Tag: Suketaro Inokai

Dawn Chorus (暁の合唱, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1941)

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“Before me flows a wide and serene river of life,” a young woman writes in an unexpectedly poetic essay, “I beg you to pray for my just and happy future.” Yet Tomoko (Michiyo Kogure) does appear to be pretty happy with her choice, even if the just future she’s forging for herself might not be what others see as just. Though she cites her family’s poverty and a minor disability as her reason for giving up on education, there seems to be another side of her that eagerly embraces independence and looks for it in unexpected places.

That would be her desire to become a bus driver, an occupation then thought to be inherently masculine. Perhaps in that way, it reflects her desire to be in control of her own destiny, while her apparent love of life on the bus hints at another for travel and ever-expanding horizons. Another of Shimizu’s travelling films, he often as in Mr Thank You includes scenes shot through the bus’ rear window including that of a flock of boys off to school on their bikes that makes Tomoko think of her stepbrother Ginjiro (Giichi Okita) who has a voracious appetite despite their family’s poverty. There are indeed all kinds of people who get on the bus, including, at one point, a melancholy woman in a bridal outfit who nevertheless pitches in when the bus gets stick in a ditch and needs a push. Tomoko fixes the bride’s makeup and gives her her compact, but there’s no avoiding the fact that she looks miserable despite the joy of the older women accompanying her.

Even Tomoko remarks that she isn’t sure whether her tears were in joy or sorrow even while wishing her a broad-shouldered husband. Later the bus catches her again trailing behind the man to whom she was married, older than her and not particularly handsome, pulling a cart. She still doesn’t look very happy, and is presumably bound for a life of drudgery over which she has little say. Her fate contrasts with that of Tomoko who is actively choosing her way forward even if the bride’s plight forces Tomoko to think about marriage and her womanhood as does the birth of a baby on the bus. Everyone is always telling Tomoko that she ought to get married quickly, and not least among them Eiko (Kiyoko Hirai) who declares herself tired by life. Working for a newspaper, she had apparently been the girlfriend of Saburo (Toshiaki Konoe) whose late brother once owned the company while now he runs a cinema. Saburo has apparently tired of her, though he appears to have developed a fondness for Tomoko which might seem slightly problematic to modern eyes because of Tomoko’s relative youth while she is in the process of coming of age and into herself uncertain if marriage is even something that she’s interested in.

On the other hand, her tomboyish qualities leave her in a slightly liminal space as reflected in her desire to become a driver, rather than a conductress. In learning to drive, she mostly wears trousers while Eiko remarks on her “big hands” and she prides herself on her physical strength when engaging in an impromptu arm wrestling match with Yoneko (Hiroko Kawasaki), the widow of Saburo’s brother who now manages the bus company and has a crush on handsome driver Ukita (Shin Saburi) who also had to drop out of university for undisclosed reasons. Tomoko loses the match because she’s overcome by tears without really knowing why, which might in its way be a manifestation of her returning femininity along with her maturity, but there’s also something strangely transgressive about the scene featuring two women under mosquito net randomly arm-wrestling in the middle of the night.

Nevertheless, Tomoko’s life seems otherwise happy and pretty care free even if there are signs of corruption all around her. One of her first challenges while working as a conductress is an old woman (Choko Iida) who tries to get out of paying. It seems like the old woman probably can’t really afford to pay, but puts on a show of having tried to cheat them deliberately to save face. She suggests to Tomoko that she simply neglect to punch a ticket and pocket the money she’s already given her, until the bus driver, a man, gets out to exert his authority and tell her off despite Tomoko’s offer to make up the shortfall out of her own money. Later it’s discovered that two of the other conductresses have been made unhappy enough to consider quitting their jobs and are deliberately avoiding riding with one particular driver because he’s forcing them to embezzle ticket money in this way on his behalf, hinting at a kind of greed and immorality that might not necessarily be motivated by abject poverty.

It is though a presence Tomoko is able to dispel, bringing on Kimie (Chiyoko Fumiya) as her own conductress when she finally becomes a driver in her own right. Though the film hints at her feelings for Saburo, it does not end on marriage but with Tomoko’s personal fulfilment if tempered by the idea that a woman must now be useful and productive in the wider world while the men are away which might be how it gets around the censors despite otherwise avoiding overtly patriotic or imperialistic themes. Based on a novel by Yojiro Ishizaka, the film rather validates Tomoko’s desire to take charge of her life and drive off towards the future as an independent woman.

Sayon’s Bell (サヨンの鐘, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1943)

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Like all directors of his era, Hiroshi Shimizu made a series of National Policy propaganda films though he was often able to circumvent their requirements by focussing on themes that interested him more directly such as teamwork or childhood. Sayon’s Bell (サヨンの鐘, Sayon no Kane) is however an unavoidably propagandist film filled with praise for the Japanese empire and to modern eyes incredibly problematic in its depictions of the indigenous peoples of Taiwan many of whom did “volunteer” to serve in the Japanese imperial army a notable example being that of Li Kuang-hui who was the last Japanese soldier to be discovered hiding in the Indonesian jungle in 1974 having been recruited from the Amis people.

The film opens with a lengthy series of title cards explaining that the film is dedicated to the Takasago Volunteers, “Takasago” being, aside from the title of a famous noh play, the name Japanese gave to the indigenous people of Taiwan believing them to have been “civilised” by Japanese rule. Thus in the opening sequences, we see the role of the Japanese military personnel as essentially paternal. They are policemen, doctors, teachers, instructors, and directors of construction who are dedicated to raising the aboriginal people to level of Japanese citizens through forced assimilation. 

Inspired by a real life incident that also inspired a popular song of an indigenous woman who drowned in a river while carrying the belongings of a Japanese policeman, the film uses the titular Sayon as an arbiter of Japaneseness enhanced by the casting of Li Koran, later known as Shirley Yamaguchi/Yamaguchi Yoshiko, who was actually Japanese but presented as Chinese in the propaganda cinema of the time having been born in Machuria and fluent in Mandarin. Somewhat awkwardly given that Sayon is supposed to be an indigenous woman herself, she is the one schooling the local children in how to be Japanese reminding them that they should “use Japanese properly” rather than their indigenous language and praising one young boy for abandoning his indigenous name and adopting that of “Taro” instead. Japanese rule in Taiwan was not as oppressive as it was in the other parts of the empire and they did have some local support thanks to their investments in infrastructure and modernisation. Nevertheless, they did attempt to enforce the use of the Japanese language and the taking of Japanese names though it should also be noted that the KMT government did exactly the same thing only with Mandarin when it gained control of the island. 

That aside the indigenous people were often treated poorly in comparison to the rest of the of the population and we can see that the framing of them is often racist and derogatory such as when an abandoned baby is taken to the police and they remark that the indigenous community have too many children and they all look alike. The eligible men from the village, including Sayon’s love interest Saburo (Hatsu Shimazaki), have been sent to Japan for a kind of militarist re-education and are eagerly awaiting their opportunity to serve the emperor in the army. Though this may seem surprising, it apparently reflects a real fervour among indigenous men who were convinced to enlist by the money on offer and a campaign of rumours that suggested men who did not do so were unmanly and therefore unattractive to the local women. When the first round of volunteers is selected, a great amount of time is given to consoling the men who were not chosen many of whom protest and plead to volunteer their services. 

In an effort to inject some drama the film includes a love triangle between Sayon, Saburo, and Mona (Kenzo Nakagawa) who is said to be moody out of jealousy and unrequited love for Sayon but later reveals he was only jealous of Saburo in respect of playing second fiddle to him as a worthy man of the village again eager to serve the Japanese emperor. Led by Li Koran, there are several renditions of a patriotic war song singing the praises of the Taiwanese army that read that like a call to arms, though the audience for this film is certainly domestic and it seems unlikely that it would be screened in these mountain villages in Taiwan.

The first part of the film is basically ethnography featuring picturesque scenes of the local scenery and footage of the indigenous people living the “simple, peaceful life” patronisingly described in the opening titles while there is some exoticisation of the aboriginal culture in the elaborate costumes and scenes of indigenous rituals. Perhaps the most shocking aspect is that Sayon is encouraged to break a traditional taboo by entering a sacred lake where women are forbidden to go lest they anger the god Uttofu. With her new cultural re-education, Sayon thinks Uttofu is a myth and goes to the lake to help Saburo assess it because the Japanese are planning to drain it to create a rice paddy. For this she is expected to drown herself in the water to placate Uttofu and is urged to do so by the tribal elders with the Japanese basically agreeing with them deciding that they should catch an animal to sacrifice and if that doesn’t work, while it’s “unfortunate”, Sayon should indeed hurl herself into the lake if the for the good of the empire rather than Uttofu. 

It is quite odd to think that the Japanese military personnel would go along with human sacrifice rather than clamp down on a practice they would otherwise term backward, though in that light it’s impossible not to see her later death by drowning as a rejection of the “modernity” the colonial authorities represent and a re-assertion of indigenous culture. The bell referenced in the title refers to one given to the village to commemorate the incident bearing an inscription of Sayon’s name. When the KMT gained control of Taiwan, they erased the inscription on the bell and removed it as a symbol of Japanese rule though it was later restored after the end of martial law and the monument re-erected beside the bridge which was also named “Sayon’s Bridge” in a evocation of the complicated relationships between the three nations. The film is however rather uncomplicated in its themes which to modern eyes prove extremely unpalatable despite the often beautiful cinematography capturing the idyllic Taiwanese countryside.

Sayon’s Bell screens at the Museum of the Moving Image May 11 as part of Hiroshi Shimizu Part I: The Shochiku Years.

Notes of an Itinerant Performer (歌女おぼえ書, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1941)

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notes-on-an-itinerant-performerFilmed in 1941, Notes of an Itinerant Performer (歌女おぼえ書, Utajo Oboegaki ) is among the least politicised of Shimizu’s output though its odd, domestic violence fuelled, finally romantic resolution points to a hardening of his otherwise progressive social ideals. Neatly avoiding contemporary issues by setting his tale in 1901 at the mid-point of the Meiji era as Japanese society was caught in a transitionary phase, Shimizu similarly casts his heroine adrift as she decides to make a break with the hand fate dealt her and try her luck in a more “civilised” world.

At 25 years old, Uta (Yaeko Mizutani) jumps ships from one acting company to another having been promised better work by a roguish fellow performer. Tired of the strenuous life of travelling from village to village, putting on folk plays and street performances, Uta is thinking of quitting the business and looking for a job as a maid or something similar which is at least in the same place everyday. In a stroke of luck, she comes into contact with a kindly tea merchant who takes pity on her and suggests she come to live with him where she can teach his teenage daughter how to dance.

Uta becomes a member of the Hiramatsu household but not all of the inhabitants are as generous of spirit as Mr. Hiramatsu (Hideo Fujino) himself. The oldest son is away at college but the daughter, Nuiko (Kyoko Asagiri), has no interest in learning to dance and resents her father’s “adoption” of such a “common” woman. Youngest son Jiro (Haruhiko Tsuda) is similarly unimpressed with Uta’s presence, making her new home less than welcoming. To make matters worse, Mr. Hiramatsu abruptly dies leaving his business and household in disarray. Oldest son Shotaro (Ken Uehara) returns and feels as if he ought to abandon his studies and take over the company, but as a student he has no experience of running a business and lacks his father’s knowledge of the tea industry. Uta encourages him to return to university and finish his studies if only so that the prestige of a degree might help him later if he decides to restart the business. She also volunteers to act as a guardian for Jiro and Nuiko though Shotaro is wary seeing as they know each other so little. He then makes a surprising suggestion – that he and Uta marry, making it perfectly natural that she take care of everything at home while he’s away studying in the city.

Like many a Shimizu hero, Mr. Hiramatsu is a good hearted man but perhaps lacking in practical skills. Though he seemed to be prosperous and successful, the business was on the rocks and he dies leaving a number of debts behind him and total admin chaos for Shotaro as there is no clear successor to keep the business running in Mr. Hiramatsu’s absence. Luckily for Uta, Shotaro is also a kindhearted man like his father (in contrast to his siblings) and has no desire to suddenly throw her out when his father promised to look after her. He is, however, at a loss as of how to take care of everyone with no money coming in.

Even before Mr. Hiramatsu died, not everyone was happy about his decision to take in a travelling performer and an old friend begins to warn him about the danger of rumours. Friend of the family Kajikawa feels he has a stake in this as he intends his daughter Ayako to marry Shotaro and thinks it’s a done deal (though Mr. Hiramatsu does not seem particularly wedded to the idea). Ayako and Nuiko are also good friends and Ayako does seem like the ideal bride for Shotaro as a member of his own social class and a business connection for the family. Shotaro, however, proposes to Uta without really thinking things through. It is, in one sense, a purely practical decision but one that is likely to meet with a degree of social opposition.

Uta left her life as a travelling performer because she wanted something more conventional. Her mother died when she was six and she never knew her father. Her only happy memory of family is the time spent with her grandmother who died when she was twelve. Uta resents her lack of status as a member of a lowly order of entertainers and longs for something grander but has also internalised a deep seated sense of inferiority. Hence when Jiro and his school friends refer to her as a “monster” living in the house, she half accepts their prejudiced view of her. Nevertheless, she wants to honour the kindness that Mr. Hiramatsu offered her and also deeply respects his son, Shotaro, possibly even developing romantic feelings for him. Despite continuing to feel herself unworthy, Uta does the unthinkable by almost singlehandedly resurrecting the tea business when presented with an opportunity from a foreign company. Even after becoming a formidable business woman and winning the respect of Nuiko and affection of Jiro, Uta still feels herself out of place in the mercantile world and ultimately opts to leave in order to pave the way for the “proper” union of Ayako and Shotaro.

When Shotaro and Uta meet again she tells him that she left because she found his middle class world of “decency” too rigid and full of dull formality. Her “housewife” life was a hard one – getting up early, no smoking, no drinking. At least as a travelling performer she can sleep in and have her share of fun. This produces a quite shocking and strange scene in which Shotaro strikes Uta violently, knocking her to the floor. He repeats his earlier promise to marry her and invites her to come home as his wife, a “decent” woman, and full member of his social class whatever anyone else might have to say about it. Shotaro is apparently a man of his word but there is real feeling implied in his actions as opposed to duty or obligation. Nevertheless, this quite surprising scene of domestic violence used as a tool of coercion does not speak to Shotaro’s otherwise kindly personality and undercuts the “romantic”, if melodramatic, quality of the scene. This may be another instance of Shimizu’s aversion to romantic resolutions or romance as a solution to crisis, but one expects better from a director generally so keen to underline the hardships faced by women in his society.

Despite being filmed well into the era of the talkies and long after Shimizu himself had made the jump to sound, Notes of an Itinerant Performer makes use of frequent intertitles setting the scene or providing explanatory background material. Conversely, it also anticipates a more recent trend by allowing the discussions between the “American” (actually heavily accented European) and his interpreter to take place in English with Japanese sidetitles for parts not subsequently translated in the dialogue. In fact, this broadly positive foreign presence seems an odd inclusion for the fraught political world of 1941 (the film was released in March, just nine months before outright hostilities would commence with the USA which had been effecting a series of trade sanctions with the expansionist nation since 1938) even if the deal itself is taking place in the comparatively more open society of 1901.

In many ways about transitionary periods both in terms of society and of the self, Notes of an Itinerant Perfomer seems conflicted right up until its “Reader, I married him” inspired intertitle. Uta crosses a class border, transcending her lowly origins through selfless sacrifice, pure heartedness, and perseverance yet finally she is dragged across by violence and condescension rather than self acceptance or personal transformation. Filled with ambiguity, Notes of an Itinerant Performer reflects the uncertainties of its times and is noticeably less forgiving than Shimizu’s general outlook as its problematic finale demonstrates.

 

Star Athlete (花形選手, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1937)

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vlcsnap-2016-09-23-01h52m32s055Japan in 1937 – film is propaganda, yet Hiroshi Shimizu once again does what he needs to do in managing to pay mere lip service to his studio’s aims. Star Athlete (花形選手, Hanagata senshu) is, ostensibly, a college comedy in which a group of university students debate the merits of physical vs cerebral strength and the place of the individual within the group yet it resolutely refuses to give in to the prevailing narrative of the day that those who cannot or will not conform must be left behind.

Seki (Shuji Sano) is the star of the athletics club and shares a friendly rivalry with his best friend Tani (Chishu Ryu). Tani likes to train relentlessly but Seki thinks that winning is the most important thing and perhaps it’s better to be adequately rested to compete at full strength. While the two of them are arguing about the best way to be productive, their two friends prefer to settle the matter by sleeping. The bulk of the action takes place as the guys take part in a military training exercise which takes the form of a long country march requiring an overnight stay in a distant town. The interpersonal drama deepens as Seki develops an interest in a local girl who may or may not be a prostitute, casting him into disrepute with his teammates though he’s ultimately saved by Tani (in an unconventional way).

Far from the austere and didactic nature of many similarly themed films, Shimizu allows his work to remain playful and even a little slapsticky towards the end. These are boys playing at war, splashing through lakes and waving guns around but it’s all fun to them. Their NCO maybe taking things much more seriously but none of these men is actively anticipating that this is a real experience meant to prepare them for the battlefield, just a kind of fun camping trip that they’re obliged to go on as part of their studies. The second half of the trip in which the NCO comes up with a scenario that they’re attempting to rout a number of survivors from a previous battle can’t help but seem ridiculous when their “enemies” are just local townspeople trying to go about their regular business but now frightened thinking the students are out for revenge for ruining their fun the night before.

That said, the boys do pick up some female interest in the form of a gaggle of young women who are all very taken with their fine uniforms. The women continue to track them on their way with a little of their interest returned from the young men (who are forbidden to fraternise). Singing propaganda songs as they go, the troupe also inspires a group of young boys hanging about in the village who try to join in, taken in by Tani’s mocking chant of “winning is the best” and forming a mini column of their own. After this (retrospectively) worrying development which points out the easy spread of patriotic militarism, the most overtly pro-military segment comes right at the end with an odd kind of celebration for one of the men who has received his draft card and will presumably be heading out to Manchuria and a situation which will have little in common with the pleasant boy scout antics of the previous few days.

Physical prowess is the ultimate social marker and Seki leads the pack yet, when he gets himself into trouble, his NCO reminds him that “even stars must obey the rules” and threatens to expel him though relents after Tani takes the opportunity to offer a long overdue sock to the jaw which repairs the boys’ friendship and prevents Seki being thrown out of the group. Seki’s individuality is well and truly squashed in favour of group unity though Shimizu spares us a little of his time to also point out the sorrow of the young woman from the inn, left entirely alone, excluded from all groups as the students leave.

Employing the same ghostly, elliptical technique of forward marching dissolves to advance along the roadway that proved so effective during Mr. Thank you, Shimizu makes great use of location shooting to follow the young men on the march. Though the final scene is once again a humorous one as the two sleepyheaded lazybones attempt to keep pace with the front runners, the preceding scene is another of Shimizu’s favourite sequences of people walking along a road and disappearing below a hill, singing as they go. However, rather than the cheerful, hopeful atmosphere this conveyed in Shiinomi School there is a feeling of foreboding in watching these uniformed boys march away singing, never to reappear. Shimizu casts the “training exercise” as a silly adolescent game in which women and children are allowed to mockingly join in, but he also undercuts the irony with a subtle layer of discomfort that speaks of a disquiet about the road that these young men are marching on, headlong towards an uncertain future.

 

Street Without End (限りなき舗道, Mikio Naruse, 1934)

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Street Witout EndNaruse’s final silent movie coincided with his last film made at Shochiku where his down to earth artistry failed to earn him the kind of acclaim that the big hitters like Ozu found with studio head Shiro Kido. Street Without End (限りなき舗道, Kagirinaki Hodo) was a project no one wanted. Adapted from a popular newspaper serial about the life of a modern tea girl in contemporary Tokyo, it smacked a little of low rent melodrama but after being given the firm promise that after churning out this populist piece he could have free reign on his next project, Naruse accepted the compromise. Unfortunately, the agreement was not honoured and Naruse hightailed it to Photo Chemical Laboratories (later Toho) where he spent the next thirty years.

Although Street Without End is a conventional melodrama in many senses, it’s also quite a complex one playing with multilayered dualities and symbolic devices. After beginning with some brief pillow shots of the real city streets, we meet the stars of the show, Sugiko and Kesako, who are both waitresses in a local tea room. Whilst walking together, Sugiko is presented with an offer from a movie studio currently looking for new talent but isn’t really convinced, though the money would come in handy for her younger brother’s college tuition. A little while later she gets another offer from her boyfriend, Harada, who wants to get married as his parents are trying to pressure him into an arranged marriage at home. Sugiko agrees but is knocked over by a car on her way to meet him with the result that Harada thinks she’s changed her mind and goes home alone. Slowly she grows closer to the man who knocked her over, Yamanouchi, and eventually marries him instead but quickly finds herself out of place in his upperclass world.

Kesako, by contrast, ends up picking up on Sugiko’s job offer and joining the studio herself. She takes her unsuccessful artist boyfriend with her though their relationship suffers as she falls in with the studio crowd. Both women get what they thought they wanted, only to discover it to be not what they wanted at all.

Sugiko’s story is the main thrust of the narrative as she marries up through misfortune after Yamanouchi carelessly runs her over. He himself plays the part of the sensitive nobleman who’s bullied by his more conservative mother and sister who’ve picked out a girl exactly like them for him to marry. In a gesture that’s probably born out of rebellion rather than love, Yamanouchi brings Sugiko home as his wife but then leaves her to the mercy of the people he most feared himself. An ordinary working class woman, Sugiko quickly angers her mother in law by treating the servants like actual people and not having the poise expected of a Yamanouchi wife. Yamanouchi is too soft to defend himself, let alone his choice of wife, and so Sugiko’s life eventually becomes untenable sending Yamanouchi off the rails with it. Naruse includes a less than subtle intertitle here which states “EVEN TODAY, FEUDAL NOTIONS OF FAMILY CRUSH THE PURE LOVE OF YOUNG PEOPLE IN JAPAN”, which makes his position plain but seems a little strong for the anti-romantic nature of the relationship between the rebound Sugiko and the “getting back at mother” Yamanouchi.

Both Yamanouchi and Harada were interested in Sugiko as shield against an unwanted arranged marriage. Sugiko was unconvinced by both offers but her decision to marry Yamanouchi is one which ultimately went against her unconventional nature (as borne out by her unconventional decision to leave it). Sugiko and Kesako appear as mirrors of each other as Kesako nabs Sugiko’s job offer and starts to climb the studio ladder. Just as Sugiko finds the life of an upperclass housewife is not all she thought it would be, so Kesako begins to find the acting profession, which she’d previously dreamed of, equally unfulfilling. By the time we loop round the end, we arrive at the beginning again with both ladies in pretty much the same space they were in before though perhaps a little clearer about what it is they want from life. The final scene is one more of acceptance and self realisation than it is about moving forward, but then there’s a curious reappearance of a familiar face on a passing bus. It remains to be seen if this is hope leaving town or merely circling.

Street Without End is the fifth and final film included in Criterion’s Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse box set.

Every-Night Dreams (夜ごとの夢, Mikio Naruse, 1933)

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Every Night DreamsFollowing on from Apart From You, Naruse returns to his exploration of working class women struggling to get by in a male dominated world in Every-Night Dreams (夜ごとの夢, Yogoto no Yume) also released in 1933. This time we meet weary bar hostess Omitsu who has a young son she’s raising alone after her deadbeat husband ran out on them a few years previously.

Omitsu doesn’t particularly like working in the bar, but as her mama-san grudgingly admits, she is quite good at it. She’s a modern woman who can drink and smoke and flirt to keep the guys buying drinks and wanting more though she’s finding it increasingly difficult to deflect some of the more intense interest such as that from a sleazy boat captain that her boss is eager to keep happy. Whilst at work, her son is looked after by a kindly older couple in her building who urge her to find a nicer line of business or get married again to a more reliable man.

The gentle rhythms of her life are disrupted when her long absent husband finally reappears. After first rejecting him outright, Omitsu eventually relents and lets him back into her life. However, despite his seemingly sincere pledges to change, get a proper job, start being a proper husband and father, Mizuhara fails to achieve any of his aims and also becomes increasingly jealous about Omitsu’s job at the bar. When their son, Fumio, is injured in an accident and requires expensive medical treatment, events reach a tragic climax.

Naruse would return to women alone facing a difficult economic future in many of his films but Omitsu’s situation is only made worse by the ongoing depression. Realistically speaking, there are few lines of work available to a woman in Omitu’s position and the more well regarded of them probably wouldn’t pay enough to allow her to keep both herself and her son, even as it stands she tries to borrow money from the bar to “reward” the older couple who watch Fumio while she’s working (though of course they wouldn’t take it). Omitsu herself feels there’s something degrading about her work and when her friend advises her to remarry, she exclaims any man worth a damn would run from a woman like her. Unfortunately, she may, in some senses, be right.

The man she ended up with, Mizuhara, is most definitely not worth a damn. It’s not entirely his fault he can’t find work – he does look for it and appears to want to find a job but in this difficult economic environment there’s not much going. Applying at factory, he’s turned down almost on sight because he’s a weedy sort of guy and doesn’t look like he’s cut out for physical labour. His inability to get ahead and provide for his wife and child sends him into a kind of depression and self esteem crisis which has him thinking about leaving again, especially as his increasing jealousy threatens his wife’s bar job which is their only form of income (whether he likes it or not). Fumio’s accident forces his hand into a series of bad decisions taken for a good reason but which again only cause more trouble for his family.

Naruse is a little flashier here than in Apart From You using canted angles, faster editing and even more zooms to hint at the panic felt by Omitsu in the increasingly distressing situations she finds herself in. Like the train accident in Flunky, Work Hard, the news that Fumio has been hit by a car is delivered in an expressionistic style beginning with his father putting down the boy’s toy car as a troupe of kids arrive and the screen is stabbed with a series of rapidly edited, alternating angle shots of intertitles mingled with the shocked reaction of the parents and the other children. If Naruse felt compelled to provide an ending with some sort of hint of far off promise in previous films, here he abandons that altogether as Omitsu laments her sad fate and instructs her son to grow up strong, not like his father, but like the mother who is doing everything she can to ensure his life won’t always be like this.

Every-Night Dreams is the fourth of five films included in Criterion’s Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse box set.

Apart From You (君と別れて, Mikio Naruse, 1933)

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Apart From YouNaruse’s critical breakthrough came in 1933 with the intriguingly titled Apart From You (君と別れて, Kimi to Wakarete) which made it into the top ten list of the prestigious film magazine Kinema Junpo at the end of the year. The themes are undoubtedly familiar and would come dominate much of Naruse’s later output as he sets out to detail the lives of two ordinary geisha and their struggles with their often unpleasant line of work, society at large, and with their own families.

The older woman, Kikue, begins the film by asking her much younger friend and almost daughter figure, Terugiku, to pluck a grey hair from her head. Kikue also has a teenage son, Yoshio, who is becoming progressively rebellious, filled with anger and resentment over his mother’s line of work. Ignoring Kikue’s many sacrifices for him, Yoshio drinks, skips school and messes around with a gang of delinquents.

Feeling sorry for her mentor, Terugiku makes use of her good relationship with Yoshio to convince him that he should be more grateful for the kindness his mother shows him. Taking him on a trip to visit her impoverished family, Terugiku shows him the oppressive environment in which she grew up. Resenting having been sold to a geisha house to finance her drunken father’s violent outbursts, she is even more outraged that they now want to force her sister to undergo the same treatment. Terugiku is not prepared to allow this to happen and has decided to do whatever it takes to save her sister from suffering in the same way as she has had to.

Naruse highlights both the problems of the ageing geisha who sees her ability to support herself declining in conjunction with her looks, and the young one who only looks ahead to the same fate she knows will come to be her own. Both women are subjected to the humiliating treatment of their drunken clients who horse around and occasionally pull violent stunts with little to no regard for those who may even have been their wives, sisters, or daughters with a different twist of fate.

Kikue does at least have Yoshio, though their relationship is currently strained, but Terugiku has no one else to rely on. Her greatest fear is that her sister will also be sold off and have to endure the same kind of suffering as she has. In order to avoid this turn of events she agrees to undergo something far worse than even the unpleasantness of the geisha house to earn double the money in her sister’s place. She faces a future even bleaker than Kikue’s, yet in some sense it is a choice that she herself has made, actively, in sacrificing herself to save her sister.

Apart from You is much less formally experimental than either Flunky, Work Hard or No Blood Relation with its elegant, beautifully composed mise en scène. That said Naruse frames with a symbolist’s eye such as in a late scene where he shoots through the cast iron footboard of a sick bed to show the two women divided yet each imprisoned. This is a world filled with subtle violence, flashes of knives from clients and delinquents alike, raining blows from drunken fathers, and innocents wounded by misdirected arrows. Maternal love is both a force for salvation and of endless suffering but romantic love is always frustrated, ruined by practical concerns. Naruse rejects the kind of fairytale ending he succumbed to in No Blood Relation for something altogether more complex and ambiguous where there is both hope and no hope at the same time as a train departs in an atmosphere of permanent anxiety.

Apart From You is the third of five films included in Criterion’s Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse box set.

Clip featuring Terugiku’s visit to her family (with English subtitles)

No Blood Relation (生さぬ仲, Mikio Naruse, 1932)

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No blood relationNaruse apparently directed six other films in-between Flunky, Work Hard and No Blood Relation (生さぬ仲, Nasanunaka) but we’ll likely never see any of them again. Adapting a “Shinpa” play (a new kind of Western style melodrama focusing on the real lives of everyday people), Naruse addresses a theme which later becomes central to his cinematic output – the trials and tribulations of women in contemporary society. This time we have two fully grown women tussling over the affections of a little girl who herself seems to have little input into the situation.

After a brief introductory sequence in which we witness the accidentally humorous escapades of a pair of petty crooks, we meet the sister of one of them who happens to be returning ex-pat and successful Hollywood actress, Tamae. It turns out that Tamae has come back to Japan after making her fortune in the movies hoping to reunite with the daughter she left behind six years ago.

However, her ex-husband, Atsumi, has remarried and the daughter, Shigeko, believes the second wife, Masako, is her real mother. Although the family are very happy together there is tension in the air as Atsumi’s company is running into trouble in this period of economic instability and he’s about to reveal he’s gone bankrupt. Atsumi’s mother does not take this well as she’s used to the upper middle class lifestyle and throws something of a hissy fit at being shamed in this way. Masako, by contrast, remains stoic and says she can bear the worst of what comes only she doesn’t want Atsumi to do anything illegal to try and solve their money problems and she doesn’t want to see Shigeko suffer. Her maternal feelings are further borne out when she is injured diving in front of an oncoming car which threatens to hit her daughter as she stops to pick up her doll in the middle of the road.

The problems continue pile up and Tamae uses her money as a lever to try and prise Shigeko away from her step-mother via the greedy grandma but the little girl was an infant when her birth mother left so she simply doesn’t remember Tamae and repeatedly asks to be allowed to go home to her “mother”. It’s understandable how much this would hurt Tamae who claims she’s only returned to Japan because she’s been unable to forget her daughter, yet her daughter never even knew her. If she was expecting some kind of cosmic connection it does not occur and if she truly wanted to rebuild a relationship with her child, what amounts to a virtual kidnapping was probably not the best way to go about it.

At heart it’s a tug of love between two women – the one who gave birth to a child and then abandoned it (perhaps harsh words, but no concrete reason other than a man and America are ever revealed), and the one who later raised it and came to love it as her own though shares no blood connection. Masako is the faithful Japanese wife, devoted to her family and just a very good, decent person which contrasts nicely with the ferocity of her rival – a modern woman, adulteress and movie star who thinks her money can enable her to take back what she previously gave up. For all that, it’s difficult to not to feel sorry for Tamae as her daughter continues to reject her. Even if the way she’s going about things is not sensible, her maternal emotions and the passion, desperation and even in part grief and regret are all too real.

Of course, what gets forgotten here is the plight of little Shigeko who never had any reason to believe Masako, who obviously loves her dearly, was not her real mother. Extremely confused and probably frightened, she just doesn’t understand why she’s being separated from her mum and being forced to hang out with this strange woman. Masako can’t get to see Shigeko after grandma has removed her from the house, but no one else stops to think about what sort of effect this is all having on a confused little girl who just wants to go home.

The depression is more of a backdrop here and even if Atsumi ultimately ends up feeling the brunt of it, money troubles are only a small part of the question at hand. Naruse doesn’t experiment as much as in Flunky, Work Hard but throws in a few impressive tracking sequences across open rooms and adds some rapid zooms as the two women have silent arguments over their relationships to Shigeko. Without giving too much away, the ending undercuts the degree of nuance Naruse had been trying add in ensuring that both women were drawn in a suitably complex manner, provoking sympathy and understanding for everyone caught up in this complicated situation (well, except perhaps for the bumbling crooks who are a little surplus to requirements).

The finale itself almost feels tacked on from an entirely different film with its sudden cheerfulness and abrupt closure as the original family is repaired thanks to a sudden monetary atonement and subsequent self-exile from the originally corrupting influence of the first wife. In many ways a standard melodrama of the time, No Blood Relation perhaps doesn’t have much more to recommend it than as an early example of Naruse’s development but does offer strong performances from its leading ladies and an interesting take on an age old question.

No Blood Relation is the second of five films included in Criterion’s Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse box set.

Ornamental Hairpin (簪, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1941)

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ornamental hair pinShimizu goes on holiday! Again! Actually, when you think about it going on holiday is always inherently sad because just like everything else holidays end and you have to return to whatever it was that made you want to go on holiday in the place only with the painful reminder that a more cheerful world exists and you’re no longer in it. That rather depressing preamble out of the way, it’s time to join the temporary residents of a small hot springs resort in the picturesque countryside where a mislaid hairpin is about to kickstart a series of mini epiphanies in the diverse collection of guests.

We arrive at the inn in the company of Emi (Kinuyo Tanaka) and her friend Okiku (Hiroko Kawasaki) on a brief visit from the city. The inn is very full right now with a festival in town and everybody seems to want a massage! Another guest, the extremely grumpy professor Katae (Tatsuo Saito), is put out that the tour groups are sapping all the hotel’s resources and complains vociferously to his go partner who is staying at the inn with his two grandsons Jiro and Taro. Other guests at the inn include a mild mannered husband and his wife, Mr. (Shinichi Himori) and Mrs. (Hideko Mimura) Hiroyasu, and a recuperating soldier, Mr. Nanmura  (Chishu Ryu). Eventually the tour groups go home taking Emi and Okiku with them, but Emi discovers she’s left her ornamental hairpin behind and sends a letter offering to pay for the return postage if anyone should find it.

Mr. Nanmura finds it in his foot one day as he’s enjoying the hot springs and even though he’s not that bothered about it, complaining expert Professor Katae can’t make enough of a fuss about the supposedly shoddy conditions at the hotel. When the hotel owners write to Emi and explain to her what’s happened she jumps straight on a train to apologise in person.

Nanmura had actually been quite happy about getting skewered by the pin. He says he found it “poetic”, as if the atmosphere of the place had penetrated deeply into his skin. The supposedly learned Katae doesn’t quite understand the soldier’s poetic leanings and starts debating whether the owner of the pin will be pretty or not, as if that would make a difference to the soldier’s romantic construction of events. Emi is indeed very beautiful, through perhaps a little sad and obviously contrite about the pin. Everyone in the inn is quite invested in witnessing a true love miracle between the bizarrely crippled soldier and the wounded beauty from Tokyo.

Once again the inn is a constructed world, a safe haven far away from the trouble and strife which exists outside it. The guests indulge themselves in the tranquil atmosphere taking in the beautiful scenery and killing time on otherwise trivial pursuits which occasionally include projecting a kind of narrative on their new found friends. The two boys, totally bored by this deliberately unstimulating environment, turn everything into a competition – even cheering on their grandfather as snores along side the equally noisy professor with the result that pretty much no one else is getting any sleep. Later they help the injured soldier recover with a set of endurance games which see him trying to walk unaided from one tree to another and eventually across a bridge.

Further comic relief is provided by the Hiroyasus with the husband being the sort of mild-mannered man who has no idea what he actually thinks so he just goes along with everything everyone says (and later checks with his wife who has the ultimate authority). Hiroyasu often defers to the professor whose authoritative tone gets things done for him though he is in fact an extremely self centred prig who just loves to complain out of a desperate need to be validated. He’s the loudest snorer of all and is keeping everyone awake yet he constantly complains about the noise of the other guests and is quick to shout at the inn keeper when he can’t get a massage because they’ve been booked by the visiting tour groups the very presence of which also annoys him. Eventually he gets so grumpy he just goes home which is probably a win/win for everyone.

But what of Emi herself? She too is escaping from something. The loss of the ornamental hair pin and its rediscovery leading her to the inn and perhaps to Nanmura has pushed her into a further consideration of her life in Tokyo. She doesn’t want to go back, this brief respite has been too pleasant and she wishes it could go on like this forever, though she knows, of course, that it can’t. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do now, but at least while she stops at the inn the sun will light the way. This is 1941, Nanmura will probably be going back to the war, the future is uncertain for everyone, but in here everything is beautiful, calm, safe. It’s just a shame it can’t last.

Ornamental Hairpin (簪, Kanzashi) is the fourth and final film in Criterion’s Eclipse Series 15: Travels with Hiroshi Shimizu box set.

Clip of one of Nanmura’s “trials” (no subtitles):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WojtILzbaBk