Tag: Yumeji Tsukioka

The Eagle and the Hawk (鷲と鷹, Umetsugu Inoue, 1957)

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Strapping sailors meditate on revenge and forgiveness while trapped aboard a moribund cargo ship in Umetsugu Inoue’s otherwise charming musical youth drama, The Eagle and the Hawk (鷲と鷹, Washi to Taka). One of several films Inoue released starring muse of the moment Ishihara, the film uses the boat as a kind of metaphor for a reluctance to deal with the unfinished past as several of its crew members are actively engaged in a self-imposed limbo wilfully remaining in a transient space floating between two harbours with no plans to disembark. 

This is most obviously true for the zombified Ken (Kinshiro Matsumoto) who wanders around the boat in a depressive daze unable to get over a girlfriend who left him for another man though as it turns out the bosun too is hiding out at sea waiting for the statue of limitations to run out on the murder of his lover 30 years previously. When two new recruits show up from the sailors union despite only one having been requested, many are under the assumption that they too are running from something on land though the boat itself is a confined environment from which there is no real escape so it’s also an ideal space for confrontation. 

The thing they may be running from is the murder of the boat’s chief engineer in the film’s noirish opening sequence in which a middle-aged man in a sailor’s cap is stalked by a youngster in jeans before being knifed with a ceremonial dagger. If they were running from that particular crime, it might be ironic that they chose this particular boat but then as the murdered man’s son, First Mate Goro (Hiroyuki Nagato), discovers the dagger was part of a set and the other one’s owned by the captain who seems very alarmed by the whole affair. Meanwhile, the captain’s daughter, Akiko (Ruriko Asaoka), has secretly stowed away along with Akemi (Yumeji Tsukioka), the heartbroken former girlfriend of one of the two new guys, Senkichi (Yujiro Ishihara). 

Women are regarded as unlucky on board, and it’s not difficult to guess why with Goro offering strict instructions to the new guys not to try anything with Akiko while one of the other sailors later attempts to rape Akemi with a palpable desperation existing within the crew. There is also a degree of homoerotic tension between the two new guys, the other being Sasaki (Rentaro Mikuni) who typically walks around shirtless in a pair of tight jeans and works hard to give the impression of having a mysterious past all of which leads Senkichi to suspect he’s an undercover cop possibly there after him or one of the other crew members though unbeknownst to (almost) everyone there is another crime in motion on board. 

As usual, it’s the past that’s come calling with Senkichi on the boat ironically running towards rather than away from a confrontation while others desperately try to cover up their crimes or deflect their responsibility for the dodgy dealings of their youth. Both Senkichi and Sasaki immediately remark that the boat’s a “junker” as soon as they get on board, implying that it too is on its way out, its disrepair a sign of its captain’s lack of respect and care for ship and crew alike. Then again, it seems the crew were intent on drinking half the cargo, most of them clearly happy in their work and enjoying a pleasant sense of camaraderie even on this crummy ship and its presumably not quite above board trip to Hong Kong which might hint at why Akemi shows up in cheongsam though for stowaways both women seem to have brought extensive wardrobes which in all honesty are not particularly well suited to life at sea. 

In any case, the boat becomes an unexpected place of healing and forgiveness largely brokered by manly magnanimity as Goro, on learning the truth behind his father’s murder, accepts that the killer’s motivations are “understandable” even while cautioning them against the fallacy of revenge which he insists will only create more hate and violence. He’s also fairly okay with Senkichi romancing his girl, Akiko, who sadly tells him she sees him more like a brother and isn’t interested in marrying him even if that’s what her father also expects neatly reflecting the dynamic which arises between Akemi and the lovelorn Ken who begins to cheer up and consider leaving the boat to open a transistor radio shop only for Akemi to describe him as a little brother while continuing to chase Senkichi despite his interest in Akiko. An expressionistic storm scene provides some divine justice, but also provokes a bittersweet romantic resolution which suggests it’s time to get off the boat and the face the past but with a kind of cheerfulness for the future otherwise at odds with the rage and violence of the original crime. Of course, this being a vehicle for Yujiro Ishihara, Inoue works in a few romantic scenes with his ukulele and a mournful song about the moon and ocean but finally sends him back to dry land a little more “grounded” for having found his sea legs.

Till We Meet Again (あした来る人, Yuzo Kawashima, 1955)

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(C) Nikkatsu 1955

“Men only want to treat women as pets” according to a disaffected housewife in Yuzo Kawashima’s Till We Meet Again (あした来る人, Ashita Kuru Hito). Given the well-meaning paternalism of her melancholy father, she may indeed be right. Her struggle, along with that of her husband, and of the lonely manageress of a dress shop, is in part to break free of paternalism, rejecting the “traditional” and breaking with the natural order of things to claim her own happiness. That, however, requires not only courage and conviction, but time and a willingness to endure hurtful failures. 

The hero, patriarch Kaji (So Yamamura), is a successful businessman. He’s married off his daughter, Yachiyo (Yumeji Tsukioka), to a promising young man, Kappei (Tatsuya Mihashi), but the marriage is unhappy. Kappei, a mountaineering enthusiast, rarely goes home – either out drinking with buddies in a bar with an Alpine theme, or away rock climbing in the mountains. Feeling neglected, Yachiyo resents her husband’s lack of interest and finds it increasingly difficult to get on with him, but her father proves unsympathetic, simply telling her she must put up with it and work harder at her marriage. A chance encounter on a train, however, kickstarts a change in Yachiyo’s outlook, while Kappei also finds himself drawn to a melancholy young woman who actively takes an interest in his mountain climbing career. 

Unfortunately, the young woman, Kyoko (Michiyo Aratama), is also in a strange “relationship” with Kaji who met her while she was a bar hostess in Ginza. Bonding with her for one reason or another, he funded her dress shop which has allowed her to escape the red light district, despite his oft repeated claim not to make frivolous investments. There is however, on his side at least, no “romantic” interest, his intentions are purely paternal. As Yachiyo said to her mother about Kappei, he is in a sense treating her as a kind of “pet”, to be loved and fussed over as an exercise in itself. He claims what he wants from her is his “lost youth”, presumably sacrificed for his business success, but she begins to believe herself painfully in love with him because, paradoxically, of his beneficence. Meanwhile, she meets Kappei by chance, never knowing his connection to Kaji, but bonding with him after taking in the little dog he brought home but was forced to give up by Yachiyo who claims to hate them (or, more accurately, living things). 

That ought to be as good a clue as any that Yachiyo and Kappei simply aren’t suited. Their marriage is already a failure which is making them both miserable, but they’re obliged to put on a show of being a happy couple for appearance’s sake. Yachiyo turns to her mother, Shigeno (Fukuko Sayo), for guidance, suddenly noticing that she looks much older than she’d remembered. Shigeno tells her that you age faster when you’ve nothing to do, busying herself by fussing over the cat (another living thing Yachiyo can’t abide). Yachiyo asks if she was ever happy with Kaji, but gets only the reply that she was “happy” to the extent that she knew she’d never have to worry about being hungry. Looking at her mother’s life, Yachiyo knows that she doesn’t want to end up in the same position, bored and aimless with no “dreams” to speak of. She doesn’t see why she has to stay in a loveless marriage and is convinced that only with another man could she ever truly be “herself”. 

The idea of divorce is still taboo, which is perhaps why her father insists she reconsider, aside of course from his business entanglements with Kappei. Talking it over the couple come to a mutual conclusion, that they only make each other unhappy and separating is the best decision for them both. Pretty much everyone, however, tries to talk them out of it – Kaji still wedded to the idea of marriage as an unbreakable sacrament, while new friend Sone (Rentaro Mikuni) is convinced he’s contributed to their marital discord.

Sone, a bumbling professor obsessed with his research into a rare type of fish and its possible ability to adapt to its environment, becomes friends with Yachiyo after a mix up with dinner bills on a train. She offers to introduce him to her father to see if he can help find financing, and thereafter generates a friendship which, in her mind at least, turns romantic. Sone, however, is a widower now only interested in his fish. Yachiyo falls for him because he’s a much softer, kinder presence than her husband and despite his dedication to his work, is keenly aware of the feelings of others even if he’s awkward in a charming sort of way when it comes to dealing with them. There is something, however, a little perverse in her immediate attraction to another emotionally distant man. She couldn’t stand Kappei’s obsession with the mountains, but could potentially become interested in Sone’s fish. Then again, that’s just as likely to be because Sone made a point of including her in his passion, where Kappei keeps his to himself, eventually sharing it with the more receptive Kyoko. 

Kaji, returning to the paternal, advises Kyoko that “romance is mutual deception”, or at least a kind of transaction and if she really wants to do this, she’d best be sure she’d be OK with regretting it at some point in the future. Previously, he’d told her that “marriage is pointless”, and she’d decided never to do it partly because she thought she was in love with him and he was married already. Her realisation that she’s just a kind of pet to him, a plaything he uses to feel useful while reclaiming his youth, pushes her towards an acceptance of her growing love for Kappei, an irony Kaji struggles with but eventually comes to understand. He really does want the best for her and will support her love story even though it’s also extremely inconvenient in providing an unwelcome link between the different branches of his life. Once Kyoko discovers the truth, however, her determination to fight for love begins to weaken as she reflects on an image of herself as a wicked and selfish woman betraying a man who’d been good to her, when in reality quite the reverse is true. 

Yachiyo, meanwhile, begins to understand that Sone does not necessarily return her feelings, perhaps still attached to the memory of his late wife, too preoccupied with his research, feeling awkward about her position as a married woman, or just not interested. So alarmed is he that he temporarily rushes off from his research to have a word with Kappei and is once again upset by his calm explanations that this is a decision they’ve come to mutually. It’s not because of his love for Kyoko, that only provided an excuse, but because they simply weren’t suited and made each other unhappy. Sone declares himself “sick of seeing beautiful things getting hurt”, but prepares to absent himself from the entire situation by returning to his research. Faced with the potential failure of their new romances, neither Yachiyo or Kappei reconsider their decision to divorce. Kappei retreats to his beloved mountains, while Yachiyo refuses an offer from her father to return home with him, electing to remain in Tokyo and live her own life.  

Now an old man, Kaji struggles to understand the young but somehow admires them for being what he couldn’t be. He describes them as having something pure that he did not have in his youth, but wonders if that purity hasn’t in a sense allowed them to be “damaged” in a way he never has been. Still, he thinks that’s probably a good a thing, because it allows them to become more themselves. Things might not work out right now, and it might hurt, but there’s always tomorrow. He admires the young people because they’re in the process of becoming whole and will be able to continue on their own journeys as complete people while he can only proceed down this corridor, unable to access the post-war future by actively rejecting the rigidity of the traditionalist past.

Currently available to stream on Mubi in the US.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Tales of Ginza (銀座二十四帖, Yuzo Kawashima, 1955)

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“If we all work together we can make Ginza’s night, no the whole world, bright and at peace” insists the hero of Yuzo Kawashima’s chronicle of changing times Tales of Ginza (銀座二十四帖, Ginza 24 Chou), trying to sell a brighter post-war future to a jaded reactionary. By 1955, the consumerist revolution was already on the horizon, and nowhere did it beckon as invitingly as in the upscale Ginza with its elegant department stores and swanky nightlife, but as Hiroshi Shimizu’s Tokyo Profile had shown two years earlier, it wasn’t all glitz and glamour. The world looked very different to the people who lived and worked in the city within a city than it did to those who just dropped in to have a good time. 

Our hero, the incongruously named Mr. Coney (Tatsuya Mihashi), is an earnest florist doing his best to brighten up the city. He’s taken three orphaned teenage girls into his shop, allowing them to support themselves honestly while he teaches them valuable skills, and has also employed the rather less earnest Jeep (Asao Sano). Jeep has had trouble with drug dependency in the past and, Coney fears, is drawn to the easy pleasures of the post-war underworld. The main drama kicks into gear when the upper middle-class Wakako (Yumeji Tsukioka) wanders past the shop and fancies a few roses, asking one of the girls to deliver them to her home later in the day. 

Wakako is currently in the middle of arranging some paintings which belonged to her late father for an exhibition in a gallery where she hopes to sell them. As we discover, she’s in need of money fast because she’s become estranged from her husband, Kyogoku (Seizaburo Kawazu), who has been seduced by post-war criminality. Wakako wants a divorce, but the situation is complicated by the fact her mother-in-law has taken custody of her daughter. In the course of sorting through paintings, the gallery owner spots one Wakako didn’t really want to part with – a portrait of herself as a teenager painted by one of her father’s apprentices when they lived in Manchuria during the war. The painting is signed “G.M”, and the only concrete thing Wakako can remember is that the boy was called “Goro” and was a beautiful, kind soul whom she’d dearly like to see again. 

The “G.M” mystery begins to whip up a small storm in the already volatile Ginza. Coney comes to believe that his older brother, whom he’d long believed to be dead, may be the man Wakako’s looking for but he doesn’t really want to say so until he’s 100% certain. Meanwhile, there are a surprising number of GMs in the city, including a rather sleazy, womanising “doctor” (Toru Abe) who goes to the papers and tells them he painted the picture though Wakako is not convinced and would be a little disappointed to think the man she wondered about all those years turned out to be a cheesy lounge lizard. Other contenders include a melancholy baseball scout (Shinsuke Ashida) who turns out to have connections to the underworld, and, unbeknownst to Coney, the drugs kingpin of post-war Japan known as the “G.M. of Ginza”. 

Drugs are something that Coney is particularly worried about. He’s seen the effect they’re having on his city, and resents that their influence is making Ginza “dark”. The orphaned girls he has working at the shop all lost their parents to drug abuse, and Coney has made getting Jeep off the stuff a primary goal. Jeep, however, is unconvinced. He thinks Coney is a sucker, and that floristry isn’t a profession for a grown man. In part, he’s kicking back against Coney’s well-meaning paternalism, but is also attracted by the flashing neon signs and easy pleasures of the modern Ginza of which the drugs trade is an increasingly big part. For Jeep, the post-war future is one of amoral and thoughtless hedonism, getting rich quick though low level, “innocent” crime, like peddling drugs and porn. 

Wakako too is tempted by that future, though mostly through lack of other options. She’s planning to open a bar with the money from the paintings, but eventually decides to go into business with Coney, working for his brighter future in the florist’s. The pair perhaps fall in love, but the future is still too uncertain for romance. Wakako refuses to see her husband, insisting only on obtaining a divorce and with it her freedom. Coney volunteers to talk to him on her behalf, essentially arguing that his wife will he happier with him because the kind of future they desire is essentially the same. Kyogoku cannot really argue with him. He is a sad and broken man who realises that his choices have robbed him of the future he desired, forced onto the run unable to see his wife and daughter. He justifies himself with the rationale that if he didn’t run drugs in Ginza, “foreigners” would take over and crime would be rampant. He claims that life is survival of the fittest, and that he has no need of love. Kyogoku never felt loved by the aristocratic mother who raised him only as an heir to their name. The only time he felt loved was by his best friend who was, he says, murdered because he lacked power and because his good heart made him weak. 

There maybe something a little reactionary in Coney’s moral absolutism. He condemns his brother for getting involved with student politics which made him “hate Japan”, though he later signs a student petition himself, and has only contempt for Ginza’s famous nightlife while willingly wandering through it selling flowers to romantically-minded guys in bars, but does his best to avoid judgment as he tries to coax those he feels have strayed back onto a better path. Coney believes in a brighter future where good people work together peacefully, while the Kyogokus of the world are content to plunge us all into darkness in a nihilistic pursuit of empty pleasures. No one really “wins” in the end. Coney gets some answers, but remains too diffident to fight for love, while Wakako is perhaps prevented from doing so in feeling called towards another kind of future, which is in effect the past, because of her maternity. Ginza is changing, and you can’t change it back, but you can do your best to be your best, saying it with flowers if with nothing else.

Currently available to stream on Mubi in the US.

Opening titles (no subtitles)

Love Under the Crucifix (お吟さま, Kinuyo Tanaka, 1962)

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Love Under the Crucifix cap 1A legendary screen actress, Kinuyo Tanaka completed only six films in her career as a director. The last film that she would ever make, Love Under the Crucifix (お吟さま, Ogin-sama), is the only one to be set in the historical past taking place against the backdrop of turbulent late 16th century politics just forty years or so before the nation would embark on 200 years of self imposed isolation undertaken in the name of preserving the national character while solidifying a political regime. As in her other films, however, Tanaka employs a standard melodrama narrative in order to subvert it. Her heroine defies all “for love”, but not so much in itself as for the right to it and to the legitimisation of her feelings as a human woman with all the rights and freedoms that ought to entail.

The film begins in the 15th year of Tensho (or 1587). Toyotomi Hideyoshi (Osamu Takizawa) is attempting to solidify his command over a Japan which is in a state of constant warfare. Meanwhile, foreign trade and influences, including Christianity, are flooding into the nation. There is growing suspicion among Hideyoshi’s advisors that Christian converts are nothing more than foreign spies working to undermine the social order and cannot be trusted. Therefore, Christianity is a spanner thrown in the works of Hideyoshi’s plans for peace and unification, only no one is quite sure as yet what to do about it except disapprove.

Meanwhile, our heroine, Ogin (Ineko Arima), is the step-daughter of prominent tea master Rikyu (Ganjiro Nakamura). She has long been in love with Ukon (Tatsuya Nakadai) – a young lord who has converted to Christianity and is in fact already married. Despite the impossibility of her love, Ogin holds fast to its purity and has refused all entreaties to marry. However, she is placed in a difficult position when it is made clear that a prominent suitor affiliated with the local lord desires her. Rikyu affirms that he will follow Ogin’s will, but Mozuya (Hisaya Ito) is too important a man to be refused out of hand and the consequences of turning him down may be severe. Ogin searches for a sign from Ukon, but he coldly tells her to marry, refusing any confirmation of the feelings which she believes to exist between them.

The film’s English title, Love Under the Crucifix, reminds us that this is not so much a story of religious freedom as social oppression. Divorced form its Christianising context, the crucifix was in this era the primary punishment for sexual transgression, most often for both men and women committing adultery or daring to love in places where society would not approve. Thus Ogin lives her life under it in being reminded of the potential costs of her inappropriate emotions. Even so, observing a young woman tied to the cross (Keiko Kishi) and apparently electing to go to her death rather than become the concubine of the local lord against her will, Ogin sees in it not censure but defiance and path towards personal empowerment if only in ultimate negation.

The literal crucifix becomes a noose around Ogin’s neck in the form of the necklace given to her by Ukon. Ogin remains unconvinced by Ukon’s religiosity even if she respects it but later resents the austerity it provokes in him while wondering if his friendship with her was only ever a pathway to conversion. Ukon’s troubles are multiple, not only is he oppressed by the social strictures of his time but also by an additional burden of Christianising morality which instructs him that his feelings are sinful and must be rejected.

Later, Ogin berates Ukon insisting that all of this suffering and the predicament they now find themselves in might have been avoided if only he had not kept his feelings hidden. Ukon’s religiosity obliges him to behave in ways which are cruel and selfish, and which ultimately bring him little other than additional suffering and unhappiness. This emotional tension has also played into the hands of the ruling regime who are content to use their feelings, and the prevailing tendency towards properness, against them as a plot against Rikyu and to prevent Ukon’s return as a military rival.

Despite Rikyu’s best efforts, Ogin has indeed become a pawn in the hands of men. Rikyu, as we’re reminded at the film’s conclusion, fell from favour and committed ritual suicide at the age of 70. Like Ogin, he remained true to himself even when politically unwise, advancing his philosophies of simplicity and respect for the natural world in the face of what he saw as Hideyoshi’s increasingly gaudy superficiality. Thus he councils Ogin that there is nothing wrong in her feelings and her only duty to him or to anyone else is to try to live happily even if that means she must live in hiding with the less courageous Ukon who refuses to abandon his faith but struggles to find the courage to fight for love, or more specifically for the right to love, as Ogin has done all her life.

Ogin is, in a sense, already on the cross as she continues to suffer not for faith but for faith in love and in her own right to her individual feelings and agency. Faced with being forced to surrender her body to a man she does not love because of a cruel game played by men for men, Ogin prefers death and finds in it the ultimate expression of her personal freedom and emotional authenticity.

The Eternal Breasts (乳房よ永遠なれ, Kinuyo Tanaka, 1955)

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(c) Nikkatsu 1955

(c) Nikkatsu 1955Having made her directorial debut for Shin Toho with the beautifully drawn post-war romantic melodrama Love Letter scripted by Keisuke Kinoshita, and then moving on to her second film after being accepted as a career director at Nikkatsu – the Ozu scripted humorous romantic family drama The Moon Has Risen, Tanaka chose to work with female script writer Sumie Tanaka (no relation) for a tale of female resilience and resistance in the face of extreme suffering. Fumiko Nakajo was a real life figure who had died of breast cancer at the age of 31 in 1954. The Eternal Breasts (乳房よ永遠なれ, Chibusa yo Eien Nare) , a biopic of sorts, was released in 1955, barely a year later but makes no concession to the recency of Nakajo’s passing in examining both the still taboo subject of breast cancer and the effects of the disease and its treatment on the heroine who, arguably, finally learns to become herself through battling her illness.

Fumiko Shimojo, née Nakajo, (Yumeji Tsukioka) is the wife of a grumpy, resentful stock broker and the mother of their two children, Noboru and Aiko. It’s clear that things in the Shimojo household are far from peaceful with the discord between husband and wife a talking point throughout the local community. Despite her husband’s claims to the contrary, Fumiko is the dutiful “good wife” of the period, trying hard to make her marriage work even in the face of her husband’s ongoing resentment and thinly veiled inferiority complex given Fumiko’s slightly elevated class credentials and education. To get away from her disappointing home life Fumiko has joined a local poetry circle specialising in tanka and is well known for the gritty realism of her poems in which she expresses all of her suffering and unhappiness in regards to life with her husband. When she comes home early one day and finds a woman dressed in kimono entertaining her man, she decides it’s time for a divorce, reverts to her maiden name of Nakajo, and goes back to live with her mother and soon-to-be-married brother, regretting only that her husband insists on custody of their son, Noboru.

The early part of the film deals with the equally taboo subjects of divorce and family breakdown as Fumiko struggles to adjust to her life as a single mother as well as coming to terms with being separated from her son. Though she is often approached by matchmakers and encouraged to remarry, her experience of married life has left her reluctant to commit to a second round of matrimonial subjugation. Her mother, whom she partly blames for pushing her into a marriage she never wanted in the first place, and her brother are fully on her side as are her friends, the Horis – a Christian couple who champion her poetry and act almost as a set of second parents despite being only a little older than she is.

Released from matrimonial shackles, Fumiko is free to embrace her life as a poetess even if she never dreams of any kind of literary success. As the tactless women at the poetry circle put it, pain is good for art and it’s certainly true that each advance in Fumiko’s fortunes is accompanied by emotional suffering. Struggling to cope with the divorce and the children, Fumiko neglects chest pains and a strange feeling in her breast only to keel over when an unpleasant woman arrives to reclaim Noboru with whom she thought she’d finally been reunited.

Diagnosed with late stage breast cancer, Fumiko undergoes a double mastectomy. Refusing to shy away from the medical consequences, Tanaka films the surgery as a kind of fever dream as the bright surgery lights loom over Fumiko whose breasts appear in full view as the surgeons prepare to do their work. The loss of Fumiko’s breasts results in one of her most famous poems, published in a national newspaper, but the physical and emotional consequences are not so easily defined. Before her illness we’re constantly told that young Fumiko was a “tom boy”, and at times it appears as if she has been unsexed after being shorn of her femininity. According to her brother, however, Fumiko has become more like a child – something that rings true as she gaily sings in the bath and almost delights in shocking her friend by flashing her surgery scars unannounced. Mrs. Hori, Kinuko (Yoko Sugi), generally a kind and progressive sort, can hardly bear to look and is unwilling to engage with the physical reality of Fumiko’s condition as much as she would like to help her.

Despite proclaiming that at least she won’t be bothered with marriage proposals anymore, Fumiko’s “unsexing” appears to have the opposite effect in reawakening and intensifying her sense of desire. Earlier on, post-divorce and hiding out from her brother’s wedding at which she feels an awkward guest, Fumiko visits Hori (Masayuki Mori) and confesses her love for him though she knows nothing will come of it. Her love is, however, pure – she also loves and respects Hori’s wife Kinuko safe in the knowledge that Kinuko makes Hori happy. After her operation she returns to the Hori’s home and asks Kinuko to run her a bath so that she can bathe in the same water as her beloved – confessing to her friend that she had been in love with her husband. Kinuko seems to know already and is sympathetic, if a little embarrassed. This same boldness later manifests itself in Fumiko’s last great act of passion in which she embarks on a brief yet intense affair with the journalist (Ryoji Hayama) who is covering her career for a paper in Tokyo.

Fumiko’s relationship with the reporter is originally compromised by his overly gloomy copy which proclaims that her death is only a matter of time (then again, for whom is that not true?). Fearing that her death is being fetishised, that no one would be giving her a second glance if she were not dying, Fumiko refuses to write or have visitors. Just as she was “imprisoned” within her marriage, she is now “imprisoned’ by death. As she puts it in one of her poems, the hospital ward is a gloomy place in which she’s often framed by bars – through the windows, through the footboard of her bed, even the hospital kimono she is wearing is patterned with tiny railings. In an eerie, dream-like sequence she wanders out of her room and follows a parade of wailing relatives as a body is wheeled away but just as she is about to leave the metal gate slides shut in front of her, trapping Fumiko like a ghost in the purgatorial world of the hospital ward as she realises that that same gate will be her only exit route.

The same image is repeated at the end of the film as Fumiko’s own bed is wheeled through the mortuary gates which slam shut across the eyes of her confused children who have been left entirely on their own and without a proper explanation of where their mum is going. Fumiko’s final poem is crushing in its anger and ambivalence as it instructs her children to accept her death as the only thing she has to bequeath them. This terrible legacy seems too cruel, condemning her children to a life of grief and mourning even as she instructs them to “accept” her passing. Yet it also speaks of the final contradictions of her character – loving mother and passionate woman, fierce poet and shy genius. Unlike the sickly heroines of melodrama, Fumiko does not always bear her suffering with saintly stoicism but rages, finally embracing the “true self” she only dared to express through her poetry, learning to live only in the knowledge that she must die.

Screened at BFI as part of the Women in Japanese Melodrama season.

Love New and Old (三味線とオートバイ , AKA Shamisen and Motorcyle, Masahiro Shinoda, 1961)

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shamisen and motorcycleMasahiro Shinoda’s first film for Shochiku, One-Way Ticket to Love, over which he’d been given a fairly free rein did not exactly set the box office alight. Accordingly, he then found himself relegated to studio mandated projects with set scripts designed with the studio’s house style in mind. Love New and Old (三味線とオートバイ, Shamisen to Otobai, also known as Shamisen and Motorcycle) is just one of these studio pictures, taking him away from the beginnings of a promising collaboration with avant-garde poet and playwright Shuji Terayama begun in Dry Lake (Youth in Fury) and Killers on Parade. Despite the banality of its melodramic tale of mother and daughter strife caused by changing times, secrets and social mores, Love New and Old plays into several of Shinoda’s recurrent themes and allows him to further indulge his tendency for visual flamboyance with a widescreen colour canvas.

Regular teenager Hatsuko (Miyuki Kuwano) hangs around with the “nice” kind of biker gang, clinging onto her upper class boyfriend Fusao (Yusuke Kawazu) as they ride around the city making use of all the new freedoms available to the young people of the day. Hatsuko lives alone with widowed mother Toyoeda (Yumeji Tsukioka), a minor celebrity known for giving lessons in traditional “kouta” singing on local television. Despite Hatsuko’s rather headstrong nature, she and her mother are very close and have a broadly happy life together in the small house they share which doubles as her mother’s studio.

Things change when Hatsuko and Fusao get into an accident on the bike which leaves them both in hospital. It just so happens that the doctor who ends up treating Hatsuko, Kuroyanagi (Masayuki Mori), is an old friend of her mother’s from before the war. During Hatsuko’s extended convalescence the pair rekindle their long abandoned romance but tension soon arises when the still youthful Hatsuko begins to resent this change in her familial relations. Having come to think of her mother as a kind of pure, saintly figure the idea of her as woman with a woman’s needs and desires profoundly disturbs her.

Shinoda frames this twin tale of women in love as series of embedded conflicts – between generations, between eras, and between a mother and a daughter whose relationship must necessarily change as one comes of age. There is also an additional burden placed on the relationship by means of a long buried secret regarding Hatusko’s birth, the man she had regarded as her father, and the newly resurfaced figure of the doctor who, it seems, has always been in Toyoeda’s heart. Despite the fact that one might assume all of the resentment towards a new relationship would come from the maternal side, Toyoeda is generally supportive of her daughter’s right to choose a boyfriend only warning her that the boy’s parents had acted with hostility following the accident and there may be class based trouble ahead given the fact that her mother is “only a kouta teacher”.

The doctor, a melancholy and perceptive figure, is the first to notice the effect his unexpected return is having on the previously happy mother daughter relationship. Correctly remarking that young people of Hatsuko’s age have much more clearly defined ideas about “morality”, especially as it relates to the older generation, Kuroyanagi can see why Hatsuko may have reservations about her mother remarrying. In this he is very much correct. Even setting aside the slight cultural squeamishness concerning second marriages, Hatsuko’s reaction to her mother’s new romance is one of deep disgust and confusion. Though she recognises that her feelings are unfair and will only cause her mother additional suffering, she cannot bring herself to accept the idea of her mother taking a lover and eventually bringing this new element into their extremely close relationship.

Eventually Hatsuko moves out to live with a friend while Fusao, who had been absent from the picture thanks to his parental machinations, finally reappears and seems to want to resume their relationship whatever the final cost to his own familial relations. Ending on a bittersweet note after which secrets are revealed, confessions are made, and hearts are bared, the film seems to want to remind us that life is short and unpredictable – there is no time for the kind of petty discomforts which lead Hatsuko to force her mother to choose between the man she loved and her daughter. After beginning with an innovative title sequence, Shinoda’s approach is more straightforward than in some of his more visually adventurous work of the period but makes good use of dissolves and interesting compositions to bring a little more substance to this otherwise generic Shochiku programme picture.