When Women Lie / 嘘 / Uso (‘Lies’, 1963)

Obscure Japanese Film #160

L-R: Eiko Takashiro, Junko Kano, Nobuko Otowa

Following the template of their earlier picture A Woman’s Testament (1960), this omnibus comedy from Daiei studios is essentially three separate half-hour films by different directors cobbled together with no linking story, only a loose theme to unite them. 

 

Takashi Nakamura and Eiko Takashiro

Episode 1, ‘Playgirl’, written by Yoshio Shirasaka and directed by Yasuzo Masumura:

Mariko (Eiko Takashiro) is a young woman dating four different men but carefully preserving her virginity as she works out which is the best candidate for marriage. She keeps detailed notes on each one and even adopts a different persona depending on the tastes of the man she is meeting next. However, her cool calculations are upset when she discovers that she has a rival (Kyoko Enami) for her current favourite (Jerry Fujio)… 

Junko Kano

 

Episode 2, ‘Mistress on the Books’, written by Ryozo Kasahara and directed by Kozaburo Yoshimura:

Shinko (Junko Kano) is a soap opera actress dismayed to learn that her character has suddenly been killed off because she’s considered a ‘daikon’ (white radish, meaning ‘bad actor’). She complains to the show’s sponsor, who is also the head of a pharmaceutical company and her sugar daddy, but she’s been milking him for too much money, so he’s considering cutting her loose and sends one of his minions (Keizo Kawasaki) to deal with the situation…

Nobuko Otowa

 

Episode 3, ‘Three Women’, written by Kaneto Shindo and directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa

A woman enters an apartment and shoots a man dead. When she is questioned by a police officer (Ken Utsui), it emerges that the woman, Michiyo (Nobuko Otowa), had left her live-in job at an inn to come and live in the apartment with a salesman, Tashiro (Eiji Funakoshi), and that she had shot him when he wanted to break it off. We also learn that Tashiro had a wife (Mitsuko Mori) who forced him to stop seeing Michiyo. But where did Michiyo get the gun?   

Eiji Funakoshi

 

The English title of this picture seems almost unfair as the men here do quite a bit of lying themselves! In fact, the unifying theme might more accurately be described as infidelity rather than lying, but in any case the tone is one of comic irony with a dash of cynicism. With its moody lighting and camera angles, Kinugasa’s episode briefly threatens to become more serious, but not for long. 

Mitsuko Mori

 

What the picture may lack in depth, it makes up for in entertainment value, and I would certainly recommend it to fans of Daiei movies of this era. The three female stars all acquit themselves well, but Junko Kano in particular gets one of her best roles and proves a dab hand at comedy. She never quite reached the heights of Daiei’s top female stars Machiko Kyo, Ayako Wakao and Fujiko Yamamoto, perhaps partly because she started later (1957) and retired at the height of her popularity in 1963 due to an eye issue which was exacerbated by working under the bright studio lights. At the time of writing, she’s still alive at 88. 

 DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

The Crab Cannery Ship / 蟹工船 / Kanikosen (1953)

Obscure Japanese Film #159

So Yamamura

Based on the 1929 novel of the same name by communist writer Takiji Kobayashi (tortured to death by the police in 1933 aged just 30), this independent production depicts the harsh conditions on board the titular vessel, where the men are not much better off than the crabs they’re tasked with catching. The ship itself is closely modelled on the real-life Hakuai maru, which had started life as a hospital ship before being purchased by a fishing company. The crab-catching is carried out using smaller boats, which then return to the ship, where the catch is processed and canned on board. According to Japanese Wikipedia, this put the ship in a legal grey area as the usual naval laws did not apply to a factory ship, and neither did the labour laws that applied to factories based on land. Of course, this makes it easy for the owners to exploit the workers mercilessly and without fear of legal consequences. Many of those doing the canning are mere children, while the men are worked like slaves, frequently beaten and occasionally lost overboard with no attempt being made to rescue them. This brutal regime is overseen by Asakawa (Ko Mihashi), who even gives orders to the weak and ineffectual ship’s captain (Minosuke Yamada), whom he forbids to respond to an SOS call from another ship. 

Ko Mihashi

 

Minosuke Yamada

The Crab Cannery Ship was the first of six films to be directed by So Yamamura, an actor perhaps most familiar outside Japan for playing Admiral Yamamoto in Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970). He gives himself a small part here as a fugitive who has joined the crew to escape the police. Yamamura also wrote the screenplay and invested his own money into the production. 

 

So Yamamura

It was the second film made by Gendai Eigasha, an independent company established in 1951 by former Toho employee Tengo Yamada (1916-88) to produce such left-wing, social conscience works as this and Tadashi Imai’s Darkness at Noon (1956). Since Yamada’s death, the company has been headed by his widow, Hisako Yamada (b.1932), and, although its output has been sporadic, continues to produce films at the time of writing. 

Jun Hamamura (left) and unidentified others

 

Unsurprisingly for this kind of story, there are no shades of grey to be found in the characterisations – everyone is either victim or victimiser, and the acting is pretty broad throughout. There is no star part, and the strengths of the film are in the realism of its setting, its fast pace and its often impressive camerawork. Cinematographer Yoshio Miyajima (who won an award for his work here) crowds the screen with grim, shadowy faces, lending the picture an almost tangible sense of claustrophobia while tilting the camera horizontally left and right appropriately (the film is not recommended to anyone prone to seasickness). Meanwhile, Akira Ifukube’s music is so ominous it sounds like he’s warming up for the following year’s Godzilla.

 

Ko Mihashi and unidentified others

Japan’s later economic recession led to the novel becoming a surprise best-seller again in 2008, and a remake appeared the following year. 

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

The Wild Goose / 雁 / Gan (1966)

Obscure Japanese Film #158

Ayako Wakao

 

Tokyo, 1880. Otama (Ayako Wakao) is a young woman back living with her widowed father (Tomosaburo Ii) after having left her husband when she discovered he was actually a bigamist and their marriage was illicit. Unfortunately for her, this means that she is now considered ‘soiled goods’ and finding a suitable husband will be much more difficult. Her father, a street vendor, is getting old and it’s uncertain how much longer he’ll be able to push his cart around. 

Wakao with Toyoko Takechi

 

Their future looks bleak when a conniving old woman (Toyoko Takechi) comes with a proposal: a recently-widowed kimono-shop owner called Suezo (Eitaro Ozawa) wants Otama for his mistress and will provide her and her father with separate places of their own as well as an allowance each if they agree. (Supposedly, Suezo feels that he can’t invite Otama to live with him because his two young children wouldn’t accept her). Seeing no better opportunities on the horizon and worried about her father, Otama agrees. 

Eitaro Ozawa

 

Suezo treats Otama well and everything is fine at first, but she soon discovers that she’s been deceived once again – the old woman had lied to get Otama and her father to agree so that Suezo would cancel the debt she owed him. It turns out that, not only is Suezo a loan shark rather than a kimono merchant, but his wife (Hisano Yamaoka) is still alive and living with him. Despite her disillusionment, Otama continues as Suezo’s mistress as she’s simply not in a position to leave him. But then she begins to have romantic thoughts about Okada (Gaku Yamamoto), a student who walks past her house every day…

 

Gaku Yamamoto

Based on a short 1913 novel of the same name by Ogai Mori – himself a young medical student like Okada at the time this story is set – this remake of Shiro Toyoda’s better-known 1953 version starring Hideko Takamine (also produced by Daiei) credits the same screenwriter (Masashige Narusawa) and follows the original picture almost scene-for-scene. For this reason, it may well seem superfluous and is probably destined to live forever in the shadow of the earlier film. However, there are some differences, and it does manage to improve on the original in a couple of ways. Toyoda’s film was shot in academy ration – standard for the time – while by 1966, widescreen had long been the norm in Japan, and that’s the format used here. Whether this really adds much in itself is debatable considering that the cinematography in the first film was one of its notable features, especially its striking close-ups of Takamine. What is much better, though, is the music – it may be a little over-dramatic at times, but it’s less cloying than in the 1953 movie, and is also used more sparingly, which helps a great deal too. The other main improvement for me was the casting of Gaku Yamamoto as Okada – he may not be a star actor, but at least he doesn’t resemble a constipated undertaker as the miscast Hiroshi Akutagawa did in the original. 

 

In regard to the casting of Suezo, the choice of Eitaro Ozawa was almost a no-brainer. If you wanted someone to play an unpleasant middle-aged male in a Japanese movie in the 1950s or ‘60s, you probably either went with Eijiro Tono or Eitaro Ozawa – both founder members of the Haiyuza theatre company, incidentally – and Tono had already played the character in Toyoda’s version. Ozawa is good here, but he doesn’t manage to surpass Tono’s memorable portrayal of Suezo as a ridiculous and pathetic character. The real villain of the piece is not Suezo, but the scheming old matchmaker (played to the hilt here by Toyoko Takechi) who cares not a damn whose lives she wrecks if there’s something in it for her. 

Hisano Yamaoka

 

Reiko Fujiwara

The rest of the cast also give strong performances, especially Hisano Yamaoka as Suezo’s wife and Reiko Fujiwara as a woman who, reduced to streetwalking to support her children, serves as a sort of ghost-of-Christmas-future to Otama.  Ayako Wakao is well-cast in her role and gives her usual immaculate performance, but I felt that she didn’t quite nail Otama’s dichotomous combination of resigned pragmatism and girlish romanticism as well as Takamine. 

 

For the most part, Masashige Narusawa’s screenplay(s) could be taken as a model of how to adapt literature for the cinema, but there’s one part of the story that bothers me in both films – while Suezo is away for a day, Otama gives her maid the day off and sets about preparing an elaborate meal for Okada, intending to invite him into her home as he passes by so they can finally be alone together. This seems stupid considering that she has no idea if he will be available, or even accept if he is. And it just doesn't seem like something a woman in her situation would do because, if he did accept, somebody would be sure to find out about it and the two would become the subject of a scandal which would do neither of them any good. This absurdity is an invention of Narusawa’s as, in the book, she simply goes to the hairdresser and intends to start a conversation with him when she sees him coming rather than simply exchanging a silent greeting as they usually do. 

 

Although both films are largely very faithful to Mori, the other major diversion from the source material concerns the scene which gives the story its title. (It should be noted here that there are no plurals in Japanese, so the title can be translated as either The Wild Goose or The Wild Geese). In the novel, Okada is persuaded by a fellow student to throw a stone at some wild geese that have alighted in a nearby pond; to his consternation, he hits one and kills it. A comparison is made between the goose and Otama, the implication of which (I think) is that, just as Okada did not mean to kill the goose, neither did he mean to make Otama fall in love with him. In this interpretation, Otama could be said to be the ‘wild goose’ of the title.* However, for some reason this event is absent from the two films. In both, after learning of Okada’s imminent departure for Europe, Otama watches a goose fly away, in effect making him the wild goose. 

 

The director, Kazuo Ikehiro, is far better known for action films, including several entries in the Zatoichi series. He does an excellent job here, but it’s hard to give him a great deal of creative credit as he was more or less following a blueprint created by Shiro Toyoda and Masashige Narusawa. He was active in television as recently as 2022 and, at the time of writing, appears to be alive at the ripe old age of 95. 

  *This bird symbolism is reminiscent of Chekhov’s The Seagull, which Mori may well have been familiar with in German translation as he was also a translator of literature from German into Japanese. Of course, there is a further avian metaphor in the caged bird that Suezo gives to Otama as a gift and which is later threatened by a snake – the implication that Otama is in the same position is clear.

Thanks to A.K.

A good translation of the novel by Burton Watson is available as a free e-book here.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

Watch the 1953 version on my new YouTube channel here.