Yoshiko Kusunoki – Windows on Worlds

Busho Sawada’s serialised novel had been adapted several times before with the first released shortly after its publication in 1926, but this “modernised” version directed by Yasuzo Masumura, The Woman Who Touched Legs (足にさわった女, Ashi ni Sawatta Onna), is tailor-made for the post-war era as the titular woman heads off in search of the old Japan only to learn that it no longer exists and what little of it remains is being sold off for golf courses and ever expanding American airbases whose noisy aircraft fly constantly overhead.

To that extent, Saya (Machiko Kyo) is an embodiment of aimless post-war youth. Her father was accused of being a spy and took his own life while her mother worked herself to death when she was just a child. Though she travels with a rather dim young man who refers to her as his older sister, they are not actually related by blood and seem to have belonged to the same community of street criminals in Osaka along with their “big sister” Haruko (Haruko Sugimura) who has since moved back to Atsugi which is Saya’s “hometown”. Since her parents’ deaths, she’s been obsessed with the idea of revenge and pickpocketing money to save for a giant memorial service to show the relatives who chased her family out of town how well she’s done for herself. But when she arrives, she can’t even find the place she’s looking for. A policeman flips through a series of ancient, handwritten ledgers looking for evidence of people with her surname and suggests they’ve all left town. Even the last one left is the wife of an adopted son who plans to move to Tokyo after their house is purchased by developers who want to build a golf course.

The golf course may be a symbol of Japan’s increasing prosperity, but the airbases seem to hint more at a sense of corruption and oppression. Saya’s “hometown” is a mythical concept that belongs to an idealised vision of a pastoral Japan before the war that she unconsciously wants to return to. Her mother spoke of a small settlement of perhaps 30 houses, a village society with a river running through it. The village has now, however, been swallowed by the airbase and, in fact, erased so that no one even quite remembers it. Saya is left feeling that she no longer has a hometown, and ironically asks policeman Kita to arrest her so she can go back to prison, which is, perhaps, where her heart truly lies. At least, it’s much quieter than here without any noisy aircraft flying overhead.

Nevertheless, Kita (Hajime Hana) is a fairly bumbling policeman and the film opens with what turns out to be part of a book set in a lawless Japan where people gamble, party, and openly sell guns on an ordinary train. Kita is currently on holiday, which he’s been forced to take even though he doesn’t really want to. He’s technically powerless for the moment, but continually complains that he’s not allowed to arrest Saya unless he catches her in the act of pickpocketing. It’s clear that the pair have feelings for each other it’s inconvenient to admit, and all this talk of “arrest” maybe more a kind of metaphor in which Saya secretly wants to be caught by Kita with the snapping of the handcuffs akin to the putting of a ring on a finger. The pair effectively lead each other on a merry dance with Saya ironically eventually chasing the policeman rather than the other way around.

The film does open rather salaciously with a closeup of a woman’s legs in fishnet tights followed by a kickline, and Machiko Kyo does indeed play up her sexy image to play the beautiful pickpocket who uses her body as a tool to mesmerise much to Haruko’s disapproval. Besides Kita, she’s followed by a rather louche writer (Eiji Funakoshi) who declares that he doesn’t need models, though evidently captivated by her, while declaring himself too successful and overworked. He doesn’t want more money, he just wants some free time and no one seems to want to let him have any, though he doesn’t exactly get a lot of writing done on this wild goose chase looking for Saya’s missing hometown. Absurd as it is, this unlikely rom-com between a beautiful pickpocket and bumbling policeman does at least end in a moment both of constraint and liberation as Saya finds herself content with her famous legs cuffed and Kita content to wear a different hat as they ride off on a decidedly unusual honeymoon.

As in her third film, The Eternal Breasts, Kinuyo Tanaka’s fourth directorial feature, The Wandering Princess (流転の王妃, Ruten no Ouhi), finds her working with extremely recent material – in this case the memoirs of Japanese noblewoman Hiro Saga which had become a bestseller immediately after publication in 1959. Tanaka’s filmic adaptation arrived mere months later in January 1960 which was, in an ironic twist, a year before the real life tale would meet something like the conventional romantic ending familiar from classic melodrama. Nevertheless, working with Daiei’s top talent including Kon Ichikawa’s regular screenwriter (and wife) Natto Wada, Tanaka attempts to reframe the darkness of the preceding 20 years as the defeat of compassionate idealism at the hands of rigid austerity and unstoppable oppression.

Tanaka opens with a scene taking place in 1957 which in fact depicts a somewhat notorious incident already known to the contemporary audience and otherwise unexplained on-screen in which the older Ryuko (Machiko Kyo) tenderly bends over the body of lifeless schoolgirl. The camera then pulls back to find another girl in school uniform, Ryuko, twenty years earlier. A young woman with innocent dreams, Ryuko’s life encounters the usual kind of unwelcome disruption in the unexpected arrival of a marriage proposal but this is no ordinary wedding. Ryuko, as the oldest daughter of a prominent noble family, has been selected as a possible bride for the younger brother of the former Qing emperor now installed as the symbolic leader of the Japanese puppet state of Manchuria. Against the odds, Ryuko and her new husband Futetsu (Eiji Funakoshi) are well matched and endeavour to build a happy home together just as they intend to commit themselves to the creation of a new nation born from the twin legacies of the fallen Chinese empire and the resurgent Japan.

Foregrounding Ryuko’s experience, the film does its best to set “politics” aside but the inescapable truth is that each of our protagonists is a prisoner of the times in which they live. The second scene finds Ryuko in 1937 as an innocent schoolgirl gazing at the young men in uniform as they march past her. She remains out of step with them, walking idly and at her own uneven rhythm while they keep rigorous and seemingly unstoppable time. The family are understandably wary of the implications of the marriage proposal, especially as it comes with a military escort, with Ryuko’s beloved grandmother the only one brave enough to ask to see whoever’s in charge of this outrage only to be told that their fates are in the hands of the nebulous concept known as “army” which knows no individual will.

Assured by her family that the decision rests with her, Ryuko consents – not only to becoming a stranger’s wife (which would have been her fate in any case) but to being a kind of ambassador, the presentable face of imperial ambition. On her marriage she’s presented with a deep red cheongsam and continues to dress in Chinese fashion for remainder of her life in Manchuria where she learns to speak Mandarin and devotes herself to becoming as Chinese as it’s possible to be. Meanwhile, her husband Futetsu busies himself with a complementary desire to become Japanese, intensely worried that the sometimes degrading treatment he and his family receive is exclusively caused by his problematic nationality. When their daughter, Eisei, is born, the couple determine to raise her as the child of a new world, the embodiment of idealised cultural integration.

The world, however, is not so kind and the blunt force of militarism continues to present a barrier to familial harmony. Futetsu is prevented from seeing his brother by the officious forces of the military police while the lonely, paranoid “emperor” suspects that Ryuko is nothing more than a Japanese spy sent to undermine his rule. Ryuko was sent to Manchuria to be the bridge between two cultures. Her, in a sense, feminine energy which attempts to build connection through compassion and understanding is consistently contrasted with the prevailing male energy of the age which prizes only destruction and dominance. Filled with the naivety of idealism, she truly believes in the goodness of the Manchurian project and is entirely blind to the less altruistic actions of her countrymen engaged in the same endeavour.

Confronted by some children in a park while pushing the infant Eisei in a pram, Ryuko is identified as a Japanese woman by her accent while conversing in Mandarin. She assures the children that Eisei is Manchurian like them, and that seeing as she married a Manchurian she is now too despite her Japanese birth. The kids are satisfied, so much so that they warn her that some Manchurians were killed recently in this park by Japanese soldiers, adding a mild complaint that it upsets their parents when Japanese people come to their restaurant and leave without paying. Mortified, Ryuko decides to use some of her (meagre) resources to buy all of the kids and everyone else in the park some sweets from a nearby stand, fulfilling her role as a Japanese ambassador even while insisting that she is a proud citizen of the newly born state of Manchuria.

Nevertheless the Manchurian project is doomed to fail, the kind of idealism fought for by Ryuko and Futetsu crushed under the boot of militarism. Despite everything, Ryuko still wants to be the bridge if only to prevent a catastrophe of this kind happening again (while perhaps refusing to engage with some of the reasons it happened in the first place) but in Eisei’s eventual death, foreshadowed in the melancholy opening, a deeply uncomfortable implication is made that the kind of cross-cultural harmony that Ryuko dreams of may not be viable. In contrast to the salaciously reported real life events (somewhat alluded to by presence of a schoolboy’s cap next to the body) which hinted at a suicide pact or murder, Ryuko attributes Eisei’s decision to end her life to an inability to reconcile her twin heritage coupled with the heavy burden of being the last descendent of the Qing Dynasty. Despite this minor misstep of tying the fate of Eisei to the failure of the Manchurian dream and the loss of its misplaced idealism, Ryuko ends her account on a hopeful note in admiring the flowers she planted finally in bloom and looking forward to a more hopeful age governed by warmth and compassion rather than violence and austerity.

The Wandering Princess was presented by Japan Foundation London as part of a series of events marking the publication of Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom and Female Subjectivity.

Tag: Yoshiko Kusunoki

The Woman Who Touched Legs (足にさわった女, Yasuzo Masumura, 1960)

The Wandering Princess (流転の王妃, Kinuyo Tanaka, 1960)