Obscure Japanese Film #13
Cover of the Japanese DVD release (no English subtitles)
This crime mystery from Nikkatsu Studios concerns Ichiro Honda (Noboru Nakaya), a businessman who takes advantage of the travelling necessitated by his job to repeatedly cheat on his wife, Taneko (Masako Togawa), with a series of women he picks up for one night stands. He regards these women as his ‘prey’ and records the details of each conquest in his ‘hunter’s diary’, but when two of these women are murdered, he begins to wonder whether this could really be a coincidence or if somebody’s out to frame him.
Noboru Nakaya as Honda finds his next 'prey'
The film begins in documentary style with a lecture on how different blood types can be used to identify criminals, but it ends – surprisingly – with a song, and I found that this unexpected contrast gave the ending an emotional power it would otherwise have lacked. The director, Ko Nakahira, is only familiar in the West for his debut, Crazed Fruit, which saw him labelled as a member of the ‘new wave’ and helped to create the ‘sun tribe’ genre discussed in my last review (for Season of the Sun). He had previously worked as an assistant for Akira Kurosawa on Scandal (1949) and The Idiot (1951); the two filmmakers reportedly enjoyed a good relationship which continued for many years. Aside from Crazed Fruit, I have seen one other Nakahira film, the terrific Mikkai aka The Assignation / Secret Rendezvous (1959), a drama of infidelity with a truly shocking denouement. In The Hunter’s Diary, he uses a combination of real locations and studio work to have fun with a clever but implausible mystery. In 1967, Nakahira began travelling to Hong Kong to make films for the Shaw Brothers, including a remake of The Hunter’s Diary under the title Lie ren (aka Diary of a Ladykiller). He was dismissed from Nikkatsu in 1968 for drinking on the job while directing The Spiders’ Great Advance, a vehicle for Japanese Beatles clones The Spiders. Forced to go independent, his output dwindled and he managed to complete only six films in the 1970s before his premature death from cancer in 1978.
Masako Togawa
Honda appears to have been a rare starring role for actor Noboru Nakaya, although he played a couple of other leads for Nakahira around this time. Nakaya was married to Kyoko Kishida (star of The Woman in the Dunes), but in the film his character’s wife – an artist who paints bizarre pictures in the style of Dali – is played by Masako Togawa in her only major film role. Togawa was the author of the novel upon which the film was based and was also a well-known singer. She gives a strong performance in the film while Nakaya, though an able enough actor, is perhaps a little nondescript. Also notable among the cast are Shohei Imamura favourite Kazuo Kitamura as a genial lawyer and Yukiyo Toake, who is wonderfully expressive as his naïve assistant.
Kazuo Kitamura and Yukiyo Toake
There is much to enjoy here, so let’s hope that the film gains a wider audience and more of Ko Nakahira’s work surfaces outside Japan.
Seen in a 35mm print with English subtitles at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, on 6 February 2022.
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