Obscure Japanese Film #16
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| Chikage Awashima |
Kon Ichikawa’s first film in colour stars three of Japan’s most popular actresses of the era as a trio of suffering geisha during the Meiji period (1868-1912). Okoh (Chikage Awashima) is being pestered by the obsessive Igarashi (Eijiro Yanagi), a former seafood seller from Hokkaido who is nicknamed ‘Red Bear’ as he constantly wears a disgusting bear skin. Having spent all his money on his hopeless love for Okoh, he finds a cheap source of food in the grubs he finds wriggling around in his bizarre garment.
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| Eijiro Yanagi as 'Red Bear' |
Okoh’s rival is Kiyoha (Fujiko Yamamoto), who has a less revolting suitor in the well-dressed and educated Katsuragi (Ryuji Shinagawa), although he states rather disconcertingly that he yearns to marry her because she reminds him of his missing sister. Unfortunately, Kiyoha has a ‘sponsor’ with whom she has an illicit child, so she’s in no position to marry.
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| Fujiko Yamamoto and Ryuji Shinagawa |
Despite being a humourless, self-pitying dullard with a sister fetish, Katsuragi attracts the attention of Okoh while he’s surreptitiously throwing some clams and sea snails off a bridge for incomprehensible reasons; naturally, she falls instantly in love with him. Meanwhile, Okoh’s naïve young friend and colleague Ochise (Ayako Wakao) is bullied in the street by a gang of boys before being rescued by a mysterious monk.
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| Ayako Wakao |
Ichikawa had just received a bashing from the press after his previous film, Punishment Room, had caused a Clockwork Orange-type controversy when it was blamed for inspiring a spate of crimes in which women had been drugged and raped. His choice of Bridge of Japan for his next project suggests that he had no wish to court such controversy and wanted to play it safe. The source is a 1914 novel by Kyoka Izumi,[1] who adapted it into a play the following year. [2] A 1929 silent version by Kenji Mizoguchi is now lost. In complete contrast to Punishment Room, Bridge of Japan is a sentimental melodrama which must have seemed somewhat old-fashioned even at the time, and it may well be the case that Ichikawa was more concerned with the visual aspects of his first colour film than the content. However, it does look beautiful and is, of course, very well-made and well-acted, with enough quirky elements to maintain interest.
In terms of acting, the female stars all acquit themselves admirably; although Ayako Wakao has the more minor of the three roles, her skill is evident in a scene in which she chats with her grandfather while cooking a meal and doing all sorts of complicated things with the props. Perhaps this unusual adeptness caught the attention of the Assistant Director – Yasuzo Masumura, who would soon go on to become an important director himself and cast Wakao in leading roles in no less than 20 of his films. The picture really belongs to Chikage Awashima, though. I’ve seen her in quite a few films, but often in supporting roles; she really rises to the occasion here, giving a memorable portrait of a fragile and emotionally-needy woman doomed to attract the wrong kind of man.
[1] Izumi was also responsible for the originals on which Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Downfall of Osen (1934), Masahiro Shinoda’s and Takashi Miike’s versions of Demon Pond (1979 and 2005) and Seijun Suzuki’s Kagero-za (1981) were based. Nihonbashi remains untranslated, but the University of Hawaii Press have published two collections of his stories in English.
[2] The play starred male actor Shotaro Hanayagi in the leading female part. Hanayagi made a handful of movies in later years, most notably playing the lead in Mizoguchi’s The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums.
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