Season of the Sun / 太陽の季節 / Taiyo no kisetsu (1956)

 Obscure Japanese Film #12

 

Yoko Minamida and Hiroyuki Nagato

A bit of background may be useful here, so please bear with me before we get to the actual film…

Shintaro Ishihara, who died at the age of 89 two days before I write this, was a far-right politician who served as Governor of Tokyo from 1999-2012. He was also a writer who had won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize whilst still a student in 1956 for his short story Season of the Sun. This was a controversial choice and the prize jury themselves had been divided over the selection.

Having just read the English translation published by Tuttle in 1966 under the new title Season of Violence, I personally felt the story to be devoid of literary merit and found it more akin to a hastily-written first draft of a synopsis than a finished work of literature. If it has any value, it’s in the portrayal of a certain type of post-war Japanese teenager which became known as the ‘sun tribe’. These were the sons and daughters from well-to-do families who approached life with little concern for morality, living only to indulge their own hedonistic impulses. While Ishihara does not necessarily glamorise these characters, he certainly refuses to take a disapproving stance in regard to their casual cruelty and promiscuity. It was this that led Ishihara’s work to find favour with another right-wing writer with similar thematic concerns (the more talented Yukio Mishima), but also raised the hackles of the older generation, and there is some evidence to suggest that a certain amount of young Japanese at the time saw the ‘sun tribe’ life as something to aspire to. The controversy was, of course, great publicity for Ishihara, and the film rights to his story were immediately snapped up by Nikkatsu, who wasted no time in producing their adaptation.

With the exception of one notorious sexual scene which had to be omitted, the film is faithful to the story and even adds a little flesh to the bones. Tatsuya is a student who abandons basketball in favour of boxing. Despite his young age, he’s already a womaniser, but meets his match when he becomes involved with Eiko, a young woman who claims she’s unable to fall in love. They have an on-again, off-again relationship, which at one point sees Tatsuya (without Eiko’s knowledge) taking 5,000 yen from his brother, Michihisa, in exchange for leaving the two alone so that Michihisa can attempt to seduce her. The story is apparently based on gossip related to Ishihara by his brother, Yujiro. 

Tatsuya is played by Hiroyuki Nagato, best-known in the West as the lead in Shohei Imamura’s Pigs and Battleships, a film in which his co-star, Yoko Minamida, also appeared. Season of the Sun was their first picture together, but far from their last – they became a couple and went on to co-star in around 25 films. Fortunately, they were also more faithful than their on-screen counterparts; they married in 1961, remaining so until Minamida’s passing in 2009. 

Yujiro Ishihara (centre) in his film debut.

 

Season of the Sun is also notable for marking the film debut of Yujiro Ishihara, the brother of Shintaro, who appears in a small role as a fellow member of the boxing team, while Shintaro himself is briefly seen as a footballer. When Shintaro’s story Crazed Fruit was to be filmed the same year, he insisted that Yujiro be cast in the lead. The studio agreed and Yujiro Ishihara rapidly became one of Japan’s biggest movie stars as a result. Meanwhile, Shintaro Ishihara also played the lead in a couple of films, but was a good deal less successful – the response to his performance in A Dangerous Hero (Kiken na eiyu, 1957) was so poor that it effectively ended his film career. 

Shintaro Ishihara in his cameo as the footballer.

 

The director of Season, Takumi Furukawa, enjoys little in the way of reputation, although his later picture Cruel Gun Story (Kenju zankoku monogatari, 1964) popped up in Criterion’s Nikkatsu Noir box set some years ago. However, he makes good use of some still-life shots while staging all scenes effectively. Even if it’s not as strong a piece of work as Ko Nakahira’s Ishihara adaptation (the aforementioned Crazed Fruit), the film certainly impressed me more than the original story. Another plus is Masaru Sato’s restrained Spanish guitar score, which makes a nice change from the typical orchestrated movie music and may have begun the vogue for Spanish guitar in Japanese films of this period. Although the characters in the film seem shallow and unlikeable at first, the strong performances from the two leads lend them some much-needed depth and suggest an emotional vulnerability and confusion bubbling away beneath the surface.