses of memory. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Good Morning (お早よう, Yasujiro Ozu, 1959)

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Even the most casual viewer of Japanese cinema will be aware that something as simple as “lovely weather today” can mean quite a lot more than it at first seems. Small talk isn’t really so small after all and without it, as one quite perceptive yet perennially tongue-tied translator points out midway through Yasujiro Ozu’s charming late career comedy Good Morning (お早よう, Ohayo), our lives would be quite boring. Boring it is not, however, when two young boys decide to rebel against the pointless politeness of the adult world by taking a vow of silence after being told off for going on in their constant tantrums over the unfairness of being denied a TV set. 

As he often did, Ozu repurposes the plot of an earlier film, in this case I Was Born But… and subverts it. The two boys at the centre of the 1932 silent film ended up going on a hunger strike out of humiliation and despair on realising that their dad, who they’d idolised, was also a soulless corporate lackey forced to debase himself in deference to his boss. The father is ashamed, he doesn’t want his boys to end up living a meaningless worker drone existence, but the boys’ decision not to eat also carries much more weight considering they are in living in a time of economic depression during which many do not have the luxury of choice. 

The Hayashi boys, Minoru (Koji Shitara) and Isamu (Masahiko Shimazu), by contrast are also rebelling against the meaningless adult world but for the opposite reasons. They don’t seem to have a lot of respect for their father and probably don’t really care if he humiliates himself on a daily basis so long as they can watch sumo on TV without needing to go next door. These are consumerist kids, they want what they want and they want it now. Minoru is really too old for screaming tantrums, but still rolls around on the floor kicking his legs in frustration because it’s all just so unfair that mum and dad won’t get him a TV even though it’s not a matter of money. The parents, for their part, are trying their best to resist the onset of consumerism. Mr Hayashi (Chishu Ryu) is against the TV because he fears the boys will stop studying and hours of vacant staring will ruin their young minds. He might have a point, but you can’t hold back the tides forever. 

It’s his scolding of the boys which eventually leads to all the subsequent problems as his insistence that they are being far too noisy and talk much more than children have a right to leads them to declare an ironic vow of silence in protest against the “meaningless” chatter of adults filled with random pleasantries such as “good morning”, “where are you off to today?”, “what lovely weather we’re having!”, etc. Their decision, however, comes at a bad moment. There has recently been some unpleasantness over misplaced money for a local community group and gossip about Mrs Haraguchi’s (Haruko Sugimura) new washing machine. The other housewives on the block also seem to be resistant to consumerist desires and do not approve of the purchase, channeling their resentment into assuming that Mrs Haraguchi may have embezzled the money. Grown up chatter isn’t always meaningless and the frivolous local gossip has a profound bearing on the social politics of the block. So when the boys don’t reply to Mrs Haraguchi’s good morning, she assumes they are deliberately snubbing her on their mother’s instruction because of a petty grudge over harsh words exchanged on account of the misunderstanding surrounding the missing club dues.

Meanwhile, we can see the shadows of a lingering economic instability. These are all modest homes where families make an effort to appear frugal, hence the outrage over the washing machine, but the family friend who teaches the boys English and has a crush on their aunt, Heiichiro (Keiji Sada), has been laid off after his company went bust. He’s supported by his older sister who remains unmarried and works at a car dealership (more consumerism) while doing translation on the side for extra money. The neighbour across the way is technically “retired” but looking for work partly because his pension’s not enough to live on and partly because what’s a man supposed to do all day in a society which expects everyone to be productive? The new neighbours next-door to the Hayashis who’ve caused all this trouble because of their TV set are viewed as scandalous because they live in their pyjamas and she used to be a cabaret bar girl. The middle-aged gossips don’t think they’re respectable while she eventually decides to move because the neighbours are too “annoying”. 

Ironically enough, it’s sumo the boys most want to watch, about as traditionally Japanese a pastime as is possible even as they yearn for colourful consumerist modernity. They communicate by refusing to communicate. As Heiichiro points out, small talk is a social lubricant but meaningless things are easy to say while important things are not. Which is not to say you can’t communicate something important by saying something seemingly as meaningless as “that cloud has an interesting shape”, but that you won’t get anywhere unless you listen to what people are actually saying even when they’re saying nothing at all. They boys can’t win against the inherent meaninglessness of adult life with its superficial conformities, petty resentments, and wilful misunderstandings but perhaps we can all learn something from their straightforward earnestness in their refusal to submit themselves to empty pleasantries. 

Female Yakuza Tale (やさぐれ姐御伝　総括リンチ, Teruo Ishii, 1973)

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Having completed her quest for revenge, Ocho (Reiko Ike) returns in Female Yakuza Tale (やさぐれ姐御伝　総括リンチ, Yasagure anego den: Sokatsu Lynch) once again swept up in intrigue after being framed for a bizarre series of murders. With Teruo Ishii taking up the reins from Norifumi Suzuki, the film has a slightly more realistic aesthetic making frequent use of handheld particularly in the narrow backstreets of the late Meiji Society while eventually taking a bizarre detour into the cruel world of an early 20th century mental health institution. 

In any case, Ocho’s troubles start when she’s met at Kobe harbour by a woman who says she’s come to fetch her. On arrival at her destination, Ocho is chloroformed and sexually assaulted by three men who evidently think she’s think she’s someone else and decide to get rid of her after realising their mistake. She wakes up next to the dead body of another woman and is in danger of becoming the prime suspect in a series of murders the subtitles don the “crotch-gauge” killings. After managing to escape, she sets about trying to find out who set her up and what’s going on while getting involved in a succession crisis in the Ogi in which the old boss who was once good to her has been killed. 

Though with much less political subtext, the film nevertheless indulges in the Sinophobia common in many similarly themed dramas in revealing a Mr Lee of Yokohama to be a major player in a drug trafficking scam in which women are forced to smuggle drugs in their vaginas after the gang gets them hooked to manipulate them. Besides Ocho, another woman dressed eerily like Sasori in a black wide brimmed hat and loose dress known as “Yoshimi of Christ” is also on their tail and seeking revenge while echoing some of the religious themes of the first film. She later teams up with recently released yakuza Jyoji who is looking for the daughter of the old boss who has gone mysteriously missing while he is also convinced that present boss Gondo had something to do with it along with the old man’s death. 

This is however mainly a tale of female revenge, Ocho’s being on the yakuza who cut off the Old Boss’ finger after he stood up for her as a teeanger whens she was caught cheating at a gambling den. Nevertheless, what eventually emerges is a sense of female socildairy as Ocho, Yoshimi, and the other women abused by the gang come together to free themselves from its grasp in a strange orgy of violence utilising eerie green lighting to lend it an almost supernatural dimension even if in the end the final blow is struck by a man and not without a little irony. 

This sense of unreality otherwise out of keeping with the immediacy of Ishii’s handheld camera is also seen in the mental institution to which the film eventually travels, a foggy gothic building echoing the Western mansion in the first film but similarly filed with oppressed and abused women sent mad by a patriarchal society or perhaps merely sent there to become so by men who wanted them out of the way. Gondo himself seems to be a regular visitor bringing along his own electroshock machine but finally resorting to using his bare hands in order to tie up a loose end and preserve his own position as head of the clan. 

Ocho is not above using her sexuality to manipulate him, while Ishii maintains the naked sword fights from the first film both from the balletic opening of Ocho and her parasol to the chaos of the final sequence as the women come together to take their revenge as one. Perhaps strangely there isn’t an awful lot of gambling in the film, but Ocho nevertheless makes good use of her trademark hanafuda cards while in a moment of symmetry it’s the wife of her target who eventually settles the matter in a more diplomatic fashion by subjecting herself to the same humiliation to which Ocho had been subjected to bring the circle to a close. Having once again stood up against corrupt crooks and greedy men, Ocho later takes her sisters with her as she walks off this time into the sunset rather than the dark. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Sex and Fury (不良姐御伝 猪の鹿お蝶, Norifumi Suzuki,1973)

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An orphaned daughter takes revenge against the corruptions of the late Meiji society in Norifumi Suzuki’s pinky violence classic Sex and Fury (不良姐御伝 猪の鹿お蝶, Furyo anego den: Inoshika Ocho). As the opening voiceover explains, the Japan of the early 1900s is already stoking imperial ambitions closely linked with the ideas of “modernisation” and “civility” it is seeking though in reality it is very much a gangster society as the three villains the heroine searches for have come to dominate the new Japan. 

This moment of schism is depicted in the opening sequence set in 1886 in which the little girl who will later take the name Ocho witnesses the murder of her policeman father by three unseen assassins who steal from him evidence of a scandal they then use for their own gain. The murder takes place in a shrine, the young Ocho rolling her paper ball onto a discarded charm that reads “misfortune”, while the film then jumps on to 1905 through a series of historical images prominently featuring the emperor Meiji along with a host of patriotic symbols that seem to signal the wrong path that is being taken. 

As for Ocho (Reiko Ike), she has survived by living on her wits as an excellent pickpocket and gambler but is otherwise uncorrupted continuing to dress in kimono and giving off an air of refined elegance that belies her toughness. In the course of her revenge, she is met by her opposite number, Shunosuke (Masataka Naruse), whose father was also killed by the same three duplicitous yakuza and is dragged into geopolitical intrigue by means of plot by the British to turn Japan into the site of the second opium wars using a spy disguised as a dancer played by Swedish starlet Christina Lindberg who is really in Japan for Shunosuke with whom she fell in love abroad only to be cruelly abandoned. 

Somewhat contradictorily, it’s these Western intrusions that are being resisted with Ocho the representative of an older Japan, and the gangsters that of a newer, largely amoral society of burgeoning militarism. Arch villain Kurokawa (Seizaburo Kawazu) lives in a huge Western-style mansion and is preparing to transition into national politics in the post-feudal society insisting that he and his organisation will soon control “everything”. His underling Iwakura (Hiroshi Nawa), who travels by motorcar, will also be handling the construction of Tokyo Harbour. When the girls from Ocho’s adopted family are kidnapped, they are taken to dance hall Panorama which is bedecked both with Christmassy tinsel and signs celebrating the victory in the Russo-Japanese conflict, while in an anachronistic touch scenes of the war are projected inside. Just to ram the point home, the man who throws a knife at Ocho is wearing stereotypical Chinese dress, while Kurokawa is later seen to have at his disposal a secret attack squad of nuns armed with switchblades and has Ocho whipped, by British spy Christina, in front of a large mural of Christ in some kind of underground chapel. 

In taking her revenge, Ocho is also in a sense attempting to right a historical wrong in removing these usurping men and their accomplice from power while fighting their perversion with her sexuality over which only she is master going so far as to kill one with poison rubbed on her own skin. In accidentally having exposed the equally duplicitous practices in a gambling hall, she is attacked while in the bath but instantly leaps into action entirely in the nude in a strangely beautiful sequence of elegant violence and poetic bloodletting that echoes the film’s conclusion in finally moving out into the snow. Eventually captured, she is bound tightly with rope and tortured but manages to cut herself free using only one of her trademark hanafuda cards which also symbolise her skill as a gambler even if her climactic game with Christina is played with Western cards for casino chips over a dining table. 

Suzuki signals the chaotic nature of this early 20th century world in his riotous use of colour and frequent anachronisms along with canted angles and a spinning top shot that seems to echo the world spinning out of control as Iwakura breaks a sacred promise between gamblers and rapes a young woman he had agreed to spare if Ocho was victorious in her bout with Christina. He saves his most expressionistic technique for the film’s closing moments in which Ocho singlehandedly puts a stop to Kurokawa’s corruption, another picture of Emperor Meiji looking down at her as she launches her final attack, and then stops to purify herself in the snow before wandering off into a storm of hanafuda cards with only darkness ahead of her.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

*Norifumi Suzuki’s name is actually “Noribumi” but he has become known as “Norifumi” to English-speaking audiences.

Legend of the Cat Monster (麗猫伝説, Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1983)

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Produced as a special marking the 100th episode of the Tuesday Night Suspense Theatre TV drama series, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Legend of the Cat Monster (麗猫伝説, Reibyo densetsu) is preceded by a title card reading “Elegy for a Faraway Film”. Scripted by Chiho Katsura, the film is indeed in its way a lament for dying world albeit one which owes a heavy debt to Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard with a little Fedora thrown in. Repurposing the classic ghost cat film it casts cinema itself as dangerous illusion, a vampiric compulsion that drowns all who encounter it in irresolvable longing. 

This sense of irrecoverable nostalgia is palpable from the opening sequence which, aside from the melancholy voiceover, introduces us to the world of Setouchi Cinema apparently a moribund studio complex once dubbed the Hollywood of Japan. The new arrival, Ryohei (Akira Emoto), is dressed in noticeably anachronistic fashion as if he were a 1930s newsboy rather than a young man living in the Japan of the early 1980s. His girlfriend, Ryoko (Jun Fubuki), who works as a stage hand dresses in a similarly old-fashioned style and in fact carries an oversize watch that was a heirloom from her late father, an unsuccessful film director. Ryoko remarks that she’s been hoping someone would come and rescue her from this half-dead island but she doubts Ryohei will be the one to do it because he has also come here in search of a dream. 

That dream is, however, already dead at least according to some. The film director working at the studio is berated by a woman of around the same age working as a manager for an idol star for still getting an allowance from his mother at 60 because he has failed to make it as a film director at least in financial terms. There is a poignant, largely unexplored subplot between that suggests the inability to reconcile the dream of cinema with the economic “reality” has kept them apart all these years and that their dream of love may now be over too. 

It seems that the reclusive actress at the film’s centre, Akiko (Wakaba Irie), is also living on a frustrated dream of love withdrawing from the world around her believing that her lover will someday return from “Hollywood” which seems to be another word for paradise or perhaps the world beyond on the other side of the silver screen. To her, film is but a dream with in a dream. A window or screen is a portal to the burdens of the heart, memories of days gone by, and the illusions we once saw that cannot be seen again.  She herself is trapped within her own dream of love, but it is not so much a dream of her that bewitches Ryohei but the impossibility of cinema.

When passing photographer, Tachihara (Toru Minegishi), who lost his own wife to the unobtainable magic of the movies, snaps a picture of Akiko at her window holding a cat and looking exactly as she did the day she abruptly walked out on an incomplete film, it spurs a cynical producer to get the idea of convincing her to make a comeback and in a ghost cat movie, no less. Obayashi’s casting coup is getting mother and daughter Takako and Wakaba Irie to play aged and youthful versions of the famous actress, Takako herself having been a huge star of the 1930s performing most notably for Kenji Mizoguchi in the The Water Magician. There is an undeniable poignancy in her reflection that is only her aging body which is dying, as if she were merely becoming an embodiment of her image migrating to silver screen which exists between this world and next. It’s this screen that is later ruptured by Ryoko as she makes her escape after failing to save Ryohei from the curse of cinema. 

As Akiko laments, he’s writing his script more for himself than for her and it’s the quest for art which has begun to drain and make him mad. When he, pale and zombie-like, attempts to proffer his scripts it appears to be nothing more than his own name written over and over again. Like the Max-esque butler Mizumori (Akira Oizumi) says, film is an eternal dream which by its definition can never realised and exists only a state of longing somewhere beyond the veil. Drawing inspiration from Nobuo Nakagawa in particular and harnessing the sense of gothic dread found in Sunset Boulevard, Obayashi captures the eternal nightmares of artistic creation with the maddening obsessions of unrequited love and the image of the ideal which exists eternally out of reach somewhere on the other side of the screen.

To Sleep So as to Dream (夢みるように眠りたい, Kaizo Hayashi, 1986)

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“I feel so well, as though I am dreaming” a ghostly old woman exclaims, having dealt with her unfinished business or perhaps merely becoming one with the silver screen. Released in 1986 but set ostensibly sometime in the 1950s and recalling the golden age of the silent movie, Kaizo Hayashi’s postmodern odyssey To Sleep So as to Dream (夢みるように眠りたい, Yumemiru Yoni Nemuritai) sends a pair of detectives on the hunt for a missing reel, voyaging through an ethereal dreamscape of mysterious magicians, kidnap and conspiracy, in search of the solution to the “Eternal Mystery”. 

Opening in total darkness, Hayashi pans across to a gas lamp and then to the figure of a woman watching a silent film projected on a screen in her living room. We see only her gloved hands, one wearing an ostentatious ring, somewhere between Miss Havisham and Norma Desmond, while the movie seems to be part of an early serial revolving around the Black Mask ninja who is trying to rescue the kidnapped Bellflower (Moe Kamura) only the princess always seems to be in another castle, as detectives Uotsuka (Shiro Sano) and his sidekick Kobayashi (Koji Otake) will discover. In any case, the film bursts into flames and dissolves at the moment of climax just as Black Mask confronts the kidnappers and declares the mystery “solved”. The old lady, Madame Cherry-blossom (Fujiko Fukamizu), then telephones the Uotsuka Detective Agency and requests their help with a kidnapping, sending her manservant Matsunosuke (Yoshio Yoshida) to the office with a tape recording of the kidnappers’ message which includes the clues to a scavenger hunt the pair must solve if they are to arrive at the drop off point with the money in order to retrieve Bellflower. 

Filming in black and white and in academy ratio, Hayashi maintains a silent film aesthetic adding selected sound effects but rendering all dialogue other than recordings as intertitles. We hear the phone ring and the radio playing, but “live” human speech is presented only as text save for that of the Benshi who appears at the film’s conclusion though even he may also be “on tape”. Meanwhile, he adds in random gags at the guys’ expense such as the “hardboiled” detective’s obsession with hard boiled eggs, while his sidekick Kobayashi is forever riding a rocking horse in the corner of their office while wielding a lasso and wearing a cowboy hat. A live chicken completes the home on the range feel while a series of horse shoes decorate the wall. The two men feel as if they emerged from a 20s noir farce, their slapstick antics eventually leading to a confrontation in which Kobayashi proves himself an unexpectedly skilled martial artist.  

Their world is already absurd even as they head into the abstract in order to chase Bellflower while, just like Black Mask, the kidnappers leave them irritating messages at each checkpoint revealing another clue and that the ransom has now doubled. They are plagued by a series of magicians who turn up in different guises from a man performing a kamishibai version of the Black Mask story for children to some guys running a shell game and posing as a trio of “scientists” led by Prof. Jerowski “of the British Empire” showing off their new gyroscope technology. Yet it’s no coincidence that the kidnappers go by the name Pathé & co, having essentially trapped Bellflower inside the celluloid realm and refusing to set her free. 

While Uotsuka falls for the beautiful, elusive image of Bellflower who begs to be released from “this endless story”, fantasy and reality begin to merge as he finds himself cast in the role of Black Mask. The ironically named “Endless Mystery” is a film with no end, the apparently incomplete debut of a faded star not so much ready for her closeup but desperate for closure and the release of her younger self from 50 years of torment in the reassurance that Bellflower will certainly be rescued by Black Mask at the film’s conclusion which is, after all, how such serials are supposed to end. While others slip ghostlike into the darkness, Uotsuka is left behind another prisoner of cinema chasing the romance of the silver screen yet finally saving his princess by extracting her from it. Operating on several levels, Hayashi expertly recreates both the grainy serials of the early silent era and crafts an absurdist, postmodern homage to its more recognisable evolution as his detective becomes wilfully lost in the labyrinths of cinema. 

To Sleep So as to Dream streamed as part of this year’s Japan Cuts.

Restoration trailer (no subtitles)

Repast (めし, Mikio Naruse, 1951)

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“Must every woman grow old and die feeling empty?” asks the unhappy heroine of Naruse’s 1951 melodrama Repast (めし, Meshi) only to conclude that yes, she must, but that this in fact constitutes “happiness” as a woman. The first of Naruse’s Fumiko Hayashi adaptations Repast arrived in the year of the author’s death and is inspired by a short story left unfinished at the time of her passing. Screenwriter Sumie Tanaka was apparently convinced that the film should end with a divorce, as Sound of the Mountain would two years later, and consequently left the project after the studio mandated a more “sympathetic” ending. Superficially happy as it might seem, however, the conclusion is as bleak as one might expect from Naruse in which the heroine simply accepts that she must recalibrate her idea of happiness to that which is available to her and learn to find fulfilment in shared endeavour with her husband. 

As she explains in her opening voiceover, Michiyo (Setsuko Hara) married her husband Hatsunosuke (Ken Uehara) five years ago in Tokyo against her family’s wishes and has been living on the outskirts of Osaka for the past three. Marital bliss has quite clearly worn off. As we see from the repeated morning scenes of the local community sending their sons off to school and husbands to the office, every day is the same and all Michiyo ever seems to do is cook and clean. The only words Hatsunosuke says to her are “I’m hungry”, and the only source of solace in her life is her cat, Yuri. Yet even this constant state of unhappy frustration is disrupted by the unexpected arrival of Hatsunosuke’s spoilt and immature niece Satoko (Yukiko Shimazaki) who has apparently run away from home in rebellion against an arranged marriage. 

There is obviously a blood relation between Hatsunosuke and Satoko, but Michiyo’s jealously is not exactly unreasonable given the young woman’s childish flirtation with her uncle, perhaps an adolescent extension of her propensity to pout and preen to get her own way. Aside from all that, finances weigh heavily on Michiyo’s mind. Other than her drudgery, the constant source of friction in the relationship is Hatsunosuke’s low salary and lack of career success. Satoko’s family are a little wealthier and having been brought up in relative comfort she has little idea of the real world and is often tactless, remarking on Hatsunosuke’s worn out tie much to Michiyo’s chagrin. Hatsunosuke is happy enough to have her, but Michiyo is wondering if there’s enough rice in the jar to see them through and Satoko never stops to consider that they’re feeding her for free even falling asleep when Michiyo enjoys her one and only day off reuniting with old friends rather than preparing dinner as she’d been asked. Perhaps aware of the disruptive effect of her presence, Satoko pours salt on the wound by constantly asking her uncle if Michiyo doesn’t like her or is angry, further placing a wedge between husband and wife. 

For all that, however, Hatsunosuke would not be accounted a “bad” husband for the time save perhaps for his lack of career success. He is not cruel or violent, merely insensitive and distant, taking his wife for granted and unable to see that she is deeply unhappy while otherwise internalising a sense of guilt and failure in his inability to adequately provide for her. She meanwhile sometimes takes her dissatisfaction out on him in barbed comments about his low salary, her barely hidden contempt never far from the surface. Yet as her mother later points out in encouraging her go back to him he is “reliable, discreet, and honest”, qualities borne out by his later refusal to go along with a dodgy scheme organised by the old elite along with his nervous rebuttal of the attentions of the “mistress” from across the way. 

At heart a conservative woman, Michiyo too looks down on Ms Kanazawa (Kumeko Otowa) for her taboo status as the illicit lover of a wealthy man which is only in a sense her way of seizing her future as an independent woman running her own bar. Satoko, a woman of the modern era, sees less of a problem with it and is far less judgemental, though her own attempts are destined to end in failure thanks to her inability to work out that her present lifestyle is far above her current reach. Retreating to her Tokyo home, Michiyo looks for other options, admiring the apparently happier relationship between her younger sister and brother-in-law who now run the family shop. She asks a sympathetic cousin, Kazuo (Hiroshi Nihonyanagi) who provides an alternate love interest, to help her find work but encounters the brutalising line outside the local employment office and then an old friend now a war widow desperate for employment because her benefits are about to run out and she has a young son to support. Later she spots the same woman handing out flyers, suddenly realising the fallacy of her fantasy of starting again as an independent woman. She pens a letter to her husband admitting that she’s realised how vulnerable she is without his protection, but remains undecided enough to avoid sending it. 

Hearing that Satoko, still childish but perhaps not quite as naive as she assumed her to be, has been laying her claws into Kazuo the final nail seems to have been struck. Michiyo knows she will return to Osaka, but does so not because she has rekindled her love for her husband but because she has accepted there are no better options. Hatsunosuke is dull, but he is in a sense reliable, and honest to the extent that he may be about to be rewarded for his moral unshakability. He cares enough about her to show up in Tokyo hoping, but not insisting, she will return with him which is perhaps as close to a declaration of love that one could hope for. On reflection she decides that a woman’s happiness is found in sharing the journey with her husband, accepting that she must subsume her own desires into his and cannot hope to expect emotional fulfilment other than that found in his satisfaction. Even for a Naruse film, and one as peppered with moments of slapstick humour as this one is, it’s an extraordinarily bleak conclusion subtly hinting at the iniquities of life in a patriarchal society in which the best a woman can hope for is a life of unrewarded drudgery.