Tag: Japan

Retreat Through the Wet Wasteland (濡れた荒野を走れ, Yukihiro Sawada, 1973)

Posted on by

Despite its lurid title which contains the classic signifier “wet”, Yukihiro Sawada’s Retreat through the Wet Wasteland (濡れた荒野を走れ, Nureta koya wo hashire) is more sleazy nihilistic drama than classic Roman Porno. Though it obeys many of the genre’s rules, the placement of its erotic scenes feels less formulaic and the film as a whole less about eroticism than abject despair in the wake of Asama-Sanso in a Japan that has become an authoritarian paradise ruled by bruiser cops driven fragile by egos and greed.

The central mystery is, for some at least, whether fugitive cop Nakamura (Hirokazu Inoue) is really “mad” or merely using the mask of mental illness to protect himself from his former colleagues who want him dead because he knows too much. The truth may be, however, that Nakamura has wilfully retreated inside his mind as a means of escape from a world of constant corruption. Or else, that his desire for the world to be better is in itself a mental illness that’s seen him institutionalised and tortured with shock treatment in an effort to cure him of his problematic humanitarianism. In any case, he has lost all his memory and knows himself only as “Number 19” having been robbed of selfhood and individuality. All of which might suggest that he isn’t as much of a threat to his colleagues as they seem to believe him to be, though the question is why exactly they fear him so much when it’s clear that they face no consequences for their actions.

The film opens with a gang of thugs raiding a church where the pastor has been collecting money to help villages in Vietnam rebuild after the war. The thugs beat the pastor and rape his daughter who is captured in a beatific pose with a crucifix on her chest as choral music plays. When the pastor calls the police, we see the policemen receive the call while one is busy stuffing the tracksuits the thugs were wearing into the boot. They are assigned to investigate the crime they have just committed while it appears that their superiors at the station are all well aware of these kinds of activities are taking place and are even encouraging of them. The police is now the biggest gang and anyone not a part of the corruption cannot tolerated in this system because it’s underpinned by an idea of mutually assured destruction. 

Nakamura appears to have been a more idealistic officer and though it is not clear whether he participated in the corruption himself, evidently opposed it at least philosophically, which is what has destroyed his mind. He was once Harada’s (Takeo Chii) mentor, cautioning against his desire to become stronger as becoming strong and powerful only makes you an oppressor which is not, evidently, what he considers the proper role for a policeman. To an extent, the film frames Harada as the hero as perhaps he would be in a certain kind of crime thriller. He’s effortlessly cool in his sunshades with a cigarette hanging from his lip, but he’s also a broken loser hollow on the inside and nothing without the authority granted to him by being a member of the police force. When he and Kato (Akira Takahashi) visit a sex worker, she complains that Harada can’t get it up as if signalling his essentially powerlessness and implying his violence is rooted in fear and insecurity.

Haunted by what seems to be flashbacks to an Anpo protest, Nakamura is apparently a counter to these authoritarian instincts. Having escaped the psychiatric hospital, he’s accompanied by a young woman who seems to be something of an outsider herself and the film’s real moral compass. She feels sorry for Nakamura and sees his inner purity, while in turning to Harada at the film’s conclusion and exclaiming that she pities him too reasserts her power over him. It’s she who takes Nakamura to her cousin’s travelling theatre troupe wandering the “wasteland” outside of the cities and thereby wilfully existing outside of mainstream society. Nevertheless, they are at first invaded by Harada and his partner Kato who have brought along Nakamura’s wife, and then by rightwing bikers who destroy their camp. Even these small enclaves cannot be permitted to exist and no attempt to escape the system can be tolerated. Sawada expresses this oppressiveness though the overuse of censorship bars many of which are not hiding anything that might be considered objectionable but are, in a certain sense, merely decorative. In Harada’s final demonic grin as he retreats across the wasteland, the film seems to suggest that there is no other way to escape this world of corruption other than madness or death.

Retreat Through the Wet Wasteland screened as part of Japan Society New York’s Kazuhiko Hasegawa’s Anarchic Ethos.

My Mother’s Eyes (マイマザーズアイズ, Takeshi Kushida, 2023)

Posted on by

“To become a mother, I must move past sanity” the maternal figure at the centre of Takeshi Kushida’s My Mother’s Eyes (マイマザーズアイズ) eventually exclaims, but what exactly are the limits of the parental sacrifice? Should a parent necessarily have to give themselves over body and soul to the next generation leaving nothing of and for themselves, and should the child accept that sacrifice or not considering that it may, in turn, rob them of their own individuality?

Hitomi, whose name ironically sounds like the word for the pupil of the eye though the kanji it uses are those of “virtuous beauty”, clearly feels some level of resentment towards her daughter Eri despite the superficial closeness of their relationship which sees the teenage daughter still cuddling up to her mother in the night. Once a promising cellist herself, Hitomi now makes her living as a teacher and claims that she now enjoys writing songs for Eri to play more than playing herself. Yet it seems Eri too may be rebelling against the necessity of playing the notes her mother has set down for her. “Listen very carefully to the music your partner makes,” Hitomi gently advises on noticing Eri veering off script while rehearsing for a duet she asked her mother to play, “then we can become one piece of music together.”

This sense of reintegration or inseparability seems to be a longed-for quality though for Hitomi perhaps it amounts to an erasure as if she sought to bring her daughter into herself so that she might be free to pursue the career in music denied her by the demands of raising a child alone. Eri, meanwhile, yearns for acceptance, countering her mother’s resentment with her own revealing that even if she had not detected it in her mother’s eyes she clearly felt it in her music in the continual duel which being fought between them. Something Hitomi had kept from her is that she was losing her sight, a sudden entrance of darkness following Eri’s attempt to broach the subject of maternal rejection while driving along a tunnel clearly warning of dangerous curves ahead. The accident leaves Eri paralysed from the neck down, and Hitomi forced to face the reality of her fading sight. 

After contacting a blogger who’d previously written about an experimental treatment but was ominously warned off writing any more, Hitomi is whisked away to a Western-style mansion in the countryside occupied by a man scientist and his creepily robotic son, Satoshi. The treatment comes in the form of a high-tech contact lens which bounces additional light to Hitomi’s fading retinas that can be adjusted via smartphone app through which everything Hitomi sees can be observed by others. As a means of making amends, she agrees to give her life over to the bedridden Eri who sees through her eyes via virtual reality headset and speaks words for Hitomi to repeat just as she had written notes for Eri to play. 

But Hitomi is in other ways free to guide her, transgressively straying into a sexual relationship with the decidedly odd Satoshi who like his father has an odd habit of just appearing out of nowhere or at any rate swiftly like a bird swooping down to land. Hitomi strokes his back like she were playing a playing a cello, making music to communicate to whom remains unclear. Satoshi’s father later says that music was his “light” too as his own sight failed though it seems he no longer plays, music like light to Hitomi, had become painful and he had come to appreciate only “haunting” melodies. Just Eri has taken control of Hitomi, Satoshi’s father is still controlling him partly through the lenses and partly through mysterious tranquilliser pills that might explain his otherwise uncanny manner. 

The relationships between them begin to blur in the incestuous cross currents in which Eri succumb to a phantom pregnancy as her mother becomes a surrogate to child that is somehow hers, Satoshi’s, and his father’s though he later tries to assume control of it roundly telling Hitomi she lacks maternal devotion and is unfit to raise a raise. Her battle is as much to reclaim her maternity as it is to reclaim herself while entering a kind of symbiosis with her daughter that included a notion of duplication and continuity. If every son must kill his father, then perhaps giving birth is paradoxically a cure for motherhood. Asking a series of questions about the use and misuse of such technology that infringes not only on a sense of reality but also the security of the self, Kishida channels a sense of anxious eeriness but ends at least on a note of harmony albeit “haunting” in its nature.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Age of Nudity (素ッ裸の年令, Seijun Suzuki, 1959)

Posted on by

Stylistically speaking, Seijun Suzuki’s Age of Nudity (素ッ裸の年令, Suppadaka no Nenrei) is one of the least interesting of his early phase and features only brief moments of innovation such as using the cameo effect for Sabu’s flashback and elements of his taste for surrealism with unexpected cutting between events. It does however have something a little more interesting to say about the world of 1959 through the eyes of someone in the process of becoming an angry young man.

The film opens with Sabu (Saburo Fujimaki) in his school uniform gazing at motorbikes and exclaiming that adulthood must be wonderful because you can ride a bike whenever you want. Ken (Keiichiro Akagi), the leader of a group of mainly orphaned delinquents, shows him that he could do that now. His gang make a habit of “borrowing” bikes and makes money through reckless drag races. Ken’s instructions that the bikes must be returned afterwards is symbolic of his desire to live a more honest life. When Sabu gets involved with actual crimes such as robbing a local food stand, he becomes very angry with him for compromising his more noble vision of what this group should be. 

But Ken is also working with a newspaper reporter and selling him insider stories about pre-teen “delinquents” . It seems as if every day is a slow news day in the Japan in 1959, and the reporter continues to plant scare stories in an effort to create a moral panic about feral children. Ken seems to think that he’ll keep them out of it and not actually report on anything too back that directly involves them, but of course his conviction is naive. Nevertheless, he convinces himself that he’s doing it all for the group so he can get money to buy a fishing boat and support everyone through honest work. But at the same time the fact that it’s the newspapers echoes the ways in which these children have been pushed out of society, while also ironic in that the reason Sabu loses his pair round is because he’s unfairly called a troublemaker when trying to get a reluctant customer to finally pay her bill.

The newspaper round incident bears out the ways in which Sabu is unable to control his temper and his frustration often turns to violence. The reporter asks a friend of his at school hoping he will badmouth him, but the only says that he’s not a bad kid, it’s just that his family’s poor. What Sabu most wants is to stay in school, but his parents won’t pay and his mother even says that he’s getting above himself. Poor people like them don’t go to school they just work. But Sabu’s desire to break that barrier is thwarted by social prejudice and the frustration it arises in him. He first looks up to Ken as a role model, but is also the most betrayed on realising that it was Ken who leaked info on them to the press and that he’s planning to take their share of the loot and make a new life for himself alone in the country.

Humiliated after having been betrayed by the newspaper man, Ken then reverts to Sabu’s way of thinking, that as old as he gets this society won’t respect him. So perhaps he no longer needs to respect it or to stick to the nobility he was trying to teach the kids. Adulthood won’t be what we expected, he tells Yoko, as if he had thought that on turning 20 he’d suddenly be more respected and that he’d be able to forge his own future by buying a boat and becoming a fisherman. The film’s title does not translate particularly well, but the nuance is more like “the naked age” where age refers to that of a person rather than to an era. Sabu goes to the beach and marvels that everyone is “naked”, or rather that they’re all scantily clad in swimwear, and are therefore all the same with the divisions of class and wealth temporarily dissolves. But at the same time it’s more that he himself is naked in that he’s at his most raw and vulnerable. He feels himself to be alone, and has no role models to look to for how he should live his life. Resenting his father for bowing and screaming and his mother for her lack of ambition, he wants more for himself but also can’t find a way to get it. 

The fact that Ken is eventually killed in a fiery crash signals him out as a false prophet. The person the children should have been listening to was the homeless old man (Bokuzen Hidari) who appears in a vision of beatific pastorally at the film’s conclusion posed on a green hill with the sun behind him. Though the children sometimes make fun of him for his disability and what they see as a failure at life, the old man laughs it off and is constantly happy living in a tent with his little dog. He encourages the children and gives them helpful advice that helps to overcome the failures of their birth parents, while his presence suggests that true happiness is to be found only on escaping contemporary capitalist society. Sabu too perhaps comes to a similar conclusion, realising that their “independence” is an illusion when they have to compromise themselves morally in order to earn money. Ken may have given them false hope, but perhaps the old man is different in living his own “independent” life defined by humanism and simplicity free from the constraints of a society which only values and status.

Star Virgin (スターヴァージン, Ichiro Omomo, 1988)

Posted on by

A young woman sets off to travel the universe and discovers that a lot of it’s full of inappropriate men, which is why is her father thoughtfully gave her a chastity bracelet that can detect “evil intent” and allow her to transform into the superhero Star Virgin to protect her virginity. We first see her do this in a weird reptile planet where, for some reason she’s being crucified as a giant Jabba the Hut-like frog extends his gruesome tongue towards her. 

Produced with the involvement of props team Ogawa Modelling who wad worked on Bye-Bye Jupiter, director Ichiro Omomo intended Star Virgin (スターヴァージン) to be a tokusatsu take on the Supergirl movie from 1984. A pilot version made in 1986 was apparently more serious in tone, though the completed film released two years later is deliberately silly and includes a series of references to contemporary Hollywood cinema such as Eiko and her Earth friend Ko running away from a ball of dung spun by a giant dung beetle like in Indiana Jones, while the robots have a heads up interface that’s clearly inspired by The Terminator, and the inside of the villain’s lair resembles the inside of the ships in Star Wars.

But while Eiko seems to be an intergalactic princess, she only speaks Japanese and the design of her fish-like spacecraft, which doesn’t look that big but has room for a giant bubble bath, is inspired more by Japanese sci-fi manga. She’s apparently come to Earth after the bad experience on the reptile planet because she thought there was a chance of it becoming civilised in the future, but is immediately drawn into a bizarre conspiracy run by a man who’s been perfecting various gadgets for the last 84 years in order to reverse Japan’s defeat in the Second World War. Eiko’s new bug-obsessive friend Ko (Fujio Takumi) annoys him by first guessing the First World War and then suggesting perhaps his siphoning off of the imperial navy’s resources is one reason they lost.

Nevertheless, Ko’s indifference lays bare a generational divide in which wartime defeat has become a kind of joke and something that only old people go on about rather than a serious wound on the national psyche. Colonel Arashiyama (Isao Sasaki), however, is intent on turning the cold war hot so Russia will nuke America, while Japan will be safe because of the protective barrier he’s placed around it. He’s also enabled his secret island to float in the sky for protection and has kidnapped Ko because he thinks he’s stolen a precious gem that stems back to the gods of Japan’s creation myth which he needs to win the war as if he’s essentially weaponising Japaneseness. Predictably, he wants Eiko to be his new princess and dresses her in white gown while taking some kind of elixir to make himself young and virile. Of course, she only needs to string him along until he finally goes too far and activates the chastity belt.

Not being able to activate it at will seems like a serious design fault, while it’s not altogether clear if it would still activate if Eiko herself were to pursue a romance. Not that that’s all that likely given the frankly inappropriate treatment she receives from men other than Ko. In fact, she’s a bit confused why he doesn’t try anything, but it’s mainly because he’s too busy thinking about bugs. In any case, they have to team up together to escape Colonel Arashiyama’s lair and stop all of his dastardly plans. Though it was clearly made on a shoestring, the special effects and production design are incredibly impressive and have a real sense of charm and invention. Never taking itself too seriously, the film nevertheless completely commits itself to its bizarre world of alien princesses and conspiracy, before finally returning to what it presented itself as in the beginning, a teenage girl’s travel diary. Even the evil robot’s programming is broken as he’s taken in by some local children and becomes their friend, just as Eiko and Ko enjoy a fun time at beach in a classic idol movie-style ending.

The Mother Tree (怪談乳房榎, Goro Kadono, 1958)

Posted on by

An amoral ronin worms his way into the home of a famous painter with the intention of stealing his wife in Goro Kadono’s eerie tale of ghostly revenge, The Mother Tree (怪談乳房榎, Kaidan Chibusa Enoki). As might be expected, it doesn’t go particularly well for him. He is, though, perhaps a symbol of the latent fear of social interlopers and those displaced within the Edo-era class system. Namihei (Asao Matsumoto) claims that he was let go by his master for being too interested in painting, though is otherwise focused on short-term gains and causing destruction.

Shigenobu (Akira Nakamura) is said to be “the greatest artist in Edo”, and is certainly very much in demand. He is father to an infant son, Mayotaro, and husband to devoted wife Kise (Katsuko Wakasugi). He appears to be a good man, if a little scatterbrained and hugely overworked, which is one reason why he was grateful to take on a pupil. The irony is that both Kise and the family’s maid Hana (Keiko Hasegawa) remark on what a nice guy Namihei is and how glad they are to have him in the household. He’s even good with the baby who apparently likes to be held by him. All of which suggests that he might have actually had talent for painting and could probably have succeeded Shigenobu, in time, if hadn’t been such a terrible person. 

Unfortunately, however, Namihei reminds Shigenobu that he promised to paint a freeze for a temple some distance away and had sort of forgotten about it. An impulsive soul, Shigenobu decides he’d better leave right away if only to shake off this sense of unfulfilled obligation that’s been plaguing him. He entrusts the women of the household to Namihei in his absence and has no reason to fear any harm may come to them while he’s away. Namihei, however, attempts to rape Kise as soon as he leaves. Though she resists him, he threatens to kill her son and she is forced to give in to a prolonged period of sexual exploitation.

This is actually quite a dangerous move on Namihei’s part considering that the penalty for adultery under Tokugawa law is death, which might be why he finally ends up killing Hana after she witnesses Kise being abused and tries to help her. Namihei evidently doesn’t have a long-term plan for how all this is supposed to pan out and panics on hearing that Shigenobu will be returning much earlier than he expected. The irony may be that Shigenobu intended to paint eyes that might see into the next world and eventually becomes a vengeful ghost after being brutally murdered by Namihei, though was unable to see his treachery. Evidently never having read a ghost story himself, Namihei dumps the body in a pond, which is all but guaranteed to come back and haunt him. “Though you kill me, I will not die,” Shigenobu curses, vowing that he cannot pass on while his dragons lack eyes. 

What might be surprising is that neither of the vengeful ghosts blame Kise for her plight or seek revenge against her. The rage of a vengeful ghost can often be indiscriminate, but both Shigenobu and Hana seem to understand that Kise has been abused by Namihei and only submitted to him out of maternal devotion in the desire to have her son. Namihei’s transgression aims at straight at the concept of motherhood and with it the entire social order. Having displaced Shigenobu, Mayotaro now seems a nuisance to him. He believes he’s conquered Kise by fear and no longer needs this leverage to control her now her husband is dead.

It is mainly fear that causes people to behave in strange ways. Namihei orders their servant Shosuke (Hiroshi Hayashi) to kill Mayotaro, telling Kise that he is to be sent to a noble samurai family that will assist in his social advancement. Kise seems to go along with this, despite having sworn to raise Mayotaro to take revenge. Shosuke is unable to resist after Namihei threatens him with death, but places Mayotoyo by the Mother Tree which had once nourished him. Following her husband’s murder, Kise’s milk had dried up in shock as if echoing this attempt on her maternity which was then restored by the ancient natural authority of the tree. 

That it’s the Buddhist priest that becomes a figure of moral authority and goodness positions Buddhism as the counter to the amoral nihilism of men like Namihei. Having been struck by Namihei, Kise leaves her son in the priest’s care who will raise him not for revenge but peace and forgiveness. This might run counter to the Shinto-inflected role of the Mother Tree as a symbol of the power of nature, but ultimately suggests that true righteousness is found in Buddhism and its values. Namihei pays for his amoral venality after being tormented by spirits appearing as flaming orbs. Japanese ghosts rarely harm humans directly, but cause them to hurt themselves through fear and madness. That he ultimately kills Kise despite Shigenobu’s telling her to raise their son suggests that she is being punished too, though none of this was her fault and it is really she who puts end to Namihei’s reign of terror. With his death, order is, in a sense, restored as Shigenobu returns to put the eyes on his dragons who can indeed see a better world free of greed or cruelty. 

Middle-Aged Man (をぢさん, Minoru Shibuya, 1943)

Posted on by

The middle-aged man in the title of Minoru Shibuya’s wam-hearted drama is a factory foreman who believes in the power of human kindness. A machine is no better than the human hand, he tells his staff somewhat prophetically explaining to them that they must remember that they are human and take of themselves and others. Yet even at work, there are those who are annoyed by him as he wanders around checking people’s work and offering advice.

Yet when Kondo is asked to go to another factory in Nagano to teach some children, he tries to object that he doesn’t know anything about teaching, though is eventually persuaded to go anyway much to the annoyance of his wife, Okiyo, who thinks he’s too much of a soft touch. She might be right that regard, and there is something to be said for the idea that they asked him because they knew he wouldn’t put up too much of a fight. She eventually goes on such a long rant about how annoyed she is by her husband’s excessive kindness that it almost ends up ruining her brother’s engagement. Kondo’s thoughts are unexpectedly progressive in contrast with those of his wife as he tells her that taking care of children is a meaningful job in its own right that not everyone can do, though the couple appear to have no children of their own.

Kondo has, however, taken on the role of surrogate father to the son of a widowed neighbour, Haruo. He continues to call the boy “bocchan” which means something equivalent to “young master”, while the boy calls him “Ojisan”, a fairly generic way of addressing a middle-aged man, bearing out the class disparity between them. A similar sense of class disparity exists between Okiyo’s brother Jukichi and his prospective bride Kazuko who turns out to come from a former samurai family who have a suit of armour in the living room and show Mrs Kondo a long scroll listing their ancestors going back to the Sengoku era. When she tries to tell Kondo about it, he misunderstands and thinks she’s talking about a kind of fish, so alien all of this is to him. 

The film seems to be saying that class barriers like these need to come down as Jukichi and Kazuko appear to be getting on quite well, effectively dating despite having been set up for an arranged marriage. Despite the difficult economic circumstances, Jukichi has been able to rent a house and a date house now been set for the wedding. This may, in its way, be a reminder that everyone needs to pull together as one for the war effort rather than allowing outdated feudal notions of class distinction prevent them working together effectively. Kondo’s kindness operates in quite the same way as he pitches in to help his neighbours plant tomatoes and is generally available whenever anyone needs help. 

Matters take a more serious turn when Haruo becomes ill after eating a sweet Kondo brought back from Nagano. Though there is no way to know that it was the sweet that made him ill, Kondo feels responsible and insists on taking him to the hospital where it is discovered that his condition is more serious than anyone had assumed. The doctors eventually suggest a blood transfusion. Kondo is not a match and has to content himself with cold baths at the Shinto shrine to pray for Haruo’s recovery, but Okiyo is and in a weird way it’s like she gets a transfusion herself. No longer so grumpy, she’s come round to her husband’s way of thinking and learned how good it can feel to help others. 

Meanwhile, she’d also objected to Kondo’s interest in traditional kagura ritual dance which she’d made him promise to give up on they marriage. He is nevertheless roped into it, and Haruo is fascinated by this ancient art form that Okiyo only regards as “silly dancing”. When he falls ill, all Haruo wants is to see the dance again and the possibility of doing so when he’s better encourages him to hang in there. Thus the film probably gets around any need for patriotic content with its embrace of kagura while otherwise sending positive messages about the importance of community and supporting one another so that the nation, like Haruo, remains robust.

Art of Assassination (女殺し屋　牝犬, Yoshio Inoue, 1969)

Posted on by

Kyoko Enami joined Daiei in 1959 and became one of its biggest stars seven years later when she played the lead in the 17-part Woman Gambler series that continued until 1971. The Art of Assassination (女殺し屋　牝犬, Onna koroshiya: Mesu Inu) shares many of the same members of the creative team while adapted from a novel by Shinji Fujiwara and written by Mitsuro Otaki who had adapted the Raizo Ichikawa vehicle Killer’s Key. Set in the present day, the film seems to be setting up another long-running series for Enami in its hints at the backstory of its hit woman heroine, though it appears not to have gone any further. 

In any case, the film anticipates the paranoia cinema of the coming decade as the ice cool Kayo (Kyoko Enami) finds herself mixed up in shady political intrigue when a yakuza working for a regular company hires her to take out a would-be-whistle-blower. Tobita, a corrupt politician in cahoots with Toyo Trading CEO Abe, has evidently been up to no good and possibly unwisely chose to freeze out one of his co-conspirators, Ishizuka. Ishizuka has now been released from prison and is minded to spill the beans on their whole operation, so Tobita wants him taken out before he can reveal his explosive memo. 

The relationship between Tobita, who is shameless in his corruption, Toyo Trading, and corporatising yakuza outfit Kijima Industries bears out a contemporary uneasiness regarding the interplay between politics, violence, and big business in the age of high prosperity. Kayo’s friend Mika works as an advertising model and has become the mistress of Toyo boss Abe to further her career. She tells Kayo that it was her dream to have her own place and live a life of luxury, which she’s ironically achieved through promoting consumerism and commodifying herself as Abe’s mistress. When Kayo is later forced to kill him, rather insensitively in Mika’s apartment, Mika seems less emotionally wounded by Abe’s death or shocked by learning the truth of her friend’s identity, than filled with despair that Kayo has now shattered her dreams. She won’t be getting any more work from Toyo nor will Abe be paying for her apartment, so she might lose everything she’s worked so build. 

Kayo, by contrast, dresses in a kimono for her cover job running a cafe and presents as the exact opposite of a modern girl like Mika. Her favourite weapon is a chunky emerald ring that conceals an extendable needle she uses to silently take out her targets. She is only really able to operate in this way precisely because of her femininity. She manages to kill Ishizuka while he’s arrogantly lounging around in a public pool at the hotel where he’s holed up by swimming under his lilo and puncturing his neck from below. This way of dispatching her targets necessarily means she has to get in close and is able to do so precisely because no suspects her. She is, however, prepared to use guns where necessary and is meticulous in her work while seemingly having no inner personality outside of her identity as a contract killer. Mika thinks they’re friends, but Kayo uses her without a second thought and seems only mildly guilty about getting her involved, placing a share of the bounty in front of her by way of compensation.

The film flirts with a backstory, offering a few flashbacks to Kayo as a child sitting in a pool of blood, but never explains any further. It seems Kayo’s coolness is a trauma response, but this job has her feeling very annoyed. As she says, it’s the first time she’s ever killed for rage rather than money and demands vengeance from those who’ve doubled crossed her. In that sense, it doesn’t really matter that her ultimate targets are the evils of the age from corrupt politicians to amoral capitalists and disingenuous yakuza because her quest is personal and driven and her own particular code of ethics, but it does nevertheless say something about contemporary anxieties. That Daiei chose to advertise this using a poster with Enami in a swimsuit, which does admittedly appear in the film, along with the Japanese title (Female Killer: Bitch) which makes the film sound a little more salacious than it actually is, suggests they may have had a different audience in mind from their usual fare, but it is a shame that Enami did not get the opportunity to further flesh out this ultra-cool heroine.

Ghost Stories of Wanderer at Honjo (怪談本所七不思議, Goro Kadono, 1957)

Posted on by

Ghost Stories of Wanderer at Honjo (怪談本所七不思議, Kaidan Nana Fushigi) seems to have become mistitled somewhere along the line seeing as the Japanese is something more like The Seven Wonders of Honjo, an area of Tokyo that had a reputation for gloominess during the Edo era. The “seven wonders” are a collective name for a series of local ghost stories, of which there may actually be more than seven, which were popular fare for rakugo tales and other forms of storytelling. Though the film opens with a brief rundown of the seven wonders which it weaves into the tale, it is more of a revenge drama that throws in the appearance of popular yokai such as Rokurokubi, Kasa-obake, and Hitotsume-kozo.

The yokai emerge to scare a pair of fishermen who were about to ignore a ghostly voice telling them to leave the fish they’d just caught in the river behind, but what the fishermen really seem to object to is the presence of a tanuki who makes a habit of tricking the local people. After becoming fed up with them, the locals hunt down the tanuki and are about to turn it into soup when a wealthy nobleman, Komiyama (Hiroshi Hayashi), arrives and buys the tanuki from them which he then frees. Komiyama tells the tanuki to stop bothering the villagers in return and continues home after marking the anniversary of his wife’s passing and the departure of his son who is going out into the world.

The tanuki later appears in the form of a beautiful young woman to tell Komiyama that she is grateful for his saving her life and will always protect him. Unfortunately, however, Komiyama gets into trouble on the night of a tanuki ritual, so she doesn’t make it in time to save him from a dastardly plot by his disinherited nephew to murder him for his money. She can, however, help his son Yumenosuke (Juzaburo Akechi) exact revenge and put a stop to the amoral Gonkuro’s (regular Shintoho villain Shigeru Amachi) reign of terror.

As in many tales like these, it’s Gonkuro who is real terror threatening chaos in the ordered Edo society while being unable to conform to his proper role in life. Before the film begins, Komiya has already disowned his nephew for being a wastrel. Gonkuro says that he’s come to pay his respects to his late aunt, but Komiyama suspects he’s after money again which he’ll spend on drink, women, and gambling. There is a direct contrast being drawn between the good son Yumenosuke and Gonkuro, though it’s Yumenosuke who apparently becomes seriously ill while on his travels preventing his speedy return until his desire for revenge enables him to overcome his illness. 

Meanwhile, Komiyama has recently married again to a younger woman, Sawa (Akiko Yamashita), who turns out to be a former lover of Gonkuro’s. Though she at first resists, she’s bullied into resuming a sexual relationship with him which she then carries on enthusiastically. She and Gonkuro seem to be symbols of the evils of the age in their lack of properness and humanity. Not only does Sawa cheat on her husband, but even goes along with Gonkuro’s murder plot to kill him and inherit his money.

Though the tanuki fails to save Komiyama and is generally depicted as an untrustworthy trickster, it is a kind of guardian of these virtues in standing behind Yumenosuke as a source of righteousness. Komiyama’s act of kindness will eventually be repaid, while Gonkuro’s attempt to triumph over the moral order represented by Komiyama will be denied. Having dispatched Komiyama, Gonkuro occupies an awkward class status as a usurping lord and even tries to rape Yumenosuke’s betrothed Yae during an expressionist storm as a means of asserting his triumph over his cousin. Sawa meanwhile does something similar by flirting with and then potentially entering a sexual relationship with their servant Gosuke (Saburo Sawai) in full contravention of the social order. Their attempts to get rid of the tanuki by praying her away are a means of reasserting control and dissolving the rules of human morality that they feel constrain them.

In that sense, the tanuki and yokai are not particularly frightening but a constant presence that enforces a moral order defined by humanity and compassion. The two fishermen are only spooked because they ignore the disembodied voice telling them to leave the fish, not because they heard it in the first place. The tanuki, meanwhile, are mainly seen dancing as part of their ritual rendered as ghostly figures not quite of this world. They appear not to do anything that could be considered more than irritating even when messing with locals and definitely don’t deserve to get made into soup. The message seems to be that being good and kind might not save you personally, but it will eventually pay off, and is after all, the right thing to do as man can only thrive when living in harmony with nature and the supernatural world rather than attempting to transcend it through immorality like the selfish and thoughtless Gonkuro.

Pure Emotions of the Sea (海の純情, Seijun Suzuki, 1956)

Posted on by

Directed under his birth name Seitaro, Seijun Suzuki’s second film Pure Emotions of the Sea (海の純情, Umi no Junjo) is essentially a vehicle for pop star Hachiro Kasuga who plays a character with the same and sings several of his popular hits including Otomi-san which eventually sold over a million copies. Perhaps precisely because of its nature as a 45-minute programme picture, Suzuki was able to get away with quite a lot of the nonsense that would become his signature style in an otherwise anarchic tale of a romantically troubled whaler and the improbable number of women who love him.

Hachiro is the harpoon operator on a whale boat, but it’s mainly women’s hearts that he seems to be piercing. While he seems to have feelings for captain’s daughter Kazue (Toshie Takada), he also attracts the attentions of Miyoko (Tomoko Ko), daughter of the head of the shipping company, local sex worker Yumi (Miki Odagiri), and “judo-geisha” Suzugiku (Kyoko Akemi). His various encounters encourage him to swear off women, but this is quite a small town and he can’t avoid them entirely. Eventually, Miyoko suggests that perhaps she, Yumi, and Suzugiku could divide Hachiro in three with Yumi taking his money, Suzugiku his heart, and Miyoko his throat for his singing voice. After some rather macabre discussions about how to get his heart out of his body, they settle on a time share arrangement instead with each of them having Hachiro for eight hours of the day, though Hachiro’s thoughts don’t seem to enter into it.

Conversely, ambitious rudder-operator Goro is interested in all these women too, though for largely cynical reasons. With the captain’s position weakened he’s angling to take over, though is unpopular with just about everyone except Yumi who feigns taking her own life to get his attention when he starts trying to woo Suzugiku, who doesn’t like him at all. He seems to be a kind of parody of the ambitious salaryman, even giving hair tonic to his balding boss in the hope of currying favour. The other sailors, however, seem to see Hachiro as a natural successor, though the captain isn’t so sure and particularly hates his habit of singing all the time. There’s a minor irony in the fact that Suzugiku often carries a portable radio to listen to Hachiro’s songs, making her a representative of modernity rather than the emblem of traditional culture one might expect a geisha to be. She even plays records of Hachiro rather than playing the shamisen much to Captain Eizo’s (Jushiro Kobayashi) consternation. According to him, geisha aren’t what they used to be. Not only are there “judo-geisha” but dancing geisha and mahjong geisha too.

Eizo’s grumpiness and harsh treatment of his men is one reason given for the boat’s declining fortunes, with Hachiro posited as a more cheerful presence who could boot their morale, though he’s more dopey than anything else and preoccupied with his romantic difficulties. Thus it’s not surprising that Eizo’s position is under threat or that he mildly resents Hachiro though picking up on his daughter’s obvious fondness for him. Nevertheless, he will eventually have to make way for the next generation, handing his captain’s jacket over to Hachiro in addition to accepting him as a potential son-in-law.

Suzuki, however, takes a rather roundabout route to get there embracing an absurdist sensibility and sense of cartoonish fun. He opens the film with an ethnographic voiceover reminiscent of a travel programme and then cuts to Miyoko away at university studying whales and introducing herself to the camera as a kind of guide to the weird fishing village, though she is not the protagonist of the film and only resurfaces halfway through as a love rival. He also adds in surrealist touches such as frequent cuts to classical statues during Suzugiku’s judo routine. When she shows off her techniques, she throws Goro straight through a wall leaving a man-shaped hole behind, while she later deflects his romantic attentions by punting him right to the top of a tall tower at the beach. Suzuki also uses small stretches of whale-themed animation to add to the childish sense of fun while simultaneously ignoring the bloodiness of Hachiro’s job as a whale hunter. Probably, he could only get away with all this precisely because it was a 45-minute kayo eiga pop song movie intended as a programme filler, but still there are hints at what would become his signature style in his distinctive composition and absurdist sense of humour.

A New Love in Tokyo (愛の新世界, Banmei Takahashi, 1994)

Posted on by

Life is theatre in Banmei Takahashi’s A New Love in Tokyo (愛の新世界, Ai no Shinsekai). Strangely marketed in some quarters as a kind of sequel to Ryu Murakami’s Tokyo Decadence though it is entirely unconnected to it, Banmei Takahashi’s after hours drama is a breezy riot that runs in direct contrast to other post-Bubble era movies which saw only despair and disillusionment in economic stagnation. For Rei (Sawa Suzuki) and Ayumi (Reiko Kataoka), however, life is one long party that they live on their own terms hoping to ride the wave all the way to the sea.

That said, it’s true that Rei, at least, is doing her dominatrix job because it’s impossible to support oneself as an artist in this economy. She is, in fact, basically subsidising her whole theatre troupe through sex work as a means of keeping it going. Her relationship to the men in the group is almost like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves while, for unexplained reasons, she sleeps with each of her dopey castmates on a rota system. It’s not until crunch time that they realise they should probably get jobs too, while the only other woman in the group (Yoko Nakajima) takes a job as a receptionist answering the phone at the call girl agency where Ayumi works.

Rei often runs into Ayumi leaving hotels and the pair soon become fast friends, though unlike Rei, Ayumi is a regular sex worker who sleeps with her clients. Nevertheless, Rei seems to like her precisely because, as she puts it, she’s a good liar, which is perhaps what you need to be to be successful at this business. She manipulates her clients by pretending to be a shy virgin so they pay her more for basic services, while lying to her boyfriend that she’s an office lady. The fact he takes it at face value suggests he might not be all that bright, which is why he’s struggling to finish his exams to become a doctor. Later, she’s thrown him over for a lad training to be a lawyer but just with as much success. Both the men she ends up with seem to be feckless and dim, though she fluffs their egos by pretending to be stupid. She says that her end goal is to become the wife of a professional lawyer or doctor, which is to say she’s looking for class status and respectability, though she’s probably earning more than they are by herself already. Ayumi has a host of savings pots and sometimes transfers large sums of money into one telling her boyfriend it’s from her father to help pay for a wedding.

Which is to say, everyone here is playing a kind of role. Both Rei and Ayumi seem to be using their real names for their work, but as Rei says the dominatrix gig is good for her acting career in allowing her to take on multiple personas. She too writes frequent letters home to her mother which bear little relation to reality in which she claims to be a therapist’s receptionist. But the clients are acting too, because this is, after all, all about role play. One of Rei’s most devoted customers is a yakuza who bosses his men around all day then comes to her to be punished. He is scrupulously polite and really rather sweet, buying up all the tickets to Rei’s play to make sure she’s not embarrassed on the opening night. Generally speaking, the streams shouldn’t cross between Rei the actress and Rei the dominatrix, so the yakuza is crossing a line by intruding on her personal life at the play, though he does so in an otherwise respectful way, apologising for his presence and making it clear that he doesn’t mean to expose her to those who might not know nor does he intend to encroach any further on her personal life.

Another of the women’s clients seems to be a fed up salaryman ranting about his boss and company lay-offs, hinting at the stressfulness of the economic situation for those working outside of the sex industry as well as the emasculating nature of corporate life in which the salaryman can only vent his frustrations through BDSM role-play rather than by actually taking it up with his boss. Rei and Ayumi are, by contrast, free from any such concerns. That is not to say, however, that their lives are easy or without danger. When a sex worker is found dead in a love hotel bathroom, a gloom falls over the industry. Rei asks Ayumi if she’s feeling alright, but as it turns out her agency has spotted a business opportunity seeing as most of the others will have decided to close for the sake for safety and as a gesture of respect. Ayumi too is threatened by a customer with a knife and is only saved by the arrival of a yakuza, in an unexpected cameo from ice cool V-Cinema star Show Aikawa, who intimidates the customer into backing off by eating his own sunglasses. Nevertheless, Ayumi goes straight back to work to meet the next customer, unwilling to let herself be cowed by male violence.

That’s something she has in common with Rei who similarly treats the attempts of men to ruin her night with similar disdain. When one customer proves rebellious, she keeps him waiting for hours while tied up and bound in the dark. She and Ayumi try turning the tables by visiting a host club, but are instantly put off by their poor quality patter. They go on a kind of date with two guys who tried to pick them up, but dump them when they’ve had enough. Rei, in particular, has several boyfriends who think they have some sort of claim on her body and her time, but she only ever does as she pleases. There’s something unexpectedly joyful about the two women running hand in hand through the midnight city, as if this were only ever their playground. The juxtaposition of the erotic photographs taken of actress Sawa Suzuki by Nobuyoshi Araki and those of her childhood hint at this quality of playfulness, as if her life were one of fun games in which she’s never quite grown up. They also remind us, however, of her ordinariness. She had a childhood too, and is, in fact, just like everyone else. Her job is just a job, no different from those of the guys at her theatre troupe who work in restaurants and video stores. She and Ayumi even exchange business cards. This festival might be over now, but that only means it’s time to start preparing for the next in the company of her friends as she and Ayumi enjoy their lives in the permanent dawn of a city that seems to exist only for them.

Trailer (English subtitles)