Friday, 29 August 2025

Ten no yugao / 天の夕顔 (‘A Moonflower in Heaven,’ 1948)

 

Mieko Takamine

Toyohiko Fujikawa


 


 

garnered high praise in Western Europe as a masterpiece of romantic literature, comparable to Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther. After the war, it was translated into six languages, including English, French, German, and Chinese, and was highly praised by Albert Camus.’ We also learn that Nakagawa got the story upon which he based his book from a masseur named Kozaburo Fujiki, who greatly resented the fact that Nakagawa refused to give him any credit. A feud between the two men lasted for decades, culminating in the self-publication of a 1976 book by Fujiki with the splendid title The Great Achievement of Shattering the Masterpiece Ten no yugao - A Guide for Reading Novels Carefully and with Taste.

 


 

This literary feud is arguably more entertaining than the film itself, which is an extremely maudlin piece of work, an aspect emphasized by the keening violin featured excessively  throughout composer Fumio Hayasaka’s score. Director Yutaka Abe had already made around 60 films at this point, and went on to make The Makioka Sisters (1950) and Confession (1956). He certainly does a competent job, but the material is so old-fashioned and sentimental that it has dated very badly indeed and is at times even laughable today - the animated firework near the end being an especially corny touch. 

 


 

Leading lady Mieko Takamine will be familiar to many readers, but who, you may well wonder, was her co-star, @Shimo_x2 on x.com, he ‘was not originally an actor but a young president of a construction company. It seems he also invested in this film, making his appearance in the movie something of a hobby.’ In any case, he gives a slightly stolid but perfectly acceptable performance and certainly looks the part of a leading man. 

 


 


Tuesday, 26 August 2025

Izu no odoriko / 伊豆の踊子 (‘The Dancing Girl of Izu’, 1954)

 

Hibari Misora

 

This Shochiku production was the second film version of a famous short story by future Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972). First published in 1926, it's a semi-autobiographical piece based on a solitary walking trip he took as a student around the Izu Peninsula in the year 1918. Attracted to a young dancer who is part of a small group of travelling entertainers, the narrator (named Mizuhara in the film) contrives to fall in with them. The others are Eikichi, a man of 23 who is the leader; his 18-year-old wife Chiyoko; her mother; and Chiyoko’s 16-year-old sister, Yuriko.  The dancer, named Kaoru, is Chiyoko’s youngest sister. Although disconcerted to find that she is only 13 (he had judged her to be 15-16*), he finds himself deeply moved at the group’s friendliness towards him, and this greatly helps to mitigate his low self-esteem. 

 

Akira Ishihama

 

While the story is often characterised as one of unrequited youthful love, there’s more to it than that. Like Kawabata, the narrator/Mizuhara is an orphan with no close family left alive, and Kawabata is said to have been concerned as a young man that this fact may in some way warp his personality. Despite the extremely low status of travelling entertainers in Japanese society at the time, the family in the story are not unhappy and enjoy a warm relationship with one another. It’s clear that the narrator is pathetically grateful to be accepted – almost adopted – by these outcasts, and this aspect of the work is equally as important as the theme of young love. 

 


 

Even in its unabridged form, Kawabata’s story is not really long enough to sustain a feature-length film, so screenwriter Akira Fushimi expanded it, mainly by giving the family of entertainers a more detailed backstory, introducing a rival for Kaoru’s love and adding a minor sub-plot about a young boy pursuing Mizuhara from village to village to return some money he had dropped. Incidentally, it was Fushimi who had also written the screenplay for the first adaptation, a silent film made by Heinosuke Gosho in 1933. However, for this one he wrote a fresh script with a number of differences, the most notable being that the character of Eikichi is far more sympathetic in the second version, in which he is played by Akihiko Katayama. This is more faithful to Kawabata. 

 

Akihiko Katayama

 

The silent version had starred a 22-year-old Kinuyo Tanaka alongside the 26-year-old Den Ohinata, whereas this one stars 16-year-old Hibari Misora as Kaoru and 19-year-old Akira Ishihama as Mizuhara. Misora was best-known for her singing ability, but gets surprisingly few opportunities to sing here, while Ishihama will be familiar to many as the young samurai forced to commit seppuku with a bamboo sword in Harakiri (1962). Although these two actors are the right age for their characters, I felt that their acting abilities were a little too limited to really put across their feelings as described by Kawabata, but director Yoshitaro Nomura is also partly to blame for this. Compare the final scene on the boat with what Kawabata had written and you’ll probably see what I mean. Here’s what Kawabata wrote (as translated by J. Martin Holman):

I lay down, using my bag as a pillow. My head felt empty, and I had no sense of time. My tears spilled onto my bag. My cheeks were so cold I turned my bag over. There was a boy lying next to me. He was the son of a factory owner in Kawazu and was on his way to Tokyo to prepare to enter school. The sight of me in my First Upper School cap seemed to elicit his goodwill.

After we talked for a while, he asked, "Have you had a death in your family?"

"No, I just left someone."

I spoke meekly: I did not mind that he had seen me crying. I was not thinking about anything. I simply felt as though I were sleeping quietly, soothed and contented.

I was not aware that darkness had settled on the ocean, but now lights glimmered on the shores of Ajiro and Atami. My skin was chilled and my stomach empty. The boy took out some sushi wrapped in bamboo leaves. I ate his food, forgetting it belonged to someone else. Then I nestled inside his school coat. I felt a lovely hollow sensation, as if I could accept any sort of kindness and it would be only right. […]

The lamp in the cabin went out. The smell of the tide and the fresh fish loaded in the hold grew stronger. In the darkness, warmed by the boy beside me, I let my tears flow unrestrained. My head had become clear water, dripping away drop by drop. It was a sweet, pleasant feeling, as though nothing would remain.

 

But in the film, Ishihama can barely manage a single tear and Nomura decides to end it with a shot of Misora staring blankly at the water, followed by a shot of a single geta (wooden sandal) floating off. Personally, I felt that Nomura had rather missed the point of the ending and also not shot what he did as effectively as he could have – a shame, as other parts of the film are a good deal more impressive. 

 


After the success of his 1958 film Stakeout, Yoshitaro Nomura became best-known for his intelligent and twisty crime dramas, often based on Seicho Matsumoto stories, and films from this earlier stage in his career are not easy to see. The nature of the story meant that the bulk of it had to be shot on location, and this is something that Nomura seemed to relish. Despite his odd lack of focus (for the most part) on the emotions of the two main characters and the performances of the two leads, he was a talented filmmaker and this is most obvious in a sequence which occurs around 21 minutes in, contains no dialogue and lasts for just under three minutes. It simply features Mizuhara walking by himself during a heavy rain shower and pausing to take shelter in a doorway, through which he watches a baby crying alone until a boy (presumably the baby’s older brother) runs up and stares at him, at which point he hurries on. There’s a sense that even the crying baby is better off than Mizuhara because at least it has a big brother to look after it. This beautiful sequence does nothing to advance the plot but expresses Mizuhara’s loneliness perfectly without even requiring Ishihama to do much in the way of acting. Most of the film and this scene in particular are also helped by Chuji Kinoshita’s restrained score – one of his better ones, with the exception of his use of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ at the end, which can’t help but feel corny. Anyway, despite my quibbles, this film is well worth seeking out and quite likely the best film version of the story to date. 

 


 

*Other sources may give different ages depending on which age system is used, and the two  translations of the story into English do not agree. The first, by Edward Seidensticker, appeared in 1954, was slightly abridged, and described Kaoru as being dressed and made-up to appear 15 or 16, but turning out to be only 13. The second translation, by J. Martin Holman, appeared in 1997, was unabridged, and described Kaoru as looking 17 or 18 but actually being 14. The discrepancy is due to the fact that Seidensticker used the standard system of counting age in the West, whereas Holman used the traditional Japanese system, which considered a person to be one year old at birth and for their age to increase by a year not on their birthday, but at the turning of the New Year. This system is no longer used in Japan.

Thanks to A.K.


Friday, 22 August 2025

Arijigoku sakusen / 蟻地獄作戦 / (‘Operation Antlion’, 1964)

 

Tatsuya Nakadai


 

L-R: Natsuki, Hirata, Sato, TN, Sakai, 

 

Sato, Kumi Mizuno, Natsuki

 


 


 

 

The antlions are a group of about 2,000 species of insect in th neuropteran family Myrmeleontidae. They are known for the predatory habits of their larvae, which mostly dig pits to trap passing ants or other prey.

In Japan, both the insect and its pit-traps are popularly known as Arijigoku (蟻地獄; lit. "Ant Hell"). This term has since become a stock colloquialism for any "inescapable" trap, whether literal or metaphorical (e.g. an unpleasant social obligation). 

 

File:Antlion1 by Jonathan Numer.jpg
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Antlion1_by_Jonathan_Numer.jpg