Natsuko’s Adventure in Hokkaido / 夏子の冒険/ Natsuko no boken (1952)

Obscure Japanese Film #103

Rieko Sumi

 

 

Natsuko (Rieko Sumi) is a spoiled and stubborn young woman bored by the various men chasing her and the thought of becoming a housewife or socialite. Instead, she dreams of a man who pursues his passion no matter what obstacles he must face. Unable to find such a person, she decides to become a nun, but on her way to enter a convent in Hokkaido she takes the ferry and meets Tsuyoshi (Masao Wakahara). He’s a hunter returning to the island to shoot the bear which, according to the subtitles, ‘dismembered and killed’ his fiancée, Akiko (Keiko Awaji).

Masao Wakahara

 

Convinced that she has finally found the man of her dreams, Natsuko abandons the idea of becoming a nun and decides to follow Tsuyoshi and help him to kill the bear whether he likes it or not. When they reach Sapporo, Tsuyoshi tries to get rid of Natsuko by dumping her on his journalist friend, Noguchi (Teiji Takahashi), who promptly falls in love with her. However, she proves impossible to shake off and follows Tsuyoshi into the countryside to the house of Akiko’s father, Juzo (Takeshi Sakamoto), who accepts her as a guest. 

Yoko Katsuragi and Takeshi Sakamoto

 

Despite her efforts to assist Tsuyoshi in his quest, Natsuko proves more of a hindrance than a help, while Akiko’s younger sister, the 17-year-old Fujiko (Yoko Katsuragi), seems to have become interested in Tsuyoshi herself and to regard Natsuko as a rival. Accustomed to rural life, Fujiko skips along the mountain trails with ease while Natsuko can barely keep up. Meanwhile, Natsuko’s grandmother, mother and auntie (Chieko Higashiyama, Teruko Kishi and Sachiko Murase) want her back home and are hot on her trail…

This Shochiku comedy was the second Japanese feature film in full colour. As the process was so new to Japan, some of the crew had to travel to Hollywood to get advice from the experts there. Like many early colour films, subtlety was not the idea and the costumes and backgrounds were designed to be as colourful as possible in order to dazzle the cinemagoers of the day. Unfortunately, some brief parts of the film are missing, although the soundtrack is complete apart from one sequence; however, the vast majority of the film survives in excellent condition.

Natsuko’s Adventure in Hokkaido is a moderately amusing piece of fluff, so it’s something of a shock to see that it was based on a novel by Yukio Mishima, of all people. The book has not so far been translated into English, but it appears that the film is actually quite faithful and the novel is a similarly lightweight piece. In the Asahi Weekly newspaper (29 July 1951), Mishima explained his motivation for writing it. Here is a rough translation:

Although the story is set in Hokkaido, the main characters are young men and women from the city. However, in the city, young people cannot find anything worthy of their energy. They leave Tokyo with different dreams. I am dissatisfied with the fact that the current era does not provide the means of fulfilling youthful dreams, so I wanted my characters to pursue their dreams among the lakes and forests of Hokkaido, where present-day Japan feels more like a foreign country. 

Fans of the writer Haruki Murakami may also be interested to know that Mishima’s book is said to have influenced Murakami’s novel A Wild Sheep Chase.

 

Rieko Sumi

 

Another surprising aspect of the film is that the star of this expensive production is not terribly well-known. Rieko Sumi (1928-2005) was from Hiroshima, where she suffered exposure to the atomic bomb, though thankfully she made a full recovery and became the first Miss Hiroshima in 1948, leading to her being signed as a new face by Toho. Most of her leading roles were in the early ‘50s, after which she was mainly relegated to supporting roles. I felt that she failed to give much depth to her portrayal of Natsuko, who comes across as a little too unsympathetic, and perhaps that indicates why her career as a leading woman ended early. However, she contributed a moving cameo as an A-bomb survivor who refuses to feel sorry for herself in Kozaburo Yoshimura’s A Night to Remember. 

 

Yoko Katsuragi

In Natsuko’s Adventure in Hokkaido, it’s Yoko Katsuragi who steals the show as the coquettish Fujiko. Given that the film feels like an imitation of the Hollywood style even down to avant-garde composer Toshiro Mayuzumi’s uncharacteristically conventional music score, it’s ironic that Fujiko explicitly criticises Natsuko’s American values at the end of the film. As the Americans had just left when the film went into production, perhaps the filmmakers were unable to resist having a dig at their former occupiers even as they continued to enthusiastically absorb their culture.

In regard to director Noboru Nakamura, at this stage in his career he was just beginning to gain a reputation as a reliable director of literary adaptations. On the basis of Natsuko’s Adventure, there’s little to distinguish him from any other competent director, but his best work was yet to come in films like Downpour (1957) and Koto (1963).  

 

Bonus trivia: actor Yoko Katsuragi married composet Toshiro Mayuzumi in 1953. 

Lake of Illusions / 幻の湖 / Maboroshi no mizuumi (1982)

Obscure Japanese Film #102

Reiko Nanjo

Shinobu Hashimoto (1918-2018) had one of the most impressive track records in screenwriting, including as it did not just many of Kurosawa’s best films, but also other cast-iron classics such as Hara Kiri (1962) and Sword of Doom (1966), together with a long list of other excellent pictures. In 1973, he formed his own production company, making two films in collaboration with Toho – Castle of Sand (1974) and Mount Hakkoda (1977) – both of which were big hits. These were followed by Village of Eight Gravestones (1977) for Shochiku, an even bigger hit, so when he and his production company asked Toho to co-produce Lake of Illusions, which he would write and direct, he was in an excellent position to get what he wanted and was given a free hand. As Hashimoto had also directed two previous features, they must have felt the risk to be minimal, and their optimism was such that the film was planned as Toho’s 50^th anniversary celebration work. However, they probably failed to take into account that many of Hashimoto’s previous screenplays had been written in collaboration with others (which he himself always maintained was the best way) or under the firm guiding hand of top directors such as Yoshitaro Nomura, Masaki Kobayashi, Tadashi Imai, Kihachi Okamoto and others. Furthermore, Hashimoto was an eccentric, as anyone who reads his book Compound Cinematics – Akira Kurosawa and I can easily see. 

Daisuke Ryu

 

The genesis of Lake of Illusions is downright peculiar. As Castle of Sand had featured a lot of walking and Mount Hakkoda a lot of marching, he figured that it was time for a film with a lot of jogging. According to Japanese Wikipedia, Hashimoto also wanted to develop a story which included three elements – an image of a woman in traditional Japanese dress plunging a knife into a man; a statue of Kannon, the 11-faced Bodhisattva of mercy, located near Lake Biwa; and, randomly, computer technology. He spent two years working on the screenplay, but even he wasn’t convinced that he had successfully combined the three elements when the film went into production. 

Reiko Nanjo

 

The central character is Michiko, a 22-year-old woman who works in a weird theme hotel where she has to dress in character as Oichi, a woman from the past who came to an unfortunate end (played by Keiko Takahashi in a flashback sequence). Michiko has no interest in history and is doing the job purely for the money and planning to leave as soon as she has reached her savings goal. Her main duties are actually providing baths and sex to wealthy businessmen, something she finds tolerable as long as she’s ‘Oichi’ and not Michiko. She adopts a stray dog, whom she dubs ‘Shiro’, and goes for long runs with him along the shores of Lake Biwa on her days off, meeting a mysterious flute player (Daisuke Ryu) along the way. When Shiro is found dead from a head wound, she becomes obsessed with tracking down the killer and getting revenge… 

 

Hashimoto held open auditions for the part of Michiko. Out of 1,627 applicants, a young model named Reiko Nanjo was chosen, seemingly for her good looks, athleticism and willingness to disrobe. Unfortunately, she had no real acting experience, and Hashimoto was asking too much of a novice to carry the weight of such a huge part in a major production. The film features endless scenes of Nanjo jogging – she reportedly ran 4,500 km while playing Michiko – as well as constant close-ups of her, usually wearing the same sullen expression. Nanjo deserves respect for her hard work but, in her hands, Michiko comes across as a bit of a brainless bimbo, which was presumably not the intention. Perhaps a more experienced director could have provided better guidance, but here she seems over-exposed and under-directed, and she received poor reviews and few offers of work once the film was released. However, Akira Kurosawa (perhaps taking pity on Nanjo) gave her a small part in Ran, and she subsequently enjoyed a decade of modest success as an actress in TV dramas before quitting the entertainment industry and vanishing from public life. 

Daisuke Ryu

 

On its release, the film was so badly received that Toho pulled it from cinemas two weeks after release and effectively buried it. Shinobu Hashimoto’s magic touch had deserted him and he suddenly found himself persona non grata with the film studios. It’s not difficult to see their point of view – Lake of Illusions has a terrible script consisting of several disparate elements clumsily cobbled together, even relying on two unlikely coincidences to patch up the deficiencies in its plot, like using sticking plaster to cover a wound when a transplant is called for. It also feels insanely long at over 2 hours and 40 minutes, while the ending, which is akin to being catapulted into a completely different movie, has to be seen to be believed. 

Keiko Takahashi

 

With no TV broadcasts or VHS release, Lake of Illusions was virtually impossible to see until its eventual DVD release in 2003. It had come to be regarded as a legendarily bad film, but since then it has acquired a small cult following and has its defenders. While it does offer some incidental pleasures along the way, such as a chance to see the scenery around Lake Biwa, and a subtle music score by Yasushi Akutagawa, in my opinion the film ultimately deserves its reputation as Hashimoto’s grand folly, and his own verdict as expressed in Compound Cinematics is equally damning. 

 

Sanshiro Sugata / 姿三四郎 (1965)

Obscure Japanese Film #101

Yuzo Kayama

According to Stuart Galbraith IV in his book The Emperor and the Wolf, this remake of Kurosawa’s debut film (about an early exponent of judo) and its sequel was motivated by the need to turn a quick profit after the inordinately lengthy and expensive production of Red Beard. However, this may not have been the only reason, as Sanshiro Sugata Part Two (1945) not only contained some badly dated anti-Western propaganda, but was actually considered a lost film at the time this remake was produced.* 

 

Toshiro Mifune

In any case, Kurosawa chose to co-produce the film, but not direct it, instead handing the reins over to the 42-year-old Seiichiro Uchikawa, who had been an assistant to an impressive range of directors, including Ozu, Kon Ichikawa, Hiroshi Shimizu and Kenji Mizoguchi. He had found Mizoguchi extremely difficult and eventually been fired by him after a dispute. Nevertheless, Uchikawa became a director himself in 1953. By the time Sanshiro Sugata went into production, he had already directed around 30 films – often also writing the screenplays – and gradually built up a decent reputation without breaking into the A-list. Most of these earlier films are inaccessible, the exceptions being the two immediately preceding this one, namely Tange Sazen (1963) and Samurai from Nowhere (1964). The latter of the two was especially well-received and was likely the reason why Kurosawa chose him as director of this remake. Unfortunately for Uchikawa, Sanshiro Sugata would not be received as positively, at least by the critics, and seems to have damaged his career as he did not direct another feature film until 4 years later; when finally given another chance, he was reduced to making a vehicle for the pop group known as The Tempters. In my opinion, that was unfair – while the remake lacks the panache that Kurosawa himself would no doubt have brought to it, in some ways it improves on the originals, benefitting from the use of widescreen, staging at least some of the fight sequences more effectively, and employing a stronger cast, and it’s certainly far more satisfying than Kihachi Okamoto’s1977 kiddie remake. Uchikawa was also somewhat straitjacketed by the obligation to follow Kurosawa’s blueprint, as Kurosawa made only minor changes to his originals and even had Uchikawa replicate the montage of the abandoned geta. 

Yunosuke Ito

 

Bokuzen Hidari

Tsutomu Yamazaki

Kurosawa further put his stamp on the film by filling the cast with his favourite actors. Yuzo Kayama (son of Ken Uehara) had just co-starred in Red Beard, and makes a good Sanshiro, being both convincing in the fight scenes and likeable in general. Toshiro Mifune is the perfect actor to play his mentor, Shogoro Yano, and it’s great to see him kicking ass at the beginning, hurling multiple assailants into a canal. Also ideal casting is Bokuzen Hidari as the comic priest who gives Sugata a hard time, while Yunosuke Ito and Tsutomu Yamazaki make effective bad guys, and even Takashi Shimura pops up, although his part is so brief it seems a mere token gesture. In the first film, Shimura had played ju-jitsu master Hansuke Murai, the part played here by Daisuke Kato (surprisingly convincing as a formidable martial artist!). 

Takashi Shimura

 

Daisuke Ito and Eiji Okada

Not Robert Shaw, but Eiji Okada

From outside the Kurosawa stable, Eiji Okada is impressive in a dual role as two of the brothers who are Sugata’s most dangerous opponents (as karate master Tesshin, he looks remarkably like Robert Shaw). The female characters are played by less familiar names – Yumiko Konoe is the love interest, while Chisako Hara** plays Yunosuke Ito’s vengeful daughter. Konoe’s main career has been as a singer, while Hara was the wife of director Akio Jissoji, and had a long career, but mainly played supporting roles in movies. Both are fine, but Hara has the more interesting role even though it’s much smaller than Konoe’s.

Chisako Hara

Yumiko Konoe

 

The high-contrast cinematography looks good throughout, while Yojimbo composer Masaru Sato provides a score which, ironically, seems to be imitating Ennio Morricone’s music for Sergio Leone’s unacknowledged Yojimbo remake, A Fistful of Dollars. The film’s main flaw is that it feels too long at two and a half hours, but otherwise it’s hard to imagine it could have been much improved on by a director other than Uchikawa – unless, of course, it were Kurosawa himself, or perhaps Masaki Kobayashi. On the evidence of the film alone, it’s hard to see why it should have been a career-killer for Uchikawa, although it’s entirely possible there are additional unknown factors which account for the sudden 4-year gap in his film career after this was released. Although this film has been largely ignored by critics, its current of rating of 7.4 on IMDb strongly suggests that most people who have seen it enjoyed it, and I would certainly encourage anyone interested to check it out if you have the chance.

 

*A print was subsequently discovered in Russia. 

**Chisako Hara is listed as two separate people on IMDb.