Konki / 婚期 / 'Marriageable Age' (1961)

Obscure Japanese Film #124

Ayako Wakao

 

Takuo (Eiji Funakoshi) runs an inn (a family business he has inherited), and lives not just with his wife, Shizuka (Machiko Kyo), but with his two sisters – Namiko (Ayako Wakao) and Hatoko (Hitomi Nozoe), who are financially dependent on him and on the lookout for husbands. Namiko, 29, teaches calligraphy to children and is in danger of becoming an old maid (although it was unclear to me why). Hatoko, 24, is trying to become an actress but only getting tiny parts. The two sisters get on well, spending much of their time together, and are united in their dissatisfaction with Shizuka, perhaps because she does not run a perfect house and relies too heavily on the elderly maid (Tanie Kitabayashi). 

Eiji Funakoshi

 

Machiko Kyo

One day, Shizuka receives an anonymous letter telling her that her husband has a mistress with whom he has had a child, but she seems only a little perturbed by this. In this dysfunctional family, the only person who seems to have their shit together is Takuo’s sister, Saeko (Mieko Takamine), an emancipated divorcee who lives apart from the rest, works in the fashion industry and sees through her womanising brother…

Mieko Takamine

 

Director Kozaburo Yoshimura was better-known for his more serious literary adaptations, but on this occasion he successfully turned his hand to a domestic comedy from an original screenplay by frequent Tadashi Imai / Mikio Naruse collaborator Yoko Mizuki (1910-2003). Mizuki actually won the 1962 Best Screenplay Award for this and Tadashi Imai’s The Harbour Lights (1961). In the case of Konki, the screenplay is a dialogue-heavy one which allows the mostly female ensemble star cast to have a field day. 

Ayako Wakao and Hitomi Nozoe

 

Despite watching twice with decent if imperfect subtitles, I still felt that there was a great deal I didn’t understand, and I suspect that you have to be Japanese to really get this one. The subtitles sometimes struggled to keep up with the often rapid-fire dialogue, with the result that it was not always clear who was saying what to whom. I also suspect that the ending had a point to it which sailed right over my head. Nevertheless, there’s a lot to enjoy here, with Ayako Wakao and Hitomi Nozoe making a great comic double act. The real star of this movie, though, is Tanie Kitabayashi, an actress who specialised in granny roles. She was around 50 when she made this, but was playing at least 20 years older. She’s hilarious here as the put-upon help, and the splendidly reluctant intonation she puts into a simple ‘hai’ (‘yes’) when instructed to do something is priceless. 

Tanie Kitabayashi

 

One notable aspect of the film is the sheer amount of business the actors find to do while delivering their dialogue. Whether it’s Wakao marking her pupils’ calligraphy homework, Nozoe cutting her toenails, Takamine removing a face pack or Kitabayashi grating dried bonito, Konki is a masterclass in the use of props, and the skilfully co-ordinated interaction of the various cast members shows their considerable acting chops. While the film may be baffling at times for non-Japanese viewers, anyone who loves these actors and Daiei films of this era (as I do) should certainly seek it out.


Thanks to Anonymous.

The Pass – Last Days of the Samurai / 峠 最後のサムライ / Tōge saigo no samurai (2020)

Obscure Japanese Film #123

Koji Yakusho

This Shochiku production stars Koji Yakusho, well-known for his leading roles in international hits such as Shall We Dance? (1996), The Eel (1997) and, most recently, Perfect Days (2023). Here, he plays Tsugunosuke Kawai (1827-68), a senior samurai retainer preparing for civil war while simultaneously doing everything he can to prevent it, even though it means being called a coward by many of his peers as a result. The story is set in the years 1867-68 when the influence of America and Europe is beginning to make itself felt in Japan, and Kawai has been inspired in his neutral stance by the example of Switzerland. However, the film certainly has an ambivalent attitude towards the West as the opening narration suggests that everything would have been fine in Japan if only the Western world had left them alone. Indeed, Kawai himself is a rather contradictory character – despite sticking his neck out in the hopes of maintaining peace, he ends up gleefully mowing down his opponents with a Gatling gun! (Incidentally, although such a weapon may seem out of place in a samurai movie, it is a historical fact that Kawai purchased a Gatling gun, though whether he used it himself in battle I can’t say.)

 

The Pass is based on a 1968 novel by Ryotaro Shiba (1923-96), whose work also provided the basis for films such as Castle of Owls (1963), Assassination (1964), Hitokiri (1969) and Gohatto (1999). The film appears to be a faithful adaptation as far as one can tell without reading the book, which is yet to be translated into English (though some of Shiba’s work has been). 

Kyoko Kagawa

 

The man responsible for the adaptation is writer-director Takashi Koizumi, a former assistant director to Akira Kurosawa who had made After the Rain (1999) from Kurosawa’s script after his mentor’s death. Among the cast are long-in-the-tooth Kurosawa veterans Tatsuya Nakadai (b.1932), Kyoko Kagawa (b.1931) and Hisashi Igawa (b.1936), though they are given nothing very challenging to do and their parts are cameos of the “wheel ‘em out for old times’ sake” variety. Still, we have to be thankful for any appearance by these greats of Japanese cinema these days. 

Hisashi Igawa

 

The historical accuracy of the piece seems generally solid with the exception of the casting – Koji Yakusho, then 64, is playing a 40-year-old, while his former acting teacher Tatsuya Nakadai, then 87, plays Kawai’s boss, samurai lord Tadanori Makino (1844-75), who died at the age of 30! Perhaps wisely, no attempt has been made to make Nakadai look half a century younger – the filmmakers’ presumably thought that only a few history nerds would notice the discrepancy. 

Tatsuya Nakadai

 

The Pass is often very impressive visually and looks like it must have been given a generous budget, with the large-scale battle scenes being especially well done. On the other hand, its quieter moments are sometimes a bit too fussy and picture-postcardy for their own good, with some scenes feeling pretty lifeless as a result. The music is also a mixed bag, varying from sentimental light classic piano to more dramatic and effective orchestration for the battle scenes. However, for me it is mainly in the script department that this film is lacking as, not only does it present us with a nostalgic, rose-tinted view of the past, but we have to suffer dialogue like, “Your samurai spirit will inspire countless others. You are our ideal. You shall live on in history!” For me at least, the film is ideologically dubious in the way it seems to lament the passing of feudalism. While it may be true that, under the Tokugawa Shogunate, Japan enjoyed 260-odd years of peace and stability during the Edo period (1603-1868), this was only achieved by enforcing a policy of isolationism and a rigid social hierarchy. Such a situation may have been comfortable for the aristocracy, but was doubtless a lot less pleasant if you were one of the oppressed, and the film never shows us this side. 

Takako Matsu as Kawai's wife, Suga

 

Despite these quibbles, it’s a shame that The Pass has yet to receive a proper release overseas. While uneven, its best bits make it worth seeing and it features an engaging performance by Yakusho in the lead. Kawai was also certainly an interesting figure worthy of a movie (I believe this was the first feature film in which he was the main character, though there had been TV dramas before).

The film’s release was delayed until 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

For a more detailed synopsis, see Hayley Scanlon’s review here.

The Horse Boy / 暴れん坊街道 / Abarendo kaido (1957)

Obscure Japanese Film #122

Shuji Sano

 

Isuzu Yamada

Yosaku (Shuji Sano) is a low-ranking samurai employed at Yurugi Castle in Tanba Province. He has a secret affair with Shigeno (Isuzu Yamada), the daughter of senior retainer Inaba Kotayu (Kenji Usuda). When she becomes pregnant, he is banished from the castle, while she gives birth to a baby boy, but is not allowed to keep him and has to watch helplessly as he is taken away. Shigeno is then assigned to act as wet nurse and carer for another infant – a new-born princess. 

Motoharu Ueki

 

Ten years pass, and Yosaku has become a wandering ronin. While travelling, he hires a horse from Sankichi (Motoharu Ueki), a precocious urchin who gambles and smokes a pipe. Looking for somewhere to rest up, Yosaku is taken to an inn next to the little shack in which Sankichi lives. Yosaku becomes friendly with the boy as well as with Koman (Shinobu Chihara), a young woman who works at the inn. 

Shinobu Chihara with Ueki an Sano

 

When a procession from Yurugi Castle passes through, it gets delayed when the young princess has a tantrum and jumps out of her palanquin. Shigeno fails to persuade her to get back in so they can continue her journey, but the princess discovers Sankichi gambling by the side of the road and is drawn to him, with the result that Sankichi is asked to accompany the retinue to the castle. Shigeno is shocked to discover that Sankichi is in possession of the omamori (amulet) she had tied around her son’s neck when forced to let him be taken from her all those years before… 

 

The screenplay was adapted by Yoshikata Yoda (best known for his many screenplays for Kenji Mizoguchi) from a jurori* entitled The Night Song of Yosaku from Tamba (Tamba Yosaku machiyo no komurobushi) by Monzaemon Chikamatsu (1653-1725), the dramatist later portrayed by Chiezo Kataoka in Chikamatsu’s Love in Osaka (1959). That film was, of course, directed by Tomu Uchida, as was The Horse Boy.

With a new emphasis placed on the character of Sankichi, this Toei production seems to have been intended mainly as a vehicle for child actor Motoharu Ueki, who was the eldest son of Chiezo Kataoka, a legendary actor and great favourite of Tomu Uchida. Kataoka had been the star of Uchida’s first post-war film, Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji (1955), and went on to appear in a further nine films for him, while Ueki had also appeared in that film as well as Uchida’s The Kuroda Incident (1956) and Rebellion from Below (1956) and would also be featured in The Eleventh Hour (1957).

Shigeno lives in a world of extremely refined manners in which etiquette dominates behaviour and rebellion is unthinkable, while the abandoned Sankichi has no manners at all and does what he likes. Uchida makes much of this contrast between the two very different worlds they inhabit. Unfortunately, my personal reaction was that Sankichi’s rude behaviour did not endear him to me at all, and for this reason I was never as moved as I felt I was probably supposed to be by this film, which I would definitely consider a minor work in Uchida’s filmography. I felt that Uchida saved his best bit of direction for a scene which occurs late in the film and takes place on a quiet road at night when a confrontation between Yosaku and the local moneylender (Eitaro Shindo) turns violent. Incidentally, Shindo is the stand-out among the supporting cast and could always be relied upon to play a man-you-love-to-hate effectively. 

Sano confronts Eitaro Shindo

 

It’s worth noting that, while Chikamatsu’s original apparently had a happy ending, Uchida’s film does not, and perhaps this is because he preferred to make it clear that the unforgiving rules of Japan’s former feudal society had ruined a lot of lives. 

Note on the title: The Japanese title translates as something like ‘Wild Child of the Road’.

*Wikipedia defines jurori as “a type of sung narrative with shamisen accompaniment, typically found in bunraku, a traditional Japanese puppet theatre”.

Watched without subtitles. 

David Baldwin has subsequently written a more detailed analysis of the film which can be found here.

 

Song of the Horse / 馬の詩 / Uma no uta (1971)

Obscure Japanese Film #121

 

Toshiro Mifu-neigh?

Akira Kurosawa’s only work for TV was this documentary co-produced by his own company and Nippon Television. It’s unlike any of his feature films and should not be approached with high expectations. 

Kurosawa had always loved horses, which were of course an important element in many of his movies, perhaps most memorably in the post-battle sequence in Ran, where we see them dying in slow-motion to the strains of Toru Takemitsu’s haunting score. However, Song of the Horse is far lighter in tone, and therein lies the rub…

Although it would have been preferable to present this as the life of a single horse, as such an approach would have involved a shoot spread across a number of years, it's understandable that Kurosawa opted to structure the film more loosely around the lifecycle of horses raised for racing. Following some introductory footage of a traditional festival at which horses are dressed up and paraded, we see a horse being born and later cavorting in a field on its first day out of the stable. The film goes on to show us how racehorses begin to be trained at one year of age before running their first races at the age of two and competing in major events the following year. This is interspersed with footage of horses having their hooves trimmed, horses being groomed, horses being sold at auction, etc. Throughout the film, there is intermittent narration in the form of an informal conversation between an elderly-sounding man and a young child, both of whom are reacting to the images we see, most of which is comprised of endless scenes of horses running in slow-motion. (The narration is by Noboru Mitani and Hiroyuki Kawase, who played, respectively, the homeless father and son in Dodes’ka-den; I suspect that Mitani was given scripted material and Kawase reacted spontaneously, but this is speculation). There's also a music score by Kurosawa regular Masaru Sato which is decent if not great.

Shortly before the documentary concludes by showing us a horse thought to be a likely future champion, we see a retired racehorse now living in luxury, and I could not help but wonder if this was really representative of how such horses were treated in Japan at the time. Were none turned into dog food and glue once their usefulness had expired? Kurosawa never addresses the issue of how these animals are exploited, and for me that makes this film feel rather dishonest. Instead, we are presented with a world in which horses only want to do their best and are thrilled when they win a race for their benevolent two-legged masters.

Kurosawa is my favourite director, so it pains me to be so negative about this one, but in my opinion Song of the Horse is worth watching for Kurosawa completists and equestrian freaks only.