Tag: Shiro Toyoda

The Twilight Years (恍惚の人, Shiro Toyoda, 1973)

Posted on by

In the early 1970s Japanese society was not as concerned with population slowdown as it would come to be, but Shiro Toyoda’s sympathetic ageing drama The Twilight Years (恍惚の人, Kokotsu no Hito) is evidence of a growing consciousness that traditional ideas about how one cares for the elderly may now be becoming incompatible with the functioning of modern society. Based on a best-selling novel by Sawako Ariyoshi, the film has profound empathy both for the ageing patriarch once apparently a tyrant but now a meek and frightened child, and the daughter-in-law to whom his care largely falls.

In fact, it’s caring for Shigezo (Hisaya Morishige) that some believed shortened the lifespan of his late wife who passes away in the film’s opening scenes. Already somewhat detached from reality, Shigezo simply reports that his wife won’t wake up no matter how much he tries to wake her, much like a child who’s discovered someone no longer living. While his daughter-in-law Akiko (Hideko Takamine) rushes to her room with a sense of foreboding, Shigezo merely stays in the kitchen eating boiled potatoes straight out of the pan. It’s the odd behaviour that seems to irk his son Nobuyoshi (Takahiro Tamura) but it’s only now that the couple seem to be realising that there’s something wrong especially as Shigezo does not appear to understand that his wife has died. Pitiably, he chides her for lounging around so late in the day when she’s already been laid out for her funeral.

When his daughter, Kyoko (Nobuko Otowa), arrives having actually missed the funeral itself due to transport issues and a conflicting responsibility to act as a matchmaker at a wedding, Shigezo doesn’t recognise her. He continues to ask for Akiko and gradually forgets most of the other people in his life, screaming when encountering Nobuyoshi and instructing Akiko to call the police to report a burglar in their home. According to both women, Shigeyoshi had treated Akiko poorly ever since she joined their family, which makes caring for him so much harder. The reason he becomes so attached to Akiko is likely simply that she is the person who is always around him so he has less time to forget her. He may realise on some level that she may not wish to care for him given his previous behaviour which may be why he becomes preoccupied with the idea she may “disappear” and cries out in the night when he can no longer see her.

But Akiko also has other responsibilities including a job outside the home and a teenage son studying for his exams. Nobuyoshi expresses regret that he hasn’t been more help and voluntarily tries to pitch in, but lets himself off the hook given that his father doesn’t recognise him and becomes anxious in his presence. Satoshi (Izumi Ichikawa) meanwhile does try to do his bit but is young and a little resentful of the responsibility. As his dementia becomes more severe, Shigezo begins calling Satoshi “Dad” as if he were a child again. Which is all to say, Shigezo becomes Akiko’s responsibility and the strain of caring for him begins to affect her own mental and physical health leading her to fear that she too may die younger than she otherwise might have. 

Yet in exploring her options, Akiko finds little by way of support. Most nursing homes won’t accept patients with complex needs like Shigezo and conditions such dementia are often regarded as mental illnesses meaning her only option might be to put him in an asylum. Shigezo was attending an old person’s daycare centre, but later says he doesn’t want to go anymore because it’s full of old people and therefore no fun. While the film is sympathetic towards Akiko and the difficulties she is facing in caring for her father-in-law it also has profound empathy for Shigezo for though he has so many people who are doing their best to look after him, his increasing mental confusion quite obviously leaves him isolated and he must be incredibly lonely while trapped within his own reality. He develops a habit of saying “hello, hello,” as if he were answering the telephone which may be his attempt to communicate while he is also fascinated with a caged bird which may reflect his own sense of being constrained by his condition.

Later, the bird seems to symbolise Akiko too, trapped as she is within the domestic environment where all responsibility seemingly falls to her. Even so a young student couple she rents the annex to for a lower price in exchange for keeping an eye on Shigezo during the day remark that he may be in the ideal state for a human being having returned to early childhood in which there are no concerns or responsibilities and he is therefore unburdened by the weight of what is to live. Toyoda often uses handheld camera to symbolise the desperation and destabilisation of Shigezo’s existence in which Akiko has become his only fixed point. One of Nobuyoshi’s friends remarks that perhaps it was better when the average life expectancy was 50 and Nobuyoshi’s mother might have been lucky passing away peacefully while otherwise in good health. Still, as Nobuyoshi says, it comes for us all in the end and we should all try to be kinder to each other while we’re here.

The Wind Blows Twice (風ふたゝび, Shiro Toyoda, 1952)

Posted on by

Struggling with the end of her marriage, a young woman finds herself listless yet considering new possibilities in Shiro Toyoda’s The Wind Blows Twice (風ふたゝび, Kaze Futatabi). Adapted from a serialised novel by Tatsuo Nagai, the title is echoed in a remark from one of two potential suitors that youth is something that can come two or even three times so as long as you remain young at heart. They are each, however, each currently frozen and unable to move forward in the wake of their personal traumas. 

Kanae (Setsuko Hara), it seems, married for love but her husband has apparently been arrested for some kind of corruption. She has severed all ties with him and returned to the house of the uncle and aunt who raised her after her mother’s death where she helps out in their shop. Meanwhile, she learns that her semi-estranged father Seijiro (Ken Mitsuda), a university professor who lives in Sendai and hasn’t been in contact despite his daughter’s difficult circumstances, collapsed on the steps of the local station and is being cared for by a former student, Miyashita (Ryo Ikebe). She travels to look after him and becomes closer to Miyashita, who currently works as an auctioneer and has dreams of becoming a greengrocer, but is perturbed to learn that her father is a suspect in the theft of 10,000 yen from the wallet of a wealthy man, Michihara (So Yamamura), who carelessly left in the toilet and discovered the money missing when he went back to pick it up. Worried that the rumour may damage her father’s career, Kanae goes to apologise and find out what’s going on but Michihara tells her not to worry and it was his own fault anyway but his sudden magnanimity seems suspicious. In any case, Kanae later tells her friend Yoko that Michihara frightened her, also remarking to Miyashita that she felt as if she managed to slip away from him as she made her escape.

Though he later turns out to be sympathetic, Michihara appears as the villain of the piece. He thinks Kanae reminds him of his late wife and intends to ask her to marry him one the seventh anniversary memorial service is concluded. He starts using his wealth and power to gently interfere in her life, setting up a job for her on hearing that she’d been looking for employment and later approaching her father with the idea of investing in his research into the use of fluorides in the production of resin. Despite her initial dislike of him, Kanae goes along with everything and is soon sucked into Michihara’s world while otherwise wilfully oblivious of his feelings for her (which she does not share) and hoping he’ll help her convince Miyashita that he ought to return to science and help her father with his research which would obviously pave the way for them be together romantically.

The problem is that like Kanae Miyashita has become frozen inside, scarred by his wartime experiences and soured on science. Yet just as staying with him restores Kanae’s spirit and encourages her to want to look for work and find purpose in her life, her influence on him reawakens his passion for scientific research only he is less happy about it than she was. The interest that’s sparked in him ironically lies in the frozen north, travelling to Hokkaido to see an old friend and researching how to prevent potatoes from freezing in order to improve people’s quality of life. In essence it seems as if the futures they may want are too different. Now much more cheerful and energetic, Kanae genuinely enjoys her work in broadcasting and is less than keen to give it up and move to rural Hokkaido to help Miyashita study potatoes while secretly hoping she can convince him, with Michihara’s help, to become a respectable academic like her father and live a nice middle class life researching things that are more useful to industry and big business than to regular people.

Miyashita is disinclined to do so. He bounds straight off a train to see her with three day stubble from the journey, only to be disappointed witnessing in her in an elaborate kimono with her hair constrained in traditional style while Michihara is there waiting to see him to discuss a job offer from Seijiro. It’s at this point that he seems to decide his romantic desire for Kanae is most likely futile and she has chosen the rarified world of Michihara rather a rustic and homely life with a man like himself. Of course, this makes it sound as if Kanae doesn’t have much choice at all herself and to an extent she doesn’t or at least she feels backed into a corner while her aunt pressures her to remarry, unbothered to which man but excited about the proposal from Michihara because it means she will enjoy a life of uninterrupted financial comfort.

Having chosen her own suitor and seen things go drastically wrong also increases her aunt’s conviction that she shouldn’t make the same mistake again while she too is perhaps wary of remarrying. In any case. Kanae seems to want work and enjoys her job in broadcasting as much as she’s naturally drawn to Miyashita who brings out in her a greater desire to live while Michihara only seems to want her to be a shadow of his late wife suggesting that to marry a man like that may itself be a kind of death sentence. To that extent, the choice Kanae makes involves a predicable sacrifice, but still in any case it is a choice that she makes for herself to strike out for happiness and fulfilment of her own choosing rather than allow herself to be railroaded by conventionality unable to express her own desires.

Nightingale (鶯, Shiro Toyoda, 1938)

Posted on by

Set in a quiet northern town, Shiro Toyoda’s Nightingale (鶯, Uguisu) finds the nation still struggling to emerge from the feudal past into the modern era. The film opens with a scene in the local train station, yet we’re also told that it is literally cut off from prosperity because the express train does not stop there and so it is relegated to the status of provincial backwater. Physically trying to flag the train down, the Mayor has been trying to get the town placed on the fast track but has had no luck so far.

The ticket man, who’d been more or less ignoring him, suggests they can’t put the station on the express line because the population of the town is decreasing presumably as young people migrate to the cities in search of work. One of the people waiting there is a man with two sons who tries to get the younger to pretend he’s younger than he is so he won’t have to pay for his ticket, though the ticket man refuses to give him a discount leaving the man with only the option to leave one of the boys behind while the family can no longer survive in the town. He explains that he’s been financially crippled by the medical fees to care for his now late wife and is clearly at his wits end trying to find a way to support his children.

The costs of medical treatment seem to be a direct driver of poverty and crime. Shifting to the local police station, we’re introduced to a man who’s become a serial chicken thief having begun stealing neighbour’s birds to pay for doctors to treat his sickly wife only she eventually left him for another man because he was always away conducting poultry heists so she thought he’d abandoned her due to her illness. His problem is compounded by the fact he had not formally registered their marriage intending to wait until the first child was born leaving him without a leg to stand on.

An official doctor later jokingly complains that he’s losing custom because no one in the area can afford modern medical care so they’re turning to dubious snake oil-style miracle cures proffered by a “fake priest” the police are about to arrest for fraud. Meanwhile, they’ve also arrested a middle-aged woman (Haruko Sugimura) who assists with births for violating the medical practice law. Branded a midwife she is really more of a wise woman who is well respected in the local community as someone who had had many children herself and also offers advice about folk remedies for various illnesses. She never claims to be a doctor and does not regard it as a job, merely as helping people even if she perhaps also enjoys the sense of being needed and important, and is unable to understand how that could ever be a crime. Unlike the priest, she takes no payment and uses her own resources though people sometimes give her small compensatory gifts such as parcels of rice as a thank you. When a woman goes into labour and the “official” midwife is not available, the policeman is unwilling to let her in but hearing the woman’s distress she runs to help her kicking all the policemen out of this very personal female space.

Her confusion bears out that within the general society as people struggle to adjust to a more ordered modernity and the encroachment of urbanity which is what the police themselves represent. Then again, they are presented as being more compassionate certainly than the staff of the railway and seemingly have a duty of pastoral care for the local area which is separate from their role in enforcing the law. A secondary drama that began at the train station involves a young woman who is being sold into sexual slavery by her father against her will. She is eventually rescued by an earnest school teacher who says the sale isn’t valid because she also signed a contract to become a teacher, convincing her father to change his mind with the help of the police who remonstrate with him that it’s wrong to sell your child even if the practice had been somewhat normalised which plays into a propagandistic element about the importance of moving on from “backward” rural practices still mired in the feudal era. The police also have access to a fund which can be used to get the broker out of the way in an effort to stamp out this morally indefensible situation in which parents sell their children into indentured servitude for reasons of poverty. 

They also agree to help an old lady who’s arrived in search of a child she fostered a decade previously who was taken back by her birth mother and sold to a circus. Like the chicken thief, the old woman was caught out by the modern convention of paperwork. She had been led to believe the adoption had been processed and the child placed on her own family register, but was illiterate and therefore easily deceived. The old woman also becomes a victim of the dodgy priest and the disease currently spreading because of his problematic cure-alls which people have turned to out of desperation in their poverty.

But despite the police’s apparent altruism, the arrival of a young woman selling a captive nightingale reveals the irony that she’s come there because it’s the only place anyone has any money. Unfortunately it turns out that capturing a nightingale has also been ruled illegal, even if one of the policeman was interested in buying it if only it could sing, so she’s come to the wrong place and if she doesn’t release it she’ll end up with a fine. The nightingale’s song is later replaced by that of a flute player who had been arrested for being drunk and disorderly having spent some money he was given towards the funeral of his baby on drink. 

The police are in some ways a disruptive influence, trying to bring a new urban order to this rural place which has its own laws and customs often at odds with those of the city. Their efforts tie in to a persistent message of modernising for the good of the nation which was particularly current in the late 1930s though the film is equally sympathetic towards the plight of the rural poor who are not after all being given very much support as the youngsters move to the city leaving the old behind, trapped on the slow line cut off from the benefits of modernity while otherwise expected to simply adapt to new visions of civility in a society still trying to emerge from the feudal past. 

Portrait of Hell (地獄変, Shiro Toyoda, 1969)

Posted on by

Asked to paint a vision of heaven, an artist replies that he cannot because he sees it nowhere in this present society. “Over my body and my life, you have absolute authority. But you can never command my artist’s soul,” he spits back at his corrupt lord, but in many ways the lord can command his soul as an artist for he creates the world he reflects for all that he attempts to manipulate him as a man and one he assumes to be far inferior to himself. 

Shiro Toyoda’s adaptation of the classic horror story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Portrait of Hell (地獄変, Jigokuhen) opens with a brief voiceover narration that explains that this story takes place almost 1000 years ago in the Heian era when the Fujiwara clan was at the height of its power. But after so long at the top of the tree, the Fujiwara have become both restless and indifferent in their complacency. “The common people live lives of hopeless despair,” the narrator explains outlining the Fujiwara’s inability to govern as even minor natural disasters give rise to famines and corpses litter the streets. Even nobles now live “lives of perpetual dread” having gained a sense of their own impermanence. 

Lord Horikawa (Yorozuya Kinnosuke) is however seemingly oblivious to the suffering of his people. Yoshihide (Tatsuya Nakadai), a Korean painter, tells him that his problem is everyone tells him what he wants to hear (because they fear for their lives) rather than what is actually happening. During the opening sequence, Horikawa had abruptly decided to leave a public celebration. An old man appeals to some of the guards for money, but they roughly beat him and he is later trampled to death by Horikawa’s frightened bull which had become loose during a storm. The old man dies cursing him, exclaiming that “he has treated us like slaves. I have become no better than an animal.” Horikawa had been told that the man used his last dying breath to remark on what an honour it was to be trampled by the lord’s bull. Yoshihide paints a picture that drives a court lady out of her mind featuring the corpse of the old man under a cherry tree that seems so vivid to her that it emanates a stench of death. Horikawa doesn’t like it much either, and its uncanny realism unsettles his mind. He thinks he sees the ghost lying in wait for him in his own bed and orders Yoshihide to dismantle the painting as if that would make the ghost disappear. 

Horikawa believes the “ghost” is a manifestation of Yoshihide’s rage rather than his own guilt or incompetence. Yoshihide certainly does not like the world the lord has made, replying that he has seen hell everywhere in the cities and the villages while there is no heaven to be had which is why he cannot paint it. Yet Yoshihide and the lord are almost perfect mirrors of each other. Yoshihide is also rigid and superior. He prides himself on being Korean, pointing out that the foundations of the court and of modern learning were all brought over by Korean scholars even if Horikawa claims to have “improved” upon them. Yet some of his fellow painters worry that the style their Korean ancestors worked so hard to perfect has been eclipsed by Japanese influence while secretly considering returning to Korea which has now become prosperous unlike the conditions in Japan. 

Horikawa later slips and calls Yoshihide a stupid “foreigner” making plain his contempt despite describing him as the greatest artist of his generation which is why he’s commissioned this piece of art in the first place even though he had described all of his previous pieces “ugly” while objecting to their attempt to show him how rotten his kingdom has become. Yet Horikawa is correct when he says that it’s Yoshihide’s “infernal arrogance” that has provoked his downfall. Having caught his daughter Yoshika (Yoko Naito) with one of his pupils, he locked her in a shed and exclaimed that no other man would have her. If he had not done so, she may never have come to the attentions of the lord and suffered her eventual degradation at his hand, nor would Yoshihide have been so easily manipulated into a obsessive desire to effectively depict the depths of hell. 

Yoshihide is some kind of method artist who insists he can only paint what he sees. Thus he goes to great lengths to observe hellish cruelty, tying up an apprentice boy in chains and torturing him with snakes, his eyes burning with a fiery intensity. His tragedy is that he comes to realise that the painting reflects not the world but himself. He is hell, hell is here. While his daughter burns, he looks on impassively only to be outdone by her pet monkey who in a gesture of selfless love leaps into the flames. Even so, Horikawa praises the finished painting as a masterpiece, “an impressive depiction of the hell that is our life,” commenting somewhat ironically on the current conditions within his fiefdom. Only latterly does he notice his own role within it, suddenly consumed by his hellishness as if dragged own into the flames despite himself. 

Toyoda shoots in the manner of a classic ghost story, making fantastic use of ghostly effects as Horikawa finds himself haunted by the spirits of those he’s wronged. At times, the screen fills with red light as if soaked in blood or baked in the hellish glow of slow burning flames. He flips between the icy blues of Horikawa’s estate, and the stifling ochre that seems to surround Yoshihide who does after all feed off all this strife rather than seeking to cure it. The two men end up in an impossible game of brinksmanship from which neither can back down, two “arrogant” rivals blindly creating a hell for those around them through their selfishness and vanity. “Life is more hellish than hell itself” runs a final quote from Akutagawa, laying bare the tale’s essential irony in our inability to recognise the hell we create for ourselves and others through our own arrogance and fear.

Snow Country (雪国, Shiro Toyoda, 1957)

Posted on by

Closely associated with literary adaptation, Shiro Toyoda had been wanting to adapt Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country (雪国) since its serialisation and apparently spent four years preparing his treatment ahead of the 1957 film starring Ryo Ikebe as the solipsistic aesthete at the novel’s centre. Characteristically, however, he takes several liberties with the source material, notably introducing an entirely different conclusion which perhaps helps in re-centring the tale away from the hero Shimamura to the melancholy geisha who apparently falls for him because of his intense loneliness. 

A brief reference to a failed military insurrection in Manchuria sets us firmly in the mid-1930s as do repeated mentions of the ongoing depression which causes additional anxiety to local business owners in a small holiday resort town. Mimicking the novel’s famous opening, Toyoda opens with a POV shot of a train exiting a tunnel into the snow-covered landscape, the hero Shimamura (Ryo Ikebe) sitting sadly gazing out of a window and eventually captivated by the reflection of a young woman devotedly caring for a young man who appears to be in poor health. Meanwhile, another young woman, Komako (Keiko Kishi), gazes at her own reflection in a train station window, waiting once again as if unable to depart. As we discover, Shimamura has returned with the intention of seeing Komako with whom he’d struck up a relationship during a summer trip but is somewhat disappointed to learn that she has since become a geisha.

In a flashback to their first meeting, Komako asks Shimamura if he has come for “escape”, a question he doesn’t exactly answer while petulantly complaining about his lack of artistic success as someone who paints pictures apparently out of step with his times. When the head of the local commerce association tries to involve him in conversation about the failed insurrection, he bluntly tells him that he’s an artist and as such has no interest in such things, but it does indeed seem that he is looking for some kind of escape from the turbulent times, expressing that here the war seems very far away as does “the depression”. Komako, a more modern and perhaps prophetic figure than it might at first seem, is the only one to bring up the war directly speculating that it may be about to intensify while the frustrated affair between the two seems to be informed by the mounting tensions against which they are attempting to live their lives. 

Rather self-absorbed, Shimamura in a sense may even identify with Komako explaining that he too has a “patron” and implying that his flight is perhaps a response to his sense of powerlessness, that he feels constrained by his financial dependency presumably on his father-in-law though his relative economic superiority which leads Komako to frequently remark on his “extravagance” obviously affords him the freedom to make these random solo trips to ski resorts and indulge his career as a painter regardless of its capacity to support himself and his family. Komako must know on some level that the relationship is a fantasy, yet she believes in it enough to end her connection with an elderly patron on suspecting that she is carrying Shimamura’s child only to have her hopes dashed when he does not turn up for a local festival as promised with the consequence that all of her dependents are turfed out of the home he had provided for her. 

Komako is not “free” in the same way that Shimamura evidently is, her entire life dictated by the fact that she is poor and female. Fostered by a shamisen teacher, she may have been technically engaged to the young man, Yukio (Akira Nakamura), Shimamura saw on the train being cared for by Yoko (Kaoru Yachigusa), Komako’s foster sister in love with him herself, but intensely resents the burdens she is expected to bear quite literally with her body. She later tells Shimamura that she didn’t become a geisha for Yukio in order to pay his medical bills but out of a sense of obligation, while she is also responsible for her birth family, the now bedridden shamisen teacher, and Yoko who intensely resents her for her callous treatment of Yukio and generally “dissolute”, selfish way of living. During the famous fire in a cinema that closes the novel (but not the film), Komako even exclaims that her life would be easier if Yoko burned to death, but on witnessing her either fall or jump from the burning building she can do nothing other than run to her side. 

Indeed, the novel’s climax finds Shimaura standing alone indifferent to the fate of Yoko, a young woman he had come to admire if only for her contrary qualities, admiring instead the beauty of the night sky. In Toyoda’s characterisation, Yoko is in one sense the conventionally good woman whose selfless devotion to the sickly Yukio so captivates Shimamura, but her goodness is nevertheless undercut by the degree of her animosity towards Komako even as the two women remain trapped in a complex web of frustrated affection and intense resentment, each perhaps knowing they neither can have the man they want and are condemned to an eternal unhappiness as the snow mounts all around them in this perpetually cold and depressing moribund resort town. Switching between studio matte paintings ironically mimicking Shimamura’s art and on-location footage of the deepening snows, Toyoda’s sense of near nihilistic melancholy evoking the atmosphere of Japan in the mid-1930s hints at grand tragedy but finds resolution only in stoicism as the heroine picks up her shamisen and trudges onward amid the quickening blizzard.  

Shozo, a Cat and Two Women (猫と庄造と二人のをんな, Shiro Toyoda, 1956)

Posted on by

Post-war melodrama is largely concerned with the place of women, in particular, in a rapidly changing society, but given the centrality of domestic life, were men yearning for “independence” too? Shiro Toyoda was closely associated with comedic tales of strong women and weak men, and Shozo, a Cat and Two Women (猫と庄造と二人のをんな, Neko to Shozo to Futari no Onna) is as its title implies no exception. Adapting the novel by Tanizaki, Toyoda offers a subtle critique of the traditional family as its hapless hero finds himself caught between the conflicting demands of his feudalistic mother, stoic first wife, hedonistic second, and his much loved but perhaps mercenary feline, Lily. 

Shozo (Hisaya Morishige) is perhaps a typical spoiled only son, lazy, feckless, and essentially passive. Shinako (Isuzu Yamada) who agreed to an arranged marriage with him four years previously is walking out, thoroughly fed up with her mother-in-law Orin’s (Chieko Naniwa) constant complaints not least among them that the couple have no children. Unbeknownst to Shinako, however,  Shozo has been carrying on with his slightly younger cousin, Fukuko (Kyoko Kagawa), who is a free spirited modern woman. In fact, Fukuko has already run away from home three times in the company of various men so her wealthy father would be only too pleased to see her settle down and is so desperate to offload her that he’s even offering a huge dowry. All of this is complicated by the fact that Fukuko’s father already owns the mortgage on Shozo’s family store, which presents a serious challenge to typical family dynamics. 

Shozo, meanwhile, is only really interested in his pet cat, Lily, something which was a bone of contention in his failed marriage to Shinako (and perhaps a reason they have not been blessed with children). On learning that Orin has already moved Fukuko into the family home mere seconds after she vacated it, Shinako is suddenly struck by remorse and feels the need to vindicate her pride through revenge. Plotting how best to drive a wedge between Fukuko and her new husband, she settles on petitioning Shozo to give her custody of Lily, and then suggests the same thing to her rival knowing that whatever happens it will cause a series of problems in the Oyama household. 

The irony is, in a sense, that it’s Shozo who has been displaced from his own home. Perhaps surprisingly, he often tries to help out with household tasks but his mother always stops him, insisting that housework isn’t something a man should pay attention to. Orin is of course perpetuating outdated ideas of traditional gender roles, but there is also an obvious anxiety in her need to protect her territory from possible incursion. She doesn’t necessarily trust the idea that she and Shozo are connected by anything deeper than practicality and filial obligation and her only currency is her ability to provide the services that Shozo “cannot” provide for himself. His learning to take care of himself is an existential threat to her position as his caregiver even though he is a grown man in his 30s perfectly capable of doing his own laundry and preparing his own meals (as he already does for Lily who particularly enjoys grilled chicken). 

When they brought Shinako into the house, they did so apparently because she was known to be a “good worker” at her job as a maid for a wealthy family. Since then she has indeed worked hard, but is viewed as little more than a glorified servant by Orin who has delegated much of the feminine labour to the younger woman, while Shozo emotionally neglects her in favour of the cat and apparently satisfies his carnal urges outside the home. They accept Fukuko for her money, but take the opposite approach, treating her as the lady of the manor. Fukuko does no housework (a cupboard is later discovered where she’d thrown all the washing she couldn’t be bothered to do), but Orin simply picks up her share and more, becoming maid to her daughter-in-law who frequently reminds them that it’s her money paying for everything so she is the one who is really in charge. 

Shozo does not seem to react too closely to these assaults on his masculinity, but only wants to escape to be alone with Lily whom he believes is the only one who really loves him. In this he is perhaps the truly modern man who wanted his family relations to be “real” rather than defined by social obligation, but he’s also self-centred and childish, still seeing the women (even Lily) as providers of service rather than fellow human beings. His mother satisfied his hunger, Shinako kept him financially by managing the business, and Fukuko sated his passion, but he feels oppressed by all of them in different ways and in the end does not want the responsibility of dealing with human emotions. Lily may be capricious, but her needs are easily satisfied and to that extent she is dependent on him. His desire to be “independent” and find emotional fulfilment only with his cat is just as much of a challenge to the social order as a woman who rejects marriage or seeks to fulfil herself outside of the home. 

Shozo’s dilemma is however presented as comedic until its unexpectedly melancholy conclusion which reduces him to the status of a stray cat as the women come to literal blows, fighting not quite over him (he isn’t worth fighting over) but for their own self-esteem and particular brand of womanhood. Shinako sits at home and calculates all the back pay she’d be entitled to for the labour she performed at the Oyama household in recognition that being a wife is also a job and they treated her as a maid anyway (which is to say as an outsider with no intention of love or loyalty), while Fukuko begins to see the “emptiness” in her party girl lifestyle but prefers to be pampered and resents being “beaten” by a mere housemaid. This system traps everyone, forcing them to manipulate the desires of others while suppressing their own. Shozo and his cat are left out in the cold, trapped between tradition and modernity but no more free than they were before even in their mutual dependency.

Madame White Snake (白夫人の妖恋, Shiro Toyoda, 1956)

Posted on by

A studio director at Toho, Shiro Toyoda was most closely associated with adaptations of well respected works of literature, often with an earthy, humanist touch. He might then be an odd fit for a tale of high romance co-produced with Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers and inspired by a classic Chinese legend. Madame White Snake (白夫人の妖恋, Byaku Fujin no Yoren) effectively drops some of Toho’s top talent, including “pan-Asian” star Shirley (Yoshiko) Yamaguchi (AKA Li Xianglan / Ri Koran), into a contemporary Hong Kong ghost movie with Toyoda doing his best to mimic the house style. 

As in the classic legend, fate is set in motion when herbalist Xu-xian (Ryo Ikebe) allows “noblewoman” Bai-niang (Shirley Yamaguchi) and her maid Xiao-qing (Kaoru Yachigusa) to board a boat he is riding to escape a storm. The pair bond because they are both orphans out in the rain to pay their filial respects to their late parents on tomb sweeping day. Disembarking, Xu-xian lends the ladies his umbrella, vowing to visit their house the next day after his rounds to reclaim it. When he arrives, Xu-xian is greeted by a near hysterical and extremely romantic Bai-niang who has apparently fallen deeply in love with him because of his pure heart. She proposes marriage, but Xu-xian is wary. He is after all just a poor boy, a herbalist living with his older sister and her husband. He has no money to get married and Bai-niang is a noble woman from a good family, society simply wouldn’t allow it. Xu-xian tries to escape, but his gentle words of refusal only wound Bia-niang’s heart. 

Hoping to smooth the situation, Xiao-qing decides to give Xu-xian a small fortune in silver taels so the money issue will be solved. Strangely, the plan appears to work. Xu-xian quickly gets over his reluctance to accept money from a wealthy woman who wants to marry him and returns to being in love and excited, selling his newfound hope for the future to his sister by showing her the taels. It is, however, not quite that simple. The silver turns out to be stolen as evidenced by a mark of fire on its surface. Xu-xian falls under suspicion as a thief and comes to resent Bai-niang for placing him in such a difficult and embarrassing position. 

Nevertheless, despite all the strange goings on such as the suddenly “abandoned” house, the green smoke, and vanishing women, Xu-xian does not seem to suspect that Bai-niang is not fully human, and is only angry with her for misusing him. In a motif which will be repeated, however, he is eventually won over. After taking a job in his sleazy uncle’s inn, he re-encounters Bai-niang and realises she really is the one for him. But as they begin to build their life together, launched with an unwise loan from the sleazy uncle who can’t seem to keep his eyes (and occasionally hands) off Bai-niang, doubt begins to creep in. Those small cracks are deepened when Xu-xian is accosted by a man who announces himself as a Taoist from Mount Ji and tells him that he has an evil aura over his head, encouraging him to believe that an evil spirit is slowly capturing his heart which why he’s a little bit afraid to go home. The priest gives him some useful talismans, which are of course quite bad news for Bai-niang who now knows that her husband secretly doubts her. 

Meanwhile, prepared to do “anything” to make the man she loves happy, Bai-niang has come to the strange conclusion that Xu-xian’s moodiness is down to the fact that their medicine shop isn’t doing so well. Unfortunately, her big idea is poisoning the local well to make everyone think there’s a plague so they’ll have to buy more of her potions. It’s a fairly nefarious plan, but apparently all for love. As in the original tale, however, the real crisis once again comes with the randy uncle who uses the pretext of a local festival to try and get Bai-niang drunk on special wine that is known to unmask spirits. Realising that his wife is a little bit otherworldly sends Xu-xian into a coma, while Bai-niang goes to ask the gods for help, only to be undercut by the annoying Taoist priest who wakes Xu-xian up by convincing him his wife’s “evil”. 

If you don’t want people to think you’re “evil”, trying to drown the entire town might not be the best move. Bai-niang’s refusal to give up on Xu-xian even when he constantly tries to reject her places her at odds with loyal servant Xiao-qing who is equal parts enraged on her behalf and exasperated that she can’t see sense. Bai-niang tells the gods that the only witchcraft she used was the witchcraft of love even if that love caused her to try and poison the entire town, but now regards herself as nothing more than Xu-xian’s wife and is willing to renounce her powers in order to save him. Once again, Xu-xian has a sudden change of heart, avowing that there are human women with the heart of a snake, and Bai-niang is a woman to him even if she’s a snake spirit which is, apparently, the only thing that matters. Still, theirs is a love this world doesn’t understand, and so only in a better one can they ever be together.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Hotelman’s Holiday (駅前旅館, Shiro Toyoda, 1958)

Posted on by

Hotelman's holiday poster 1The post-war world was one rife with trouble. By 1958, however, the horizon was perhaps beginning to brighten which means it was no longer too soon have a good laugh about how awful life could be. Nothing particularly awful happens in Shiro Toyoda’s cheerful comedy The Hotelman’s Holiday (駅前旅館, Ekimae Ryokan), the first in a series of “Ekimae” or “station front” movies produced by Toho, but it does amusingly rip a leaf out of Toei’s book in having its community of feckless hoteliers band together to stand up to greedy yakuza stand-in barkers who are actively destabilising the local economy with their underhanded ways.

Our hero, “born in a maid’s room” Jihei (Hisaya Morishige), is the manager of the Kukimoto inn near Tokyo’s Ueno station. Kukimoto seems to get most of its business from large tour groups, particularly school children on trips to the city and religious organisations, seemingly unperturbed by the area’s then scrappy working class earthiness. The problem is that there are rather a lot of inns in this small area (it is after all near a major rail station) and they’re all competing for the same walk-in guests which means they’re increasingly at the mercy of the local “barkers” who target travellers at points of transit and take them to certain inns in return for commissions. Even so, Jihei himself can often be found outside enticing passersby into the hotel to prove his managerial prowess.

The barkers know their worth and are beginning to get too big for their boots in shifting into the human trafficking business. Not to go into the finer details, the inns have a lot of ladies living on their premises on whom some of their trade relies. The barkers have been tempting the girls from the inns away from their homes and into potentially more lucrative though almost certainly less friendly occupations.

The central drama kicks off when the barkers try to abduct Kukimoto’s maid Okyo (Mina Mitsui) who is saved at the last minute by intellectual student Mannen (Frankie Sakai). Mannen is studying law and working illicitly for several tourist information companies in order to pay his way through college. As such he’s just another of the scrappy young guys trying to forge ahead in the precarious post-war environment. Jihei is, in a sense, pretty much the same. Born in a maid’s room, as he says, he’s very much part of the inn business and is proud to be a manager but also resents his subordinate position to the owner and the way they often treat him like a servant rather than the dependable employee he really is. His position leaves him feeling as if he’s already reached his peak and there is no real future for him other than the status quo. That feeling of futility might be why he, Mannen, and some of the other hotel managers eventually decide that they need to “cleanse” the Ueno Station area of the barker threat.

Their resistance has a pleasantly pithy quality in that it relies on a perfectly peaceful method of putting up banners to encourage customers not to trust the barkers and to approach inns directly. As might be assumed, the barkers aren’t very happy about their business being undermined and immediately begin threatening the Kukimoto inn, whom they assume to be the instigators, with destruction if they do not immediately cease and desist. Jihei thinks he has a solid plan and it does indeed defuse the situation but cannot ultimately rectify it. What it does do is give the inn’s owners the excuse they’ve been looking for to part with him, and Jihei the impetus he perhaps needed to rethink his life.

As Mannen puts it, “our reality is preposterous and absurd”, but we have to go on resisting because “happiness exists even in this world”. The inn managers stand up against the barker oppression in the same way communities stand up against yakuza in Toei’s modern gangster dramas, but like many of anti-gangster narratives, the corruption is so deeply ingrained that it cannot be entirely eliminated, only managed. Thus Jihei, also involved in a series of romantic subplots involving an intense former geisha (Keiko Awaji) and a diffident bar owner (Chikage Awashima), eventually realises that if he cannot change his environment he might be better to leave it, escaping to the sort of place where they still grow barley and travel by cart. Mannen too, their revolution failed, eventually takes off with Okyo to go into business in Osaka, giving up on his imagined future for a more solid present. Meanwhile, chaos rules in Ueno as crowds of travellers pour out of the station towards an uncertain future with only the barkers to guide them.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Twilight Story (濹東綺譚, Shiro Toyoda, 1960)

Posted on by

Director Shiro Toyoda, closely associated with high minded literary adaptations, nevertheless had a talent for melancholy comedy and for capturing the everyday reality of ordinary people. A fierce condemnation of the patriarchal society at a moment of intense masculinity, Twilight Story (濹東綺譚, Bokuto Kitan), an adaptation of the novel by Kafu Nagai, follows an ambivalent author as he covertly observes the life and love of a former geisha daring to dream of romantic salvation while fully aware of the world’s cruelty.

Set in 1936, the film opens with an author on a research trip who guides us into the world of the Tamanoi pleasure quarter which he seems to disdain but is drawn to all the same. Whilst there he runs into a nervous middle-aged man, Junpei (Hiroshi Akutagawa), who is later accosted by sex worker Oyuki (Fujiko Yamamoto) for use of his umbrella during a violent storm. A mild-mannered sort, Junpei is unused to the ways of the red light district and quickly makes his escape after being invited into Oyuki’s home. After a swift drink, however, he returns and the pair begin an awkward semi-romantic relationship.

Despite his affirmation that he is single, Junpei is in fact already married if (for the moment) unhappily. Though he knew his future wife Mitsuko (Michiyo Aratama) had given birth to an illegitimate child fathered by her employer, Junpei chose to marry her anyway because he was in love. The pair married, they say, for “genuine” reasons but the father of Mitsuko’s son continues to send maintenance money for the boy’s education and his constant presence has begun to play on Junpei’s mind especially as his teacher’s salary is dwindling in this age of militarism in which educational hours are decreasing in favour of compulsory military drills. Meanwhile, Mitsuko also seems to have got religion and spends most of her time reciting sutras with the implication that she has begun to neglect her husband, emotionally, spiritually, and most particularly physically. In order to escape his depressing home life, Junpei hangs out in the Tamanoi where men’s hearts are lighter and people talk frankly about love.

This is, of course, not quite the case, but the fantasy the pleasure quarters sell of themselves. Our jaded author is perfectly aware of that and broadly sympathetic towards the women caught in its web. Oyuki, a former geisha, has “debased” herself in order to earn extra money to send home to her family and pay the medical fees for her sickly mother. Her uncles constantly pressure her for more and she wonders if they are not merely exploiting her, using her money for their own benefit and refusing to chip in for her mother’s care. Nevertheless, she is trapped. On meeting Junpei with whom she seems to develop a genuine emotional connection, she dares to dream that one day they might marry, that she could leave this life behind and build a stable family home of her own.

Of course, it’s not to be. Like all men in the Tamanoi, Junpei is misrepresenting himself for his own ends. He is only using Oyuki as an idealised point of refuge from the unhappy marriage he shows no other signs of leaving. As the author points out, the men think they’re using women but the women are also using them though they do so without calculation. Denied power or agency of their own, the women of the Tamanoi have no other option than to manipulate that of men, though the author sympathises with them so strongly that to expose the hidden “vulgarity” seems to him an act of intense cruelty.

Junpei falls in love with the world of the Tamanoi because he thinks it’s more emotionally honest, but the truth is quite the reverse. Wandering through the narrow streets at night, the author pities the women in the windows, knowing that men come here to escape their isolation but there is no escape for these women who are forced to delude themselves that a better future is waiting in order to go on living. Meanwhile Junpei’s colleague, looking back over his shoulder towards the young men in uniform, declares that he too has lost all hope for a promising future. With militarism on the rise, hyper-masculinity has led to a further decline in the already woeful status of women with even the girls’ sympathetic pimp lamenting that the army, who have been rounding up sex workers for forced service in Manchuria, regard them as little more than products to be poked and prodded and giggled over as they are cruelly bought and sold.

Reuniting with his wife, Junpei is forced to face his emotional cowardice, that he was just playing with Oyuki’s feelings in indulging the fantasy of an idealised romantic union. Oyuki, meanwhile, faces the destruction of all her dreams when she realises her uncle has betrayed her, her mother is dead, and all her sacrifices have been for nothing. On some level she may have known Junpei had another woman, but needed to believe in the fantasy of his love for her in order to make her life bearable. Even so, she now sees no other future for herself than a return to work shorn of all her hope. Toyoda’s condemnation of the red light district is bleak and total, even as the jaded author himself becomes an ambivalent part of it, but the Tamanoi is only a symptom of longstanding social oppression exacerbated by militarist fervour as the lights go out all over town.

Wild Geese (雁, AKA The Mistress, Shiro Toyoda, 1953)

Posted on by Leave a comment

(C) Daiei, 1953In the extreme turbulence of the immediate post-war period, it’s not surprising that Japan looked back to the last time it was confronted with such confusion and upheaval for clues as to how to move forward from its current state of shocked inertia. The heroine of Shiro Toyoda’s adaptation of the Ogai Mori novel, Wild Geese (雁, Gan, AKA The Mistress), finds herself at a similar crossroads to the women of the 1950s, caught between tradition and modernity as they embrace the new freedoms but remain constrained by a conservative society. Toyoda, well known for his adaptations of great literature, makes a few key changes to Mori’s novel in effect placing a Showa era heroine in a recognisably “Meiji” world.

The Japan of the 1880s is one of extreme contrast and rapidly unfolding modernity. Having finally opened its doors to the outside world, the nation is in a big hurry to “catch up” to those it sees as its equals on the world stage. Consequently, Western thoughts and values are flooding into the country, bringing both good and ill. Arranged marriages are still common and Otama (Hideko Takamine) has been married once but the marriage has failed – she was deceived, the man she married already had a wife and child. Still, having lived with a man as his wife, Otama is considered “damaged” goods and will find it difficult to make a good match in the future (especially given the whiff of scandal from being involved in an illegitimate marriage with a bigamist).

When a matchmaker (Choko Iida) arrives with a potential husband it proves hard to turn down but the matchmaker is not quite on the level. Suezo (Eijiro Tono), she says, is a recently widowed man with a young child who is in need of a new wife but cannot marry again immediately for propriety’s sake. Otama will be his mistress and then in due course his wife. However, the matchmaker is an unscrupulous woman who has spun Otama a yarn in the hope of getting her debt written off by getting the shady loanshark she owes money to a pretty young woman to have some fun with.

The position Otama finds herself in is one of impossibility. A woman cannot survive alone in the Meiji era and its lingering concessions to feudalism. For a woman as poor and lowly as Otama whose marriage prospects are slim there are few options available. Otama’s neighbour (Kuniko Miyake) has managed to carve out a life for herself as a single woman through teaching sewing classes but such opportunities are few and far between, as Otama is warned when she considers following her example. The “arrangement” with Suezo may not seem too bad on the surface – he looks after her and her father, has set her up in a house, and treats her well even if his behaviour leans toward the possessive. Despite confessing to her father that she feels trapped and miserable, humiliated on learning she has been ostracised as the mistress of a married loanshark, Otama finds little sympathy as her father declares himself “very happy” and councils her against leaving because he has no desire to return to a life of poverty, remaining selfishly indifferent to his daughter’s suffering.

Resigned to her fate, Otama does her best to adapt to her new life but remains as trapped within Suezo’s house as the caged bird he presents her with “for company”. Jealous and fearing that his wife will find out about the affair, Suezo’s preference is for Otama to stay indoors waiting for him to call. His visits are routine and perfunctory. Handing the maid a few coins to go to the public bath, Suezo signals his intentions in the least romantic of ways, pausing only to lock the garden gate.

Catching sight of an earnest student who passes by everyday at 4, Otama begins to dream of something better. The student, Okada (Hiroshi Akutagawa), is a source of fascination for all the young women in the neighbourhood but he too is instantly captivated when he glimpses the beautiful Otama trapped behind the bar-like slats of Suzeo’s love nest. Adding a touch of biblical intrigue, it is a snake which eventually leads to their meeting but no matter how deep the connection this is a love destined to fail – Otama is the kept woman of a loanshark, and Okada is a medical student with international ambitions. They inhabit different worlds and, as his friend (Jukichi Uno) puts it, this is still the Meiji era, the times will not allow it.

Nevertheless, even if her brief infatuation seems doomed, the mere act of wanting something else provokes a shift in Otama’s way of thinking. This act of fierce individualism which prompts her to defy the dominant male forces in her life whose selfish choices have caused her nothing but misery would normally be severely punished in the name of preserving social harmony but Otama’s epiphany is different. The opening title card reminded us that this was a time wild geese still flew in the skies above Tokyo. It seems to imply that birds no longer fly here, that there is no true freedom or possibility for flight in the modern age of Showa, but Otama is a woman trapped in the cage of Meiji suddenly realising that the doors have been open all along. Her choices amount to a humiliating yet materially comfortable life of subjugation, or the path of individualistic freedom in embracing her true desires. Her dream of true love rescue may have been shattered, but Otama’s heart, at least, is finally free from the twin cages of social and patriarchal oppression.

Screened at BFI as part of the Women in Japanese Melodrama season.