Reiji Akitsu – Windows on Worlds

In the noir films of the immediate post-war era, the protagonists are often haunted by an inescapable past that prevents them from moving on into the new democratic Japan. But in Shohei Imamura’s Endless Desire (果しなき欲望, Hateshinaki Yokubo) the situation is ironically reversed as a group of former soldiers who on the surface of things at least seem to have made moderately successful lives for themselves reunite to dig up buried treasure from the dying days of the war greedy for a little more glamour than the world has seen fit to show them.

Their venal amorality is directly contrasted with the bumbling earnestness of Satoru (Hiroyuki Nagato), a young man who fears his childhood sweetheart, butcher’s daughter Ryuko (Sanae Nakahara), is going to marry another man because he is unemployed and cannot find a job in the still difficult if steadily improving post-war economy. As such, he’s incredibly excited by the opportunity to get into the real estate business, wandering around town dressed in a suit and carrying a briefcase to scout properties or otherwise doing odd jobs for the gang, which is a shame because unbeknownst to him the business is a sham set up as a front by the crooks who’ve rented a vacant shop from Satoru’s land shark dad so they can tunnel their way to the treasure which they think is buried under Ryuko’s butcher’s shop.

The changing nature of the times is rammed home by the fact that the shopping district, which stands atop the site of the former military hospital where the gang buried a barrel full of stolen morphine at the end of the war ten years previously, is itself about to be torn down. Effectively a post-war shantytown, the area is now ripe for redevelopment with the economy beginning to bounce back thanks to the stimulus of the Korea War. The post-war era is not quite “over”, but it’s definitely on its way out which makes the gang’s determination to recover the stolen morphine all the more ironic especially as the market for hard drugs may not be as a lucrative as it once was not to mention to the logistical difficulties of turning it into cash.

Nevertheless, the desire for it immediately sets the gang against each other. The problem is that the lieutenant, Hashimoto, who set the whole thing up has apparently died and extra person has turned up to claim some of the loot despite the gang members having been told there should only be three of them. They were not particularly close in the war and cannot exactly remember each other while Hashimoto had them all work separately without knowing who else was on board so they don’t even know which one of them is the potentially uninvited guest. Meanwhile, the presence of a woman, Shima (Misako Watanabe), who claims to be Hashimoto’s sister sets them all on edge with masculine jealously as she sometimes gleefully plays the femme fatale later even trying to seduce the innocent Satoru, convincing him she’s a victim of domestic violence in need of rescue in an attempt to quiet his concerns over what might be going on at the shop.

The fact is that none of the gang members can really claim to be desperate, all are simply greedy and selfish silently plotting to keep all the money for themselves rather than share it. One of them is eventually crushed under the barrel, an embodiment of their insatiable desire, but with their dying breath insists it’s theirs and no one else can have any. As old man later says, this kind of greed only leads to a bad end unlike the greed he’s patiently practiced over decades which seems to be taking a little here and there where you find it such as asking Shima for some extra money for “helping” her before asking the police about a reward and turning her in anyway.

Even Satoru’s dad is “greedy”, renting the crooks a shop he new would soon be knocked down and then complaining when his tenants try to take the tatami mats and shoji doors they’d paid for themselves out of his property. Greed maybe the way of the world, at least for those who unlike the diffident Satoru do not lack for self-confidence, but endless desire has only one reward. Darkly comic and often deeply ironic, Imamura plays with a noirish sense of fatalistic retribution but finally returns to a sense of childish innocence in the bumbling courtship of Satoru and Ryuko who may be her own kind of femme fatale playing two suitors against each other while refusing to be dominated by any man but nevertheless riding off into the sunset on her bicycle with a diffident Satoru chasing along behind her.

Many things were changing in the Japan of 1957. In terms of cinema, a short lived series of films known as the “Sun Tribe” movement had provoked widespread social panic about rowdy Westernised youth. Inspired by the novels of Shintaro Ishihara (later a right-leaning mayor of Tokyo), the movement proved so provocative that it had to be halted after three films such was the public outcry at the outrageous depictions of privileged young people indulging in promiscuous sex, drugs, alcohol, and above all total apathy – frivolous lives frittered away on self destructive pleasures. The Sun Tribe movies had perhaps gone too far becoming an easy source of parody, though the studio that engineered them, Nikkatsu, largely continued in a similar vein making stories of youth gone wild their stock in trade.

Yuzo Kawashima, a generation older than the Sun Tribe boys and girls, attempts to subvert the moral outrage by reframing the hysteria as a ribald rakugo story set in the last period of intense cultural crisis – the “Bakumatsu” era, which is to say the period between the great black ships which forcibly re-opened Japan to the outside world, and the fall of the Shogunate. The title, Bakumatsu Taiyoden (幕末太陽傳), literally means “legend of the sun (tribe) in the Bakumatsu era”, and, Kawashima seems to suggest, perhaps things now aren’t really so different from 100 years earlier. Kawashima deliberately casts Nikkatsu’s A-list matinee idols – in particular Yujiro Ishihara (the brother of Shintaro and the face of the movement), but also Akira Kobayashi and familiar supporting face Hideaki Nitani, all actors generally featured in contemporary dramas and rarely in kimono. Rather than the rather stately acting style of the period drama, Kawashima allows his youthful cast to act the way they usually would – post-war youth in the closing days of the shogunate.

They are, however, not quite the main draw. Well known comedian and rakugo performer Frankie Sakai anchors the tale as a genial chancer, a dishonest but kindly man whose roguish charm makes him an endearing (if sometimes infuriating) character. After a post-modern opening depicting contemporary Shinagawa – a faded red light district now on its way out following the introduction of anti-prostitution legislation enacted under the American occupation, Kawashima takes us back to the Shinagawa of 1862 when business was, if not exactly booming, at least ticking along.

Nicknamed “The Grifter”, Saiheiji (Frankie Sakai) has picked up a rare watch dropped by a samurai on his way to plot revolution and retired to a geisha house for a night of debauchery he has no intention of actually paying for. Though he keeps assuring the owners that he will pay “later” when other friends turn up with the money, he is eventually revealed to be a con-man and a charlatan but offers to work off his debt by doing odd jobs around the inn. Strangely enough Saiheiji is actually a cheerful little worker and busily gets on with the job, gradually endearing himself to all at the brothel with his ability for scheming which often gets them out of sticky situations ranging from fake ghosts to customers who won’t leave.

Saiheiji eventually gets himself involved with a shady group of samurai led by Shinshaku Takasugi (Yujiro Ishihara) – a real life figure of the Bakumatsu rebellion. Like their Sun Tribe equivalents these young men are angry about “the humiliating American treaty”, but their anger seems to be imbued with purpose albeit a destructive one as they commit to burning down the recently completed “Foreign Quarter” as an act of protest-cum-terrorism. The Bakumatsu rebels are torn over the best path for future – they’ve seen what happened in China, and they fear a weak Japan will soon be torn up and devoured by European empire builders. Some think rapid Westernisation is the answer – fight fire with fire, others think showing the foreigners who’s boss is a better option (or even just expelling them all so everything goes back to “normal”). America, just as in the contemporary world, is the existential threat to the Japanese notion of Japaneseness – these young samurai are opposed to cultural colonisation, but their great grandchildren have perhaps swung the other way, drunk on new freedoms and bopping away to rock n roll wearing denim and drinking Coca Cola. They too resent American imperialism (increasingly as history would prove), but their rebellions lack focus or intent, their anger without purpose or aim.

Kawashima’s opening crawl directly references the anti-prostitution law enacted by the American occupying forces – an imposition of Western notions of “morality” onto “traditional” Japanese culture. In a round about way, the film suggests that all of this youthful rebellion is perhaps provoked by the sexual frustration of young men now that the safe and legal sex trade is no longer available to them – echoing the often used defence of the sex trade that it keeps “decent” women, and society at large, safe. Then again, the sex trade of the Bakumatsu era is as unpleasant as it’s always been even if the familiar enough problems are played for laughs – the warring geisha, the prostitute driven in desperation to double suicide, the young woman about to be sold into prostitution against her will in payment of an irresponsible father’s debt, etc. One geisha has signed engagement promises with almost all her clients – it keeps the punters happy and most of them are meaningless anyway. As she says, deception is her business – whatever the men might say about it, it’s a game they are willingly playing, buying affection and then seeming hurt to realise that affection is necessarily false and conditional on payment of the bill.

Playing it for laughs is, however, Kawashima’s main aim – asking small questions with a wry smile as Saiheiji goes about his shady schemes with a cleverness that’s more cheeky than malicious. He warns people they shouldn’t trust him, but in the end they always can because despite his shady surface his heart is in the right place. Warned he’ll go to hell if he keeps on lying his way though life, Saiheiji laughs, exclaims to hell with that – he’s his own life to live, and so he gleefully runs away from the Bakumatsu chaos into the unseen future.

Masters of Cinema release trailer (English subtitles)

Tag: Reiji Akitsu

Endless Desire (果しなき欲望, Shohei Imamura, 1958)

Bakumatsu Taiyoden (幕末太陽傳, Yuzo Kawashima, 1957)