Shigeyoshi Mine – Windows on Worlds

Carmen from Kawachi (河内カルメン, Seijun Suzuki, 1966)

February 6, 2023by Hayley Scanlon

A naive girl from the mountains finds herself chasing consumerist success and urban independence only to encounter further exploitation before eventually transcending her subjugation and returning to the source of her trauma in an ironic picaresque from the characteristically anarchic Seijun Suzuki. Adapted from a novel from Toko Kon whose book also provided the source material for The Incorrigible, Carmen from Kawachi (河内カルメン, Kawachi no Carmen) loosely adapts Bizet’s classic opera but ironically discovers a much positive outcome for its relentlessly plucky heroine.

In Kawachi, meanwhile, a rural mountain backwater near Osaka, Tsuyuko (Yumiko Nogawa) is a rather innocent young woman with a crush on the son of the local factory owner, Bon (Koji Wada), who seems to like her too but is equally diffident if presumably mindful of the class difference which makes a relationship between them unlikely to succeed. Tsuyuko’s friend tells her of a girl from school who now works in a cabaret bar in the city and has all the mod cons in her fancy apartment including an electric fridge, washing, machine, and double bed but Tsuyuko doesn’t seem to be too impressed. However, when a pair of local reprobates overhear her romantic conversation with Bon, they begin to feel resentful and decide to rape her. As they approach Tsuyuko, they are seemingly joined by a small crowd of men from the local area each chasing after her. On her return home, she simply bursts into tears but is greeted by an even worse sight, catching her mother (Chikako Miyagi) in a passionate embrace with a lecherous monk whose disgusting fisheye face continues to haunt her, a spectre both of a world of patriarchal exploitation and her own prudishness which is also coloured by the trauma of her rape.

Tsuyuko is indeed followed around by various men who are all in their way disappointing in their desire to possess her body. “When a woman sleeps with a man just one time, the man thinks she belongs to him”, her school friend explains after she begins working in the bar in Osaka thinking that as her honour’s already lost she might as well try cabaret. Yet there is a kind of power play involved in the hostess life, the men all running after Tsuyuko who only has to stand still and can in fact manipulate them in turn. Then again, as soon as she starts work she ends up having too much to drink and sleeping with a sad sack salaryman who lied that he was also from Kawachi in an attempt to win her sympathy. Like many in the bar he thinks of her as a bumpkin still smelling of mountain soil and is disappointed she’s not a virgin but then becomes obsessed with her to the point of ruination. Kanzo (Asao Sano) embezzles a humiliatingly small amount of money from the financial company where he works and is fired, hanging out in the rain outside the bar just to catch a glimpse of Tsuyuko. Tsuyuko isn’t interested in him but ends up feeling bad about her role in his downfall and letting him move into her apartment where he becomes something like her wife, taking care of all the domestic arrangements and even ironing her smalls.

For all that, Kanzo’s not that bad. He’s a sweet, if pathetic, guy who takes her sudden announcement that she’s moving on with good grace explaining rather sadly that these have been the happiest days of his life but he never expected them to last. Rather than a jealous lover, he willingly lets her go even agreeing to put on a show of anger so she won’t feel bad about abandoning him. In many mays, Kanzo is one of the best men she’s going to meet, save perhaps wealthy artist Seiji (Tamio Kawaji) who seem to have no romantic interest in her but becomes a valuable friend and confident. Then again, it’s not just men. After taking a job as a model to try and move on from the cabaret life, she’s sexually harassed by a predatory lesbian boss who takes her in as a maid and then tries to force her attentions on her, possibly lacking the language for seduction in this less enlightened age. When Seiji had tried to explain that her boss is a lesbian, Tsuyuko had simply laughed and been unable to believe such a thing could be true.

Suzuki pulls back from the fashion entrepreneur’s home to frame it as a dollhouse stage set, Tsuyuko now merely another plaything but also herself playing a role in the newly aspirant society. She does so again when Seiji gets her the gig as a mistress for a loanshark who sets her up in a fancy apartment but only asks her to wander around in the nude apparently interested in little other than voyeurism. Tsuyuko only agrees because she continues to chase the dream of pure love with Bon whom she has reencountered by chance. He is now brought low as his factory has gone bust and he’s broke which dissolves the class difference between them. But Bon is also chasing an elusive dream, in his case of success back in Kawachi by building an onsen at the site of a mysterious waterfall no one has been able to find for decades. Just as Tsuyuko is forced to prostitute herself for Bon, Bon prostitutes himself for his dream in that as she discovers he is her partner in a porn shoot directed by the sleazy loanshark who quite clearly also gets off on the romantic drama in play and the destruction of the “pure” love between Bon and Tsuyuko.

Part of Tsuyuko’s disillusionment had been caused by the discovery that not only was her mother sleeping with the creepy priest but that she was doing it for money and her father knew. Her troubles have largely be precipitated by male failure, firstly her father’s in his inability to support his family, secondly in the fragile masculinity of the local boys who assaulted her, and then finally in the weakness of Bon who chose his fleeting dream of local success over his love for her. Having inherited the loanshark’s riches after he is randomly killed in a plane crash, Tsuyuko discovers she no longer wants them and tries to free her mother from male exploitation by giving her money in part for a decent funeral for her father. Only then does she learn that her mother has already substituted her younger sister Senko (Ruriko Ito), forcing her to sleep with the priest and blaming Tsuyuko for it for having run away.

Tsuyuko takes dark and destructive action to rid herself of the troublesome priest as if exorcising the roots of her trauma, no longer afraid of men or of sex but firmly in charge of herself and her body. Her mother is not, however, particularly happy to be emancipated if ironically expressing the same sentiment in that she need have no fear of loneliness or penury for she can always find company if she desires it. Unlike Carmen, Tsuyuko is not undone by toxic masculinity and frustrated male pride but eventually transcends them even if as her mother says she may never be free of the priest’s “dark magic” while she takes to the streets of Tokyo with a rose in her teeth looking, if not quite perhaps for love, then at least satisfaction. Brimming with the joie de vivre and anarchy that would later make him famous from the raucous club scenes to the ironic framing of the porno shoot and dramatic freeze frames as Tsuyuko finally loses her faith in men, Suzuki’s Carmen allows its pure hearted heroine not only to triumph over the forces that oppress her be they men or merely consumerism but to subvert them to her advantage.

Carmen from Kawachi screens at Japan Society New York on Feb. 10 as part of the Seijun Suzuki Centennial.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Tokyo Drifter (東京流れ者, Seijun Suzuki, 1966)

February 1, 2023by Hayley Scanlon

“Money and power rule now, honour means nothing” according to the new bread of upstarts gangsters in Seijun Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter (東京流れ者, Tokyo Nagaremono). In many ways, what separates Nikkatsu’s youthful crime movies from Toei’s yakuza epics is that the nobility of Toei’s heroes is rarely questioned. In a Toei movie, it’s the world that’s wrong because the code is good and should be obeyed just as the hero obeys it, but in a Nikkatsu picture nihilism rules. The code isn’t right either, in fact it’s just another tool to manipulate and the hero, while noble, is wrong to follow it.

That is in essence how Tetsu (Tetsuya Watari) will end up a Tokyo drifter, caught between the old world and a new consumerist Japan in which even the yakuza is attempting to corporatise and reform its image. His old boss, Kurata (Ryuji Kita), has done just that only he’s had to take out a sizeable loan from another former gangster turned real estate agent, Yoshii (Michio Hino), to do it. Realising his weakness, the upstart Otsuka gang sees an opportunity and stages an elaborate ruse that allows them to get their hands on Kurata’s valuable building and take out Yoshii at the same time though it results in Yoshii’s secretary (Tomoko Hamakawa), also the girlfriend of one of the Otsuka gang, getting caught in the crossfire.

Tetsu describes his relationship with Kurata as like father and son and is sure he would never betray him. To preserve their new image, Tetsu does not fight back when ambushed by Otsuka goons and even puts himself on the hook for the secretary’s murder, but as much as Kurata insists he wouldn’t betray one of his “kids” to make things easier for himself perhaps he will if the situation calls for it. A defector from Otsuka’s gang, Shooting Star (Hideaki Nitani), tries to warn Tetsu that his faith in ideals like duty and loyalty is misplaced but Tetsu refuses to believe him. “Don’t shatter my dreams” Tetsu pleads, claiming that he cannot be around someone with “no sense of duty”.

Tetsu even feels sorry for Shooting Star, attributing his melancholy air to his having lost his sense of purpose in his disillusionment with post-war gangsterism. He might have a point in Shooting Star’s world weariness, but fails to realises that Shooting Star does in fact have a sense of duty and is in some ways the film’s only truly free man in forging it for himself from basic humanitarian values if tinged with a degree of cynicism. Though the pair clash, Shooting Star claims that he wants to save Tetsu from the pain of his inevitable betrayal and the disillusionment that will eventually come with it rendering him a perpetual wanderer and exile from mainstream society.

Both men are in a sense lost amid the rapid social changes of their era, unable to move on from the post-war past into the new society even after breaking with the yakuza code in order to live by their own. In Suzuki’s complex colour scheme, Shooting Star is always clad in a forest-like green which echoes his freedom, while Otsuka is represented by a bloody red, and Tetsu dressed in an innocent powder blue suit until the final confrontation in which, along with his equally innocent love interest Chiharu (Chieko Matsubara) who had previously been associated with the colour yellow, is dressed in a pure white while all around him are now in black as representatives of those who have succumbed to the amoral capitalism of the the contemporary society.

Suzuki even has Tetsu walk down an arched corridor reminiscent of a church into an abstract space expanding the stage at the club to lend this moment of existential struggle a little more theatricality. In a sense what Tetsu does is an act of suicide, severing his ties to the yakuza world by smashing Kurata’s glass and killing at least the image of him as a father figure to become a new man or perhaps a wandering ghost who no longer has a home and must even give up his romance with Chiharu in an acknowledgement of his exile. On Otsuka’s death, it’s almost like an alarm is switched off in the sudden shift from red to white in the giant statue standing behind Chiharu, the survivors united in white but rather than the wedding suggested by the colour of their clothes the atmosphere is funereal as Tetsu accepts he can no longer stay in this temporary space and must enter another sort of purgatory as lonely wander comforted only by his newfound freedom.

Tokyo Drifter screens at Japan Society New York on Feb. 4 as part of the Seijun Suzuki Centennial.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Our Blood Will Not Forgive (俺たちの血が許さない, Seijun Suzuki, 1964)

January 2, 2020by Hayley Scanlon

In Japan, “kaeru no ko wa kaeru”, or “a frog’s son is also a frog”, is an often heard idiom, sometimes disparaging but often affectionate. Can a yakuza’s son become anything other than a yakuza, or does your blood define you in ways you cannot defy? Our Blood Will Not Forgive (俺たちの血が許さない, Oretachi no Chi ga Yurusanai), an early semi-absurdist gangster drama from Seijun Suzuki’s mid-period at Nikkatsu, asks just that question as two brothers battle the legacy of their slain father whose dying wish it was that the yakuza line die with him.

After their father was assassinated at home by sword, the Asari brothers were raised by their mother, Hatsu (Chikako Hosokawa), who did her best to keep them out of the underworld. After the war, however, times were tough. Older brother Ryota (Akira Kobayashi) had to work as a delivery boy to keep the family fed, studying hard at the same time and getting in to a good university. Now grown up, he’s a smart suited night club manager. His younger brother Shinji (Hideki Takahashi), meanwhile, is a clownish goof-off with a good job at an ad agency he’s always in danger of losing (like a fair few jobs before). Today, Shinji was meant to collect his bonus, but he’s bunked off to take part in a local festival which is unfortunate, because he’s got a visitor – Tobita (Akifumi Inoue), the man who killed their father without knowing why and now regrets it. He’s managed to track Shinji down thanks to the fact he looks just like his dad and has a habit of doing stupid things that get his picture in the papers like winning eating competitions and getting lucky on the horses only to get mugged outside.

Tobita’s desire to apologise to the boys exposes their father’s sordid yakuza past and forces them to deal with the legacy of their gangster blood. Though Ryota is more sanguine and simply declares that he “hates all yakuza” before asking Tobita to leave and never come back, Shinji immediately attacks him but then becomes enamoured of the romanticism of the gangster life and considers restarting the Asari clan after getting fired when a picture of him fighting with thugs on the company away trip makes the papers with the headline “yakuza’s son”.

The central irony is that Ryota, who was his mother’s favourite and ostensibly the steady, respectable son, has secretly been a yakuza for quite some time. The club he runs is a yakuza front, which is why he tries to talk Shinji out of trying to get a job there, leading him to feel rejected enough to have too much to drink and start a bar fight, causing problems for Ryota with his boss.

“All yakuza are the same,” Ryota confesses to Shinji as they argue in a car incongruously surrounded by roaring waves, “they’re violent because they’re afraid”. Despite graduating from Tokyo University, Ryota couldn’t get an honest job because they always found out his dad was a yakuza. Out of other options, he decided he had no other choice but to become one too, that he could not escape his blood but might be able to make sure his brother could. Shinji has romantic dreams of the yakuza lifestyle (his bedroom wall’s covered in pictures of Al Capone et al), but Ryota knows what it means, which is why he hates all yakuza, including himself. He’s planning to marry his secretary girlfriend, Yasuko (Chieko Matsubara), but his emotions are so corrupted that he isn’t quite sure if he really loves her or is only making a bid for respectability as a kind of atonement to his mother. In any case, he also feels guilty, knowing that just as his father eventually made his mother miserable, no woman can be happy with a yakuza.

“Yakuza are so stupid, you’re all obsessed with dying – what’s the point?” Shinji eventually exclaims, finally thoroughly disillusioned as his brother goes out in search of an honourable ending rather than trying to escape from certain death at the hands of his vengeful boss. “It may not be easy to live, but there’s nothing honourable about dying!” he tells him, undercutting a series of cultural signifiers, but finally crawling out of the yakuza trap and vowing to live on muddling through with his mother and perky girlfriend, Mie (Yuri Hase) whose birthday party he’s currently missing. Blood does not forgive, but it does eventually release if only you can learn to see it for what it is and choose to be free of it.

Opening (no subtitles)

Man with a Shotgun (散弾銃の男, Seijun Suzuki, 1961)

June 23, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Nikkatsu’s “Borderless Action” seemingly opened a portal to a world entire to be found within Japan itself. Man with a Shotgun (散弾銃の男, Shotgun no Otoko) is, as the title suggests, another tale of a wandering, gun toting hero though this time one less of aimless flight from failure, responsibility, or rejection than of revenge. Hideaki Nitani gets a (relatively) rare chance to strut his stuff as the lead in a full colour picture, perhaps incongruously starring as one of Nikkatsu’s singing cowboys but he does certainly lend his characteristic sense of gravitas and authority to an otherwise underwritten role.

Ryoji (Hideaki Nitani) rocks up at at rickety bridge looking for a nearby shrine only to be warned off by a grumpy old man in a van. You don’t want to go up there, he tells him, there’ll be trouble if you do. Ryoji is, he claims, a hunter and so he’s not afraid. After all, he’s still in Japan – it’s not as if the entire place is infested with lions and tigers. Then again it’s not exactly game he’s come to hunt.

When he reaches the shrine, Ryoji finds himself in a strange mini kingdom presided over by mill owner Nishioka (Akio Tanaka). The few locals who still live in the village mingle uncomfortably with the migrant work force who people the mill while Nishioka dominates the local economy by owning the only bar in town which is also the only place his largely male workforce have to blow off steam. After getting roughed up by three of Nishioka’s henchmen on the way into town, Ryoji makes the first of many enemies when he stands up to fellow drifter Masa (Yuji Kodaka) when he threatens to throw a man’s daughter to the sex starved labour force unless he pays his debts. The sheriff, an ineffectual local, gets himself seriously wounded meaning the position becomes temporarily open. Nishioka, originally a “benevolent” dictator, is in danger of becoming less so when it is suggested he also form a police force given that the state authorities can’t be bothered with such a remote little village. Ryoji doesn’t quite want to stand for that and volunteers only for Masa to do the same, but the argument is eventually settled to one side of their continued male posturing.

As far as westerns go, Man with a Shotgun leans heavily towards colonial romance and adventure rather than your typically arid, dusty world of saloons and ranches. Lush and green, the small mountain town smacks more of the jungle as does Nitani’s idiosyncratic costume which arrives somewhere between chic safari and fashionable cowboy. Claiming to be a “hunter” Ryoji wanders around with self satisfied smugness, certain that he’s bringing justice to this lawless town all while he makes investigations into the matter which sent him wandering in the first place. Of course, while he’s here, there are other damsels in distress including Setsuko (Izumi Ashikawa) – the younger sister of the sheriff’s late wife, apparently raped and killed by “drifter” bandits.

“Drifters” turn out to be the scapegoated big bad as the migrant workforce quickly take over this little town, making trouble in the bar and hassling the locals, only the locals don’t seem to mind as much as they say they do. There’s trouble at the mill, but not quite the kind that might be imagined. Nishioka has his sticky fingers in some nasty business which also involves not just migrants but actual foreigners and illegal activity on a grand scale. As it turns out, some people are in on the action and some aren’t, and Nishioka is currently making a few calculations as to how to “eliminate” a few inconveniences – something to which he thinks Ryoji and his sparring partner Masa might turn out to be the perfect solution.

Like many a Nikkatsu hero Ryoji is a noble sort, something which engineers for him a happier ending than many get even if it has to be bittersweet to hint at possible followup instalments where Ryoji takes names and fights crime in other small towns. Nevertheless, given the choice he opts for the cool guy conclusion of firing into the air and casting his burdens away rather than damning himself forever in becoming what he hates. Shooting in colour even if not quite with Nikkatsu’s A-list, Suzuki doesn’t get much scope to flex his muscles but does make pointed use of painted backdrops coupled with location shooting, as well as doing everything he can to bring out Nitani’s cowboy cool and adding in a number of B-movie western cliches from letters delivered by a knife thrown into a door to the constant refrains of the title song. Still even if it largely lacks Suzuki’s anarchic touch save for the stylishly composed and absurdly humorous bar room brawls, there’s plenty of fun to be to had with Ryoji and his shotgun as they protect the innocent and seek justice in an often unjust world.

Available as part of Arrow’s Seijun Suzuki: The Early Years Vol. 2 Border Crossings box set.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Smashing the 0-Line (密航０ライン, Seijun Suzuki, 1960)

June 21, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Looking from the outside in, the Tokyo of 1960 seems to have been one of rising economic prosperity in which post-war anxiety was beginning to transition into a relentless surge towards modernity, but there also seems to have been a mild preoccupation with the various dangers that same modernity might present. Like The Sleeping Beast Within released just two months previously, Smashing the 0-Line (密航０ライン, Mikko Zero Line) centres on a mystery which leads straight back to Hong Kong and a dangerous, international smuggling ring – this time involving both drugs and people. Our heroes are both reporters, but at odds with each other despite being old friends in having diametrically opposed notions of professional ethics.

Katori (Hiroyuki Nagato), our anti-hero, is a man so desperate to get a scoop that he thinks little of engineering one. Thus we witness him making passionate love to a woman one minute before turning her into the police the next. The woman, Reiko (Sanae Nakahara), is also the little sister of one of his oldest friends, Saiko (Ryohei Uchida), whom he also decides to turn into the police in service of his story. Another old friend, Nishina (Yuji Kodaka), has also become a reporter but for a more respectable paper and is dating Katori’s little sister, Sumiko (Mayumi Shimizu), who is now the announcer at the local baseball stadium. Katori’s decision to turn on Reiko will have profoundly negative consequences for her former lover who is prepared to sacrifice all in pursuit of his goal.

Three men, once college friends, have chosen three radically different paths in the post-war world. Saiko has become a gangster while Katori has become an unscrupulous yet apparently publicly minded newshound and Nishina a pure hearted journalist who insists on doing everything by the book and abiding by conventional journalistic ethics. Yet despite himself, or possibly because of his love for Sumiko, Nishina tries to help Katori see the dangers of his extremely dangerous pattern of behaviour in which he has been content to use people like things to get what he wants.

Katori claims to be on the same side as Nishina – he thinks something is going sour in the city and that only he can stop it by exposing the various conspiracies in play. Katori’s chief fear is that Tokyo will become “another Hong Kong” – a crime ridden state of drug addled lawlessness (an extremely biased and seemingly inaccurate view of ‘60s Hong Kong but one that speaks of a certain fear of Japan’s new spot on the global scene). This particular conspiracy does indeed ping back to Hong Kong and the illegal traffic of drugs but also people heading in both directions. In the Japan of 1960, it was near impossible to get a passport and so smuggling yourself out might be the only way if you really need to get to Hong Kong which means you’ll need to pay a people trafficker to do it.

Katori, broadly, seems to think people trafficking is a bad thing he doesn’t want in Japan but is entirely blind to the same ways he himself uses people in pursuit of his goals. Not only does he bed Reiko (his friend’s little sister) only to make a speedy exit minutes before the police arrive, but he also palms off another mark on his informant only to turn them both in in hope of greater gain. He even manages to find time to seduce a doctor at the centre of the scandal who tries to pull a gun on him but later surrenders completely, only to fall victim to some proactive tidying up from the bad guys. Not content with sacrificing former lovers, Katori will not give in even for his sister, refusing to give up on his lead even when Sumiko is threatened with gang rape. When Nishina turns up and saves the day, Katori doesn’t even stop to ask how Sumiko is but walks off in the direction of the story with nary a second glance to his unconscious sister.

Yet Katori’s particular brand of nihilistic heroism consistently fails. His scoops are uninteresting and he only gets them by inserting himself into the story. Nishina, steadfast and honest – he even goes to the trouble of getting a proper passport to hide on his person in case he’s caught pretending to be a stowaway, is the one who gets there in the end, breaking the smuggling ring, rescuing Katori after he gets himself in trouble, and generally always being around to save the day. Mildly ironic themes of xenophobia aside, Smashing the 0-Line is a typically frenetic piece from Suzuki which offers only a few instances of unusual experimentation in his use of freeze frames and onscreen text but packs in plenty of punch in its amoral anti-hero and the dogged investigative reporter trailing along behind.

Available as part of Arrow’s Seijun Suzuki: The Early Years Vol. 2 Border Crossings box set (also features incisive audio commentary from Jasper Sharp providing a wealth of background information not just about Suzuki’s career but the state of the Japanese film industry at the time)

The Sleeping Beast Within (けものの眠り, Seijun Suzuki, 1960)

June 20, 2018by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment

To those of a “traditional” mindset, a woman’s career is her home and she never gets to retire. Men, by this same logic, are killed off at 60 and reborn into a second childhood where they get to indulge their love of fly fishing or suddenly discover an untapped talent for haiku. Seeing as a man often lives at the office, being excommunicated from his corporate family can seem like a heavy penalty for those who’ve devoted their entire existence to the salaryman ideal. So it is for the old timer at the centre of Seijun Suzuki’s 1960 mystery thriller, The Sleeping Beast Within (けものの眠り, Kemono no Nemuri) in which the sudden disappearance of a model employee sparks his daughter and her dogged reporter boyfriend to investigate, unwittingly discovering a vast drug smuggling conspiracy headed by a dodgy cult leader.

Veteran salaryman Junpei Ueki (Shinsuke Ashida) has been working in Hong Kong for two years and is finally coming home, to retire. His family have come to meet him but, as his daughter’s reporter boyfriend Kasai (Hiroyuki Nagato) points out, no one much else has turned up – so it is for those who don’t play office politics, claims one of the few colleagues who has arrived to greet the recently returned businessman. Ueki isn’t very happy about his retirement and believes he’ll be getting a part-time job at the same company only to be informed position has been “withdrawn”. When he doesn’t come home after his retirement party, something surely out of character for such a straight shooting family man, his wife and daughter become worried. Keiko (Kazuko Yoshiyuki) enlists Kasai to help figure out what’s happened to her dad only for him to suddenly turn up with a bad excuse and an almost total personality transplant. Kasai keeps digging, and the reporter in him loves what he finds even if the nice boyfriend wishes he didn’t.

Suzuki sets up what a good guy Ueki is when he brings back a modest ring for Keiko only for her to mockingly ask if her dad couldn’t have brought something a bit flashier. Ueki points out that the customs people might not have liked that so she jokes that he should have just smuggled it in like everyone else. Kasai reminds her that her dad’s not that kind of man, but two years in Hong Kong have apparently changed him. Having spent two years away from his family and 30 years slaving away at a boring desk job, Ueki feels he’s owed something more than an unceremonious kiss off and a little more time for gardening. The reason he ended up entering the world of crime wasn’t the money, or that he was blackmailed – it started because of his sense of integrity. He felt he owed someone and he did them a favour. It went wrong and he ended up here. His decision to join the gang came after he tried to “pay back” the money for some missing drugs only to realise that his entire retirement plan was worth only a tiny fraction of his new debt. Ueki felt small and stupid, like a man who’d wasted his life playing the mugs game. He wanted some payback, but his life as criminal mastermind turned out not to be much of a success either.

Trying to explain her father’s actions to the wounded Keiko, Kasai explains that everyone has a sleeping beast in their heart which is capable doing terrible things when it awakens. Ueki’s sleeping beast was woken by his resentment and sense of betrayal in being so cruelly cast aside by the system to which he’d devoted his life while the guys who broke all the rules – drug dealers, gangsters, and corrupt businessmen, lived the high life. One could almost argue that a sleeping beast is stirring in Kasai’s heart as he pushes his investigation to the limit, occasionally forgetting about the harm it will do to Keiko even whilst acknowledging the greater good of breaking the smuggling ring once and for all. Keiko too finds herself torn, confused and heartbroken by the change in her father’s personality though her mother feels quite differently. Claiming that “a woman has no say in her husband’s work”, Keiko’s mum tells her daughter that a wife’s duty is to do as her husband says and avoid asking questions. Keiko has asked a lot of questions already and shows no signs of stopping now, even once she realises she won’t like the answers.

Despite the grimness of the underlying tenet that it doesn’t take much for honest men to abandon their sense of morality, Suzuki maintains his trademark wryness as Kasai and Keiko go about their investigation like a pair of pesky kids chasing a cartoon villain. Though the tale is straightforward enough, he does throw in a decent amount of experimentation with two innovative flashback sequences in which the flashback itself is presented as a superimposition with the person narrating it hovering at edges as if referring to a slide. The beast is quelled with a shot to the heart, but not before it wreaks havoc on the lives of ordinary people – not least Ueki himself who is forced to confront what it is he’s become and who he was prepared to sacrifice to feed the hungry demon inside him.

Available as part of Arrow’s Seijun Suzuki: The Early Years Vol. 2 Border Crossings box set.

I Hate But Love (憎いあンちくしょう, Koreyoshi Kurahara, 1962)

March 13, 2018March 13, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Does “pure love” exist in the Japan of 1962, and if so what does it look like? Yujiro Ishihara, the poster boy for youthful rebellion, might not be the best person to ask but it’s his unfulfilled media superstar that ultimately determines to find out. In I Hate But Love (憎いあンちくしょう, Nikui Anchikusho) Koreyoshi Kurahara puts the jazz clubs and delinquency of The Warped Ones to one side for a Technicolor romp that owes more to Day/Hudson than it perhaps does to James Dean or Marlon Brando. Yet there is something mildly subversive in its low level criticism of Japan’s lurch towards the consumerist future, finding only emptiness in fame and success while the central couple’s deliberately repressed desires push them towards a point of both spiritual and physical exhaustion.

Daisaku (Yujiro Ishihara) and Noriko (Ruriko Asaoka) have been a couple for two years. Noriko is also Daisaku’s manager and has been with him since he was broke and an aspiring poet. Now he’s one of Japan’s top DJs and she looks after his schedule which is packed in the extreme – in fact it leaves him no time for sleeping between his radio show, TV appearances, and meetings in bars, not to mention a late night date starting at 2am! Raiding the local papers for a suitable human interest story they can flag up on the show, Noriko stumbles over the tale of a local woman who is looking for a “driver who understands humanism”. Intrigued, Daisaku and his producer Ichiro (Hiroyuki Nagato) set off to interview her but the woman doesn’t want to be involved with the media – she doesn’t want to sully her love! The fact of the matter is, Yoshiko (Izumi Ashikawa) has kept up a romance with a doctor in a rural town by letter alone and used all her savings to buy a jeep to help transport his patients more effectively. Yoshiko doesn’t need to see Toshio (Asao Koike) – her dashing doctor fiancé, she believes in their love and that’s good enough for her. She just needs someone to actually take the jeep to Kyushu where it is most needed.

Just at this point, Daisaku’s relationship with Noriko reaches a crisis point. Lovers for two years, they each feared the sparks would fade and so to keep them popping they’ve committed to a rule of no physical contact. Spark they do (though not always in a good way), but when trapped in Daisaku’s apartment one rainy afternoon and bored out of their minds they nearly give in – damaging the fragile balance they’ve managed to build through mutual rejection of their equally mutual attraction. Though Noriko remains committed to their plan for long term romance, the non-encounter pushes Daisaku into a profound state of crisis in pondering the nature of his relationship – does “pure love” exist, does he really “love” Noriko, what is the point and the purpose of their central bond of negation? Hoping to find all of that out, Daisaku makes a surprise on air announcement that he himself will drive Yoshiko’s truck to Kyushu and see what her Toshio does with that.

Yoshiko and Noriko set themselves up as rivals – not for Daisaku’s heart but for the true nature of “love”. “Reclaiming” Daisaku’s Jaguar so she can chase after him, Noriko has a few words for Yoshiko, pointing out that she’s been patiently “building” her love with Daisaku for 737 days. Yoshiko looks at her pityingly – you don’t “build” love, she tells her, you just believe it. For Yoshiko her letters were enough, her love an act of faith, but for Noriko love is a process and an almost scientific endeavour filled with recordable and quantifiable data. Yet everything Noriko says about Daisaku is correct – she knows who he is and truly understands him, every part of him is welcome to her and so she is perfectly placed to find him off on his magic quest even if her desire to bring him back to the city is misplaced.

Daisaku’s journey puts them both through the ringer though their bond is never seriously in question. He runs and she follows, though neither of them can quite escape the net of the society in which they live. Daisaku’s flight is perhaps more from his micromanaged yet extremely comfortable life than it is just of a difficult romance. Taking to the road he wants to feel something, to know that there is something real out there. Unfortunately, even his attempt to embrace something “real” is subverted by his media buddies who secretly film him and air the footage like it’s all been a giant publicity stunt. Fearing that their cash cow is “drunk on humanism”, they ready a contingency plan to bring him back into the fold.

Ichiro tells Noriko that her desire to “tie Daisaku down” is not love but “female egotism”. What drives Noriko isn’t really a desire for control (Daisaku seemingly allows her enough of that), but a need to be needed and fear that Daisaku, now rich and famous, will eventually leave her. Paranoid their love will fail, she rejects its consummation. Yet faith alone is not enough, as Yoshiko painfully finds out on witnessing the disconnect between her imagined love created through her letters and the real flesh and blood man before her to whom she essentially has no real connection. Reaching the end of their journey, Daisaku and Noriko are forced together again, each abandoning some part of their Tokyo lives and personas to break through to something deeper and more essential. Their path takes them straight into a bizarre summer festival complete with giant floats and excited men in traditional Japanese underwear throwing water everywhere. When they finally reach their destination, their love transcends faith to become ritual, their ennui somehow transformed into an ironic celebration of life in fulfilled desire.

Ichiro categorises Noriko and Daisaku as stingy children – defiantly saving the best for last. There is certainly something immature in their constant bickering and bargaining, the superstition that they can keep their love alive by continually rejecting it and repressing their desire for each other, but there’s also something faintly realistic in the messy grown-up commitment phobia of it all even if it joyfully strays into the absurd. Light and bright and breezy, Kurahara works in the darknesses of early ‘60s Japan from the destructive effects of celebrity and media manipulation to the emptiness of a life of excess but even if he doesn’t quite find “pure love” he does find something close to it in a perfect merger of faith and industry.

The Incorrigible (悪太郎, AKA The Bastard, Seijun Suzuki, 1963)

February 24, 2018February 6, 2023by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment

Seijun Suzuki often credits 1963’s Youth of the Beast as the real turning point in his directorial career, believing that it marked the first time he was ever really able to indulge his taste for the surreal to the extent that he truly wanted. The Incorrigible (悪太郎, Akutato, AKA Bastard), completed directly after Youth of the Beast, is another turning point of a kind in that it marks Suzuki’s first collaboration with set designer Takeo Kimura who would accompany him through his ‘60s masterpieces contributing to the uniquely theatrical aesthetic which came to be the director’s trademark.

Inspired by an autobiographical novel by Toko Kon, The Incorrigible of the title, Togo Konno (Ken Yamauchi), is a young man coming of age in the early Taisho era. He’s of noble birth and enjoys both wealth and privilege – something of which he is well aware, but is also of a rebellious, individualist character believing himself above the normal rules of civil society. Expelled from his posh Kyoto school after getting into a dalliance with a teacher’s daughter (she’s been sent off to a convent), Konno is then abruptly abandoned by his mother who has tricked him into travelling to a remote rural town where a friend of a family friend has promised to reform him at his military middle school. Konno thinks he’s too clever for this, he makes a point of deliberately failing his entrance exam in the mistaken belief that failing to get in would make him free to travel to Tokyo and start life on his own. He’s wrong, and failure to pass the exam would only entail being held back a year. Konno capitulates and agrees to start his new life as one among many in a backward little village in Southern Japan.

Though set in the Taisho era, Konno’s youth seems to suffer from the same problems that would plague the young men of 30 years later. His school is proto-militarist and hot on discipline. The boys are trained to be strong rather than smart and have inherited all the petty prejudices of their parents which they hone to the point of weaponry. The “Public Morals” department operates almost like a mini military police for students – making routine inspections of students’ home lives and keeping an eye out for “illicit” activities round and about town. Konno sees himself as grown man with a rebellious heart – he smokes openly, keeps a picture of the girl who got him into this mess in his room, and tells bawdy, probably made up stories about how he lost his virginity to a geisha (for free). He will not bow to the morality police, or any authority but his own.

Authority is something Konno seems to be good at. Picked on for his continuing preference for Japanese dress, Konno neatly deflects the attentions of the Public Morals division and comes out on top. When they raid his room and complain about his novel reading habit, he shouts them all down and gets them to sit on the floor while he “educates” them about foreign literature. Militarism has not yet arrived, but anti-intellectualism is already on the up and up. Konno’s love of literature is one of his many “deficient” qualities as teachers and students alike bemoan his “frivolous” hobbies, seeing his sensitivity and disregard for the commonly accepted ideals as signs of his unwelcome “unmanliness”.

Konno’s other big problem is, as might be expected, girls. Having been in town only moments Konno takes a fancy to doctor’s daughter Emiko (Masako Izumi) – his desire is only further inflamed after catching sight of her in the book shop and realising she too has bought a copy of Strindberg’s Red Room. She doesn’t care for Strindberg’s misanthropy, but a bond is quickly forged between the two sensitive souls trapped in this “traditional” small town where feelings are forbidden and youth constrained by social stricture.

It is, however, a love doomed to fail. The majority of Suzuki’s early work for Nikkatsu had been contemporary youth dramas, yet the artfully composed black and white photography of the Taisho setting is a melancholic affair which rejects both the rage of the modern action dramas and Suzuki’s trademark detached irony. Using frequent dissolves, The Incorrigible conjures a strong air of nostalgia and regret, a sad love story without end. Yet at its conclusion it makes sure to inject a note of uplifting inspiration as our hero wanders off into a fog of confusion, filled with a passion for pursuing truth and vowing to live without losing hope.

The Incorrigible is the fourth of five films included in Arrow’s Seijun Suzuki: The Early Years. Vol. 1 Seijun Rising: The Youth Movies box set.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

A Colt is My Passport (拳銃は俺のパスポート, Takashi Nomura, 1967)

January 21, 2018January 21, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Jo Shishido played his fare share of icy hitmen, but they rarely made it through such seemingly inexorable events as the hero of Takashi Nomura’s A Colt is My Passport (拳銃は俺のパスポート, Colt wa Ore no Passport). The actor, known for his boyishly chubby face puffed up with the aid of cheek implants, floated around the lower end of Nikkatsu’s A-list but by 1967 his star was on the wane even if he still had his pick of cooler than cool tough guys in Nikkatsu’s trademark action B-movies. Mixing western and film noir, A Colt is My Passport makes a virtue of Japan’s fast moving development, heartily embracing the convenience of a society built around the idea of disposability whilst accepting the need to keep one step ahead of the rubbish truck else it swallow you whole.

Kamimura (Joe Shishido) and his buddy Shiozaki (Jerry Fujio) are on course to knock off a gang boss’ rival and then get the hell out of Japan. Kamimura, however, is a sarcastic wiseguy and so his strange sense of humour dictates that he off the guy while the mob boss he’s working for is sitting right next to him. This doesn’t go down well, and the guys’ planned airport escape is soon off the cards leaving them to take refuge in a yakuza safe house until the whole thing blows over. Blowing over, however, is something that seems unlikely and Kamimura is soon left with the responsibility of saving both his brother-in-arms Shiozaki, and the melancholy inn girl (Chitose Kobayashi) with a heart of gold who yearns for an escape from her dead end existence but finds only inertia and disappointment.

The young protege seems surprised when Kamimura tosses the expensive looking rifle he’s just used on a job into a suitcase which he then tosses into a car which is about to be tossed into a crusher, but Kamimura advises him that if you want to make it in this business, you’d best not become too fond of your tools. Kamimura is, however, a tool himself and only too aware how disposable he might be to the hands that have made use of him. He conducts his missions with the utmost efficiency, and when something goes wrong, he deals with that too.

Efficient as he is, there is one thing that is not disposable to Kamimura and that is Shiozaki. The younger man appears not to have much to do but Kamimura keeps him around anyway with Shiozaki trailing around after him respectfully. More liability than anything else, Kamimura frequently knocks Shiozaki out to keep him out of trouble – especially as he can see Shiozaki might be tempted to leap into the fray on his behalf. Kamimura has no time for feeling, no taste for factoring attachment into his carefully constructed plans, but where Shiozaki is concerned, sentimentality wins the day.

Mina, a melancholy maid at a dockside inn, marvels at the degree of Kamimura’s devotion, wishing that she too could have the kind of friendship these men have with each other. A runaway from the sea, Mina has been trapped on the docks all her adult life. Like many a Nikkatsu heroine, love was her path to escape but an encounter with a shady gangster who continues to haunt her life put paid to that. The boats come and go but Mina stays on shore. Kamimura might be her ticket out but he wastes no time disillusioning her about his lack of interest in becoming her saviour (even if he’s not ungrateful for her assistance and also realises she’s quite an asset in his quest to ensure the survival of his ally).

Pure hardboiled, A Colt is My Passport is a crime story which rejects the femme fatal in favour of the intense relationship between its two protagonists whose friendship transcends brotherhood but never disrupts the methodical poise of the always prepared Kamimura. The minor distraction of a fly in the mud perhaps reminds him of his mortality, his smallness, the fact that he is essentially “disposable” and will one day become a mere vessel for this tiny, quite irritating creature but if he has a moment of introspection it is short lived. The world may be crunching at his heels, but Kamimura keeps moving. He has his plan, audacious as it is. He will save his buddy, and perhaps he doesn’t care too much if he survives or not, but he will not go down easy and if the world wants a bite out of him, it will have to be fast or lucky.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Take Aim at the Police Van (１３号待避線より　その護送車を狙え, Seijun Suzuki, 1960)

January 19, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Nikkatsu’s main stock in trade during its 50s/60s heyday was the youth movie – films which captured the frustrations of being young (and usually male) in the scrappy post-war years. It’s a surprise then that the hero of Seijun Suzuki’s “action” movie Take Aim at the Police Van (１３号待避線より　その護送車を狙え, Jusango Taihisen Yori: Sono Gososha wo Nerae) is a genial middle-aged man who’s more Cary Grant in North by Northwest than Japanese James Dean. A programme picture, there’s nothing particularly interesting about the movie on paper but it’s among the first in which Suzuki indulges his talent for the surreal including a number of fantastically choreographed action sequences.

The film opens with a warning as a sniper trains his sights on a set of road signs which state that many accidents have occurred in this area. The one which is about to befall unlucky prison warden Tamon (Michitaro Mizushima) is however entirely man made. Momentarily confused by the figure of a woman watching the bus from the roadside, Tamon is blindsided when the sniper opens fire and kills several of the passengers while another, Goro (Shoichi Ozawa), cowers in the back. Tamon is suspended for six months but isn’t particularly upset about it. He’s not a detective and he knows he should leave it to the professionals, but he’s desperate to know why someone would bother attack such a lowly crew of petty criminals. Wondering who the woman was and how she fits into the case, who the snipers were aiming for and if they got them, and perhaps wanting to assuage his own feelings of powerlessness during the attack Tamon gets on the case.

Tamon is not your typical Nikkatsu action hero. He’s a little on the old side for starters – hardly the marquee face the studio was beginning to favour with its collection of “Diamond Guys”. He’s also not a policeman or a detective, he has no idea what he’s doing or what he’s getting himself into. What Tamon is is a righteous man. Almost immediately he’s sucked into the seedy underbelly of late ‘50s Tokyo with its strip clubs, trafficked women, and petty gangsters. This world is alien to him and he’s disgusted by it. Meeting the female manager of the “talent agency” which supplies in-room strippers to sleazy hotels where businessmen go when they’ve told their wives they’re at a conference, Tamon is horrified to hear her admit she thinks of the girls as “merchandise”. He pauses to explain to her that he always thought of the felons he looked after as “humans” rather than “criminals”, no matter what it was they’d done. Such naive humanitarianism is too much for Yuko (Misako Watanabe) – she’s instantly smitten, which is a problem because it means she needs to play both sides of her own game.

The pair end up in an uneasy alliance as Tamon’s goodness begins to work its magic. An unlikely white knight, Tamon finds himself wanting to save all the ladies threatened by “Akiba’s” dastardly plan from the icy charms of Yuko to Goro’s cabaret girl Tsunako (Mari Shiraki), and another young one, Shoko (Kyoko Natsu), about to get sucked into the Akiba web. What he discovers is a nasty trail of exploitation running from the bars and clubs of the city centre to the genial holiday spa towns where the moderately wealthy travel to pursue their discrete pleasures.

Tamon may be a little older than your average Nikkatsu action star, but he’s also a perfect fit for a film noir hero in wrong man mould. Tamon is not on the run, but he is out of place in this world, perhaps harking back to a presumably more innocent age where honesty and compassion still counted for something. He views his job as a prison warden as a public service, believing that there is goodness in everyone and it’s the job of people like him to find it and bring it to the surface. This he does at least seem to accomplish with Yuko who (despite her role in events so far) seems to have “reformed” and intends to follow Tamon’s lead in taking her “talent agency” in a more legitimate direction.

Suzuki often claimed that Youth of the Beast was the first of his films where he was able to fully embrace his madcap desires, but Take Aim at the Police Van contains a fair few Suzuki touches of its own from the bold opening sequence shot through the sights of a sniper rifle, to the show girl killed by an arrow to her bare breast, bizarre murder by petrol tanker set piece, and exciting train station finale. Keeping the camera fluid, Suzuki captures a world in motion, seemingly running away from our noble hero until justice, in the form of an unstoppable steam train, finally arrives.

Attack on the police van clip (English subtitles)