Bara no ki ni bara no hana saku / 薔薇の木にバラの花咲く / (‘Roses Bloom on the Rose Bush’, 1959)

Obscure Japanese Film #136

Ayako Wakao

Rieko Sumi and Ayako Wakao

Reiko (Ayako Wakao) is a senior university student majoring in English who gets a part-time job tutoring junior student Mariko (Noriko Kubota). This is valuable income as Reiko lost both parents in the war and the only family she has left is her elder sister, Ginko (Rieko Sumi), who has become involved with the no-good Nose (Manabu Morita) and ended up working in the red light district. 

Jiro Tamiya

 

One day at Mariko’s house, Reiko meets a young architect, Fuyuhiko (Jiro Tamiya), who is immediately attracted to her. Coming from a wealthy family and used to having his own way, he pursues her relentlessly until his persistence pays off. Reiko begins a relationship with him which soon leads to talk of marriage. However, there is also the matter of Reiko’s sister, whose status would make the match unacceptable to Fuyuhiko’s family, as well as Reiko’s friendship with fellow student Narumi (Keizo Kawasaki), who loves her but has so far kept his feelings to himself…

Wakao and Keizo Kawasaki

 

This Daiei production was based on a novel of the same name by Yoshiko Shibaki, whose work had also formed the basis of Mizoguchi’s Akasen chitai and Yuzo Kawashima’s lesser-known but excellent Suzaki Paradise (both 1956), both of which were stories of the red light district. Like those films, this is also concerned with people who have found themselves marginalised by society partly due to economics, but here the red light district is a minor element and the main focus is on social status, or the class divide, a theme seldom dealt with in Japanese films as explicitly as it is here. 

 

The director was Hiroshi Edagawa (1916-2010), a filmmaker credited with just two feature films on IMDb, but who actually directed 31 features between 1950 and 1965 before finishing his career in TV, which shows just how much info is still missing on IMDb. Not having seen any of his other films, I can’t say how this one compares, but his work here is more than competent and he succeeds in delivering a satisfying and affecting Naruse-like relationship drama with good performances all round. 

 

Keizo Kawasaki

The characters here actually resemble real people – Jiro Tamiya’s, for instance, could easily have been a one-dimensional spoilt rich kid type, but is portrayed as having both positive and negative traits, while Ayako Wakao’s heroine is also shown to have her own flaws (embarrassed by her sister, she later comes to realise how lucky she is to have her). This unusual attention to character is probably why I found myself so drawn into the story and caring about what happened to the fictional people on screen. Given the obscurity of both film and director, I didn’t expect much from this, but I have to say I was very pleasantly surprised and warmly recommend it. 

 Thanks to A.K.