Kaze no aru michi / 風のある道 / (‘Windy Road’, 1959)

Obscure Japanese Film #240

Izumi Ashikawa

Naoko (Izumi Ashikawa) is a young woman still living at home with her father (Shiro Osaka), mother (Toshiko Yamane) and younger sister Chikako (Mayumi Shimizu). Her older sister Keiko (Mie Kitahara) has just got married, and Naoko is expected to marry wealthy ikebana master Kosuke (Yuji Odaka). However, when she meets Kobayashi (Ryoji Hayama), a teacher of special needs children, she finds herself drawn to him despite the fact that he doesn’t have a pot to piss in…

Ashikawa, Yuji Odaka and Mayumi Shimizu

Ryoji Hayama

Based on an untranslated novel of the same name by future Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata which was published as a serial in a women’s magazine during 1957-58, this Nikkatsu production is the sort of material more usually associated with Daiei Studios. Although the plot hinges on one massively-unlikely coincidence, it’s not as contrived as some that I’ve seen and the film is generally a well-made and enjoyable watch. Having said that, it’s actually the parents who turn out to be the most well-rounded and interesting characters here, which I doubt was the original intention.

Toshiko Yamane and Shiro Osaka

Masayoshi Ikeda’s music is a slightly eccentric mish-mash of styles, but quite effective on the whole, and the rather cheeky audience-teasing climax even features a passage that sounds similar to John Williams’s famous cello piece from Jaws. Another memorable use of music in the film is the counterpoint provided by the upbeat tune which plays on the jukebox while Kosuke is getting Naoko drunk so that he can have his wicked way with her.

Mie Kitahara

It’s surprising to see Mie Kitahara in such a small role here as she was, I think, Nikkatsu’s top female star at the time, but it’s an example of how Japanese studios back then tried to squeeze as much out of the stars they had under contract as possible – Kitahara featured in seven films released in 1959, which was actually taking it easy in comparison to some. This film is, instead, a vehicle for Izumi Ashikawa, who was touted as Japan’s answer to Audrey Hepburn and was a decent if unremarkable actor. She married fellow actor Tatsuya Fuji in 1968 and promptly retired but is still with us at the time of writing at the age of 90.

Ashikawa and Yamane

The director of this film, Katsumi Nishikawa (1918-2010), was especially well-known for films based around female stars, the previously-reviewed A Portrait of Shunkin (1976) being a good example. He worked in a wide variety of genres but never quite made the top rank, although he’s one of the few directors to have his own museum (located in Tottori Prefecture – click here for further information).

A Portrait of Shunkin / 春琴抄 / Shunkinsho (1976)

Obscure Japanese Film #154

Momoe Yamaguchi

 

Doshomachi, Osaka, early Meiji era (c.1870s). Okoto (Momoe Yamaguchi), the youngest daughter of the wealthy owner of a wholesale medicine company, has lost her sight due to a childhood illness. She takes a liking to Sasuke (Tomokazu Miura), a young apprentice employed by her father, and soon he is the only person she will allow to escort her to her music lessons and help her with other tasks. Okoto becomes proficient at playing the instrument whose name she shares (the koto, the ‘O’ being a polite prefix), inspiring the devoted Sasuke to take up the more humble samisen, which he practises in secret. 

Tomokazu Miura

 

Initially, Sasuke gets into trouble for being more concerned with looking after Okoto and learning music than he is about learning the trade. However, Okoto has become extremely stubborn and difficult to deal with since losing her sight, so her parents decide to release Sasuke from his normal duties and allow him to be Okoto’s full-time companion – even paying for him to have music lessons from Okoto’s teacher – in the hope that this will soothe her anger and improve her character.  Meanwhile, Okoto’s beauty has led to her attracting the attention of wealthy playboy Minoya (Masahiko Tsugawa), who begins laying plans to seduce her… 

Yamaguchi with Masahiko Tsugawa

 

Later in the story, Okoto becomes a music teacher herself and takes the name of Shunkin, hence the title. Junichiro Tanizaki’s 1933 novella of the same name (available in a good English translation in the collection Seven Japanese Tales) was first filmed in 1935 by Yasujiro Shimazu in a version starring Kinuyo Tanaka. At the time, talking pictures were still relatively new in a Japan which was lagging a few years behind Hollywood in this department. As the story features both music and birdsong quite prominently, it must have seemed a good choice by which to exploit the possibilities of the new sound medium. Other versions followed: in 1954, Daisuke Ito directed Machiko Kyo as Okoto, while in 1961 Teinosuke Kinugasa made a third version starring Fujiko Yamamoto. Up to this point, each film had featured a big female star, with the role of Sasuke being played by a more minor male co-star. Kaneto Shindo broke this pattern in 1972 with his version, entitled Sanka (‘Hymn’), which featured the unknown Tokuko Watanabe in the role. Shindo also restored the novella’s framing device, which uses a first-person narrator visiting the graves of Okoto and Sasuke and meeting their former maid – now an old woman – whom he persuades to tell him their story. In Sanka, Shindo himself plays the narrator, while his mistress Nobuko Otowa takes the role of the maid, so it seems likely that Shindo followed the book in this regard mainly to provide a role for Otowa, who was too old to play Okoto. 

 

Given that Okoto continues to treat Sasuke like a servant even after they become lovers and is often cruel to him, Tanizaki’s story can equally be interpreted as a story of how Sasuke’s unwavering devotion represents the ideal of true love, or as a story about the perfect sado-masochistic relationship. Unlike the previous film versions, Shindo’s very much emphasizes the latter reading, even going so far as to have Sasuke reverently burying his mistress’s shit in the garden every day – a detail not present in the book. However, considering that Tanizaki’s title was not Okoto and Sasuke but A Portrait of Shunkin, it’s also possible that his main concern was to provide a character study of a woman whose sense of pride means that she absolutely refuses to behave like a victim and for that reason would rather be thought cruel than allow anyone to feel sorry for her. 

 

Made just four years later, director Katsumi Nishikawa’s 1976 version – the fifth – returns to the more conventional interpretation of the tale as a tragic love story, with a screenplay co-written by Nishikawa and Teinosuke Kinugasa, who had directed the 1961 version. A lot of care evidently went into the making of this one, and it’s very pretty to look at. Its raison d’etre was clearly to provide a vehicle for stars Momoe Yamaguchi and Tomokazu Miura. Yamaguchi – who first came to fame as a 13-year-old pop singer in 1972 – was such a phenomenon in Japan in the 1970s that she even has a chapter devoted to her in Mark Schilling’s Encyclopedia of Japanese Pop Culture. Her first major film part was in a version of another oft-filmed literary work, Yasunari Kawabata’s The Izu Dancer in 1974, the first of seven films for director Katsumi Nishikawa but also, more significantly, the first of 12 features in which she co-starred with Tomokazu Miura. The two soon became known as the ‘golden combination’, and were married in 1980, at which point Yamaguchi retired from show business to become a full-time wife and mother but continued to be hounded by both the media and her obsessive fans. 

 

Yamaguchi and Miura give decent performances in A Portrait of Shunkin, as do the rest of the cast, and it’s a well-made film. However, with Masaru Sato’s syrupy music ladled all over the soundtrack, I found its pretty sentimentality a bit cloying for my taste and prefer Shimazu’s early attempt or even Shindo’s more eccentric take on the story. 

DVD at Amazon Japan

English subtitles