A Portrait of Shunkin / 春琴抄 / Shunkinsho (1976)

Obscure Japanese Film #154

Momoe Yamaguchi

 

Doshomachi, Osaka, early Meiji era (c.1870s). Okoto (Momoe Yamaguchi), the youngest daughter of the wealthy owner of a wholesale medicine company, has lost her sight due to a childhood illness. She takes a liking to Sasuke (Tomokazu Miura), a young apprentice employed by her father, and soon he is the only person she will allow to escort her to her music lessons and help her with other tasks. Okoto becomes proficient at playing the instrument whose name she shares (the koto, the ‘O’ being a polite prefix), inspiring the devoted Sasuke to take up the more humble samisen, which he practises in secret. 

Tomokazu Miura

 

Initially, Sasuke gets into trouble for being more concerned with looking after Okoto and learning music than he is about learning the trade. However, Okoto has become extremely stubborn and difficult to deal with since losing her sight, so her parents decide to release Sasuke from his normal duties and allow him to be Okoto’s full-time companion – even paying for him to have music lessons from Okoto’s teacher – in the hope that this will soothe her anger and improve her character.  Meanwhile, Okoto’s beauty has led to her attracting the attention of wealthy playboy Minoya (Masahiko Tsugawa), who begins laying plans to seduce her… 

Yamaguchi with Masahiko Tsugawa

 

Later in the story, Okoto becomes a music teacher herself and takes the name of Shunkin, hence the title. Junichiro Tanizaki’s 1933 novella of the same name (available in a good English translation in the collection Seven Japanese Tales) was first filmed in 1935 by Yasujiro Shimazu in a version starring Kinuyo Tanaka. At the time, talking pictures were still relatively new in a Japan which was lagging a few years behind Hollywood in this department. As the story features both music and birdsong quite prominently, it must have seemed a good choice by which to exploit the possibilities of the new sound medium. Other versions followed: in 1954, Daisuke Ito directed Machiko Kyo as Okoto, while in 1961 Teinosuke Kinugasa made a third version starring Fujiko Yamamoto. Up to this point, each film had featured a big female star, with the role of Sasuke being played by a more minor male co-star. Kaneto Shindo broke this pattern in 1972 with his version, entitled Sanka (‘Hymn’), which featured the unknown Tokuko Watanabe in the role. Shindo also restored the novella’s framing device, which uses a first-person narrator visiting the graves of Okoto and Sasuke and meeting their former maid – now an old woman – whom he persuades to tell him their story. In Sanka, Shindo himself plays the narrator, while his mistress Nobuko Otowa takes the role of the maid, so it seems likely that Shindo followed the book in this regard mainly to provide a role for Otowa, who was too old to play Okoto. 

 

Given that Okoto continues to treat Sasuke like a servant even after they become lovers and is often cruel to him, Tanizaki’s story can equally be interpreted as a story of how Sasuke’s unwavering devotion represents the ideal of true love, or as a story about the perfect sado-masochistic relationship. Unlike the previous film versions, Shindo’s very much emphasizes the latter reading, even going so far as to have Sasuke reverently burying his mistress’s shit in the garden every day – a detail not present in the book. However, considering that Tanizaki’s title was not Okoto and Sasuke but A Portrait of Shunkin, it’s also possible that his main concern was to provide a character study of a woman whose sense of pride means that she absolutely refuses to behave like a victim and for that reason would rather be thought cruel than allow anyone to feel sorry for her. 

 

Made just four years later, director Katsumi Nishikawa’s 1976 version – the fifth – returns to the more conventional interpretation of the tale as a tragic love story, with a screenplay co-written by Nishikawa and Teinosuke Kinugasa, who had directed the 1961 version. A lot of care evidently went into the making of this one, and it’s very pretty to look at. Its raison d’etre was clearly to provide a vehicle for stars Momoe Yamaguchi and Tomokazu Miura. Yamaguchi – who first came to fame as a 13-year-old pop singer in 1972 – was such a phenomenon in Japan in the 1970s that she even has a chapter devoted to her in Mark Schilling’s Encyclopedia of Japanese Pop Culture. Her first major film part was in a version of another oft-filmed literary work, Yasunari Kawabata’s The Izu Dancer in 1974, the first of seven films for director Katsumi Nishikawa but also, more significantly, the first of 12 features in which she co-starred with Tomokazu Miura. The two soon became known as the ‘golden combination’, and were married in 1980, at which point Yamaguchi retired from show business to become a full-time wife and mother but continued to be hounded by both the media and her obsessive fans. 

 

Yamaguchi and Miura give decent performances in A Portrait of Shunkin, as do the rest of the cast, and it’s a well-made film. However, with Masaru Sato’s syrupy music ladled all over the soundtrack, I found its pretty sentimentality a bit cloying for my taste and prefer Shimazu’s early attempt or even Shindo’s more eccentric take on the story. 

DVD at Amazon Japan

English subtitles

 

The Twilight Years / 恍惚の人 / Kokotsu no hito (‘Senile Person’, 1973)

Obscure Japanese Film #153

Hideko Takamine and Takahiro Tamura

Akiko (Hideko Takamine) is a middle-aged woman with an office job who lives with her husband, Nobuyoshi (Takahiro Tamura), her teenaged son, Satoshi (Izumi Ichikawa), and her parents-in-law, Shigezo (Hisaya Morishige) and his wife Haruyo (Matsuo Ono). After Haruyo dies suddenly, Shigezo begins acting strangely and ceases to recognise Nobuyoshi, but continues to recognise Akiko. When Shigezo’s other child, Kyoko (Nobuko Otowa), who is also Nobuyoshi’s sister, visits, he fails to respond to her as well and it gradually becomes apparent that he’s suffering from senile dementia. His behaviour turns increasingly child-like, unpredictable and embarrassing and, being the only person he pays any kind of attention to, it is left to Akiko to look after him while also trying to hold down her job and be a wife and mother…

Hisaya Morishige

 

With a screenplay by Hideko Takamine’s husband, Zenzo Matsuyama, The Twilight Years was based on a 1972 novel of the same name by Sawako Ariyoshi* which had become an unlikely bestseller, shifting nearly two million copies in Japan.  It’s an admirably unsentimental film which pulls no punches and is not an easy watch. However, if you’re up for a film about senile dementia – and I certainly wouldn’t blame you if not – there’s much to appreciate here. The performances are excellent all round, and it’s a little surprising that neither Hideko Takamine nor Hisaya Morishige (unrecognisable as the star of The Naked Executive, made just 9 years previously) were nominated for any awards for their excellent work here. Morishige was 60 at the time but plays an 84-year-old most convincingly (though this is partly due to good make-up as well). Nobuko Otowa also makes a memorable character out of the pragmatic and rather slovenly Kyoko. 

Nobuko Otowa

 

As the book had been so successful, a film version probably seemed a safe investment, although it does look like it was made on a fairly low budget. It was the first film produced by the Geiensha Company, which was affiliated with Toho and was to produce a further nine films over the following decade. Veteran director Shiro Toyoda proves himself very adaptable here, shooting in academy ratio black and white and often using handheld camera and natural light. Considering Toyoda’s age at the time (67) as well as the subject matter, it’s impressive that this never feels like an ‘old man’s movie’ – the younger characters, such as Akiko’s son and the students who come to live in the spare room in exchange for helping to look after Shigezo – do actually seem like believable people rather than some old fuddy-duddy’s idea of teenagers. There’s also a fine, tasteful music score courtesy of Masaru Sato. 

Hisaya Morishige

 

The story was thrice remade for television, most recently in 2006 starring Rentaro Mikuni.

*Although out of print, an English translation of the novel was published and is not difficult to find in used copies for sale online. 

 Thanks to A.K.

The Kii River / 紀ノ川 / Kinokawa (1966)

Obscure Japanese Film #152

Yoko Tsukasa

 

Wakayama, 1899. Hana (Yoko Tsukasa) is a young woman from a highly-respected family who marries slightly below her class as her husband, Keisaku Shintani (Takahiro Tamura), is judged to be a young man of exceptional promise. However, their married life gets off to an awkward start when Hana joins her husband to live in his family home, which is also shared by his brother, Kosaku (Tetsuro Tanba). He takes an instant dislike to her, perhaps because he resents her for being from a family of higher status, or perhaps because he’s secretly in love with her himself. Meanwhile, Keisaku spearheads an ambitious engineering project to build flood defences along the Kii River which will protect the surrounding farmlands in the event of heavy rain.

Takahiro Tamura and Tetsuro Tanba

 

As the years pass, the influence of the West increases and the modernisation of Japan begins. People begin to wear Western clothes more and more, and even express their appreciation of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. We see the introduction of new consumer items such as ready-made cigarettes and bicycles, as well as new ideas, including democracy, communism and the emancipation of women. Kosaku eventually mellows towards his sister-in-law, who has a daughter, Fumio (Shima Iwashita), with whom she has little in common. Fumio is an outspoken rebel who leads a protest when one of her teachers is unfairly dismissed and regards her parents’ ideals as hopelessly out-of-date. But after Fumio has a daughter of her own and Hana enters old age as the family prepare to face the tribulations of World War Two, their animosity too will fade… 

Shima Iwashita

 

Keisaku’s obsession with building flood defences may be symbolic of a desire to control the forces of nature – something which the Shintani family learn on multiple occasions is the one thing their wealth and status will never enable them to do. There is also symbolism of a weirder variety in the motif of the white snake which lives in the attic and will drop dead onto the tatami below at the very moment the mistress of the house expires. 

Yoko Tsukasa

 

Running nearly three hours, this major Shochiku production was based on a 1959 novel of the same name by Sawako Ariyoshi (1931-84), whose work had also provided the source material for Keisuke Kinoshita’s even longer The Scent of Incense (1964), and would go on to form the basis of films such as Yasuzo Masumura’s The Wife of Seishu Hanaoka (1967), Tadashi Imai’s The Time of Reckoning (1968) and Shiro Toyoda’s The Twilight Years (1973). Ariyoshi was from Wakayama, where this story is set, and elements of it are said to have been based on her own family’s history. However, she had little in common with the character of Hana, being more similar to that of Fumio, although neither character should be taken as her alter ego. English translations of her work include this novel (as The River Ki), The Twilight Years, and The Wife of Seishu Hanaoka (as The Doctor’s Wife).  

Yoko Tsukasa

 

Director Noboru Nakamura had already made three films with Shima Iwashita at this point, including the excellent Koto (1963). Her performance is sometimes a little on the broad side here, whereas Yoko Tsukasa’s is quite understated. It was Tsukasa who won most of the major Japanese film awards for her performance in The Kii River, largely (I suspect) because she is convincing in regards to the ageing of her character from around 20 to 70. This is reminiscent of the transformation of Machiko Kyo in A Woman’s Life (1962), another female-focused period family saga of a type which seems to have been popular in Japan around this time. Personally, though, I felt that the strongest performance here comes from Tetsuro Tanba as the surly brother-in-law, although the reasons for his change of attitude towards Hana are not entirely clear. 

Tetsuro Tanba

The Kii River is beautifully shot by cinematographer Toichiro Narushima, whose credits are few but who also shot Koto, The Shape of Night (1964, again for Nakamura) and Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (1983). I’ve rarely seen a film with so few close-ups, and one thing I’ve always liked about Japanese cinema is that close-ups are generally used far more sparingly than in Hollywood. Another strength of the film is the score by Toru Takemitsu, which is also used sparingly, and features his brilliant modernist take on traditional Japanese music. 

 

Yoko Tsukasa

When made into films, such sagas spanning periods of many years are often limited in the amount of depth possible in regard to their characters and can rely too much on skipping from one melodramatic incident to the next. The film in question is also guilty of this to some extent – there seem to be a lot of sudden deaths occurring sporadically throughout – but the aesthetics of the film are of such a high standard that it remains a true cut above the rest. For these reasons, The Kii River may fall slightly short of masterpiece status, but certainly deserves recognition as a classic of the Japanese cinema.

Shima Iwashita

 

The Naked Executive / 裸の重役 / Hadaka no juyaku (1964)

Obscure Japanese Film #151

Hisaya Morishige

Hidaka (Hisaya Morishige) is a widowed office manager with a grown-up daughter, Keiko (Yuriko Hoshi). Now 50 years old, he has a reputation for strictness and is, in fact, a bit of a bastard who has no sympathy for those less fortunate such as Hamanaka (Seiji Miyaguchi), an employee nearing retirement age who begs to be kept on as he has a sick wife to support. 

Yuriko Hoshi

 

Seiji Miyaguchi

When Hidaka gets promoted to senior manager and is to be sent on a lengthy business trip abroad, he reluctantly agrees to help Hamanaka before he departs, but seems to have an ulterior motive. Hidaka has learned to his horror that Keiko has been seeing Okuda (Kiyoshi Kamoda), whom he regards as his most useless employee, and he wants Hamanaka’s help in ending their relationship. 

Kiyoshi Kamoda (not Kodama)

 

However, upon his return, Hidaka is disconcerted to find that Keiko has not only stubbornly refused to cut ties with Okuda, but encouraged him to marry her in spite of her father’s opposition. Hidaka realises he has no choice but to accept the situation, but as a result he finds himself humbled in the eyes of the big boss (Eijiro Tono) and loses his self-confidence. Beginning to suffer from insomnia and depression, he finds unexpected solace in the arms of streetwalker Sakiko (Reiko Dan)…

Eijiro Tono

 

This Toho production is the sort of Japanese film not shown very often in the West, probably because Westerners used to marrying whoever they want and not having to kow-tow to their bosses to the extent we see here may find it hard to relate to. An awful lot of arse-kissing goes on in Hidaka’s office, although it’s simply portrayed as perfectly normal and not satirised at all. In fact, I was surprised to see barely a hint of true criticism of the money- and career-obsessed world Hidaka inhabits. However, the very uber-Japaneseness of the film does lend it a certain cultural curiosity value. 

Hisaya Morishige

 

It’s unusual to see a character like Hidaka as the protagonist of a movie. The fact that he’s played by Hisaya Morishige led me to expect a comedy, but I think this is supposed to be a drama, toothless as it may be. Morishige is an actor little-known abroad, but who played leads for director Shiro Toyoda in Marital Relations (1955) and Shozo, A Cat and Two Women (1956). Hidaka is a character who undergoes a complete, almost Scrooge-like transformation by the end of the film. The problem is that none of it is at all convincing. We are in some weird kind of male-wish-fulfilment fantasy land here with the vivacious Reiko Dan as a highly unlikely streetwalker. It’s not Dan’s fault, though, it’s just a whitewashed portrait of someone reduced to this profession – the contrast with Miyuki Kuwano in the same year’s The Shape of Night could not be more pronounced. 

Reiko Dan

 

From an original screenplay by regular Naruse collaborator Toshiro Ide, The Naked Executive is competently but rather blandly directed by Yasuki Chiba, a veteran who was then under contract to Toho. He seems to have been well-regarded in his time, but the only other film I’ve managed to see by him so far is a rather wonderful comedy entitled Tokyo Sweetheart (1952) starring Toshiro Mifune and Setsuko Hara. 

Yuriko Hoshi