Tag: Haruo Tanaka

The Man Without a Map (燃えつきた地図, Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1968)

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Hired to find a missing person no one really wants found, a detective begins to chase his own tail amid the impersonal vistas of the contemporary city in Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Man Without a Map (燃えつきた地図, Moetsukita chizu). The fourth and final in his series of Kobo Abe adaptations and the only one in colour, the film’s Japanese title “burned-up map” may also, in its way, refer to the city of Tokyo which appears blurred out and indistinct in the sepia-tinted opening and is thereafter frequently shot from above as a depersonalised space where anonymous cars shuttle along highways like so many ants moving in rhythm with the momentum of the metropolis.

We follow a nameless detective (Shintaro Katsu) as he’s charged with investigating the disappearance of a 43-year-old salaryman, Hiroshi Nemuro, who turns out to have myriad other personalities and hasn’t been seen for six months. The man’s wife, Mrs Nemuro (Etsuko Ichihara), is not terribly helpful and the detective comes to wonder if the investigation itself is intended to further disguise the man’s whereabouts and prove that he really is a “missing person”. Yet this Tokyo is full of “missing people” including the detective who, we later learn, is a kind of fugitive himself. He apparently walked out on his wife (Tamao Nakamura), the owner of a successful boutique, because he couldn’t find his place there any more. He was once a salaryman too, and became a detective because it was the furthest thing he could think of from a regular job. 

It confuses him that no one really seems to be interested in where Nemuro is or if he’s alright, only in the reason behind his disappearance. The more he chases him, the more he begins to take on Nemuro’s characteristics as if he were intended to slide into the space Nemuro has vacated. Toru Takemitsu’s eerie harpsichord score only seems to add to the hauntingly gothic quality of this quest. The question is whether such a thing as identity even exists any more. The detective puts on Nemuro’’s jacket, though it’s too small, and is mistaken for him, while a colleague of Nemuro’s insists that he’s seen him in the street and is sure it was Nemuro simply because of the unusual colour of his suit without ever seeing his face. Tashiro (Kiyoshi Atsumi) tells the detective that Nemuro had a secret hobby taking nude photos at a specialist club that caters to such things. The two of them are confident they’ve identified the woman in the picture based on her haircut, but the girl they speaks laughs and takes off her wig explaining that she was merely asked to wear it, so the woman in the photo could be anyone, including Nemuro’s own wife.

Nemuro apparently had a series of hobbies for which he’d obtained certificates because he said that having them helped him to feel anchored in his life, though he’s apparently unmoored now. Like the detective, he may have been trying on different personalities from car mechanic to school teacher looking for the right fit and a place he felt he belonged in rebellion against the depersonalisation of the salaryman society in which one man in a suit is as good as another. The detective finds an opposite number in the missing man’s brother-in-law (Osamu Okawa), a very modern, apparently gay gangster connected with a network of male sex workers sold on to influential elites, and a commune of similarly displaced people working as casual labourers that is overcome with corporate thugs and eventually trashed.

The trashing of the commune may have something to do with a man named Maeda who is a councillor in a town no one’s heard of, but was possibly involved in some shady business over which Nemuro may have been intending to blackmail him or blow a whistle with the assistance of his brother-in-law who helped him land a big contract at work. The more the detective investigates, the more confused he becomes. It’s impossible to follow the case as we might expect in a conventional noir thriller, but we’re not supposed to be looking at Nemuro’s disappearance so much as the detective’s gradually fracturing sense of self as he becomes lost in the anonymous city. He sees himself bury Mrs Nemuro in leaves only for her body somehow reduce itself to its component parts and sink into the street. Later her face is superimposed on the buildings as if she were looking down on him while he is lost and alone. Nemuro’s face also appears on buildings, though more as a metaphor as if the salaryman and the office building were one and the same and the reason the detective can’t find him is because he doesn’t really exist as a concrete identity. The detective spots a dead cat in the road and laments that he never thought to ask its name, but will try to think up a good one later. He might as well be talking about himself, now displaced, unmoored, and pursued among the city streets, a man without a map lost amid the simulacrum of an imaginary city.

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.

The Woman in the Rumour (噂の女, Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954)

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A mother and daughter find themselves deceived by the same man, each hemmed in by realities which cannot be altered but eventually coming to a place of mutual understanding that allows them to restore their relationship not only as parent and child but as women in Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1954 melodrama, The Woman in the Rumour (噂の女, Uwasa no Onna). The first question we might ask ourselves is to which of the women the title refers, or indeed to which rumour, though in a sense rumours matter little for either of them when the problem is the constraints which each of them feel as women in the contemporary society. 

Even so, the sense of shame is evident when Yukiko (Yoshiko Kuga) is brought back to the geisha house run by her mother Hatsuko (Kinuyo Tanaka) after having attempted to take her own life in Tokyo. As we learn, the reason for her despair is in part heartbreak. She had been engaged but her fiancé’s family convinced him to end their relationship when they discovered that her mother ran a geisha house. Thus the suicide attempt is also a reflection of her sense of futility. She will always be the daughter of a woman who earned her living in the sex trade. This is a fact that cannot be changed and may lead her to think that her situation is hopeless because the same thing is likely to happen again leaving her unable to marry in a society in which there are few options for a single woman to make a life for herself not to mention the loneliness of living without romantic love. 

Hatsuko, meanwhile, is uncertain how seriously she should take the situation in part believing that it’s a product of youthful naivety in her daughter’s first romantic heartbreak. When a young doctor with whom she is close, Matoba (Tomoemon Otani), explains to her that Yukiko is depressed because she feels deep shame, self-loathing, and hopelessness due to her mother’s occupation, Hatsuko struggles to understand it and does not fully believe him. Nevertheless, she took care to bring her daughter up largely outside of the geisha world, sending Yukiko to Tokyo to study music implying that she herself to some degree sees her work as improper. The other girls view Yukiko with a degree of disdain, realising that her refinement was bought with their exploitation and noticing her animosity towards them. 

Hatsuko is mother both to Yukiko and the young women under her care who are always quick to point out that this is one of the better geisha houses because they are well looked after. When one of the women, Usugumo (Kimiko Tachibana), is taken ill, Hatusko calls in the doctor and allows her time off to rest which likely would not be granted at another house. She is reluctant to send her to hospital, but would if the situation called for it. In a sense it’s this solicitation that eventually allows Yukiko to find accommodation with her mother’s profession as she grows closer to the other women while nursing Usugumo herself and comes to understand their particular circumstances that have left them no choice but to live as geisha. Usugumo is reluctant to go to hospital because she is worried about the money she’d usually send to her sister Chiyoko (Sachiko Mine) who works the family farm and cares for their sickly father, but when she dies Chiyoko herself is left with little option other than to petition the geisha house to take her sister’s place. 

On seeing Chiyoko sitting on the step and pleading to be taken on, another of the women laments as she’s leaving that she wonders when there will be no more need for women like them. The geisha world is perhaps an unchangeable reality, just like Yukiko’s birth and her mother’s age. The rumours that surround Hatsuko are to do with her closeness with Matoba with whom she has clearly been in an intimate relationship, dreaming of becoming his wife and even considering selling the geisha house to buy a large property where they could live together as a couple while he runs a private clinic. Matoba predictably decides he prefers the younger Yukiko, Hatsuko increasingly desperate after overhearing their conversation about leaving her behind to move to Tokyo together where Matoba ponders finishing his education. The play they’ve gone to see almost feels like a personal attack as an actor intones that feelings of love at 20 are fine but at 60 it’s merely shameful. “Even carp know better than to fall in love at this age”, he adds, the old woman a figure of ridicule in her romantic delusion leaving Hatsuko feeling both humiliated and resentful.

When Hatsuko finally confronts Matoba, she does it as a scorned woman rather than as a mother, while Yukiko in turn first turns on her rather than Matoba even as she begins to realise the reality of the situation that the man who seduced her had been using her mother for his own gain in total disregard of her feelings. In short, even if Hatsuko were not her mother which certainly makes this a very complicated situation, he is not the sort of man she’d want to make a life with. Acutely aware of her own experiences of heartbreak, she fears for her mother’s wellbeing and comes to an understanding of her as a woman while accepting that “men are all alike” and in that at least perhaps her mother’s profession is the most honest of all. Mutually betrayed, mother and daughter are able to repair their familial bonds while Yukiko finds herself taking refuge in the geisha house as a space of female solidarity and bulwark against a cruel and patriarchal society. 

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. 

A Wife’s Heart (妻の心, Mikio Naruse, 1956)

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“We’re too late for everything these days,” mutters an overly cheerful geisha whose behaviour is becoming ever more erratic. A sense of fatalism, that everything has already been decided and there is no real escape from the misery of life, hangs over much of Naruse’s filmmaking even if his heroines often do their best to rail against it and on occasion succeed. Kiyoko (Hideko Takamine), the heroine of A Wife’s Heart (妻の心, Tsuma no Kokoro), finds herself faced with just this dilemma while considering which side of a generational divide she might be on and whether she has the power to escape from her disappointing life to chase emotional fulfilment. 

We can see the literal distance between herself and her husband Shinji (Keiju Kobayashi) in the opening sequence as he stands in a vacant lot at the back of their property and she firmly within the domestic space hanging washing. Yet for all that she seems excited, perhaps even a little giddy as they plot their escape together through planning to turn that vacant space into a cafe in an attempt to fend off the economic changes ravaging their town and wider society of Japan in the mid-1950s. Out and about on his bike, Shinji looks anxiously at the construction of a new pharmacy much larger than his own and with flashy modern signage. Their business is failing and they don’t know how to save it so the cafe is their way out and also a break with the depressing past represented by Shinji’s grumpy mother, Ko (Eiko Miyoshi), who is predictably dead against the cafe idea. 

The new business, in its way, is also a stand-in for the child they don’t have and a means for Kiyoko to find domestic fulfilment in a society ruled by motherhood. This one reason that the sudden arrival of her sister-in-law Kaoru (Chieko Nakakita) with her small daughter Rumiko causes so much disruption. Kaoru has fulfilled the social obligations which Kiyoko has not and quickly insinuates herself within the house, taking over the domestic space as symbolised by her otherwise trivial action of putting back a pair of nail clippers in the place she sees fit rather than their usual home. Yet she does this in part because her husband, Zenichi (Minoru Chiaki) who left the family to become a salaryman in Tokyo, is so obviously unreliable and appears to have not for the first time lost his job while employed at a company possibly involved in something untoward. On getting wind of Shinji’s plans to open a cafe, Zenichi announces he’s thinking of opening one himself and gets his mother to put pressure on the couple to give him the money they borrowed for their dream project.

It’s the loan that in part allowed Kiyoko to consider life beyond her marriage in reuniting with the still unmarried brother of her best friend Yumiko (Yoko Sugi). Kenkichi (Toshiro Mifune) is everything Shinji is not, handsome, well dressed, and with a good, middle-class job working at a bank. On a visit to her relatives, Kiyoko’s aunt remarks that everyone wanted to marry her provoking a slight twinge of pain in Kiyoko’s face. Mother-in-law Ko arranges marriages and it’s likely she arranged the one between Kiyoko and her son and that Kiyoko likely agreed out to of social obligation under the rationale that Shinji was a good catch as the proprietor of a successful business. The implication is that if, like Yumiko, she had held out a little longer she probably would have fallen in love and married Kenkichi. As the atmosphere in the family home grows ever more toxic, she grows closer to him yet at least in part as a symbol of the path not taken, what her life may have been like if only she had resisted and claimed a little more freedom for herself. 

Ko has also arranged a marriage for youngest daughter Sumiko (Akemi Negishi) who asks her if all of her matches were happy. An indignant Ko replies that only one or two have split up, but as Sumiko points out just because a couple stays together does not mean they are happy. “Women don’t have the courage, they just give up,” she remarks implying that she, as a representative of the younger generation, might be less minded to simply accept a disappointing situation in the same way as someone of Kiyoko’s age may feel she had to. For these reasons Kiyoko is torn. Yumiko remarks that she and Shinji didn’t even particularly like each other when they married and perhaps remain indifferent to each other now. The cafe may have brought them closer as a couple, but now it’s causing a rift in the wider family while also offering Kiyoko the faintest glimmer of an escape route. When she returns to the cafe where she was learning the ropes as a part-time employee, much to Ko’s chagrin at losing a domestic helper, it’s clear that she’s doing so in part to have a means of supporting herself as she leans closer to the idea of leaving Shinji. 

But for all that it seems unlikely that she has the courage, as Sumiko put it, to break with the traditional social codes of feminity by leaving a husband who was not really bad but that she did not love and made her unhappy. In rebellion, Shinji has an indiscretion with a local geisha who goes missing on the way home from a hot springs and is later found dead having taken her own life because she was trapped in a bad relationship with her husband. The implication is that this is the only way many women find to escape from their dismal circumstances and may soon present itself to Kiyoko if she cannot find a way to reconcile herself to her life with Shinji or find the confidence to leave it. The enemy is the increasingly outdated institution of arranged marriages as advocated by the austere Ko who refuses to hire maids while believing herself entitled to the free labour of her daughters-in-law, and the patriarchal social codes of a modernising nation in which Shinji can have his dalliance with a geisha and his wife is expected to put up with it, but merely being seen walking with a man not one’s husband provokes gossip and jealousy. 

When Shinji implies he suspects her of having an affair with Kenkichi, he tells her that she’s free to follow her heart and he understands if she chooses to leave him but of course by telling her this he seals her fate by making it almost impossible for her to do so. The couple repairs itself, but the resolution is far from comfortable as it becomes clear that each is essentially resigning themselves to misery because of social convention vowing that they’ll build their cafe in the next season though it seems like a dream destined to go unfulfilled while the institution of Rumiko left behind in the family superficially fills the void it was designed to fill. The fades to black between scenes seem to echo an exhalation of bleakness as the interrupted thought of Kenkichi’s dangerous “Kiyoko…” as an admission that the prospect of escape is only ever a torturous fantasy and a heart is something that must be sacrificed in the name of conventional success. 

Dancing Girl (踊子, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1957)

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The sudden arrival of a younger sister throws the despair and disappointment of an ageing chorus dancer into stark relief in Hiroshi Shimizu’s Dancing Girl (踊子, Odoriko). Chiyo (Machiko Kyo) is indeed a dancing girl, waltzing her way through post-war Japan with seemingly little thought for others or the consequences of her actions aware only of her ability to dazzle and what it might win her if used in the right way while her sister quietly yearns for a more comfortable, conventional kind of life.

Hanae (Chikage Awashima) apologises for Chiyo’s childishness when she suddenly gets up to marvel at the snow during in an important meeting with choreographer Tamura (Haruo Tanaka) who has offered to take her on as a trainee dancer but he simply replies that it’s what makes her special in the way Hanae herself perhaps is not. In that sense there’s something a little uncomfortable in Tamura’s first word on meeting Chiyo being simply “sexy” uttered as if he were already salivating over her when the key to her appeal seems to lie in the awkward juxtaposition of her naivety and curvaceous figure. In many ways, it’s childishness that is Chiyo’s defining characteristic. She follows her impulses and is incapable of thinking beyond them. In a repeated motif we see her eat heartily as if she had not for eaten days or else to be snacking on something or other at a time when food is scarce. We later discover that she’s some kind of kleptomaniac, stealing at every opportunity even when she has no need to, simply taking something she wants without considering why it might not be right to do so as if all the world belonged to her. Meanwhile she embraces her sexuality without shame, sleeping with whomever she chooses but also doing so in a calculated effort to advance her own cause. 

The irony is that her rise coincides with her sister’s fall. Hanae has passed the age at which she might have become a star and is beginning to age out of her career as a chorus dancer. She tells her husband, Yamano (Eiji Funakoshi), that what she wants is a comfortable life and to become a mother though the couple have been married for five years and not yet conceived a child leading her wonder if there’s medical issue in play though Yamano confesses in what turns out to be an ironic comment that he doesn’t really want children anyway. In any case, they are each becoming tired of life in Asakusa and their mutually unsatisfying careers. Crushingly they each fear they have disappointed the other, Hanae sorry that she never made it as a dancer and wondering if Yamano would have been better off marrying someone from a less stigmatised profession, while he feels guilty that he could not give her a better standard of life and has failed to progress in his own career as a violinist. Chiyo’s arrival reinvigates them both in different ways. Hanae shifts into a maternal mode otherwise denied her in looking after Chiyo as she begins her career as a dancer, while Yamano begins with her a sexual affair that rekindles his masculine drive. 

But Chiyo also remains flighty and elusive. Essentially lazy, she soon tires of dancing and decides to become a geisha because it requires less rehearsal, then to give that up too to become someone’s second mistress. She rejects the conventional, settled life Hanae has come to long for and describes that in the countryside as “boring” when she suggests moving there having selflessly offered to adopt the baby Chiyo has also rejected which maybe Yamano’s or perhaps Tamura’s or someone else’s entirely not that it necessarily matters. The closing moments of the film perhaps imply a moralising rebuke of the new post-war vision of liberated sexuality, a despondent Chiyo once again making a surprise appearance and wanting to see her child but being afraid to do so unable to match up to the unsullied maternity of Hanae. Shimizu lends her passage a kind of transient quality in his restless camera which is in constant motion sliding laterally from one scene to another often coming to rest on emptiness even amid the bustling streets of a neon-lit Asakusa and the false promises of its illusionary glow.

Dancing Girl screens at Japan Society New York on May 18 as part of Hiroshi Shimizu Part 2: The Postwar and Independent Years.

365 Nights (三百六十五夜, Kon Ichikawa, 1948)

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For his second film at Shintoho, Kon Ichikawa had wanted to adapt a story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa that later inspired Rashomon, but was handed a standard melodrama to direct first. Ichikawa apparently did not think much of the novel the film was to be based on nor the script by Kennosuke Tateoka which he subsequently brushed up with the help of his new wife Natto Wada, and it’s not difficult to see why he might have felt he had an uphill battle. Melodrama is after all a genre that is founded on coincidence, though 365 Nights (三百六十五夜, Sambyaku-rokujugo ya) quickly strains credulity with the sheer number of unlikely events and surprise reappearances along with its rather strange take on the contemporary post-war society which is undoubtedly influenced by the demands of the Occupation censorship regime. 

Indeed, the setting itself seems reminiscent of 1930s cinema following the dashing hero Koroku, played by the equally dashing Ken Uehara, an architect who has walked away from his privileged upbringing as the son of a successful construction magnate. His problem is that he’s being aggressively courted by the haughty Ranko (Hideko Takamine), also the daughter of a successful but shady businessman, who to modern eyes is basically stalking him. Grinning with an evil glint in her eye, she tells her minion Tsugawa (Yuji Hori) that she’ll have seduced Koroku within 365 days which by melodrama standards seems to give her quite a lot of leeway.

Clueing us up to her villainy, Ranko is always seen wearing incredibly stylish Western outfits but otherwise behaves in a transgressively masculine fashion ordering her male employees about while set on the sexual conquest of Koroku who despises her for everything she is. It’s difficult not to see an inherent criticism of the new post-war woman and an anxiety regarding the power that comes with wealth being wielded by someone who is not a man. The contrast between Ranko and traditional femininity is rammed home by the fact that Teruko (Hisako Yamane), the daughter of the landlady in the house where Koroku finds new lodging after moving home to escape Ranko, is always dressed in kimono and otherwise naive and innocent. 

This positions Ranko, and her minion Tsugawa who is also in love with her, as the villains who are rebelling against the kind of earnestness expressed by Koroku and Teruko. From more humble origins, Tsugawa is deeply resentful of Kokoku’s class privilege and feels that he looks down on him which is one reason he seeks revenge by destroying his life along with his sexual jealously that Ranko pays him no attention yet is fixated on Kokoku perhaps precisely because he is entirely uninterested in her though it remains mystery why you’d want to be married to someone who strongly dislikes you. 

Yet for all his own earnestness, Koroku is almost betrayed by the capitalist father of whom he also seems to disapprove when he asks him to consent to an arranged marriage with Ranko to save his business. Meanwhile, it also transpires that Teruko’s father has been absent from her life because he two has a criminal past further tainting the legacy each of them bear. Ichikawa stages each evolution of their relationship at the same, noirish street corner that seems to exist as a kind of border between the illicit underworld that seeps out from Tsugawa’s bar into the post-war society, and the geniality represented by Teruko’s otherwise nice, middle-class home. 

It’s the this transgressive quality, of being caught between these two worlds, that starts to eat away at Koroku leaving him a broken and shabby man little better than a tramp. In a break with melodrama norms, though he is aware that he has led Teruko into Tsugawa’s trap he comes to believe that she has betrayed him while she clings fiercely to her love and in the end attempts to sacrifice it basically giving Koroku to Ranko whom she believes can better care for him in his now corrupted state. Though events become grim with a wedding that is staged like a funeral and takes place at a death bed, there is also the sense that something must come right that seems a little incongruous and perhaps a concession to the censors board as may be the coda implying that Ranko, despite having undergone a kind of redemption, will also have to pay for all her dodgy dealings. Though clearly hampered by the material, Ichikawa crafts some stunning images such as the final scene at Tsugawa’s bar along with a surprisingly energetic action sequence during which Koroku fights off burglars at Teruko’s home and wins her heart with his manliness. In any case despite the hints at redemption the implication remains that this is a world dark at its core in which not even the earnest can escape its creeping corruption. 

Three Women of the North (北の三人, Kiyoshi Saeki, 1945)

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Film was the primary medium for propaganda and Japan had been pumping out increasingly patriotic fare under the National Policy programme since the late 1930s but what’s interesting about those which appeared towards the war’s end is that they do not try to sugarcoat the situation or pretend that the conflict is going well, rather they use the encroaching sense of desperation as an additional motivator to get all hands on deck. Released on Aug. 5, 1945, Three Women of the North (北の三人, Kita no Sannin) was the last propaganda film to be produced and the only film currently screening when the war ended on Aug. 15. Of course, after that it was swiftly withdrawn by the Occupation forces never to be seen again except perhaps as a historical document. 

Like The Most Beautiful, the film skews accidentally feminist in its focus on three female radio operators who seem to be regarded as something of pioneers in the field. After encountering technical issues, a plane with a top secret mission is guided into an airfield in Aomori by nothing more than the voice of radio operator Sumiko (Setsuko Hara) yet on landing the pilot expresses surprise apparently stunned that a young woman would be able to perform such a stellar job. The sexist attitudes seem almost set up so they can be shot down, the pilot is quickly corrected by the ground control chief (Takashi Shimura) who explains “nowadays women can become excellent radio operators.”

Of course, this is born of necessity seeing as at this late stage there is a huge untapped resource of young and widowed middle-aged women previously discouraged from getting directly involved with the war effort. In earlier propaganda films, the most important thing a woman could do was get married and particularly to a young man who was going to the war, but this time a conflict develops between two of the women, Yoshie (Hideko Takamine) and Sumiko, because Sumiko declined to marry Yoshie’s brother Kazuo before he left because she too wanted to do her bit for the war effort and would not have been able to do so as a married woman. On learning from Yoshie that Kazuo has been killed after volunteering to lead a suicide mission, she breaks down in tears and cries that she should have married him but Yoshie, who has forgiven her on learning of her patriotic reasoning, tells her that she has done the right thing and her brother would be proud of her for serving her country. 

Meanwhile, at another airfield even deeper into the frozen north their friend Akiko (Hisako Yamane) has a developed a fondness for a research scientist but their romance is of course frustrated by the war. In a moment of fraught emotion, he tells her that he will be returning after delivering his findings and she should wait for him there which is almost to say that they will be granted their romantic resolution once the war is over. The curious thing is that Hara (Shin Saburi) is a weather scientist whose cloud forecasts have apparently been very useful to the pilots. A slightly strange diversion sees the film try to argue that at this point the greatest threat to the Japanese war effort is the weather, which aside from sounding like a very British excuse makes very little sense even if it is obviously a factor in mission success. 

The radio operators obviously can’t do much about the weather, but they can pull together with plucky spirit dedicating themselves to the national good and giving all to the war effort. While Sumiko and Yoshie are having their emotional confrontation they’re interrupted by a trio of young women who were supposed to be getting a radio demonstration from Sumiko but they’ve come to say they can’t make it because one of the other girl’s mothers has been taken ill so they’re walking up the snowy mountain to the observatory in the middle of the night to send her back and take over her shift. When the radio operator on the special flight is taken down by pneumonia (the weather, again), Yoshie volunteers insisting that she’s prepared if the worst should happen but on landing remarks that she couldn’t have got through it without Sumiko and Akiko on the other end of the line resting their success on female solidarity. Though it’s clear the film was made on a shoe string it does feature special effects by none other than Eiji Tsuburaya along with some well conceived action sequences that lend an uncomfortably thrilling note to this extremely late entry into the realms of propaganda filmmaking. 

Ghost Man (幽霊男, Motoyoshi Oda, 1954)

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Employees at a small nude modelling agency find themselves in the firing line when a “bloodsucking painter” escapes from a psychiatric institution in Motoyoshi Oda’s adaptation of Seishi Yokomizo’s Ghost Man (幽霊男, Yurei Otoko). Though produced by Toho and helmed by the director of The Invisible Man, the film does not particularly make use of special effects and as it turns out, Ghost Man is just a creepy name for a weird villain rather than an accurate description of a supernatural threat. 

Even so, you’d expect someone who runs a modelling agency to be on high alert after hearing that a crazed painter who is a danger to women is on the loose, but the manager of the Mutual Art Club simply assumes it must be an eccentric artist thing when he’s presented with a business card from “Ghost Man” Sugawa. Ghost Man is dressed in an unsettling outfit and is immediately rough with the model he picks out, Keiko, all of which you would think would have the manager thinking twice about allowing her to go with him. Some of the other girls urge her to turn the job down, but Keiko is the breadwinner for her family and work has been thin on the ground so she agrees to take it only to realise Ghost Man does indeed intend to kill her on arrival at an abandoned house way out in the country. 

“What a single woman has to do to earn a living, it’s both thrilling…and terrifying,” one of the other women, Ayuko, tells her boyfriend Ken (Yu Fujiki) after she quits the agency to become a stripper and decides to take to the stage despite knowing that Ghost Man may try to kill her during the show. Her words hint at a transgressive frisson of danger which she at least has chosen to embrace, an icy glint in her eye as she encourages Ken to pay close attention to her performance which she claims will be “wonderful”. Nevertheless, it also makes clear that the work the women do at the agency is necessarily unsafe given that it involves travelling to the home of a man they don’t know where they will be expected to undress. 

For reasons the film doesn’t quite explain, the models are also members of the “Bizarro Enthusiast Club” led by Dr. Kano (Joji Oka) who is the head doctor at the psychiatric hospital from which the bloodsucking painter, Tsumura (Ren Yamamoto), escaped. Meanwhile, Dr. Kano also seems to have a sideline in taking the girls to remote locations for nude photoshoot parties. In all honesty, he’s quite suspicious especially seeing as he seems to instinctively know how to open the tricky door at the abandoned house where Keiko’s body is found. Then again, we’re also told that Tsumura was once a member of the club with at least some suggesting that he ended up getting too into the bizarre and going out of his mind to the extent that he began committing weird acts of crime of his own. 

The lesson might be that getting overly obsessed with the occult and esoteric is unhealthy, only it turns there’s something else going on entirely that isn’t really about anything “weird” but caused by completely banal negative human emotions resulting from spurned romantic interest and the fear of parental disappointment. This being a Kindaichi mystery, the famous detective soon makes his appearance (played by a hardboiled Seizaburo Kawazu) only in a less eccentric guise and accompanied by a more efficient Todoroki who assists him as he begins to put the pieces together to solve the mystery. 

The villain may be taking advantage of a historical moment in allowing others to think his face is bandaged to disguise a disfigurement like those of many men wounded in the war, as was the case in another Kindaichi case The Inugami Family, but is also harking back to the Invisible Man while his accomplice adopts a much more “monstrous” appearance with buck teeth and the two missing fingers on his hand along with the insectile movements that play into the spider-themed finale. Oda has a lot of fun with the villain’s Phantom of the Opera-esque antics which include recording a tape to taunt the police along with a public announcement of “Act 3” of his ongoing drama to be staged at the “Reijin Theatre” which literally means “the beautiful lady show” but is also a minor pun that makes it sound a little “Ghost Man Theatre” in true B-movie villain fashion. Even so, there’s an underlying darkness in the serial killer drama most particularly in the scrapbook the villain makes with photos of the dead women posed and titled as works of art as if they were never any more alive than the mannequins he often substitutes for them. Striking in its set pieces and unsettling design, Oda’s strange drama is surprisingly nasty and actually quite cynical even as it unmasks its villain as little more than a ghost of man who hid behind the spectre of unease to mask his cowardice and insecurity.

Ikiru (生きる, Akira Kurosawa, 1952)

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The Japanese economy may have embarked on a path towards recovery thanks to the stimulus of the Korean War, but in the early 1950s many might have thought it too soon to ask if survival in itself was enough yet this is exactly what disillusioned civil servant Kenji Watanabe finds himself asking after receiving the devastating news that he has advanced stomach cancer and year at most to live. “To live” is apt translation of Akira Kurosawa’s intensely moving existential melodrama, Ikiru (生きる), which tackles the compromises of the salaryman dream head on along with those of the contradictions of the sometimes dehumanising post-war society. 

As the opening voice over reveals to to us, Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) is man who died long ago or perhaps has never truly been alive. In some senses, he is nothing more than an embodiment of the seal he uses to stamp documents day in day out, a mere piston in an ever turning machine of relentless bureaucracy. A young woman, Miss Odagiri (Miki Odagiri), working in the Public Affairs department loudly reads out a joke someone has written about their boss, Watanabe, who has taken not a single day’s holiday in 30 years suggesting that it’s less that he fears city hall will grind to a halt without him than they’ll suddenly figure out city hall has no need of him at all. The irony is city hall does indeed grind to a halt in Watanabe’s absence as he, unthinkably, fails to turn up for work for days on end as the papers pile ever higher on his desk. “Nothing moves here without his seal” one of the workers admits, bewildered by this sudden break with protocol while salivating over its implications in the possibility that Watanabe’s chair may soon be empty. 

Yet Watanabe’s crisis is that he’s realised he’s wasted his life on a pointless bureaucratic career that’s done little more than keep a roof over his head. Even the roof is a fairly modest one and it’s clear that his grown up son Mitsuo (Nobuo Kaneko) considers him to be a stingy old miser, unable to understand why he’s never spent so much as a penny on himself and lives in a kind of self-imposed austerity. Perhaps to Watanabe this is what constitutes properness. He’s done everything he was supposed to do, got a steady job at city hall and eventually became the head of department, but now he feels foolish and lonely. Mitsuo and his wife seem to resent him and talk openly about their plans to use their inheritance, along with Watanabe’s retirement bonus, for a downpayment on a “modern” home the polar opposite of the pre-war townhouse where the family continue to live. 

Mitsuo and Kazue (Kyoko Seki) are perhaps emblems of the increasingly empty consumerism of the post-war era, emotionally disconnected from Watanabe and seeking only the flashy and new. Miss Odagiri, the young woman from work, immediately says that she’d love to live in a home like Watanabe’s rather than the crowded multiple occupancy flat she currently inhabits with her family. Cheerful and outgoing, Odagiri is on the other hand a symbol of a new generation that wants something more out of life than simple material comfort and might even be willing to trade it for a small amount of happiness. Having worked at city hall for all of 18 months, she decides that she just can’t take it anymore and is quitting to get a job in a factory making toy rabbits that she says allow her to feel as if she’s making friends with all the babies in Japan. 

To that extent, Watanabe is himself also a baby craving Odagiri’s company admitting that he envies her youth and vitality in realising he squandered his own and will never get it back. How uncomfortable it must be for her, their final meeting in a restaurant sandwiched between a loving couple and teenage girl’s birthday party as Watanabe, gaunt and shrunken, claws at the air and begs her to help him live. Yet even within the grotesquery the tone is ironic, the strains of “Happy Birthday” accompanying Watanabe down the stairs as a the high school climbs up to meet her friends signalling his (re)birth as a man with purpose and determination. Just as Odagiri had found meaning in the rabbit, Watanabe finds it deciding to get a playground built over a post-war swamp in the slums filled with raw sewage and mosquitos that left the local children ill. 

Yet children’s parks aren’t particularly profitable which is presumably why the petition to build one had been kicked all round city hall in the infernal wheel of bureaucracy in which Watanabe too is trapped. “You call this democracy?” one of the women bringing the petition asks, taking the clerk to task complaining that all they do is fob them off insisting it’s someone else’s responsibility to help while determined only to guard their own turf. “You’re not supposed to do anything at city hall” someone ironically adds, “the best way to protect your place in this world is to do nothing at all”. Watanabe did nothing at all for 30 years and it got him nowhere, his dedication to his job disrupting his relationship with his son though Watanabe is ironically one of the most emotional men and engaged fathers seen on screen in the post-war era. 

After his death, in the park he helped build for which the deputy mayor has taken credit, his colleagues put him on trial at the wake trying to work out why he did it and whether or not he even knew he was dying seeing as he told no one close him not even the son whom he felt he could no longer trust. They deny his role while both praising and condemning his passion as somehow improper, disrupting the dispassionate rhythms of the bureaucratic machine with human emotion. It was only coincidence, they say. The deputy mayor wanted an election and the yakuza wanted to turn the swamp into a red light district. “Did he think he could just build a park?” someone adds, bemused by his effrontery as a man from Public Affairs straying into the Parks Department’s territory. You have to protect your turf after all. Finally moved by Watanabe’s last ditch bid to make his life mean something, to feel alive and know he has lived, the the drunken salarymen, all but one who retreats to look at Watanabe’s photo above the altar, swear to follow his example. 

But of course the bureaucratic wheel keeps turning, another dangerous sewage problem diverted to another department continuing the literal pollution of the capitalistic post-war society. A kind of ghost story, Kurosawa lights Shimura from below, shadows cast across his gaunt face even by his “rakish” new hat while his huge eyes have a somehow haunted, grotesque quality filled with hungry desperation. Yet it’s to childhood that Watanabe eventually returns, “perfectly happy” sitting on a swing singing a song from his youth about the price age while surrounded by snow and at last painfully, absurdly alive. 

Ikiru screens at the BFI Southbank, London on 4th & 15th February 2023 as part of the Kurosawa season.

Original trailer (English subtitles)