Settlement of love / 愛情の決算 / Aijo no kessan (1956)

Obscure Japanese Film #255

Shin Saburi

Narasaki (Shin Saburi) has married Katsuko (Setsuko Hara), the widow of a soldier who got killed fighting alongside Narasaki in the Philippines and who left her with a son, Hiroshi. However, it was a marriage of convenience and there’s been little intimacy between the two – her husband is suffering from PTSD and suppressing his emotions, so he often comes across as a bit of a cold fish. One of Narasaki’s friends is Ohira (Toshiro Mifune), a less damaged veteran who finds himself attracted to Katsuko. Emotionally starved as she is, she finds herself falling for him despite her moral qualms...

Setsuko Hara

This Toho production was based on a story entitled Kono ju-nen (‘These 10 Years’) by Hidemi Kon (1903-84), who had himself been stationed in the Philippines during the war. It was adapted by Toshiro Ide, a notable screenwriter who worked for many of Japan’s top directors, but is perhaps best-known for his frequent collaborations with Mikio Naruse, whose films this one somewhat resembles. On this occasion, however, the director is none other than star actor Shin Saburi, whom I’ve often criticised in previous reviews for being wooden. After seeing this film, he’s definitely gone up in my estimation as, not only does he give a better performance than usual – indeed, there are times you could almost swear that he’s alive – but he also does a highly creditable job of direction. This was actually the 11^th of 14 films he directed, though I’ve yet to see any of the others.

Toshiro Mifune

Saburi also gets excellent performances out of the rest of the cast, although considering that – apart from Setsuko Hara and Toshiro Mifune – this also includes Keiju Kobayashi, Murasaki Fujima and Kaoru Yachigusa, they may not have needed too much help. Mifune might seem an unlikely romantic lead but, reunited with Hara after their successful pairing in Tokyo Sweetheart (1952), he again shows that he was quite capable of giving a good performance in a non-aggressive role. However, top-billed Hara is the real star of the show here and for her part she demonstrates a wide range of subtle expressions that her work for Ozu rarely allowed her.

Setsuko Hara

Aside from being a strong love story for grown-ups which offers no fairy-tale endings or easy solutions, the film is also an insightful portrait of post-war Japanese life, the story taking place in flashbacks over a period of 10 years from the end of the war until what was then the present day. We witness the lives of the various characters change greatly during this period, especially in economic terms – immediately after the war, they’re all living hand-to-mouth, but some prove able to adapt to new circumstances very successfully and become quite wealthy within just a few years, while others (like Narasaki) are, to their detriment, unable to let go of the past and seem bewildered by the sudden dramatic social changes. Meanwhile, the Americans are a constant background presence throughout – jeeps rumble through the streets and military jets fly over, startling everyone with their sudden noise. Such sights are common in films of the period, and this one in particular shows that the war and its aftermath continued to affect the lives of everyone in the country in all sorts of subtle ways.

A pleasant surprise, then, and a film well-worth seeking out.

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Waga ai / わが愛 (‘My Love’, 1960)

Obscure Japanese Film #232

 

Ineko Arima

Niizu (Shin Saburi) is a newspaper reporter who drops dead in the street after a night of heavy drinking. At the wake, his wife (Yatsuko Tan’ami) is surprised when a mysterious guest turns up to pay her respects. This is Kiyo (Ineko Arima), a young woman who has been Niizu’s mistress for the past three years while he was in the mountains working on a labour of love, a book entitled A History of the Chinese Salt Industry (sounds riveting!). 

 

Yatsuko Tan'ami

In flashback, we learn how Kiyo first met Niizu during the war when she was a teenager and was living with her aunt and a geisha named Hideya (Nobuko Otowa), who Niizu regularly slept with. One night, Niizu, Hideya and Kiyo were all sharing the same room when Niizu made love to Hideya while Kiyo kept her head turned away and covered her ears. When they were finished, Hideya went to use the bathroom and Niizu took the opportunity to say to Kiyo, ‘When you grow up, let’s have an affair.’ Instead of being creeped out by this, she fell in love with him and started keeping a scrapbook of his newspaper articles. When they met again a few years later, it was she who initiated their affair...

 

Arima

This Shochiku production involved many of the same talents that made the previously-reviewed film The Hunting Rifle (1961). Like that later picture, it was directed by Heinosuke Gosho, shot by Haruo Takeno, scripted by Toshio Yasumi based on a Yasushi Inoue story, scored by Yasushi Akutagawa and featured Shin Saburi and Nobuko Otowa. It’s safe to assume, then, that Waga ai was a commercial success as Shochiku would not have green-lit The Hunting Rifle otherwise. However, it suffers from several of the same fatal flaws as that later picture and I doubt it would be well-received by audiences today, which is perhaps why the only way to see it is via an old VHS transfer.

Shin Saburi

Nobel Prize nominee Yasushi Inoue was a very talented writer but, like many Japanese authors of the 20th-century, he was extremely prolific and divided his efforts between writing highbrow literary material and more commercial works to pay the rent, so that the quality of his work varied greatly. Without an English translation, I’m not sure how the 1952 story ‘Tsuya no kyaku’ (‘A Guest at the Wake’) which provided the basis for this film sits on that spectrum, but, for me anyway, the story is the fundamental problem here, consisting as it mostly does of  sentimental claptrap meets male wish-fulfilment. Indeed, it’s a complete mystery why Kiyo would fall in love with a craggy-faced, middle-aged, married drunk old enough to be her father and basically insist on becoming his uncomplaining slave; feminism must have been a completely alien concept to the people responsible for this film. Perhaps if Niizu had been played by someone more charismatic than Saburi, it might have helped a little, but probably not much – the picture is also sabotaged by the cloying clichés which make up Yasushi Akutagawa’s dreadful score.

Rise, Fair Sun / 朝やけの詩 / Asayake no uta (‘Poem of the Morning Glow’, 1973)

 

Tatsuya Nakadai

 

The Shinano Plateau, Nagano. Left without a position after Japan’s defeat, former naval officer Sakuzo (Tatsuya Nakadai) is now a comparatively poor but hard-working and extremely proud farmer with a teenage daughter, Haruko (Keiko Takahashi), and two younger children, all of whom he is raising by himself. His wife, Yaeko (Kaneko Iwasaki), seems to have been unable to bear the drudgery, has developed a drinking problem and left him for an easier life, shacking up with Kamiyama (Yosuke Kondo). He’s the president of Apollo Tourism, who want all the farmers in the area to clear out so they can use the land to build a holiday resort. As the farmers are all in debt to local bigwig Inagi (Shin Saburi), Kamiyama conspires with him to make them an offer they can’t refuse, but some – like Sakuzo – prove inconveniently stubborn. When land surveyors are sent in, violence breaks out… 

 

Kaneko Iwasaki and Keiko Takahashi

 

Rise, Fair Sun was a co-production between Toho and Haiyuza, the theatre company to whom Nakadai and a number of his fellow cast members (including Kaneko Iwasaki and Yosuke Kondo) belonged. The film was directed by Kei Kumai and based on his original screenplay, co-written with the little-known Akiko Katsura and the slightly better-known Hisashi Yamanouchi, who had worked on three of Shohei Imamura’s early pictures. Like many of Kumai’s films, it has an obvious left-wing, social conscience theme. 

 

Shin Saburi and Nakadai

 

In the early 1970s, many Japanese feature films returned to using the old academy ratio that the studios had originally abandoned around 1957, and this film is one example of such. As I understand it, this was mainly done because it was cheaper and the studios’ profits were diminishing, but I also wonder whether it may have been related to the more TV-friendly nature of the academy ratio as the sale of films to television after their cinema run was more of a concern by this point. In any case, it’s part of the reason why Rise, Fair Sun has something of a TV miniseries feel to it. However, that’s not to say that the film fails to impress visually – mostly shot on location, it features some beautiful scenery and attractive cinematography by Kozo Okazaki (Goyokin, Inn of Evil) which includes a spectacular shot of Haruko and her young lover silhouetted against the sun towards the end. Another plus is the score by Kumai’s regular composer, Teizo Matsumura, which is refreshingly free from the usual clichés. 

 

 

The film is generally very sympathetic to Sakuzo despite the clear suggestion that his wife has been a victim of domestic violence, an implied additional motivation for her absence. Like Toshiro Mifune in Redbeard, there’s a scene in which Nakadai appears to forget that he’s not in a samurai movie and launches a one-man attack on multiple opponents – in this case grabbing a surveying pole and going into full Sword of Doom mode on the unfortunate surveyors. As if to compensate for this violent side, he tries to save a bloated cow (by stabbing it!) and, while digging on his land, he discovers an ancient pot from the Jomon people (who were believed to have lived in harmony with nature to a remarkable degree). This instantly turns his farm into a major archaeological site, and when a Jomon face sculpture is dug up, he declares it better than anything in the Louvre (which he has apparently visited while in the navy). This unexpected plot thread is quickly dropped, but – with symbolism not too hard to decipher – we will later see a shot of a bulldozer carelessly running over another piece of Jomon pottery. 

 

 

 

 

The film marked veteran star Shin Saburi’s return to the big screen after an absence of 12 years, during which time he had been very active as both an actor and director in television. It was his first film opposite Nakadai and there’s a memorable confrontation scene between the two, who were reunited the following year in Satsuo Yamamoto’s The Family. Nakadai had known his other co-star, Kaneko Iwasaki, since the very beginning of his acting career and the two had appeared in a number of films together. Though she has seldom had leading roles in feature films, Iwasaki is the official representative of Haiyuza at the time of writing and remains a highly respected stage actor who played the King Lear equivalent in Haiyuza’s 2024 production Dokoku no Ria (‘Lear’s Lament’). 

 

 

 

 

 

The production of the film was overshadowed by the publicity around the nude swimming scene featuring an 18-year-old Keiko Takahashi – then known as Keiko Sekine – who had already been a popular star for a couple of years at this point. Although the inclusion of such a scene may have been a cynical move by the producers, it was tastefully shot by Kumai, but in any case it was not enough to make Rise, Fair Sun a hit either at the box office or with the critics. Though screened in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, it failed to win any prizes. This is not too surprising as, despite some good work in a number of departments, it’s basically a noble effort which doesn’t quite gel – mainly, I think, due to the flawed script and somehow unconvincing characters. In my view, stories of this type often work better with a more Ken Loach-type approach, in which the use of improvisation by a cast of mainly non-professionals can be more effective.

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) Film Library in Californiaa has a 35mm print of this film with English subtitles

Thanks to A.K.

 

May Love Be Restored / 五番町夕霧楼 / Gobancho Yugiri-ro (1980)

 

Keiko Matsuzaka

 

A little background may be useful here, so please bear with me before I get to the film…

In July 1950, the famous 500-year-old golden temple known as Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto was deliberately  burned down by an apprentice monk named Yoken Hayashi, who made a suicide attempt immediately after but failed and was sentenced to seven years in prison as a result. His health worsened during his incarceration and he was released early, but died in 1956 aged just 26. Kinkaku-ji was successfully reconstructed in the intervening years and still stands today. Hayashi, who suffered from a severe stutter he was said to have had since the age of 3, never explained the reasons for his actions. 

 

 

In 1956, Yukio Mishima published his novel based on the incident (known in English as The Temple of the Golden Pavilion). Mishima interpreted the crime as the result of an urge to destroy beauty – a recurring theme in his work The novel was filmed in a compromised version by Kon Ichikawa in 1958 as Enjo (aka Conflagration); a more faithful version by Yoichi Takabayashi appeared in 1976. 

 

Eiji Okuda

 

Another writer, Tsutomu Mizukami (or Minakami), had also become interested in the story from a different perspective. Mizukami had himself begun monastic training while still a boy, but was treated badly and quit by the time he was 18. He related to Hayashi, whom he even claimed to have met before the incident, and interpreted the crime as an act of rebellion against the hypocrisy of the temple authorities. Mizukami (who also authored The Temple of Wild Geese, another story involving a disaffected acolyte) carried out a great deal of research on the case and published his own novel inspired by it, Gobancho Yugiri-ro, in 1962. Shortly before committing his act of arson, Hayashi was said to have visited the same prostitute a couple of times in the red light district of Kyoto known as Gobancho, and Mizukami took this detail and created a major character out of her. In his novel, the two are childhood sweethearts from a struggling rural community who end up being sent (separately) to Kyoto by their families for very different reasons – he to train as a monk, she to work as a prostitute in a brothel as her destitute father has too many hungry mouths to feed.

 

Keiko Matsuzaka

 

Gobancho Yugiriro was first filmed in 1963 by director Tomotoka Tasaka. In his version, the prostitute (now named Yuko) is the focus of his film, with Hayashi (now Kunugi) not appearing until quite late on. In contrast, the version we’re concerned with here – directed by Shigeyuki Yamane and produced by Shochiku – balances its story more equally between the two principals. This is likely because Mizukami had published a second book about the Kinkaku-ji incident in 1979. Entitled Kinkaku-enjo (‘The Burning of the Golden Pavilion’), it was a non-fiction account which has yet to be translated into English. The opening credits of this film state that it is based on both books.

 

Yuko Hama

 

Yuko (Keiko Matsuzaka) is treated with apparent kindness by the madam, Katsue (Yuko Hama), whose brothel is named Yugiri-ro (providing the second half of the Japanese title). Although in neither film is this character treated with condemnation, she is, of course, involved in a sleazy business, and she arranges for one of her trusted regulars, the middle-aged ‘Ta-san’ (Hiroyuki Nagato) to take her virginity, and he becomes sexually-obsessed with her. Once that’s out of the way, Yuko takes to her new profession with disconcerting ease, and soon becomes the most popular prostitute in the place – with the clients, that is. Her colleagues soon get tired of being passed over and become envious. Meanwhile, Yuko secretly makes contact with Kunugi (Eiji Okuda), the stuttering apprentice monk she had grown up with and who is the only person she truly loves. She also feels responsible for his affliction as it began when they were children after she had accidentally dropped a snake on him while trying to get it out of a tree with a stick. He begins visiting her at the brothel, where she pays his fees, but, instead of sleeping together, they spend their time talking and singing songs they remember from their childhood. He’s supposed to be looking after the Golden Temple (here called Hokaku-ji), but he’s becoming increasingly disillusioned with his vocation and his relationship with the head priest (Shin Saburi) is deteriorating, while he sees little hope for a future with Yuko…

 

Shin Saburi

 

On the whole, I have to say that I prefer the 1963 version, mainly because I think it’s better cast and acted. Yuko is supposed to be 19 years old when she enters the brothel but, despite the fact that the 27-year-old Keiko Matsuzaka has not even the suggestion of a wrinkle, she somehow fails to convince as a teenager. However, having played leading roles in a number of successful films and TV dramas throughout the 1970s, she was a big star whose popularity was at its peak at the time this film was released. Some of the other performances also suffer in comparison to the earlier film – Hiroyuki Nagato overdoes it here (I preferred Minoru Chiaki in the 1963 version), while, as the madam, Yuko Hama is less memorable than Michiyo Kogure.

 

Hiroyuki Nagato

 

Another issue is that, although the film is set in 1950, it doesn’t always feel like it. A lot of little details don’t seem quite right – for example, the character known as ‘sensei’ played by Tadashi Yokouchi wears a polo-necked sweater and corduroy suit – was anyone really wearing that in 1950? And the cheesy music score which sometimes lapses into anachronistic distorted electric guitar doesn’t help either. 

 

Tadashi Yokouchi

 

The one point on which I felt it improved on the previous film was in its portrayal of the ensemble of prostitutes who share the brothel with Yuko. In Tasaka’s film, we were given what looked like a very rose-tinted view in which it was basically one happy family with perfect manners and barely a hint of conflict or rivalry, whereas Yamane’s film shows the inevitable friction between the women, which even erupts into a catfight at one point, and their excessive make-up and gaudy clothes seem more fitting. But the film has little to say about the burning of the temple – ultimately, it’s simply a confection intended to appeal to those with a taste for romantic tragedies. 

 

 DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

On This Earth / 地上 / Chijo (1957)

Obscure Japanese Film #150

Hitomi Nozoe and Hiroshi Kawaguchi

Kanazawa, central Japan, c.1920. Heiichiro (Hiroshi Kawaguchi) is a student who lives in a small first floor flat in the red light district with his widowed mother, Omitsu (Kinuyo Tanaka), who earns her living from needlework. Although once part of a wealthy family, they are now struggling to get by, and Heiichiro’s school fees are overdue. 

 

Kinuyo Tanaka

Kyoko Kagawa

One evening, a naïve country girl, Fuyuko (Kyoko Kagawa), is brought to the geisha brokerage downstairs by her uncle and sold. The broker (Kichijiro Ueda) intends to sell her on to a geisha house the next day, but not before he’s taken advantage of her himself. When he gets drunk and tries to rape Fuyuko, she flees the house and is taken in for the night by Omitsu. However, she has no choice but to return in the morning, when she is taken to the geisha house as planned and must prepare to learn her new trade. Omitsu is subsequently offered a job as a live-in seamstress at the same geisha house, so she and Heiichiro go to live there. Omitsu develops an affection for Heiichiro, but resigns herself to her fate, and is ordered by the head of the house (Kyu Sazanka) to sleep with local bigwig Amano (Shin Saburi). 

Kyu Sazanka

 

Shin Saburi

Meanwhile, Heiichiro has a chance meeting with his former childhood sweetheart, Wakako (Hitomi Nozoe), and he falls in love when he sees her in a ridiculous Bo Peep bonnet and dress. She’s the daughter of a wealthy factory owner whose employees go on strike. One of these employees is a friend of Heiichiro’s, which leads to him being suspected of helping the strikers. Despite the efforts of a sympathetic teacher (Kinzo Shin), Heiichiro finds himself expelled from school by the headmaster (Eitaro Ozawa) …

Hitomi Nozoe

 

Eitaro Ozawa

On This Earth was adapted by Kaneto Shindo based on the first part of a long four-part autobiographical novel by Seijiro Shimada (1899-1930), whose life is closely reflected in the character of Heiichiro. Shimada was apparently something of an angry young man, and after his book was a huge success he was said to have become unbearably arrogant, which led to his early supporters dropping away and his success being a short-lived one. Shimada’s dissatisfaction with the state of the world and socialist beliefs are evident in the film – Shindo and director Kozaburo Yoshimura portray a society in which the vast majority accept its inherent injustice unquestioningly because the exploitative economic eco-system in which they must survive is so inflexible. If – like Heiichiro’s uncle (Taiji Tonoyama), who is in a position to help  due to his job working for the council, but refuses to stick his neck out – they are lucky enough to have found themselves a niche, they dare not risk losing it. The filmmakers are obviously in sympathy with Shimada on this point, and make it pretty clear how they feel – for instance, a scene in which a female striker is dragged off screaming by the police cuts abruptly to a shot of fat cat Saburi enjoying himself in a geisha house. 

Taiji Tonoyama

 

Where the film is less successful is in the way that every female character in the film seems to conclude that Heiichiro is the best thing since sliced bread within a few seconds of meeting him. In fact, the character is mysteriously held in such high esteem by everyone that even Wakako’s brother (Keizo Kawasaki) encourages her love affair with Heiichiro against their parents’ wishes, and Fukai (Yosuke Irie), a mutual friend of Heiichiro and Wakako, who might have been expected to have feelings for Wakako himself, is only too willing to act as a go-between. It could well be that this assumed acceptance that Heiichiro is special without any apparent justification is also a weakness in the novel, which would make sense given Shimada’s reputation for arrogance, but in any case, I felt that it worked against the film. 

Kyoko Kagawa and Kinuyo Tanaka

 

On This Earth benefits from a strong cast, but the story is nothing special and the cliché count is high. The main reason it remains worth watching in my opinion is the cinematography – the film was shot (much of it on location) using Daiei’s own colour process and was one of their last using the old academy ratio format, but it looks rather wonderfully like a moving painting. 

 

Bonus trivia: This was the second film (after Masumura’s The Kiss) out of 21 to co-star Hiroshi Kawaguchi and Hitomi Nozoe. They married in 1960 and remained together until his death in 1987. 

DVD at Amazon Japan.  

Thanks to kagetsuhisoka for the English subtitles, which can be found here. 

Additional thanks to A.K.