Tag: Toru Yuri

The Great Chase (華麗なる追跡, Norifumi Suzuki, 1975)

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What about if you rebooted the Bannai Tarao series, but the hero was a female spy who is also a champion race driver and martial artist? Norifumi Suzuki did actually make a Bannai Tarao move in 1978 starring Akira Kobayashi, but the heroine of The Great Chase (華麗なる追跡, Karei-naru Tsuiseki) certainly loves a disguise or two and like the famous man of a thousand faces seems to have no trouble pulling them off as she infiltrates a gang of evil traffickers led by a furry which has come up with an ace new plan of packing heroin into coffins and having them shipped to nuns!

Oh, and the gang were also behind the death of her father who “committed suicide” in prison after being framed for drug smuggling. The Great Chase takes place in a world of pure pulp which somehow maintains its sense of cartoonish innocence even after Shinobu (Etsuko Shihomi) has infiltrated the heart of darkness and seen most of her associates killed by sadistic gang boss Inomata (Bin Amatsu). But at the same time, it delves into a deep sense of ‘70s paranoia as it becomes clear that the authority figures are all corrupt. Inomata has become a politician, while Shinobu’s father’s murder was orchestrated by the prison warden who was working with him in return for financial gain. The man who framed her father was a friend of his, implying that no one can really be trusted when there’s money to be made.

In a roundabout way,as this sense of anxiety is only reinforced by Shinobu’s role as some sort of secret agent working for the spy ring run by her uncle which is currently hot on the trail of the drug dealers even if they haven’t yet figured out who their boss is. Conversely, her home life is as wholesome as it could be with her two adopted siblings who run a florist’s along with Shinobu’s fan club. Her status as a kind of race car idol lends Shinobu a particular kind of ‘70s cool and turns her into some sort of superhuman figure capable of triumphing over any kind of adversity like a superhero worthy of any kid’s lunchbox. The siblings, Nagi (Fujika Omori) and Shinpei (Naoyuki Sugano), were taken in as orphans by her father which once again signals his goodness in contrast to the greed and selfishness of the gang that had him killed to cover up their crimes. 

That they peddle in drugs marks them out as a force of social disruption, but they’re also actively heretical in hiding behind the shield of the church. Suzuki frequently uses religious imagery in his films and here again echoes the romanticism of School of the Holy Beast with the use of red roses to decorate the coffin of the unfortunate young woman who has been turned into a vessel for smuggling drugs and has for some reason been laid out otherwise entirely naked. When it comes to retrieving the merchandise, we can see that many of the habits are being worn by men while Inomata himself masquerades as a priest. Then again, perhaps he is merely indulging his love of costume play seeing as he also has a hobby of wearing a furry bear suit to attack and rape women in his living room. 

Inomata’s claws then seem to represent something else, a rapacious, grasping sense of patriarchy in which he also uses drugs to bind women to him. Shinobu’s childhood friend Yukiko (Hisako Tanaka) has apparently fallen victim and laments that she is possessed by him body and soul to the point that the old Yukiko is dead which is why she hasn’t been able to step in and help Shinobu and is doing so now fearing that it may cost her her life. Suddenly, it’s all quite grim with the basement sex cult, whipping and torture, but Shinobu maintains her plucky spirit and is somehow able to lure Inomata towards a cable-car-based showdown. With a cameo from real life wrestler / singer Mach Fumiake, the film enters a kind of meta commentary on a real-life Shinobu (though she was not, as far as anyone knows, one of Japan’s top spies), but otherwise remains within the realms of pulp in which the heroine is able to pull off her difficult mission with the help of her talent for disguises before dramatically unmasking herself as the woman who’s going to take them all down. Camp to the max and incredibly surreal, the film never drops its sense of silliness even as the grim events enveloping Shinobu lead to tragic consequences that she barely has time to deal with before barrelling straight into the next duel with the forces of corruption.

*Norifumi Suzuki’s name is actually “Noribumi” but he has become known as “Norifumi” to English-speaking audiences.

Festival Champ (お祭り野郎 魚河岸の兄弟分, Norifumi Suzuki, 1976)

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Who doesn’t love a festival? The hero of Norifumi Suzuki’s Festival Champ (お祭り野郎 魚河岸の兄弟分, Omatsuri yaro: Uogashi no Kyodai-bun) loves them so much that he travels all over Japan to help out in places where young men have become thin on the ground thanks to increasing urbanisation and rural depopulation. Following the success of Suzuki’s entries in the Truck Yaro series in 1975 and 1976, the film was part of a new line of comedies and sports movies launched by Toei as well as a vehicle for Hiroki Matsukata who was trying to move on from yakuza movies.

Katsuo (Hiroki Matsukata) is however something of a goodhearted bruiser who is always getting into manly scraps and especially at the festivals he travels to which is a pretty good hook for an ongoing series. But it’s not all that great for his employer who runs a family fishmonger’s at the Uogashi fish market and complains that Katsuo’s always running off and causing trouble. The fish market itself takes on an exoticised quality in the opening sequence which features a voice over from karate queen Etsuko Shihomi, here in a purely dramatic role, who is the daughter of a well-to-do traditional Japanese restaurant and travels there daily by speedboat to pick up the best fresh fish available. Suzuki throws in some documentary-style stock footage and statistics about the market that lend a strangely corporate feel, but then homes in on its capacity as a community hub. Kiyoko says it’s her favourite place precisely because there’s nothing formal about it. Deals are done through body language and you don’t need any kind of resume to work there, everyone’s welcome. 

That may be the implied contrast between Kiyoko’s father, who owns an upscale place and cultivates genuine relationships with local fishermen and brokers, and local boy made good Kurosaki who has supposedly become the CEO of a restaurant chain, itself a symbol of the soulless corporation of ‘70s Japan. Kurosaki rocks up dressed like a yakuza, but everyone treats him as a successful businessman and in part thanks to Katsuo’s boss Zenjiro’s recommendation is eager to make deals with him but predictably he’s running a huge scam that could destroy the local economy. Zenjiro is later faced with the difficult decision of selling his family business to repay all the other fishermen and brokers that have fallen foul of him. 

It’s this societal sense of unfairness that stripper Kumi (Terumi Azuma) hints at when she says she feels “frustrated” and that her long-lost brother Eiji (Toru Emori) probably feels even more frustrated than she does after he slaps her having found out that she’s become a burlesque dancer. As she points out to him, he ran away from home and left her behind with the aunt that was cruel to them so what exactly he expected her to do is a mystery. In the end, it’s his own fault for abandoning her, so he has no leg to stand on in criticising her for the way she’s lived her life. Kumi is well accepted in the local community and walks around in very elegant attire which gives her the air of an “ojosan” or upperclass lady to much greater extent that Kiyoko has in her love of the earthy world of the fish market. The fact that she turns out to be suffering from a tragic terminal illness perhaps only reinforces this sense of unfairness, that the modern world has essentially poisoned her and she can no longer survive in it.

The only things that give her solace are Katsuo and the idea of joining in carrying a shrine festival which would seem to be ways of reconnecting with a more essential Japaneseness. Despite his rowdiness, Katsuo is as she describes him the kindest person she’s ever met and a more positive vision of a still traditional masculinity that looks to protect the community and those around him. He gets into a fight with Eiji, but after exchanging a few blows the men become firm friends, while it’s trying to hook his wimpy friend Kinichi up with a date that brings him to Kumi in the first place. Meanwhile, it seems like Ayuko (Junko Natsu) has a crush on him and despite Zenjiro’s exasperation with Katsuo, everyone expects that he will eventually marry her and take over the family business. 

And so, it’s only a violent, but also quite funny, intervention from Katsuo that can eventually overcome the disruption Kurosaki threatens. Suzuki throws in a lot of his trademark weirdness including all of Zenjiro’s other daughters having fishy names, and a local sex worker who is insatiably aroused by octopuses followed by a gag in which Katsuo is trolled with a suggestive-looking shellfish, but mostly rests on a sense of qualified wholesomeness and community all carried on Katsuo’s broad shoulders as the lone guardian of a more essential Japaneseness otherwise uncorrupted by venal post-war capitalism.

*Norifumi Suzuki’s name is actually “Noribumi” but he has become known as “Norifumi” to English-speaking audiences.

Criminal Woman: Killing Melody (前科おんな殺し節, Atsushi Mihori, 1973)

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“Five women like us could take on the whole world!” a woman exclaims after a very successful mission of revenge in which they didn’t have to do very much at all except play on male pride and yakuza honour. Criminal Woman: Killing Melody (前科おんな殺し節, Zenka onna: Koroshi-bushi) stars the two main players of Toei’s pinky violence line, Reiko Ike and Miki Sugimoto, and plays with their star rivalry by casting them as a pair of women eventually divided by the conflicting loyalties presented by the heroine’s desire for revenge. 

Ike stars as Maki, an intense young woman first seen hiding behind a door in the classic club scene that opens the film. Eventually she darts inside and slashes some yakuza with a knife, but her assassination attempt is very unsuccessful landing her in prison for a number of years where she largely spends her time glaring at the bars and plotting her revenge. Nevertheless, it’s the solidarity she finds with her cellmates that eventually allows her to carry out her plan. On her arrival, she first clashes with cell boss Masayo (Miki Sugimoto), a former yakuza moll inside for slashing some guys with a razor after they caught her cheating at hanafuda, but eventually wins her respect after a prison test of strength in which each woman is armed with a glass shard and grips a rope between their teeth until the loser gives in and lets go. Maki is not a skilled fighter and easily wounded by Masayo but refuses to surrender, getting right back up again every time Masayo knocks her down until Masayo finally concedes defeat.

The early prison fight is repeated at the end of the film only without the rope and with real knives, drugs replacing the white chalk that clouded around them as they fought in the prison yard. This time they are more evenly matched. Maki is no good with a knife, but more than able to hold her own and the fight is more about settling a score than it is about revenge so neither really wants to harm the other anyway. Though they found themselves temporarily on opposing sides, inevitably it turns out that Masayo is the woman of the yakuza Maki is trying to bring down, the sense of solidarity between them as women eventually wins out and though Masayo is unable to betray Oba (Ryoji Hayama) she cannot betray Maki either and ends up helping in her in quest for revenge if in a round about way.

It’s this sense of solidarity that brings the other cell mates back to the prison when Maki is released already having decided to help her get her revenge on the yakuza who forced her father to traffic drugs and then had him killed. Maki first refuses their help, as she had the opportunity of getting legal justice by telling the police everything that had happened including her own gang rape at the hands of the same yakuza, because it’s important that she’s the one who takes down Oba but later accepts their gesture and forms a tightly knit gang of her own fronted out of former sex worker Kaoru’s (Yumiko Katayama) bar. To fund the mission, Maki goes on a two week sex work spree mostly bedding American servicemen with whom she later makes a deal to buy a large number of guns and grenades she eventually sells to hotheaded yakuza son Tetsu (Takeo Chii) who is already resentful towards Oba for having stolen his father’s turf.

All Maki has to do to is light the touch paper on a simmering gang war between old school yakuza and the amoral corporatising Oba. She antagonises him by expertly offing one of his guys in a rain drenched assassination scene and getting one of the other girls to strongly hint it was Tetsu’s doing, then pretending to come to Tetsu’s rescue with the guns only to further provoke Oba. The girls even joke they’re doing a public service by cleaning up the town in taking out the corrupt politician who was propping up Oba for his own financial gain. It’s all expertly planned by Maki who appears in a series of quite stunning power suits and sporting giant hair, battling yakuza with killer style and an expert understanding of the way their brains work. But the reason the plan succeeds is the shared sense of solidarity between the women, Masayo included, as they strike back together against an oppressive and patriarchal society.

Sympathy for the Underdog (博徒外人部隊, Kinji Fukasaku, 1971)

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Toei’s stock in trade through the 1960s had been the ninkyo eiga, chivalrous tales of noble gangsters set before the war and implicitly in a less corrupt Japan in which jingi could still triumph over the giri/ninjo conflict if at great personal cost to the idealistic hero. By the end of the decade, however, audiences were growing tired of yakuza romanticism particularly in the wake of grittier youth dramas produced by Nikkatsu. Originally conceived as a kind of sequel to Japan Organised Crime Boss, Kinji Fukasaku’s Sympathy for the Underdog (博徒外人部隊,  Bakuto Gaijin Butai) marks a shift towards the jitsuroku or “true account” trend of the 1970s which would come to dominate the genre following the success of his Battles Without Honour and Humanity cycle two years later, employing many of the same techniques from onscreen text to shaky handheld photography but doing so within the confines of moody noir as the hero emerges from a 10-year prison sentence into a very different Japan. 

When Gunji (Koji Tsuruta) gets out, he steps into an empty, windswept street his incongruous zori sandals clashing with his smart suit and sunshades and marking him out as a relic of a bygone era. He’s met only two loyal underlings, his gang apparently now disbanded following the death of his boss who refused to take his advice as regards the big name gang from Tokyo attempting to muscle in to their Yokohama territory. Part of the missing post-war generation, Gunji has no illusions about going straight, wandering into their former HQ now a derelict building and calling the guys, who’ve since moved on to more legitimate occupations, back together. He knows he can’t take on Daitokai with his meagre forces and so settles for extracting from them some compensation money to get out of town, later teaming up with Kudo (Noboru Ando) a similarly orphaned former member of a rival Yokohama gang wiped out by Daitokai, and resolving to relocate to Okinawa where he is convinced the post-war gangster paradise is still very much in existence. 

Okinawa was only “returned” to Japanese sovereignty in 1972, having been governed by the Americans since the end of the war, and of course maintains a large American military presence up to the present day. As such to Gunji, and in a yakuza movie trope which persists right into Takeshi Kitano’s Boiling Point, it exists in a permanent post-war present in which the conditions of the occupation are still very much in play. Gunji knows that he and his guys are products of the post-war era, they cannot adapt to the “new” world of corporatising yakuza in which street brawls and petty thuggery have given way to more sophisticated kinds of organised crime, and so they retreat into an Okinawan time warp, determining to steal turf from under two rival gangs who control between them the ports and the red light district mediated by black market booze from the American military.  

Fukasaku was apparently inspired by Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, intending to make a comment on resistance to American imperialism on the mainland though it has to be said that this is extremely ironic given that Japan is itself a coloniser of the Okinawan islands where there has long been a demand for self-determination and recognition of a distinct identity which has often been subject to oppression in the face of conformist Japanese culture. Nevertheless, the film continues the persistent theme that the chaotic post-war era which has come to a close thanks to rising economic prosperity in the time Gunji was inside is inextricable from the American occupation, implying that Okinawa is in a sense the last frontier and the only viable territory for men like Gunji who, like the melancholy ronin of the Edo era, lack the skills to live in time of peace.  

Nevertheless, modernity is also on its way to Okinawa and where there’s money there are gangsters so as expected Daitokai eventually rear their heads on the island pushing Gunji towards the revenge he didn’t want to take. The Okinawa he inhabits is one of loss and nostalgia, taking up with a sex worker who reminds him of the Okinawan woman who left him when he went to prison and perhaps playing into the slightly complicated political dialogue which positions Gunji as an ironic “migrant worker” salmoning back to Okinawa as many Okinawan youngsters are forced to travel to the mainland for work while the islands themselves remain, it’s implied, mired in poverty and crime economically dependent on the American military. Indeed, the head of the dock gang brokers a deal with Daitokai predicated on the fact that there is plenty of cheap labour available at the harbour. “Good place for a long life” he ironically adds, shortly before all hell breaks loose. Shot with typical Fukasaku immediacy, Sympathy for the Underdog looks forward to jitsuroku nihilism but does so through the prism of film noir cool as its fatalistic hero submits himself to his inexorable destiny.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Prison Boss (獄中の顔役, Yasuo Furuhata, 1968)

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“Both you and I must do what a man must do and live this life to the very end” according to the melancholy theme song of Yasuo Furuhata’s fatalistic tale of gangster nobility, Prison Boss (獄中の顔役, Gokuchu no Kaoyaku). Another vehicle for tough guy star Ken Takakura, this post-war drama despite the name spends less time in a cell than one might imagine but casts its melancholy hero as a man imprisoned by the times in which he lives, too good to survive in an ignoble society and eventually brought down by his self-destructive need for retributive justice. 

As the film opens, Hayami (Ken Takakura) is goaded into a knife fight with a foot soldier from the evil Honma gang, Tetsu the Viper, and eventually kills him. Stumbling into a nearby bar, his only intention is to do the right thing and turn himself in filled with remorse as he is that he’s offed Tetsu in territory which belongs to “good” mob boss Tajima (Ichiro Ryuzaki). Tajima lives up to his name when some of his guys rescue Hayami and take him to their HQ where the old man insists that he rest and recover from his wounds. Whilst there, Hayami is cared for by Tajima’s teenage daughter Toshiko (Junko Fuji) who falls in love with him and vows to wait while he honours his word and spends seven years in jail for the killing of Tetsu. 

Meanwhile, awkward small-town politics is destabilising the precarious post-war environment as the Honma, embodiments of the new, venal and violent yakuza who care nothing for honour or humanity, are intent on squeezing Tajima’s influence mostly through muscling in on the running of the local bike races for which Tajima currently runs security. Though the Tajima gang is presented as an unambiguous good, the old style noble yakuza who live by a code and care about protecting the little guy, you can’t deny the levels of nepotistic corruption on display at the local council meetings given that the mayor and Tajima are apparently childhood friends while his rival shouts about allowing yakuza too much sway in politics while in the pay of Honma. 

Nevertheless, the central drama exists solely in the soul of Hayami who emerges from seven years in prison into this already destabilised environment owing a debt of honour to Tajima. Not quite a yakuza, he feels himself a perpetual other forever tainted by his crime having lost the right to live as other men live. Thus he struggles with discovering that Toshiko has also remained true to her word, having waited for him all this time running a small coffee bar rather than getting married. Even so, he finds himself dragged back into yakuza drama avenging the death of a Tajima man gunned down by Honma and thereby ending up back inside where he’s reunited with another childhood friend, Kurosaki (Ryo Ikebe), who’s been far less fortunate and is now affiliated with Honma.  

Kurosaki and veteran prisoner Pops (Shogo Shimada) are perhaps both mirrors of Hayami’s internal conflict, Kurosaki like him bound by a code but forced to act in ways which betray his own sense of honour and humanity and eventually paying a heavy price for doing so. Pops meanwhile as a man nearing the end of his life tries to talk him down from the road of destructive nobility, reminding him that he has a choice and ought to choose himself rather continuing to suffer for an outdated ideal. Hayami’s selflessness, his oft remarked tendency to disregard his own interest to protect others (the true mark of the noble gangster), is his weakness and fatal flaw. A yakuza’s daughter, Toshiko understands the code of manliness well enough and even she eventually tells him to run, to abandon his revenge and live free rather than becoming just another sacrifice on the altar of yakuza honour, but of course a man has to do what a man has to do. 

Though Hayami himself becomes a big man in prison, it’s Honma to whom the film’s title primarily refers hinting at the corruption involved in a society in which it is perfectly possible (and in some ways advantageous) to continue running a yakuza gang from behind bars, while the central crisis also turns on post-war desperation in betting all on controlling the lucrative bicycle races. In such a world as this, there’s precious little room for the noble gangster who must in the end damn himself if only to redeem it. 

Inferno of Torture (徳川いれずみ師：責め地獄, Teruo Ishii, 1969)

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“There’s no hope for us anymore” cries the hero, redeeming himself with one last act of humanity before allowing himself to be consumed by the flames of Edo-era barbarity. Another tale of feudal exploitation, Teruo Ishii’s Inferno of Torture (徳川いれずみ師：責め地獄, Tokugawa Irezumi-shi: Seme Jigoku) opens with an otherwise unrelated scene of female crucifixion followed by an elaborate beheading, presenting both of these events with a degree of historical authenticity they do not perhaps possess. Nevertheless, his central tale which turns out to be less about two women than two men, turns on the exploitation of female bodies, subtly suggesting that the modern society is itself founded on female exploitation. 

Though dropping the portmanteau structure frequently employed in the Joys of Torture series, Ishii returns from the prologue with the end of the first arc in which the presumed heroine, Yumi (Yumiko Katayama), makes a stealthy visit to a ghostly cemetery in which she trashes the grave of a man named Genzo (Shinichiro Hayashi), digs him up and dismembers his body to retrieve a key we later see him swallow which she hopes will unlock her womanhood currently imprisoned by an ornate chastity belt, only the key doesn’t fit. 

Flashing back again, we see Yumi forced into sex work in payment of a debt and imprisoned in a labyrinthine brothel which specialises in bondage and torture under the guidance of lesbian madam Oryu* (Mieko Fujimoto) and her samurai fixer Samejima (Haruo Tanaka). The brothel’s USP is in its tattooed women which neatly leads us into the main narrative as Yumi’s body becomes a battleground contested by two men, top tattoo artists in search of the perfect canvas in order to win, ironically, the hand of their master’s pure and innocent daughter Osuzu (Masumi Tachibana). 

Horihide (Teruo Yoshida) and Osuzu are in love, but the dark and brooding Horitatsu (Asao Koike) is determined to frustrate his rival’s desires by becoming the successor to Osuzu’s dying father, the tattooist Horigoro. The “hori” which prefixes each of the men’s names relates to the process of tattooing and comes from the verb to chisel, hinting at the way they prick and channel their desires into the canvas which is human skin. Horihide is our “hero”, described by Horigoro as the light to Horitatsu’s dark, Horitatsu currently making more of an impact with his designs of violent intensity, but each of them is in a very real way content to use and exploit the bodies of women without their full consent in order to practice their art. It is essentially an act of violence if not of “torture”. 

Meanwhile, Oryu and Samejima are profiting off their “merchandise” more directly in participating in the trafficking of tattooed ladies to lecherous foreigners displaying an early fetishisation of Asian women. This being late Edo, Japan is still in its isolationist period in which fraternising with foreigners was illegal which is why the action eventually takes us to Nagasaki and the Dutch trading port of Dejima, here presented as a nexus of corruption, where Samejima and Oryu prove themselves very much in league with foreign powers dealing with powerful businessman Clayton (Yusuf Hoffman), despite his name apparently a Dutchman, and his Chinese associates. Like Nikkatsu’s borderless action films of the ‘50s and ‘60s, Inferno of Torture indulges in an unpleasant Sinophobia which culminates in a chase through a crowded Chinese wet market in which we catch sight of dogs hanging bound ready for the slaughter in similar poses to those of the women in the brothel, not to mention thrusting snakes, before being confronted by a basket full of adorable puppies presumably headed for a dark destination, while we finally rediscover Hidetatsu collapsed in an opium den after being forcibly addicted by Oryu as a means of control. 

“This is a house of horrors” the Chinese gang leader tells a group of women bought by Samejima from a prison and promised a life of wealth and ease as geisha catering to high class clients. It’s difficult to tell if Ishii is critiquing Edo-era misogyny or that of the present day, or merely revelling in it with increasingly perverse scenes of sexual violence and degradation which continually imply that women have no role or value outside of reflecting the desires of men while those who try to claim their own agency are brutally put down by an inherently misogynistic, patriarchal society. After a Count of Monte Cristo-esque subplot in which Horihide is framed for murder but escapes to plot his revenge, the psychedelic final showdown returns us to the tattooists’ artistic face off as they again weaponise female bodies to embody their own ambitions, Horihide turning a blameless young woman into an iridescent peacock to get back at her father. Nevertheless, he finally reassumes his humanity in ending his mission of vengeance before it takes more innocent lives while accepting that he may now be too corrupted to return to his former life. Elegantly composed often unconsciously recalling the keyhole in Yumi’s chastity belt as it imprisons women within the peephole of the frame, Inferno of Torture ends exactly as it began, with a scene of grim and ironic punishment in which the female form is itself obliterated. 

Inferno of Torture is available on blu-ray from Arrow Video in a set which also includes an in-depth commentary from Tom Mes discussing the treatment of the various actresses involved with the series, Ishii, and Toei in general; Jasper Sharp’s Miskatonic lecture Erotic Grotesque Nonsense & the Foundations of Japan’s Cult Counterculture; and a booklet featuring new writing by Chris D.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

*This character’s name is rendered as “Oryu” in the subtitles but “Otatsu” (different ways of reading the same character which means “dragon”) in the accompanying booklet.

After Life (ワンダフルライフ, Hirokazu Koreeda, 1998)

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Afterlife posterAt the end of your life, if someone asks you what it all meant, what will you say? It’s a question that can’t be answered until after you’ve turned the final page, but there is an idea at least that death brings clarity, rendering all things simple from a strange perspective of subjective objectivity. This is the central idea behind Hirokazu Koreeda’s meta existential fantasy After Life (ワンダフルライフ, Wonderful Life) in which the recently deceased are given seven days’ grace in order to decide on their most precious memory so that a small collection of clerks working in an old-fashioned government building can “recreate” it through the medium of cinema, allowing a departing soul to take refuge in a single memory preserved in eternity.

Heaven’s waiting room, as it turns out, is apparently located inside the ghost of the Japanese studio system. The recently deceased give their names at the door and patiently wait for their turn with their allotted case manager whose job it is to offer after life counselling designed to bring them to the point of boiling their existence down to the single moment which defines it within the arbitrary three day time limit which gives the crew the time to put their memories into pre-production complete with old-fashioned stage sets and studio-era special effects.

The purpose of all of this is not is exactly clear, though a clue is perhaps offered when we discover that the clerks are able to order VHS tapes of the entirety of their subjects’ lives in the event that they are struggling to think of relevant moments in an existence which seems to have disappointed them. The point is not so much the literal truth of the memory, be it accurate or not, but its sensation and the transience of feeling which is then re-experienced through the medium of cinema, captured in celluloid as momentary permanence.

Consequently, the chosen moments are necessarily often ones of stillness which promise the kind of peace and serenity one is supposed to find in death. The moments are ones of silent togetherness, of natural beauty, of childish innocence, or unbridled joy but is each is perhaps the key to unlocking the enigma of a life and as such is a solution which points towards a question. One older gentleman, Watanabe (Taketoshi Naito), finds himself unable to choose. He views his life as the epitome of mediocrity and can find nothing in it that seems worthy of “eternity”. Watching the videotapes of his life, he sees himself as a young man vowing to make a mark and is desperate to find some evidence that he lived but like many does not find it. His life was happy by virtue of being not unhappy for all that it was perhaps unfulfilled but only through communing with himself after death is he able to reclaim the memory of his late wife (Kyoko Kagawa) with whom he never quite bonded in mild jealousy of her lingering attachment to her first love who fell in war.

This being a film from 1998 and mostly featuring those in their 70s and above, the war looms large from painful battlefield memories of fear and starvation to unexpected reunions and the joy of simple pleasures found even in the midst of hardship. The clerks who died young may look on in envy of Watanabe’s “ordinary” life in the knowledge of all they were denied, while others mourn for a future they will never see. Yet there are shorter sad stories here too from a high school girl (Sayaka Yoshino) whose original choice of a day out at Disneyland is deemed too prosaic, to a middle-aged bar hostess (Kazuko Shirakawa) reminiscing about an old lover who let her down, and a rebellious young punk (Yusuke Iseya) who flat out refuses to choose because he feels that is the best way to accept responsibility. Forced into a reconsideration of his own life, even a clerk is eventually moved by the realisation that even if he had previously believed his existence devoid of meaningful moments he has achieved something by featuring in those of others and is therefore also a meaningful part of a considered whole.

Making the most of his documentary background, interspersing “genuine” memories among the imagined, Koreeda’s heavenly fantasy is one firmly tied to the ground where seasons still pass, time still flows, and the relentlessly efficient march of bureaucracy continues on apace undaunted by the presence of death. Death may give life meaning, but it’s living that’s the prize in all of its glorious complexity filled with both beauty and sadness but always with light even in the darkest corners.

After Life screened as part of an ongoing Koreeda retrospective currently running at BFI Southbank.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Horrors of Malformed Men (江戸川乱歩全集　恐怖奇形人間, Teruo Ishii, 1969)

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Horrors of Malformed Men poster

The line between madness and sanity is often a thin one, entirely dependent on a series of social perceptions themselves dictated by a vague concept of time and morality. Horrors of Malformed Men (江戸川乱歩全集　恐怖奇形人間, Edogawa Rampo Zenshu: Kyofu Kikei Ningen), loosely inspired by an Edogawa Rampo short story The Strange Tale of Panorama Island as well as a series of similarly themed tales from East and West, is set in 1925 – the end of “Taisho” which is to say immediately before the problematic “Showa” era marked by its own kind of madness and defeat if also by a gradual rebirth. Nevertheless, madness reigns in here though it’s madness of a very particular kind as those excluded from a fiercely conformist society seek to remake the world in their own image and take a horrifyingly poetic revenge on the rest of humanity for their failure to embrace difference.

The tale begins with amnesiac medical student Hirosuke (Teruo Yoshida) who finds himself inside a cage at a mental institution surrounded by screaming, half naked women one of whom attacks him with a knife. Luckily, the knife turns out to be a stage prop with a retractible blade presumably given to the unfortunate woman wielding it as a kind of calming device. Eventually rescued by the warden who attacks the mad with whips as if they were mere cattle, Hirosuke retreats to his cell to ponder on his current circumstances, if he is really “mad” or the only sane man in an insane world. Meanwhile, he is plagued by the memories of a long forgotten lullaby and the vision of a woman’s face suddenly contorting, transformed into a horrifying monstrosity.

Managing to escape, Hirosuke gets a lead on the lullaby that takes him to a coastal village where he discovers that a man who looks eerily like himself has recently passed away. Hoping to solve a series of mysteries, he fakes his own death and manages to convince the other villagers that he is the recently deceased Genzaburo somehow resurrected and risen from the grave. Where all this takes him is to a mysterious island where Genzaburo’s father Jogoro (Tatsumi Hijikata) – a hideously deformed man with webbed fingers, has been trying to create his own bizarre society.

Horrors of Malformed Men was technically “banned”, or perhaps it’s better to say suppressed in an act of self censorship by a nervous studio, but not so much for its gleefully surreal grotesquery as for the “malformed” in the Japanese title which is in fact an extraordinarily offensive word. In any case it adopts a typically difficult position towards those it calls “malformed” as warped both in body and mind. Our mad scientist, Jogoro is a man driven insane by his society’s consistent rejection of him. When the beautiful wife he has somehow managed to win displays only disgust towards his twisted body and finally betrays him by sleeping with her handsome, sensitive cousin, Jogoro’s mental stability is forever fractured leading to his dark desire to take revenge on the “perfect” world by creating his own “malformed” creatures mirroring his own spiritual decline.

Jogoro’s island is a place of “madness” where spiritual corruption leads only to a kind of devolution in which animalistic desires exist only to be sated. Here there is no love or community, only a cold and individual progress towards oblivion. Hirosuke enters a nightmare of a waking sort in which he must confront himself, his family legacy, and a potential conflict between his own desires and the rules of society. Yet he is also haunted by the image of an as yet unseen future of where such ugliness may lead. Jogoro’s otherworldliness and deformities, his singleminded to desire to remake the world with himself on top and others all below, speak of a madness yet to come and the terrible retribution which would be exacted for it.

As if to reinforce his own message, Hirosuke declares himself not of this kind – he chooses to remove himself from a world with which his personal desires are incompatible, maintaining their purity in refusing to live on indulging in a practice most would regard as so taboo as to constitute a kind of “madness” all on its own rather than honouring civilisation by living on in denial. Something tells him, this is where he’s been heading all along. Deeply strange, surreal, and perhaps questionable in its final moment of capitulation which lays the blame for the entire sad and sorry escapade at the feet of a scornful woman rather than the society which both forced her to marry a man she didn’t like and encouraged her to reject him on the grounds of his “ugliness”, Horrors of Malformed Men is not a story about madmen and weird islands but of the evil that men do and the pain it leaves behind.

Horrors of Malformed Men is available on blu-ray from Arrow Films. The set includes two audio commentaries – one featuring film critic Mark Schilling ported from a previous release, and the other a new commentary by film scholar Tom Mes, as well as interviews with Shinya Tsukamoto and Minoru Kawasaki on Ishii’s career, and footage of Ishii visiting the Udine Far East Film Festival. The first pressing also comes with a booklet featuring a wide ranging essay by Jasper Sharp plus shorter essays by Tom Mes on Ishii’s career and Grady Hendrix on Edogawa Rampo.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

North Sea Dragon (北海の暴れ竜, Kinji Fukasaku, 1966)

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north sea dragon dvd cover.jpgAt the beginning of the 1970s, Kinji Fukasaku’s Battles Without Honour and Humanity would put the ninkyo eiga firmly to bed, but in the mid-1960s, they were still his bread and butter. Fukasaku’s earlier career at Toei leant towards the studio’s preference for youthful rebellion but with a stronger trend towards standardised gangster tropes than the countercultural thrills to be found in similar offerings from Nikkatsu. For Fukasaku the rebellion is less cool affectation than it is a necessary revolt against increasing post-war inequality and a constraining society though, as the heroes of If You Were Young, Rage or Blackmail is My Life find out, escape can rarely be found by illicit means. Jiro, the prodigal son of North Sea Dragon (北海の暴れ竜, Hokkai no Abare-Ryu), finds something similar even whilst conforming almost entirely to Toei’s standard “young upstart saves the village” narrative.

Jiro (Tatsuo Umemiya), dressed in white with jet black sunshades, nonchalantly walks into his childhood fishing village filled with a sense of nostalgia and the expectation of a warm welcome. The village, however, is much changed. There are fewer boats around now, and the fishermen are all ashore. Arriving at his family home he discovers they now live in the boat shed and his mother doesn’t even want to let him in. Jiro, as his outfit implies, has spent his time away as a yakuza, and his family want little to do with him, especially as his father has been murdered by the soulless gangsters who are currently strangling the local fishing industry.

The local fishermen are all proudly tattooed but they aren’t yakuza, unlike the tyrannical son of the local boss, Gen Ashida (Hideo Murota), who carries around a double barrelled shotgun and fearsome sense of authority. The Ashidas have placed a stranglehold around the local harbour, dictating who may fish when and extracting a good deal of the profits. An attempt to bypass them does not go well for Jiro’s mother who is the only one brave enough to speak out against their cruel treatment even if it does her no good.

When Jiro arrives home for unexplained reasons he does so happily, fully expecting to be reunited with his estranged family. Not knowing that his father had died during his absence, Jiro also carries the guilt of never having had the opportunity to explain himself and apologise for the argument that led to him running away. An early, hot headed attempt to take his complaint directly to the Ashidas ends in disaster when he is defeated, bound, and whipped with thick fisherman’s rope but it does perhaps teach him a lesson.

The other boys from the village – Jiro’s younger brother Shinkichi (Hayato Tani) and the brother of his childhood friend Reiko (Eiko Azusa), Toshi (Jiro Okazaki), are just as eager as he is both to avenge the death of Jiro’s father and rid the village of the evil Ashida tyranny. Jiro tries to put them off by the means of a good old fashioned fist fight which shows them how ill equipped they are in comparison with the older, stronger, and more experienced Jiro but their youth makes them bold and impatient. The plot of Toshi and Shinkichi will have disastrous consequences, but also acts as a galvanising force convincing the villagers that the Ashidas have to go.

Jiro takes his natural place as the hero of a Toei gangster film by formulating a plan to undermine the Ashidas’ authority. His major strategic decision is to bide his time but he also disrupts the local economy by attempting to evade the Ashida net through sending the fisherman to other local ports and undercutting the Ashida profit margin. As predicted the Ashidas don’t like it, but cost themselves a crucial ally by ignoring the intense bond between their best fighter and his adorable pet dog. Things do not quite go to plan but just as it looks as if Jiro is about to seal his victory, he stays his sword. The Ashidas’ power is broken and they have lost enough already.

Fukasaku’s approach tallies with the classic narrative as the oppressive forces are ousted by a patient people pushed too far finally deciding to fight back and doing so with strategic intelligence. It is, in one sense, a happy ending but not one without costs as Jiro looks at the restored village with the colourful flags of fishing boats enlivening the harbour and everyone going busily about their work. He knows a sacrifice must be made to solidify his mini revolution and he knows who must make it. Like many a Toei hero before him, he prepares to walk away, no longer welcome in the world his violence has saved but can no longer support.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Murder Unincorporated (大日本殺し屋伝, Haryasu Noguchi, 1965)

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0089_86_MURDER_UN-INCORPORATED“If you don’t laugh when you see this movie, I’m going to execute you” abacus wielding hitman Komatsu warns us at the beginning of Haryasu Noguchi’s Murder Unincorporated (大日本殺し屋伝, Dai Nihon Koroshiya-den). Luckily for us, it’s unlikely he’ll be forced to perform any “calculations”, and the only risk we currently run is that of accidentally laughing ourselves to death as we witness the absurd slapstick adventures of Japan’s craziest hitman convention when the nation’s “best” (for best read “most unusual”) contract killers descend on a small town looking for “Joe of Spades” – a mysterious assassin known only by the mole on the sole of his foot.

After the amusing Bond style opening, we witness the first victim of Joe of Spades who happens to be one of the five top gangsters in town. Sure enough, the other four then receive a threatening phone call to the effect that they’re next in line for a bullet in the brain. After ringing up an assassins agency and holding a series of auditions, the head honchos wind up with a gang of hitmen bodyguards each of whom have their own theme and wacky back story.

The leader of the gang is Heine Maki – a poetry loving, bowler hatted killer whose signature weapon is a heavy book of poems with a gun hidden inside,. He’s joined by O.N. Kane – an ex-baseball player who missed out on the major leagues through being too good and carries a baseball bat that’s really a gun, “Knife” Tatsu – ex-sushi chef knife thrower with an intense fear of fish, Al Capone III – a midget who claims to be the Japanese grandson of Al Capone and is obsessed with the Untouchables TV show, and of course Komatsu himself whose signature move is to throw his abacus in the air and invite chaos in the process.

The guys are really a little more than this small town can handle though they quickly discover the situation is nowhere near as straightforward as they thought and wind up facing off against some equally eccentric foes. That’s not to mention the mama-san at Bar Joker who turns out to be at the center of the case and a local mechanic who’s suspiciously handy with a pistol.

There really are no words to describe the quick fire, extremely zany universe in which Murder Unincorporated takes place. This is a world ruled by crime in which each of our “heroes” showcase extremely sad backstories which explain why they had absolutely no choice but to turn to killing people to survive. Take “Knife” Tatsu for example, he became a hitman because he was unable to kill the fish gasping away on his cutting board so he decided to kill people instead. O.N. Kane turned murderous after being let down in his baseball dream, Heine has a romantic tale of lost love, Capone III simply has it in the blood, and Komatsu? He wants to be a pharmacist…

This is all inspired by legendary Japanese funnyman Kobako Hanato who is famous for his Southern Japan flavoured absurd comedy routines. Kon Ohmura, who plays Komatsu, was one of his top collaborators for a time and became one of Japan’s all time great comedians. Meta quips such as remarking that the police are about to turn up “for the first time in this film” and involved jokes like the one that sees Komatsu tracking down identical “Joes” in varieties club, diamond, heart (amusingly, dressed as a geisha and playing pachinko), before heading into a punchline it would be a crime to spoil only add to the feeling that absolutely anything could happen and that would be perfectly OK.

Director Noguchi mostly keeps things straightforward but builds a fantastic comedic rhythm managing the quick fire dialogue and general absurdity with ease. Much of the film is told in flashback or reverie but the device never becomes old so much as easily syncing with with general tone of the film. There are some more unusual sequences such the opening itself, keyhole view, and a later sequence where we see directly though Komatsu’s big square glasses but otherwise the deadpan filming approach boosts the inherent comedy in the increasingly surreal situations. Quirky, oddly innocent, absurd, and just extremely laugh out loud funny, Murder Unincorporated is a world away from Nikkatsu’s po-faced crime dramas but exists in a crazy cartoon world all of its own that proves near impossible to resist!

Murder Unincorporated is the third and final film included in the second volume of Arrow’s Nikkatsu Diamond Guys box set.

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