Stepbrothers / 異母兄弟 / Ibo kyoudai (1957)

 Obscure Japanese film #23

Kido (Rentaro Mikuni) with his two eldest boys.

Covering a period of 25 years, Stepbrothers begins in 1921 as we see a military officer returning home on horseback. Upon being greeted by his servant, he dismounts and slaps the poor fellow so hard that he knocks him down. This introduction to Hantaro Kido provides an accurate first impression of a character who is to remain entirely unambiguous. Indeed, Kido proves to be not only an arrogant bully, but a humourless bore to boot. Who better to play him, then, than Rentaro Mikuni, an actor never afraid to be unsympathetic and who even seemed to revel in such roles.

Kinuyo Tanaka in a highly symbolic shot.

Kido has two nasty young sons who are chips off the old block and a terminally ill wife who has left him sexually frustrated. When a new maid arrives in the form of Rie (Kinuyo Tanaka), she’s barely begun work before he rapes her in the stable, and his wife passes away soon after. After learning that Rie is pregnant with his child, Kido initially plans to kick her out, but his superior officer hears about the pregnancy and asks him what he plans to do to avoid a scandal. Purely to impress the commander, he says he will marry Rie, and the unfortunate woman is doomed to a life of near-slavery as she has no other options. Another son, Tomohide, soon follows, and both her children are continually treated with contempt by their stepbrothers, although a scene in which one of the elder boys watches Rie laughing and having fun with her two young ones makes it clear that a degree of jealousy is involved. As the years pass, the Second World War begins and the focus of the narrative moves on to the teenage Tomohide (Katsuo Nakamura, who later played Hoichi the Earless in Kwaidan), the only boy in the family who has no wish to be a soldier. Tomohide falls in love with a maid, Haru (Hizuru Takachiho), but she is kicked out by Kido for singing and sold into prostitution (evidently, this was still happening in Japan as late as the 1940s).

Hizuru Takachiho and Katsuo Nakamura.

Like the young hero of the only other film I’ve seen directed by Miyoji Ieki, The Wayside Pebble (1964), Tomohide’s life is ruined as a result of living in an oppressive, semi-feudal, patriarchal society. The characters are as black and white as the images themselves, and perhaps it might have been preferable to make them a little more complex, but then again this may have diluted the strength of Ieki’s message that a society founded on such values is ultimately destructive for all involved.

Rentaro Mikuni

Kinuyo Tanaka is too old for her role in the early stages, but her casting makes more sense as the years pass. Her appearance remains the same, while Mikuni gradually transforms into a decrepit old git as he would also do in Satsuo Yamamoto’s Ballad of the Cart-Puller a couple of years later. The organ music by Kon Ichikawa favourite Yasushi Akutagawa has a very churchy feel and seems a strange choice, but then again Stepbrothers is certainly a solemn piece of work.

The film is based on a then recently-published novel of the same title by Torahiko Tamiya (1911-88), while the screenplay is co-written by Kenji Mizoguchi’s regular collaborator Yoshikata Yoda (who also wrote the screenplay for the aforementioned Ballad of the Cart-Puller) and the lesser-known Nobuyoshi Teruda. Stepbrothers shared the main prize at Czechoslovakia’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival with Sergei Gerasimov’s epic And Quiet Flows the Don.

Hymn to a Tired Man / 日本の青春 / Nihon no seishun / Youth of Japan (1968)

Obscure Japanese Film #22

Makoto Fujita

What a treat to finally see one of Masaki Kobayashi’s lost films! Hymn to a Tired Man is based on a 1967 novel by Shusaku Endo entitled Dokkoisho.^[1] Endo (a Catholic) is best-known outside Japan as the author of Silence, filmed by Masahiro Shinoda in 1971 and again in 2016 by Martin Scorsese (whose version was a great improvement on that of Shinoda). He is also one of the most widely-translated of Japanese writers, although Dokkoisho has yet to appear in English. Having read a number of Endo’s books in translation, I suspect that Kobayashi’s film is quite faithful to the original as it contains a number of themes, concerns and characteristics I recognised from those works, such as a preoccupation with the struggle to be good in a world within which evil always seems to prevail.  Of course, this has also been a theme of Kobayashi’s in films such as The Human Condition and Harakiri, so the combination of Endo and Kobayashi makes a great deal of sense and it’s only surprising that the director did not adapt other works by this author.

Michiyo Aratama and Makoto Fujita

The film opens with scenes of the middle-aged, overworked Zensaku (Makoto Fujita) enduring a variety of annoyances on his daily commute to the accompaniment of some sardonic narration by Masao Mishima which seems to suggest we’re in for a comedy. However, despite a further comic scene involving a ludicrous invention for repelling perverts on the tube (Zensaku works in a patent office), the tone soon turns serious as this apparently walking-dead non-entity finds himself suddenly confronted with the past in the shape of the fiancée from whom he had been separated during the war (Michiyo Aratama) and the officer who had beaten him so badly that it had permanently damaged his hearing (Kei Sato). Zensaku’s dull life is turned upside down by the reappearance of these two, while a number of flashback sequences increase our understanding and sympathy for this unlikely hero as he contemplates leaving his unhappy marriage and struggles to be a good parent to his directionless son (Toshio Kurosawa), who is flirting with becoming a member of Japan’s Self-Defence Force.

Kei Sato and Makoto Fujita

Unfortunately for Kobayashi, such themes proved to be box office poison and this film damaged his career, perhaps explaining why it has languished in obscurity for so long. It’s certainly true that the film has a number of flaws. Typically for an Endo story, we have a protagonist haunted by the past and afflicted by guilt, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that the film becomes a little too talky at times in its efforts to express Endo’s themes and explain the characters’ motivations. There is also a coincidence or two too many in the story. Furthermore, although Kobayashi enlisted his brilliant regular composer Toru Takemitsu, this is far from Takemitsu’s best work and the use of a harmonica in several sequences feels decidedly out of place, while the misleadingly comic beginning also seems an odd choice. Nevertheless, as one would expect from this director, he delivered a very well-made film which tells a moving story, offers plenty of food for thought and characteristically lifts the rug to expose the dirt swept under it, so to speak – the dirt, in this case, being represented by Kei Sato’s portrayal of a war criminal turned successful (and untouchable) businessman, a figure we can safely assume is intended as more than a mere isolated example. The flashbacks depicting his treatment of Zensaku instantly recall scenes from Kobayashi’s monumental trilogy The Human Condition, and it’s clear that the director relates strongly to Zensaku just as he did to Kaji, portrayed by Tatsuya Nakadai in the aforementioned trilogy.

The performances by the three principals are excellent, with Makoto Fujita a revelation as Zensaku – I believe he was best-known for playing comic parts on television, and Kobayashi probably took a considerable risk in casting him for such an important role, but he pulls it off very well indeed and ages most convincingly. His portrayal of a downtrodden man who has been called a coward so often (simply for refusing to be a bully) that he has come to believe it himself is genuinely touching. Throughout his life, Zensaku consistently does what he believes to be the right thing, often at considerable personal cost and without seeking any glory – if that’s not bravery, then what is?, Kobayashi seems to ask.  Plenty of reasons, then, why Hymn to a Tired Man is well worth seeking out. The copy I saw looked like a VHS transfer, so let’s hope somebody remasters it for digital and gives it some proper distribution.

---

[1] According to Stephen Prince in his book A Dream of Resistance – The Cinema of Masaki Kobayashi, ‘dokkoisho’ is a ‘phonetic rendering of the groan that Zensaku makes as he sits down with fatigue.’