Hachiro Kasuga – Windows on Worlds

Another of Nikkatsu’s crime inflected pop song movies, Inn of the Floating Weeds (浮草の宿, Ukigusa no Yado) makes space for the singer of the song which gives the film its name, Hachiro Kasuga, but only in a minor role as a supportive friend. Directed by Seijun Suzuki under his birth name Seitaro (he’d change it to Seijun for Underworld Beauty the following year), the film is in some ways typical of his early work as a B-movie director at the studio but nevertheless displays flashes of his later brilliance in its unconventional composition and wistful sense of irony.

Company man Shunji (Hideaki Nitani) gets into a fight during which Shida, a high ranking executive at Marubishi construction, is stabbed to death. Shunji is kicked into the water and left for dead, while his fiancée, Kozue (Hisano Yamaoka), pines for him at a nearby bar. Five years later Shunji resurfaces hoping to reunite with Kozue after having fled to Hong Kong and taken a job at a shipping company. At the bar, however, he discovers a woman that looks exactly like his lost love but turns out to be her younger sister, Mio (also played by Hisano Yamaoka), the bar’s madam and apparently the mistress of Murayama (Toru Abe), the current head of Marubishi.

Shunji’s survival and subsequent reappearance is inconvenient for everyone so it’s no surprise that Murayama wants to have him bumped off, but Shunji is determined to stay and find out what’s happened to Kozue who, according to her sister, went missing in suspicious circumstances three years earlier while desperately searching for Shunji.

Haunted by memories of lost love, Shunji finds himself drawn to the mysterious Mio who closely resembles her sister, while pulled towards a nexus of criminal activity unwittingly positioned between Murayama’s Marubishi and the avaricious interests of his American colleagues operating out of Hong Kong. Indeed, Shunji has himself it seems taken on an alternate identity as Hong Konger Kang Ho-chun, interpreter to the mysterious Mr. Green (Harold Conway). Perhaps still naive, Shunji appears to be unaware of his boss’ shadiness, warned off by good Samaritan Haruo (Hachiro Kasuga) who rescues him after he’s beaten up by Marubishi goons and allows him to rest in his apartment where he’s nursed back to health by his cheerful kid sister Yuri (Ikuko Kimuro).

The strange goings on on the Saganmaru perhaps testify to an ambivalence with Japan’s new globalising presence which echoes through Nikkatsu’s “borderless” action dramas. Mr. Green is certainly not on the level, later revealed to be involved with drug smuggling through Marubishi and employing a large number of Chinese stewards (he operates out of Hong Kong after all) which plays into a sense of Sinophobia common across the series. The major problem, however, is Murayama whom Shunji later learns tried to assault Kozue after he left and may be connected with her disappearance. Perhaps trying to warn him off, Mio fires back at Shunji that this all his own fault, that Kozue couldn’t live with the knowledge he was a murderer and in the end he broke her heart, while he meekly protests his innocence and vows revenge on Murayama.

Meanwhile, he’s pulled back towards innocence by Haruo and his relentlessly cheerful sister who has obviously taken a liking to him. Mio, echoing the femme fatale, remains enigmatic, concealing key information about her sister, later confessing that she too has been desperate for vengeance but fears that Murayama has grown too powerful. Haruo, singing the mournful song about past regrets and lost love, observes from the sidelines trying to decide if Shunji is rotten inside or merely in danger of being swallowed by a vortex of crime and violence.

Yet, as it so often is, the gangster world is in danger of collapse, destroying itself through internecine power struggles and petty betrayals. Murayama thinks he’s the top dog but there’s always someone agitating from below. Shunji, didn’t kill Shida, and maybe he’s close enough to finding out who did, clearing his name while figuring out what happened to Kozue, but in someways it hardly matters because the true battle is for the future, not the past. Like the singer of the song, he reflects on what a fool he’s been, resolving to put the past aside as he walks towards a less complicated future and an eventual return to a compassionate and forgiving society.

Title song by Hachiro Kasuga

Hibari Misora turned 20 in 1957, but she’d already been working for eight years and was well on her way to becoming one of the most successful stars of the post-war era. The Deep Blue Sea (青い海原, Aoi Unabara) is one of her earliest grown up musical dramas and finds her sharing the bill with another of the biggest acts of the day in Hachiro Kasuga who, despite being stuck in second lead limbo, does the bulk of the musical heavy lifting. It also sees her star opposite an actor who would become her frequent leading man which might come as something of a surprise to those most familiar with his later work – Ken Takakura, then very fresh faced and playing the juvenile lead.

The action begins with Takakura’s Ken as the stranger who walks into town. In fact he’s not that much of a stranger – he runs into an acquaintance, Saburo (Hachiro Kasuga), right away, but he’s come on a mission. He’s looking for the friend of a man who died in an accident on his boat in order to give him a photograph and some money he’d saved for the daughter he had to leave behind. Before any of that happens, however, he ends up in a meet cute with Misora’s Harumi who manages to tip a whole bucket of water over him, and then later a jug of beer when he fetches up at the bar where she works (and where Saburo is a regular). As coincidence would have it, the man Ken is looking for also lives at the bar and is actually Harumi’s father. Harumi never knew she was adopted and is stunned when she overhears the conversation between the two men but decides to go on pretending not to know anything.

The real drama revolves around a lecherous gangster, Sakazaki (Isamu Yamaguchi), who is having an “affair” with the owner of the bar where Harumi and her dad live. He’s taken a liking to Harumi who wants nothing to do with him, but when her dad gets into an accident and needs money for medical treatment, Saburo makes a deal and unwittingly gives him an additional angle to start railroading Harumi into his arms.

Director Tsuneo Kobayashi would later be best known for genre pieces and tokusatsu. Besides some quite beautiful and unusually convincing work with backdrops, there are no shocks or special effects in Deep Blue Sea but there is plenty of music, most of it sung by Hachiro Kasuga with Misora taking centre stage for a few solo numbers of her own as well as humming an odd tune here and there. Despite not being an integrated musical (all of the songs have a diegetic genesis) and in contrast with many of Misora’s films, The Deep Blue Sea is otherwise a fairly typical musical drama in which the songs drive the narrative rather than being an aside to it.

It does however begin to blur genres, shifting into familiar Toei territory with the introduction of the sleazy yakuza tough guys who are willing to go to quite a lot of trouble to ruin the life of an ordinary girl like Harumi. The central romance follows a familiar pattern as Ken comes to care about Harumi and her dad through his connection with her birth father and becomes their noble protector, while Saburo, who’d silently harboured a crush on Harumi all along hovers sadly on the sidelines, wanting to support his friends in their romantic endeavour but also somewhat grateful when Ken decides to sacrifice himself on Harumi’s behalf. Ken’s sacrifice, however, doesn’t entirely work – you can’t get rid of men like Sakazaki through honest or logical ways and simply paying them off is never enough, in fact it might just make everything worse.

The Deep Blue Sea may be a little darker than most musical romances with its seedy port town setting, gangsters, smuggling action, and the constant sense of things always floating away with the boats that come and go, but in true musical fashion it all works out in the end. Despite learning that she is adopted and that a wealthier blood relative was keen to take her in, Harumi chooses to stay with her adopted father, steadfastly choosing real feeling over blood ties or pragmatic concerns – unlike the greedy bar owner who steals the money her father left her, or the nefarious gangster who tries to manipulate her into giving up her principles and stepping into his world of betrayal and avarice. As usual for a Toei film, the forces of good (for a given definition of “good”) eventually triumph and the bad pay for all their mistakes while the merely unlucky accept their fates with good grace and resolve to make the most of new opportunities. It may not have made any great waves, but The Deep Blue Sea is cheerful and fun and chock full of post-war humanism as the noble Ken comes to the rescue of the goodhearted Harumi and her steadfast father to stand up against the forces of corruption.

Some of Hibari’s musical numbers (no subtitles)

Tag: Hachiro Kasuga

Inn of the Floating Weeds (浮草の宿, Seijun Suzuki, 1957)

The Deep Blue Sea (青い海原, Tsuneo Kobayashi, 1957)