Tag: Isao Tamagawa

A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness (悲愁物語, Seijun Suzuki, 1977)

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Famously, Seijun Suzuki was let go by Nikkatsu in 1968 after studio bosses became fed up with his apparently “nonsensical” filmmaking. Exiled from the film world, Suzuki made do with TV work before making his comeback with, rather surprisingly, a media satire based on a manga by Ashita no Joe’s Ikki Kajiwara. A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness (悲愁物語, Hishu Monogatari) is at once a dissection of the fluctuating class and social systems of a nation entering an era of high prosperity and a condemnation of the consumerist corruptions of a society increasingly ruled by celebrity.

It is in the corporate that the corruption begins. With mild overtones of cold war paranoia, Nichei Fabrics is alarmed that a rival firm has brought on a top Russian gymnast as a brand ambassador and is convinced they need to find someone who can steal her thunder. Fashion co-ordinator Tadokoro (Masumi Okada) comes to the conclusion that they need a homegrown star and decides to make one by grooming a promising lady golfer to become both a champion and a minor celebrity after achieving an underdog victory in a prestigious tournament. 

One might ask weather society at large is likely to take much interest in who wins the Japanese Women’s Golf Tournament, but then everyone loves an underdog victory and Tadokoro seems to think he can make them care through carefully managed media manipulation. Golf is also, of course, thought of as an upperclass pursuit beloved by a new class of salaryman despite its origins, as sportswriter Miyake (Yoshio Harada) describes them, as a pastime invented by farmers to stave off boredom. Reiko (Yoko Shiraki), Miyake’s girlfriend whom he is in a way agreeing to sell to Tadokoro, is ostensibly a working class woman raising her orphaned little brother who discovered a natural talent for golf while working as a caddy for veteran male golfer, Takagi (Shuji Sano), now her mentor. She is not, however, a natural media star, something not helped by the brand’s decision to photograph her wearing wedge shoes and eventually a bikini on the green to showcase their leisurewear which she otherwise would not necessarily be wearing during a regular golfing tournament. 

The colour green ironically becomes a kind of harbinger of doom, caught in the reflection of psychotic stalker housewife Kayo (Kyoko Enami) and later that of Reiko herself while she is otherwise offered sickly green cocktails or projected against predominantly green backgrounds. The house that Nichiei build for her comes with a tiny putting green that more resembles the catwalk it eventually becomes in the crazed bacchanal organised by Kayo in which she orders the other neighbourhood housewives to strip a near catatonic Reiko of the few clothes she is still permitted to wear. The early photo shoot marked the beginning of a gradual erasure of her identity and its replacement by Reiko the star, to Tadokoro, and Reiko the champion golfer to Miyake. 

Much of Reiko’s golfing technique seems to centre on a kind of cosmic ordering, insisting that she is one with the ball which will land exactly where she envisages it while ignoring her competitor’s attempts to make conversation with her warning that a golfer’s career is long and it’s a bad idea to offend ones seniors. A moment with her stylist is chilling its similarity as she’s told to believe herself happy so that she can smile for the cameras with the otherwise vacant look of a manufactured celebrity. She repeats these mantras to herself constantly even as her own personality is overwritten in part by Nichei fabrics and in part by Kayo who jumps in front of her car while Miyake is driving and thereafter blackmails her into almost total servitude. 

The other housewives had objected to Reiko’s presence in describing her as “low-class” and suggesting that she must be some man’s mistress because it seems unlikely to them that a pro golfer could earn the kind of money to buy a house in their neighbourhood. Their opinion of her is confirmed in their complaints about her noisy garage door, though in truth Reiko doesn’t own the house it almost owns her given that it is provided for her by Nichiei so she can get to the studio to film the daytime show they’ve created for her which mainly seems to be about fashion rather than golf which she now has almost no time to practice despite Tadokoro’s plan for her to participate in a high profile contest against a top American golfer. A classic curtain twitcher, Kayo is taken with the idea of having a celerity living next door and, already ostracised by the other housewives for being a little odd, worms her way into her life eventually deriving a quasi-sexual thrill in being able to manipulate a famous face. “I’m the only one who knows her hair’s not real!” she squeals watching Reiko on TV with her new wig after hacking her hair off as a means of punishment for hitting her with the car. 

Kayo might be, in another way, the true victim of this system. Her life is obviously materially comfortable, but she’s trapped in the role of the conventional housewife while largely ignored by her salaryman husband and, as they have no children, left on her own all day with nothing to do. When she tells Reiko that she’s lonely and just wants a friend, it goes someway to explaining her otherwise bizarre behaviour as it also does for Reiko who later chuckles when Kayo randomly asks her to sleep with her husband as a favour replying that’s it’s fine “because we’re friends”. Reiko’s body, often caught by Suzuki naked in classical poses, is misused by just about everyone from Kayo to Nichei to Miyake, leaving her little more than a grinning mannequin completely hollowed out and devoid of all individuality. 

In some ways, Kayo’s decision to invite the neighbourhood women into Reiko’s home, letting them try on her clothes, drink her booze, and generally jump all over her nice new life, could be seen as an attack on everything she represents by these otherwise conservative women who resent her class transgression and independent success. Yet it’s also a very personal act of self-destruction in erasing this image of herself through that of Reiko which she has equally created. It’s another kind of self-destruction that ends the film and may be another kind of bid for freedom, an attempt to free Reiko from psychological disintegration at the hands of the consumerist society until it all quite literally goes up in smoke. A tale of sorrow and sadness indeed, Reiko is eventually consumed by the consumerist society, a little ball hit into its hole and unable to climb out, while the flames rise all around her.  

A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness Japan Society New York on Feb. 11 as part of the Seijun Suzuki Centennial.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Tokyo Drifter (東京流れ者, Seijun Suzuki, 1966)

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“Money and power rule now, honour means nothing” according to the new bread of upstarts gangsters in Seijun Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter (東京流れ者, Tokyo Nagaremono). In many ways, what separates Nikkatsu’s youthful crime movies from Toei’s yakuza epics is that the nobility of Toei’s heroes is rarely questioned. In a Toei movie, it’s the world that’s wrong because the code is good and should be obeyed just as the hero obeys it, but in a Nikkatsu picture nihilism rules. The code isn’t right either, in fact it’s just another tool to manipulate and the hero, while noble, is wrong to follow it. 

That is in essence how Tetsu (Tetsuya Watari) will end up a Tokyo drifter, caught between the old world and a new consumerist Japan in which even the yakuza is attempting to corporatise and reform its image. His old boss, Kurata (Ryuji Kita), has done just that only he’s had to take out a sizeable loan from another former gangster turned real estate agent, Yoshii (Michio Hino), to do it. Realising his weakness, the upstart Otsuka gang sees an opportunity and stages an elaborate ruse that allows them to get their hands on Kurata’s valuable building and take out Yoshii at the same time though it results in Yoshii’s secretary (Tomoko Hamakawa), also the girlfriend of one of the Otsuka gang, getting caught in the crossfire. 

Tetsu describes his relationship with Kurata as like father and son and is sure he would never betray him. To preserve their new image, Tetsu does not fight back when ambushed by Otsuka goons and even puts himself on the hook for the secretary’s murder, but as much as Kurata insists he wouldn’t betray one of his “kids” to make things easier for himself perhaps he will if the situation calls for it. A defector from Otsuka’s gang, Shooting Star (Hideaki Nitani), tries to warn Tetsu that his faith in ideals like duty and loyalty is misplaced but Tetsu refuses to believe him. “Don’t shatter my dreams” Tetsu pleads, claiming that he cannot be around someone with “no sense of duty”.

Tetsu even feels sorry for Shooting Star, attributing his melancholy air to his having lost his sense of purpose in his disillusionment with post-war gangsterism. He might have a point in Shooting Star’s world weariness, but fails to realises that Shooting Star does in fact have a sense of duty and is in some ways the film’s only truly free man in forging it for himself from basic humanitarian values if tinged with a degree of cynicism. Though the pair clash, Shooting Star claims that he wants to save Tetsu from the pain of his inevitable betrayal and the disillusionment that will eventually come with it rendering him a perpetual wanderer and exile from mainstream society. 

Both men are in a sense lost amid the rapid social changes of their era, unable to move on from the post-war past into the new society even after breaking with the yakuza code in order to live by their own. In Suzuki’s complex colour scheme, Shooting Star is always clad in a forest-like green which echoes his freedom, while Otsuka is represented by a bloody red, and Tetsu dressed in an innocent powder blue suit until the final confrontation in which, along with his equally innocent love interest Chiharu (Chieko Matsubara) who had previously been associated with the colour yellow, is dressed in a pure white while all around him are now in black as representatives of those who have succumbed to the amoral capitalism of the the contemporary society. 

Suzuki even has Tetsu walk down an arched corridor reminiscent of a church into an abstract space expanding the stage at the club to lend this moment of existential struggle a little more theatricality. In a sense what Tetsu does is an act of suicide, severing his ties to the yakuza world by smashing Kurata’s glass and killing at least the image of him as a father figure to become a new man or perhaps a wandering ghost who no longer has a home and must even give up his romance with Chiharu in an acknowledgement of his exile. On Otsuka’s death, it’s almost like an alarm is switched off in the sudden shift from red to white in the giant statue standing behind Chiharu, the survivors united in white but rather than the wedding suggested by the colour of their clothes the atmosphere is funereal as Tetsu accepts he can no longer stay in this temporary space and must enter another sort of purgatory as lonely wander comforted only by his newfound freedom.

Tokyo Drifter screens at Japan Society New York on Feb. 4 as part of the Seijun Suzuki Centennial.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Graveyard of Honor (仁義の墓場, Kinji Fukasaku, 1975)

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“Like hell you’re free” the “hero” of Kinji Fukasaku’s Graveyard of Honor (仁義の墓場, Jingi no Hakaba) coolly snaps back in squaring off against a rival gang in a crowded marketplace. Perhaps a familiar scene in the jitsuroku eiga, a genre Fukasaku had helped usher into being and later solidified in the hugely influential Battles Without Honour and Humanity series. A reaction against the increasingly outdated ninkyo eiga and their tales of noble pre-war gangsterdom, the jitsuroku or “true account” movie claimed a higher level of authenticity, inspired by the real lives of notorious gangsters and depicting the chaotic post-war period as it really was, a Graveyard of Honor. 

Based on another true crime novel by Battles Without Honour and Humanity’s Goro Fujita, Graveyard of Honour charts the slow self-implosion of reckless gangster Rikio Ishikawa (Tetsuya Watari). In keeping with the jitsuroku mould, Fukasaku opens in documentary mode, onscreen text giving us Rikio’s pregnant birthdate of 6th August, 1924 before giving way to the voices of, we assume, real people who actually knew him when he was child. They describe him alternately as shy, an oversensitive crybaby, and an evil genius in waiting who was always different from the others and had a lifelong ambition to become a yakuza. They wonder if it was the chaos of the post-war world which turned him into a “rabid dog” but note that he was in fact just as crazy before the war and after.

A cellmate during his time in juvenile detention recalls that Rikio would often liken himself to a balloon, intending to rise and rise until he burst but his trajectory will be quite the opposite. A mess of contradictions, he repeatedly tells his remarkably understanding boss Kawada (Hajime Hana) that whatever it is he’s done this time it was all for the gang but all he ever does is cause trouble, picking fights with the rival area gangs in an obsessive need for masculine dominance over his surroundings. His trip to juvie was apparently down to getting into a fight defending Kawada’s honour, implying that he was “the sort of kid who genuinely respected his godfather”, yet it’s in transgressing this most important of unwritten yakuza rules that he damns himself. Beaten up as punishment for setting fire to the car of a gang boss he felt slighted him, Rikio is asked for his finger but gets so drunk psyching himself up that he eventually turns on his own side and is exiled from the capital for a decade. 

That gang boss, meanwhile, Nozu (Noboru Ando), is currently running for political office in Japan’s new push towards democracy. He eventually loses but only by a small margin, bearing out that in this extremely difficult post-war environment, the yakuza is still a respected, if perhaps also feared, force providing services which ordinary people are sometimes grateful for in that they provide a buffer against other kinds of threat. Meanwhile, the first of Rikio’s gang raids is undertaken against so called “third country nationals” a dogwhistle euphemism for Zainichi Koreans, Chinese, Taiwanese, and other citizens from nations colonised by Japan during in its imperialist expansion who entered the country as Japanese citizens but have now been “liberated” only to face further oppression while those like Rikio accuse them of looking down on and taking revenge against the Japanese for the abuse they suffered as imperial subjects. When both sides are arrested a racist policeman allows the yakuza to escape, thanking them for helping him round up all the Chinese businessmen who will now go to jail for illegal gambling allowing the local gangs to seize their turf. 

The greatest irony is, however, that the American occupation forces may be the biggest gang of all, willingly collaborating with Kawada in peddling blackmarket whiskey (amongst other things) from the local base. The yakuza is also in collaboration with the local sex workers who use their connections with American servicemen to facilitate yakuza business. When Rikio starts a fight with a rival gang in a local bar that threatens to spark a war, it’s the Americans who are called in as neutral third party mediator, Nozu being unable to fulfil that role in having an affiliation with Kawada. The Americans, however, merely issue a loudspeaker announcement for the gang members to disperse or face possible arrest, keeping the peace if somewhat hypocritically. 

Rikio, meanwhile, continues to flounder. Exiled from his gang, he becomes addicted to hard drugs and gets a problematic minion of his own, Ozaki (Kunie Tanaka), not to mention contracting tuberculosis. In a particularly morbid moment, he has his own gravestone carved, perhaps detecting that the end is near or at least that an ending is coming for him. In another somewhat inexplicable turn of his life, though a common trope in jitsuroku, he eventually marries the sex worker who fell in love with him after he raped her, presumably touched by his concern after he burned a hole in her tatami mat floor. Wearied by grief and already out of his mind, a final act of nihilistic craziness sees him approach his former boss for the turf and capital to form his own gang, crunching his late wife’s bones as hardened gang members look on in utter disbelief. 

Rikio’s desire for freedom, to be his own boss, is elusive as the red balloon we often see floating away away from him, free in a way he’ll never be. “Don’t these young people respect the code anymore?” Kawada exasperatedly asks on hearing that Rikio has broken the terms of his exile and returned only a year into his sentence. But Rikio’s tragedy may in a sense be that he understood the code too well. On the side of his tombstone he writes the word “jingi”, honour and humanity, full in the knowledge that such concepts in which he seems to have believed no longer exist in the cruel and chaotic post-war world which forces even true believers to betray themselves in a desperate bid for survival. “We all live by a code” his friend echoes, “there’s just no way around the rules”. 

A case of printing the legend, Fukasaku’s take on the life of Rikio Ishikawa may not quite be the “true account” it claims but is in its own strange way a tale of frustrated gangster nobility, a cry baby’s failure to become the man he wanted to be in the complicated post-war landscape. Capturing the confusion of the era through frantic, handheld camera Fukasaku nevertheless takes a turn for the melancholy and mediative in his shifts to sepia, the listless vacant look of a drugged up Rikio somehow standing in for the nihilistic emptiness of a life lived in honour’s graveyard. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Tokyo Bay (東京湾, Yoshitaro Nomura, 1962)

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Yoshitaro Nomura is most closely associated with the thriller and particularly with its lower end as a purveyor of B-movie noir, yet look a little closer and his films are perhaps not really about crime at all but about the complicated relationships between people in the ever changing post-war society. Just as Stakeout is really about a policeman’s marriage, Tokyo Bay (東京湾, Tokyowan) is less concerned with the radiating corruption of the smuggling ring at its centre than with frustrated male friendship and the wartime legacy.

Opening with an aerial pan over post-war Tokyo, a title card informs us that this is just one frame in the “intense struggle for existence” in a city of 10 million before we arrive at the titular bay and a boat which is presumably carrying drugs later passed from one hand to another. The fixer, Takeyama (Kei Sato), talks to a man in a car and instructs him to be in front of the Taiyo building before 10am to pick up a golf bag from his contact. Gazing up at a post-war construction site, however, the man, Saeki (Jun Hamamura), is shot in the head and killed by a bullet piercing the roof of his car, Nomura suddenly switching to a disorientating POV shot as he twists in a sudden death spiral. 

As it turns out, Saeki was a plant, an undercover cop with the drugs squad sent to expose the smuggling ring the shadowy owners of which will predictably turn out to have Chinese connections in another echo of post-war cinema’s continuing Sinophobia. Two officers are assigned to the case, the young and earnest Akine (Jiro Ishizaki), and the veteran Sumikawa (Ko Nishimura) who acts largely on a series of inexplicable policeman’s hunches. Their major lead, however, comes as a stroke either of dumb luck or dark fate as Sumikawa, dodging into a dodgy mahjong parlour while tailing Takeyama, runs into an old army buddy, Inoue (Isao Tamagawa), who just happens to be a left-handed sniper perfectly matching the profile of the man they’ve been looking for. 

While Sumikawa keeps tabs on his old friend, somehow feeling he has something to do with all this but ambivalent in his torn responsibilities, Akine travels to Inoue’s hometown of Onomichi and sympathetically concludes that he was merely “rather unfortunate”. His life derailed by the war, Inoue returned to discover the girl he hoped to marry had married someone else. Giving evidence at Inoue’s trial for pulling a knife on her husband, the young woman remarks that she never promised him anything and did not consider their relationship to be serious, merely treating him with the politeness due to someone about to leave for war. In any case, she asks, even if she had been in love and intended to wait for him, as an orphaned woman there were only two choices open to her to survive, marriage or sex work, what else could she have done?

Back in Tokyo, Sumikawa begins to catch up with his old friend, realising that his romantic disappointment set him on a dark course of bad relationships and a drift towards crime but that he seems to have turned himself around. He is now happily married to a woman he describes as “simple” who seems devoted to him and if he did this, he did it to start again. His one last job intended to take him back to Onomichi, a pleasant coastal town the bay of which he describes as far more beautiful than that of the grimy, industrial Tokyo and largely untouched by urban corruption. Sumikawa feels himself torn, not least on account of the debt that exists between the two men because Inoue once saved his life, but also knowing that he may have to arrest this man and destroy his attempt to return to a more innocent world leaving his wife alone. Disapproving of the nascent relationship between his younger sister Yukiko (Hiromi Sakaki) and his partner, Sumikawa worries Akine may be becoming the kind of man who cares more for making an arrest than friendship, a conflict presumably weighing on his mind, even as he agrees he’s a good man and a good police officer. Yukiko meanwhile fires back that Sumikawa’s wife left him not because he is a policeman but because he is selfish and arrogant, and more to the point incapable of understanding a woman’s feelings. 

Nevertheless, he’s acutely aware of the effect his actions or inactions may have on Inoue’s wife Yoshiko (Kyoko Aoi), especially as it’s suggested she may need a degree of looking after. Inoue, careful to admit nothing, reveals that the man who carried out the hit may not have known he was killing a police officer but may have assumed the target was fair game being, like themselves, a denizen of the underworld. Largely a MacGuffin, the smuggling ring is not as important as one might assume, the two men locked into a cycle of guilt and retribution each marked by wartime trauma and in a sense unable to claim their place in the post-war society. Twin betrayals lead to a fateful, train-bound showdown shot with fraught claustrophobia as each man engages in an intense struggle for his survival but also perhaps already defeated in a shared sense of fatalistic nihilism. Trekking through the half-constructed streets of the post-war city with shaky handheld Nomura hints at the radiating corruption exemplified by the growth of the trade in drugs, but perhaps one corruption is merely the result of another which may in turn be far less easy to cure. 

Shitamachi no Taiyo (下町の太陽, Yoji Yamada, 1963)

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(C) Shochiku 1963

Shitamachi no Taiyou DVD coverYoji Yamada’s debut feature, The Strangers Upstairs, was very much of its time as it attempted to capture the aspirational fighting spirit of the post-war era through the struggles of a nice young couple who are trying to “get on” and escape their humble origins for the salaryman dream through achieving the goal of home ownership as quickly as possible. His second film, Shitamachi no Taiyo (下町の太陽, also known as The Sunshine Girl / Sunshine in the Old Neighbourhood), takes a slightly different look at a similar issue as a young woman from Shitamachi – a working class industrial area on the outskirts of Tokyo, agonises over her future prospects as she considers a marriage to her longterm boyfriend who has ambitions to join the salaryman revolution.

Yamada opens with shots of Shitamachi and its prominent smokestacks while the now famous song plays in an instrumental version over the credits, before abruptly shifting to visions of the upscale Ginza where Machiko (Chieko Baisho) and her boyfriend Michio (Tamotsu Hayakawa) are enjoying a demonstration of an extraordinarily expensive, state of the art radio before retreating to a cafe where they agree that sometimes its more fun to “aspire” to things than actually obtain them. After all, there’s no way they could ever afford the diamond rings they walked past on their way out of the department store unless they decided to rob the place. Both Machiko and Michio are residents of Shitamachi and work in a local soap factory. Michio, however, has his sights firmly set on the path to a middle-class life and is planning to take the exam for a promotion to head office – though he lacks qualifications, Michio is confident because he’s studying hard (though more so because his dad and his section chief served together in the war so Michio is sure a good word will be put in for him).

Despite her fondness for Michio, Machiko has her doubts about his overriding ambition to get out of Shitamachi. Since her mother died, Machiko has been the lady of the house and primary caregiver for her naughty little brother Kenji (Joji Yanagisawa) while her older brother Kunio (Toshio Suzuki) is the family brainbox and also planning to bust out only through the path of education rather than advancement. Having left education behind, Machiko is happily contributing to the family finances with her job on the packing line at the soap factory which is, all things considered, not too bad – the work may be dull and methodical but also relatively quiet and stress free, not to mention sweet smelling. Nevertheless, Machiko does not necessarily want to work on the shop floor all her life but knows her opportunities are limited.

This fact is one cruelly brought home to her by a moody Michio when descends into a major sulk on learning that he hasn’t passed the test for head office because another of his colleagues outdid him – both in terms of his study ranking and in one upping him in having a direct connection to the director. While Machiko tries her best to sympathise and put up with his moody petulance, Michio chooses to throw her sympathy back in her face by abruptly announcing that she can’t understand the pain he’s going through because careers are irrelevant to women who only use them as a stopgap until they get married. Thoroughly annoyed, Machiko leaves Michio to his wallowing before things get any worse but she can’t argue with the fact that he’s only said what most people think.

Still, Machiko isn’t even sure she wants to get married. One of her friends, Kazuko (Kyoko Aoi), recently won the jackpot – she married a nice man who did get a promotion to head office and won the housing lottery for a home on one of the shiny new “danchi” – brand new apartment complexes for upwardly mobile young couples and the very embodiment of post-war aspiration. However, when Machiko and a friend visit the new bride they find that she is not quite as happy as one might expect. Though married life is peaceful enough and she and her husband evidently get on, Kazuko is also intensely lonely. With her husband away at work all day and often out playing golf with colleagues on Sundays too (not to mention after hours drinking and miscellaneous get togethers), there’s precious little for Kazuko to do, stuck at home all day cooking and cleaning while waiting for her husband to return. Having moved to the danchi she’s also lost her community and is no longer close enough to her friends to see them very often.

Meanwhile, Machiko is also somewhat disturbed by Kazuko’s collection of expensive cosmetics which her husband has instructed her to buy because he’s “very particular” about her appearance. Kazuko makes sure her makeup is on point before her husband gets home because that’s apparently what he likes. Machiko, however, does not like this – to start with, she thinks Kazuko looks better without. Not that there’s anything wrong with wearing makeup because you want to wear it, but the idea of wearing it because someone told you to and you’re worried they’ll “get bored” with your face doesn’t strike her as a particularly healthy relationship dynamic. If this is what a love marriage is like, perhaps Machiko would rather do without.

Despite her otherwise close relationship with Michio, it quickly becomes obvious that she does not love him and if she decides to marry him it will be because it’s the “sensible” decision rather than any great romantic desire. Annoyingly enough, Michio hasn’t really even asked her, he just assumes they will marry once he gets his promotion. He also assumes that Machiko, like him, will want to shake the dust of Shitamachi off her feet for good for the bright lights of Tokyo. Machiko, however is not so sure. “Getting on” is one thing and there’s nothing wrong with “aspiration”, but that doesn’t mean you need to look down on the people who come from the same place as you – after all, the sun still shines even in Shitamachi and there’s nothing wrong in choosing to be happy here rather than always chasing an unattainable dream of conventional success.

Another possibility presents itself when Machiko meets an unrefined boy who has an ordinary job in the steelworks. Though their first meeting did not make a good impression – he creepily chased her off a train and then made a mess of trying to explain why, they later bond when she realises he has befriended her troubled little brother and the pair then end up spending a pleasant evening together which is far more romantic than any of her dull and conventional outings with Michio. Then again the choice she faces isn’t between two men but whether or not to embrace her own ability to make a definitive choice about her future. What she rejects is cold and selfish path of men like Michio who only want to get ahead and are willing to step on anyone who gets in their way to make it happen. Machiko doesn’t want fancy radios and diamond rings, she just wants to not have to worry too much about money and for someone to actually listen to what she’s saying. She doesn’t want to end up like Kazuko, all alone in a sparkling apartment with nothing to do but knit. When Michio tells her to shut up and do as he says because he’ll definitely make her happy, the choice seems clear. Hard work, community, and maybe the fiery boy who seems determined to get a yes rather than assuming he already has one. Who wouldn’t want to live here?

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Famous title song performed by Chieko Baisho

Take Me Away! (ふりむけば愛, Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1978)

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Take Me Away PosterDuring his long and extremely varied career, Nobuhiko Obayashi was a not infrequent visitor to the world of the idol movie though his most notable entries into the genre would come in the 1980s Kadokawa heyday with the much loved The Little Girl who Conquered Time (starring Tomoyo Harada) and School in the Crosshairs (starring Hiroko Yakushimaru) among many others made for that studio alone. Obayashi’s ‘80s idol movies play very much into his key themes in their preoccupation with youthful melancholy and teenage ennui but 1978’s Take Me Away (ふりむけば愛, Furimukeba Ai) takes a slight step away from the genre norms in its slightly more grownup tale of complicated love and early life disappointments.

Beginning in typically strange Obayashi style, the film opens with some footage of abandoned machinery before the caption “Kyoko is on a journey” flashes up on the screen and we meet the woman herself (Momoe Yamaguchi) as she stares at San Fransisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.  Soon enough her view is obscured by a runaway kite bearing the name of Tetsu (Tomokazu Miura) – a young Japanese man currently living in the city. The pair hit it off while Tetsu tries to fix his both kite and Kyoko’s shoe which she broke trying to catch it. Tetsu promises to show her around San Fransisco and asks her to meet him at Union Square the next day at noon. Kyoko waits but Tetsu does not arrive – eventually a friend of his turns up in his place and Kyoko reluctantly spends a few hours with him during which she reveals that she’s on a suicide holiday and is about to go back to her hotel room to write the note. Finally Tetsu arrives, takes her to a hippy beatnik club where he sings her the title song of the movie, and the pair fall deeply in love.

Tetsu promises to meet Kyoko back in Tokyo to start a life together, but once again he does not turn up. Heartbroken and worried, Kyoko searches for him but the name of a bar he gave her as a point of rendezvous seems to be fake and her letters all come back undeliverable. When she gets hit by a car driven by a wealthy businessman, another, more stable, romantic possibility presents itself but will Kyoko let her true love dream go?

Take Me Away was the eighth in a series of films which starred popular Horipro idol Momoe Yamaguchi and her regular leading man Tomokazu Miura but the couple already had a long history of working with Obayashi in his career as a director of TV commercials. In fact the pairing which would eventually become a real life marriage was born thanks to Obayashi who was casting around for some stars while he made commercials with Miss Lonely apparently already on his mind. Obayashi was offered the chance to direct Yamaguchi’s cinematic debut but the dates didn’t line up and she made her first film, an adaptation of Yasunari Kawabata’s The Dancing Girl of Izu, with Katsumi Nishikawa instead.

This being the eighth Yamaguchi/Miura romantic drama the stakes needed to be raised – hence the decision to shoot for real on location in San Fransisco. Like many idol movies, the temporary shift away from the regular world the leading lady inhabits provides her an occasion to reinvent herself and the jet-setting, glamorous American holiday is certainly in keeping with the new, globally minded youth of Japan interested in transgressing borders of all kinds. When Tetsu meets Kyoko, she spins him a tale about diplomat parents that sounds like it could come out of any idol movie but in a departure from the norm it’s a part of her new holiday persona. In truth, beatnik dropout Tetsu is the posh one, a runaway son of a wealthy doctor, while Kyoko’s origins are humbler – she’s saved the money for this extremely extravagant holiday while working not as a concert pianist as she claimed, but as a piano tuner (making her choice of a Holiday Inn less strange in retrospect).

Though many idol movies centre around their teenage target audience, Kyoko and Tetsu are very noticeably grown up, already leading “adult” lives, no longer students but young people living semi-independently. This is brought home by the incongruous inclusion of a sex scene – the first in the series of films starring Yamaguchi and Miura, something which would not usually feature (at least explicitly) in the generally innocent idol movie world. Obayashi chooses to shoot this in an artistic, surreal, and impressionistic rather than naturalistic manner which shows the pair lying together naked (Yamaguchi covers herself with an arm) with a superimposition of the couple about to kiss over the top while the entire scene is bathed in golden white light. The sequence is one of the few typically Obayashi flourishes seen in the film (others include the title sequence, obvious Pan Am model shots, illustrated starry skies, and a slapstick brawl conducted to ‘20s jazz), but it perfectly captures the glory of young love so central to the early part of the film.

Of course, it doesn’t last. Holiday romances are one thing, but Tetsu proves to be a flaky sort of guy on every conceivable occasion until he’s finally dragged back into Kyoko’s orbit and vows to give up on his half-hearted ways once and for all to finally be true to his one true love. Kyoko’s second chance – a marriage proposal from the CEO who ran her over looks like the better option, that is until he shows his true colours at the film’s climax. Just as Tetsu leant meaning to Kyoko’s life in San Fransisco, so she too reawakens his fighting spirit. Tetsu describes himself as like the kite which bears his name – a free floating thing whose strings have long been severed. He needs the steady hand of Kyoko to right himself again. Unlike many of Obayashi’s wistful dramas, Take Me Away has a classically happy ending though its oddly silly, slapstick quality is very much in keeping with his sensibilities. A strange brew to be sure, but one which retains the essential innocence of the idol movie even whilst moving it beyond its traditionally adolescent remit.

Tomokazu Miura’s Furimukeba Ai

Fighting Elegy (けんかえれじい, Seijun Suzuki, 1966)

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Fighting Elegy PosterAh, youth. It explains so many things though, sadly, only long after it’s passed. For the young men who had the misfortune to come of age in the 1930s, their glory days are filled with bittersweet memories as their personal development occurred against a backdrop of increasing political division. Seijun Suzuki was not exactly apolitical in his filmmaking despite his reputation for “nonsense”, but in Fighting Elegy (けんかえれじい, Kenka Elegy) he turns a wry eye back to his contemporaries for a rueful exploration of militarism’s appeal to the angry young man. When emotion must be sublimated and desire repressed, all that youthful energy has to go somewhere and so the unresolved tensions of the young men of Japan brought about an unwelcome revolution in a misguided attempt at mastery over the self.

Kiroku (Hideki Takahashi) is an impulsive young man with a magnetic personality who, like many of his age, has found himself at a military training school designed to toughen up the boys of Japan for the glorious services they will later be expected to provide for the emperor. Very much into his training, Kiroku submits himself to the rigid codes of the school which prize virility and encourage competitive brawling between the boys. Despite the strict prohibition on soft stuff like getting it on with girls, Kiroku has developed a heavy crush on the daughter at his Catholic boarding house, Michiko (Junko Asano). Delighting in her piano playing, Kiroku cannot find a permissible way to express his desires and so records them in a very frank diary. Michiko, it seems, may return his feelings but times being what they are cannot say or do anything until he declares them and so things are left to simmer between the two with no useful place to go.

Despite belonging to a military school, Kiroku’s main outlet is in a kind of extracurricular club which is obsessed with being manly but also with rebelliousness and showing how individualist they can be through a series of challenges which often involve flagrantly breaking the rules of the school. Kiroku’s violent escapades eventually get him expelled and sent to a different institution a few towns over which explicitly prizes the “Aizu Spirit”. By now truly invidualist in his isolation, Kiroku is disappointed in the tenets of the “Aizu Spirit”. Calling all of his fellow students “wild monkeys”, Kiroku makes some odd comments on the nature of oppression and dominance by pointing out that the students all willingly submit to the teacher who demonstrates authentic authority, but refuse to respect the ones who simply don’t have it. This is, in a sense, the opposite of the philosophy which Kiroku has come to follow in which pleasure comes from rebelliousness and the natural tendency of the young to resist all forms of constraining power.

However, the most primal constraining force acting on Kiroku is sexual desire as a running joke finds him consistently bothered by unwanted erections which he then has to hide from his comrades to avoid embarrassment. Kiroku is quite passionately obsessed with Michiko to the point that he thinks of little else despite the total prohibition on female contact advanced by his military training. His diaries are full of notes about how he dreams of her delicate hands though he lies about refusing to masturbate in favour of pouring all of his virility into his violent pursuits. The situation is complicated by the presence of Christian religion which places a further taboo on the young people’s desires as they glance guiltily at the crosses on the walls each time impure thoughts arrive. Michiko is not much better off, though her own frustrations result in internalised rather externalised violence which looks set to rob her of her own happiness but lacks the all encompassing destructive element of Kiroku’s unresolved energy.

Suzuki’s message is clear, if somewhat blunt. If only these young men and women had been allowed to work out their frustrations in a more normalised way, the entire folly of warfare and imperialist expansion could have been avoided. The Christian context does add to the levels of guilt and repression, but it is one layer further than the average farm boy from rural Japan who suddenly found himself caught up in the fascist movement would have experienced. Events reach their natural conclusion at the end of the film as Kiroku reads a newspaper report of the declaration of martial law in Tokyo following the February 26th Incident in which a cabal of hotheaded young military officers launched a broadly leftwing yet authoritarian coup designed to delegitimise the government and restore power to the emperor in a return to paternalistic feudalism. His romantic dream shattered, Kiroku recognises a kindred spirit and finds a calling in the call to arms but his vocation is a false one in its negation of everything it is to be alive. The path of militarism leads only to death and destruction in its pointless and nihilistic quest to overcome rather than satisfy ordinary desires and the forces which divide Kiroku and Michiko are those same forces which bring such overriding misery to a society caught in its own difficult adolescence.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Outlaw: Heartless (大幹部 無頼非情, Mio Ezaki, 1968)

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heartlessThings take a slight detour in the third of the Outlaw series this time titled “Heartless” (大幹部 無頼非情, Daikanbu Burai Hijo). Rather than picking up where we left Goro – collapsed on a high school volleyball court, it’s now 1956 and we’re with a guy called “Goro the Assassin” but it’s not exactly clear is this is a side story or perhaps an entirely different continuity for the story of the noble hearted gangster we’ve been following so far. The only constant is actor Tetsuya Watari who once again plays Goro Fujikawa but in an even more confusing touch the supporting characters are played by many of the actors who featured in the first two films but are actually playing entirely different people….

So, it’s 1956 and this time Goro is out on a job to take out a rival gangster only he has a change of heart when the man’s wife pleads with him. Goro tells the pair to leave through the back door but one of the other gangsters turns up before they can escape and takes care of the husband whilst casting a watchful eye on the now treacherous Goro. Right before his lights go out, the murdered man tells Goro that he’s been framed as part of the boss’ gambling scam and tasks Goro with taking his sickly wife to Nagoya for medical treatment. After cleaning out the bad guys at the gambling den, Goro takes off with wife in tow and even runs into an old friend along the way but as usual nothing’s quite a simple as it seems.

If the problem with Gangster VIP 2 was staying too close to the formula established in the previous film, then Heartless perhaps attempts to overcorrect this flaw by doing something completely different. It’s really not clear how this film links in with the other two and the presence of most of the same actors playing entirely different characters is more than a little confusing to say the least, though it is a problem which occurs quite frequently with these kinds of films and is largely due to the way they were produced at studio level.

Once again the roots of restless gangsters lie post-war turmoil as the fellow ex-mobster Goro runs into is another childhood friend from the streets – Goro actually saved his life when he became dangerously ill by sneaking onto a US military base to “acquire” some penicillin (quite a canny move for a young boy, it has to be said). There’s less harking back to the theme of homes and hometowns than in the first two movies – yakuza wives take on a bigger role instead, becoming the symbol of a more normal life that is somewhat denied to both gangsters (ex or otherwise) and also burdening their husbands with the need to ensure their safety.

As in the first two films, Goro is referred to as being “different” from the regular yakuza. His potential love interest (again played by Chieko Matsubara but not as Yukiko from the other two movies) argues with her father who was also a yakuza but gave up the gangster life for love of her mother – he warns her off men of Goro’s ilk as they rarely do anything from the kindness of their hearts, but she remonstrates with him that Goro isn’t that kind of gangster. This time he’s also carrying around a bracelet that belonged to an old flamed called “Natsuko” that we haven’t heard of before but gives his pleas not to take a man like him to heart a little more weight.

Heartless is the only film in the series to be directed by Mio Ezaki (the first being directed by Toshio Masuda and the others by Keiichi Ozawa) and has little of the visual style of the first two movies though the title sequence of Goro single handedly raiding the gambling den proves a stylish early highlight. In keeping with the other two films we still have a large scale fight sequence nearing the finale which is played against the song of a cabaret singer and there’s even a little strange slapstick as the final fight ends up in some kind of decorators’ warehouse with everyone sliding around and getting covered in paint. After taking care business Goro tries to exile himself again, staggering off in an uncertain direction whilst the song playing extols the lonely fate of a “wandering man” which is perhaps the only heart he carries – the ruined heart of a “heartless” man with no roots or anchor to tie him home, a wanderer with no clansmen and no hope of salvation.

Outlaw: Heartless is the third of six films included in Arrow films’ Outlaw: Gangster VIP The Complete Collection box set (which is region free on DVD and blu-ray and available from both US and UK).

English subtitled original trailer:

Gate of Flesh (肉体の門, Seijun Suzuki, 1964)

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nikutai_no_mon_2_film-1600x900-c-defaultWhat are you supposed to do when you’ve lost a war? Your former enemies all around you, refusing to help no matter what they say and there are only black-marketers and gangsters where there used to be merchants and craftsmen. Everyone is looking out for themselves, everyone is in the gutter. How are you supposed to build anything out of this chaos? Perhaps you aren’t, but you have to go one living, somehow. The picture of the immediate post-war world which Suzuki paints in Gate of Flesh (肉体の門, Nikutai no Mon) is fairly hellish – crowded, smelly marketplaces thronging with desperate people. Based on a novel by Taijiro Tamura (who also provided the source material for Suzuki’s Story of a Prostitute), Gate of Flesh has its lens firmly pointed at the bottom of the heap and resolutely refuses to avert its gaze.

A nervous young woman, clearly tired, starving and alone wanders through a marketplace in desperation before a yakuza offers to buy her something to eat. She is wary but has little choice. Soon after she meets toughened prostitute Sen who is the de-facto head of a small group of streetwalkers committed to supporting and protecting each other. They have few rules but the biggest one is no giving it away for free. Maya joins their “merry” band and things are going OK for them until they make the fateful decision to take in a wounded ex-soldier on the run from the American military police. Shin puts a great big wedge between the members of the group, deepening the cracks which were present all along. Sure enough, Maya starts to fall for this damaged man threatening to fall foul of the gang’s single taboo. When you’ve lived like this, without hope, without a future, can you ever go back to being a “real human being” ever again?

Make no mistake, this is a ruined world. Almost post-apocalyptic, it’s populated by the starving and the desperate. The sweet potato seller is king here – the working girls are depicted like packs of rabid animals, descending on any passing male ready to extract any amount of loose change which they immediately run out to thrust into the hands of anyone who has food. The great horror is hunger.

The other great horror is, of course, violence and particularly male violence against women. Maya is assaulted early on and a truck carrying two army officers and a priest tries to make a quick escape after noticing her lying wounded by the roadside. The Americans aren’t going to help her, she’s just another raped Japanese woman after all, but the priest stops and offers another kind of salvation shining from his dangling crucifix. He repeatedly turns up later and tries to convince Maya to come back to church but you can’t live on a communion wafer alone and eventually Maya puts a definite end to the idea of any kind of religious solution to her predicament.

Sex is business for the woman under Sen’s command. They sell their bodies, hence the prohibition on giving them away. Breaking the rules will get you cruelly beaten and humiliated before being thrown out of the group and it’s near impossible to survive alone. The other women have all been injured by the war, they’re all among those left behind. One of them, Machiko, stands a little to the side as a middle class war widow rigidly sticking to her kimono and dreaming of becoming someone’s wife again. Needless to say, she and Sen do not always see eye to eye as Machiko’s desire to return to a more innocent age conflicts with Sen’s hard nosed pragmatism.

This is Japan in defeat. The girls live in a warren of ruined buildings haunted by visions of the past. Shin has returned from the war to a land devoid of hope. He’s a broken man and, as the woman have been “reduced” to prostitution, he has been “forced” into crime. There aren’t any real people here anymore, just animals willing to do whatever it takes just to stay alive.

When Suzuki was given this assignment, they wanted him to make a soft-core exploitation pic full of the sleazy lives of the red light district. Suzuki doesn’t give them that, he gives them another round of beautifully composed, surrealist social commentary in which the downtrodden citizens of Japan are defeated for a second time by the corrupting influences of the American occupation. The final shot of the ascendant Stars and Stripes flapping in the wind while the Japanese flag lies drowned in the muddy river speaks for itself and though Suzuki shows us those defiantly trying to live his prognosis for them is not particularly hopeful. He uses multiple exposure here more than in any other film as the past continues to haunt the traumatised populace in quite a literal way where one scene of degradation leads on to another. Extended metaphor, surrealist examination of the post-war world and also the low level exploitation feature Suzuki was hired to direct (albeit in more ways than one) Gate of Flesh proves one of his most complicated and accomplished features even given his long and varied career.

Gate of Flesh is available with English subtitles on R1 DVD from The Criterion Collection.