Tag: Hisashi Igawa

Madadayo (まあだだよ, Akira Kurosawa, 1993)

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It’s tempting to read Akira Kurosawa’s final film Madadayo (まあだだよ) as a kind of valediction, though he may not have thought of it as a “final” film and if he had, it would have been ironically for film’s title means “not yet” and thematically hints at a desire on hold to a life that is admittedly fleeting. Much of the film is indeed bound up with transience and the difficulties of accepting it, but it’s also a humorous tale of a man who was “pure gold” and managed to maintain his childish heart even into his 77th year. 

Inspired by the life of the writer Hyakka Uchida (Tatsuo Matsumura), the film rather curiously opens with his retirement as he abandons his teaching position to pursue writing full-time much to the disappointment of his doting students. The relationship between Uchida and the boys he taught is at the heart of the film, for much like Mr Chips he had no children of his own and is cared for in his old age by a collection of old boys who almost venerate him as if he were something precious which cannot be allowed to slip from the world. Soon after his retirement, Uchida achieves his Kanreki, that is his 60th birthday or the completion of one cycle of the Chinese zodiac which is also the beginning of a second never to be completed round, which some consider as a second childhood or the beginning of old age.

Uchida is indeed childishly innocent and generally lighthearted forever making incredibly silly puns and approaching even potentially serious situations with good humour. When his wife remarks that the rent may be reasonable on their new home because it is unlucky and prone to being burgled, Uchida simply puts up a series of signs directing thieves to the “burglars entrance” through the “burglars corridor” to the “burglars lounge” and “burglars exit” reasoning any potential robber would find the situation so odd as to want to leave as soon as possible. The house does turn out to be unlucky in a sense as it is burned down during the fire bombing of Tokyo leaving the Uchida and his wife to move into a tiny shack on the grounds of a ruined mansion. 

Signs of a sense of irony and an underlying darkness are, however, present in his improvised version of a march he would have taught the students during the years of militarism on which he comments on the disillusioning realities of new era of “democracy” under the Occupation ruled by bribery and corruption. The students decide to hold a birthday party for the professor they christen the “Not Yet Fest”, taking the lines from a child’s game of hide and seek to ironically ask if he’s ready to throw in the towel first, actually featuring a performance of his funeral which might seem insensitive but Uchida can be relied upon to see the funny side. During the party the former students give various speeches, one announcing he will recite the names of all the stations from one end of the country to the other, but no one really pays very much attention to them. The students even track on a large white dinner plate during a children’s song about the moon to hold behind Uchida’s head as if he were a buddha achieving enlightenment. 

Yet the crisis comes when, shortly after the students buy Uchida and his wife a new house to live in, their beloved cat Alley disappears, plunging the professor into a well of existential despair that leaves him unable to sleep or eat. The depths of his sorrow perhaps hint at his childish sincerity, though there is an undeniable poignancy in the attachment of the childless couple to this cat that chose them as its family. Despite the best efforts of the students along with the local community, Alley never returns though the professor and his wife learn to love a new cat who like Alley wandered into their garden and found a home. As in the poem that inspires Uchida in his “ascetic” life in the hut, life is an ever-flowing river. The waves of students that flowed through his classroom, the homes that were destroyed and rebuilt, the cats who stayed as long as they could and then made way for the new visitor all of them small circles of life that will continue long after he is gone. 

But as Uchida says, “Not Yet”. Like Kurosawa himself who feels the light dimming he asks for more time as if playing hide and seek with death whose presence he must eventually acknowledge even if he’s not quite ready to welcome him in. At the last Not Yet Fest that we see times have clearly changed. Uchida’s wife is now present along with the daughters and granddaughters of the students, one of whom points out they’ll soon be genuine old geezers themselves. For a moment we think we see the boy from 1943. Uchida tells the children to find their passion and give their lives to it, imparting one final not quite lesson while gifting them the cake they’ve just brought him in order of his 77th birthday. A 77th birthday is supposed to be lucky, though seven sevens are also 49 which is the length of a Buddhist mourning period and the time it takes to be reborn. The cycle begins again, as Uchida may know as he dreams of childhood hide and seek only to be distracted by a surrealist sky in its pinks and blues, a vista apparently painted by Kurosawa himself who lets the clouds roll into the credits an endless stream of dream and memory on which our lives are mere bubbles that disappear and form anew. But perhaps, not yet. 

Luminous Moss (ひかりごけ, Kei Kumai, 1992)

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At the end of the increasing surreal trial which concludes the play within a play in Kei Kumai’s Luminous Moss (ひかりごけ, Hikarigoke), the protagonist turns to the people of the court and asks them to look at him. He wants to know if they see the ring of light around his head that looks like the luminescent plants inside the cave where he spent three months or so after being shipwrecked in the middle of the war. His plea is as much to ask what would you have done and if we can ever really judge him when we ourselves have never been faced with his dilemma.

It is however a dilemma many were faced with, and one tacitly suggested in other earlier films such as Kon Ichikawa’s Fires on the Plain though at that point too taboo and painful to address openly. In the framing sequence which bookends the film, an author visits a town in Northern Hokkaido in search of inspiration and is guided to a cave, now reachable by a roadway built after the war, where luminous moss grows. The man who takes him, a headmaster (Rentaro Mikuni), also tells him of an incident which took place there in which four shipwrecked men swam to shore and took refuge within the cave. Only the captain (also played by Rentaro Mikuni) survived, making a perilous trek across the ice a few months later when his food source depleted and he was left with no other choice.

The middle of the film is presented as a flashback, but actually the play the author is writing based on the investigations of the headmaster who says that he increasingly came to sympathise with the captain because of his own experiences as a prisoner of war in Siberia. Hachizo (Kunie Tanaka), a middle-aged father to a large family who refuses to eat the corpse of the first man to die, Gosuke (Tetta Sugimoto), because he promised him he wouldn’t, describes the captain as a “resourceful man” in both positive and negative senses of the word. He assumes the captain is already calculating when the current supply will run out, and when his own body will have consumed, leaving him with a dilemma about what to do next. The captain is in no real doubt about the necessity of eating Gosuke’s flesh and feels no guilt about it, after all he died of natural causes after consuming seawater and is now, in the captain’s view, simply meat so not eating him is just a pointless waste. Perhaps the situation would be different if he had killed him deliberately in order to eat him, but on the other hand it would not really be advantageous to do so given that the captain’s end goal is surviving until the end of the winter when it will be possible to return to the mainland. Thus he waits for his men to die and leaves the rest up to fate. 

The situation only comes to light when a wooden box is washed to shore containing the bones of Private Nishikawa (Eiji Okuda), whom the captain did actually kill but accidentally while he was trying to commit suicide so that the captain would not be able to eat him. Nishikawa is originally a thorn in the side to the stranded men, a brainwashed militarist who insists they must survive out of loyalty to the emperor. He refuses to eat Gosuke’s corpse on moral grounds, but is eventually unable to resist unconsoled by Hachizo’s well-meaning advice that he should tell himself he did it for the emperor. Knowing that he did it solely for his own survival shatters his illusions of himself as a loyal subject and fractures his sense of identity. He cannot live with himself having eaten human flesh, while as the captain says those who were going to die were always going to while those who must survive must to everything to do so. 

Thus at his trial, in which he appears to have lost his mind, he stresses that though he does not object to the legal process or its consequences he will not feel himself to have been judged by the prosecutor (Hisashi Igawa) as he has never eaten human flesh nor had his own flesh eaten. While in the cave, Hachizo had claimed to see a glowing ring around Nishikawa’s face which he attributed to a folk belief that such a ring resembling the green glow of luminescent moss was a signifier of his guilt visible only from a certain angle and for a short time only to those who look for it. It’s this ring that captain asks others to look for at his trial, to show him the signifier of his own guilt so that he may himself accept it. But then he may actually have a point that those who have never experienced what he has experienced are incapable of judging him. At the critical moment, the trial is interrupted by an air raid, there after becoming increasingly surreal as the location is shifted back to the cave as if it were all taking place within the captain’s mind. 

The prosecutor tries to attack him for attempting to blame it all on nation and society, suggesting that his actions have disgraced all of Japan and brought shame on the emperor about whom the captain makes an inappropriate remark suggesting that the emperor too is human and merely “enduring” his circumstances. Pressed to explain himself, the captain only says that he is “enduring” many things and that during his time in the cave he simply “endured”, doing what seemed to him the only thing he could do. The prosector points out that Hachizo refused and chose death, while Nishikawa attempted suicide to atone for his actions, asking what right the captain had choose survival but the only ones who can really judge him the three men he cannibalised each of whom appear as (almost) silent ghosts whose judgement cannot be interpreted. 

Though the film is not as visually striking as others in Kumai’s earlier career, he succeeds in conjuring a sense of primeval eeriness in the swirling mists and oddly shaped icicles of the cave while avoiding any sense of gore in the act of cannibalism itself which might otherwise unbalance the ethical dimensions he wishes to address. In the closing sequence, both the writer and the headmaster are positioned behind the bars which now protect the moss as if this kind of primal impulse could really be restrained or tempered by our civility. After the death of Gosuke and given the objections of the other two men, the captain suggests waiting a day or two to see how long their “human feelings” could hold in the face of their survival, the answer perhaps being less than you’d hope and about as long as you’d expect.

Village of Eight Gravestones (八つ墓村, Yoshitaro Nomura, 1977)

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Can a curse end up being “real” just because people believe in it? Unlike many of his other crime films which were adapted from the novels of Seicho Matsumoto, Yoshitaro Nomura’s The Village of the Eight Gravestones (八つ墓村, Yatsuhaka-mura) edges towards the idea that the curse at its centre is real in a more literal sense with grimly grinning samurai standing on their hilltop and rejoicing in the fulfilment of the 400-year campaign of vengeance, but also hints at a toxic legacy of enmity and warfare along with a karmic sensibility found in many of Seishi Yokomizo’s other mysteries in which a noble family must account for the way it gained its riches. 

In this case, the Tajimi family which now owns most of the village became prosperous after betraying a band of eight displaced samurai during the Sengoku era. Fleeing the battlefield in defeat, the samurai had originally frightened the villagers when they came down off the mountain but were in actuality non-threatening, simply settling down to a life of farming and peaceful co-existence. But some members of the community became greedy and accepted the promises of riches from a rival clan for the service of eliminating the eight samurai. Cruelly inviting them to the local festival in what seemed like a moment of acceptance as members of the village, they betrayed them killing some by poison and others by the sword. 

Now, hundreds of years later, the Tajimi family is on the verge of extinction with the eldest daughter unable to bear children and the oldest son bedridden and soon to die which explains why they’re keen to track down long lost grandson Tatsuya Terada (Kenichi Hagiwara) who was presumably adopted by his stepfather and bears his name after his now deceased mother Teruko left the family to escape her abusive relationship with half-mad husband Yozo (Tsutomu Yamazaki). Surprisingly, it’s his maternal grandfather Ushimatsu Igawa (Yoshi Kato), who comes looking for him only to drop dead as soon as they meet of apparently strychnine poisoning in the first of several murders that all echo the ancestral curse placed upon the Tajimi family by samurai leader Yoshitaka Amako (Isao Natsuyagi) as he died. 

Like many of Nomura’s films this too features a journey only this one is in a sense into the past as Tatsuya ventures to the rural heart of Japan hoping to see his mother’s birthplace and satiate his curiosity about his birth father. What he discovers there is obviously a lot of what seems like unfounded local superstition along with a degree of unpleasant stigmatisation as he’s immediately accosted by a shamaness who calls him a murderer to his face for his connections with the Tajimis to whom he feels himself a stranger, and then is later blamed for all the weird goings on which only began after he arrived. The film uproots itself from the original 1948 setting to the present day which perhaps lessens the impact of its central theme about the legacy of violence and betrayal that is stoked by war and enmity along with the destructive capacity of human greed that encourages some to betray others for their own advancement only to discover that success founded on human sacrifice will never get you very far. 

Ironically in a more real world sense, it turns out to be greed that motivates these present crimes with the villain hoping to usurp the Tajimi family fortune and utilising the curse as a means to do so. Much of the action takes place in a network of underground caves filled with glowing green lakes where the villain eventually takes on demonic proportions, face ghostly white with yellowish eyes and a crazed expression that echoes those of the samurai as they died. Nomura hints at the sense of ancient dread in this very old place while also surprisingly bloody in his flashbacks which feature scenes of shocking violence including severed heads one of which seems to lick its lips and stare intently even while on display. This being a Kindaichi (Kiyoshi Atsumi) mystery, the famous detective does indeed appear though remains a background presence quietly solving the crime behind the scenes while Tatsuya searches for the key to his own history and an escape from this legacy of violence and destruction in reclaiming his own identity.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Desperate (どろ犬, Takaharu Saeki, 1964)

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A bruiser cop railing against the system is pulled towards the dark side in Takaharu Saeki’s icy noir, The Desperate (どろ犬, Doro Inu). Adapted from a novel by Shoji Yuki, the film is one of only two Saeki directed in an otherwise lengthy career mainly spent in television and captures an eerie sense of existential dread as its detective hero sinks to even greater depths in a quest for self preservation while kicking back against the hypocrisies of the post-war society. 

As one officer puts it, Sugai (Minoru Oki) is one of many veteran officers who can’t adjust to new codes of justice in the democratic era. In the film’s opening sequence, he’s pulled aside and warned about using excessive force on a suspect only to counter that he knows the guy’s guilty so he doesn’t see what the problem is. Sugai had been particularly motivated about this case as the victim was an 18-year-old girl raped after accepting a lift from a stranger. She was so traumatised that she could hardly speak but did remember the registration plate of the car. She’d only been working because her father lost his factory job though he appears to have begun drinking and is abusive towards his daughter for her silence, later coming to the station to drop the charges after being paid off by the suspect’s lawyer. The legal definition of rape in this era is founded not on an idea of consent but whether violence was involved and the victim can be proved to have resisted physically. The guilty party, Tomita (Hideo Murota) claims that nothing illegal transpired in his car and then walks away with a smirk when his lawyer gets him off the hook. It’s all too much for Sugai to bear, resentful that the rich and powerful are now effectively above the law thanks to legislation he feels ties his hands as a police officer. 

It’s at this point he runs into petty yakuza Yamaguchi (Ko Nishimura) whom he’s been trying to turn as an informant, unwisely mouthing off about his dissatisfaction with contemporary law enforcement only for Yamaguchi to turn the tables and effectively blackmail him having discovered that Sugai has begun a relationship with the estranged wife of an imprisoned gangster. In an act of petty revenge and desperation, Sugai leaks info on “guilty” suspects who weren’t charged to Yamaguchi who exacts financial justice by extorting them for money while threatening to expose their immorality. 

Disappointed in him, the gangster’s wife, Chiyo (Chisako Hara), exclaims that Sugai’s no different from her husband and in truth he isn’t. Part of Sugai’s resentment lies in the fact his wife left him for another man while he was on a stakeout, frightened by his violence and insisting that she hated detectives. His old-fashioned police tactics include taking suspects to the dojo where beats the living daylights out of them. Later he tells another, more earnest officer, he reminds him of himself when he was younger implying that he has become corrupted by the times and the impossibility of justice, particularly for young women whom he feels an urge to protect, in a world ruled by money and status. He may feel some pangs of guilt for a rookie who is unfairly fingered as the mole on the grounds that he and Yamaguchi were originally from the same area and had a past acquaintance, but in the end is happy enough to scapegoat him for his wrongdoing while he continues trying to dig himself out a hole but falling still further into the abyss. 

Sugai is merely trying to save his own skin, but those around him are desperate too. His opposite number, Toku (Hisashi Igawa) is desperate to clear his name, while Chiyo is desperate for what she describes as a proper marriage to a proper man while seemingly kept captive in the apartment Sugai rents for her on his meagre police salary but does not live in himself. She wants to work and has an innocent desire to buy him some better shoes that he otherwise resents in its implied challenge to his masculinity that he evidently cannot afford all this additional expense coupled with the strain of keeping his problematic relationship with a gangster’s wife secret from his employers. In the end he claims that the problem was he couldn’t escape from being a detective, pushed into desperate acts of destruction as a man now exiled from his times unable to move on from post-war chaos into a newly democratic, consumerist Japan. Saeki ends his fatalistic vision with an image of a train reeling backwards, echoing the degree to which Sugai has lost control of his life and himself no longer a detective but only a man without a moral compass whose path can only lead in one direction. 

Willful Murder (日本の熱い日々 謀殺・下山事件, Kei Kumai, 1981)

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Beginning to piece something together, the dogged reporter at the centre of Kei Kumai’s Willful Murder (日本の熱い日々 謀殺・下山事件, Nihon no Atsui Hibi Bosatsu: Shimoyama Jiken) looks out at an industrial complex and reflects that when he visited it eight years previously it was a “piddling little factory” and has since become a “major company”. His comments might equally stand for Japan itself as Kumai charts the course of the nation’s post-war economic miracle viewing it as a kind of Faustian bargain with the Americans largely conducted by former militarists driven by personal gain and ideological fury. 

Based on the book by Kimio Yada, The Killing: The Shimoyama Incident, the film turns on the mystery surrounding the still unexplained death of Japan National Railways CEO Sadanori Shimoyama whose dismembered body was discovered by the railway tracks in July 1949 suggesting he had been hit by a train. Given the investigative techniques available at the time, Shimoyama’s demise has never been conclusively ruled either a murder or a suicide with experts from rival universities coming to opposing opinions and the police later closing the case in somewhat suspicious circumstances. 

Kumai’s film leans towards the murder angle though like the real life investigators cannot definitively rule out that Shimoyama may have taken his own life presumably due to the pressure he felt himself under after being ordered by the occupation authorities to dismiss 30,000 railway workers from their jobs as part of the so called “Dodge Line” economic plan intended to halt runaway inflation. As the film’s opening voice over also reveals, the Japan Railways Union was at the centre of the labour movement at the moment in which occupational approach was shifting from its original purpose of demilitarisation and democratisation, towards remilitarisation and capitalisation as the Americans sought to make Japan a foreign policy ally in their opposition towards communism in Asia. 

The film’s thesis is that US forces were already planning for the Korean War and urgently needed to crush the labour movement. Shortly after Shimoyama’s death, two other railway incidents occurred firstly with the runaway train in Mitaka which crashed into the station killing six and injuring 20, and then the Matsukawa derailment for which 17 men were falsely convicted (four sentenced to death) all of whom were members of the railway workers’ union. The conclusion that dogged reporter Yashiro (Tatsuya Nakadai) slowly comes to, is that Shimoyama was murdered and the train incidents staged to discredit the labour movement on the orders of the occupation forces while former militarist collaborators continued on the same path in a newly “democratic” Japan.

Japan certainly did very well out of the Korean War the economic stimulus of which allowed that “piddling little factory” to become a “major company” in under a decade much as the nation rocketed towards the economic prosperity which culminated in the 1964 Olympics against which the film’s finale is played. The portrait the Kumai paints is of a nation which has lost its soul, mired in hypocrisy which makes a mockery of “pacifism” and “democracy”. There are in fact at least three unexplained deaths presented in the film, the second of the being that of Michiko Kanba who was killed during the protests against the Anpo security treaty which was later forced through parliament despite clear public opposition. The same possibly corrupt pathologist is assigned to the autopsy and argues that the young woman died as the result of a crowd crush despite the attending physician’s report that the cause of death was strangulation. 

The true villain is however the American occupation and Japan’s continuing complicity even after it ended. Kumai includes several scenes of mass protest against the presence of the American military in Japan, and often places American soldiers ominously hovering in the corners of the frame such as those standing directly outside the police station. Yashiro attempts to interview a Korean man who tried to blow a whistle on the Shimoyama murder only to be arrested by US Counter Intelligence and later physically dragged out of the visiting room by a lurking MP. It all sounds like a conspiracy theory and one Yashiro doesn’t know if he should believe but then has to ask himself why all these people are seemingly being silenced if there is nothing to hide. He maintains his conviction that Shimoyama was murdered, but cannot necessarily say whether it was by a communist foreign nation as the Korean whistleblower had suggested or by the Americans trying to frustrate the “democracy” they’d previously been so keen on lest it disrupt their capitalist agenda. 

In the closing scenes, Yashiro is confronted by yet another death which cannot be ruled suicide or murder along with the realisation that he will never learn the truth. The grills from a grate on the platform of a train station above cast shadowy bars that imprison him in the shady cynicism of the Cold War society. Kumai films in boxy 4:3 academy ratio and in the black and white of golden age cinema, lending a degree of cinematic realism to his devastating tale of post-war moral decline which contains a note of inescapable dread in the faces of two men caught in the intermittent flashes of a train going by obscuring a truth that can never be revealed.

Rhapsody in August (八月の狂詩曲, Akira Kurosawa, 1991)

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“People do forget everything, and quickly too” a teenage girl laments preparing to meet her half-American uncle and feeling a little awkward having been admonished by her parents for inadvertently confronting him with the realities of the wartime past. The middle generation in Kurosawa’s tri-generational tale of the legacy of warfare Rhapsody in August (八月の狂詩曲, Hachigatsu no Rhapsody) have it seems an ambivalent attitude they’re in the process of imparting to their children that views talk of the atomic bomb as almost taboo, tiptoeing around it with their newfound American relatives lest they offend them but mostly out of a desire for economic gain that reflects an early post-war mentality almost entirely alien to their Bubble-era teenage kids.

It’s the children who are keenest to learn about their past, staying with their elderly and seemingly frail grandmother Kane (Sachiko Murase) over the summer while their parents have travelled to Hawaii to investigate after receiving a letter from Kane’s long lost younger brother Suzujiro who emigrated in the 1920s and has since become a wealthy man running a pineapple plantation. The problem is that Kane had a large number of siblings, at least 11, and honestly doesn’t remember one called Suzujiro who did after all leave the country 60 years previously and was never seen again. The children, Tadao (Hisashi Igawa) and Yoshie (Toshie Negishi), think her refusal to visit him in Hawaii is partly down to a lingering resentment for the dropping of the atomic bomb which killed her husband, but as she later tells the grandchildren that was 45 years ago and she no longer has any strong feelings either way about the Americans adding only that it was all the fault of the war.

Nevertheless, it’s clear that Kane lives with a sense of loss and the continuing trauma of witnessing the flash that is expressed by the bald spot on the back of her head. As the grandchildren ask her questions she begins to reflect more on the past, remembering a younger brother, Suzukichi, who witnessed the flash with her and later had some kind of breakdown locking himself away endlessly drawing pictures of eyes that she later explains mimicked that of the flash itself. Kurosawa depicts this memory with surrealist imagery, a red sky splitting open just as Kane described exposing an eye which seemed to stare down at them. Youngest grandson Shinjiro (Mitsunori Isaki) draws such an eye on the blackboard in the study room in his grandmother’s house, an eye which continues to observe the children as they contemplate the recent past as well as an older Japan exemplified by their grandmother’s tales of the water imp living in a nearby pool who might once have saved Suzukichi’s life. 

In some ways, it’s almost as if the middle generation has been passed over. The grandchildren are very close to their grandmother and resentful of their parents, irritated by their constant references to their American relatives’ wealth with Shinjiro directly asking them why they haven’t asked how Kane has been or bothered to say hello to her before showing off photos of the Hawaiin mansion owned by Suzujiro. Kane also sets them right after deciding she’d like to visit after all, explaining that she couldn’t care less or if he’s rich or not she’d just like to see her brother. Her refusal to accept him was perhaps an expression of her own inability to make peace with the past, having literally forgotten only latterly coming to believe that Suzujiro really is her brother and wanting to reintegrate him into her life as an expression of peace between nations. 

Kane had said that Tadao’s conviction that they should avoid mentioning the bomb was illogical and ridiculous, an attitude later borne out by the unexpected arrival of Suzujiro’s half-American son Clark (Richard Gere) who speaks pigeon Japanese and is somewhat mortified by his own ignorance not having realised that his uncle must have died in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki until inadvertently tipped off by eldest grandson Tateo’s (Hidetaka Yoshioka) telegram. Clark bonds with Kane and sadly reflects on his own lack of knowledge after visiting the school where his uncle died and seeing scores of contemporary children flood into the playground where the twisted metal of a melted climbing frame serves as a memorial for the young lives that were lost. The intention is not however to provoke an apology or apportion blame only to mourn the folly of war while trying to put the past aside to ensure it never happens again.

The kids wear jeans and T-shirts with the logos of American universities on, but are determined to fix the out of tune harmonium in their grandmother’s parlour as if literarily setting the past to rights. The song they play sings of a red rose in a field, a rose that Shinjiro later sees near the shrine during the memorial service for the bombing that comes to resemble Kane in the closing frames as she charges through the rain with her blown umbrella while her children and grandchildren chase after her as the ants had trailed the rose. “People will do anything just to win a war,” Kane admonishes her son, “sooner or later it will be the ruin of us all” reminding him that dropping the bomb didn’t stop people killing each other, even 45 years later war continues to ruin people’s lives. Like the rose “blossoming in innocence” she stands for peace and mutual compassion amid an expressionist storm of fear and resentment.

Rhapsody in August screens at the BFI Southbank, London on 19th & 25th February 2023 as part of the Kurosawa season.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Dodes’ka-den (どですかでん, Akira Kurosawa, 1970)

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By the late 1960s, Akira Kurosawa was in the midst of a creative crisis having spent two years working on the Japanese segments of the Hollywood war film Tora! Tora! Tora before he was eventually let go by the parsimonious US producers who feared he was spending too much money and making too little progress. Meanwhile, the studio system which had supported his career was collapsing and could no longer offer the kinds of budgets necessary for his personal brand of epic cinema. Teaming up with Masaki Kobayashi, Kon Ichikawa, and Keisuke Kinoshita, he formed the Club of the Four Knights production company but the first and only film they produced, Dodes’kaden (どですかでん), was not perhaps the kind of film many were expecting.

Inspired by a novel by Shugoro Yamamoto, the film like The Lower Depths focuses on a small community living in a slum only in this case on the edge of the modern city. Shot in classical 4:3, it was also Kurosawa’s first foray into colour and makes the most of his painterly eye with its surrealist backdrops and exaggerated sunsets. Once again there is the feeling that these people are already dead or trapped in a kind of purgatory unable to escape their desperate suffering, the slum as much of a mindset as a physical place. “Life is nothing but pain to me” one man claims, stating his hope that he die as quickly as possible while relating the sad story of his life: falling into depression when his sons were killed in the war and losing his wife, business, and finally home to the Tokyo air raids. Yet he is reminded that his family live on in him as long as he does and to kill himself is to kill them too, rediscovering a desire to survive even in his suffering. 

Another man, Hei (Hiroshi Akutagawa), dresses in a soldier’s uniform and wanders around like a zombie with, as one person puts it, the eyes of a dead man. Later a woman comes to find him, but he is seemingly unable to reawaken himself and move on from his trauma, now numbed to life, an already spent force. A young woman, Katsuko (Tomoko Yamazaki), is little different. Never speaking she has been raised by her uncle who begins sexually abusing her while her aunt is in hospital. She says that she wants to die, stabbing the only boy who showed her kindness because she feared he’d forget her. 

These people have largely been forgotten, living almost in another era and entirely cut off from mainstream society in a kind of etherial purgatory. Like the residents of The Lower Depths, a degree of fantasy is necessary for their survival a case in point being that of a beggar and his son who live an abandoned car and fantasise about the kind of house they’d build, a vast modernist building in white with a swimming pool. Like Katsuko, the boy is let down by his father who remains the car and sends him out to beg for food, telling him off when he lights a fire to boil fish as the man at the sushi shop had told him to do insisting, with disastrous results, that as it’s pickled it doesn’t need to be cooked. The furthest out of the residents, the pair have an almost grotesque appearance, their faces tinged with a morbid green. 

But then the couples living at the centre seemed to have found an antidote to despair in a surreal process of wife swapping now unable to remember whose husband is whose despite being neatly colour coded in matching outfits. A man with a nervous tic defends his grumpy yet fiercely loyal wife, and another man raises several children who may not be biologically his but are loved all the same. The old man who acts as a kind of confidant giving out advice and settling disputes through benevolent trickery has evidently learned how to live in this world and gets by as best he can while the son of the melancholy woman who runs the tempura stall drives an imaginary train through the slum the rhythm of which gives the film its name in its slow and certain progress towards nowhere at all. Heartbreakingly there are moments where the young man can hear the train in the distance, but it remains forever out of reach. Dodes’kaden didn’t do very well at the box office or with critics, its lack of success of cited as a factor in Kurosawa’s attempt to take his own life the following year, yet had perhaps set him on a new artistic course of colour and light which would define the further direction of his later career.

Dodes’ka-den screens at the BFI Southbank, London on 15th & 16th January 2023 as part of the Kurosawa season.

House on Fire (火宅の人, Kinji Fukasaku, 1986)

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In the closing scene of Kinji Fukasaku’s 1986 literary drama House on Fire (火宅の人, Kataku no hito), the hero plays a game he’s designed with his children titled “too heavy to bear” in which they each climb on his back waiting to see which if any of them can prove too much for the paternal shoulders. In recent years Fukasaku has become most closely associated with his late career international hit Battle Royale but prior to that his name had been almost synonymous with the genre he helped to consolidate, the jitsuroku gangster picture. Like the later A Chaos of Flowers, however, House on Fire is a subdued literary drama though one set largely in a more recent past revolving around conflicted author’s paternal anxiety and inspired by the autobiographical fiction of Kazuo Dan who might be best known outside of Japan for having penned the novel which inspired Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Hanagatami. 

Like many similar literary endeavours of the time, House on Fire revolves around a conflicted writer’s affair with a much younger woman. Though set mainly in the 1950s, the film opens with a prologue set 40 years earlier in which the young Kazuo witnesses the breakdown of his parents’ marriage as his father abruptly leaves the family while his mother (played by Dan’s real life daughter Fumi Dan) later leaves him too after falling in love with a young student. As an older man (Ken Ogata) he feels he understands, though as a young boy all he felt was resentment. It’s this central conflict that consumes him as he contemplates embarking on an affair, knowing that he’s betraying his own wife and children in the same way that his father had him and his mother. He explains that this is partly because of a distance that has arisen in his relationship with his second wife Yoriko (Ayumi Ishida) following a family tragedy in which his second son Jiro was left with brain damage after contracting meningitis, Yoriko retreating grief-stricken into obsessive religious practice praying for a miracle he does not believe will come. 

Typical of the “I Novel” Kazuo funnels all of this inner conflict into a serialised novel including all the salacious details of his subsequent affairs. The first of these is with a young actress, Keiko (Mieko Harada), who came to him with a letter of recommendation hoping to get his support and advice on embarking on a career in Tokyo. It seems clear that what Kazuo is attracted to is youth while what he fears is an ending, an anxiety which overshadows his romance while he continues to neglect his responsibilities as a husband and father leaving Yoriko to cope alone looking after the other children while caring for their disabled son. Learning of the affair she temporally leaves the family in much the same way his mother had, yet rather than accept his responsibility for the children Kazuo promptly abandons them too retreating to a hotel to write while leaving Jiro’s nurse and the housekeeper in sole charge of the family home. 

It may be true in a sense that if he lived as a regular family man he’d have nothing to write about, but as much as Kazuo agonises over the possibilities of making Keiko mother to his children he knows he cannot marry these two desires as simply as swapping one woman for another. Just as he had, his eldest son Ichiro born to his first wife comes to resent him, breaking in to the flat he shares with Keiko and smashing the place up to make plain his sense of hurt and betrayal. Yet Kazuo seemingly cannot reconcile his passionate desires with his familial responsibilities while consumed by guilt in his failure to live up to an inner ideal. The only conclusion he comes to is that he is illequipt to understand the complicated relationships between men and women, looking back on his parents’ romance and reflecting that they run from love so great it makes you want to die to hate so strong it makes you want to kill. 

Meanwhile, he circles around three women from the capable if strangely mysterious Yoriko who insists that she knows everything he does, to the petulant Keiko and carefree Yoko (Keiko Matsuzaka), a melancholy bar hostess who accompanies him on a trip around Japan while trying to decide whether to accept an offer of marriage from a wealthy old man. In contrast with the maternal Yoriko, both Keiko and Yoko present a less complicated vision of typical femininity each lively and childlike but both ultimately wanting something Kazuo can’t give them because to him the relationships are transitory. Yoko understands this the best even if Kazuo’s assertion that he enjoys being with her because she never asks him difficult questions speaks volumes about his own insecurity, enjoying the journey while coming to her own realisations in ultimately opting for a kind of stability in a loveless marriage. An essentially passive figure, Kazuo is abandoned by all three women as they exercise a romantic freedom he didn’t really consider they had with Yoriko finally deciding to return but defiantly redefining the terms of their relationship as she does so. 

With this the family is in a sense repaired, Yoriko reminding him that she knows everything he does while he is forced to acknowledge that he is lucky his family will have him back even as he plays the “too heavy to bear” game with his children as pregnant as it is with his internal failures as a husband and father. A minor meditation on the changing social mores of the post-war society and the inner turmoil of a man caught between them, Fukasaku’s distanced approach undercuts the sense of melancholy in the otherwise conservative conclusion as Kazuo both resists his self-characterisation as a feckless and weak willed man and embraces it in his imperfect determination to reintegrate himself into a quietly smouldering home. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Pass: Last Days of the Samurai (峠 最後のサムライ, Takashi Koizumi, 2021)

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“Even with 100 plans and 100 ideas, we cannot defeat the march of progress” a progressive samurai admits, well aware that he’s witnessing the end of his era while knowing that the “thrilling future” that lies ahead will have no place for him. Adapted from the novel by Ryotaro Shiba, The Pass: Last Days of the Samurai (峠 最後のサムライ, Toge: Saigo no Samurai) is inspired by the life of Kawai Tsugunosuke, known as the “Last Samurai” for his steadfast embodiment of the samurai ideal during the chaos of the Bakumatsu and subsequent Boshin War. 

As the opening voiceover from Tsugunosuke’s wife Osuga (Takako Matsu) explains, the Tokugawa Shogunate had ruled Japan for close to 300 years after bringing the warring states era to an end following the Battle of Sekigahara, placing the nation into a period of enforced isolation which by the 1850s was beginning to crack while resentment towards the Tokugawa continued to grow over their handling of access to foreign trade. In 1867, Tokugawa Yoshinobu (Masahiro Higashide) effectively relinquished his monopoly on power and restored ultimate authority to the emperor (the “Meiji Restoration”). Yet if he hoped his decision would both restore peace and allow the Tokugawa to maintain political influence he was quite mistaken. In the immediate wake of this political earthquake the nation became polarised between those in favour of imperial rule and those who remained loyal to the Shogunate. 

The chief retainer in Nagaoka, Tsugunosuke (Koji Yakusho) finds himself in an impossible position caught between the forces of East and West and essentially unable to pick a side because of the demands of samurai loyalty. Fearing another war would prove disastrous, he chooses neutrality certain that the present conflict cannot be resolved militarily and requires a political solution. To this effect he attempts to petition a delegation from the Western, pro-emperor, pro-modernisation army but his pleas fall on deaf ears and lead only to a rebuke that he is a coward and a traitor. Like any good leader, however, Tsugunosuke has also been preparing for the worst, buying a gatling gun from foreign dealers in order to boost his meagre man power eventually realising they have no other option than to go war 

The irony is that Tsugunosuke tacitly supports imperial rule but cannot say so because his clan is closely affiliated with the Tokugawa. He is well aware that his era has come to a close and that he will not live to see the new Japan, knowing that he is man of the old world and cannot progress into the classless society he is certain is coming. For all that he seems to be excited by the promises of revolution, encouraging the son of a friend to take advantage of the freedoms of a new era while dreaming of foreign travel and advocating for “liberty and rights” along with universal education in the hope of building of a better society. 

Yet for himself he cannot let go of samurai ideals, knowing he must fight a pointless war in which he does not believe because honour dictates it. “If it shows future generations what we samurai truly stood for then this battle will have been worthwhile” he tells a friend, fearful of a future dominated by the clans of Satsuma and Choshu. “Your samurai spirit will encourage countless others” another retainer tells him, “you are our ideal”, touched by his stoicism and grace even in defeat as he takes sole responsibility for the failure of their military campaign caused in part by the betrayal of a defecting ally. “This warriors’ way shall die with me” he cheerfully tells a servant, advising him to become a merchant and travel abroad to seize the “thrilling future” which lies ahead of him. 

A martyr to his age, Tsugunosuke is the last of the samurai stoically defending a lofty ideal in an acknowledgement that he does not belong in the new society and must sacrifice himself in order to bring it about. An homage to classic samurai cinema from former Akira Kurosawa AD Takashi Koizumi, who even throws in the odd screen wipe, featuring cameos from golden age stars Tatsuya Nakadai and Kyoko Kagawa, The Pass is about the passage from one era to the next taking as its hero a closet revolutionary and walking embodiment of the idealised samurai who chooses unity and shared vision over conflict in the creation of a better world he does not intend to live to see.

The Pass: Last Days of the Samurai screens on Aug. 21 and Sept. 1 as part of this year’s Japan Cuts.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Big Shots Die at Dawn (顔役暁に死す, Kihachi Okamoto, 1961)

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“Assassins make the world an unfit place to live in” according to a random gas station attendant clueing our errant hero in to the fact his small-town home is now a “den of yakuza” and unlikely tourist hotspot. An early, delightfully absurdist yakuza romp from Kichachi Okamoto, Big Shots Die at Dawn (顔役暁に死す, Kaoyaku Akatsukini Shisu) is part Nikkatsu parody, part ironic western, and all cartoonish fun as a prodigal son returns to find his father murdered and his uncle on the throne. Sound familiar? 

Jiro (Yuzo Kayama) has been working for the forestry commission in Alaska and has not returned to his small-town home of Kuraoka in some time which is why he didn’t even know his father, the mayor, was dead let alone that he was apparently assassinated in a manner which strongly anticipates the Kennedy assassination though the film was released in 1961. He also had no idea his father, a widower, had remarried and his family home is now occupied by his stepmother Hisako (Yukiko Shimazaki), a former secretary who scandalously lounges around in her underwear all day. His uncle Imamura (Eijiro Yanagi) is now the mayor, and as he explains to him, the town is a hotbed of gangster activity apparently a consequence of his attempt to turn it into a tourist hotspot. In trying to find out who killed his father, Jiro finds himself quite literally in the middle of a petty yakuza gang war aided and abetted by corrupt police. 

Quite clearly influenced by American cinema, Big Shots Die at Dawn situates itself in the new frontier of small-town Japan in which a war is being fought over the spoils of the post-war era. Uncle Imamura’s legacy is apparently a children’s theme park with the distinctly pregnant name Dreamland. Apparently a man who just loves the children but was unable to have any of his own, he’s also opened a pre-school for the local kids. Meanwhile, in the yakuza-backed casino, obsessive gamblers brush their teeth at the tables while local kingpin Goto (Akihiko Hirata) attempts to fend off the incursion of the rival Handa gang. Jiro’s return puts the cat among the pigeons as both sides attempt to use him as a way to take out the other.

The dark heart of small-town Japan is however present in the greed and double dealing which extends even to the police, a corrupt officer offering to sell Jiro a key piece of evidence he had concealed in the hope of profit. Just about everyone tries to sell the evidence to someone else at one time or another, leveraging an idea of justice alongside greed and self-interest. Meanwhile, Yoshiko (Kumi Mizuno), a quasi-love interest and former girlfriend of a fallen foot soldier, reports that she gave the police valuable evidence that her fiancé’s death wasn’t a suicide but they ignored her.

Jiro’s come to clean up the town, but the showdown takes place incongruously in the children’s theme park complete with its cutesy mascot characters and adverts for chocolate in the background making plain that these venal gangsters are really just boys playing war, taking pot shots at each other from tiny trains. What could be a dark comment on a loss of innocence is more cartoonish irony from Okamoto who shoots in extreme closeup with intentionally humorous composition and slapstick choreography. Nevertheless the message is unmistakable as we piece together the connections between small-town government and organised crime underpinned with a rather creepy all for the kids justification. 

Then again, the world has its share of misogyny, everything coming down to the incursion of transgressive femininity as one duplicitous woman manipulating her feminine wiles becomes the common link between each of the warring factions, as if this is all her fault and Jiro’s return is a way of clearing up the pollution her arrival provoked. Nevertheless as even he says, his father, and implicitly his father’s generation, must share some of the blame. Filled with stylish action sequences, car chases, self-consciously cool dialogue, and scored with a mix of moody jazz and dreamy childlike melodies, Okamoto’s cartoonish takedown of the zeitgeisty youth movie is very much in keeping with Toho’s spoofier side but chock full of charm even if its hero’s particular brand of smugness occasionally borders on the insufferable.