Tag: Shizue Natsukawa

In Search of Mother (瞼の母, Tai Kato, 1962)

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The toxic hyper-masculinity of the yakuza world conspires against a sensitive young man who longs to reclaim his place in society through reuniting with the mother who was forced to abandon him at five years old in Tai Kato’s hugely moving jidaigeki, In Search of Mother (瞼の母, Mabuta no Haha). Adapted from a kabuki play by Shin Hasegawa, Kato’s wandering tale is perfectly tailored for post-war concerns situating itself in a world of mass displacement, economic inequality, and lonely regret in which the secrets of the immediate past have become a threat to the promise of the near future which may then in itself prove unrealisable. 

As the film opens, 25-year-old Chutaro (Kinnosuke Nakamura) is trying to stop his hot-headed friend Hanji (Hiroki Matsukata) from taking revenge on a rival gang on behalf of their boss who is to them something like a father figure. Chutaro reminds Hanji that he has other ties and should think about the mother and sister who wait for him in his hometown to whom he should return and attempt to live an honest life, the possibility of which Chutaro is deprived because he is an orphan with no home or family to turn to. His pleas fall on deaf ears, Hanji reminding him of the code by which they live. “What’s going to happen to my pride as a man?” he exclaims, later telling his mother “I’m not a man if I don’t accept their challenge”. “If that’s the case then don’t be a man” she counters, physically preventing him from leaving as if Hanji were a still a child but to him it seems life is not worth living if you are not accounted a proper “man” by the values of the society in which he lives. When Hanji’s sister Onui (Hitomi Nakahara) attempts to plead for him, the gangsters explain to her that they are trapped too, they cannot return without fulfilling this debt of honour. “That’s not how it works miss, if we let him go after he attacked our boss we won’t be able to survive in our world.” 

Just as Chutaro searches for his long lost mother in order to reclaim his place in mainstream society, he is pursued by the gangsters desperate to redeem themselves through revenge. Eventually arriving in Edo by winter, he adopts the rather unscientific tactic of stopping every middle-aged woman he comes across and asking her if she might once have had a son. The first of these is a blind shamisen player whom he witnesses being cheated by man who makes a point of dropping the coin he was to give her back in his own pouch to make it sound like he paid when he didn’t and then getting indignant when he she calls him on it. The woman gives her age as 50 though looks 20 years older and relates her own sad story of widowhood and a son she had to give up but is not Chutaro’s mother. In any case he gives her a large amount of money out of a kindness he might hope someone would show to his own mother were they in his position. 

He does something similar with the next woman, Otora (Sadako Sawamura), a sex worker, like him ostracised by the world around her, who had a son who died in infancy and is now rejected by a judgemental society for doing the only thing she can to survive. Kato films each of these poignant moments in long unbroken takes tinged with the desperation and loneliness of two people looking for something from the other which in the end they are not able to give each other only find relief in their shared sorrow. Nevertheless the encounters also expose the difficulties faced by women in this era in which they must be dependent on men, the shamisen player suffering in her widowhood and Otora left with no choice than to engage in sex work which then exiles her from society at large just as Chutaro is rendered an outcast because of his yakuza past yet as he later explains what else could a child without parents have done?

This is something which might press heavily on the minds of a post-war audience in which the plight of war orphans and otherwise displaced children was all too familiar. In terms of cinema, the yakuza is often presented as a surrogate family in which orphaned boys can replace unconditional love with the mutual solidarity of a brotherhood defined by highly codified existence. Yet Chutaro longs to repair his connection to mainstream society by finding his mother, carrying around money he has saved in order to help her should he discover that she, like Otora and the shamisen player, is living in poverty. What he did not consider, however, is that she may reject him. Acting from a tip off from Otora he pays a visit to a local store run by Ohama (Michiyo Kogure) who unlike the other women has been able to build an independent life for herself and is preparing to marry off her daughter Otose (Keiko Okawa) to a wealthy merchant’s son. When Chutaro first appears, she assumes he is a conman fed information by Otora, admitting that she once had a son by his name but was told he had died in an epidemic when he was nine. Just as we’d seen her reject Otora lest she expose her sex worker past, she rejects Chutaro in fear that his yakuza ties will ruin her reputation, wreck her daughter’s marriage, and disrupt the comfortable life which she worked so hard to create just at the moment of its fruition. 

“You are suspicious of people because you have wealth” Chutaro points out, making plain the various ways in which economic inequality continues to disrupt the bonds between people. As we discover, Ohama was forced to abandon him because his father was abusive. In that era it would not have been possible to take her son with her and so she made her peace with leaving him but despite herself is now conflicted on witnessing him crying in front of her like a child while afraid to acknowledge him lest it disadvantage her daughter. The problem here is not that her past is shameful or a secret, Otose knows she had an older brother, but the fact that Chutaro has become a yakuza with judgment unfairly placed upon him for simply doing what he could to survive without parents to care for or guide him. Too late, Ohama realises she has made a terrible mistake. She and Otose go out to look for Chutaro but either too hurt by the rejection or having come to believe that he cannot escape his yakuza past, he lets them pass him by resigning himself to the fate of a lonely wanderer. Shot entirely on stage sets more often from mid-height rather than his characteristically low perspective and with additional fluidity mimicing Chutaro’s restless sense of displacement, Kato’s take on this classic tale is a profoundly moving examination of the effects of oppressive social codes on even the most essential of connections. 

The Tattered Wings (遠い雲, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1955)

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“Why can’t a woman have the freedom to pursue her own happiness?” wails an extremely conflicted woman in Keisuke Kinoshita’s The Tattered Wings (遠い雲, Tooi Kumo), though it appears she may have completely misinterpreted the desires of the woman she is speaking to. By 1955, provincial Japan had perhaps returned to a kind of peaceful normality but times were changing here too, just in ways that seem slightly unexpected. In this case, the problem is not curtain twitching grannies keen to enforce the social order, but a pair of young punks hoping to stir up trouble through malicious gossip for motives which are entirely unclear save resentment and desire to rebel against their own lack of prospects in an otherwise rigid society. 

All the trouble starts when brooding intellectual Keizo (Takahiro Tamura) returns from Tokyo for a 10 day visit with his family before taking up a job transfer to Hokkaido after which he claims he will not be able to see them for several years. Before he left, Keizo had been sweet on Fuyuko (Hideko Takamine), but she eventually consented to an arranged marriage to support her parents’ failing business and is now a widow with a small daughter. Though the marriage was abusive, since her husband’s death Fuyuko has been happy in her married home, spending time with her husband’s sensitive younger brother Shunsuke (Keiji Sada) and there is some talk that they may later marry. 

Though this kind of quasi-incestuous union of a widow and her brother-in-law may have fuelled countless other melodramas, it is not the problem here so much as its potential solution. After running into him by chance at her husband’s grave, a strange place to reencounter an old lover, Fuyuko is seen in several places around the town walking and talking with Keizo. There is nothing more to their relationship than that, a man and a woman talking at a respectful distance in public, but the young toughs at the station who always carried a torch for the beautiful Fuyuko decide to start a nasty rumour that there is something improper going on. 

In real terms, of course, there isn’t, but there is a kind of silent pull between Keizo and the lonely Fuyuko that is much more difficult and ambiguous than one might expect it to be. Keizo clearly wants to pick up where they left off, but is intense and awkward, motivated to urgency by the briefness of his stay. He forgets that he’s been gone a long time and Fuyuko is no longer the carefree 19-year-old she was when he left, but the mother of a young girl who claims that she has long since lost the ability to dream. Brutalised by her abusive husband, she is unwilling to stake her hopes on new romance and is wary of becoming a middle-aged woman chasing a return to the past in embracing an idealised first love in flight from its complicated reality. She accuses Keizo of trying to project his own dream of the past onto her, wanting to return to the possibilities of his youth rather than really in love with a woman he now barely knows. 

Meanwhile, Fuyuko is pulled in two directions by her respective families. Her older sister is embittered, resentful of their mother who refused her permission to marry a man she loved because he wasn’t wealthy and they wanted a son to marry in, while her younger sister has herself long carried a torch for Keizo and is acting more out of jealousy than genuine concern. Faced with crisis, the families of both Fuyuko and Keizo affirm that they don’t care what anyone might say about it so long as their children are happy, but the problem is that Fuyuko no longer knows what she wants. Keizo accuses her of tearing off her wings rather than using them to fly, but perhaps what she wanted all along wasn’t an excuse to leave but one to stay. Maybe what she wants isn’t actually what everyone expects it to be, and the permission she’s trying to give herself is the right to be comfortable with a slow and steady kind of love at the side of a patient and compassionate sort of man who’d be content to let her choose and know he’d been her choice. Fuyuko’s wings may be tattered, but she is in a sense pursuing her own happiness in choosing the present over an unrealistic dream of adolescent romance.

Opening and titles (no subtitles)

Growing Up (たけくらべ, Heinosuke Gosho, 1955)

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Gosho Growing UpCaught in a moment of transition, it’s no great mystery that post-war Japanese cinema began to look back at the Meiji past. Progress had indeed been rapid but ended in national tragedy and collective madness. The post-war humanists were eager for a different outcome, to avoid the mistakes of the last fifty years and build a society that was kinder and freer than that which had come before. Though on the surface it might seem as if much had changed since the dawn of a new century, the problems were still the same and a failure to address them only likely to add new tragedies in place of the better future many hoped for. Among the foremost proponents of post-war humanism, Heinosuke Gosho made a rare trip back into the Meiji past in 1955’s Growing Up (たけくらべ, Takekurabe), an adaptation of the well known short story by Ichiyo Higuchi, finding that nothing much had really changed when it came to the fates of women and the poor in an often wilfully indifferent society.

The action opens on the outskirts of the Yoshiwara in 1894. Our heroes are a collection of children who find themselves dealing with typically adolescent problems but also, by modern standards, expected to grow up all too fast. Chief among them is 13-year-old Midori (Hibari Misora) whose sister, Omaki (Keiko Kishi), is the most famous courtesan of the red light district. Although she knows on some level that her parents have already sold her to the brothel owner in whose house they live as servants, Midori has not yet quite processed the full implications of her destiny or that her world of childhood innocence is rapidly drawing to a close. She is in love with a local boy, Shinnyo (Takashi Kitahara), who seems to return her feelings but is as awkward and confused by them as any teenage boy and treats her by turns with coldness and contempt mixed with grudging affection.

Shinnyo, meanwhile, is the son of a greedy and heartless monk (Takamaru Sasaki) who has decided to sell his older sister as a concubine to a wealthy man who already has a wife. As he loves his sister dearly and has a naive, childish sense of absolute morality, this is a sin Shinnyo cannot forgive. He argues with his father but has no real power to change the situation and then decides on rebelling against his father’s wishes that he not become a monk by leaving for the main temple in Kyoto to take holy orders. Of course, this also means he must sacrifice any youthful idea he might have had of pursuing his love for Midori.

The title, in a sense, could refer not only to the increasingly melancholy youngsters coming of age in an oppressive society, but also to Japan itself as it emerged into modernity in an effort to prove itself the equal of any other major power in the late 19th century. It is, however, an ironic a title as any could be. To “grow up” here is to abandon one’s humanity and conform to the kind of “real world” thinking that codifies cruelty and makes a virtue of heartlessness. Still an innocent child, Midori bounces her ball and basks in her somewhat elevated position as a wealthy young girl and sister of a “notorious” woman without fully understanding all that entails. When her sister tells her about a dream she had of climbing trees and picking persimmons, she is incapable of understanding her warning about the loss of innocence she’s about to experience, but her world is brought crashing down when a gang of rival boys rudely attack her and point out that all her finery was bought through “whoring” and that she is nothing more than a “whore” in waiting.

Another of the boys, Sangoro (Masanori Nakamura), whose family is poor, says he can’t wait to be “grown up”, reacting with less than sensitivity to Midori’s pained pleas that she wishes everything could stay as it was and they could be children forever. Sangoro sees adulthood as freedom. He’ll be free to earn his own living and maybe he won’t have to be like his father, too afraid to stand up to people with money because when you don’t have any you’re always reliant on their kindness. Sangoro may be poor, but he’s a man (or will be) and can’t process the total lack of agency that comes with being an adult female whose future is decided entirely by her closest male relative. Midori, like Shinnyo’s sister, has been sold by her father and there’s nothing she or anyone else can do about it now.

Nevertheless, confronted by her fate, Midori decides to own it. She encourages her parents to think of her as dead, cooly hitting back at their callousness but acknowledging an obligation as she goes. The final scenes preceding her passage across the small bridge which will forever sever her from her childhood are filled with dread and anger as if crying out for someone to stop the inevitable from happening, but of course, no one can. An old woman and former courtesan, Okichi (Isuzu Yamada), who owns a shop where Midori used to spend time and is indirectly responsible for Midori’s acceptance of her fate in some cruel, drunken words she threw at her, puts it best when she briefly feels as if she could have done something in affirming that it isn’t her fault, and it isn’t Midori’s, it’s simply “the world”.

Midori meets her fate not with resignation but rage and defiance. Shinnyo, who runs away from his inability to help his sister by becoming a monk, is forever incapable of declaring his real feelings in words but leaves a flower in front of her window in echo of another he gave her long ago. At first Midori picks it up and cherishes it for the innocent symbol of love that it is, but by the time she has travelled half way along the bridge which will take her to the Yoshiwara, she has realised this kind of innocence does not belong inside. She throws the flower to the mud and leaves her youthful dreams of love and happiness behind as she prepares to step through the doorway into a future which is not of her making and over which she has no say. To “grow up”, in this world, is a kind of spiritual death in which there exists nothing other than emptiness and indifference.

Thus Another Day (今日もまたかくてありなん, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1959)

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Thus Another Day vertical bannerThe cinema of the immediate post-war era, contrary to expectation, is generally hopeful and filled with the spirit of industry. Keisuke Kinoshita might be thought of as the primary proponent of post-war humanism in his fierce defence of the power of human goodness, but looking below the surface he’s also among the most critical of what the modern Japan was becoming, worried about a gradual loss of values in an increasingly consumerist society which refuses to deal with its wartime trauma in favour of burying itself in intense forward motion.

The housewife at the centre of Thus Another Day (今日もまたかくてありなん, Kyo mo mata Kakute ari nan), Yasuko (Yoshiko Kuga), is a perfect example of this internal conflict. She and her husband Shoichi (Teiji Takahashi) have built a modest house way out of the city in the still underdeveloped suburbs for which they are still burdened by an oppressive mortgage. Shoichi has a regular job as an entry level salaryman but his pay is extremely low and Yasuko is forced to scrimp and save just to get by. The central conflict occurs one summer when Shoichi’s boss declares he’s looking to rent a summer house in the quiet area where the family live. Shoichi thinks it would be a great idea to rent out their house to his boss earning both money and favour. Yasuko can go stay with her family who live in a pleasant resort town while he will stay with a friend in a city apartment. Yasuko does not really like the idea, but ends up going along with it.

Shoichi is trying to live the salaryman dream, but it isn’t really going anywhere. Yasuko is home alone all day with the couple’s small son, Kazuo, who is too young to understand why the family lives the way it does and continuously asks probing questions which upset and embarrass his mother. Watching her painstakingly washing clothes by hand, Kazuo wants to know why they don’t have an electric washing machine like some of his friends’ mothers do. Yasuko tells him they’re saving money to get one, at which point he pipes up that he personally would rather have a TV set. Like his father, he is rather self-centred but being only four can perhaps be forgiven. Nevertheless, Yasuko is constantly embarrassed by the family’s relative poverty. When another neighbour spots her out shopping and decides to accompany her, she is visibly distressed that the stall she takes her to is a little more expensive than the one she had in mind. Wanting to save face, she buys expensive fish but is mindful of there being less money for the rest of the week.

Meanwhile, Shoichi is obsessed with “getting ahead” by ingratiating himself with his bosses – hence why he decided to let out his own house over the summer. The house is, after all, Yasuko’s domain and she perhaps feels family atmosphere isn’t something you should be selling. She resents that the family will be split up over the summer even if it gives her an opportunity to visit her mother and sister out in the country. Even when Shochi arrives to visit, he makes them trot out to a neighbouring town to visit his boss’ wife also on holiday in the area, and stays there all day playing mahjong while Yasuko and Kazuo are bored out of their minds sitting idly by. The second time he doesn’t even bother to invite them.

The small resort town itself is something of a haven from the demands of the city but there is trouble and strife even here. Shortly after her arrival Yasuko meets a strange, rather sad middle-aged man who is a stay at home dad to his beloved little girl, Yoko. Takemura (Nakamura Kanzaburo XVIII) came of age in the militarist era, attending a military university to become one of the elite. The world changed on him and he remains unable to reconcile himself to the demands of the post-war society. Experiencing extreme survivor’s guilt, Takemura is filled with regret and resentment towards the ruined dreams of his misguided youth in which he abandoned a woman he loved to marry a wealthy man’s daughter who he has also let down by refusing his military pension, forcing her into the world of work and eventually onto the fringes of the sex trade as a hard drinking bar girl.

As if to underscore the looming danger, a thuggish gang of yakuza have also decided to spend the summer in the resort, holing up at the inn where Takemura’s wife is working. The young guys terrorise the youngsters of the town, disrupting the well established social hierarchy with acts of violence and intimidation. The punks cause particular consternation to Takemura who remembers all the men their age who went to war and never came back only for the successive generation to live like this. Having lost everything which made his life worth living, Takemura decides to take a stand against modern disorder, hoping to die in battle the way he feels he ought to have done all those years ago.

Thus Another Day is among the darkest of Kinoshita’s post-war dramas, suggesting that there really is no hope and that past innocence really has been lost for good. The values of Takemura’s youth, however, would not perhaps line up particularly well with those most often advanced in Kinoshita’s cinema, as kind and melancholy as he seems to be. Yasuko goes back to her crushing world of unfulfillable aspirations with her obsequious husband and demanding son with only gentle wind chimes to remind her of happier days while she tries to reaccommodate herself to the soullessness of post-war consumerism .

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Night Drum (夜の鼓, Tadashi Imai, 1958)

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night-drum

The works of Chikamatsu Monzaemon continue to have a large influence over Japanese drama even if not as frequently and directly adapted as they were in the immediate post-war period. Famous for tales of tragic love suicides and romantic heroes who risk all in the service of deep emotion, Chikamatsu’s works perhaps found even greater resonance in the turbulent years in which individual freedom and adherence to tradition found themselves in even greater conflict than ever before. Tadashi Imai makes the most of Chikamatsu’s melancholy fatalism to take a sword to the samurai order itself with all of its arcane rules and the essential hypocrisy which underlines its cruelty.

Hikokuro Ogura (Rentaro Mikuni) has been in Edo for a year with the shogun and is now on his way home. Stopping at an inn, he has a low level argument with his brother-in-law who warns him the men are getting restless and need to blow off some steam preferably with some sake. Hikokuro is in charge of the purse strings and knows all of this pageantry costs money the clan do not quite have hence he’s reluctant to fritter it away on alcohol no matter how much the men might resent him for it.

That’s not to say Hikokuro is a particularly officious person, he’s kind and cheerful by nature but also tired and eager to get home after such a long time away. His wife, Otane (Ineko Arima), is very happy to see him but something seems different about her and there’s a tension in the air among some of the other women. It seems, there are rumours about Otane and a travelling musician (Masayuki Mori) who frequented the house during the summer while Hikokuro was away. Rumours are often just that, especially in these petty circles of nobility, but female adultery is punishable by death and so is not something to be gossiped about idly.

Night Drum (夜の鼓, Yoru no Tsuzumi) begins with the ominous sound of the drum itself, beating out the inevitably tragic fate of all concerned with a melancholy fatality. The tale proceeds in a procedural fashion as the authorities become involved, hearing witness testimonies and trying to discover if there could be any truth at all in these unpleasant rumours. Matters are further complicated by the pecuniary difficulties the clan currently finds itself in – the elders are half hoping it is true because it would be a good excuse to expel the Ogura household and thereby save the money which goes on its upkeep. They are aware, however, that they’re talking about the life of a previously unblemished woman as well as the ruin of her extended family.

The life of a retainer is not as easy as it sounds and we’re constantly reminded of just how much money is necessary to keep up appearances. The clan authorities are dismayed when they hear of Otane earning money on the side through needlework though other retainers are quick to confess their wives also help out, they just can’t survive on such meagre stipends. Each lord is required to hire servants as befits their status but they aren’t given the money to do so. Hikokuro is also required to serve the shogun in Edo every other year for at least twelve months meaning Otane is left alone at home with almost nothing other than her needlework to do except wait patiently for her husband’s return.

Given these circumstances, it’s easy to understand how such pernicious rumours might begin. The sole basis of the evidence seems to rest on a tip off that Otane is thought to have been alone in a room with a man who is not her husband. That she may be put to death solely for the crime of sharing the same space as someone of the opposite sex seems extreme, but this is the feudal world where rules and propriety are all. The men can cavort with geishas to their heart’s content, but Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.

The action unfolds piecemeal as each of the various witnesses offers their testimony of events. Given the gravity of the situation, few are eager to recount their suspicions – especially the other women who fear the rumour may be true but are also unwilling to believe it. Hikokuro does not want to believe it either but faced with such convincing, if circumstantial, evidence doubt creeps into his mind and finds an anchor in Otane’s guilt ridden behaviour. Ironically, this entire situation developed only because of Otane’s attempts to avoid it – remaining at an inn rather than travelling with a man on the road only for one of her husband’s friends to attempt to rape and blackmail her. Having had far too much to drink in an attempt to steel her nerves and cover up the embarrassing assault, Otane finds herself at the mercy of man who should have known better than to take advantage of another man’s wife in such a moment of weakness.

One stupid mistake born of alcohol, loneliness, and a series of male betrayals is enough to bring down the social order all on its own. Rentaro Mikuni plays the part of the previously affable wounded spouse with an exceptional level of nuance as he accepts his part in his wife’s downfall thanks to the the circumstances of their lives which have kept them apart and left her at the mercy of untrustworthy lords. There is anger here, and shame, but there is still love too which only makes the inevitable outcome all the more painful for everyone concerned. Hikokuro plays the part he’s expected to play, but it pains him and you can’t wipe a slate clean with blood. Imai has his eyes firmly on the civilised society with all of its rigid yet often cruel and unfair rules for living. Shot with a kind of hypnotic dreaminess in which each of our unfortunate players is swept along by events they are powerless to influence, Night Drum beats out the death knell of those who allow their individual desires to overwhelm their “civilised” conformity but it does so with a rhythm that is filled with anger rather than sorrow, for those who are forced to leave half their lives unlived in maintenance of the very system which oppresses them.

Love Letter (恋文, Kinuyo Tanaka, 1953)

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Love-Letter-1953-film-images-d67cf443-345f-409e-9cdb-26f20177f50Kinuyo Tanaka was one of the most successful actresses of the pre-war years well known for her work with celebrated director Kenji Mizoguchi including several of his most critically acclaimed works such as Sansho the Bailiff, Ugetsu, and The Life of Oharu. However, post-war Japan was a very different place and Tanaka had a different kind of ambition. With 1953’s Love Letter (恋文, Koibumi) she became Japan’s second ever female feature film director, though her working and personal relationship with Mizoguchi ended when he attempted to block her access to the Director’s Guild of Japan. No one quite knows why he did this and he tried to go back on it later but the damage was done, Tanaka never forgave him for this very public betrayal. Whatever Mizoguchi may have been thinking, he was very wrong indeed – Tanaka’s first venture behind the camera is an extraordinarily interesting one which is not only a technically solid production but actively seeks a new kind of Japanese cinema.

Based on the novel by Fumio Niwa and scripted by another of Tanaka’s frequent collaborators Keisuke Kinoshita, Love Letter takes place around 1950 just as the post-war chaos was beginning to settle down allowing individual trauma to come to the surface for the very first time. Our “hero” is Reikichi Mayumi (Masayuki Mori) – a melancholy naval veteran living with his brother Hiroshi (Juzo Dosan) and eking out a living as a translator of French literature. He spends his days hanging round train stations looking for a familiar face and constantly rereading a letter from his childhood sweetheart which informs him that, against her own wishes, she is shortly to be married to someone else. Michiko is apparently now a war widow, but despite his best efforts Reikichi has not been able to find her since being repatriated.

One day he runs into an old naval friend, Yamaji (Jukichi Uno), who has an interesting job. He drafts love letters in English and French from Japanese girls to the faithless foreigners who have abandoned them and returned home. Yamaji has developed an affection for some of these desperate women and tries to help them as much as he can with fatherly advice as he writes heartrending messages designed to get that guilt cash rolling back to Japan. Reikichi is not as well disposed the girls who he feels have sold themselves to the enemy but soon begins working there too. One fateful day, he hears a familiar voice.

Whereas you might expect this to be the end of a conventional movie, it’s only really the beginning. After a desperate chase to the train station Reikichi catches up with Michiko (Yoshiko Kuga) in a beautifully filmed, emotionally powerful scene which frames them both in a closing train door, momentarily eclipsed as it moves away. However, the elation soon fades as Reikichi’s rather backward thinking kicks in and he dwells on the reason Michiko was in the shop in the first place. After having longed for her, searching endlessly for five years, he can’t bring himself to accept this Michiko who he sees as “polluted” by her relations with an American soldier. He says some extremely cruel, and in fact unforgivable, things which Michiko accepts with a deeply internalised sense of guilt and shame. It looks as if the long awaited romantic reunion is not to take place after all.

Tanaka’s point of view is about as progressive as it was possible to be, but there is an ongoing conflict in the film in regards to its portrayal of the post-war “pan-pan” phenomenon. Great pains are taken to separate Michiko from the ranks of other desperate women who found themselves reliant on the occupying forces for their survival. Michiko became the mistress of an American man, bearing and losing his child, and though she wonders herself if it makes a difference that it was one American man and not several, the film definitely thinks it does. Later on she meets a group of women who are more obviously prostitutes and former friends whom she tries to avoid but the attitude to these women is far less sympathetic. At once we’re told that we shouldn’t judge Michiko for having done what she needed to do to survive, but we are being invited to judge these other women, all the while being reminded that Michiko is not like them.

Reikichi, however, is firmly painted as being in the wrong especially when compared to his cheerfully pragmatic brother and down to earth friend. Everybody tells him he’s being unreasonable and attempting to punish himself by also punishing Michiko for a series of things that are no one’s fault, but Reikichi persists in his oddly romanticised, absolutist way of thinking. It is he who will need to change, become less rigid and more empathetic but there is still the idea that Michiko’s past is something to be “forgiven”, and therefore a pre-determined view that she has acted in a morally incorrect way and is paying for it now.

Interestingly, Tanaka undermines the film’s inherently melodramatic quality by choosing to end on a note of ambiguous anxiety. A decision seems to have been reached, yet it is a tentative one and there will be difficulties along the way. This is new and different world, filled with broken and damaged people. A better one is possible but won’t happen with a heartfelt apology over a hospital bed, it will require a long process of mutual understanding and empathy though the wounds themselves may never be entirely healed. Tanaka’s debut is a daring wonder filmed with true visual flair and an unusual degree of assuredness. A sympathetic look at the bubbling trauma of the post-war environment, Love Letter approaches its subjects with extreme sensitivity and the hope that love and forgiveness are possible, but they will require hard work and a willingness to embrace them.

The first Japanese feature film to be directed by a woman was completed by Tazuko Sakane in 1936. Mizoguchi actually gave her a start in the industry and she was able to keep working during in the war by making documentaries as part of the Manchurian Film Association. Once the war ended she was barred from further directorial opportunites because she didn’t have a university degree and returned to continuity and editing roles at Shochiku until she retired in 1962, never making another feature film. Kinuyo Tanaka was a little luckier in this regard and was able to make a few more features becoming the first woman able to have a career in film directing through she also continued acting in other people’s films and on television until the 1970s.