Tag: Keisuke Kinoshita

This Year’s Love (今年の恋, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1962)

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The friendship between two underachieving teenage boys hints a series of conflicts in a changing society while accidentally bringing their respective siblings together in Keisuke Kinoshita’s cheerful romantic comedy, This Year’s Love (今年の恋, Kotoshi no Koi). In many ways, it’s the older siblings who appear to be stuck while the parents are largely content to let life be and the boys rejecting the conventional paths laid out for them while attempting to overcome their loneliness and sense of despair through the sincerity of their interclass friendship. 

As the film opens, high school boys Hikaru (Masakazu Tamura) and Ichiro (Ryuji Ishikawa) have been lured to a patch of grass above the city where they’re assaulted by an older bully who for some reason resents the fact that they weren’t wearing their traditional students caps even though such things are perhaps already outdated in the rapidly changing society of 1962. In any case, Hikaru vows revenge, deciding to give up golf club and a series of other things to take up boxing, instructing Ichiro to abandon the “girly” sport of basketball and join him. Neither boy is currently doing very well at their studies, with Ichiro’s prim and proper sister Mikako (Mariko Okada) convinced that Hikaru is a bad influence on her brother assuming that he is another spoilt rich kid set on leading him astray. 

In fact, she’s not entirely wrong. Hikaru does seem to be somewhat aimless probably because his family is wealthy and he doesn’t see much urgency in the situation nor hold that kind of anxiety for his future though is fond of telling people that he feels quite depressed. While Ichiro lives in Ginza where his family run a successful restaurant, Hikaru lives in a large townhouse in nearby Yokohama cared for largely by their kindhearted housekeeper (Chieko Higashiyama) and a live-in maid while his older brother Tadashi (Teruo Yoshida) is currently a graduate student heading towards a regular salaryman job. Their mother having died some time ago and their father always away on business, care for Hikaru has largely fallen to Tadashi who is nevertheless a young man himself with his own life to be getting on with. Similarly Mikako has largely taken on a maternal role when it comes to caring for Ichiro because her parents are always busy with the restaurant. Part of the reason she’s resentful of Hikaru is that she’s the one the school keeps calling in about her brother’s poor academic performance while Ichiro is always off messing around with his rich kid friend. 

Mikako seems to take against Hikaru in part because he is rich, assuming that wealthy people are necessarily decadent and lazy while concerned that Ichiro’s head is being turned by seeing the way the other half live without understanding what it takes to live that way. The Aikawas aren’t exactly poor, they also have a live-in maid and their quarters behind the restaurant are spacious enough, though they couldn’t quite claim to be middle class because they work in the hospitality sector which is still somewhat looked down upon. In any case, dressing exclusively in kimono Mikako is extremely uptight and obsessed with properness. She further takes against the Yamadas after an awkward first meeting with Tadashi who is dumped by his fed up girlfriend in her restaurant and ends up getting beer thrown in his face, while his father later turns up with his secret longterm mistress, a maid from an inn in Atami, leaving Mikako scandalised and embarrassed. 

Ironically enough, Tadashi’s name quite literally means “correct” though even if he isn’t quite as hardline as Mikako he also wants the best for his brother. Because of the realities of life in post-war Japan, both boys explain that they find it hard to study in part because they are lonely often left home alone with no one to talk to which is one reason they value their friendship so deeply. Hikaru’s mother has passed away and his father is largely absent, while Ichiro’s parents are always working in the restaurant as is Mikako even if she’s largely been delegated other maternal duties. Tadashi and the housekeeper attempt to set Hikaru straight that he needs to do well in school because he’ll have to be able to get a good job to support himself, but Hikaru is part of a new generation that doesn’t the see point in the emptiness of the salaryman lifestyle. Tadashi might not either, but he’s going along with it anyway whereas as Mikako is completely wedded to the idea of aspirational respectability intent that Ichiro should do his best to get into college and catapult himself into the middle classes.

Her cheerfully laidback parents meanwhile barely finished school and have done alright for themselves with restaurant. They aren’t that bothered if Ichiro isn’t academically inclined because they can train him up as a chef even if that isn’t quite the future Mikako had envisaged for him in her upwardly mobile worldview. Nevertheless, she’s not quite as prim as she makes out, sneaking the odd cigarette here and there, and despite herself begins to fall for Tadashi’s goofy charms while bonding in shared love for their siblings. In the end she’s the one who has to learn that it’s alright to have a little fun now and then and if longtime widower Mr Yamada has a girlfriend that’s probably alright too. The boys’ teacher hints that he finds it strange they aren’t more into girls, Hikaru apparently so popular that the phone at his house never stops ringing but he turns them all down because he’s too consumed with ennui to date, introducing an additional transgressive element to their friendship along with their bid for manliness with their new obsession with boxing which as Mikako’s maid points out does feature a series of shirtless musclebound men. Perhaps Mikako’s newfound appreciation for romantic freedom wouldn’t stretch that far, but it does seem to have opened her up to new possibilities in a less judgemental future as she rings in the new year in the old capital of Kyoto. 

The Rose on His Arm (太陽とバラ, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1956)

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In the mid-1950s, a minor moral panic took hold over the so-called “Sun Tribe” movies which, inspired by the novels of Shintaro Ishihara, depicted a world of crazed abandon in which a collection of bored rich kids lost themselves in the hedonistic pursuits of sex and drugs rejecting the stability the wartime generation had striven so hard to create for their children. Shochiku, at that time the home of polite melodrama, nevertheless attempted to get in on the youth movie boom mostly through commissioning a series of young directors such as Kiju Yoshida and Nagisa Oshima in the hope that they could speak directly to their generation. Meanwhile, the by that point well-established Keisuke Kinoshita also made his own, perhaps surprising, take on the genre with The Rose on His Arm (太陽とバラ, Taiyo to Bara), a youth movie melodrama which nevertheless anticipated the questions others were beginning to ask about the Sun Tribe movies in their very particular view of contemporary class dynamics. 

Our hero, Kiyoshi (Katsuo Nakamura), is like the (anti-)heroes of the post-Sun Tribe youth movies, a poor boy turned delinquent out of a sense of frustrated hopelessness. Quitting one job after another solely because the work is boring, he spends most of his days hanging out at the beach with other no good kids robbing unsuspecting bathers. Kiyoshi’s sense of inferiority is compounded by the fact that his mother (Sadako Sawamura) works as a maid for a wealthy family while making ends meet by crafting paper flowers by night. The young master of the house where his mother works, Masahiro (Akira Ishihama), never misses a chance to lord his wealth over him but later co-opts Kiyoshi into his group of wealthy friends as a source of entertainment (and because his delinquent friend, Yamanaka (Tamotsu Tamura), begins supplying them with drugs).

“I screwed up my life because I was poor, what’s your excuse?” Kiyoshi eventually asks an indifferent Masahiro after beginning to see him for what he is. Like the hero of Punishment Room, Kiyoshi’s internalised resentment is partly down to a paternal failure in that he is deeply ashamed of his late father who died, his mother claimed, saving him but also in the course of his activities as a black marketeer in which he’d forced his son to be complicit. The family had apparently tried to make a life for themselves in the new colonies, in this case Palau, but of course had to return to Japan and were then penniless. People did what they had to do, but no one trusts a black marketeer and it seems to be a stain Kiyoshi (whose name means “pure”) cannot wash off. As a poor boy with no education or prospects, he knows all that awaits him is drudgery, so why not make a fast buck stealing purses at the beach rather than slave away at the factory for a week making less than Masahiro gets in pocket money from his factory owner father? 

Convincing himself he’s no good, Kiyoshi consistently sabotages opportunities but resents himself for doing so. He begins to buckle down at the factory but quickly becomes “bored” and starts taking advantage of his supportive floor manager while sucked into Masahiro’s hedonistic lifestyle even after it becomes obvious that he’s keeping him around to be some kind of hired goon, good for punching other pasty rich boys and hooking him up with underworld thrills. Masahiro is a delinquent because his life is too easy, he has no economic imperative to be responsible and will most likely go to college and then either take over the factory or walk into a lucrative salaryman job. Kiyoshi is a delinquent because he’s desperate and has no other means of living. 

Meanwhile he resents his mother’s love, shamed, in more than one sense, by her continuing industry. She often tells him the story of how he fell ill on Palau only to make a miraculous recovery after which she collapsed into a rose a garden. To spite her, Kiyoshi gets the titular rose tattooed on his arm, something which forever marks him out as a ne’er do well in conservative Japanese society, all but guaranteeing he’ll never get an honest job (he even has to cover the tattoo with bandages in public places to avoid causing offence). Eventually he takes drastic action to end his sense of hopelessness, pursuing what is strangely a darker yet more romantic destiny than that of his post-Sun Tribe compatriots in taking a poetic stand, paper rose in hand, defying his despair only through embracing it. 

The Rose on His Arm is currently available to stream in the US via Criterion Channel.

Sing, Young People (歌え若人達, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1963)

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Keisuke Kinoshita has sometimes been dismissed by Western critics for his supposed sentimentality, but his mid-career comedies can be surprisingly cynical. Scripted not by Kinoshita but Taichi Yamada, 1963’s Sing, Young People (歌え若人達, Utae Wakodotachi) is in someways an exception to the rule, a breezy take on the student comedy updated for the present day, but underneath all the absurdist humour and jibs about youthful ennui is a real sense of adolescent hopelessness as these aimless young men ponder their “pitch-black” futures in a rapidly changing Japan where the best they can hope for is fulfilling the salaryman dream.  

Shooting in glorious colour, Kinoshita opens with a lengthly pan over contemporary Tokyo which the jaunty voice over describes as “the number-one city in the world” before homing in on the incongruous figure of a strangely dressed man holding a sign advertising “sensual massage beauties”. A relic of an earlier advertising age, the wandering sign man nevertheless catches sight of someone even “weirder” than he is, a student wearing a student’s cap! Kinoshita then takes us on a brief detour through Japan’s major universities demonstrating that no one is so uncool as to wear a student’s cap in the age of protest, drawing a direct contrast to the student comedies of old while showing us a series of scenes of students “playing” hard with part-time jobs in bands or as models, training hard in preparation for the upcoming Olympics, fomenting the revolution, or fighting in the streets. In the first of many meta touches, our hero, Mori, is eventually woken by the narrator after falling asleep in class, his eyes “gleaming with hopes for the future”. 

Or, perhaps not, he’s just tired. Mori (Tsutomu Matsukawa) is as he describes himself a man without hopes or dreams who believes that the road ahead of him is “pitch black”. Dropping a brush from the window washers’ platform at one of his part-time jobs, he asks himself if there shouldn’t be more to life than this. The only son of his widowed mother, he’s pinned everything on graduating from a top university but feels powerless and empty, adrift in the post-war landscape. Where his calculating friend Miyamoto (Yusuke Kawazu) fills the void with romance and a determination to “get lots of As” and then land a top job, his roommate Okada (Shinichiro Mikami) earnestly studies hard afraid to disappoint his austere family but also quietly resentful in his lack of autonomy, and the dopey Hirao (Kei Yamamoto) simply goes about being nice to people more or less forcing them to eat the traditional treats his loving mother is forever sending. 

Yet for all the bleakness Mori seems to see in his future, he only ever falls up. Luck follows him and he’s presented with ever more fantastic opportunities at every turn. In fact, it’s his slightly grumpy expression as he cleans the windows of an office building that leads to them snapping a picture and making him a cover star without ever bothering to ask his permission though they do eventually pay. Still Mori remains indifferent, telling a reporter who tries to interview him that he had nothing to do with the cover, he has no dreams or aspirations for the future but lives his life day by day. He describes himself only as “nervous”. His words run ironically over the magazine literally becoming tomorrow’s chip paper, used by a stall owner to wrap her croquettes, as a stand for a hot pot, and otherwise bundled up to be pulped. Nevertheless, the cover leads to great opportunities from a TV network looking for a fresh face to front their new youth-orientated drama serial. 

Despite all the promise, Mori remains indifferent, later irritating a new colleague and potential love interest (Shima Iwashita) when he idly suggests he might just give up acting and fall back on the salaryman dream. As she points out, she had to fight all the way to achieve her dreams of becoming an actress so hearing someone say they’re going to throw away a tremendous opportunity that came to them entirely by chance is mildly offensive. Miyamoto meanwhile is growing lowkey resentful, realising that maybe nothing matters after all it’s all just dumb luck. Mori deliberately didn’t do anything because he thought his life was pointless but everything has landed right at his feet while Miyamoto’s life is crumbling. He’s lost all his girlfriends and endured a lonely New Year alone in the dorm, coming to the conclusion that his future really is “pitch black”.

Nevertheless, it’s difficult to remain resentful about a friend’s accidental success and so each of the men eventually finds direction in even in directionlessness. Mori realises that he might as well ride his wave of fame for as long as it lasts, accepting in part at least his sense of powerlessness, while Okada does the reverse in deciding to rebel against his authoritarian family by marrying in secret. Miyamoto resolves to make a success of himself in his own way, and Hirao seemingly accepts the hand fate has dealt him with good humour. Kinoshita ramps up the meta comedy with Mori joining Shochiku, encouraged to try and work for that “excellent” director Keisuke Kinoshita, later referencing Garden of Women, while Mariko Okada and Keiji Sada turn up as onstage guests at an event launching him as a young actor. Playfully using outdated, quirky screen wipes and opening with an artsy title sequence featuring colourful confetti falling up, Kinoshita perhaps adopts a slightly ironic tone in satirising the all pervasive sense of confusion and hopelessness among the younger generation but does so with only sympathy for those coming of age in uncertain times. 

Immortal Love (永遠の人, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1961)

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Patriarchal feudalism destroys not only the life of an innocent young woman but all of those around her in Keisuke Kinoshita’s embittered romantic melodrama Immortal Love (永遠の人, Eien no Hito). Scored to the impassioned beat of an incongruous flamenco and spanning almost thirty years of turbulent history from the tightening years of militarism to Anpo protests, Immortal Love finds its heroine imprisoned by the system within which she was raised but determining to free her children from the legacy of feudalism even while knowing that she traps herself in her intense resentment towards her husband and everything he represents. 

Heibei (Tatsuya Nakadai), the wealthy son of the village chief, returns home from military service in Manchuria after sustaining an injury that will leave him walking with crutches for the rest of his life. Though his father tells him that his is an honourable discharge and has organised a small parade complete with flag waving and a band to greet him, it’s obvious that Heibei feels ashamed to have returned home wounded and is unhappy that his father has made such a fuss. He’s doubly unhappy at his welcome home party on hearing the gossip that local beauty Sadako (Hideko Takamine) is in love with farmer’s son Takashi (Keiji Sada) to whom Heibei has always felt inferior, something which is only exacerbated by the fact Takashi is also at the front and apparently acquitting himself well. Cruelly calling her over, he tells Sadako that he met Takashi at a field hospital but that he was about to go off to a big battle so could very well be dead. 

Heibei’s true feelings, if you could call them that, remain unclear. Later, justifying himself, he claims that he really did care for Sadako and that all of his subsequent “immoral” acts were committed out of a love he was ill equipped to express, but that first night at the party it seems obvious that he only wants her because he knows she is Takashi’s. He tries to assault her when she is massaging his wounded leg, attempts to court her, and then finally resorts to rape with the help of his father who keeps Sadako’s dad occupied by forcing him to drink sake as his guest while making veiled threats about the status of his tenancy. Heibei had made a formal proposal which Sadako was about to turn down, further humiliating him, despite the pressure he’d piled on by threatening to throw Takashi’s brother off his land and potentially kicking her family off theirs too. By raping her and tricking her father into agreeing to the marriage he forces her to accept, wielding his feudal privilege like a weapon. 

Shortly before the marriage, Takashi returns on leave, a heroic soldier painted in glory. He too is resentful and heartbroken to learn that Sadako is to marry to Heibei, eventually hearing the truth of it from his brother. Sadako tries to kill herself rather than be forced into marriage with her rapist, and avoids seeing Takashi in thinking she is now “impure” and can no longer be his wife. Takashi assures her she is wrong, and that even if Heibei thinks he has “stolen” her in taking her by force, he can simply take her back. He proposes they elope, but fails to turn up, leaving Sadako standing sadly at the roadside until her father arrives with a letter explaining that Takashi has reconsidered and advises her to accept a life of material comfort as Heibei’s wife rather than one of hardship with him. 

Forced to marry the man who raped her, Sadako lives in quiet resentment, bearing three children the first of which she struggles to love because he is the result of the rape which condemned her to her present life of misery. Years later, Sadako learns that Takashi married too when his wife Tomoko (Nobuko Otowa) is evacuated to the village to stay with his brother. Heibei, ever cruel, offers Tomoko a job as a household servant, revelling in the idea that Takashi’s first love and current wife are both under his roof, telling her all about their strange romantic history and setting her at odds with Sadako whom she too resents knowing that her husband has never loved her because he can’t give up on his first love. A twisted bond arises between Heibei and Tomoko, united in resentment of Takashi and Sadako, but Heibei eventually tries to rape her too, once again trying to take what Takashi has, or possibly destroy it.  

Despite her despair and loathing for her husband, Sadako tries to rise above it and always makes a point of treating Tomoko with respect and kindness even when she is cruel. Later on the road, she tells her not to worry, that what she grieves isn’t Takashi but the life she lived before. Heibei is perhaps also a victim of the system, his masculinity undermined by his brash father while his sense of inferiority is exacerbated by his disability, but he is also innately cruel and selfish. There’s strange perversion in the act of healing which closes the film in that it forces Sadako to ask for an apology from Heibei, the man who raped her and ruined her life, for using his abuse as an “excuse” to go on hating him all these long years. Heibei characteristically paints himself as the victim, branding Sadako a cold and unfeeling woman, wondering who will look after him now that he has been abandoned by all his children. He tells her that his feelings were sincere even if his acts were immoral, implicitly blaming her for the abuse that he inflicted, but Sadako merely accuses him of romanticising the past in trying to justify this internecine bid for vengeance that ruined the lives of at least four people as a frustrated love story. 

“You and I may never be reconciled until one of us dies” Heibei admits, while Sadako tearfully tells a dying Takashi that it’s not too late for her to try to be happy. Tomoko was able to reconcile with her son and apparently lived out the last of her days in contentment. Naoko (Yukiko Fuji), Sadako’s daughter, eventually married Takashi’s son Yutaka (Akira Ishihama), breaking with the past both in rejecting the feudal class structure within which she was raised in marrying a working class man, and the patriarchal in ignoring her cruel father’s authority. A kind of healing has been achieved, freeing the younger generation from the cursed family legacy which claims that their ancestral wealth was gained by a literal betrayal of thousands of peasant farmers at the time of the siege of Osaka in 1615. The corruption of the war and a culture of hypermasculinty is visited on Sadako in the violent trauma of the rape, an event which echoes through not only her life but perhaps her children’s too. It is not she who should be asking for forgiveness, but she does perhaps begin to find it in herself, in making a kind of peace with the past which at least cuts the cord, allowing the younger generation to escape the net of feudal oppression for a brighter, freer, post-war future.

Immortal Love is available to stream in the US via the Criterion Channel.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Phoenix (不死鳥, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1947)

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“Life is about facing your loneliness” according to the heroine of Keisuke Kinoshita’s Phoenix (不死鳥, Fushicho), a woman who’s known her share of suffering but has learned to endure. She knows not only war widows are lonely, and she’s not the only war widow, so she’s doing her best to be as happy as one can be under the circumstances. As much about its nation’s rebirth from the ashes, Phoenix is also quietly subversive in its critique of outdated social conventions and enthusiasm for a woman’s right to seek her independence rather than rely on the support of the traditional family. 

In 1947, Sayoko (Kinuyo Tanaka) is a much loved daughter-in-law and mother to Ken, who is about to celebrate his fourth birthday. She takes care of the household and looks after the numerous Yasaka siblings while putting up with her sometimes grumpy father-in-law (Isamu Kosugi) who harshly scolds little Ken when he throws a stone through the side window but feels guilty about it afterwards and vows to come home with sweets to make it up to him. Life with the Yasakas is peaceful and happy, though the present crisis, which isn’t really a crisis so much as a matter for consideration, is the potential marriage of younger son Yuji (Akira Yamanouchi) who has been wanting to marry his girlfriend Yoko but had been worried both that his parents would object to him trying to choose his own bride without their input, and that bringing another young woman into the house as a new wife might be insensitive, leaving Sayoko feeling sad and unwelcome. 

Yuji’s mother tells him that he doesn’t need to worry on either point, she and his father have long been in favour of the marriage which hints at something of a sea change in contemporary social attitudes. In Sayoko’s flashbacks to her early courtship, we see Shinichi (Keiji Sada), her later husband, bring her to his family home with the intention of introducing her to his parents as his future bride, but his father won’t even see her, loudly shouting that Shinichi should immediately ask her to leave. His objections are largely feudal in nature, Shinichi is the oldest son and his marriage is therefore of great importance to the family name. Not only does he not know anything about Sayoko, whom he basically calls a loose woman for daring to date while in high school, but he deeply resents that Shinichi has gone behind his back, defied his authority, and tried to arrange his own marriage without his father’s input. 

Despite the clear intention of the pair to continue their association with or without his consent, Mr. Yasaka continues to object. Shinichi insists that “nothing can separate us” despite knowing that he has already enlisted for the army and will shortly be leaving for the war. Sayoko holds the line, resisting even when her father dies and pushy relatives try to railroad her into an arranged marriage which will benefit them financially, and supporting her younger brother who is spared the war but only because he is already in the later stages of incurable TB.

Mr. Yasaka’s objections gain more weight with the war’s intensity. With her brother on his deathbed, he turns up to ask Sayoko not to see Shinichi on his brief leave before he’s shipped abroad during which they plan to get married because he thinks it’s irresponsible for his son to marry a woman knowing there is a good chance he will leave her a widow. Overwhelmed by the scale of her tragedies, Sayoko has had enough, rounding on Mr. Yasaka and letting him know that his concerns are moot because every healthy young man is in the same position and if he’d only given up his stubborn insistence that Shinichi has wronged him by undercutting his authority and given his consent to their marriage at any point during the last six years he wouldn’t have had to come here on this day with her brother dying in the next room to tell her that she shouldn’t marry the man she loves because her marriage is somehow his decision to make. 

Mr. Yasaka is clearly moved by Sayoko’s distress, moving to comfort her but then withdrawing and getting up to leave without saying anything. Petitioned again by Sayoko’s faithful housekeeper, he catches sight of the blooming flowers Sayoko has grown in adversity and is minded to reconsider. Several years later we can see that Mr. Yasaka has grown fond of Sayoko and his grandson even if he has a bit of temper, while she is very happy as a member of their family and not at all minded to remarry despite their desire for her to lead a fulfilling life. That is, as she tells Yuji encouraging him not to feel bashful about his bride, not because of a romantic notion of faithfulness or being hung up on old memories, but for the practical reason that she has nowhere else to go, or at least she is certain there is nowhere where she would be so happy. Later, however, she hopes to open a shop of her own and strive for her independence together with her son rather than remaining dependent on her husband’s family or marrying again for practical rather than emotional reasons.

Shinichi had been fond of talking about the life they’d lead once the war was over, that they’d only be apart for a few years and then never again, but the war stole their future from them as it did for so many other young people whom the film was doubtless intended to comfort. Nevertheless, Sayoko is forever telling people how happy she is. Mr. Yasaka seems to have relented, is going to let his younger son marry a woman of his choosing, and the younger siblings are all bright and cheerful. The future looks rosy, and Sayoko is going to do her best to enjoy it, striving for independence in a now less restrictive society. 

Titles and opening (no subtitles)

The Tattered Wings (遠い雲, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1955)

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“Why can’t a woman have the freedom to pursue her own happiness?” wails an extremely conflicted woman in Keisuke Kinoshita’s The Tattered Wings (遠い雲, Tooi Kumo), though it appears she may have completely misinterpreted the desires of the woman she is speaking to. By 1955, provincial Japan had perhaps returned to a kind of peaceful normality but times were changing here too, just in ways that seem slightly unexpected. In this case, the problem is not curtain twitching grannies keen to enforce the social order, but a pair of young punks hoping to stir up trouble through malicious gossip for motives which are entirely unclear save resentment and desire to rebel against their own lack of prospects in an otherwise rigid society. 

All the trouble starts when brooding intellectual Keizo (Takahiro Tamura) returns from Tokyo for a 10 day visit with his family before taking up a job transfer to Hokkaido after which he claims he will not be able to see them for several years. Before he left, Keizo had been sweet on Fuyuko (Hideko Takamine), but she eventually consented to an arranged marriage to support her parents’ failing business and is now a widow with a small daughter. Though the marriage was abusive, since her husband’s death Fuyuko has been happy in her married home, spending time with her husband’s sensitive younger brother Shunsuke (Keiji Sada) and there is some talk that they may later marry. 

Though this kind of quasi-incestuous union of a widow and her brother-in-law may have fuelled countless other melodramas, it is not the problem here so much as its potential solution. After running into him by chance at her husband’s grave, a strange place to reencounter an old lover, Fuyuko is seen in several places around the town walking and talking with Keizo. There is nothing more to their relationship than that, a man and a woman talking at a respectful distance in public, but the young toughs at the station who always carried a torch for the beautiful Fuyuko decide to start a nasty rumour that there is something improper going on. 

In real terms, of course, there isn’t, but there is a kind of silent pull between Keizo and the lonely Fuyuko that is much more difficult and ambiguous than one might expect it to be. Keizo clearly wants to pick up where they left off, but is intense and awkward, motivated to urgency by the briefness of his stay. He forgets that he’s been gone a long time and Fuyuko is no longer the carefree 19-year-old she was when he left, but the mother of a young girl who claims that she has long since lost the ability to dream. Brutalised by her abusive husband, she is unwilling to stake her hopes on new romance and is wary of becoming a middle-aged woman chasing a return to the past in embracing an idealised first love in flight from its complicated reality. She accuses Keizo of trying to project his own dream of the past onto her, wanting to return to the possibilities of his youth rather than really in love with a woman he now barely knows. 

Meanwhile, Fuyuko is pulled in two directions by her respective families. Her older sister is embittered, resentful of their mother who refused her permission to marry a man she loved because he wasn’t wealthy and they wanted a son to marry in, while her younger sister has herself long carried a torch for Keizo and is acting more out of jealousy than genuine concern. Faced with crisis, the families of both Fuyuko and Keizo affirm that they don’t care what anyone might say about it so long as their children are happy, but the problem is that Fuyuko no longer knows what she wants. Keizo accuses her of tearing off her wings rather than using them to fly, but perhaps what she wanted all along wasn’t an excuse to leave but one to stay. Maybe what she wants isn’t actually what everyone expects it to be, and the permission she’s trying to give herself is the right to be comfortable with a slow and steady kind of love at the side of a patient and compassionate sort of man who’d be content to let her choose and know he’d been her choice. Fuyuko’s wings may be tattered, but she is in a sense pursuing her own happiness in choosing the present over an unrealistic dream of adolescent romance.

Opening and titles (no subtitles)

Farewell to Dream (夕やけ雲, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1956)

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Does adulthood mean the death of dreams, or simply accommodation with disappointment? Yoichi (Shinji Tanaka), the cheerfully romantic hero of Keisuke Kinoshita’s Farewell to Dream (夕やけ雲, Yuyake-gumo), has made his peace with “losing” out in the great game of life, comforting himself in working hard to provide for others while becoming good at what he does, but keeping one eye always on the past and the boy he once was whose horizons were boundless and future untethered. 

In his chipper yet somehow poetic opening monologue, 20-year-old Yoichi introduces us to the family fishmonger’s he runs with his mother. If he says so himself, standards have improved since his father’s day and he’s done quite well for himself. His mother even jokes about finding him a wife, but that’s a long way off. To show us how he got here, he picks up his binoculars, a present from an uncle who sailed away and never came back, to show us “the last chapter of his youth, full of innocent dreams”. At 16, Yoichi dreamed of becoming a sailor, staring out over the horizon and catching sight of a beautiful woman in a distant window far on the other side of town. He lives with his parents and three younger siblings, while his older sister Toyoko (Yoshiko Kuga) has an office job that supplements the family income seeing as there’s not much money in fishmongering. 

Yoichi describes his sister as beautiful yet cold. No one can quite believe such a fantastic beauty was born to a lowly family of fishmongers with a back alley shop in a small town, but her beauty has made her cruel and avaricious. She wants out of poverty and she doesn’t much care what she has to do to escape it. She knows the easiest way, and in real terms perhaps the only way, is to attach herself to a man of means, which is why she’s just agreed to marry a man named Sudo (Takahiro Tamura) who comes from a wealthy family and is head over heels in love with her. When he tells her that his family business has collapsed and he’s no more money, she abruptly calls the engagement off and begins courting her widowed boss, eventually marrying him despite the fact that it’s a second marriage and he’s more than twice her age. 

Toyoko may just be playing the only cards she’s been dealt, but she’s also a personification of selfish post-war individualism. She only cares about herself, has no real sense of morality, and a total disregard for the feelings of others. Sudo, who for some reason truly seems to have loved her, cannot let her go, turning up on her wedding day to punch her in the face. Toyoko is fully aware of the effect she has on men and skilled in manipulating it, drifting back into an affair with Sudo even after her marriage, leaving her irate husband forever ringing her parents with orders to return her to her new home as if they had any real influence over her. 

Despite himself, Yoichi is by contrast the “good son” who gives up the right to his individual future to take care of his family. At 16, he hates being a fishmonger’s boy because the other kids tease him that he always smells of fish, as if he can’t wash away the scent of poverty. He dreams of freedom as a sailor out on the wide ocean, forever staring at the horizon with his binoculars, and of the beautiful woman who, he decides rather romantically, must be suffering with some kind of illness which is why she’s always in her room. When his father becomes ill, suffering a heart attack brought on by Toyoko’s harsh words, Yoichi begins to realise that his dreams are dying. Like the fish in his shop, he’s trapped, no longer able to swim free but tethered to the ground. There can’t be anything more of life for him than becoming a fishmonger himself, whether he liked it or not. His fate was sealed before he was even born. 

Yet unlike the flighty Toyoko who seems unhappy in her marriage but doing her best to put up with it by continuing to do as she pleases, Yoichi has made peace with warmhearted practicality. At 16 he lost everything – his father, the image of Toyoko, his younger sister fostered out to a badgering uncle, his best friend, the beautiful woman in her lonely room, and finally the horizon and his dreams. “His dream was as fleeting and as beautiful as the clouds at sunset” the opening text tells us, echoing the film’s title with a poetic melancholy that makes plain that Yoichi has not so much abandoned his dream as made the memory of it a part of him, a relic of another time when all was possible. Still, in essence perhaps it’s only what it is to grow up, an acceptance of shrinking horizons and that dreams are by definition things destined not to be, but that’s it’s OK in the grand scheme of things because that’s just the way life is. Forced to become a fishmonger, Yoichi becomes the best fishmonger he could be, and even if he does so with a heavy heart, he has a lightness in his step in knowing he does it not for himself but for those he loves. 

Titles and opening (no subtitles)

Broken Drum (破れ太鼓, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1949)

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The evils of of authoritarianism are recast as family drama in Keisuke Kinoshita’s 1949 satirical comedy, Broken Drum (破れ太鼓, Yabure Daiko). Co-scripted by Masaki Kobayashi, a student of Kinoshita’s who went on to forge a long career dedicated to interrogating the place of the conscientious individual within an oppressive system, Broken Drum is also a testament to changing times and new possibilities as the youngsters slowly find the strength to resist and insist on their right to individual happiness. 

As the film begins, the family’s maid is leaving in a hurry, sick to the back teeth of the treatment she receives from the head of the household. Though she admits that the wife and children are all lovely, the husband is a tyrant and, according to her, a nouveau riche upstart, all money and no class. Tsuda (Tsumasaburo Bando), a self-made construction magnate, runs his family like a small cult and everyone is so afraid of upsetting him that they find themselves entirely unable to stand up for themselves. Times are, however, changing and Tsuda’s business is in trouble, which means his power may be waning. Denied loans all over town, he tries to railroad his eldest daughter, Akiko (Toshiko Kobayashi), into marrying a wealthy suitor, Hanada (Mitsuo Nagata), and is deaf to her cries of resistance.

Despite the rather ironical speech from the maid who describes herself as a “feminist” which is why she’s unable to put up with Tsuda’s poor conduct, stopping to tell a pregnant dog not to let anyone push her around just because she’s a girl, the world of 1949 is still an incredibly sexist one. Tsuda’s long suffering wife Kuniko (Sachiko Murase) complains that her younger daughter spends all her time rehearsing for her role as Hamlet rather than learning “useful” skills for women like cooking and housekeeping. Akiko’s suitor sides with the maid, affirming that “men should be nice to women” and making a point of telling her that all his maids love him without quite realising that what he’s just said isn’t quite as nice as he thought it was. Akiko doesn’t want to get married and she doesn’t even like Hanada, but she’s too conflicted to fully resist, unsure if she has the right to go against the “tradition” of arranged marriage. She asks her mother how she felt, and learns that she too cried every day, somehow normalising the idea that a woman’s marriage is supposed to make her miserable. 

Meanwhile, Tsuda is slowly destroying his oldest son, Taro (Masayuki Mori), who has been trying to quit the family construction firm to go into business with his aunt making music boxes. Tsuda isn’t having any of it, he tells Taro that music boxes aren’t a manly occupation and that he’ll never make it on his own, but Taro has an advantage in knowing that the construction company is in a bad place and his father’s authority is weakened. He becomes the first of the children to escape by rejecting Tsuda’s influence, decamping to his aunt’s which becomes a point of refuge for the other members of the Tsuda family seeking escape. 

Akiko begins to gain the courage to walk away after bonding with a painter she meets after her father was extremely rude to him on a bus, poking a hole in his canvas and then blaming it on the driver. Luckily he dropped his sketchbook which has his name, Shigeki Nonaka (Jukichi Uno), inside so she can pay him a visit to return it. Unlike the Tsuda’s, the Nonaka household is one of cheerful family warmth. They are not wealthy, but they do not particularly care. Mr & Mrs Nonaka fell in love in Paris decades ago where she was charmed by the sound of his violin while she sketched in the streets. Tsuda, angrily rejecting Akiko’s attempt to cancel the marriage, tells his wife that even if she doesn’t like him now, Hanada’s wealth will make her happy in the long run, but it’s at the Nonaka’s that she discovers “the true happiness of family”, vowing to do whatever it takes to be able to marry Shigeki with whom she has fallen in love. 

Even after losing two of his children and finally alienating his wife, Tsuda fails to learn, blaming his family for the failure of his business rather than accept his old school authoritarianism is out of step with the modern world. His middle son, Heizo (Chuji Kinoshita), actually the most sympathetic of the children, has written a satirical song that likens his father to a “broken drum”, something that makes a lot of noise but is confusing and very unpleasant to listen to. It doesn’t help that Tsuda also has the habit of going into speech mode, raising his arm in a fascist salute as he barks out his orders. “Life is most miserable when there’s no one to love”, Heizo tries to warn him, calmly explaining that a family is made up of “lonely creatures” with individual lives, and that that strong connection only survives through trust and independence.

Beginning to see the light, Tsuda accepts that he’ll be deposed if he doesn’t allow his family its democratic freedoms. Undergoing a conversion worthy of Scrooge at the end of a Christmas Carol, he he suddenly realises that “you need other people to succeed in life”, and is re-embraced by his family who decide to give him a chance to be better than he’s been in the knowledge that he has no more power over them than they choose to give him. 

Titles and opening (no subtitles)

The Scent of Incense (香華, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1964)

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Scent of Incense still 1Sometimes regarded as overly sentimental, Keisuke Kinoshita’s later career grew progressively harder around the edges, as if he began to lose faith in the efficacy of human goodness but never it seems in its capacity for endurance. Spanning more than 50 years in the turbulent history of mid-20th century Japan, The Scent of Incense (香華, Koge) reverses the path of the hahamono in dramatising the complicated relationship of two women – a “selfish” mother and her “self-sacrificing” daughter who finds herself unable to give up on maternal approval despite the many disappointments of her life.

We open in late Meiji with a funeral interrupted by news from the Russo-Japanese war. Shortly after, young widow Ikuyo (Nobuko Otowa) argues with her mother, Tsuna (Kinuyo Tanaka), over custody of her five-year-old daughter Tomoko. Ikuyo is planning to remarry and her new husband has three children of his own. Fearing Tomoko would be an inconvenience, Ikuyo proposes to make her heir to her mother’s family, leaving her behind in her grandmother’s care. Though Tsuna loves Tomoko dearly, she resents her daughter’s intention to abandon them just because she’s got a better offer, and perhaps privately wonders how long she’ll actually stick it out for seeing as, as we later see, she has a strong tendency to give up when the going gets tough.

The prediction proves accurate. Ikuyo persuades her new husband to abandon his existing children and family home for the bright lights of Tokyo, while Tomoko and her grandmother live on alone in the country. Ikuyo has another daughter, Yasuko, but the couple quickly become impoverished without access to her husband’s family money. When Tsuna dies, Ikuyo decides to fetch Tomoko from the family residence, but then sells her to a geisha house. A few years later, she too falls into the sex trade but as a less exulted “oiran”, embarrassingly re-encountering her daughter from the other side of a brothel. Despite her abandonment and shame over her mother’s profession, Tomoko (Mariko Okada) continues to try to help her, maintaining an awkward familial relationship with a woman who only pays attention to her when she needs something.

Perhaps ironically, in one sense, Tomoko ends up becoming a successful, independent woman in pre-war Japan but is forever denied the kind of familial life she craves as a conventionally respectable wife and mother of the kind her own was not. In the course of her work, she meets dashing military cadet Ezaki (Go Kato) and, despite the warnings of her madam (Haruko Sugimura) who cautions her that she’s the type to fall in love too deeply, embarks on a longterm affair with him. Though he is obviously aware that she is a geisha, he is confident that his family would accept a marriage, but Tomoko’s hopes are later dashed when his pre-marital investigations turn up the fact that Ikuyo has worked as a “common prostitute”. Heartbroken, she resents once again paying the price for her mother’s transgressions, but does not break with her completely.

Tomoko’s liminal status is further brought home to her when her elderly patron, who has set her up with a geisha house of her own, suddenly dies and not only is she informed some days later by the madam at another house, but she’s not even permitted to attend the funeral. Another man, Nozawa (Eiji Okada), who’d had his eye on her but honestly admits that men of his class do not engage in “serious” relationships with geisha, asks her to become his mistress but she has had enough of the shadow life, vowing both that she doesn’t want to be “owned” anymore, and that her next man (if there is one) will have to marry her.

Loneliness renders that particular vow void as she finds herself embarking on a casual affair with Nozawa while Ikuyo considers getting married for the third time – this time, rather transgressively, with the family’s recently widowed former servant, Hachiran (Norihei Miki), who married into a wealthy family and apparently made something of himself. Hachiran, however, finds it difficult to shake off the old class attitudes, treating Ikuyo like a goddess while she bosses him around and makes a pretence of leaving every time she gets fed up.

Later we might wonder if Ikuyo’s sudden exit from Hachiran’s distant home is more that she missed her daughter than it was boredom with her husband. “I don’t think of her as a mother” each woman says, Ikuyo on learning that Tsuna is dangerously ill, and Tomoko when Nozawa suggests making a detour to visit Ikuyo and Hachiran. Ikuyo, it is true, is a cold woman who abandoned her daughter only to reclaim her in order to sell, later giving up two more children one of whom apparently disappears without trace. The proof of her love is found only in its end, while Tomoko suffers on all the long years otherwise alone, until in an immense act of circularity she at last becomes a kind of mother to another woman’s son.

Forever haunted by the spectre of soldiers, Tomoko loses everything in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, but perseveres and rebuilds. She loses everything again in the firebombing of Tokyo, only later remembering her foresight in burying a large collection of crockery in the cellar which might allow her to open a restaurant. She resents her mother but keeps her close, while Ikuyo’s affections seem to ebb and flow as she disappears off to greener pastures only to resurface again when they’ve been thoroughly grazed. A flighty, perhaps selfish woman, Ikuyo too proves unable to sever connection from her daughter. Tomoko disapproves of her mother’s gaudiness, her unbridled lust for life and disregard of social conventions, but the two women are more alike than they first seem – each in their own way fiercely independent and unwilling to allow their desires to be defined or defeated by the world around them.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

She Was Like a Wild Chrysanthemum (野菊の如き君なりき, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1955)

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She was like a wild chrysanthemum dvdForemost among the post-war humanists, Keisuke Kinoshita had a somewhat complex relationship with the past, by turns decrying the restrictions of latent feudalism and pining for the lost innocence of an idyllic pastoral Japan untouched by mid-century trauma. She Was Like a Wild Chrysanthemum (野菊の如き君なりき, Nogiku no Gotoki Kimi Nariki) manages to do both at once, lamenting the passing of time and a clear division between then and now while railing against the unfairness of the society which keeps young lovers apart in insisting that broken hearts are merely something that must be endured.

In the contemporary era, 73-year-old Masao (Chishu Ryu) is taking a boat back to his hometown though he no longer has any family there, his brother’s adopted son having inherited the family estate but seemingly rejected it. The local kids treat his abandoned family home as a haunted house. He tells us that he’s going back the way he came, it may be old fashioned to travel by river like this but there was no train back in his day. Masao feels his age. His grandson has just entered college and his mind is no longer what it was. He finds himself lost in sentimental memories, which is what has brought him back here, to the place which stole from him the only thing he ever loved.

Flashing back almost 60 years to the late Meiji-era when Masao (Shinji Tanaka) was but a boy of 15 preparing to leave home to study at high school, the older Masao recalls the happiest time of his life, now ensconced in a nostalgic cameo frame, when he lived with his sickly mother (Haruko Sugimura) and 17-year-old cousin Tamiko (Noriko Arita) with whom he had quietly fallen in love. Though it is not exactly unusual for cousins to marry, especially among the gentry, the closeness of the two youngsters has begun to cause gossip in the village especially as they are no longer children if not quite grown up. Still stuck somewhere between awkward adolescent attachment and the dawning realisation of a greater love, Masao and Tamiko resent the attempts made to keep them apart, but are largely powerless to resist the world in which they live.

That would be, in a largely feudal context, that Tamiko is more or less a “poor relation”, somewhere between servant and beloved daughter, not quite a member of the family, but resented by the maids. As such, she is no match for Masao who will be expected to marry someone of his mother’s choosing. The issue is not so much that the pair are cousins, or the slight squeamishness that they have been raised more or less as siblings, but an anxiety that something dreadful may be about to befall them which should be stopped before it becomes an unsolvable problem.

Masao’s mother tells Tamiko that women must learn “housework” like cleaning and dressmaking which might be a thinly veiled way to excuse the fact that she is using her as an unpaid maid, but it does at least remind us that she must marry someone, someday. At 17, Tamiko is at the age where her marriage becomes a matter for consideration, whereas at 15 Masao will leave home to pursue his education. They know their time together is limited, but still they dare to hope, the proximity of an ending giving them the courage to give tentative voice to their feelings.

Meanwhile, the danger they face is entirely homegrown and as much political and avaricious as it is conservative. The problem is that Masao’s older brother and his wife have no children. The sister-in-law intensely resents Tamiko’s presence, fearing she will somehow end up marrying Masao and getting her hands on the estate. To prevent that happening, she flags up the villagers’ gossip with Masao’s mother, who had been content to let them be because they were “only children” but is beginning to be swayed by the possibility of scandal or social censure. She decides to send Masao away to school ahead of schedule, hoping the whole thing will blow over, but Tamiko is so distraught that the sister-in-law eventually has her sent back to her parents where she receives an offer of marriage from the son of a wealthy family.

Too heartbroken to do much else, Tamiko spends most of her time in bed and flatly rejects the idea of marriage while the rest of her family desperately try to persuade her. Even Masao’s mother who professes to love her as a daughter tells her in no uncertain terms that she could never consent to her marrying her son. Only Tamiko’s melancholy grandmother who regards her own marriage to a man she truly loved as the thing which has given her life meaning, stops for pause, not objecting to the proposal but disappointed with her children’s insensitivity and aware of the dangers in the sacrifice Tamiko would be making if she agreed to marry more or less against her will.

The cruelty of the times is brought home by two near identical sequences, one a funeral procession in bright sunlight and the other a solemn moonlight wedding. The youngsters pledge themselves to each other, but are torn apart by forces beyond their control. In this, Kinoshita perhaps presages a greater tragedy still to come at the hands of implacable authoritarianism, suggesting that this rigid adherence to tradition at the expense of human feeling leads only to an eternal heartbreak and chaos born of resentment. If the relatives had simply let them be, let nature take its course and love find its way, then all of this sadness and regret could have been avoided. Masao apparently lived an ordinary life, suffered in the war, but married and had children, all while living with unutterable regret. His love has lasted 60 years, along with the memory of innocent wild flowers and the tranquility of his rural childhood in a Japan now long gone, inhabited solely by the ghosts of memory. “Only crickets sing by her grave”.

Original trailer (no subtitles)