Tag: Koji Shimizu

Kagemusha (影武者, Akira Kurosawa, 1980)

Posted on by

“The shadow of a man can never stand up and walk on its own” a shadow warrior laments, wondering what happens to the shadow once the man is gone. Set at the tail end of the Sengoku era, Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha (影武者) charts the transformation of a man reborn as someone else and discovers that he’s better at playing the role he’s been assigned than the man who was born to play it only to fall victim to his own hubris and self-delusion. 

The nameless hero (Tatsuya Nakadai) is a lowborn thief sentenced to death only to be reprieved thanks to his uncanny resemblance to the local lord, Takeda Shingen (also Tatsuya Nakadai), whose double he must play if he’s to keep his life. The shadow objects to this characterisation, outraged that a man who has killed hundreds and robbed whole domains dares to call him a scoundrel. Shingen agrees he too is morally compromised. He banished his father and killed his own son but justifies it as a necessary evil in his quest to conquer Japan hoping to unify it bringing an end to the Warring States period and ensuring peace throughout the land. 

The shadow goes along with it, but does not really realise the full implications of his decision. He tries to smash a giant urn hoping to find treasure to escape with, but is confronted by a corpse bearing his own face. Shingen has been killed by an enemy sniper in an act of hubris sneaking around a castle under siege hoping (not) to hear the sound of a flute. Before passing away, Shingen instructs his men to keep his death a secret for three years, retreating to defend their own domain rather than conquer others. But there are spies everywhere and news of his apparent demise soon travels to the allied Oda Nobunaga (Daisuke Ryu) and Tokugawa Ieyasu (Masayuki Yui), his rivals for the potential hegemony over a unified Japan. The shadow Shingen must keep up the pretence to keep the dream alive and protect the Takeda Clan from being swallowed whole by the advance of Nobunaga. 

Shingen had been the “immoveable mountain”, the solid force that anchors his troops from behind but also an implacable leader famed for his austerity. The shadow Shingen is almost caught out by the honest reaction of his grandson and heir Takemaru (Kota Yui) who immediately blurts out that this man is not his grandfather because he is no longer scary, while he’s also bucked by Shingen’s horse who in the end cannot be fooled. His retainers wisely come up with a ruse that he’s too ill to see his mistresses lest they realise the thief’s body does not bear the same scars even as everything about him from the way he talks and moves and laughs is different. Yet in his sudden conversion on witnessing Shingen’s funeral on lake Suwa and resolving that he wants to do something to serve the man who saved his life, the shadow proves an effective leader who earns the trust and affection of his immediate retainers but is equally struck by their sacrifice as they give their lives to protect him. 

Meanwhile, his illegitimate son Katsuyori (Kenichi Hagiwara), skipped over in the succession, complains that he can never emerge from his father’s shadow emphasising the ways in which the feudal order disrupts genuine relationships between people and bringing a note of poignancy to the connection that emerges between the shadow Shingen and little Takemaru otherwise raised to perpetuate that same emotional austerity. Hoping to eclipse his father, Katsuyori too experiences a moment of hubris, successful in his first campaign but then over ambitious, forgetting his father’s teachings and walking straight into a trap only to be defeated by Nobunaga’s superior technology. 

Nobukado (Tsutomu Yamazaki), Shingen’s brother and sometime shadow, remarks that he hardly knew who he was once his brother was gone, and wonders what will become of the shadow once the three years are up. In a sense, the thief is already dead. As Nobukado puts it, it’s as if Shingen has possessed him, his confidence in his alternate persona apparently solidified by the victory at Takatenjin castle. But the sight of so many dead seems to unnerve him in the hellish spectacle of death that is a Sengoku battlefield knowing that these men died if not quite for him than for his image. When he attempts to mount Shingen’s horse, it’s either born of hubristic self-delusion in wanting to prove that he truly has become him, or else a bid for freedom and to be relieved of his shadow persona. Either way, he becomes a kind of ghost, once again watching his men from behind but this time invisibly and powerless to do anything but watch as they are massacred by Nobunaga’s guns. 

Earlier on he’d had a kind of nightmare, painted in surrealist hues by Kurosawa who conjures battlegrounds of angry reds and violent purples along with ominous rainbows, seeing himself dragged down into the water by Shingen’s ghost which he has now seemingly become. In the end all he can do is accept his fate in a final act of futility running defenceless towards the enemy line and reaching out to retrieve his banner from its watery fate only to be carried past it on a current of red. “I’m not a puppet, you can’t control me” the thief had said, but in the end just like everyone else he was powerless, another casualty of the casual cruelties and meaningless struggles of the feudal order. 

Kagemusha screens at the BFI Southbank, London on 11th & 31st January 2023 as part of the Kurosawa season.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The House of Hanging (病院坂の首縊りの家, Kon Ichikawa, 1979)

Posted on by

Unlike many directors of his generation who either shifted into television or saw their careers stall, Kon Ichikawa was able to continue working throughout the difficult 70s and 80s precisely because he was less averse to taking on commercial projects such as 1976’s The Inugami Family, an ensemble mystery adapted from the bestselling book by Seishi Yokomizo and starring his famed detective Kosuke Kindaichi. The film proved an unexpected hit, an early success for Haruki Kadokawa’s new multimedia marketing model which would allow him to dominate cinema screens throughout the bubble era, and spawned a series of Kindaichi adaptations produced for Toho boasting a host of A-list stars. By 1979, however, the age of the prestige country house mystery was perhaps coming to a close and The House of Hanging (病院坂の首縊りの家, Byoinzaka no Kubikukuri no Ie) would be the last in the cycle of movies starring Koji Ishizaka who would eventually return to the role in Ichikawa’s 2006 remake of the original Inugami Family. 

Set quite specifically in 1951 (Showa 26), House of Hanging is among the more complex of Kindaichi’s cases and rests not on war trauma, which is only a background presence in the present venality of the post-war society, but on the decline of a once noble house ruined, as we find out, through the legacy of sexual immorality and abuse. For the moment, however, Kindaichi gets roped into the mystery after visiting an author friend (played by Seishi Yokomizo himself in a cameo) who recommends a photo studio he could visit in order to get a picture taken for his passport as he plans to travel to America. The photographer, Naokichi (Koji Shimizu), takes on an odd job from a strange young woman who asks them to take wedding photos of her sister but abruptly leaves explaining she’ll send a car later to bring them to an undisclosed location. That turns out to be the bombed-out former home of the Hogen family who own the local hospital. Escorted by a creepy young man, Naokichi finds himself in front of a traditional gold screen backdrop but feels uncomfortable because the bride does not seem to be very present and he worries that perhaps she’s been drugged and something untoward may have been going on. He shows the photo to Kindaichi for advice and is later called back to the same location to discover the severed head of the groom hanging from a ceiling light.  

In slightly comedic fashion, the circumstances of the case are so confusing that they have even Kindaichi admitting that he doesn’t quite follow while his temporary sidekick, photographer’s apprentice Mokutaro (Masao Kusakari), proudly holds up a chart he’s made to help keep track. Though the why is in this case more important than it might usually be, it boils down to the same old problem of buried secrets and past shame. We learn that the Hogen family is descended from a line of prominent doctors, though the family tree is complicated because it appears many of the sons of previous generations had illegitimate children, some of whom were later adopted or married to other adopted children in a quasi-incestuous union. With no one quite sure whose children are whose, incest appears to be the original sin which condemns the family, though as we later realise it’s another kind of abuse which sets the present events in motion.

The murdered man, Toshio (Teruhiko Aoi), was apparently part of travelling jazz band earning their living playing on American bases (the photographer also has a sideline in blackmarket army surplus). Aside from the original sin that connects the murders with melancholy fatalism, the additional victims damn themselves through their amoral greed, foolishly engaging in blackmail in the hope of improving their circumstances. Nevertheless, the sin remains the same, the theory being that Toshio was murdered by missing sister Koyuki who killed him in order to escape his inappropriate romantic obsession with her. The additional complication is that Koyuki looks near identical to Yukari (Junko Sakurada), daughter of the Hogen family, connecting the crime with the traumatic events of some years’ previously which led to the cottage becoming known as the “house of hanging” when the body of a young woman was found there having taken her own life. 

As in many of the other Kindaichi mysteries, the detective has only sympathy for those caught up in this complicated murder plot, many of whom are also victims acting simply to protect themselves ironically enough from the past trauma that has in a sense led to this sorry turn of events. Justice, in the end, takes care of itself though Kindaichi will also do his bit to protect those in need acting from a place of moral compassion rather than judicial censure. This final instalment in the Kindaichi cycle has slightly lower production values and a much less starry ensemble but sees Ichikawa adding a few idiosyncratic touches such as his fast, multi-angle cuts to a single person’s speech and a brief theatrical reconstruction sequence, while making time for the return of bumbling inspector Todoroki (Takeshi Kato) and the ironic comedy the series is known for. “Old things pass, that’s when new things are born” Yokomizo sagely advises in his cameo, Kindaichi apparently taking his leave from a corrupted post-war Japan for the bright lights of San Francisco, perhaps never to return. 

Original trailers (no subtitles)

Mandala (曼陀羅, Akio Jissoji, 1971)

Posted on by 1 Comment

Mandala jissoji poster 2Politically speaking, the Japan of 1971 was trapped in a kind of limbo. The student movement had been dealt a serious blow with widespread supressionary measures in the run-up to the renewal of the ANPO treaty in 1970, which was finally signed despite opposition. It was not, however, yet dead and would stumble on, losing its way, until the climactic events of Asama-Sanso in 1972. Following hot on the heels of his radical This Transient Life, Akio Jissoji’s second film for ATG Mandala (曼陀羅) finds him exploring just this conflict as two young men look for “utopia” in an escape from the tyranny of time.

Kyoto uni students Shinichi (Koji Shimizu) and Hiroshi (Ryo Tamura) have taken their girlfriends to a strange little beachside inn for a spot of wife swapping. Where Shinichi’s girlfriend Yukiko (Akiko Mori) is only too happy to oblige her boyfriend’s whims, Hiroshi’s squeeze Yasuko (Ryo Tamura) goes along with it but instantly regrets her decision. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to them, the couples are being spied on by weird ultra-Buddhist cult leader Maki (Shin Kishida) who comes to the conclusion that Shinichi and Yukiko are good candidates to add to their commune which is built around the concepts of agriculture and eroticism. Maki’s violent recruitment method is knocking out the guys and then subduing the women so they can be raped by cult members and thereby inducted.

Maki’s strange philosophy which posits a new “utopian” future born of a return to a more primitive way of life in which love does not exist and sex is a free and natural act whose only purpose is reproduction, wins an acolyte of Shinichi because of its key offering – the ability to stall time. Always looking for a way to be dead yet alive, Shinichi is obsessed with the idea of stillness. Movement is the image of time passing. Coming to and finding the comatose, naked body of Yukiko lying on the beach after being raped by Maki’s minions, Shinichi cannot resist the urge to have sex with her “lifeless” body (which she apparently consents to, playing dead even after regaining consciousness part way through). Yukiko too confesses her own fantasy of being ravished as a corpse, a body outside of conscious time.

Shinichi, proclaiming he no longer believes in the future or in that a classless anti-State will ever arise, leaves the struggle and joins Maki’s atavistic utopia to which only those who “deny time and history” are permitted. Hiroshi, meanwhile, berates him for betraying the “continuous revolution” while he himself is on the run having left university after a disagreement with his Trotskyist protest group. The two men are each fleeing the centre and heading in different directions if perhaps ultimately bound for a similar destination. A hyper individualist, Hiroshi declares that there is no such thing as mankind, only a confluence of individuals, with the exception perhaps of those who have dedicated themselves to religion. He doesn’t want the child that Yasuko is carrying, not because he fears it may be Shinichi’s, but because he does not see the point in contributing to “the multiplication of mankind”, which is a key tenet of of Maki’s primitivist manifesto.

Unlike Hiroshi, Yasuko is not seeking revolution but conventionality. She wants the baby, and perhaps a marriage. At the end of her tether, having suffered horribly at the hands of Maki’s minions, she draws a small cottage with a friendly bird flying above as if to symbolise the simple dream that has been destroyed by the cruelty of men. Too late, Hiroshi realises that his irritation with Yasuko was simply a reaction against the shadow of himself he saw reflected in her, and he cannot forgive those who have caused her harm.

Harm there is plenty. Maki’s vile philosophy, overseen by his shaman wife (Yoshihiro Wakabayashi), supposedly the embodiment of many gods, strips women of their right to autonomy, insisting that “love” is an unwelcome modern sophistication which should be replaced by “benevolence” in an egalitarian affection for all mankind. In “ancient times”, he says, a woman would willingly submit to a man and, therefore, there was no such thing as “rape”. “A woman’s silence and resistance make a man a rapist” he tells his minions while Shinichi is busy raping the latest kidnap victim in a room equipped with CCTV for Maki to watch from behind a screen. His tenet of fecundity, both in terms of agriculture and human reproduction, comes at the cost of basic human decency and reduces the role of women to mere vessels for men’s desires.

Throughout the history of Japanese cinema, “love” has indeed been the destabilising, individualising force which threatens the social fabric, but for Maki it serves as a palpable evil. Like Hiroshi, he too believes that men exist as individuals, but also that “benevolence” could raise them to become a “community”. Hiroshi wants to live in a world of revolution, free of charisma and religion, but Shinichi seems to have found peace in atavistic simplicity. Faced with the choice, Hiroshi again chooses individualism, declaring that he would rather die alone than go mad along with everyone else. Yet his frustration may perhaps take him to a dark and unexpected place that sees him pick up a sword and a copy of the Manyoshu as if on some sort of nationalistic mission of revenge against an intransigent government and society. Revolutions fail, and then they start again. Hiroshi has perhaps picked a side, even if that side is merely opposition, but what he’s chosen is movement, action, maybe even life however fleeting, over the cold meaninglessness of Maki’s grand plan for a primitivist utopia.

Mandala is the second of four films included in Arrow’s Akio Jissoji: The Buddhist Trilogy box set which also features an introduction and selected scene commentaries by scholar of the Japanese New Wave David Desser plus a 60-page booklet with new writing by Tom Mes and Anton Bitel.

Original trailer (English subtitles, NSFW)