Tag: Reiko Kongo

Miss Oyu (お遊さま, Kenji Mizoguchi, 1951)

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“I never realised how heavy this kimono was” a young woman exclaims towards the conclusion of Kenji Mizoguchi’s Miss Oyu (お遊さま, Oyu-sama), adapted from the Junichiro Tanizaki short story The Reed Cutter, finally collapsing under its weight having committed what amounts to an act of spiritual suicide in an internalised betrayal. Mizoguchi’s highly selective adaptation excises much of Tanizaki’s trademark perversity and targets instead the repressive social codes of the era which proceed to ruin three lives in frustrated affection, shame, and self-harming guilt. 

The trouble begins when Shinnosuke (Yuji Hori), a young man in search of a wife, mistakes his prospective bride for her sister and is forever smitten. Oyu (Kinuyo Tanaka), a widow with a young son, is only accompanying her younger sister, Oshizu (Nobuko Otowa), but is perhaps herself taken with the handsome suitor whom she repeatedly brands a “fine gentleman”. Having objected to all of Oshizu’s previous matches, she encourages her sister to marry this one not least because of his physical proximity that would allow the pair to visit each other regularly. The pain on Oshizu’s face is however readily apparent as Oyu relates the amusing incident to their brother, the younger sister clearly consumed with an inferiority complex in the shadow of the beautiful and elegant Oyu. 

It’s never quite clear to what extent Oyu is aware of her sister’s feelings, if she says these things thoughtlessly or with an intent to wound though she obviously cares deeply for Oshizu. Similarly the extent of her feelings for Shinnosuke remains oblique. As a woman well aware of her beauty and its power, perhaps she simply enjoys being desired or is so accustomed to male attention as to barely notice that Shinnosuke has fallen in love with her. Then again perhaps she knows all too well and for the sake of politeness pretends not to though in that case the decision to encourage her sister to marry him would seem perverse or suggest that she is attempting to deny her own feelings which she may not even understand by rendering Shinnosuke a “brother” in an attempt to remove him from the pool of potential romantic suitors. 

Even so there is an underlying quality of incestuous desire of Oshizu for her sister to whom she remains devotedly besotted, willing to sacrifice her own happiness in the hope of ensuring Oyu’s. After agreeing to marry Shinnosuke, she explains to him that she intends their marriage to be purely symbolic. She refuses to consummate their union on the grounds that it would be a betrayal of Oyu whom she knows to be in love with Shinnosuke while realising that he has married her only to be connected with her sister. When the trio take a trip together the strangeness of the ménage à trois is brought home by the confusion of the hotel maid who assumes that Oyu and Shinnosuke are the married couple, commiserating with Oshizu for being a third wheel. While Oyu childishly makes light of it, Oshizu is hurt and confused, jealous in two directions but pleading with Shinnosuke to be only his sister rather than a wife. 

Yet the wrongness of the arrangement is signalled on Oyu’s return home when she discovers not only that her son, Hajime, has fallen mortally ill in her absence but that rumours have begun to circulate about her unusual relationship with her brother-in-law. It is impossible to avoid the implication that Oyu is being punished firstly for betraying her maternity in having gone on holiday without her son to experience freedom as a woman, secondly for feeling sexual desire, and thirdly for feeling it for a married man who is now technically a brother in being her sister’s husband though as we know no one’s sexual desires are currently being fulfilled in this incredibly complicated and destructive arrangement. 

Though Tanizaki might have been more interested in exploring the darker aspects of human sexuality, Mizoguchi pulls back from the author’s trademark perversity to take aim at the repressive social codes of a patriarchal society which brought such a fraught situation into being. Oyu is unable to marry Shinnosuke because she is bound to her late husband’s family and by the responsibility to her son whom she would have to leave behind even if she were given permission to take another husband. Once her son dies, her ties to marital family are severed and they, disapproving of the rumours surrounding her unconventional relationship with her sister and brother-in-law, send her back to her brother who is also reluctant to accept her. On learning of the reality of her sister’s marriage, she decides to accept a proposal from a sake merchant in another town but the separation breeds only more destruction. Oshizu and and Shinnosuke move to Tokyo and three years later are living in poverty, Shinnosuke now dishevelled and dressing in Western suits with a modern haircut and a scraggly, half-hearted moustache. Oshizu’s eventual pregnancy which confirms that theirs is now a “full” union while Oyu’s is “symbolic” only the slows implosion of the trio’s repressed desires. 

Mizoguchi stops short of arguing for a transgressively new arrangement that would have allowed the trio to live together as a family but nevertheless attacks the repressive social codes that prevent them from speaking honestly about their feelings and force them into self-sacrificing acts of subterfuge which create only more suffering. He dramatises the claustrophobia of their lives through the obvious artificially of the stage sets which stand in such stark contrast to the expansive beauty of nature albeit sometimes unruly but always free, while lending their tragic tale a hint of the parabolic in its mists and rugged gardens as Shinnosuke finds himself alone under the cold light of the moon on a distant shore, a romantic exile from a repressive society. 

A Lustful Man (好色一代男, Yasuzo Masumura, 1961)

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“Why are women in Japan so unhappy?” the carefree Casanova at the centre of Yasuzo Masumura’s 1961 sex romp A Lustful Man (好色一代男, Koshoku Ichidai Otoko) laments, never quite grasping the essential inequalities of the world in which he lives. Masumura is best known for extremity, a wilful iconoclast who flew in the face of golden age cinema’s genial classism, but shock was not his only weapon and he could also be surprisingly playful. Adapted from a well known novel by creator of the “floating world” Ihara Saikaku, A Lustful Man finds him indulging in ironic satire as his hero sets out to “make all the women in Japan happy” chiefly by satisfying their unfulfilled sexual desire while resolutely ignoring all of the entrenched patriarchal social codes which ensure that their lives will be miserable. 

Set in the Edo era, the film opens not with the hero Yonosuke (Raizo Ichikawa) but with his miserly father who berates a servant after discovering a single grain of rice on the hall floor. According to him, the central virtues necessary to become rich are endurance, diligence, and vitality. You must treasure each and every grain of rice in order to accumulate. A cruel and austere man who only thinks of money, Yonosuke’s father keeps his wife in earnest poverty despite their wealth, angrily grabbing an obviously worn kimono out of her hands and insisting that it’s still good for another year, apparently caring nothing for appearances in the otherwise class conscious Kyoto society. It’s this meanness that Yonosuke can’t seem to stand. He hates the way his father disrespects his mother, and her misery is a primary motivator in his lifelong quest to cheer up Japan’s melancholy women though the weapon he has chosen is sex, a convenient excuse to live as a genial libertine to whom money means essentially nothing. 

Yonosuke’s father has set him up with an arranged marriage into a much wealthier family, which is not something he’s very interested in despite the fact she seems to be quite pretty but on learning that she has transgressively found love with the family butler he determines to help her instead, ending the marriage meeting by chasing her round the garden like a dog in heat. Several similar stunts eventually get him sent away from his native Kyoto to Edo but he takes the opportunity to escape, travelling all over Japan making women “happy” as he goes. 

As the first example proves, Yonosuke genuinely hates to see women suffer. His own pleasure, though perhaps not far from his mind, is secondary and he never seeks to take advantage of a woman’s vulnerability only to ease her loneliness. Despite that, however, he remains essentially superficial opting for the transience of postcoital bliss while ignoring the very real societal factors which make an escape from misery all but impossible. During an early adventure, he spends all of the money he conned out of his new employer on redeeming a geisha (at more than three times the asking price) so that she can be with the man she loves, but he continues to visit sex workers without interrogating their existence as indentured servants, “merchandise” which is bought and sold, traded between men and entirely deprived of freedom. In fact, he proudly collects hair cuttings from the various geishas he has known as a kind of trophy only to later discover the grim truth, that the hair likely doesn’t belong to the geisha herself but is sold to them by middlemen who get it by digging up dead bodies. 

Yonosuke remains seemingly oblivious to the duplicitous hypocrisy of the yoshiwara, but is repeatedly confronted by the evils of Edo-era feudalism with its proto-capitalist cruelty where everything is status and transaction. He is often told that as he is not a samurai he would not understand, but seems to understand pretty well that “samurai are idiots” and that their heartless elitism is the leading cause of all the world’s misery. To some a feckless fool, Yonosuke refuses to give in to the false allure of worldly riches. As soon as he gets money he spends it, and does so in ways he believes enrich the lives of women (even if that only extends to paying them for sex), eventually getting himself into trouble once again reneging on his taxes after trying to prove a geisha is worth her weight in gold. 

Yogiri (Ayako Wakao) complains that women are but “merchandise”, valued only as toys for men. “Japan is not a good country for women” Yonosuke agrees, suggesting they run away together to find a place where women are respected, indifferent to Yogiri’s rebuttal “no, wherever you go, no one can change women’s sad fate”. Yonosuke’s naive attempts to rescue women from their misery often end in disaster, a runaway mistress is dragged back and hanged, the woman he was set to marry goes mad after her father and lover are beheaded for having the temerity to speak out about corrupt lords, Yogiri is killed by a samurai intent on arresting him for tax evasion, and his own mother dies seconds after his father only to be immediately praised as “the epitome of a Japanese wife”. Yet he remains undaunted, wandering around like an Edo-era Candide, setting off into exile to look for a supposed female paradise without ever really engaging with the systems which propagate misery or with his own accidental complicity with them. Nevertheless, he does perhaps enact his own resistance in refusing to conform to the rules of a society he knows to be cruel and unfair even if his resistance is essentially superficial, self-involved, and usually counterproductive which is, in its own way, perfectly in keeping with Masumura’s central philosophies on the impossibilities of individual freedom within an inherently oppressive social order.