Punishment Room, released in 1956 as Daiei’s attempt to get in on the Sun Tribe phenomenon, had provoked a moral panic that brought the whole short-lived movement to a close. In considering his next film, Ichikawa consulted with Daiei executive Matsutaro Kawaguchi, who is also the father of Punishment Room’s star Hiroshi Kawaguchi, and was offered the chance to direct one of two relatively safe and subdued literary adaptations, either Izumi Kyoka’s Nihonbashi, or Kafu Nagai’s Okamezasa. Ichikawa chose Nihonbashi (日本橋), though his wife and screenwriter Natto Wada feared adapting it maybe beyond her capabilities.
The film is generally known under the The Bridge of Japan in English-speaking territories. This is either an attempt to suggest a wider thematic importance that extends across the nation, or an overly literal translation of a place name. In any case, the significance of Nihonbashi is that, during the time the film is set, it was known as an area where there were many high-class geisha houses. On the other hand, Izumi was well known for incorporating supernatural themes in his work, which is why the film opens like a ghost story with the curtain rising on a dark and gloomy alleyway through which a geisha walks until she finally dissolves leaving only a creepy song and the sound of her geta rattling along on the cobbles.
The messages seems to be that this is a place that consumes women. The ghost is said to be that of Owaka who, according to rumour, cheated on her husband who left her after which she died of tuberculosis. Ambitious geisha Okoh (Chikage Awashima) has just moved into Owaka’s former giesha house, apparently unperturbed by its grim history or the the possibility that it is effectively cursed. Geisha come to a miserable end if they act selfishly, according to one of Okoh’s clients who will essentially prove correct further sealing Okoh’s unhappy fate. As is common in these tales she has an entirely one-sided rivalry with local favourite Kiyoha (Fujiko Yamamoto) who her is total opposite in terms of personality. Kiyoha is kind, gentle, and dislikes her life as a geisha, not because she disapproves of it, but because of the moral compromises it requires her to make and the happiness that it denies her.
She has taking a liking to a regular customer, university professor Shin, but when he asks her to marry him, she has no choice but to refuse. Then again, Shin’s proposal is seemingly driven by his incestuous desire for his older sister, who, perhaps having realised this, has disappeared from his life apparently in shame in having become the mistress of a married man to provide for his education. Shin then bears out a sense of hypocrisy in the relationship between men and geisha in that he insists he has never seen has as one but only as his sister who was of course another woman sexually exploited for material gain. As Kiyoha is unable to marry him because she must also financially support her mother and an illegitimate daughter, as well as being indebted to her primary patron, they will not meet again as a geisha and a client.
Okoh, meanwhile, has a tendency to pick up things Kiyoha as dropped as a way of getting back her meaning she is now determined to become Shin’s lover, though he is not interested in her. After she helps in him out with a predicament with a local policeman in which she claims to be his wife, she really considerers herself to be so, though again one-sidedly. She then faces the same thing with a clingy client, Daikichi, she nicknames “Red Bear,” who has convinced himself, one-sidedly, that she is his wife despite also having a legal wife and child.
Red Bear is presented somewhat grotesquely and really takes on the position of a monster within the story. He was once a wealthy seafood wholesaler from Hokkaido who set up shop in Tokyo before an economic downturn which has also impacted the geisha world. This, along with his foolish infatuation with Okoh has ruined him financially and may also have contributed to the later death of his wife which leads him to abandon his infant son ironically dropping him off at Kiyoha’s knowing she will care for him though she rejected Red Bear on the grounds of his ugliness. Driven into a kind of madness, he now subsists on grubs and maggots that live on his distinctive but poorly made bearskin coat.
Okoh is also driven into madness when Shin decides to become a wandering pilgrim and search for his sister in order to ease the tension between Okoh, Red Bear, and Kiyoha. For her, Shin may represent a way out of this geisha world as a respectable man’s wife, something which is otherwise unobtainable to her. While in some senses, a geisha could claim greater independence as a single woman through running her own house rather than being dependent on a patron, she may also be denied the possibility of a settled domestic life or romantic fulfilment. Even if Kiyoha cannot escape her life as a geisha, she does at least have her daughter and comes to dote on Red Bear’s son, though without knowing who his parents were.
Her parting with Shin (Ryûji Shinagawa), who does not belong in this world and has undergone a religious conversion in deciding to become a monk permanently having given up on looking for his sister and symbolically accepting Okoh as his wife, is then bittersweet but not as much of a tragedy as the fate of Okoh. The geisha house appears to have been purified, released from its cursed legacy under the ownership of Kiyoha even if geisha gossiping about the constant flow of people in this ever changing area. The alleyway which was once dark and gloomy, is now brightly lit and has lost its sense of ominousness, if otherwise seeming rather ordinary.
This was Ichikawa’s first colour film, though in order to recreate Izumi’s world he decided on a broadly grey colour palate for the props and sets, recreating all of the Meiji-era setting only to burn it down for real during the fiery climax. At that time, filming in colour also required additional lighting which meant that it was stiflingly hot on set. They eventually had to purchase industrial size air coolers of the kind that were only used in cafes, pushing up the production budget which was already high considering the painstaking attention to detail in the historical sets which included laying actual tracks to recreate the Meiji-era street car. Nevertheless, it all pays off in the exquisite visuals that bring that bring this world to life in all of its defeated hopes and melancholy.
Junichiro Tanizaki is widely regarded as one of the major Japanese literary figures of the twentieth century with his work frequently adapted for the cinema screen. Those most familiar with Kon Ichikawa’s art house leaning pictures such as war films The Burmese Harp or Fires on the Plain might find it quite an odd proposition but in many ways, there could be no finer match for Tanizaki’s subversive, darkly comic critiques of the baser elements of human nature than the otherwise wry director. Odd Obsession (鍵, Kagi) may be a strange title for this adaptation of Tanizaki’s well known later work The Key, but then again “odd obsessions” is good way of describing the majority of Tanizaki’s career. A tale of destructive sexuality, the odd obsession here is not so much pleasure or even dominance but a misplaced hope of sexuality as salvation, that the sheer force of stimulation arising from desire can in some way be harnessed to stave off the inevitable even if it entails a kind of personal abstinence.
Windows on Worlds 