Tag: Kazuyo Mochida

Ghost Man (幽霊男, Motoyoshi Oda, 1954)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Floating Clouds (浮雲, Mikio Naruse, 1955)

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(C) 1955 Toho

floating clouds poster“The past is our only reality” the melancholy Yukiko (Hideko Takamine) intones, only to be told that her past was but a dream and now she is awake. Adapted from a novel by Fumiko Hayashi – a writer whose work proved a frequent inspiration for director Mikio Naruse, Floating Clouds (浮雲, Ukigumo) is a story of the post-war era as its central pair of lovers find themselves caught in a moment of cultural confusion, unsure of how to move forward and unable to leave the traumatic past behind.

We begin with defeat. Shifting from stock footage featuring returnees from Indochina, Naruse’s camera picks out the weary figure of a young woman, Yukiko, drawing her government issue jacket around her. She eventually arrives in the city and at the home of an older man, Kengo (Masayuki Mori), whom we later find out had been her lover when they were both stationed overseas working for the forestry commission but has now returned “home” to his family. Kengo had promised to divorce his wife, Kuniko (Chieko Nakakita), in order to marry Yukiko but now declares their romance one of many casualties of war. With only the brother-in-law who once raped her left of her family, Yukiko has nowhere left to turn, eventually becoming the mistress of an American soldier but despite his earlier declarations the increasingly desperate Kengo cannot bear to let her go and their on again off again affair continues much to Yukiko’s constant suffering.

Floating Clouds is as much about the post-war world as it is about a doomed love affair (if indeed love is really what it is). Kengo and Yukiko are the floating clouds of the title, unable to settle in the chaos of defeat where there is no clear foothold to forge a path into the future, no clear direction in which to head, and no clear sign that the future itself is even a possibility. Naruse begins with the painful present marked by crushing defeat and hopelessness, flashing back to the brighter, warmer forests of Indochina to show us the lovers as they had been in a more “innocent” world. At 22, Yukiko smiles brightly and walks tall with a lightness in her step. She went to Indochina in the middle of a war to escape violence at home and, working in the peaceful environment of the forestry commission, begins to find a kind of serenity even whilst dragged into an ill-advised affair with a moody older man more out of loneliness than lust.

Yet, Yukiko’s troubles started long before the war. Assaulted by her brother-in-law she escapes Japan but falls straight into the arms of Kengo who is thought a good, trustworthy man but proves to be anything but. Kengo, frustrated and broken, attempts to lose himself through intense yet temporary relationships with younger women. Every woman he becomes involved with throughout the course of the film comes to a bad end – his wife, Kuniko, dies of tuberculosis while Kengo was unable to pay for treatment which might perhaps have saved her, an inn keeper’s wife he has a brief fling with is eventually murdered by a jealous husband (a guilty Kengo later attempts to raise money for a better lawyer to defend him), Yukiko’s life is more or less destroyed, and goodness only knows what will happen to a very young errand runner for the local bar whom he apparently kissed in a drunken moment of passion.

The lovers remain trapped by the past, even if Kengo repeatedly insists that one cannot live on memory and that their love died in Dalat where perhaps they should have remained. Yukiko’s tragedy is that she had nothing else than her love for Kengo to cling to, while Kengo’s is that he consistently tries to negate the past rather than accept it, craving the purity of memory over an attainable reality, chasing that same sense of possibility in new and younger lovers but once again squandering each opportunity for happiness through intense self obsession. “Things can’t be the same after a war”, intones Kengo as an excuse for his continued callousness, but they find themselves retreating into the past anyway, taking off for tropical, rainy Yakushima which might not be so different from the Indochina of their memories but the past is not somewhere one can easily return and there can be only tragedy for those who cannot let go of an idealised history in order to move forward into a new and uncertain world.