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).

Confession / 色ざんげ / Iro zange (‘Confession of a Love Affair’, 1956)

 

Yuasa (Masayuki Mori) is a middle-aged painter in the process of divorcing his wife (Hisano Yamaoka) and in love with the much younger Tsuyuko (Mie Kitahara), who reciprocates his feelings. However, Tsuyuko’s father (Ichiro Sugai) is dead set against the match and packs her off to America in the hope that she’ll forget about Yuasa. While she’s gone, Yuasa decides he’d better accept the situation and gets married instead to another much younger woman, Tomoko (Keiko Amaji), but she just likes the idea of being married to a famous painter and continues to see her former student boyfriend, Kunihiko (Joe Shishido) on the sly. Then Tsuyuko returns from America…

 

Mie Kitahara

 

This Nikkatsu production was based on a novel originally published as a serial between 1933 and 1935 by Chiyo Uno (female, 1897-1996). The character of Yuasa was based on the painter Seiji Togo (1897-1978), with whom Uno had an affair that lasted from 1930-34. The story must have seemed old-fashioned even in 1956, and it’s doubtful that the film was very successful commercially as Uno’s work was not adapted for the screen again until 1984. Nikkatsu is also a studio not known for its tragic love stories and would soon focus its attention on producing gangster movies aimed at the youth market. 

 

Masayuki Mori and Keiko Amaji

 

The fact that the central character of Yuasa never really convinces or comes to life leaves this film dead in the water. The other characters are constantly making a fuss about what an amazing artist he is, but we see no evidence of this except a not particularly impressive portrait of Tsuyuko dressed like Little Bo Peep. As we never see the beginning of their relationship, it’s impossible to understand how these two were drawn to each other in the first place. Worse still, it seems that we’re expected to sympathise with how hard life must be for Yuasa as a wealthy middle-aged younger-woman magnet who lives a life of idleness. When Tsuyuko’s father understandably prevents him from getting what he wants, Yuasa mopes his way through the remainder of the film wallowing in self-pity, Masayuki Mori rarely deviating from his patented Staring Into The Void expression. 

 

Kinuyo Tanaka

 

Joe Shishido

The cast also includes Kinuyo Tanaka (wasted here as a friend of Yuasa’s) and a thin-faced Joe Shishido before the cheek job, but it’s the great Hisano Yamaoka who steals it here as the ex-wife who’s probably supposed to be a shrew, but for whom I felt quite sympathetic, though not quite as much as I did for Yuasa’s second wife Tomoko when she complains about being, ‘Bored, bored, bored!’ 

 

Hisano Yamaoka

 

This is the first film I’ve seen by director Yutaka Abe (1895-1977), who had lived in America from around 1912-24 and worked in Hollywood, first as an extra and later as a featured actor. This experience led to him becoming a director after his return to Japan, and he directed his first film there in 1925. I can’t say that I was much impressed by his work in Confession, in which he lets the same scene between Mori and Shishido play out twice (first on a beach, then again immediately afterwards in a hotel room) and uses waves crashing against rocks as a visual metaphor for passion – something I’m pretty sure was a hoary old cliché even then.

Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

Thanks to A.K. 

 

Gyakukosen / 逆光線 / (‘Backlight’, 1956)

Obscure Japanese Film #199

Mie Kitahara

Following on from the commercial success earlier in 1956 of their films Season of the Sun and Crazed Fruit, this was Nikkatsu’s stab at a female-centred ‘sun tribe’ movie - ‘sun tribe’ being a term adopted by the Japanese press in reference to the first film to describe what was then a new phenomenon: rebellious, spoilt teenagers, generally from wealthy families, who despised the older generation and were unapologetically interested only in gratifying their own desires. Like Season of the Sun, this one was directed by Takumi Furukawa, a lesser director than Ko Nakahira, who had made Crazed Fruit, the female star of which was Mie Kitahara, who stars again here. 

 

Kitahara and Shoji Yasui

 

Kitahara plays Reiko, a student who shares a dormitory with other female students and who, in this case, does not seem to be from a wealthy family or even to have a family – certainly no reference is made to one, and she has to take on various part-time jobs to get by. What marks Reiko out as different is her attitude to sex – she likes to take the initiative and, early on in the film, she makes advances to a male student, Maki (Shoji Yasui), literally throwing herself at him and biting the button off his jacket. The two begin having a relationship, but one in which traditional roles are reversed – in this case, it’s the man who wants marriage and complains that she only loves him for his body, while she wants no commitment, only to have a good time. Reiko also has a one-night stand with Teramura (Kyoji Aoyama), incurring the wrath of his fiancé / her classmate Motoko (Misako Watanabe) as a result. But it’s when she begins tutoring a young boy at his home and seduces his father (Hiroshi Nihonyanagi) that she really begins playing with fire… 

 

Hiroshi Nihonyanagi

 

Whereas the previous two films had been based on stories by Shintaro Ishihara, the source for Gyakukosen was a novel of the same name by Kunie Iwahashi (1934-2014). Apparently, on its publication (also in 1956), there was ‘a frenzy of media coverage of her as the female equivalent of Ishihara’ (Japanese Wikipedia). 

 

 

Although it may seem like fairly tame stuff today, there’s no doubt that the sexual frankness of this film and the carefully-calculated moments of uninhibited sensuality on Reiko’s part (another example being the scene in which she takes a drink of water from Teramura’s mouth at a drinking fountain) would have been quite shocking at the time. The problem with the film is that it comes across less as a heartfelt plea for sexual equality and more like a cynically motivated product designed to stir up controversy and extract as many yen as possible from the pockets of Japanese teenagers. The sun tribe genre proved to be extremely short-lived as there was some evidence that a number of rapes and sexual assaults had been committed by youngsters influenced by the films. This led to protests by concerned parents and teachers, who were successful in having the genre effectively banned by the end of the year. As Liam Grealy and Catherine Driscoll point out in an online article, there were really only five sun tribe films proper, all of which were released in 1956, the other two being Kon Ichikawa’s Punishment Room and Hiromichi Horikawa’s Summer in Eclipse.

 

 

One oddity of this film is that it features a great deal of group singing of Russian folk songs by the young people, presumably a reflection of the fact that communism had become popular in Japan during the post-war years and had inspired an interest in Russian culture. Gyakukosen is largely unremarkable in terms of cinematic craft – the ending is really the only part that is visually memorable – and probably only of interest to fans of Mie Kitahara or anyone with an interest in the sun tribe phenomenon. 

 

 Thanks to A.K. 

Wandering Shore / 流離の岸 / Ryuri no kishi (1956)

Obscure Japanese Film #180

Terumi Niki

 

Sachiko Murase

Chiho (Terumi Niki) is a young child left alone in the country to be raised by her grandmother , Uta (Sachiko Murase), because her mother, Hagiyo (Nobuko Otowa), has left her father and is getting remarried. Chiho is a sensitive but also somewhat wilful and proud child who misses her mother but doesn’t like to admit it. Uta sends Chiho to take food to her neighbour, Okichi (Sachiko Soma), whom Uta has known since childhood. Uta is now a penniless old lady living in a shack; according to Uta, she has ended up this way because she was frivolous in her relationships with men and spent her life doing what she wanted without regard for the consequences. 

Mie Kitahara and Nobuko Otowa

 

After a year, Chiho goes to live with her mother and stepfather, Takakura (Nobuo Kaneko), who has a son of his own, but Chiho’s status is lower and she feels it. Ten years pass, and Chiho (now played by Mie Kitahara) is a high school student living with her uncle (Taiji Tonoyama) and his wife (Yoshiko Tsubouchi). When Chiho wakes up one day with a strange pain in her finger, she goes to see her friend’s father, a doctor, but he’s out, so the doctor’s son, a newly graduated medical student, Ryukichi (Rentaro Mikuni), attends to her instead. An instant mutual attraction soon leads to marriage plans, but Ryukichi has not been entirely honest with her about his past…

Rentaro Mikuni

 

Mie Kitahara

Released four months after Love is Lost (see review below), this is another Nikkatsu production written and directed by Kaneto Shindo and featuring some of the same cast, with Nobuko Otowa taking a supporting role here and Taiji Tonoyama and Jun Hamamura popping up as expected. Again, the screenplay was not an original – in this case it’s an adaptation of a novel first published in 1953 by Yoko Ota (1906-63),* whose childhood seems to have been similar to that of Chiho’s. 

 

The film is a little less successful than Love is Lost – although it also features the work of composer Akira Ifukube and cinematographer Takeo Ito, their contributions here are less memorable. For his part, Shindo was perhaps a little too faithful to the novel as the story feels more complicated than it needed to be. However, while Terumi Niki (from the previous year’s Policeman’s Diary) growing up to be Mie Kitahara is a stretch, the attraction between Chiho and Ryukichi is convincing. The film is also quite powerful in putting across its message, which I would summarise as a cautionary one about the irreparable damage that can be caused to a relationship when one party deceives the other – especially when that other is a sensitive soul like Chiho, whose fractured childhood has left her more emotionally vulnerable than most.

 

*Ota was a Hiroshima survivor and her 1948 novel City of Corpses on this theme is available in English translation in Hiroshima: Three Witnesses (Princeton University Press, 1990). She also has a short story in the collection Fire from the Ashes: Short Stories about Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Readers International, 1985).

Thanks to A.K. 

Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)