Obscure Japanese Film #152
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| Yoko Tsukasa |
Wakayama, 1899. Hana (Yoko Tsukasa) is a young woman from a highly-respected family who marries slightly below her class as her husband, Keisaku Shintani (Takahiro Tamura), is judged to be a young man of exceptional promise. However, their married life gets off to an awkward start when Hana joins her husband to live in his family home, which is also shared by his brother, Kosaku (Tetsuro Tanba). He takes an instant dislike to her, perhaps because he resents her for being from a family of higher status, or perhaps because he’s secretly in love with her himself. Meanwhile, Keisaku spearheads an ambitious engineering project to build flood defences along the Kii River which will protect the surrounding farmlands in the event of heavy rain.
Takahiro Tamura and Tetsuro Tanba
As the years pass, the influence of the West increases and the modernisation of Japan begins. People begin to wear Western clothes more and more, and even express their appreciation of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. We see the introduction of new consumer items such as ready-made cigarettes and bicycles, as well as new ideas, including democracy, communism and the emancipation of women. Kosaku eventually mellows towards his sister-in-law, who has a daughter, Fumio (Shima Iwashita), with whom she has little in common. Fumio is an outspoken rebel who leads a protest when one of her teachers is unfairly dismissed and regards her parents’ ideals as hopelessly out-of-date. But after Fumio has a daughter of her own and Hana enters old age as the family prepare to face the tribulations of World War Two, their animosity too will fade…
Shima Iwashita
Keisaku’s obsession with building flood defences may be symbolic of a desire to control the forces of nature – something which the Shintani family learn on multiple occasions is the one thing their wealth and status will never enable them to do. There is also symbolism of a weirder variety in the motif of the white snake which lives in the attic and will drop dead onto the tatami below at the very moment the mistress of the house expires.
Yoko Tsukasa
Running nearly three hours, this major Shochiku production was based on a 1959 novel of the same name by Sawako Ariyoshi (1931-84), whose work had also provided the source material for Keisuke Kinoshita’s even longer The Scent of Incense (1964), and would go on to form the basis of films such as Yasuzo Masumura’s The Wife of Seishu Hanaoka (1967), Tadashi Imai’s The Time of Reckoning (1968) and Shiro Toyoda’s The Twilight Years (1973). Ariyoshi was from Wakayama, where this story is set, and elements of it are said to have been based on her own family’s history. However, she had little in common with the character of Hana, being more similar to that of Fumio, although neither character should be taken as her alter ego. English translations of her work include this novel (as The River Ki), The Twilight Years, and The Wife of Seishu Hanaoka (as The Doctor’s Wife).
Yoko Tsukasa
Director Noboru Nakamura had already made three films with Shima Iwashita at this point, including the excellent Koto (1963). Her performance is sometimes a little on the broad side here, whereas Yoko Tsukasa’s is quite understated. It was Tsukasa who won most of the major Japanese film awards for her performance in The Kii River, largely (I suspect) because she is convincing in regards to the ageing of her character from around 20 to 70. This is reminiscent of the transformation of Machiko Kyo in A Woman’s Life (1962), another female-focused period family saga of a type which seems to have been popular in Japan around this time. Personally, though, I felt that the strongest performance here comes from Tetsuro Tanba as the surly brother-in-law, although the reasons for his change of attitude towards Hana are not entirely clear.
Tetsuro Tanba
The Kii River is beautifully shot by cinematographer Toichiro Narushima, whose credits are few but who also shot Koto, The Shape of Night (1964, again for Nakamura) and Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (1983). I’ve rarely seen a film with so few close-ups, and one thing I’ve always liked about Japanese cinema is that close-ups are generally used far more sparingly than in Hollywood. Another strength of the film is the score by Toru Takemitsu, which is also used sparingly, and features his brilliant modernist take on traditional Japanese music.
Yoko Tsukasa
When made into films,
such sagas spanning periods of many years are often limited in the amount of
depth possible in regard to their characters and can rely too much on skipping
from one melodramatic incident to the next. The film in question is also guilty
of this to some extent – there seem to be a
lot of sudden deaths occurring sporadically throughout – but the aesthetics
of the film are of such a high standard that it remains a true cut above the rest. For these reasons, The Kii River may fall slightly short of masterpiece status, but certainly deserves recognition as a classic of the Japanese cinema.
Shima Iwashita
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