Tag: Nobuo Takagi

Street of Love and Hope (愛と希望の街, Nagisa Oshima, 1959)

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“You must sell your pigeons or you can’t survive in this world” a less progressive figure than he first seemed eventually admits in Nagisa Oshima’s ironically titled debut feature Street of Love and Hope (愛と希望の街, Ai to Kibo no Machi). As might be expected given the director’s later trajectory, there is precious little love or hope on offer and it seems his particular brand of grumpy pessimism ruffled studio feathers from the very beginning earning him a sixth month directing ban with a top executive complaining “this film is saying the rich and poor can never join hands”. The executive may have had a point in the increasing inequalities of the post-war society in which humanist hypocrisy offers only entrenched division and inevitable class conflict. 

As the film opens, the hero, Masao (Hiroshi Fujikawa), is selling his sister’s beloved pet pigeons because, as his social worker later explains, welfare payments are not enough to live on and his mother Kuniko (Yuko Mochizuki), who usually shines shoes for a living, has TB which leaves her unable to work. Kuniko is keen for Masao to stay in education and attend high school, but he acutely feels the burden on his mother and intends to work while attending evening classes. The trouble begins when Masao sells his pigeons to a wealthy young lady, Kyoko (Yuki Tominaga), who is the teenage daughter of an electronics factory boss. 

Well-meaning as she is, Kyoko tries to give Masao the change from her purchase after he explains he’s selling the birds because he needs money. Ironically she gives one of them to her sickly younger brother, but the problem is that Masao is effectively running a scam. The birds are homing pigeons. Assuming the new owners don’t cage them in properly, the birds will fly right back home and he can sell them again. He’s already done this a couple of times and is at least conflicted about it, especially as it upsets his sister Yasue (Michio Ito) so much, though what else really is he supposed to do?

This central question is the one that eventually comes between Masao’s progressive schoolteacher Miss Akiyama (Kakuko Chino) and Kyoko’s sympathetic older brother Yuji (Fumio Watanabe) who works in HR at his father’s factory. Another of Oshima’s mismatched, ideologically opposed frustrated couples, Miss Akiyama and Yuji find themselves on either side of a divide. It seems that the factory does not ordinarily employ city boys, preferring to recruit from the countryside and house employees in dorms because the boss is convinced rural youth is less corrupted by amoral urbanity. Hoping to help Masao, Kyoko and Miss Akiyama team up to convince him to change his mind and give Masao a chance, but they eventually fail him during the exam because it accidentally uncovers his pigeon scam and therefore proves the boss’ point. 

That isn’t all it exposes, however, as even the seemingly progressive Yuji expresses some extremely outdated, quite offensive prejudices even as he insists they didn’t fail Masao because he comes from a single-parent family. According to the boss, children of “broken families” become “twisted human beings” which is unfortunate because “corporations value stability”. Even while not disagreeing with his father’s logic, Yuji explains that he can’t employ Masao not because of his fatherless status but because he’s fundamentally dishonest as proved by his pigeon scam. Miss Akiyama who’d previously described him as the kind of boy who never lies, is shocked but later reflects on his circumstances and her own. In its own ways, her life is also hard and she can see how it might happen that she too may have to “sell her pigeons” (a handy piece of wordplay hingeing on the fact the Japanese for pigeon, “hato”, sounds similar to the English word “heart”) in order to survive. She can forgive Masao for doing the same in the knowledge he had no other choice, but believes Yuji wouldn’t nor would he forgive her if he discovered that she too had sold herself. She cannot be in a relationship with a man who is so “heartless” and unforgiving and it is this which creates the unbreachable gulf between them itself informed by their differing socioeconomic circumstances. 

These differences in standing are also brought out in the youthful idealism of Kyoko who wholeheartedly believes she can help Masao by giving him money and then trying to improve his circumstances by getting him a job in her father’s factory. Both her father and her brother dismiss her altruistic desire to help as childish, Yuji pointing out that there are millions of poor people not just one and you can’t help them all, while their cynicism is eventually validated in the exposure of Masao’s “fraud” which accidentally brands those living in difficult economic circumstances as duplicitous criminals even as it directly implies that it is an unfair society which turns honest boys like Masao who never lie and just want to take care of their mothers into “heartless” bird traffickers. You can see why Shochiku didn’t like it, the hope of the post-war era shot down by the gun of a conflicted industrialist. 

Tokyo Bay (東京湾, Yoshitaro Nomura, 1962)

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Yoshitaro Nomura is most closely associated with the thriller and particularly with its lower end as a purveyor of B-movie noir, yet look a little closer and his films are perhaps not really about crime at all but about the complicated relationships between people in the ever changing post-war society. Just as Stakeout is really about a policeman’s marriage, Tokyo Bay (東京湾, Tokyowan) is less concerned with the radiating corruption of the smuggling ring at its centre than with frustrated male friendship and the wartime legacy.

Opening with an aerial pan over post-war Tokyo, a title card informs us that this is just one frame in the “intense struggle for existence” in a city of 10 million before we arrive at the titular bay and a boat which is presumably carrying drugs later passed from one hand to another. The fixer, Takeyama (Kei Sato), talks to a man in a car and instructs him to be in front of the Taiyo building before 10am to pick up a golf bag from his contact. Gazing up at a post-war construction site, however, the man, Saeki (Jun Hamamura), is shot in the head and killed by a bullet piercing the roof of his car, Nomura suddenly switching to a disorientating POV shot as he twists in a sudden death spiral. 

As it turns out, Saeki was a plant, an undercover cop with the drugs squad sent to expose the smuggling ring the shadowy owners of which will predictably turn out to have Chinese connections in another echo of post-war cinema’s continuing Sinophobia. Two officers are assigned to the case, the young and earnest Akine (Jiro Ishizaki), and the veteran Sumikawa (Ko Nishimura) who acts largely on a series of inexplicable policeman’s hunches. Their major lead, however, comes as a stroke either of dumb luck or dark fate as Sumikawa, dodging into a dodgy mahjong parlour while tailing Takeyama, runs into an old army buddy, Inoue (Isao Tamagawa), who just happens to be a left-handed sniper perfectly matching the profile of the man they’ve been looking for. 

While Sumikawa keeps tabs on his old friend, somehow feeling he has something to do with all this but ambivalent in his torn responsibilities, Akine travels to Inoue’s hometown of Onomichi and sympathetically concludes that he was merely “rather unfortunate”. His life derailed by the war, Inoue returned to discover the girl he hoped to marry had married someone else. Giving evidence at Inoue’s trial for pulling a knife on her husband, the young woman remarks that she never promised him anything and did not consider their relationship to be serious, merely treating him with the politeness due to someone about to leave for war. In any case, she asks, even if she had been in love and intended to wait for him, as an orphaned woman there were only two choices open to her to survive, marriage or sex work, what else could she have done?

Back in Tokyo, Sumikawa begins to catch up with his old friend, realising that his romantic disappointment set him on a dark course of bad relationships and a drift towards crime but that he seems to have turned himself around. He is now happily married to a woman he describes as “simple” who seems devoted to him and if he did this, he did it to start again. His one last job intended to take him back to Onomichi, a pleasant coastal town the bay of which he describes as far more beautiful than that of the grimy, industrial Tokyo and largely untouched by urban corruption. Sumikawa feels himself torn, not least on account of the debt that exists between the two men because Inoue once saved his life, but also knowing that he may have to arrest this man and destroy his attempt to return to a more innocent world leaving his wife alone. Disapproving of the nascent relationship between his younger sister Yukiko (Hiromi Sakaki) and his partner, Sumikawa worries Akine may be becoming the kind of man who cares more for making an arrest than friendship, a conflict presumably weighing on his mind, even as he agrees he’s a good man and a good police officer. Yukiko meanwhile fires back that Sumikawa’s wife left him not because he is a policeman but because he is selfish and arrogant, and more to the point incapable of understanding a woman’s feelings. 

Nevertheless, he’s acutely aware of the effect his actions or inactions may have on Inoue’s wife Yoshiko (Kyoko Aoi), especially as it’s suggested she may need a degree of looking after. Inoue, careful to admit nothing, reveals that the man who carried out the hit may not have known he was killing a police officer but may have assumed the target was fair game being, like themselves, a denizen of the underworld. Largely a MacGuffin, the smuggling ring is not as important as one might assume, the two men locked into a cycle of guilt and retribution each marked by wartime trauma and in a sense unable to claim their place in the post-war society. Twin betrayals lead to a fateful, train-bound showdown shot with fraught claustrophobia as each man engages in an intense struggle for his survival but also perhaps already defeated in a shared sense of fatalistic nihilism. Trekking through the half-constructed streets of the post-war city with shaky handheld Nomura hints at the radiating corruption exemplified by the growth of the trade in drugs, but perhaps one corruption is merely the result of another which may in turn be far less easy to cure. 

Escape from Japan (日本脱出, Kiju Yoshida, 1964)

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Like many directors of his generation, Kiju (Yoshishige) Yoshida began his career at Shochiku working on the studio’s characteristically inoffensive fare before being promoted as one of their youth voices through which they hoped to capture a similar audience to that attracted by Nikkatsu’s Sun Tribe movies. Yoshida’s films may have spoken to youth but they were perhaps not quite what the studio was looking for nor the kinds of projects that he really wanted to work on, which is one reason why 1964’s Escape from Japan (日本脱出, Nihon Dasshutsu), an anarchic B-movie crime thriller of intense paranoia all maddening angles and claustrophobic composition, was his last for Shochiku, the final straw being their decision to change the ending without telling him and release the film while he was away on honeymoon. 

Set very much in the present, the film opens with a young man miming to American jazz which turns out to be part of the floor show being performed by the band on the stage below for whom he is a reluctant roadie. Tatsuo (Yasushi Suzuki) dreams of going to America to rediscover “real jazz” and subsequently bring it back to Japan. He has the strange idea that America is a true meritocracy where his talent will be recognised, unlike Japan where it is impossible for him to succeed because he is not particularly good looking or possessed of “star quality”. Feeling himself indebted to the band’s drug-addled drummer Takashi (Kyosuke Machida) for helping him get the roadie gig with the false promise of becoming a singer, Tatsuo agrees to help him commit an elaborate robbery of the “turkish bath” (low level sex services and precursor to the modern “soaplands”) where his girlfriend Yasue (Miyuki Kuwano) works. Only it all goes wrong. The guys kill a policeman during the escape, and the other hotheaded member of the gang becomes convinced that Yasue may talk now that they’ve got involved with murder so they should finish her off too by forcing her to take an overdose of sleeping pills. 

Absolutely everyone is desperate to escape Japan for various different reasons. Tatsuo because of his obsession with American jazz and the freedom it represents to him coupled with the sense of impotence he feels in an oppressive society which refuses to recognise his talent because he doesn’t look the part. He jokes with his next-door neighbour, a sex worker who has redecorated her apartment in anticipation of impressing the tourists arriving for the Olympics, that he envies women and wishes he could find a “sponsor” to take him to the States, but later can offer only the explanation that Japan doesn’t interest him when probed over why he was so desperate to leave. 

“Korea or anywhere else, it’s better than Japan” Yasue later adds, consoling Tatsuo as she informs him that their escape plan won’t work because all of the US military planes are being diverted to Korea to bring in extra help for the Olympics. Bundled into a van filled with chicken carcases as a potential stowaway, he discovers another escapee – a Korean trying to go “home”, or rather to the North (presumably having missed out on the post-war “repatriation” programs) where he claims there are lots of opportunities for young people only to lose his temper when Tatsuo explains that he wants to become a jazz singer. He doesn’t want decadent wastrels in his communist paradise and would rather Tatsuo not mess up his country. Yet they are each already dependent on the Americans even for their escape, making use of military corruption networks and getting Yasue’s friend’s GI squeeze into trouble through exposing his black-marketeering. 

Tatsuo and Yasue find they have more in common than they first thought, both “deceived” by those like Takashi who turned out to be a feckless married man and father-to-be risking not only his own future but that of his unborn child solely to fuel his escapist drug habit (which was perhaps the reason for the lengthy hospital stay from which he had just returned). Yasue was just trying to save up enough money to open a hairdresser’s in her hometown, but Takashi told her he was a “famous jazz drummer” and presumably sold her the same kind of empty dreams as he did Tatsuo. Giving up on her own future, realising that even in America the sex trade is all that’s waiting for her, Yasue tries to engineer Tatsuo’s escape but he, traumatised by his crimes, descends further into crazed paranoia, eventually finding himself right in the middle of the Olympics opening ceremony. This is event is supposed to put Japan back on the map as a rehabilitated modern nation, but perhaps all it’s doing is creating an elaborate smokescreen to disguise all the reasons a man like Tatsuo and a woman like Yasue might want to be just about anywhere else. Yoshida seems unimpressed with the modern nation and its awkward relationship with the Americans, perhaps a controversial point in the immediate run up to the games. Shochiku neutered his attempt to depict a man driven to madness by the impossibilities of his times, but a sense of that madness remains as Tatsuo finds himself on the run and eventually suspended neither here nor there, trapped in a perpetual limbo of frustration and futility.

Original trailer (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)

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)

Fireworks Over the Sea (海の花火, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1951)

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In the films of Keisuke Kinoshita, it can (generally) be assumed that the good will triumph, that those who remain true to themselves and refuse to give in to cynicism and selfishness will eventually be rewarded. This is more or less true of the convoluted Fireworks Over the Sea (海の花火, Umi no Hanabi) which takes a once successful family who have made an ill-advised entry into the fishing industry and puts them through the post-war ringer with everything from duplicitous business associates and overbearing relatives to difficult romances and unwanted arranged marriages to contend with.

The action begins in 1949 in the small harbour town of Yobuko in Southern Japan. Tarobei (Chishu Ryu) and his brother Aikawa (Takeshi Sakamoto) run a small fishing concern with two boats under the aegis of the local fishing association. The business is in big trouble and they’re convinced the captain of one of the boats has been secretly stealing part of the catch and selling it on the black market. Attempts to confront him have stalled and the brothers are at a loss, unsure how to proceed given that it will be difficult to find another captain at short notice even if they are already getting serious heat from their investors and the association.

Luckily things begin to look up when a familiar face from the past arrives in the form of Shogo (Takashi Miki) – a soldier who was briefly stationed in the town at the very end of the war during which time he fell in love with Tarobei’s eldest daughter, Mie (Michiyo Kogure). Shogo has a friend who would be perfect for taking over the boat and everything seems to be going well but the Kamiyas just can’t seem to catch a break and their attempt to construct a different economic future for themselves in the post-war world seems doomed to failure.

The Kamiyas are indeed somewhat persecuted. They have lost out precisely because of their essential goodness in which they prefer to conduct business honestly and fairly rather than give in to the selfish ways of the new society. Thus they vacillate over how to deal with the treacherous captain who has already figured out that he holds all the cards and can most likely walk all over them. They encounter the same level of oppressive intimidation when they eventually decide to fight unfair treatment from the association all the way to Tokyo only to be left sitting on a bench outside the clerk’s office for three whole days at the end of which Tarobei is taken seriously ill.

However, unlike Kinoshita’s usual heroes, Tarobei’s faith begins to waver. He is told he can get a loan from another family on the condition that their son marry his youngest daughter Miwa (Yoko Katsuragi). To begin with he laughs it off but as the situation declines he finds himself tempted even if he hates himself for the thought. He never wanted to be one of those fathers who treats his daughters like capital, but here he is. Both Miwa, who has fallen in love with the younger brother of the new captain, and her sister are in a sense at the mercy of their families, torn between personal desire familial duty. Mie, having discovered that her husband died in the war, is still trapped in post-war confusion and unsure if she returns Shogo’s feelings but in any case is afraid to pursue them when she knows the depths of despair her father finds himself in because of their precarious economic situation. Shogo is keen to help, but he is also fighting a war on two fronts seeing as his extremely strange (and somewhat overfamiliar) sister-in-law (Isuzu Yamada) is desperate to marry him off to her niece (Keiko Tsushima) in order to keep him around but also palm off her mother-in-law.

Meanwhile, a lonely geisha (Toshiko Kobayashi) who has fallen into the clutches of the corrupt captain is determined to find out what happened to someone she used to know who might be connected to Shogo and the Kamiyas and falling in desperate unrequited love with replacement captain Yabuki (Rentaro Mikuni) who is inconveniently in love with Mie. Kinoshita apparently cut production on Fireworks short in order to jet off to France which might be why his characteristically large number of interconnected subplots never coalesce. Running the gamut from melancholy existential drama to rowdy fights on boats and shootouts in the street, Kinoshita knows how to mix things up but leaves his final messages unclear as the Kamiyas willingly wave their traumatic pasts out to sea with a few extra passengers in tow still looking for new directions.

Titles and opening (no subtitles)

The Good Fairy (善魔, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1951)

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Good fairy DVDAlthough one of the more prominent names in post-war cinema, the work of Keisuke Kinoshita has often been out of fashion, derided for its sentimental naivety. It is true to say that Kinoshita values heroes whose essential goodness improves the world around them though that is not to say that he is entirely without sympathy for the conflicted or imperfect even if his equanimity begins to waver with age. 1951’s The Good Fairy (善魔, Zemma), however, working from a script penned not by himself but Kogo Noda and adapted from the novel by Kunio Kishida, seems to turn his life philosophy on its head, wondering whether the tyranny of puritanical goodness is an evil in itself or merely the best weapon against it.

After beginning with a hellish, ominous title sequence set against the flames, the film opens with newspaper editor Nakanuma (Masayuki Mori) getting a hot tip regarding a politician’s wife who seems to have mysteriously disappeared. He hands the assignment to rookie reporter Rentaro Mikuni (played by the actor Rentaro Mikuni who subsequently took his stage name from this his debut role) who specialises in political corruption. Mikuni doesn’t like the assignment. He thinks it’s unethical and whatever happens between a man and his wife is no one’s business, but ends up going to see the politician, Kitaura (Koreya Senda), anyway and instantly dislikes him. Mildly worried by Kitaura’s lack of concern over his wife’s sudden absence, Mikuni stays on the case and visits the wife’s father (Chishu Ryu) up in the mountains where he also meets her sister, Mikako (Yoko Katsuragi), who eventually leads him to the woman herself, Itsuko (Chikage Awashima), who has taken refuge with a friend after becoming disillusioned with her husband’s “vulgar” pursuit of success at the continuing cost of human decency.

To pull back for a second, in any other Kinoshita film, Itsuko would be among the heroes in standing up against her husband’s corrupting influences, but for reasons which will later be explained she lingers on the borders of righteousness owing to having made a mistaken choice in her youth which was, in many ways, defined by the times in which she lived. Nukanuma had not been entirely honest with Mikuni in that he had known and secretly been in love with Itsuko when they were both students but he was poor and diffident and so he never declared himself, his only attempt to hint as his feelings either tragically or wilfully misunderstood. Where Itsuko, who married for money and status as a young woman was expected to do in the pre-war society, has mellowed with age and gained compassionate morality, Nakanuma who became a reporter to fight for justice against the background of fascist oppression has become cynical and selfish. Never having quite forgotten Itsuko, he has been in a casual relationship with a young actress, Suzue (Toshiko Kobayashi), for the last two years never realising that she has really fallen in love with him.

Thinking back on his college relationship with Itsuko, Nakanuma remembers talking with her about unsuccessful romances, that if a man tries his best to make a woman happy but isn’t able to then it must be because she doesn’t love him. Itsuko agrees, adding that men never seem to know what makes a woman happy in love but that friendship is a different matter. She says something similar when she tells him she’s getting married but doesn’t want to lose his friendship, and when he begins floating the idea of marriage hinting that he wants to marry her but perhaps giving the mistaken impression that there’s someone else in stating that it’s sad when a friend marries because the relationship with never be the same again and knowing that he intends to marry she now treasures their friendship even more. In a sense, Nakanuma thinks of Suzue as a “friend” with whom he occasionally sleeps, believing that their relationship is only ever liminal and temporary but mutually beneficial and capable of continuing even if the sexual component had to end.

Having failed once in love, Nakanuma is resolved not to do so again and determined to fight to win Itsuko rather than lose her through cowardice, but to do so he will cruelly wound Suzue who has treated him with nothing other than tenderness. By this time, Mikuni has fallen in chaste, innocent love with Mikako who reminds him of the parts of himself he feels are being erased by his compromising job as part of the mass media machine. Mikuni’s terrifying “goodness” is largely a positive quality which leads him to fight for justice against oppression even within his own organisation but his love for the saintly Mikako only intensifies his moral purity and threatens not only to turn him into an insufferable prig but to create in him a new oppressor, spreading guilt and unhappiness like the self-righteous hero of an Ibsen play.

Early on, following their mild disagreement about journalistic ethics, Mikuni and Nakanuma have dinner together over which they debate the power of the press to bring about social change and hold power to account. Nakanuma says he’s become cynical because hating injustice isn’t enough and there’s nothing that the individual can do against an oppressive system. What he’s telling Mikuni is that he used to be like him, but time has taught him righteousness is not an effective weapon against entrenched social privilege. He recounts a dark story from a Buddhist monk who told him that good can never win over evil because it isn’t strong enough, only evil is strong enough to fight evil and so in order to counter it you will need to affect its weapons. Later, crazed by grief and exhaustion, Mikuni’s “goodness” seems to pulse out of him with ominous supernatural force as he takes Nakanuma to task for his callous treatment of Suzue only for he and Itsuko to come to the conclusion that they’ve heard the voice of “evil” and are now condemned by their past choices to lives of morally pure unhappiness.

This central conundrum seems to contradict Kinoshita’s otherwise open philosophies in its unwelcome rigidity which says that there are no second chances and no possibility of ever moving on from the past with positivity. Itsuko made the “wrong” choice when she was young in choosing to marry for material gain, but she was only making the choice her society expected her to make in the absence of other options – it wasn’t as if she had any reason to wait around for Nakanuma whose regret over his romantic cowardice has made him cold and bitter. She realised her mistake too late and resolved to correct it, but the “Good Fairy” won’t let her, it says she has to pay (for the crimes of an oppressive society) by sacrificing again her chance of happiness in the full knowledge of all she’s giving up. Kinoshita’s films advocate the right to love by will, free of oppressive social codes or obligations but Itsuko is denied a romantic resolution despite having “reformed” herself and made consistently “correct” choices since discovering her husband’s “fraud”. She is denied this largely because of Nakunuma’s failing in being unkind to one who loved him, which is, in a round about way, still her fault for not having realised he loved her and deciding to marry him instead. In fact, the only one who seems to get off scot-free is Kitaura whose fraudulent activities will be covered up on the condition he consent to Itsuko’s divorce petition and sets her fully “free” so she can be fully burdened by the weight of her romantic sacrifice.

In the end, it’s difficult to see a positive outcome which could emerge from all this unhappiness which seems primed only to spread and reproduce itself with potentially disastrous consequences. Mikuni’s purity has become puritanical, unforgiving and rigid, condemning all to a hellish misery from which there can be no escape. The cure is worse than the disease. No one could live like this, and no one should. Goodness, tempered by compassion and understanding, might not be enough to fight the darkness all alone but it might be better to live in the half-light than in the hellish flickering of the fires of righteousness.

Title sequence and opening scene (no subtitles)

The Snow Flurry (風花, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1959)

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Snow Flurry poster 2Studies of the post-war world have often made the cities their home. Filled with the starving, the ruined, and the hopeless, the cities of post-war Japan were places of defeat but also of perseverance as a betrayed generation struggled to survive in whatever way they could. Generally speaking, the rural countryside seems to fare better, coping only with the absence of lost sons and lonely daughters as life goes on much as it always has. Nevertheless things are changing even here. Recalling the subversion of his earlier Army, Keisuke Kinoshita’s The Snow Flurry (風花, Kazahana) employs a complex non-linear structure to examine the various ways in which the past continues to inform the future, trapping post-war youth in the same way their parents were trapped not only with a legacy of wartime rigour but with the weight of the feudal world pressing down upon them as they struggle to escape the authority of the generation by whom they have been betrayed.

We begin with the conventional “happy ending”. A middle-aged woman looks on with genuine happiness as a younger one leaves in a bridal outfit before running off to look for her son, Suteo (Yusuke Kawazu), who has run off towards the river with dark thoughts clouding his mind. Stepping back a little, we are told that 19 years previously Suteo’s mother, Haruko (Keiko Kishi), attempted double suicide with his father, Hideo (Masanao Kawakane) – the son of the local lords. Hideo, fearing that he would soon be sent away to war and knowing that his noble family would never approve of the woman he loved, felt death was his only solution but while his attempt succeeded, Haruko’s did not. Surviving she gave birth to a child and was eventually taken in by Hideo’s family, the Naguras, but only to avoid the gossip in town that their heartlessness was the cause of their son’s death. Haruko and Suteo, rather than living in the main house with the other family members, occupy a small shed to the side of the property and are treated as a maid and farm hand respectively. The only member of the family to treat them kindly is the grand-daughter, Sakura (Yoshiko Kuga), who is a little older than Suteo and remains unmarried at 25 while her grandmother insists on finding a wealthy man willing to marry into the family and save it from dying out altogether.

Though the main action takes place in 1959, not much has changed in the village and the eventual arrival of modern cars belonging to Sakura’s prospective suitors proves jarring in more ways than one. The Naguras, once the feudal landlords, have been greatly reduced in status thanks to the post-war agricultural reforms which limited the amount of land which could be held by one family to that which they could reasonably farm themselves. This obviously means that their income has sharply decreased which, coupled with the patriarch’s profligacy, makes their present way of life untenable unless they can find a wealthy man to marry into the family and re-inject it with cash while they figure out how to make money by farming their own land. Sadly, this will be hard because the Naguras are terrible people with a bad reputation thanks not only to their unpleasant personalities but the lingering stigma of Hideo’s death and the continuing existence of Suteo.

Nagura (Yasushi Nagata), a hard man, rejected his son’s remains out of shame for his “cowardice” in refusing to die bravely for the emperor. When Suteo is born in 1941, he takes it upon himself to register the child’s birth name without consulting the mother, insisting that the child is neither hers nor his but belongs to the nation and will be expected to sacrifice himself in his father’s place to make up for Hideo’s failure of duty. “Suteo” itself means “abandoned boy” and is hardly a warm legacy to leave to anyone let alone your own grandchild and the only offspring of your own late son.

Despite their reduced circumstances, the Naguras continue to behave like lords and are trapped within the feudal pre-war world, obsessed with status and position while those around them have entered the brave new era of promised equalities and modern possibility. Sakura, the only “legitimate” child of the last generation, is literally kept a prisoner by her hardline grandmother (Chieko Higashiyama) who has insisted on conferring various “accomplishments” such as traditional dance and learning to play the piano intended to hook an upperclass husband. Such things hardly matter now in the post-war world and any man who valued them is unlikely to make her very happy, but the Naguras care little for happiness and only for their own “good” name. Sakura wanted, like her friends, to go Tokyo for university but of course she couldn’t – her family wouldn’t even let her spend time with the other girls because there were boys around and they viewed even that as “improper” given her “position”. It’s no wonder that Sakura already feels as if her life will be “crushed by the weight of this house” and longs to leave it, as well as her cold and oppressive family, far behind her.

Suteo’s tragedy is the same has his mother’s, he has fallen in love with someone who can never be his because of outdated notions of social class and the unbreakable authority of the older generation. Sakura loves him too, though she hardly knew it until faced with her own dilemma and realises a marriage is the only way to escape her miserable existence even if she must sacrifice her feelings to do so. Despite all this lifelong suffering, grandma declares herself satisfied in having reasserted her noble status in marrying Sakura off to another prominent family, even if it is to a second son and no one could be persuaded to take on their family name. The Nagura family ends here and she gives her permission for the estates to be sold after she’s gone. All of this sacrifice in name of honour was, apparently, entirely pointless.

Employing a bold non-linear structure in which past and present inhabit the same space, Kinoshita mythologises his ordinary villagers through the repeated use of theatrical narration in the songs which accompany Sakura’s traditional dance, commenting on the action with a melancholy passivity. Trapped by circumstance and burdened by legacy, his protagonists are backed into corners with no way out other than to accept the paths before them. The future for Suteo lies in “abandonment” as he prepares to reject his cruel history and attempts to start again by walking bravely into the post-war world free of feudal oppression.

Original trailer (no subtitles)