Obscure Japanese Film #33
Machiko Kyo
Opening in documentary style as it takes us on a whistle-stop night-time tour around the upmarket bars of Tokyo’s Ginza district, Night Butterflies features intermittent narration by the world-weary Shuji (Eiji Funakoshi, best known for his leading role in Fires on the Plain), a failed musician turned ‘hostess-broker’. He finds bar hostess jobs for young women, many of whom have come to the capital due to the difficulty of earning a decent wage in the country. More spiv than pimp, Shuji treats the girls reasonably well and does not take advantage of them.
Fujiko Yamamoto
One of his best clients is Mari (Machiko Kyo), a bar owner from Osaka, where people are said to be more outspoken and down-to-earth than in Tokyo, and this is certainly true in her case. Mari’s bar is thriving, but she is displeased to hear the news that Okiku (Fujiko Yamamoto) has just arrived in the area and will shortly be opening a bar of her own. Okiku is originally from Kyoto, a city often seen as the polar opposite to Osaka and whose inhabitants have something of a reputation for pretentious and snobbish behaviour. The two women have a history revealed in black-and-white flashbacks – seven years previously, Mari had discovered that her late husband was cheating on her with Okiku. Initially, the two rivals are frostily polite to each other, but their mutual loathing simmers away beneath the surface before eventually boiling over, leading to tragedy.
Machiko Kyo and Eiji Funakoshi
Like the previously-reviewed Beauty is Guilty, Night Butterflies was based on a novel by Matsutaro Kawaguchi[1] and adapted by Sumie Tanaka, although the two films seem to mark the extent of their collaborations. Director Kozaburo Yoshimura (1911-2000) was a well-respected filmmaker who specialised in drama but occasionally experimented with comedy, as in The Fellows Who Ate the Elephant (1947). An Osaka Story (1957) is perhaps the most impressive of his accessible films. While well-executed, Night Butterflies is interesting mainly for its story, subject matter and two female stars. Shot in academy ratio during the last days of that format in Japan before widescreen became standard, it left me feeling that the latter format usually makes for more arresting compositions even in dramas of this sort, despite Fritz Lang’s famous apocryphal quote that Cinemascope was only good for photographing funerals and snakes. If Yoshimura’s film had been shot in widescreen, it would closely resemble the work of fellow Daiei director Yasuzo Masumura, especially in its misanthropic outlook (although a Masumura version would probably have featured Shuji slapping the girls around and taking advantage of them).
There is one extremely jarring transition in the film – around 50 minutes in, we suddenly find ourselves observing a new character, a doctor (Hiroshi Akutagawa), squeezing blood out of a prostrate rabbit while his lab assistant fiancée (Mieko Kondo) reluctantly helps. It’s like suddenly finding yourself watching a completely different movie, although the connection to the main story does become apparent in the end. Otherwise, the film holds no major surprises, but the climactic tragedy is well-staged and it’s an effective cautionary tale about the dangers of pursuing revenge. It’s also worth viewing to see the face-off between Osaka and Kyoto personified by two of Japan’s top female stars.
[1] Kawaguchi’s novel had the same title and was published the same year the film was released. It was based on the real-life rivalry between Rumiko Kawabe (1917-1989), proprietress of a bar called Espoir, and Hide Ueha, also known as Osome (1923-2012), who owned a bar of the same name financed by a politician. Matsutaro Kawaguchi was a regular customer at Osome. However, the feud between Kawabe (the model for Mari) and Okiku (the model for Osome) did not end in tragedy and it was even said they eventually became friends. Ueha appeared as herself in Yuzo Kawashima’s The Balloon (1956).
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