Tag: Yoshikata Yoda

Tough Guy (悪名, Tokuzo Tanaka, 1961)

January 28, 2026by Hayley Scanlon

Starring a baby-faced Shintaro Katsu, Tokuzo Tanaka’s adaptation of a popular novel by Toko Kon, Tough Guy (悪名, Akumyo), went on to spawn a 17-film “Akumyo” or “Bad Reputation” series. Asakichi (Shintaro Katsu) is certainly the “tough guy” of the title and fulfilling a certain vision of post-war masculinity in this early Showa tale, yet getting a “bad reputation” is something he ultimately rejects in the film’s closing moments as he continues to straddle a line, not quite the “yakuza” he claims to hate but a noble rogue all the same.

Asakichi is a small-town boy from rural Kawauchi. Despite the nobility which later comes to define his character, he’s disowned by his family after stealing a chicken from a yakuza-affiliated farmer to use in a cock fight. Originally, he skips town, with the farmer’s apparently married sister Kiyo who tells him that she’s pregnant though is probably not telling the truth. In any case, when they get to the next town he discovers she’s been engaging in sex work and breaks up with her, but Kiyo is only one element of his increasingly complicated love life. While staying in the town, Asakichi ends up developing a relationship with besotted former geisha Kotoito (Yaeko Mizutani) whom he eventually agrees to help rescue through another elopement. Meanwhile, he also becomes a “guest” of the local Yoshioka yakuza group and sworn brother of former enemy Sada.(Jiro Tamiya).

The problem is that the Yoshioka gang is small potatoes in the town and does not have the resources to stand up against the hired thugs of the Matsushima red light district who eventually turn up to reclaim Kotoito. While she manages to escape on her own, Asakichi ends up randomly marrying a completely different woman, Okinu (Tamao Nakamura), who cannily makes him sign a contract saying they’re married before she’ll sleep with him. Nevertheless, when he hears that Kotoito came back to look for him and was recaptured, he springs into action and heads to Innoshima to battle agains the Silk Hat Boss and a wily yet fair-minded female yakuza who turns out to be the one really in charge of the island.

Asakichi is, in many ways, an embodiment of a certain kind of masculinity in his determination to do what he sees as right even when others don’t agree with him. Consequently, his moral code seems inconsistent and difficult to define. He was fine with stealing the chicken, but doesn’t like the idea of cheating at gambling (though later does it to get money to rescue Kotoito) despite proving himself an expert at bluff and trickery. Similarly, he hates “yakuza” and refuses to become one, but is willing to stay as their “guest” and to help out when they need extra bodies for a fight. The only thing that certain is that he hates those who abuse their power to oppress the weak, which explains his objection to the yakuza, while otherwise doing what they claim to do but in reality do not in defending the interests of those who cannot defend themselves such as Kotoito who has been sold into the sex trade by a feckless father.

Her position is mirrored in that of the female gang boss, Ito (Chieko Naniwa) , who eventually assumes control over Kotoito’s fate, an ice-cold and fearless leader who nevertheless respects Asakichi’s earnestness and brands him the tough guy of the title after he decides to return alone and accept punishment for freeing Kotoito. In giving them a week’s grace to have a kind of non-honeymoon (on which Okinu actually also comes along), she may not have expected the pair to return and is surprised that Asakichi insists on bringing the matter to a formal close. Eventually he defeats her by refusing to give in, insisting that they see which is stronger, his body or her cane, rather than begging for mercy and thereby accepting her authority. Having defeated her, he breaks the cane in two and throws it in the ocean to stand by his strength alone while crying out that he has won, yet suggesting that he does not want the kind of life that leads to a “bad reputation”. Tanaka makes fantastic use of lighting not least in the final shot of the shining sea that leaves Asakichi alone on the shore, a tiny figure in an expanding landscape.

Trailer (no subtitles)

The Woman in the Rumour (噂の女, Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954)

November 28, 2024by Hayley Scanlon

A mother and daughter find themselves deceived by the same man, each hemmed in by realities which cannot be altered but eventually coming to a place of mutual understanding that allows them to restore their relationship not only as parent and child but as women in Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1954 melodrama, The Woman in the Rumour (噂の女, Uwasa no Onna). The first question we might ask ourselves is to which of the women the title refers, or indeed to which rumour, though in a sense rumours matter little for either of them when the problem is the constraints which each of them feel as women in the contemporary society.

Even so, the sense of shame is evident when Yukiko (Yoshiko Kuga) is brought back to the geisha house run by her mother Hatsuko (Kinuyo Tanaka) after having attempted to take her own life in Tokyo. As we learn, the reason for her despair is in part heartbreak. She had been engaged but her fiancé’s family convinced him to end their relationship when they discovered that her mother ran a geisha house. Thus the suicide attempt is also a reflection of her sense of futility. She will always be the daughter of a woman who earned her living in the sex trade. This is a fact that cannot be changed and may lead her to think that her situation is hopeless because the same thing is likely to happen again leaving her unable to marry in a society in which there are few options for a single woman to make a life for herself not to mention the loneliness of living without romantic love.

Hatsuko, meanwhile, is uncertain how seriously she should take the situation in part believing that it’s a product of youthful naivety in her daughter’s first romantic heartbreak. When a young doctor with whom she is close, Matoba (Tomoemon Otani), explains to her that Yukiko is depressed because she feels deep shame, self-loathing, and hopelessness due to her mother’s occupation, Hatsuko struggles to understand it and does not fully believe him. Nevertheless, she took care to bring her daughter up largely outside of the geisha world, sending Yukiko to Tokyo to study music implying that she herself to some degree sees her work as improper. The other girls view Yukiko with a degree of disdain, realising that her refinement was bought with their exploitation and noticing her animosity towards them.

Hatsuko is mother both to Yukiko and the young women under her care who are always quick to point out that this is one of the better geisha houses because they are well looked after. When one of the women, Usugumo (Kimiko Tachibana), is taken ill, Hatusko calls in the doctor and allows her time off to rest which likely would not be granted at another house. She is reluctant to send her to hospital, but would if the situation called for it. In a sense it’s this solicitation that eventually allows Yukiko to find accommodation with her mother’s profession as she grows closer to the other women while nursing Usugumo herself and comes to understand their particular circumstances that have left them no choice but to live as geisha. Usugumo is reluctant to go to hospital because she is worried about the money she’d usually send to her sister Chiyoko (Sachiko Mine) who works the family farm and cares for their sickly father, but when she dies Chiyoko herself is left with little option other than to petition the geisha house to take her sister’s place.

On seeing Chiyoko sitting on the step and pleading to be taken on, another of the women laments as she’s leaving that she wonders when there will be no more need for women like them. The geisha world is perhaps an unchangeable reality, just like Yukiko’s birth and her mother’s age. The rumours that surround Hatsuko are to do with her closeness with Matoba with whom she has clearly been in an intimate relationship, dreaming of becoming his wife and even considering selling the geisha house to buy a large property where they could live together as a couple while he runs a private clinic. Matoba predictably decides he prefers the younger Yukiko, Hatsuko increasingly desperate after overhearing their conversation about leaving her behind to move to Tokyo together where Matoba ponders finishing his education. The play they’ve gone to see almost feels like a personal attack as an actor intones that feelings of love at 20 are fine but at 60 it’s merely shameful. “Even carp know better than to fall in love at this age”, he adds, the old woman a figure of ridicule in her romantic delusion leaving Hatsuko feeling both humiliated and resentful.

When Hatsuko finally confronts Matoba, she does it as a scorned woman rather than as a mother, while Yukiko in turn first turns on her rather than Matoba even as she begins to realise the reality of the situation that the man who seduced her had been using her mother for his own gain in total disregard of her feelings. In short, even if Hatsuko were not her mother which certainly makes this a very complicated situation, he is not the sort of man she’d want to make a life with. Acutely aware of her own experiences of heartbreak, she fears for her mother’s wellbeing and comes to an understanding of her as a woman while accepting that “men are all alike” and in that at least perhaps her mother’s profession is the most honest of all. Mutually betrayed, mother and daughter are able to repair their familial bonds while Yukiko finds herself taking refuge in the geisha house as a space of female solidarity and bulwark against a cruel and patriarchal society.

Sound in the Mist (霧の音, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1956)

May 21, 2024by Hayley Scanlon

In the opening scenes of Hiroshi Shimizu’s Sound in the Mist (霧の音, Kiri no Oto), a young woman tells another that “as women, we need to create our own happiness,” though as it turns out it’s something that neither of them are really able to do. A classic melodrama, the film once again hints at Shimizu’s mistrust of romance and the frustrating inability of men and women to communicate or embrace their love for one another even when the seeming barriers preventing it have been removed.

To that extent, it’s interesting that the chief disagreement between unhappily married botanist Kazuhiko (Ken Uehara) and his wife Katsuyo is over her feminist politics and desire to devote herself to women’s emancipation under the new post-war constitution. The main bone of contention is that she wants to sell a mountain owned by Kazuhiko’s family to fund her political career though as he later says this mountain is his life. In any case he lets her sell it, believing there’s no point putting up a fight. He puts up even less of one in his relationship with Tsuruko (Michiyo Kogure), his assistant who is hopelessly in love with him yet after his wife’s angry visit decides to absent herself feeling as if she’s in the way.

It was her friend Ayako, a Tokyo dancer, who told her that women need to make their own happiness but in the end she couldn’t do it either. She was similarly involved with a weak-willed married man who continued to vacillate over leaving his wife offering the justification that he didn’t want to mess things up for his children. Eventually the pair find escape through double suicide which only emphasises the futility of their romantic connection. Tsuruko similarly makes several comments about the idea of death and dying, stating that if she were to die she’d want to go to a particular spot in the mountain which seems like heaven to her.

Though Katsuyo describes it as a “filthy” place the cabin does indeed become a kind of haven, a bubble of apparently chaste love and longing inhabited only by Kazuhiko and Tsuruko as the voiceover says hiding out from post-war chaos. Tsuruko seems to be the kind of woman Kazuhiko regards as the ideal wife in that she cares for him and supports his work even if he tells Katsuyo he just needed someone to run errands and do the grocery shopping so Tsuruko is there as his maid. Both are at pains to emphasise that no physical relationship exists between them but are otherwise prevented from acting on the their love because of Kazuhiko’s marriage along the existence of his daughter, Yuko (Keiko Fujita), who may be adversely affected by her parents’ decision to divorce in an age when such things were less common.

Kazuhiko continues to return to the mountain cabin which has since become an inn at regular intervals to see the Harvest Moon, as does Tsuruko though she also carries a degree of shame that makes her fear re-encountering Kazuhiko having become a geisha apparently solely to ensure her proximity to the mountain. Once again filming with the gentle lateral motion familiar from his later films, Shimizu focuses on the landscape and suggests that these lovers are only free to love in the natural world unconstrained by the petty concerns of civilisation which prevent them from embracing their desires. The sound in the mist is perhaps that of Kazuhiko’s latent romanticism and the implication that to him it may be better to suffer for love than to accept it. The same may be true for Tsuruko who is equally powerless if filled with regret that in the end she gave up so easily rather than fight for the love of her life.

On the other hand, the cabin seems to have given rise to a love match between Kazuhiko’s daughter Yuko and her husband who vow to continue the tradition of coming to the inn on the occasion of the Harvest Moon which marks both their wedding anniversary and the time they met. Yuko’s melancholy expression on coming to an understanding of her father’s “special memories” suggests a gentle sympathy but also that this younger generation is freer to love though no less romantic.The poignant closing scenes in which Kazuhiko wanders into the mist are nevertheless filled with irresolution, regret, and a longing that express only a deep sadness for the misconnections and misunderstandings of a less open past.

Sound in the Mist screens at Japan Society New York on May 23/30 as part of Hiroshi Shimizu Part 2: The Postwar and Independent Years.

Miss Oyu (お遊さま, Kenji Mizoguchi, 1951)

May 15, 2023May 15, 2023by Hayley Scanlon

“I never realised how heavy this kimono was” a young woman exclaims towards the conclusion of Kenji Mizoguchi’s Miss Oyu (お遊さま, Oyu-sama), adapted from the Junichiro Tanizaki short story The Reed Cutter, finally collapsing under its weight having committed what amounts to an act of spiritual suicide in an internalised betrayal. Mizoguchi’s highly selective adaptation excises much of Tanizaki’s trademark perversity and targets instead the repressive social codes of the era which proceed to ruin three lives in frustrated affection, shame, and self-harming guilt.

The trouble begins when Shinnosuke (Yuji Hori), a young man in search of a wife, mistakes his prospective bride for her sister and is forever smitten. Oyu (Kinuyo Tanaka), a widow with a young son, is only accompanying her younger sister, Oshizu (Nobuko Otowa), but is perhaps herself taken with the handsome suitor whom she repeatedly brands a “fine gentleman”. Having objected to all of Oshizu’s previous matches, she encourages her sister to marry this one not least because of his physical proximity that would allow the pair to visit each other regularly. The pain on Oshizu’s face is however readily apparent as Oyu relates the amusing incident to their brother, the younger sister clearly consumed with an inferiority complex in the shadow of the beautiful and elegant Oyu.

It’s never quite clear to what extent Oyu is aware of her sister’s feelings, if she says these things thoughtlessly or with an intent to wound though she obviously cares deeply for Oshizu. Similarly the extent of her feelings for Shinnosuke remains oblique. As a woman well aware of her beauty and its power, perhaps she simply enjoys being desired or is so accustomed to male attention as to barely notice that Shinnosuke has fallen in love with her. Then again perhaps she knows all too well and for the sake of politeness pretends not to though in that case the decision to encourage her sister to marry him would seem perverse or suggest that she is attempting to deny her own feelings which she may not even understand by rendering Shinnosuke a “brother” in an attempt to remove him from the pool of potential romantic suitors.

Even so there is an underlying quality of incestuous desire of Oshizu for her sister to whom she remains devotedly besotted, willing to sacrifice her own happiness in the hope of ensuring Oyu’s. After agreeing to marry Shinnosuke, she explains to him that she intends their marriage to be purely symbolic. She refuses to consummate their union on the grounds that it would be a betrayal of Oyu whom she knows to be in love with Shinnosuke while realising that he has married her only to be connected with her sister. When the trio take a trip together the strangeness of the ménage à trois is brought home by the confusion of the hotel maid who assumes that Oyu and Shinnosuke are the married couple, commiserating with Oshizu for being a third wheel. While Oyu childishly makes light of it, Oshizu is hurt and confused, jealous in two directions but pleading with Shinnosuke to be only his sister rather than a wife.

Yet the wrongness of the arrangement is signalled on Oyu’s return home when she discovers not only that her son, Hajime, has fallen mortally ill in her absence but that rumours have begun to circulate about her unusual relationship with her brother-in-law. It is impossible to avoid the implication that Oyu is being punished firstly for betraying her maternity in having gone on holiday without her son to experience freedom as a woman, secondly for feeling sexual desire, and thirdly for feeling it for a married man who is now technically a brother in being her sister’s husband though as we know no one’s sexual desires are currently being fulfilled in this incredibly complicated and destructive arrangement.

Though Tanizaki might have been more interested in exploring the darker aspects of human sexuality, Mizoguchi pulls back from the author’s trademark perversity to take aim at the repressive social codes of a patriarchal society which brought such a fraught situation into being. Oyu is unable to marry Shinnosuke because she is bound to her late husband’s family and by the responsibility to her son whom she would have to leave behind even if she were given permission to take another husband. Once her son dies, her ties to marital family are severed and they, disapproving of the rumours surrounding her unconventional relationship with her sister and brother-in-law, send her back to her brother who is also reluctant to accept her. On learning of the reality of her sister’s marriage, she decides to accept a proposal from a sake merchant in another town but the separation breeds only more destruction. Oshizu and and Shinnosuke move to Tokyo and three years later are living in poverty, Shinnosuke now dishevelled and dressing in Western suits with a modern haircut and a scraggly, half-hearted moustache. Oshizu’s eventual pregnancy which confirms that theirs is now a “full” union while Oyu’s is “symbolic” only the slows implosion of the trio’s repressed desires.

Mizoguchi stops short of arguing for a transgressively new arrangement that would have allowed the trio to live together as a family but nevertheless attacks the repressive social codes that prevent them from speaking honestly about their feelings and force them into self-sacrificing acts of subterfuge which create only more suffering. He dramatises the claustrophobia of their lives through the obvious artificially of the stage sets which stand in such stark contrast to the expansive beauty of nature albeit sometimes unruly but always free, while lending their tragic tale a hint of the parabolic in its mists and rugged gardens as Shinnosuke finds himself alone under the cold light of the moon on a distant shore, a romantic exile from a repressive society.

Stepbrothers (異母兄弟, Miyoji Ieki, 1957)

August 18, 2022by Hayley Scanlon

The destructive effects of militarist folly are borne out in the fortunes of one bifurcated family in Miyoji Ieki’s impassioned social drama, Stepbrothers (異母兄弟, Ibou Kyodai). Ieki had joined Shochiku in 1940 and served as an assistant director to Minoru Shibuya making his directorial debut in 1944 taking over a project Shibuya had begun before being drafted, Torrent. After the war he became the head of the studio’s union and was subsequently dismissed during the Red Purge of 1950. Adapted from the novel by Torahiko Tamiya, Stepbrothers was produced by Dokuritsu Eiga which became a kind of refuge for left-leaning directors and makes a direct attack on lingering feudalism and the militarist past.

Spanning 25 years, the film opens in 1921 with pompous military officer Hantaro Kido (Rentaro Mikuni) riding his horse before immediately slapping his stableboy on dismounting apparently dissatisfied with his service in insisting there is something wrong with one of the horse’s shoes. This fear is later confirmed by the new maid he has just hied, Rie (Kinuyo Tanaka), who is the daughter of a recently deceased carriage driver. She has been hired because Hantaro’s wife is chronically ill and bedridden, no longer able to care for their two brattish sons Ichiro and Gojiro who imitate their father by pointing swords and guns at people while ordering them around. After asking Rie to check on the horse and observing her treating it with tenderness before pointing out the problem with its shoe unprompted, Hantaro loses control of himself, pushes her into the straw, and rapes her. With nowhere to turn Rie goes to the family friend who got her the job who discourages her from having an abortion and tries to make Hantaro take responsibility but he refuses to compensate her finally scoffing that there’s no way he would marry the mere daughter of a carriage driver.

Challenged by his superior officer, however, he pledges to do just that in order to save the honour of the Kido family along with that of the regiment but is soon sent off to a less prestigious provincial position. In appointing Rie as a maid, Hantaro had expounded at length on his family lineage as guardians of a particular style of kendo, but there’s no denying that he has acted dishonourably while Rie is forced to marry the man who raped her and is then rendered little more than an unpaid servant in his home who is essentially raped every night for the remainder of her married life. After giving birth to the baby, a son Yoshitoshi, she has another some years later, Tomohide, but she and her children are not regarded as members of the family and are forced to sleep in the kitchen. Ichiro and Gojiro still call her Rie rather than mother and order her around like a servant while Hantaro simultaneously rejects her sons and insists they follow the family tradition by becoming fine soldiers.

A poignant scene sees Gojiro looking on at Rie as Yoshitoshi and Tomohide cheerfully play cards with some of the servants one New Year implying he may in fact miss maternal closeness but is unable to express it because of his father’s code of manliness later tearfully asking his brother for memories of their mother when they are both grown men. The difference between the boys can seen in their names, those of Hantaro’s sons from his first marriage meaning something like “first son boss” and “strong second son” while those of Rie’s sons are much warmer, Yoshitoshi using the characters for good and benefit, and Tomohide’s wisdom and excellence. Ichiro and Gojiro continue to mercilessly bully Yoshitoshi and Tomohide, insulting them as sons of mistresses a term which Yoshitoshi does not fully understand but instantly associates with the way his family has been treated as other and inferior, confined to the parts of the house otherwise occupied by servants. When he says he’s no desire to become a soldier, Hantaro locks him in the cupboard under the stairs and seemingly never talks to him again.

Rie tells him that he will understand her actions when he’s older but he continues to blame her for them, angry that could not reject Hantaro’s authority to protect him nor would she escape the situation by simply leaving it. His criticism is unfair and ignores her continued suffering given the reality that as a young woman with no family or fortune she is left with no means of supporting herself that would make it possible to escape. But he may also have a point in that she is also the product of a feudal and patriarchal society and is spiritually unable to refuse Hantaro’s corrupt authority over her even as he dismisses her as a carriage driver’s daughter and her sons as unworthy by his name. She suffers and placates him to protect them but Yoshitoshi sees only her complicity.

Yet Hantaro’s pompous austerity which is also the code of the age later destroys him. He prattles on about his supposed military prowess while telling one of his sons that soldiers should be thought of as pawns to be sacrificed for the emperor only to lose both of them to the inevitable defeat. Portraits of his two sons sit proudly under a map of the Japanese empire now shorn of the flags he’d pinned to mark their victories, while Rie’s are hidden away on the shelf of a cupboard itself one of the few pieces of furniture they had not sold to survive in the difficult post-war period. Hantaro had rejected Tomohide (Katsuo Nakamura) who craved his approval because he was in poor physical health and therefore unable to fulfil his vision of manliness but it is he who alone survives having rejected his name after his father beat him for singing and sent Haru (Hizuru Takachiho), the cheerful servant girl he loved, away to be sold off to a brothel by her impoverished family.

When Tomohide returns home after some years of wandering to a mother who thought him dead only for Hantaro to reject him, his only living son, Rie finally finds the strength to reject his authority. This time she refuses to leave, insisting that the house is rightfully Tomohide’s and he should not surrender it to a Hantaro who is now beaten and defeated, a pitiful old man who can barely walk and is perhaps consumed by the humiliation of his life’s folly. It’s his hypocrisy and moral cowardice along with the cold austerity of mindless militarism that have ruined all their lives, yet in Tomohide who truly crossed the barriers of class in continuing to help Haru with her chores there is a hope for a new future as his mother and he fill the bath together and assume ownership in equality of the home which has always been their own.

The Song of the Cart (荷車の歌, Satsuo Yamamoto, 1959)

April 12, 2020by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment

“When all human beings acknowledge each other as human let the precious joy that results be universal. When this joy lives forever in the hearts of women and is handed down to daughters who become mothers then tomorrow will not just repeat today but be a new beginning” reads the opening title card/mission statement of Satsuo Yamamoto’s chronicle of early 20th century Japan. Told though the eyes of one very good woman wrestling against her baser instincts, Song of the Cart (荷車の歌, Niguruma no Uta) is a gentle plea for a little more empathy and understanding in which the heroine suffers greatly but is finally rewarded in managing to keep the darkness at bay.

In late Meiji, Seki (Yuko Mochizuki) develops a fondness for the most eligible young man in town – the postman, Moichi (Rentaro Mikuni), who can read and write and isn’t bad looking either. To her surprise, Moichi admires her too and eventually proposes marriage, intending to give up his job as a postman which doesn’t pay as much as it used to now costs are rising because of the recently concluded Sino-Japanese war to buy a handcart with the longterm goal of building a small handcart empire with a warehouse of his own that will allow him to build a fancy house to live in. Seki hesitates, she’s an illiterate maid perhaps she isn’t good enough for the great Moichi but he replies that he couldn’t care less about that and only wants to know if she wants him. She does, but has to check with her parents first. They object to the marriage on the grounds that Moichi is penniless and disown her when she tells them she’s marrying him anyway. Disowned by her parents, she also loses her job as a maid and is forced to head to Moichi’s ahead of schedule where his extremely cold mother (Teruko Kishi) makes no secret of her resentment of her new daughter-in-law but is eventually forced to relent.

Unlike Moichi and his mother, the other residents of the village and particularly its women are bright and cheerful despite the harshness of their lives. Swept off her feet by Moichi’s seeming sophistication, Seki is in for a rude awakening in realising that his work ethic is extreme and in many ways he’s just as cruel as his heartless mother. On her arrival, Seki’s mother-in-law complains that she brings “only a small bundle” while simultaneously suggesting that she somehow looks down on them because they are only poor people, insisting that she work alongside Moichi pulling carts to make their dreams of riches come true. Seki jumps at the chance to prove her love, but finds her mother-in-law unchanged.

Pulling the cart through the village, Moichi and Seki pass another woman who seems put out by Seki’s presence, complaining that Moichi never bothered to reply to her own proposal. Moichi dismisses her complaints, avowing that he didn’t marry her because she wasn’t a worker, implying that he was only interested in someone who would work alongside him in pursuit of his goal of becoming a homeowner. Seki is indeed a worker, and a strong woman who bears her hardships with grace, but finds it increasingly difficult to put up with her mother-in-law’s heartlessness and adherence to old-fashioned feudal customs by which she claims her authority over the household while Moichi, as the dutiful son, always defers to his mother. When the first child arrives, Moichi declares that a daughter brings him no joy, while the mother-in-law who is supposed to be watching her, just lets her cry all day long and doesn’t even change her nappies. Out on the road, Seki comes across another couple in a similar situation who’ve brought their little one with them, riding in a bucket on the back of the cart. Seki wonders why they can’t do the same, then she’d at least know her daughter was alright and not crying her heart out in a dirty nappy, but Moichi won’t hear of it lest his mother be offended that Seki is suggesting she’s not looking after her granddaughter properly.

Moichi works every hour god sends, but not so much to provide for his family as to improve his own status in the hope of owning a sizeable home, perhaps to “regain” the kind of position his mother thinks is theirs as descendents of the Heike. He exists on a kind of political fault line in his rigid austerity, believing that you really can make it just by working hard while also becoming the de facto spokesman for the other cartmen because he is the only one able to read and write. Yet faced with constant and obvious oppression of the eerily feudal kind in persistent rice profiteering he does nothing much to resist it and gives only grudging approval to his son’s intention of forming a train driver’s union.

While Moichi has pinned all his hopes on handcarts, the future is fast approaching. A funeral procession of cartmen is greeted by the horse-drawn variety coming the other way as if to signal their imminent obsolescence. But the horsemen aren’t much better off. If Moichi couldn’t afford a horse, he’ll never afford a motor car and the mechanised age is on the horizon. The only work he manages to find ironically involves transporting lumber for the new railway line, but it’s a gamble that pays off and makes Moichi a wealthy man once again.

Material comforts aren’t everything, however, and Seki struggles to reconcile herself to life with her increasing cruel mother-in-law and emotionally distant husband. She worries that she’s becoming what she hates, finding it difficult to find sympathy for Moichi’s mother now she’s ill in feeling that perhaps she’s getting what she deserves. Her friend advises her that that’s just “bugs” eating away at her heart and what she really needs to do is fly in the opposite direction, finally make a friend of her mother-in-law in trying to understand her. She has, after all, had a very hard life, starved of affection all these years as a young widow raising a son alone on little more than charcoal money.

Seki meanwhile suffers numerous humiliations and heartbreaks, notably Moichi’s extremely unreasonable decision to bring his 50-year-old sex worker mistress to live with them in their home, but does her best to be generous and forgiving. As she points out, this house is half hers, she built it alongside Moichi and she won’t just vacate it so Moichi can do what he always does which is as he pleases (once his mother’s not around to tell him not to). Moichi perhaps pays for his feudalist follies and selfish authoritarianism in a fairly direct way which aligns him with his chastened nation waking up to the emotional costs of his mistakes, while Seki is finally rewarded. Unlike her mother-in-law she becomes a beloved neighbourhood granny giving rides to all the local kids while pulling her cart onwards towards the future like a reverse Mother Courage embracing her long absent son finally returned to her in recognition of her goodness.

My Love Has Been Burning (わが恋は燃えぬ, Kenji Mizoguchi, 1949)

March 28, 2019August 22, 2021by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment

Among the many parallels that could be drawn between the Meiji Restoration and the immediate post-war period, the most obvious is that each provided a clear opportunity for social change along with a moment of frozen introspection and internal debate about what the new promised future ought to look like. Following Victory of Women and The Love of the Actress Sumako, Kenji Mizoguchi completed a loose trilogy of films dealing with the theme of female emancipation with My Love Has Been Burning (わが恋は燃えぬ, Waga Koi wa Moenu), returning once again to the broken promises of Meiji as its heroine discovers that old ideas don’t change so quickly and even those who claim to be better will often disappoint.

The film opens in the early 1880s as a teenage Eiko Hirayama (Kinuyo Tanaka) attends a rally to celebrate the arrival of noted feminist Toshiko Kishida (Kuniko Miyake). Eiko, a committed social liberal from a conservative middle-class family, went to see her idol in the company of a childhood friend, Hayase (Eitaro Ozawa), who is shortly going to Tokyo to study and join the democratic revolution. He halfheartedly asks Eiko to come with him, but knows that she won’t because her parents will refuse permission and she will not disobey them. Soon after, Eiko’s loyalty to her family is weakened when the family’s maid, Chiyo (Mitsuko Mito), is sold to a brothel by her father. Devastated, Eiko asks her parents for the money to buy her back but they refuse, regarding Chiyo’s sacrifice as noble and in line with filial tradition. If Chiyo had refused (not that she had the right or power to refuse), her parents would starve. Eiko rushes back to the docks, but she is too late, Chiyo and Hayase have both departed for the capital and extremely different fates.

After her family situation declines still further and Eiko decides it is impossible for her to remain under her father’s roof, she makes her own way to the city but finds it not quite so welcoming as she’d assumed it to be. Hayase is not overjoyed to see her. He merely asks if she has finally decided to marry him and becomes petulant when she reaffirms her intention to study even if she implies that she intends to marry him at a later date. During his time apart from her, Hayase has been working for the fledgling Liberal Party agitating for wider democratic rights and the expansion of the franchise, though he is irritated still further when his mentor, Omoi (Ichiro Sugai) – the leader of the socialists, is supportive of Eiko’s ambitions and agrees to find a job for her working on the party paper.

Eiko’s early disappointment in Hayase is frequently mirrored in all of her subsequent dealings with men. Hayase put on a performance of believing in her cause of women’s liberation and more widely the equality of all peoples ending centuries of feudal oppression, but really just wanted to possess her body and is unwilling to accept her decision to reject him or to choose someone else. Later visiting her after she has been imprisoned on a somewhat trumped up charge, Hayase tells her that a woman is only a woman when loved by a man, and that a woman’s fulfilment is achieved through home, family, and motherhood. He tells her that he admires her for her education and talent, but that she has “forgotten” that she is a woman. He will help her remember by getting her out of prison if only she consent to marry him even though he has previously attempted to rape her and is now working for the rightwing government having betrayed the socialist cause.

Meanwhile, Omoi looks an awful lot better. He is, ostensibly, entirely committed to socialist aims, energetically engaged in promoting the Liberal Party, and trying to ensure true democracy takes root in the new Japan, lifting the common man above his subjugated position in the still prevalent feudal hierarchy. Nevertheless, he too eventually falls in love with Eiko and like Hayase is ultimately more interested in her body than their shared cause for liberal freedom. He appears to support her desire for women’s rights as an integral part of his desire to end feudal oppressions but his belief in female equality is later exposed as superficial. Eiko, reuniting with Chiyo in prison, takes her into the household she now shares with Omoi (though they are obviously not legally married) as her maid which is perhaps not entirely egalitarian but still a well intentioned attempt to free her from the life her father condemned her to.

Omoi disappoints, bedding Chiyo while Eiko is working hard at the campaign office. Confronted, he rolls his eyes and offers a boys will be boys justification before affirming that it was just a matter of sexual satisfaction and that his feelings for her haven’t changed, mildly reproving Eiko for allowing her emotional jealously to cloud her judgement in restricting his sexual freedom. If it were indeed a matter of free love, perhaps Eiko could have understood, but Omoi damns himself when looks askance at Chiyo and remarks that it doesn’t really matter because she is nothing but a servant and a concubine. All at once, Eiko sees – despite his fine talk, Omoi may have abandoned feudal ways of thinking when it comes to working men but still sees women in terms of things. If he thinks female “servants” are not worthy of respect or agency, then what is it that he has been fighting for in his supposed mission to end oppression in Japan?

Attempting to comfort a distraught Chiyo who has been so thoroughly brainwashed that she never quite expected anything “better” than being a concubine and has truly fallen for all Omoi’s pretty words about wanting to make her happy, Eiko reminds her that as long as men continue to think as Omoi does women will never be free. Freedom and equality are what will enable female happiness, and long as men refuse to recognise women not as domestic tools but as fellow human beings there can be no freedom in Japan. Mizoguchi reinforces the idea that while one is oppressed none of us is free, neatly celebrating the success of the disappointing Omoi while lamenting that his intentions for reform will not go far enough. Eiko cannot free the women of Japan on her own, but her solution is warm and committed – she will teach them to free themselves by starting a school, educating the next generation to be better than the last. Chiyo, notably, whom she never blames or rejects, will become her first pupil neatly subverting Hayase’s cruel words when she asks Eiko to teach her how to be a woman.

Unusually brutal, My Love Has Been Burning does not shy away from the violence, often sexual violence, which both women suffer both at the hands of men and of the state as they attempt to do nothing more than live freely as full human beings. It also makes plain that even those with supposedly high ideals can disappoint as they nevertheless motion towards real social good without fully committing to its entireties. A committed pro-democratic, intensely feminist statement, Mizoguchi’s lasting message lies in an affirmation of female solidarity as, unlike the self-serving Omoi, Eiko lifts her pupil up onto her own level and draws her shawl around them both committed to proceeding forward together into a fairer future.

The Love of the Actress Sumako (女優須磨子の恋, Kenji Mizoguchi, 1947)

March 27, 2019by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment

The Taisho era was, like that of the post-war, a time both of confusion and possibility in which the young, in particular, looked for new paths and new freedoms as the world got wider and ideas flowed in from every corner of the globe. In The Love of the Actress Sumako (女優須磨子の恋, Joyu Sumako no koi), the second of a loose trilogy films about female emancipation, Kenji Mizoguchi took the real life story of a pioneering actress of Western theatre and used it to explore the progress of lack there of in terms of social freedoms not only for women but for artists and for society as a whole.

We begin in late Meiji as theatre director Shimamura (So Yamamura) fights to establish a foothold of Western-style “art theatre”, moving away from the theatricality of kabuki for something more immediate and naturalistic. He has, however, a problem in that as women were not allowed to take to the kabuki stage all of his students are male and casting a man to play a woman’s role would run counter to his desires to create a truly representative theatre. It is therefore lucky that he runs into Sumako Matsui (Kinuyo Tanaka) – a feisty, determined young woman who had divorced her first husband for infidelity and then left the second when he complained about her desire to pursue a career on the stage. In Sumako, Shimamura finds a muse and the ideal woman to portray the extremely controversial figure of Nora in his dream production of Ibsen’s incendiary A Doll’s House.

Shimamura casts Sumako because he sees in her some of Nora’s defiance and eventual desire to be free from illusionary social constraints, but it is in fact he who ends up embodying her spirit in real life. Somewhat feminised, Shimamura is in a difficult position in having married into his wife’s family, leaving him without real agency inside his own home as evidenced by his mild opposition to his daughter’s arranged marriage. While he wishes that his daughter be happy and if possible marry for love, Shimamura’s wife is very much of the old school and wants to make the best possible match in terms of financial gain and social status, viewing emotional compatibility as a low priority (the daughter herself as relatively little say). Unwisely falling in love with Sumako, it is he who eventually decides to follow Nora’s example by walking out not only on his family but also on the theatre company. He does this not quite because the scales have been lifted from his eyes – he was never under any illusion that his arranged marriage was “real” and there is of course an accepted degree of performance involved in all such unions, but because he finally sees possibility enough in his love for Sumako and the viability of emotionally honest Western art to allow him to break free of outdated feudal ideas of familial obligation.

Nevertheless, making a career as an artist is a difficult prospect in any age and Shimamura’s emotional freedom quickly becomes tied up with that of his art. Sumako’s Nora proves a hit (in the last year of Meiji), but he is ahead of his times both in terms of his liberal, left-wing philosophy and his determination to embrace modern drama in a still traditional society. The roles we see Sumako perform, including that in Tolstoy’s Resurrection which was another of those that helped to make her name, are all from proto-feminist plays which revolve around women who, like herself, had chosen to challenge the patriarchal status quo in pursuit of their own freedom and agency. Shimamura’s wife makes no secret of her outrage to her husband’s desire to stage A Doll’s House, viewing Nora’s decision as “selfish” and perhaps of a subversion of every notion she associates with idealised femininity. Though not so far apart in age, Sumako is a woman of Taisho who left not one but two unfulfilling marriages and is determined to forge her own path even if that path eventually leads her to subsume her own desires within those of her lover as the pair attempt to put their social revolution on the stage.

The revolution, however, does not quite take off. Despite good early notices, Shimamura’s Art Theatre company quickly runs into trouble. Faced with financial ruin, he does what any sensible theatre producer would do – he begins to prioritise bums on seats and acknowledges that if he’s to keep his company afloat and facilitate his dream of making Western theatre a success in Japan he’ll have to compromise his artistic aims by putting on some populist plays. Of course, this sudden concession to commercial demands does not go down well with all and some of his hardline actors begin to leave in protest not just of his selling out but of his twinned desire to make Sumako his star.

Tellingly, the pair are eventually forced out of Japan entirely to tour the beginnings of empire from Korea to China and on to Taiwan. Their ideas are too radical and their society not quite ready for their messages even if not initially as hostile as it would later become. Shimamura works himself to the bone trying to keep his dream alive, eventually damaging his health. Sumako remains somewhat petulant about being forced into an itinerant lifestyle while her onstage personas come increasingly to influence her offstage life until it is said of her that her performance is “no longer an interpretation but an extension of reality”. In this, Sumako has, in a sense, achieved Shimamura’s dreams of a truly naturalistic theatre, but it comes at a cost, as perhaps all art does, and, Mizoguchi seems to suggest, becomes a kind of sacrifice laid down to a society still too rigid and unforgiving to appreciate its sincerity. Nevertheless, their boldness, as fruitless as it was, has started a flame which others intend to keep burning, eventually becoming a beacon for another new world looking to rebuild itself better and freer than before.

Short clip featuring Sumako’s performance as Carmen.

Killing in Yoshiwara (妖刀物語花の吉原百人斬り, Tomu Uchida, 1960)

March 23, 2019by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Having led a somewhat floating life, Tomu Uchida returned to Japan in only in 1953 after a sustained period with the Manchurian Film Cooperative followed by a brief flirtation with Maoism. Before the war Uchida had been closely identified with the Keiko Eiga movement of broadly left-wing filmmaking but later fell hard for the inherent romanticism of militarist ideology during his time in Manchuria. Nevertheless it was apparently the Maoist doctrines of progress through contradiction that influenced his later dramatic philosophy in which he came to think of narrative as a series of conflicts which culminate in an explosive act designed to resolve them (or not, as we will see). 1960’s Killing in Yoshiwara (妖刀物語花の吉原百人斬り, Yoto Monogatari: Hana no Yoshiwara Hyakunin-giri, AKA Hero of the Red Light District) is perhaps a prime example as it takes a seemingly generic story inspired by a kabuki play and uses it to tell a melancholy tale of parallel yet mutually thwarted desires for vengeance against a cruel and oppressive society.

Ostensibly, our “hero” is Jiro (Chiezo Kataoka) – a successful silk merchant. A good and kind man, Jiro is beloved of all his staff for his careful consideration of them as people as well as employees. This concern is, however, perhaps not as wholly “good” as it seems. Jiro’s major problem in life is that he is an adopted child, taken in by his parents who auspiciously discovered him abandoned on the anniversary of their own child’s death. Jiro, apparently of noble birth, was abandoned because he has a prominent grey birthmark “staining” his face. This is the reason he has so far been unable to find a wife despite his good character and relative wealth. Desperately grateful to the couple who took him in “despite” his “imperfection”, Jiro feels this failure heavily in his current inability to provide them with a male heir to take over the family business.

Being good and earnest, Jiro has never dared to fritter money away in the red light district but is tempted when invited by a valued client whom he would not want to offend by refusing. Nevertheless, his first visit to the Yoshiwara is not an altogether pleasant experience as even the seasoned courtesans find it difficult to bear the sight of his “monstrous” face. Embarrassed, the innkeepers finally decide to employ a lowly servant, Otsuru (Yoshie Mizutani), who is not a trained courtesan but a woman convicted for illegal prostitution, to minister solely to Jiro. Otsuru does her work and is relatively unbothered by Jiro’s facial abnormality – something which endears her to Jiro’s heart and has the desired effect of hooking him through his weakness.

Otsuru, later “Tamarazu” the courtesan, is in many ways our villainess but she is also Jiro’s mirror and merely another outsider trying to escape oppression through any means possible. Uchida is careful to frame Otsuru not as a cruel and amoral adventurer, but someone who has decided to survive and can at least be honest about her intentions. We see her caged, imprisoned inside the Yoshiwara to do inside it what was declared “illegal” outside and acknowledging that she may well die here to met by a lonely funeral and rest unnamed in a communal grave. Otsuru decides that if she has to stay in the Yoshiwara then she will be its queen and then use that success to catapult herself into a more comfortable life even if she knows that it will be little more than a nicer kind of cage.

Jiro and Otsuru are each victims of the oppressive society in which they live as symbolised by the cruelly hypocritical worldview of the brothel owners who set out to exploit them both. Otsuru, worldly wise, is fully aware of the ways in which she is and will continue to be exploited but has chosen to be complicit within them as a means of effecting her escape. Jiro, meanwhile, is obviously aware that the “stain” across his face is the reason for his unhappy destiny but has only ever sought to minimise the distress his appearance causes to others. Thus he overcompensates by being relentlessly nice and infinitely humble, grateful for each and every concession which is extended to him as a fully human being rather than the “monster” which he is later branded by the innkeepers in a rare moment of candour which exposes their venial desires.

This extreme desire for acceptance is in itself a symptom of his self loathing and internalised shame regarding his appearance which is after all merely an accident of birth over which he had no control. Abandoned by his birthparents who left him with a “cursed” destiny in the form of an unlucky sword, Jiro has been working overtime to overcome social prejudice but finding his path continually blocked. He latches on to Otsuru simply because she was nice to him without understanding the peculiar rules of interactions within the Yoshiwara, or as she later puts it “no money, no love”. Jiro ruins himself out of frustrated loneliness and a forlorn hope of repaying the debt he owes the couple who took him in by being able to provide them with a male heir to inherit the family business.

It is these mutual conflicts which eventually lead to the explosive finale hinted at by the violence of the title. Otsuru’s star rises while Jiro’s falls – not only is he fleeced by the innkeepers and an unrepentant Otsuru, his business also fails thanks to an act of God while his reputation lies in tatters once his associates get to know of his “frivolous” behaviour in the Yoshiwara. This in itself is doubly hypocritical as it was this same major client who introduced Jiro to the “pleasure” quarters in the first place only to remind him that business is a matter of trust and that they no longer trust him because he has broken his promise of keeping away from the Yoshiwara.

Pushed to the brink by successive humiliations, Jiro’s rage erupts in a singular act of violence which takes the sword not only to the Yoshiwara but the entrenched systems of oppression and exploitation which it represents. Otsuru, now an oiran, is literally trapped by her ostentatious outfit (in reality the very purpose it is designed to serve) as she struggles to escape male violence, her hand on the gate of the Yoshiwara which refuses to release her. Their parallel quests for revenge eventually converge only to defeat each other in a staggering act of futility which remains unresolved as the curtain falls on a moment of unanswerable rage.