A Boy Named Jiro / 次郎物語 / Jiro monogatari (‘The Tale of Jiro’, 1955)

Obscure Japanese Film #288

Koji Osawa

The Meiji era, c. early 1890s. Jiro (Koji Osawa*) is a boy of around 8 who has been lovingly raised by wet nurse turned foster mother Ohama (Yuko Mochizuki), but now it’s time to go back to his family home and live with his real mother, Otami (Ranko Hanai), and his father, Shunsuke (Ichiro Ryuzaki). Unhappy about this as well as the obsession with status and correct etiquette common among such well-off samurai families in decline, Jiro takes to moping, and, while his father is patient and kindly, Otami is less so. Jiro misses Ohama and takes a long time to accept Otami, and it’s only when she falls ill from tuberculosis and he begins looking after her that the two become close. After she dies, his father finds a new wife in Oyoshi (Michiyo Kogure), whom Jiro is now expected to call ‘mother’ – it’s no wonder the poor kid’s confused...

Yuko Mochizuki

This Shintoho production is quite similar in terms of story to the previously-reviewed Shirobamba (1962). However, it was based on the early parts of an autobiographical novel by Kojin Shimomura, part one of which was serialised in 1941 and quickly turned into a film by director Koji Shima. Further parts appeared over the years, culminating in a fifth part published in 1954. Shimomura had been planning to continue the story further, but died in April 1955. This film was released around six months later, so his death may well have been the catalyst which led writer-director Hiroshi Shimizu to remake it, although the fact that the childhood theme was close to Shimizu’s heart would likely have been another motivating factor.

Michiyo Kogure

Typically for Shimizu, it’s not a star-led picture despite the presence of Michiyo Kogure, who appears only in the last 20 minutes, and there’s also a great deal of location work. Though the outlook of the film is very conservative, it’s beautifully made and Shimizu mostly prevents the sentimentality from becoming cloying, but he’s not helped by the choral music, which has not dated well at all, and, while Ranko Hanai’s deathbed scene is too drawn out, the acting is nicely understated all round (perhaps a reflection of Shimizu's opinion that 'actors are just talking props'). What impresses the most, though, is Shimizu’s technique – the way the tracking shots are co-ordinated with the complex blocking of the actors, such as when the children play ‘it’ in the house, is quite remarkable.

Ranko Hanai

The assistant director was none other than Teruo Ishii, whose own directorial career would go in an entirely different direction.

The story was remade as a two-parter by Masao Nozaki in 1960 and again by Tokihisa Morikawa in 1987.

*This child actor has also been credited as Koji Ozawa, Yukihiko Osawa and Yukihiro Osawa in English – I’m unsure which reading is correct.

Thanks to A.K.

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Kizu-darake no okite / 傷だらけの掟 (1960)

Obscure Japanese Film #287

Hiroyuki Nagato

When Yasuo (Pigs and Battleships star Hiroyuki Nagato), an apparently naive student, allows himself to be dragged into a bar by Yuki (Sanae Nakahara), a young woman who accosts him on the street, he’s easily persuaded to treat her and her friends to cocktails. Predictably, when the bill comes it’s higher than expected and he’s unable to pay, but he’s allowed to go after leaving his watch with the yakuza who run the place; they’re members of the Hanayama gang. We then discover that Yasuo is actually a young con artist who sells fake Rolexes and that his older brother, Goro (Ryoji Hayama), is a member of a rival yakuza gang, the Noda-gumi.

Ryoji Hayama

When the Hanayama gang catch up with Yasuo and take him prisoner, Goro intercedes and gets him released. Yasuo then abducts Yuki, intending to rape her in revenge, but when the hotel is raided by the cops before he can do so, they escape together and hide out in the carriage of a stationary goods train, where she gives herself to him willingly after he slaps her a couple of times. Then they fall in love, but, like Romeo and Juliet, it’s not long before their rival gangs are at war. Can the self-sacrificing Goro help the young couple escape this life of crime before it’s too late?

Nagato with Sanae Nakahara

Set in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro district, this Nikkatsu production was based on a story by ‘Masaharu Kawase’, a pseudonym of Masaharu Segawa, a young director who was then under contract to Toei but had previously been an assistant to Yutaka Abe, who directed it. Segawa became best-known for comedies, but later made Four Sisters, while Abe was a 64-year-old veteran famous for having worked in Hollywood in the 1920s and brought some of its style back to Japan before building a highly successful post-war career largely on literary adaptations. By this point, he was regarded as old-fashioned – perhaps not unfairly as he was responsible for films like Confession – so his career was in decline and he had to take whatever directing work he could. This yakuza genre piece is by no means typical of his work, then, and was presumably a studio assignment intended to cash in on the increasing popularity of this type of material at the time. However, it speaks to Abe’s adaptability that he clearly had no trouble with the new emphasis on sex and violence and there’s no sense that this is the work of an old fuddy-duddy. It didn’t help him, though – after three more films for Nikkatsu (the latter two of which were very minor B-movies), he reportedly quit when they cut his pay and it seems that he received no further offers of work from any studio.

Nobuo Kaneko

The screenplay was co-written by prolific Nikkatsu contract hack Iwao (aka Gan) Yamazaki together with Takashi Nomura, who went on to become a director and made A Colt is My Passport (1967). It’s stylishly shot by cinematographer Yusuichiro Yamazaki, who also did Shunkin monogatari (1954) and the score by Riichiro Manabe is classier than expected for this type of fare. Still, the formulaic and unoriginal story together with the regrettable inclusion of the rape-leads-to-love cliché prevent this from being anything special even if it is well made and very watchable.

Also notable in the cast are Yoko Minamida as a widowed florist who provides the love interest for Goro, plus Nobuo Kaneko and Hideaki Nitani as the rival gang leaders.

A note on the title:

The title doesn’t translate easily into English, but the film is sometimes listed as The Law’s Bloody Wounds, which seems a reasonable attempt, although I’m not sure that was ever an official release title. At least it’s better than Tarnished Rule, which I’ve also seen it called. On some Japanese sites, the English title is listed as The Ogre in Mt. Oe, but that’s clearly not right!

Watched with dodgy subtitles.

Trailer on YouTube

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Koroshita no wa dareda / 殺したのは誰だ (‘Who is the Real Killer?’, 1957)

Obscure Japanese Film #286

Ichiro Sugai

Misako Watanabe

Eikichi (Ichiro Sugai) is a widowed 55-year-old car salesman with two adult children: Katsuko (Misako Watanabe), a bar hostess who sometimes sleeps with her customers, and Jiro (Asahi Kobayashi), a student who seems to have dropped out, works part-time at a car wash and plays billiards for high stakes when he has the cash. Eikichi has shacked up with Yurie (Toshiko Yamane), who has a cheap eatery ironically named the ‘Peaceful Oasis Diner’. However, nobody seems to actually eat there, only to drink, and it’s patronised mainly by a former salesman turned chronic alcoholic (Jun Hamamura) and assorted flies.

Sugai, Toshiko Yamane and Ko Nishimura

Eikichi is having a run of bad luck at work, partly because he keeps getting undercut by ruthless rival salesman Nakagawa (Ko Nishimura), who has also taken a liking to Yurie. When Nakagawa tempts Eikichi and his friend Frank (Taiji Tonoyama) into a dangerous criminal scheme for some supposedly easy money, more than one person ends up dead…

Yamane, Sugai and Taiji Tonoyama

The title of this Nikkatsu production might lead you to expect a whodunit but, written as an original screenplay by leftist Kaneto Shindo, the answer to the titular question is presumably supposed to be ‘society’. Unusually, Shindo places the focus largely on middle-aged failure Eikichi rather than his troubled offspring. The 50-year-old Ichiro Sugai suits this part very well (it was likely tailor-made) and gives a fine performance in what was a rare leading role for him. Apparently, he had first come to prominence playing Inspector Javert in a now lost film version of Les Miserables directed by Tomu Uchida in 1931. He went on to become a favourite not only of Shindo, but also of Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Kozaburo Yoshimura and Kon Ichikawa and appeared in over 300 films, even directing two himself, before his passing in 1973.

Sugai with Toshiko Yamane

The film was directed by Ko Nakahira*, best-known for Crazed Fruit (1956). With his customary flair and economy, he paints a vivid picture of a cutthroat post-war world in which people are desperate enough to do almost anything to make a few yen and American culture has been unquestioningly embraced, along with all the emphasis on materialism and capitalism that goes with it. It’s significant that the film opens with a driver’s POV shot of a dashboard bearing the legend ‘Cadillac’; yet when we see the driver’s hand turn on the radio, it’s not American rock and roll or jazz we hear, it’s a melancholy theme provided by the film’s composer, Akira Ifukube, of Godzilla fame. This is the first indication that this will be a film that does not play out along familiar lines.

Jun Hamamura with fly

There’s some effective if not especially subtle symbolism involving spiders and flies, while performances are solid all round, although Jun Hamamura is given a little too much license to scene-steal and be weird. And that’s not the only element which doesn’t always work – Sugai’s drunk scene is over the top and a billiards scene, though cleverly shot and edited, goes on too long – but there are some great, unexpected moments along the way that make this one well worth watching, and it’s stylishly shot by Shinsaku Himeda, who would later win awards for his work with Shohei Imamura.

*IMDb lists Shindo as co-director, but Japanese sites do not.

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Misako Watanabe

Violence / 暴力 / Boryoku (1952)

Obscure Japanese Film #285

Sumiko Hidaka

Post-war Osaka. After a prostitute commits suicide by throwing herself in front of a train, a magazine editor gives a female writer (former silent star Shizue Natsukawa) a guided tour of Shinsekai, a sleazy neighbourhood where food is cheap and criminals gather. Following this documentary-style opening, the narrative gradually focuses in on Takako (Sumiko Hidaka), a young woman who lures men to an ‘inn’ run by her stepfather, Yamada (Ichiro Sugai), where they are summarily fleeced and beaten up if they complain.

Ichiro Sugai and Chieko Naniwa

Taiji Tonoyama

Also living there are Takako’s mother (Chieko Naniwa) and blind 18-year-old sister Shizuko (Setsuko Wakayama), while their real father (Taiji Tonoyama) – having finally made it back to Japan after being a PoW only to find himself usurped by Yamada – is now a vagrant who hangs around the neighbourhood. Takako continually has to fend off the attentions of strip club owner Tomisaka (Eitaro Shindo, who also played the title role in Sansho the Bailiff) and hates her life in this cesspit, so when car thief Takami (Isao Kimura) seems to offer a way out, she’s only too ready to pin her hopes on him...

Isao Kimura

This Toei production was based on an original screenplay by Kaneto Shindo and directed by his regular associate Kozaburo Yoshimura. Prior to watching, I was under the impression that it starred Machiko Kyo because the woman on the poster / DVD cover looks like her (could this have been deliberate?), but it’s actually the lesser-known Sumiko Hidaka, who was not a star. (Perhaps Shindo and Yoshimura had Kyo in mind but couldn’t get her as she was under contract to Daiei.) Anyway, Hidaka gives a strong performance in a role that requires her at various times to be cynical and hard-bitten, tender and compassionate, falling-down drunk, and beside herself with anger, all of which she does well. This may well have been her finest hour in the movies and on this evidence she deserved more success.

Sumiko Hidaka

While there may be some influence from the Italian neorealist films of the time in the film’s depiction of post-war poverty, here the main actors are all professionals and there’s a little too much melodrama in the plot for it to be considered very realistic as realism goes. On the other hand, although most – if not all – of the exteriors were shot on location (I assume the interiors were done at Toei's Kyoto studios), the location work certainly delivers a vivid portrait of the area at the time. Made shortly after the American occupation ended, this was probably pretty strong stuff for 1952. One weird touch worth mentioning is a couple of shots in negative which are supposed to show us how the blind Shizuko views the world, but I’m not sure they really added anything other than a certain jarring effect.

Setsuko Wakayama

Eitaro Shindo

Thanks to A.K.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

English subtitles by Coralsundy

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Shunkin monogatari / 春琴物語 / (‘The Story of Shunkin’. 1954)

Obscure Japanese Film #284

Machiko Kyo

O-Koto (Machiko Kyo) is a young blind woman whose parents indulge her every whim out of pity. She takes a liking to Sasuke (Yoshiaki Hanayagi), a young apprentice supposed to be learning her family’s pharmaceutical trade, and it’s not long before he’s the only one she will allow to help her. Her parents decide to make Sasuke her full-time companion and he begins learning the shamisen so that he’ll be able to accompany her on her namesake instrument, the koto, at which she is proficient enough that her music teacher, Harumatsu (Sugisaku Aoyama), honours her by awarding her the name ‘Shunkin’. Love grows between O-Koto and Sasuke, but his low status as a servant makes him an awkward prospect for a potential husband and a wealthy would-be playboy (Eiji Funakoshi) sets out to seduce her…

Yoshiaki Hanayagi

This Daiei production was the second film version of Junichiro Tanizaki’s novella A Portrait of Shunkin following Yasujiro Shimizu’s 1935 version starring Kinuyo Tanaka. Yet to come were Teinosuke Kinugasa’s 1961 version starring Fujiko Yamamoto, Kaneto Shindo’s eccentric 1972 take and Katsumi Nishikawa’s more commercial 1976 version. Having seen these five versions, this one gets my vote as the best, mainly because it’s so well-directed by Daisuke Ito, a filmmaker both bold and clever in the way he made use of a camera. Here, we get some complex tracking and crane shots as well as a brief, effectively jarring bit of handheld camera and even a couple of dramatic shots of faces coming so close to the lens that they block out the light. He also frequently fills the screen with extras performing bits of background business – set around the time of the Meiji Restoration when all manner of Western items began to make their appearance in Japan, at one point he even has a man passing by on a penny farthing followed by three children on stilts. Ito also provides some memorable moments of visual poetry, such as when O-Koto dances alone in the snow, believing herself unobserved.

The screenplay was written by Fuji Yahiro, whose impressive track record includes classics like Ito’s Five Men of Edo (1951), Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff (1954) and Uchida’s A Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji (1955). It’s an excellent adaptation which adds another main character absent from the other versions – O-Ei, a fellow disciple of Harumatsu who is jealous of both O-Koto’s talent and her status as the teacher’s favourite. This character is played by Haruko Sugimura, who certainly helps to liven things up a bit at times, while Chieko Higashiyama’s narration preserves the literary flavour.

Haruko Sugimura

Another plus is the strong score by Godzilla composer Akira Ifukube and the koto playing is more impressive and sophisticated in this version. Although Machiko Kyo was dubbed by one of Japan’s top players (Kiyoko Miyagi*), Kyo’s fingering is so convincing that it seems likely she must have been able to play it pretty well herself. Her co-star, Yoshiaki Hanayagi, was a stage actor who made few films, but had just played the juvenile lead in Sansho the Bailiff, while Eiji Funakoshi plays what can only be called a typical Eiji Funakoshi part.

Eiji Funakoshi

Shunkin monogatari won the award for best film at the Southeast Asian Film Festival of 1955 (later renamed the Asia-Pacific Film Festival).

*You can listen to an album by Kiyoko Miyagi (aka Kiyoko Makise) on YouTube here.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

English subtitles by Coralsundy

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Fukkatsu / 復活 (‘Resurrection’, 1950)

Obscure Japanese Film #283

Keiju Kobayashi

Machiko Kyo

The 12^th year of the Showa era (1937). Kunihiko (Keiju Kobayashi) is a young soldier from an aristocratic family of Christians. Having just completed his training, he returns home to Shirahama in Wakayama Prefecture to say goodbye to his family before being sent to serve in China. While there, he seduces the young maid, Yukiko (Machiko Kyo), not realising that he’s made her pregnant in the process. Despite pressure from the family, Yukiko refuses to name the father and is dismissed, while Kunihiko forgets about her.

Four years later, Kunihiko returns and, asked to be a witness for Ushio (Osamu Takizawa), a socialist and fellow Christian accused of spreading anti-war propaganda, he is shocked to run into Yukiko at the court, where he learns she has been accused of murder after the madam at the brothel she had been working at tricked her into giving poison to a client in order to rob him. Seeing Yukiko’s downfall as the result of his own sinful lapse, the guilt-stricken Kunihiko resolves to do everything in his power to help her, even if it means breaking ties with his family…

This is certainly a more faithful adaptation of Tolstoy’s Resurrection than Mizoguchi’s very loose version of 1937 (known in English as The Straits of Love and Hate), and retains the books deeply Christian perspective, which no doubt meant that it was easily approved by the occupying American authorities at the time. In the novel, Prince Nekhlyudov is serving on a jury when he realises that one of the defendants is the maid he had seduced and abandoned years before; the Mizoguchi film dispensed with the Christian theme and had the inspired idea of having the male protagonist a theatre audience member who sees the former maid – now a comedienne – mocking their affair in a comedy sketch.

Adapted by Yoshikata Yoda, this Daiei production is well-made by director Akira Nobuchi, but it’s also probably the most heavily Christian-influenced Japanese film I’ve seen and the preachiness does become tiresome after a while. Kobayashi and Kyo do good work in the leads, although Kyo was still a relative newcomer at this point and her inexperience occasionally shows. Nevertheless, she puts across Yukiko’s conflicting emotions very effectively at times, such as in the scene where Kunihiko first visits her in prison. Interestingly, Osamu Takizawa plays a character much like himself in some respects – he had been arrested during the war for a similar offence and spent 16 months in prison.

Osamu Takizawa

The director, Akira Nobuchi (1896-1968), came from the theatre and made around 30 films from 1935-55, but this is the only one I’ve seen so far.

Thanks to A.K.

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Okoto to Sasuke / お琴と佐助 (‘O-Koto and Sasuke’, 1961)

Obscure Japanese Film #282

Kojiro Hongo and Fujiko Yamamoto

O-Koto (Fujiko Yamamoto) is a young blind woman whose parents indulge her every whim out of pity. She takes a liking to Sasuke (Kojiro Hongo), a young apprentice who is supposed to be learning her family’s pharmaceutical trade, and it’s not long before he’s the only one she will allow to help her. Her parents decide to make Sasuke her full-time companion and he begins learning the shamisen so that he’ll be able to accompany her on her namesake instrument, the koto, at which she is proficient. Love grows between the two, but Sasuke’s low status as a servant makes him an awkward prospect for a potential husband and a wealthy would-be playboy (Keizo Kawasaki) sets out to seduce her…

Keizo Kawasaki

This Daiei production was the third film version of Junichiro Tanizaki’s novella A Portrait of Shunkin following Yasujiro Shimizu’s 1935 version starring Kinuyo Tanaka and Daisuke Ito’s 1954 version with Machiko Kyo. Yet to come were Kaneto Shindo’s eccentric 1972 take and Katsumi Nishikawa’s more commercial 1976 version. In my review of the latter, I also discuss the 1935 and 1972 versions.

Unlike the Audrey Hepburn approach, the part of O-Koto has traditionally been played with eyes fully closed which might make it easier for the actor on the one hand but obviously hampers their expressiveness on the other. Nevertheless, Fujiko Yamamoto puts across the character’s spoilt, proud and stubborn nature very well here but it hardly makes her very likeable, so it’s hard to have much sympathy for O-Koto until she eventually becomes the victim of a horrendous crime. Yamamoto repeated the role in a 1965 TV adaptation. Her co-star, Kojiro Hongo, was – appropriately for the role – of considerably lower status and makes little impression at first, though his performance does improve as the film goes on.

Following the international success of his early colour picture Gate of Hell in 1953, director Teinosuke Kinugasa, who also wrote the screenplay for this and co-wrote the 1976 version, had been entrusted by Daiei with several big-budget colour productions, but the dark green hues which dominate Okoto to Sasuke are considerably less memorable than Gate of Hell’s striking visual design. In fact, there’s little to be said about Kinugasa’s direction here other than it is certainly careful and, of course, competent, so I’d only really recommend this film if you’re a particular fan of Fujiko Yamamoto or, perhaps, the story itself, which in this case is treated as a tragic, sentimental love story with its more perverse elements not entirely absent, but certainly not emphasized as they were by Kaneto Shindo.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

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