Forever, My Love / 佳人 / Kajin (‘Beautiful Woman’/ ‘Good Person’, 1958)

Obscure Japanese Film #252

Ryoji Hayama

1943. Shigeru (Ryoji Hayama) is a student returning from Tokyo to his hometown of Toyooka in Hyogo Prefecture on western Honshu (then part of the San’in region). There, he will have a farewell party before going off to war, but most of all he hopes to see his childhood sweetheart, Tsubura (Izumi Ashikawa), who has been unable to walk since contracting polio at an early age. This has caused her to be largely housebound and live rather like one of the dolls in glass boxes we see in her home.

Jukichi Uno and Sachiko Murase

On the train, Shigeru replays memories from their childhood when, as a boy (played by Hayama’s own kid brother, Kunio Yamaguchi), he would visit her and her kindly mother (Sachiko Murase), while her stern father (Jukichi Uno) looked on disapprovingly. Shigeru would often stop off at the tofu shop, where the girl, Tokie (Miori Karuhata), was jealous of his love for Tsubura. One day, she lured him into the back and seduced him despite the fact that he was yet to reach puberty (the film later backtracks on this somewhat and suggests that they did not go all the way).

Nobuo Kaneko

Izumi Ashikawa

Tsubura gives Shigeru three stones in a pouch, which he carries with him throughout the war. When he finally returns, it’s on the very day that she’s to be married to the local villain, Tachio (Nobuo Kaneko), who had previously run off with Tokie before abandoning her after six months. Now, he’s taken advantage of Tsubura and her mother’s hardship after her father’s death and pressured her into marriage in order to improve his social status. When Shigeru tries to visit her, Tachio won’t even let him in the house, so there’s little he can do but accept the situation. As he walks off despondently, he runs into Tokie (now played by Misako Watanabe), who is now working as a bar hostess (and, it’s implied, is also engaged in some form of prostitution). Initially, she tries to seduce him again, but he’s still too much in love with Tsubura. When Tokie is offered a job keeping the books for Tachio, she becomes a go-between for Shigeru and Tsubura, delivering messages between the two. Meanwhile, although it’s always been assumed that Tsubura is unable to have sex, she finally has her first period – something her mother hopes to keep secret from Tachio, who has begun bringing prostitutes home and forcing Tsubura to watch while he has sex with them...

Ryoji Hayama and Misako Watanabe

This Nikkatsu production was based on the debut novel of Shigeo Fujii (1916-79), who worked in magazine editing and had managed to get it published as a magazine serial the year before. According to Japanese Wikipedia, it ‘was highly praised by Yasunari Kawabata and nominated for the Akutagawa Prize’. When Nikkatsu bought the rights, he quit his day job and devoted himself full time to writing. Wikipedia also notes that, ‘During his lifetime, he believed that, "If I have saké, I don't need anything else." His clumsy and impulsive personality made him feared by editors, and sometimes even made them dislike him.’ Three further films (all obscure B-movies) were adapted from his work, but he’s remained unknown outside Japan. Like his protagonist, Fujii was also from Toyooka and apparently coached the actors in the local dialect. Unfortunately, I have to say that I found the story to be a contrived and excessively sentimental one, though it seems that such fare was eagerly lapped up by quite a large part of the Japanese cinemagoing audience at the time.

Izumi Ashikawa

The emerging new wave filmmakers of the era, on the other hand, had little patience for this kind of material and, although the sexual frankness of the piece is something you wouldn’t see in a Hollywood picture of this era, it sits awkwardly in what is at heart an old-fashioned (even for its day) tearjerker. As I’ve come to expect from director Eisuke Takizawa, the film is very well-made and it’s hard to find fault with the direction, only in what is (to me, anyway) the poor choice of material.

In terms of the cast, nominal star Izumi Ashikawa first appears 33 minutes in (the childhood prologue is a lengthy one) and I almost felt sorry for her in being stuck with such a role – Tsubura is so ridiculously self-sacrificing it’s actually kind of annoying. For his part, Jukichi Uno manages to escape his nice guy image briefly and play a bit of a bastard pretty well (intriguingly, his name does not appear on the poster, whereas Chishu Ryu’s does, suggesting that Uno took his role; perhaps it was felt that the gentle father of the Ozu films would not be accepted in such a part). However, the best performance comes from Misako Watanabe, who makes the perhaps unlikely character of Tokie feel more like a real human being than anyone else manages to do here. Watanabe, who won a Blue Ribbon Award for her performance in Shohei Imamura’s Endless Desire the following year and is also a well-respected stage actress, is still with us at the time of writing at 93 and has been acting as recently as 2024.

Misako Watanabe

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

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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)

A Hole of My Own Making / 自分の穴の中で / Jibun no ana no nakade (1955)

 Obscure Japanese Film #134

Rentaro Mikuni, Mie Kitahara and Jukichi Uno

Tamiko (Mie Kitahara) is a young woman living at home with her stepmother, Nobuko (Yumeji Tsukioka), and her bedridden brother, Junjiro (Nobuo Kaneko). Tamiko’s parents are both deceased and she’s approaching the usual age for marriage, so candidates are being discussed. Her father had wanted her to marry Komatsu (Jukichi Uno), an easygoing nice guy who works in a munitions factory, but she’s not attracted to him. Tamiko prefers the more aggressive and ambitious Ihara (Rentaro Mikuni), a medical doctor who spends most of his time experimenting on animals when he’s not womanising. However, she mistakenly believes that Nobuko wants him for herself, and this becomes a major source of friction between the two women. Meanwhile, Junjiro – who has never got over the fact that his wife left him – is becoming increasingly obsessed with investing in stocks and shares…

Yumeji Tsukioka

 

This Nikkatsu production was based on an untranslated 1955 novel of the same name by the left-wing writer Tatsuzo Ishikawa (1905-85), whose work was also to provide the basis for several Satsuo Yamamoto films, including The Human Wall (1959). Ishikawa had actually been imprisoned by the Japanese authorities for a few months in 1938 as a result of his novel Soldiers Alive, which criticised the Japanese presence in China; he subsequently avoided such topics until after the war. A Hole of My Own Making was adapted for the screen by Yasutaro Yagi, who had written a number of scripts for this film’s director, Tomu Uchida, back in the 1930s, before Uchida disappeared into Manchuria for a decade or so. The fact that Uchida chose to work with these two writers and that the resulting film shows so little regard for commercial considerations (with the possible exception of its casting) leaves little doubt that it was a personal passion project and by no means a routine studio assignment. 

Nobuo Kaneko

 

Like Uchida’s previous film, Twilight Saloon, it also seems to be something of an allegory for post-war Japan, perhaps most obviously in the character of Junjiro, a disillusioned and broken man pursuing financial wealth for its own sake from his sickbed. However, despite the rich symbolism that can be found throughout, I’ve seldom seen a film which leaves it so much up to the audience to decide how to feel about the characters, especially in the case of Tamiko and Nobuko. Who exactly are we supposed to be rooting for here? It’s so unclear that it’s almost disorienting in comparison to the majority of movies, and it’s difficult even to be certain about which character is referred to in the title – a hole of whose own making? Initially, I thought it must have been referring to Komatsu, who is introduced at the beginning of the film sleeping in a drainage tunnel (?), but by the end I thought it made more sense referring to Tamiko… Anyway, I personally enjoyed the film’s ambiguity, though I can imagine that some might feel exasperated and lose patience. 

Mie Kitahara

 

Even more unconventional is the harpsichord score by Yasushi Akutagawa (son of Rashomon writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa!), which at times sounds like it's being played by a demented chimp. Weirdly, I kind of liked this too, and you certainly can’t accuse anyone of going for the obvious here. Talking of music, Nobuko and Ihara attend a koto concert around half an hour in, and the blind musician we see performing is quite something. He is Michio Miyagi (1894-1956), one of the all-time greats of traditional Japanese music.*

Michio Miyagi

 

The actors are all well cast and the performances solid all round. Mikuni dissects a live frog at one point, and doesn’t appear to have faked it – unsurprising as he was known for taking realism to extremes. The point was presumably to underline the character’s lack of feeling, but I have to say that I thought it was unnecessary. 

Mikuni with another unfortunate co-star

 

To return to the film’s use of metaphors, a new sports centre is being built outside Tamiko’s family home, and construction noises are audible in every daytime scene set in that location – clearly a deliberate if unusual choice, and one that I think was intended to suggest that the old way of life is coming to an end. As in the recently-reviewed film A Rainbow at Every Turn (1956), military jets fly over in several scenes, including right at the end, implying an uncertain future not just for Tamiko and what’s left of her family, but for the Japanese people as a whole. But Uchida never represents his characters in this film as simple victims of change – many of them are unlikeable and are pursuing selfish goals, and in various ways they bring their misfortunes on themselves. Perhaps the title refers to more than one of the characters after all, and of course it could be taken to refer to the Japanese nation as a whole, so A Hole of Our Own Making might have been a better fit.

*Despite his blindness, Miyagi also composed the score for a 1935 version of Princess Kaguya photographed by special effects whiz Eiji Tsuburaya. A shortened version (33 minutes instead of the original 75) was rediscovered in the UK in 2015. An excerpt can be viewed on YouTube here. 

Thanks to A.K.

For more on A Hole of My Own Making, click here. 

Summer Storm / 夏の嵐 / Natsu no arashi (1956)

Obscure Japanese Film #112

Masahiko Tsugawa and Mie Kitahara

Director Ko Nakahira’s first film following his famous ‘sun tribe’ movie Crazed Fruit again stars Mie Kitahara and examines the lives of disaffected youth in post-war Japan. The film opens dramatically with a brief but attention-grabbing pre-credits sequence in which we hear a startling scream from Kitahara, who is standing on a windy beach and shouting out to sea. “How unfair! You’ve gone forever, that’s so unfair. I’ll never forgive you for this! Never!” she yells before rushing into the stormy ocean. This scene is repeated again at the end of the film, by which point of course we have the context to understand it. 

 

Ryoko (Kitahara) is a young woman living with her family after having been raised by another woman they call ‘Aunt Maki’ (Ayuko Fujishiro) until she was 13, at which point Aunt Maki remarried and sent Ryoko back to her birth mother, Mitsu (granny-specialist Tanie Kitabayashi playing her real age for once). 

 

Tanie Kitabayashi

As a result, Ryoko not only feels unwanted by both women and resents them, but has grown up to be a cold and cynical person. Although she works as a teacher at a special needs school, it’s a job she has taken mainly because her parents were against it (for reasons which are unclear). The family live in a Western-style house and are practising Christians. Mitsu takes religion especially seriously and is insufferably self-righteous; Ryoko sees her sister Taeko (Yoko Kozono) as a carbon copy of her mother and despises her for this reason. Their father (Yo Shiomi) is an antiques collector with his head in the clouds most of the time, and the only family member Ryoko feels any kinship with is her younger brother Akira (Masahiko Tsugawa), mainly because he’s adopted. 

 

Masahiko Tsugawa

Into this already dysfunctional household steps Akimoto (Tatsuya Mitsuhashi), a young man who is newly-engaged to Taeko. He’s full of self-loathing after having survived a suicide pact with a former girlfriend who died. When Ryoko is introduced, she suffers a shock – by pure coincidence, Akimoto is the same man she once had a one-night stand with on a camping trip. Trouble begins when the two realise they still have feelings for each other…  

 

Tatsuya Mihashi

In an attempt to follow the huge success of Crazed Fruit (based on a Shintaro Ishihara story), Nikkatsu studios chose to adapt another controversial Akutagawa Prize-nominated story by an angry young author – in this case a female one, Michiko Fukai (1932-2015). This is the only one of Fukai’s stories to have been filmed, and her literary career seems to have been a short one. To my knowledge, none of her stories have been translated into English. Although information about Fukai is scarce on the web, she was apparently influenced by Luchino Visconti’s portrayal of self-destructive emotions in Senso (1954), which had been released in Japan as Natsu no arashi, or Summer Storm, and whose title she borrowed. 

Tatsuya Mihashi and Yoko Kozono

 

The film features a considerable amount of voiceover narration by star Mie Kitahara, and is quite a dialogue-heavy piece of work in itself. It’s extremely well-directed by Ko Nakahira, who helps to hold the interest with some unusual staging; for example, he has Kitahara play a whole scene lying face down on the floor at one point, while in another, Ryoko and her colleague Kido (Nobuo Kaneko) exchange lines in a sweltering staffroom while each try to commandeer the one electric fan available. Unfortunately, Ryoko and Akimoto are both such self-pitying characters that they soon grow tiresome, and they are also given to saying things like “I crave exhilarating drama that makes my head reel!” (Ryoko). Perversely, it’s only when Akimoto realises that Taeko doesn’t love him that he wants to marry her. “You can’t understand my delight at the living death she promises me!” he exults. It’s hard to imagine real people saying such things, and I doubt it would sound any less pretentious in Japanese as the subtitles by Stuart J Walton are excellent. For these reasons, the film ultimately left me cold, and I suspect that it was a good deal less well-received than Crazed Fruit considering that it’s nowhere near as well-known and there were no further collaborations between Ko Nakahira and Mie Kitahara, or adaptations of Michiko Fukai’s stories. Where Crazed Fruit successfully tapped into the zeitgeist, Ryoko and Akimoto are both a bit too weird for most people to relate to; consequently, Summer Storm’s themes of suicide and incest feel like a slightly misjudged attempt to appeal to the supposedly nihilistic and rebellious youth of the time through mere shock value. 

 

Bonus trivia: Mie Kitahara (b.1933) was one of Japanese cinema’s biggest stars of the late 1950s and is still alive at the time of writing. After making 20 films with fellow star Yujiro Ishihara in the space of five years, she married him and retired from films in 1960, subsequently appearing in only one TV drama in 1964. Known as Makiko Ishihara since she quit acting, she co-managed her husband’s production company for many years and continued to run it after his death in 1987.