The changing social mores of the 1930s are played out in the fortunes of two sisters unwittingly falling for the same man in Hiromasa Nomura’s melancholy romance Kinuyo’s First Love. One of Shochiku’s most bankable directors, Nomura had one of his greatest hits with the romantic melodrama Aizen Katsura starring Kinuyo Tanaka and Ken Uehara. Tanaka was herself so popular in this period that her name was sometimes inserted into the titles of films in which she starred as it had been in earlier Nomura collaboration Kinuyo the Lady Doctor though this time she plays another stoic and self-sacrificing woman who gives up her own chance of happiness for that of her sister.
Kinuyo (Kinuyo Tanaka) is the oldest daughter of the Miyoshi senbei shop and has been acting as a mother to her sister Michiyo (Kuniko Igawa) since their own passed away some years previously. Their father, Mr Miyoshi (Reikichi Kawamura), has a job as a doorman at a Western-style hotel, but as the opening sequence proves he’s no longer as young as he was. When Kinuyo reminds him to be careful on his way, he snaps back that he’s “not that old”, though proceeds to forgot almost everything he needs including his hat and walks off with Michiyo’s significantly smaller bento rather than his own. The bento mixup, however, enables a meet cute between Michiyo, who has a job on the trading floor of a stockbroker’s, and the boss’ ennui-ridden son Shoichiro (Shin Saburi). Meanwhile, Kinuyo ends up falling head over heels for him when he gives she and her friend his tickets for a kabuki play after his geisha girlfriend stands him up.
The arrangements of the Miyoshi family are perhaps odd for the time in that Kinuyo seems to be supporting the family well enough with the senbei store alone even though she keeps giving half the stock away to a little girl who comes every morning. She desperately wants her father to retire and evidently feels their finances wouldn’t suffer without his wages. When he’s eventually fired for being old by the young boss who apparently “just likes everything new” and doesn’t appreciate the hotel’s history or Mr. Miyoshi’s place within it, she’s pleased rather than worried and sets about finding things for him to do at home where she can keep an eye on him and he can still feel useful. Michiyo meanwhile though she has received a good education and has managed to get a stable modern office job feels much the same secure in the knowledge that it doesn’t really matter if she gets fired because Kinuyo can go on supporting them all without her help. It’s perhaps this freedom that all own her to talk to the boss’ son like he was a regular human, something that immediately impresses him because he’s fed up of people sucking up to him or only telling him what they think he wants to hear.
To that extent, Shoichiro maybe an example of the wastrel modern boy who is ruined by his privilege as evidenced in his lack of interest in the family business and relationships with geisha though the film is also usually sympathetic of his go-playing girlfriend Fusa (Yoshiko Tsubouchi) whom he callously throws over after falling in love with Michiyo ironically because of her seeming modernity in her willingness to be straight with him. But then, lingering feudalism continues to overshadow their romance in the obvious class difference which exists between them. Mr Miyoshi wonders if the marriage is a good thing or if they will simply be incompatible but Kinuyo, even on realising that her sister’s suitor is the man with whom she has also fallen in love, assures him social class needn’t be an issue unless they make it one while simultaneously explaining that Michiyo will need to sever ties with them to fully join Shoichiro’s social rank because they are no longer good enough to be accounted members of her family. To make her point, she begins teaching Michiyo matters of upper-class ettiequte such as the importance of kneeling down to open a shoji with the wooden kick board rather than risk damaging the paper by opening it while standing up.
Michiyo’s forthrightness might be seen as modern, but her values are otherwise old-fashioned bringing Shoichiro back to the “right” path of honest handwork through refusing to indulge him. Meanwhile a very clear message is being sent that the older generation need to step out of the way, as Kinuyo puts it make their children capable and then let them work as Shoichiro’s father has perhaps failed to do while Mr. Miyoshi has done all too well. For a film of 1940, Kinuyo’s First Love has surprisingly little political content but is perhaps intended to send this message of industry among the young while the family’s senbei store may otherwise satisfy the censors in its presentation of a traditionally Japanese culinary craft. Having adopted the role of the mother, Kinuyo selflessly sacrifices her own happiness for that of her sister even though it will mean their separation but remains undefeated even in her heartbreak sniffling through her tears that she will go on looking for a good husband for herself refusing to “burden” her father with a responsibility which would traditionally belong to him declaring herself perhaps the most modern of them all.
Windows on Worlds 