“Freedom for the masses!” cry the student protestors outside the claustrophobic environment of a corrupt educational institution at the heart of Yasuzo Masumura’s Vixen (女体, Jotai – lit. “a woman’s body”). While they cry for freedom, one young “liberated” woman finds she’s anything but free even in the throws of her liberation. Possessed of little power, she has a need to find herself a white knight but no sooner has she got him than she begins to long for new conquests, trapped in a destructive cycle of sex and violence. Subverting his own ideas of sex as liberation, Masumura reconfigures lust as a trap in the form of a siren song sung by a lonely young woman unable to find her place in the complicated post-war landscape.
Michi (Ruriko Asaoka), a modern young woman, has a brief episode of fondling an office chair while waiting to see the chairman of a university. Proudly showing off the bruises on her thighs, she accuses the chairman’s son of rape. Despite the evidence, Michi’s accusation is undermined by her mercenary behaviour which does not tally with that expected in such difficult situations. She’s come alone, flirts with the chairman’s secretary Nobuyuki (Eiji Okada), and is quick to talk money. Questioned at home the chairman’s son admits everything but thinks it’s no big deal because that’s just “how it’s done these days”. The chairman, worried more for his reputation which is already under strain given the widespread student protest movement, thinks paying Michi off is the best thing to do but there’s a disagreement over the amount. Nobuyuki’s wife Akie (Kyoko Kishida), sister of the accused and daughter of the chairman, only wants to give Michi half of the two million she’s asked for. Nobuyuki gives her the full amount anyway behind his wife’s back, winning Michi’s eternal admiration for his considerate treatment. Unwisely visiting her hotel room, Nobuyuki develops a dangerous fascination with the alluring young woman and embarks on a passionate, ill-advised affair.
Michi is, in many ways, the archetypal post-war woman. Orphaned at a young age she was raised by a grandmother in a small fishing village and has been living with another relative whilst working as a waitress in his ramen restaurant after coming to the city. She’s grown up in a more liberal era, has a “positive” attitude to sex, and lives outside of the “traditional” path for “respectable” young women of early marriage and continued monogamy. As someone later puts it, women like Michi are two a penny now that the economy is getting back on its feet – they live alone in the city, aren’t interested in marriage and value their independence. Michi, however, is more or less the opposite of this “new” kind of woman. Independence is something that frightens her beyond all else. She cannot survive without a man, does not want or know how to live alone as a “single” woman and uses her sex appeal in order to manipulate men into staying by her side to look after her. Sex is not what she craves so much as security, but security also frightens her and so each time she’s made one conquest she latches on to the next gallant young man who shows her any sign of kindness or courtesy.
Indeed, all Michi thinks she has to offer is her body – the “Jotai” of the title. Perhaps hinting at some past trauma in speaking of the roughneck fishermen that frequented her grandmother’s ramen shop, fatherless Michi says she’s chased men in her dreams since childhood, seeking new tastes and new sensations. She wishes she could find one man and stick with him because the chase and the longing cause her nothing but pain, but her need will not let her be. Asked what she will do when her appeal fades (as it inevitably will), Michi has no other plan than drinking herself into oblivion. “I’m a woman,” she says, “what is there for me to do but love?”. Quite far from the idea of the “liberated”, independent woman spoken of before who has learned to make her own way in the new “freedoms” promised by increased economic prosperity.
This false idea of liberality is one which originally attracts Nobuyuki. A straight laced salaryman working for his corrupt father-in-law and often doing his dirty work for him against his batter judgement, Nobuyuki has sacrificed his individual freedom for the rewards his society offers those who play by the rules. Also a war orphan, Nobuyuki sacrificed his youth to raise his younger sister (now preparing to marry herself), and has a comfortable, middle-class life with an austere if loving wife. Having worked his way into their upperclass world, Nobuyuki feels he doesn’t quite belong, something always nagging at him prevents Nobuyuki from fully committing to his drone-like life of pleasant conformity. A mad infatuation with Michi, an irritating child woman at the best of times, is an excuse to go all out in escaping the oppression of his conventional life but it’s not one with long term stability and his life with Michi is unlikely to offer him the freedom he had originally envisaged.
Later, Michi makes a play for the man Nobuyuki’s sister is set to marry. Akizuki (Takao Ito) is not like Nobuyuki – he’s a post-war man but one with definite ambitions and goals, each element of his life is a product of considered choices. As anyone would who took the time to really think about it, he’s turning Michi down, but for some reason he continues to help her placing a wedge between himself and his fiancée. This way of living – the considered, ordered, boring but pleasant life is directly contrasted with the chaotic, destructive, and perhaps exciting one that is offered by Michi, and the dull life is winning. Michi is miserable, and her self destruction is primed to drag any “nice” young man into her wake along with any other woman associated with him. Nobuyuki is left with a choice but it turns out not to be so binary as might be assumed. Personal freedom, if it is to be found, is not found in abandonment either to another person or to a job or way of life, but in the realisation that choice exists and can be exercised, freely, by all.
Kon Ichikawa’s approach to critiquing his society was often laced with a delicious slice of biting irony but he puts sarcasm to one side for this all too rare attempt to address the uncomfortable subject of Japan’s hidden underclass – the burakumin. The term itself simply means “people who live in hamlets” but from feudal times onwards it came to denote the kinds of people with whom others did not want to associate – notably those whose occupations dealt in some way with death from executioners and undertakers, to butchers and leatherworkers. Though outright discrimination against such people was outlawed during the Meiji restoration, social stigma and informal harassment remained common with some lingering tendency remaining even today.
An Autumn Afternoon (秋刀魚の味, Sanma no Aji) was to be Ozu’s final work. This was however more by accident than design – despite serious illness Ozu intended to continue working and had even left a few notes relating to a follow up project which was destined never to be completed. Even if not exactly intended to become the final point of a thirty-five year career, An Autumn Afternoon is an apt place to end, neatly revisiting the director’s key concerns and starring some of his most frequent collaborators.
Perhaps oddly for a director of his generation, Kon Ichikawa is not particularly known for family drama yet his 1960 effort, Her Brother (おとうと, Ototo), draws strongly on this genre albeit with Ichikawa’s trademark irony. A Taisho era tale based on an autobiographically inspired novel by Aya Koda, Her Brother is the story of a sister’s unconditional love but also of a woman who is, in some ways, forced to sacrifice herself for her family precisely because of their ongoing emotional neglect.
Hideo Gosha maybe best known for the “manly way” movies of his early career in which angry young men fought for honour and justice, but mostly just to to survive. Late into his career, Gosha decided to change tack for a while with a series of female orientated films either remaining within the familiar gangster genre as in Yakuza Wives, or shifting into world of the red light district as in Tokyo Bordello (吉原炎上, Yoshiwara Enjo). Presumably an attempt to get past the unfamiliarity of the Yoshiwara name, the film’s English title is perhaps a little more obviously salacious than the original Japanese which translates as Yoshiwara Conflagration and directly relates to the real life fire of 1911 in which 300 people were killed and much of the area razed to the ground. Gosha himself grew up not far from the location of the Yoshiwara as it existed in the mid-20th century where it was still a largely lower class area filled with cardsharps, yakuza, and, yes, prostitution (legal in Japan until 1958, outlawed in during the US occupation). The Yoshiwara of the late Meiji era was not so different as the women imprisoned there suffered at the hands of men, exploited by a cruelly misogynistic social system and often driven mad by internalised rage at their continued lack of agency.
Kon Ichikawa was born in 1915, just four years later than the subject of his 1989 film Actress (映画女優, Eiga Joyu) which uses the pre-directorial career of one of Japanese cinema’s most respected actresses, Kinuyo Tanaka, to explore the development of Japanese cinema itself. Tanaka was born in poverty in 1909 and worked as a jobbing film actress before being “discovered” by Hiroshi Shimizu and becoming one of Shochiku’s most bankable stars. The script is co-written by Kaneto Shindo who was fairly close to the action as an assistant under Kenji Mizoguchi at Shochiku in the ‘40s before being drafted into the war. A commemorative exercise marking the tenth anniversary of Tanaka’s death from a brain tumour in 1977, Ichikawa’s film never quite escapes from the biopic straightjacket and only gives a superficial picture of its star but seems content to revel in the nostalgia of a, by then, forgotten golden age.
Kon Ichikawa, wry commenter of his times, turns his ironic eyes to the inherent sexism of the 1960s with a farcical tale of a philandering husband suddenly confronted with the betrayed disappointment of his many mistresses who’ve come together with one aim in mind – his death! Scripted by Natto Wada (Ichikawa’s wife and frequent screenwriter until her retirement in 1965), Ten Dark Women (黒い十人の女, Kuroi Junin no Onna) is an absurd noir-tinged comedy about 10 women who love one man so much that they all want him dead, or at any rate just not alive with one of the others.
Yusaku Matsuda became a household name and all round cool guy hero thanks to his role as a maverick private eye in the hit TV show Detective Story, however despite sharing the same name, Kichitaro Negishi’s Detective Story movie from 1983 (探偵物語, Tantei Monogatari) has absolutely nothing to with the identically titled drama series. In fact, Matsuda is not even the star attraction here as the film is clearly built around top idol of the day Hiroko Yakushimaru as it adapts a novel which is also published by the agency that represents her and even works some of her music into the soundtrack.
Windows on Worlds 