Tag: Kumeko Otowa

Okuni and Gohei (お國と五平, Mikio Naruse, 1952)

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“It’s a rough and difficult road.” The heroes of Mikio Naruse’s Okuni and Gohei (お國と五平, Okuni to Gohei), adapted from a kabuki play by Junichiro Tanizaki, are two displaced between the old world and the possibility of a new one if only they were brave enough to step away from the beaten path. Unbeknownst to them, they are being followed by the man they are seeking whose shakuhachi playing haunts them wherever they go as if taunting them with its presence. 

In this iteration of the tale, Tomonojo (So Yamamura) takes on a slippery quality almost if he were some supernatural devil sent to torment Okuni (Michiyo Kogure) and Gohei (Tomoemon Otani) leading them either towards or away from their salvation or damnation. In Okuni’s flashback, which is obviously coloured with her own nostalgia and regret, he’s a sensitive young man who promised himself in marriage to Okuni. But she is forced to refuse him. Her father rejects Tomonojo because he is without standing or prospects, and instead demands she marry a wellborn man of his choosing, Iori (Jun Tazaki). Iori is then killed in the street, uttering only Tomonojo’s name before he dies. It could then be that this is Tomonojo’s revenge on a society that has rejected him and robbed him of his love, yet the Tomonojo we later meet is much different than this idealised version in Okuni’s memory. He never denies killing Iori and offers no justification for it, but corners Okuni when she’s alone to tell her to free herself by dropping her quest for revenge. He’s also subtly blackmailing her, implying he heard her having sex with her manservant Gohei the previous night and in reality wheedling away pleading for his life.

For her part, Okuni seems torn in her motivations, uncertain whether she’s looking for Tomonojo to reunite with him or kill him, or perhaps is deliberately avoiding finding him at all. She was not married to Iori for very long and he was at the very least an insensitive and emotionally distant husband who spent most of his time at his friend’s house, claiming that it was “boring” to stay home with her. She has no great emotional desire for revenge, but has been told she must accomplish it in order to return to the samurai world, having been condemned to a kind of limbo as the widow of a murdered man. Even so, she has tired of her quest and asks herself what’s to become of them if Tomonojo is already dead. She repeatedly hints to Gohei that they should give up on finding him and on returning home, instead contenting themselves with their life on the road or else find somewhere to settle together in a new world in which a lady and her retainer could live as man and wife.

The film is both coy and somewhat transgressive in its depiction of the growing sexual tension between Okuni and Gohei from his taking hold of her injured foot and tender care for her when she falls ill, to the way they draw closer and then instinctively move apart. Passion later gets the better of them and it’s heavily implied that they sleep together, but Gohei instantly regrets it and cannot accept his class transgression. Given this development in their relationship, Okuni asks him to stop calling her “madam” but as she does so she is on one side of the fusuma and he on the other, so they remain in separate rooms divided by the ridge in the tatami. Gohei cannot let go of the old ways and is desperate to complete their quest so that his debt to Iori will be repaid and he can return in glory to be rewarded with position and the esteem of being a true samurai. Even if he tells Okuni that this quest has been his happiness in being on the road with her and knows that killing Tomonojo will end it, he does not turn back.

But the implication is that they can never escape Tomonojo who will, in fact, forever be following them. He taunts the pair with his shakuhachi and visits them in disguise. When they catch up to him, he tries again to convince them to give up their quest and live quietly together in a place free from the constraints of the samurai world, but Gohei cannot do it. Okuni first picks up her dagger and one wonders whether she about to use it on herself, but then turns on Tomonojo though it’s uncertain whether she now does so out of resentment or as revenge of herself for the way Tomonojo has again ruined her life. Just as she was a pawn of her father married off against her will to an indifferent man, she is further imprisoned by patriarchal social codes as Tomonojo needles Gohei that he had slept with her before her marriage. She has in fact already confessed to this to Gohei who transgressed by asking her what exactly Tomonojo was doing with his “shakuhachi” when they were courting, though she did so obliquely in telling him to remember his place and that he should “forget about the past.” Nevertheless she denies it now, but Gohei continues to see her as a “loose” woman with Tomonojo’s words ringing in his ears as a final revenge on the morally compromised lovers.

Their inability to let go of the quest, to do as Okuni suggests and continue on as they are along the rough and difficult path to a more egalitarian future spells their damnation. You can’t go back again. Their “home” is already lost to them. As a pedlar tells the pair along the way, they’ve already been forgotten and the village is filled with other gossip, but now they really have nowhere to go. The message may be for the coming post-occupation era that they shouldn’t try to turn back but keep moving forward into the new Japan or else risk becoming lost in a purgatorial world of confusion like Okuni and Gohei haunted by the choice to betray love for the outdated ideal of samurai honour. Haunted alternately by Tomonojo’s shakuhachi and the words of the villagers who told them they couldn’t be accepted until they fulfilled this quest, they find themselves displaced, unbalanced and uncertain amid the shifting power dynamics of class and gender, their duty and their feelings, but ultimately trapped by their cowardice in their unwillingness to cross the threshold to claim their freedom and happiness.

Flowing (流れる, Mikio Naruse, 1956)

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The denizens of a moribund geisha house contemplate visions of independence in post-war Japan Mikio Naruse’s thriving ensemble drama, Flowing (流れる, Nagareru). There is indeed a flowing through the geisha house, a tumble of comings and goings though mostly connected to money which is itself constantly flowing though the for geisha mainly in the wrong direction. Released in the year of Prostitution Prevention Law, the film casts a shadow over the lives of these women who are unwittingly living in their industry’s twilight but asks if it’s really possible for a woman to survive without a man while each of them is in one way or another badly let down by an inconstant lover. 

We’re constantly told that Tsutanoya is the most respectable geisha house in town yet despite its well appointed interiors, it’s clear that business is not good. As the film opens, a young geisha, Namie, is accusing the owner’s daughter Katsuyo (Hideko Takamine) of diddling her on her pay. Katsuyo acts indignant and tries to shift the blame back onto Namie but later admits that the house has indeed been skimming a little more off their wages than was agreed claiming all the geisha houses do it which is probably true but doesn’t make it right. In any case Namie will eventually quit and end up working at “some third rate place” while her uncle (Seiji Miyaguchi) causes problems for proprietress Tsuta (Isuzu Yamada) complaining that Namie was exploited and wanting both the backpay he feels she’s owed and compensation though it seems unlikely any of that money is finding its way back to Namie. Meanwhile the house is a geisha down with only former office worker Nanako (Mariko Okada) and 50-year-old veteran Someka (Haruko Sugimura) on the books.

Despite their financial situation, Tsuta hires a new maid, Rika (Kinuyo Tanaka) who is immediately renamed “Oharu” on her arrival. Oharu is a salt of the Earth type, infinitely capable, maternal, kind and loyal bringing a much needed sense of stability to the ever flowing geisha house while also fascinated by this exotic and arcane world. But then as Tsuta cautions her geisha houses may look glamorous from the outside but the life inside them isn’t always fun. Oharu runs into trouble on her first trip to the grocers when they inform her Tsuta hasn’t paid her tab and they can’t let her add to it until she does. A 45-year-old widow whose only child died a year previously, Oharu is also trying to live an independent life, a conflicted Tsuta struck with wonder at her ability to survive without a man, but may also have struggled, grateful to have been offered the job which others might have declined because of the stigma towards the sex trade as finding employment as a middle-aged woman is near impossible. 

At the film’s conclusion even she may imply it isn’t really possible to live as a woman without some kind of support or losing one’s humanity suggesting that she may return to her husband’s hometown and the family she claims not have gotten along with after learning of Tsuta’s betrayal at the hands of an old friend and former geisha, Ohama (Sumiko Kurishima), who at any rate seems to be living quite well as the proprietress of a restaurant. Traditionally, the profession of geisha was seen as a kind of independence in itself but it’s also one that by its nature is reliant on men. Tsuta is often described as someone who is not able to do anything else yet is highly skilled at music and dance having spent a lifetime in training. Without a patron she is stuck and as we learn she threw hers over to pursue a man she loved but he left her in the lurch having mortgaged the geisha house to invest in his business by taking a loan from her older sister who seems to have a nice sideline as a polite loan shark also having loaned money to Someka. 

The most outwardly cheerful, Someka is in other ways a dark vision of a geisha’s future surviving on nothing but nihilistic hedonism while apparently living with a much younger man who eventually leaves her to marry into another woman’s family. Katsuyo has rejected the geisha life explaining that she is unable to, as Nanaka puts it, say silly things to men in order to earn her keep and is essentially incapable of ingratiating herself with men she doesn’t like. She claims she has no desire to marry, unconvinced that any man would be interested in a geisha’s daughter while certain that for a man marrying into a woman’s family is humiliating while suggesting the same would be true for her. Putting her faith in industry, she buys a sewing machine and sets about figuring out how to use it less because she envisages being able to support herself and her mother through taking in needlework than she just wants to feel as if she’s doing something. 

Meanwhile, Tsuta’s niece Fujiko observes all the comings and goings of the geisha house learning the traditional arts in preparation for a future which will soon be obsolete. In a typically Narusean touch, Tsuta comes to a resolution about her future and envisages a new beginning for herself but is unaware the rug is soon to be pulled from under her by the underhanded capitalist Ohama who plans to turf her out to turn the geisha house into another restaurant. “My days of seeking favours from men are over,” Tsuta admits, not of her own volition but simply understanding that she no longer has access to that kind of independence though in essence surrendering her autonomy in leaving herself to the mercy of Ohama in order to escape her older sister’s control. Someka had laughed raucously at Katsuyo’s insistence that she need not be dependent on a man (and after everything she’s seen why would she want to be?) but the younger woman is undeterred even as we see her struggling, doubting that her efforts will in the end be enough to win her her freedom. Ever the optimist, Tsuta is perhaps doing something similar but even Oharu is considering giving up and going home, too good to survive in the dog eat dog world of the contemporary capital where the flow of currency is the lifeblood of the city implying that perhaps the answer to her question is no, a woman can’t survive alone, nor can she rely on female solidarity, but she’ll have to try anyway because there is no other choice. 

Portrait of Hell (地獄変, Shiro Toyoda, 1969)

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Asked to paint a vision of heaven, an artist replies that he cannot because he sees it nowhere in this present society. “Over my body and my life, you have absolute authority. But you can never command my artist’s soul,” he spits back at his corrupt lord, but in many ways the lord can command his soul as an artist for he creates the world he reflects for all that he attempts to manipulate him as a man and one he assumes to be far inferior to himself. 

Shiro Toyoda’s adaptation of the classic horror story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Portrait of Hell (地獄変, Jigokuhen) opens with a brief voiceover narration that explains that this story takes place almost 1000 years ago in the Heian era when the Fujiwara clan was at the height of its power. But after so long at the top of the tree, the Fujiwara have become both restless and indifferent in their complacency. “The common people live lives of hopeless despair,” the narrator explains outlining the Fujiwara’s inability to govern as even minor natural disasters give rise to famines and corpses litter the streets. Even nobles now live “lives of perpetual dread” having gained a sense of their own impermanence. 

Lord Horikawa (Yorozuya Kinnosuke) is however seemingly oblivious to the suffering of his people. Yoshihide (Tatsuya Nakadai), a Korean painter, tells him that his problem is everyone tells him what he wants to hear (because they fear for their lives) rather than what is actually happening. During the opening sequence, Horikawa had abruptly decided to leave a public celebration. An old man appeals to some of the guards for money, but they roughly beat him and he is later trampled to death by Horikawa’s frightened bull which had become loose during a storm. The old man dies cursing him, exclaiming that “he has treated us like slaves. I have become no better than an animal.” Horikawa had been told that the man used his last dying breath to remark on what an honour it was to be trampled by the lord’s bull. Yoshihide paints a picture that drives a court lady out of her mind featuring the corpse of the old man under a cherry tree that seems so vivid to her that it emanates a stench of death. Horikawa doesn’t like it much either, and its uncanny realism unsettles his mind. He thinks he sees the ghost lying in wait for him in his own bed and orders Yoshihide to dismantle the painting as if that would make the ghost disappear. 

Horikawa believes the “ghost” is a manifestation of Yoshihide’s rage rather than his own guilt or incompetence. Yoshihide certainly does not like the world the lord has made, replying that he has seen hell everywhere in the cities and the villages while there is no heaven to be had which is why he cannot paint it. Yet Yoshihide and the lord are almost perfect mirrors of each other. Yoshihide is also rigid and superior. He prides himself on being Korean, pointing out that the foundations of the court and of modern learning were all brought over by Korean scholars even if Horikawa claims to have “improved” upon them. Yet some of his fellow painters worry that the style their Korean ancestors worked so hard to perfect has been eclipsed by Japanese influence while secretly considering returning to Korea which has now become prosperous unlike the conditions in Japan. 

Horikawa later slips and calls Yoshihide a stupid “foreigner” making plain his contempt despite describing him as the greatest artist of his generation which is why he’s commissioned this piece of art in the first place even though he had described all of his previous pieces “ugly” while objecting to their attempt to show him how rotten his kingdom has become. Yet Horikawa is correct when he says that it’s Yoshihide’s “infernal arrogance” that has provoked his downfall. Having caught his daughter Yoshika (Yoko Naito) with one of his pupils, he locked her in a shed and exclaimed that no other man would have her. If he had not done so, she may never have come to the attentions of the lord and suffered her eventual degradation at his hand, nor would Yoshihide have been so easily manipulated into a obsessive desire to effectively depict the depths of hell. 

Yoshihide is some kind of method artist who insists he can only paint what he sees. Thus he goes to great lengths to observe hellish cruelty, tying up an apprentice boy in chains and torturing him with snakes, his eyes burning with a fiery intensity. His tragedy is that he comes to realise that the painting reflects not the world but himself. He is hell, hell is here. While his daughter burns, he looks on impassively only to be outdone by her pet monkey who in a gesture of selfless love leaps into the flames. Even so, Horikawa praises the finished painting as a masterpiece, “an impressive depiction of the hell that is our life,” commenting somewhat ironically on the current conditions within his fiefdom. Only latterly does he notice his own role within it, suddenly consumed by his hellishness as if dragged own into the flames despite himself. 

Toyoda shoots in the manner of a classic ghost story, making fantastic use of ghostly effects as Horikawa finds himself haunted by the spirits of those he’s wronged. At times, the screen fills with red light as if soaked in blood or baked in the hellish glow of slow burning flames. He flips between the icy blues of Horikawa’s estate, and the stifling ochre that seems to surround Yoshihide who does after all feed off all this strife rather than seeking to cure it. The two men end up in an impossible game of brinksmanship from which neither can back down, two “arrogant” rivals blindly creating a hell for those around them through their selfishness and vanity. “Life is more hellish than hell itself” runs a final quote from Akutagawa, laying bare the tale’s essential irony in our inability to recognise the hell we create for ourselves and others through our own arrogance and fear.

Rhapsody in August (八月の狂詩曲, Akira Kurosawa, 1991)

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“People do forget everything, and quickly too” a teenage girl laments preparing to meet her half-American uncle and feeling a little awkward having been admonished by her parents for inadvertently confronting him with the realities of the wartime past. The middle generation in Kurosawa’s tri-generational tale of the legacy of warfare Rhapsody in August (八月の狂詩曲, Hachigatsu no Rhapsody) have it seems an ambivalent attitude they’re in the process of imparting to their children that views talk of the atomic bomb as almost taboo, tiptoeing around it with their newfound American relatives lest they offend them but mostly out of a desire for economic gain that reflects an early post-war mentality almost entirely alien to their Bubble-era teenage kids.

It’s the children who are keenest to learn about their past, staying with their elderly and seemingly frail grandmother Kane (Sachiko Murase) over the summer while their parents have travelled to Hawaii to investigate after receiving a letter from Kane’s long lost younger brother Suzujiro who emigrated in the 1920s and has since become a wealthy man running a pineapple plantation. The problem is that Kane had a large number of siblings, at least 11, and honestly doesn’t remember one called Suzujiro who did after all leave the country 60 years previously and was never seen again. The children, Tadao (Hisashi Igawa) and Yoshie (Toshie Negishi), think her refusal to visit him in Hawaii is partly down to a lingering resentment for the dropping of the atomic bomb which killed her husband, but as she later tells the grandchildren that was 45 years ago and she no longer has any strong feelings either way about the Americans adding only that it was all the fault of the war.

Nevertheless, it’s clear that Kane lives with a sense of loss and the continuing trauma of witnessing the flash that is expressed by the bald spot on the back of her head. As the grandchildren ask her questions she begins to reflect more on the past, remembering a younger brother, Suzukichi, who witnessed the flash with her and later had some kind of breakdown locking himself away endlessly drawing pictures of eyes that she later explains mimicked that of the flash itself. Kurosawa depicts this memory with surrealist imagery, a red sky splitting open just as Kane described exposing an eye which seemed to stare down at them. Youngest grandson Shinjiro (Mitsunori Isaki) draws such an eye on the blackboard in the study room in his grandmother’s house, an eye which continues to observe the children as they contemplate the recent past as well as an older Japan exemplified by their grandmother’s tales of the water imp living in a nearby pool who might once have saved Suzukichi’s life. 

In some ways, it’s almost as if the middle generation has been passed over. The grandchildren are very close to their grandmother and resentful of their parents, irritated by their constant references to their American relatives’ wealth with Shinjiro directly asking them why they haven’t asked how Kane has been or bothered to say hello to her before showing off photos of the Hawaiin mansion owned by Suzujiro. Kane also sets them right after deciding she’d like to visit after all, explaining that she couldn’t care less or if he’s rich or not she’d just like to see her brother. Her refusal to accept him was perhaps an expression of her own inability to make peace with the past, having literally forgotten only latterly coming to believe that Suzujiro really is her brother and wanting to reintegrate him into her life as an expression of peace between nations. 

Kane had said that Tadao’s conviction that they should avoid mentioning the bomb was illogical and ridiculous, an attitude later borne out by the unexpected arrival of Suzujiro’s half-American son Clark (Richard Gere) who speaks pigeon Japanese and is somewhat mortified by his own ignorance not having realised that his uncle must have died in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki until inadvertently tipped off by eldest grandson Tateo’s (Hidetaka Yoshioka) telegram. Clark bonds with Kane and sadly reflects on his own lack of knowledge after visiting the school where his uncle died and seeing scores of contemporary children flood into the playground where the twisted metal of a melted climbing frame serves as a memorial for the young lives that were lost. The intention is not however to provoke an apology or apportion blame only to mourn the folly of war while trying to put the past aside to ensure it never happens again.

The kids wear jeans and T-shirts with the logos of American universities on, but are determined to fix the out of tune harmonium in their grandmother’s parlour as if literarily setting the past to rights. The song they play sings of a red rose in a field, a rose that Shinjiro later sees near the shrine during the memorial service for the bombing that comes to resemble Kane in the closing frames as she charges through the rain with her blown umbrella while her children and grandchildren chase after her as the ants had trailed the rose. “People will do anything just to win a war,” Kane admonishes her son, “sooner or later it will be the ruin of us all” reminding him that dropping the bomb didn’t stop people killing each other, even 45 years later war continues to ruin people’s lives. Like the rose “blossoming in innocence” she stands for peace and mutual compassion amid an expressionist storm of fear and resentment.

Rhapsody in August screens at the BFI Southbank, London on 19th & 25th February 2023 as part of the Kurosawa season.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Kagemusha (影武者, Akira Kurosawa, 1980)

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“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)

Untamed (あらくれ, Mikio Naruse, 1957)

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“Don’t let guys control you. You have to make them men” the heroine of Mikio Naruse’s Taisho-era drama Untamed (あらくれ, Arakure, AKA Untamed Woman) advises a former rival, yet largely fails to do so herself in the fiercely patriarchal post-Meiji society. Based on a serialised novel by Shusei Tokuda published in 1915 but set in late Meiji rather than early Taisho, Naruse’s adaptation essentially drops a contemporary post-war woman into a by then almost unrecognisable Japan, but finds her hamstrung firstly by feckless and entitled men and then by complicit women who themselves cannot accept her transgressive femininity. 

As the film opens, a teenage Shima (Hideko Takamine) has just married wealthy grocery store owner Tsuru (Ken Uehara) but the marriage is already a failure. Though Shima is compared favourably with Tsuru’s previous wife who was apparently in poor health, presumably suffering with TB which required a sojourn by the sea, it soon becomes clear that Tsuru is as trapped by the archaic patriarchal social system as she is. He was apparently in love with a woman from a higher social class he was too afraid to pursue and despite still seeing her also has a mistress near their factory in Hokkaido whom he often visits under the guise of a business trip. Yet when Shima tells him she thinks she may be pregnant, he is unimpressed, immediately questioning the paternity of the child while harping on about her having been married before which it seems is not quite true. Perhaps the reason that she has ended up a second wife despite her youth and beauty, Shima ran out on a marriage to a childhood friend arranged for her by her adoptive parents the night before the wedding not realising they had already registered the union without her knowledge or consent. 

This transgressive act at once signals Shima’s total disregard for conventionality and insistence on her own autonomy, yet it is also indicative of the fact she married Tsuru in search of a better life, knowing that to marry her adoptive parents’ choice meant only a life of servitude on the family farm. She is not always a terribly likeable figure, coldly explaining that she didn’t mind being fostered out because the adoptive family were wealthier and could give her a better life than she had with her birth parents. Yet it’s this sense of familial dislocation and the liminal status it gives her that allow her to take agency over her life in the way other women might not, unwilling to lose the familial security Shima may not feel she ever had. Tsuru is also an adopted son, but the price for disobedience for him may be even higher and indeed as we later hear his inability to sort out his love life eventually sees him out on his ear. His pettiness in refusing to accept the child is his leads to an argument which causes Shima to slip on the stairs and miscarry, the implication being that she may not be able to bear more children leaving her unlikely to remarry and thereby spurring her desire for a tempered independence. 

The fall is the last straw. Tsuru divorces Shima citing her inability to play the role of the proper wife while her birth family, from whom she is emotionally estranged, refuse to take her back as do the adoptive parents because of the embarrassment she caused them with the marriage stunt. She is often described as “like a man”, unable to win as Tsuru at once insists she wear the frumpy kimonos left behind by his previous wife who was a decade older, complains she wears too much makeup, and tells her to loosen her kimono belt to de-emphasises her figure, while criticising her for being unfeminine in her refusal to simply put up with his bad behaviour as is expected for a wife in this era. Shima fulfils all her wifely duties and as we see is in fact running his business as the women of the family are often seen to do while their husbands spend the money they earn for them on other women whether drinking with geishas or supporting mistresses in second homes. When her husband hits her, she fights back rather than shrinking away chastened as intended. 

Yet she cannot overcome the sense that a man is necessary for her success which cannot be accomplished alone. Cast out from her family, her brother installs her in the mountains to work in a geisha house if only as kitchen staff but soon does a flit to reunite with his married lover who has left her husband for him. While there she falls for the quiet and sensitive inn owner Hamaya (Masayuki Mori), also an adopted heir, whose wife is again ill with TB. Hamaya may be treating his wife a little better than Tsuru did his, but quite clearly assumes she’ll die in starting an affair with Shima who is then sent away to an even more remote inn to avoid a potential scandal. As Tsuru did with the woman he apparently loved, Shima continues to see Hamaya until he too succumbs to TB as an ideal of an impossible love while simultaneously accepting that he failed her in being too weak and cowardly to fight for their romance, outright refusing to become his mistress. 

This may be one reason she is determined never again to be an employee but to own her own store which is why she ends up marrying tailor Onoda (Daisuke Kato) who introduces her to textiles and seamstressing at which she quickly proves adept having mastered the modern sewing machine. She marries Onoda in believing him “reliable”, but soon comes to regard him as lazy and feckless. The first shop fails because he can’t keep up with her. The male employees are always taking breaks to drink tea and play shogi, Onoda complaining that he’s tired while she does all his work for him and the housework too. Yet he also criticises her for a lack of femininity, snapping back that it must be her time of the month when she berates him in front of their employees while later after they’ve become successful complaining it’s “embarrassing” that his workhorse wife doesn’t know the things a sophisticated society woman would such as ikebana while flirting with the teacher he’s hired ostensibility to teach her. He even forces her to wear a frumpy and already somewhat dated classically Edwardian dress with a fancy bonnet which more resembles something a country girl might wear to church than the latest in Western fashions in an attempt to advertise their tailoring which seems primed to backfire. 

That she learns to ride a bicycle in this rather ridiculous outfit is again a symbol of her desire to seize and manipulate modernity even giving rise to a piece of innuendo from her much younger assistant Kimura (Tatsuya Nakadai) as to the pounding she’s been getting from the saddle. Kimura seems to think the problem with the business is that Onoda’s patterns are outdated, offering her a new modernity while she prepares to cut Onoda out on catching him with his mistress taking their best employee with her to ruin his business and start another of her own. Though once again she cannot leave alone only with a man the ending is perhaps more hopeful than might be expected from a Naruse film allowing Shima to commit herself fully to the sense of industry she embodies always ready to start again, work harder, and achieve her desires unwilling to be bound by conventional ideas of femininity or to simply put up with useless men who refuse to accept her for all she is. Yet she largely fails to make men of them, each of her various suitors failing to live up to her, ruined by an oppressive social system that encourages them to exploit female labour while taking it for granted in their intense sense of patriarchal entitlement. 

Repast (めし, Mikio Naruse, 1951)

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“Must every woman grow old and die feeling empty?” asks the unhappy heroine of Naruse’s 1951 melodrama Repast (めし, Meshi) only to conclude that yes, she must, but that this in fact constitutes “happiness” as a woman. The first of Naruse’s Fumiko Hayashi adaptations Repast arrived in the year of the author’s death and is inspired by a short story left unfinished at the time of her passing. Screenwriter Sumie Tanaka was apparently convinced that the film should end with a divorce, as Sound of the Mountain would two years later, and consequently left the project after the studio mandated a more “sympathetic” ending. Superficially happy as it might seem, however, the conclusion is as bleak as one might expect from Naruse in which the heroine simply accepts that she must recalibrate her idea of happiness to that which is available to her and learn to find fulfilment in shared endeavour with her husband. 

As she explains in her opening voiceover, Michiyo (Setsuko Hara) married her husband Hatsunosuke (Ken Uehara) five years ago in Tokyo against her family’s wishes and has been living on the outskirts of Osaka for the past three. Marital bliss has quite clearly worn off. As we see from the repeated morning scenes of the local community sending their sons off to school and husbands to the office, every day is the same and all Michiyo ever seems to do is cook and clean. The only words Hatsunosuke says to her are “I’m hungry”, and the only source of solace in her life is her cat, Yuri. Yet even this constant state of unhappy frustration is disrupted by the unexpected arrival of Hatsunosuke’s spoilt and immature niece Satoko (Yukiko Shimazaki) who has apparently run away from home in rebellion against an arranged marriage. 

There is obviously a blood relation between Hatsunosuke and Satoko, but Michiyo’s jealously is not exactly unreasonable given the young woman’s childish flirtation with her uncle, perhaps an adolescent extension of her propensity to pout and preen to get her own way. Aside from all that, finances weigh heavily on Michiyo’s mind. Other than her drudgery, the constant source of friction in the relationship is Hatsunosuke’s low salary and lack of career success. Satoko’s family are a little wealthier and having been brought up in relative comfort she has little idea of the real world and is often tactless, remarking on Hatsunosuke’s worn out tie much to Michiyo’s chagrin. Hatsunosuke is happy enough to have her, but Michiyo is wondering if there’s enough rice in the jar to see them through and Satoko never stops to consider that they’re feeding her for free even falling asleep when Michiyo enjoys her one and only day off reuniting with old friends rather than preparing dinner as she’d been asked. Perhaps aware of the disruptive effect of her presence, Satoko pours salt on the wound by constantly asking her uncle if Michiyo doesn’t like her or is angry, further placing a wedge between husband and wife. 

For all that, however, Hatsunosuke would not be accounted a “bad” husband for the time save perhaps for his lack of career success. He is not cruel or violent, merely insensitive and distant, taking his wife for granted and unable to see that she is deeply unhappy while otherwise internalising a sense of guilt and failure in his inability to adequately provide for her. She meanwhile sometimes takes her dissatisfaction out on him in barbed comments about his low salary, her barely hidden contempt never far from the surface. Yet as her mother later points out in encouraging her go back to him he is “reliable, discreet, and honest”, qualities borne out by his later refusal to go along with a dodgy scheme organised by the old elite along with his nervous rebuttal of the attentions of the “mistress” from across the way. 

At heart a conservative woman, Michiyo too looks down on Ms Kanazawa (Kumeko Otowa) for her taboo status as the illicit lover of a wealthy man which is only in a sense her way of seizing her future as an independent woman running her own bar. Satoko, a woman of the modern era, sees less of a problem with it and is far less judgemental, though her own attempts are destined to end in failure thanks to her inability to work out that her present lifestyle is far above her current reach. Retreating to her Tokyo home, Michiyo looks for other options, admiring the apparently happier relationship between her younger sister and brother-in-law who now run the family shop. She asks a sympathetic cousin, Kazuo (Hiroshi Nihonyanagi) who provides an alternate love interest, to help her find work but encounters the brutalising line outside the local employment office and then an old friend now a war widow desperate for employment because her benefits are about to run out and she has a young son to support. Later she spots the same woman handing out flyers, suddenly realising the fallacy of her fantasy of starting again as an independent woman. She pens a letter to her husband admitting that she’s realised how vulnerable she is without his protection, but remains undecided enough to avoid sending it. 

Hearing that Satoko, still childish but perhaps not quite as naive as she assumed her to be, has been laying her claws into Kazuo the final nail seems to have been struck. Michiyo knows she will return to Osaka, but does so not because she has rekindled her love for her husband but because she has accepted there are no better options. Hatsunosuke is dull, but he is in a sense reliable, and honest to the extent that he may be about to be rewarded for his moral unshakability. He cares enough about her to show up in Tokyo hoping, but not insisting, she will return with him which is perhaps as close to a declaration of love that one could hope for. On reflection she decides that a woman’s happiness is found in sharing the journey with her husband, accepting that she must subsume her own desires into his and cannot hope to expect emotional fulfilment other than that found in his satisfaction. Even for a Naruse film, and one as peppered with moments of slapstick humour as this one is, it’s an extraordinarily bleak conclusion subtly hinting at the iniquities of life in a patriarchal society in which the best a woman can hope for is a life of unrewarded drudgery. 

A Woman’s Place (女の座, Mikio Naruse, 1962)

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“A woman’s life is so dreary” laments a disappointed woman as she sits awkwardly at a funeral in Mikio Naruse’s A Woman’s Place (女の座, Onna no Za, AKA The Wiser Age). What exactly is “a woman’s place” in the changing post-war society? The continuing uncertainties of the age begin to burrow into the Ishikawa household as it becomes plain that the house is already divided, in several senses, as daughters and sons find themselves pulled in different directions, each of them perhaps banking on an inheritance to claim a different future. 

As the film opens, the sons and daughters of the Ishikawa family have been sent telegrams to come home at once because dad is at death’s door. Thankfully, that turns out to be premature. All he’s done is put his back out overdoing it in the garden by trying to lift a big rock in defiance of his age. Oldest daughter Matsuyo (Aiko Mimasu), who runs a boarding house, is quite put out to have rushed over for nothing, but everyone is obviously relieved that there turned out to be nothing to worry about after all. Widowed daughter-in-law Yoshiko (Hideko Takamine) realises that she needs to wire Michiko (Keiko Awaji) who moved to Kyushu when she got married that there’s no need to come, but she later turns up anyway along with her goofy husband Masaaki (Tatsuya Mihashi), claiming they’ve decided to make the trip a kind of honeymoon though it seems obvious to everyone that there must be reasons they seem intent on overstaying their welcome. 

“They depend on us, everyone does when they return home” mother/step-mother Aki (Haruko Sugimura) chuckles as Matsuyo and only remaining son Jiro (Keiju Kobayashi) pocket some paper towels from the family shop on their way out. Everyone is indeed depending on the family, not least for a clue as to where they stand as much as for a permanent place to return to. Three daughters of marriageable age still live at home. The oldest, Umeko (Mitsuko Kusabue), the daughter of patriarch Kinjiro’s (Chishu Ryu) first wife, has renounced the possibility of marriage and has made a career for herself as an ikebana teacher, a traditionally respectable occupation for “independent” women. In her 30s, she has become cruel and embittered, sniping at her sisters and always smirking away in a corner somewhere being aggressively miserable (nobody in the family seems to like Umeko very much, but still they accept her). Later she offers a sad, surprisingly romantic explanation for her decision in her unrequited love for a middle school classmate who died in the war, but is in someway revived by an unexpected attraction to a young man Matsuyo brings to the house who claims to be the infant boy Aki was forced to give up when she left her former husband’s family and married Kinjiro. 

The unexpected reappearance of Musumiya (Akira Takarada) destabilises the family across several levels, firstly in highlighting Aki’s awkward status as a second wife and step-mother to the two oldest children, and then by inciting a false romantic rivalry between the widowed Yoshiko and the unmarried Umeko. Umeko at one point cruelly describes Yoshiko as the only “outsider” in the household, viewing her connection to them now that her husband has died solely through the lens of being the mother of the only male grandchild, Ken (Kenzaburo Osawa). Yoshiko, only 36 years old, is repeatedly urged to remarry, but she like Aki would be forced to leave Ken behind if she did, though he is now a teenager and perhaps old enough not to feel abandoned. Ken in fact joins in encouraging his mother to find a second husband, but partly because she is always nagging him to study harder (something which will have have tragic, unexpected consequences). Yoshiko’s “place” in the household is therefore somewhat liminal, part of the family and yet not, because her status depends on solely on her relationships to others rather than blood. 

Nevertheless, Yoshiko is clearly in charge as we witness all of the other women disturbing her while she’s cooking to enquire after missing items, whether the bath is ready, or to attend to something in the store. Umeko has built her own smaller annex on another part of the property and mostly keeps to herself, while the two younger daughters busy themselves with a series of romantic subplots. Despite her sister Matsuyo’s eye-rolling that she should “forget about working and get married”, Natsuko (Yoko Tsukasa) is trying to find another job after being laid off when the company she worked for went bankrupt. Her brother, meanwhile, is experiencing the opposite problem in that it’s impossible to find and keep delivery staff at his ramen shop and he desperately needs help because his wife is pregnant again. Natsuko is convinced to “help out” though it’s clear that working in a ramen shop wasn’t what she had in mind, but it does bring her into contact with an eccentric friend of her sister Yukiko’s (Yuriko Hoshi) while she works on the box office of a nearby cinema. 

A crisis occurs when Natsuko is presented with the prospect of an accelerated arranged marriage to a man who took a liking to her while working at the company which went bust and has since got a job which requires him to relocate to Brazil. The ramen shop guy, Aoyama (Yosuke Natsuki), meanwhile is also getting a transfer but only to the top of Mount Fuji. Natsuko is torn, but also wonders if Yukiko actually wants Aoyama herself and only tried to set them up as a sort of test. In any case, both of these younger women also feel that their “place” is defined by marriage and their status conferred by their husbands even if they are exercising a personal preference in their choice, Yukiko’s in romance while Natsuko’s is perhaps a little more calculation in that she knew and liked her suitor but would not go so far as to call it “love”. 

In her own strange way, Umeko may be the most radical of the women in that she has attempted to define her own place through rejecting marriage and making enough money to buy her own home (albeit still on the family property) in a kind of independence, later deciding that perhaps she does want marriage after all but only on her own terms. Unfortunately, she is drawn to Musumiya whose presence poses a threat to the family on several levels, the most serious being that he is quickly exposed as a conman guilting Aki into assisting him financially while also trying some kind of car sale scam on the smitten Umeko who wants to add to her independence through learning to drive. Musumiya, it seems, prefers Yoshiko and his affection may well be genuine, but she is trapped once again. While she and Aki privately express their doubts about Musumiya, they have no desire to hurt Umeko’s feelings and cannot exactly come out and say that he is no good seeing as he is Aki’s son. Yoshiko stoically keeps the secret, perhaps also attracted to Musumiya but loyal to the Ishikawas and wanting no trouble from such a duplicitous man. Still, Umeko regards Yoshiko’s attempts to discourage her as “jealousy” and wastes no time embarrassing them both in a nasty public altercation. 

While all of this going on, there has been some talk that the shop may be compulsory purchased to make way for an Olympic road, and each of the Ishikawa children is eagerly awaiting their share of the compensation money, not least Michiko and her feckless husband who turns out to have fled Kyushu after getting fired from his job for assaulting a client. The “heir”, technically is Ken as the only male grandchild and Yoshiko’s tenuous status in the household is entirely conferred on her as his mother. When that disappears, her “place” is uncertain. Most of the others are for kicking her out, she’s not a “real” member of the family and so deserves none of the money with only Natsuko stopping to defend her. But, as so often, the widowed daughter-in-law turns out to be the only filial child. Mum and dad feel themselves displaced in their own home, somehow feeling they must stand aside, but it turns out they have plans of their own and Yoshiko is very much included. They want to take her with them, and if one day she decides to marry again then that’s perfectly OK and they will even provide a dowry for her as if she were one of their own daughters. 

“We have many children but they only think of themselves” Kinjiro laments, “let’s not worry about them and live peacefully by ourselves”. It’s easy to see their decision as a strategic retreat, as if they’re being left behind by a future they cannot be a part of, but it’s also in some ways an escape from the increasingly selfish post-war society. Yoshiko may not have actively chosen her “place” but she does at least have one and reserves the right to choose somewhere else in the future. The older Ishikawas choose to be happy on their own, freeing their children and giving them their blessing so long as they’re “doing their best”. It’s a strangely upbeat conclusion for a Naruse film, if perhaps undercut with a mild sense of resignation, but nevertheless filled with a hope for a happier future and an acknowledgement that “family” can work but only when it is defined by genuine feeling and not merely by blood. 

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.

Composition Class (綴方教室, Kajiro Yamamoto, 1938)

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composition class posterChildren’s essay classes can yield unexpected revelations but sometimes it’s the tragedy behind the humour which catches the attention rather than a unique way of describing a situation not fully understood. Composition Class (綴方教室, Tsuzurikata Kyoshitsu) has something in common with the later Korean classic Sorrow Even Up in Heaven or even the more temporally proximate Tuition in drawing inspiration from the diaries of school age children but predictably it’s far less bleak in outlook. Though young Masako (nicknamed Maako) has her share of problems, her troubles are met with characteristic cheerfulness and a determination to carry on no matter what.

In a small town in North East Tokyo, 1938, Masako Toyoda (Hideko Takamine) lives with her parents and her two brothers in a humble home her family can barely afford. Disaster strikes when dad gets a letter from the court which he can’t read – Masako usually reads for him but letters from the court are still too difficult for a preteen schoolgirl. The family are behind on their rent and have heard that someone is trying to buy up the area with other families also facing possible eviction. Bright though she is, Masako might have to give up school and find a job as a maid while the family moves to stay with relatives who own a shoe shop. Luckily, none of that happens because the note was only about a rent increase (on the rent that haven’t paid for months).

The second crisis occurs when Masako’s teacher is taken with the essays she’s writing in class which are so real and honest that they espouse all the values he wants to teach the children. Around this time, the lady from next door, Reiko’s mother Kimiko, is leaving town (and her husband) and so gives away some her breeding rabbits as pets believing that a nice girl like Masako will be sure to take care of them and that they could use the extra money from selling the babies. Kimiko, thinking Masako is out of earshot, remarks that she was going to give some of the rabbits to the local bigwigs, the Umemotos, but even if they’re wealthy, they aren’t very nice and she wouldn’t like to think of her rabbits not being looked after. Masako naively records this minor detail in one of her essays which the teacher then sells to a local magazine. The Umemotos find out and aren’t happy which is a problem because dad gets most of his work through Mr. Umemoto who has a stranglehold on the local economy.

Through Masako’s diary and child’s eye view of the world, Kaijiro Yamamoto paints an oddly relaxed picture of depression era privation as the Toyodas endure their penury with stoicism and a belief the bad times will sometime end. Masako and her family have it a little better than some, but when bad weather puts an end to dad’s tinsmithing business and he’s forced into the precarious life of a day labourer things go from bad to worse. Now out of work more than in, the family are reliant on rice coupons to get by and spend one miserable New Year’s with no money for the first week of January when the biting cold makes it impossible to go out and forage for food. Masako writes of her embarrassment the first time her mother sent her to the shop with coupons and that she eventually got used to it, save for one occasion she ran into friends and had to quickly cover by saying she’d bought rice bran rather than collecting the rice dole. Like Masako, dad is a good natured soul though he’s also fond of drinking and is often let down or tricked out of his money, even being cheated out of his bicycle which he needs to keep working.

Sadness is all around from the man next door who’s so poor he doesn’t even have money for sake to the dejected Kimiko who eventually returns pale, drawn, and barely recognisable only to find her husband remarried to a much younger woman. Though Masako is a bright girl with a talent for writing her future is already limited. At one low point, her mother seems excited about the idea of selling Masako off to a geisha house where she will at least be fed, have pretty clothes, and maybe make a good match with the sort of man who marries former geishas. Needless to say, Masako is not very enthusiastic, and neither is her teacher who pledges to save her from such an unpleasant fate but luckily it never comes to that. Other girls will be going on to high school and university, but Masako counts herself lucky to have got a job in the local factory which will provide a steady income for her family. Though it’s a shame Masako is denied the same opportunities as the other girls because of her family’s poverty, she does at least pledge to keep writing even as she marches happily towards work and a (possibly) brighter future.