Hyoroku’s Dream Tale / 兵六夢物語 / Hyoroku yume monogatari (1943)

 Obscure Japanese Film #226

Ken'ichi Enomoto aka Enoken

 

Here’s a weird one! This Toho production was based on a story by Masanao Mori (1761-1803) with the slightly longer title of ‘Oishi Hyoroku yume monogatari’, though that was not a totally original work, but rather Mori's version of a folk tale. Of course, being made in Japan during the war years, the filmmakers had little choice but to introduce a propaganda element, so the film begins with a scene in the modern day in which young children with wooden swords are being taught to defend the motherland from attack by foreign soldiers. I guess somebody thought that was motivational at the time, but, from today’s perspective, it’s hard to see it as anything other than a sad indictment of a sick society (I suppose the other possible interpretation is that director Nobuo Aoyagi was subtly critiquing the militaristic government in a way they were too dumb to appreciate). 

 

Jumping back a couple of centuries, we’re introduced to Hyoroku (Ken’ichi Enomoto), a teenage samurai who lives with his mother and is practising for an upcoming kendo competition. With his small stature and prematurely-aged face, he cuts a ridiculous figure, but happens to be the grandson of a master swordsman and so feels obliged to try to act like one. Unfortunately, his efforts to impress not only embarrass himself, but bring shame to the others in his kendo group, who want to kick him out. 

 

Hideko Takamine

When Hyoroku’s mother asks him to deliver a letter to a monk five miles away, he discovers that he must first get past the various yokai (supernatural entities)* in the forest, and hopes to restore his honour by slaying them. However, these shape-shifting creatures – which include a fox who turns into a young girl (Hideko Takamine) – prove to be not so easy to defeat… 

 

For those unfamiliar with the story (probably everyone not Japanese), there’s little clue in the first half of the film that this comedy is going to turn into an out-and-out fantasy with a good number of special effects. In fact, it’s surprising that the film’s not a little better-known given that it features a number of yokai created by legendary effects whiz Eiji Tsuburaya, who went on to bring Godzilla to life in 1954. Although the 69-minute running time suggests a B-movie, budgets were low during the war years, and this film may well have been considered quite lavish at the time. Indeed, it’s also a musical and features an elaborate dance number at one point, as well as several popular stars of the era, even if only Ken’ichi Enomoto and Takamine are remembered at all today. 

 

Playing a curiously old-looking teenager, the comic actor Ken’ichi Enomoto, better-known as Enoken, was 38 at the time and one of the most well-known faces in Japanese entertainment. Outside of his home country, he’s only likely to be familiar to those who have seen The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail (1945), one of Akira Kurosawa’s early films. In Hyoroku’s Dream Tale, his unsmiling demeanour is sometimes reminiscent of Buster Keaton. 

 

Takamine again

The director, Nobuo Aoyagi, helmed over 80 films between 1940 and 1964, including the modest masterpiece World of Love (1943), also with Takamine, and over a dozen other Enoken vehicles. Despite its unfortunate message – which seems to be that even physical weaklings have a part to play in defeating the enemy – Hyoroku’s Dream Tale is often quite nicely shot and I somehow couldn’t bring myself to dislike it.

BONUS TRIVIA: The production manager was none other than Kon Ichikawa.

* For more on yokai, check out this interesting page. Thanks to Michel for the link. 

Watch on YouTube here (no English subtitles)

Yellow Dog / イエロー・ドッグ (1973)

Obscure Japanese Film #225

 

Jiro Tamiya

 

This oddity is an independent Japanese-British co-production from a company called Akari, which seems to have been formed by star Jiro Tamiya and director Terence Donovan especially for this movie. Tamiya plays Kimura, a secret service man who goes to London on a covert mission. A Professor Bewsley (John Welsh) has found a way to produce synthetic fuel from hydrogen (or sommat) and Kimura must prevent it from falling into the wrong hands – but of course that’s all just a Hitchcock-like MacGuffin to set the plot in motion. Along the way, Kimura forms an uneasy alliance with British secret service man Alexander (Robert Hardy) and is seduced by the mysterious Della (Carolyn Seymour). 

 

Carolyn Seymour

Unfortunately, the plot is convoluted to the point of incomprehensibility at times. The screenplay is by Shinobu Hashimoto, justly famous for his collaborations with Akira Kurosawa among others, but who sometimes seemed to go off the rails when not working from a literary source and left to his own devices (see also Lake of Illusions). Here, Hashimoto has based his story on the fact that Japan had no specific law against espionage at the time, making it a so-called ‘paradise for spies’ (Japan’s State Secrecy Law finally went into force in 2014). It’s perhaps worth noting that, preceding Hashimoto’s screenplay credit, the opening credits state (in this order) ‘New Dialogue by John Bird / Original Translation from the Japanese by Professor Alan Turney / From an Idea by Terence Donovan.’ John Bird (1936-2022) was a very well-known figure in the UK, famous for his satirical writing and comic acting, mainly on television, and was no doubt responsible for making the dialogue more colloquial. In any case, a bizarre climax involving Tamiya rubbing rice balls all over himself and an actual yellow dog (which has been died that colour) is something only the eccentric Hashimoto could have cooked up.

 

Of course, the title is also partly a racial epithet – another strange scene features Kimura pretending to be hopeless at judo before his opponent calls him a ‘yellow Jap’, at which point he snarls, ‘I don’t mind the “Jap” so much, but don’t ever call me “yellow”!’ He then loses it and proceeds to fuck up his opponent by dislocating both his arm and his jaw for him (incidentally, Tamiya was a black belt in karate, so why the filmmakers failed to make use of this real-life skill instead of featuring a judo match is anyone’s guess). Helpfully, Kimura later explains the second word in the title more fully, saying, ‘In Japan, detectives and informers are called dogs – they’re always sniffing around. Not a very polite expression,’ while another canine quirk of this film is that Kimura has a phobia of dogs. However, perhaps a further motivation for the use of ‘dog’ in the title is that Tamiya had starred in the series of nine Inu (‘dog’) films made by Daiei between 1964 and 1967. 

 

Tamiya with Robert Hardy

God knows how Tamiya hooked up with fashion photographer Terence Donovan and chose him as director. Donovan had never made a film before and never would again, with the exception of a number of music videos such as the one for Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted to Love’. On this evidence, it’s not hard to see why Donovan made no further features. Almost everything falls flat here and, considering Donovan’s background, one might expect the film to look good at least, but most of it’s indifferently photographed and looks like cheap TV. A tragic footnote to this film is the fact that both Tamiya and Donovan suffered from depression and would die by suicide – Donovan not until 1996, but Tamiya in 1978, the year after this film was finally released in Japan (by Shochiku) and flopped both with the critics and at the box office. While Yellow Dog was certainly not the reason for his suicide, it may have been one of many contributing factors. 

 

Tamiya does surprisingly well in terms of his English pronunciation, though his intonation is rather strange and I suspect that he learned his lines phonetically. This must have been quite a challenge, and you can only admire him for taking it on, especially considering that he’s surrounded by such experienced and confident British actors as Robert Hardy and co. Cross-cultural collaborations of this sort rarely turn out well, and this one certainly didn’t, but it’s not entirely without entertainment value as we watch Tamiya as a fish out of water slurping his soup, pretending incompetence and bemusing the Brits, who (I’m ashamed to say) mostly come across as a cold and chauvinistic bunch of entitled snobs. 

 

Robert Hardy and Angela Thorne

 

Yukiko / 由紀子 (1955)

 Obscure Japanese Film #224

 

Keiko Tsushima

1932. Intending to kill herself in a beautiful place, high school girl Yukiko (Keiko Tsushima) travels to Lake Towada in northern Honshu, but her plans are foiled by Kyosuke (Jukichi Uno), an older artist who happened to be contemplating suicide in the same spot. Kyosuke is disabled as a result of contracting polio at the age of 30 and is miserable because his wife has left him and run off with his apprentice.

 

Jukichi Uno

As Yukiko tells her story to Kyosuke, we learn in flashback that she is an orphan brought up by her cold-hearted aunt (Sachiko Murase), who considers Yukiko’s mother to have been a slut as she had Yukiko out of wedlock and who thinks that Yukiko will go the same way. Yukiko’s best friend, Tatsuko (Chieko Seki), has already dropped out of school and become a dancer at the Casino Follies in Asakusa, run by dapper gangster Aoto (Eitaro Ozawa), who has already broken up Tatsuko’s relationship with her fiancé Miyoshi (Isao Kimura). 

 

Chieko Seki

Yukiko finds herself in the awkward position of becoming an intermediary between Tatsuko and Miyoshi, but the result is that she falls out with Tatsuko and becomes close to Miyoshi, who gets in a fight with Aoto, stabs him in self-defence and is forced to flee. Yukiko is then expelled from school for having been friends with Miyoshi, who is now wanted by the police. 

 

Isao Kimura

 

Back in the present, Yukiko and Kyosuke become close companions. Four years pass, and it’s now 1936. When the attempted coup of February 26 occurs, they head south to escape the chaos, and she suggests going to Innoshima island. Her hidden motive is that she knows this is where Miyoshi fled to and is hoping to see him again. She finds him in a remote fishing village where he has now become engaged to fisherman’s daughter Tome (Hitomi Nozoe)…

 

Hitomi Nozoe

This independent production by by Chuo Eiga (who made the previously-reviewed Sisters the same year) was based on a popular radio serial of the time by the prolific Kazuo Kikuta (male, 1908-73), who also provided the source material for Kurosawa’s The Silent Duel (1949), Hideo Oba’s What’s Your Name? (trilogy 1953-54) and wrote the play version of Fumiko Hayashi’s autobiographical Horo-ki filmed by Mikio Naruse in 1962 (the film is known in English as A Wanderer’s Notebook). 

 

Sachiko Murase

It’s difficult to see what director Tadashi Imai saw in this corny and sentimental misery fest – certainly, it’s quite a dull watch and there’s little of interest in it in terms of direction, although he does do an excellent job of recreating the Asakusa of 1932. This neighbourhood was largely destroyed in bombing raids during the war, but the Casino Follies was a real venue located, oddly enough, above an aquarium, and the mock-up constructed for this film looks identical.*

 

Keiko Tsushima

Matters are not helped by the miscasting of the 29-year-old Keiko Tsushima, who’s entirely unconvincing as a high school teenager and immediately looks more comfortable as soon as her character’s finally grown up a bit and shed the sailor suit uniform. The organ music featured prominently on the soundtrack is another poor choice.

 

Eitaro Ozawa and Chieko Seki

The only people to come out of this film well are Sachiko Murase (later the elderly heroine of Kurosawa’s 1991 film Rhapsody in August), whose performance suggests a thin line between puritanism and sadism, and Eitaro Ozawa as the foppish, narcissistic bully Aoto. Ozawa seems to have got into his role a bit too much, in fact, as I swear he’s hitting poor Isao Kimura for real during their big confrontation scene.

*Go to this link if you’d like to compare the two.

Watched with dodgy subtitles.

Heat Wave Island / かげろう / Kagero (‘Heat Wave’, 1969)

Obscure Japanese Film #223

 

Nobuko Otowa

Produced by Kindai Eiga Kyokai, an independent company formed by director Kozaburo Yoshimura, screenwriter Kaneto Shindo and actor Taiji Tonoyama in 1950, this crime drama was directed and co-written by Shindo and features Tonoyama in a supporting role as the head of an island village. Shindo’s long-term muse and mistress Nobuko Otowa plays Otoyo, a bar hostess who turns up dead at the beginning of the film when a dog carrying a human hand (an idea obviously nicked from Yojimbo) leads the cops to her corpse. Otowa, an actor always willing to do anything for her art, has to play a partially-excavated cadaver, but gets to pop up in flashbacks as a a living being throughout the rest of the movie. 

 

Rokko Toura

 

As the title suggests, it’s set during a heatwave, and a murder investigation is soon underway led by sweaty detectives Oishi (Oshima favourite Rokko Toura) and Iino (future director Juzo Itami), who have to traipse all over the islands of the Seto Inland Sea to interview sundry witnesses played by Shindo’s favourite character actors, including Jukichi Uno, Tanie Kitabayashi, Eitaro Ozawa and, of course, the aforementioned Taiji Tonoyoma. The dogged police begin to suspect that following Michiko (Masako Toyama), a young woman who worked at Otoyo’s bar, may lead them to the killer…

 

Masako Toyama

 

The little-known Masako Toyama, who has one of the principal roles here, was apparently a theatre actor whom Shindo had cast as a result of seeing her in a camera commercial. She had actually already made one film before this, a Shochiku action picture known in English as Pursuit of Murder: Shinjuku’s 25th Hour (1969), and she would go on to appear in at least nine more movies. IMDb has her listed (incorrectly I think) as Masako Tomiyama. 

 

Taiji Tonoyama

 

Anyway, the film is stylishly shot by cameraman Kiyomi Kuroda and has an interesting score by Hikaru Hayashi, although it’s one that works better in certain scenes than others, sometimes lending a strange feeling of detachment rather than enhancing the suspense. Both Kuroda and Hayashi had worked on Shindo’s best known films, Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968). 

 

Tanie Kitabayashi

 

What surprised me most about the film is how much it reminded me of Castle of Sand (1974), Yoshitaro Nomura’s big hit movie adaptation of Seicho Matsumoto’s 1961 novel of the same name. Heat Wave Island must surely have been an influence on that later film, right down to the permanently perspiring policemen. On the other hand, the plot of Heat Wave Island is also very much like something that Matsumoto might have written, and he was undoubtedly an influence on the original screenplay written by Shindo and Isao Seki (an assistant director on Onibaba and other Shindo films). 

 

Jukichi Uno

 

Unsurprisingly for Shindo, there’s also a leftist social commentary aspect to the film, as Joan Mellon pointed out in her 1975 book Voices from the Japanese Cinema:

Kagero has been highly praised by both [Donald] Richie and [Richard N.] Tucker. Its locale is again the Inland Sea, the same setting as The [Naked] Island [1960]. Ten years have elapsed and the people who might have been the heroes of the earlier film have moved to the cities. Lacking skills, they are absorbed inevitably into the lumpen proletariat as petty criminals, prostitutes and dealers in drugs. Richie holds that the film far transcends the level of melodrama:

From the brilliant opening it becomes apparent that he [Shindo] is making a statement on the relation between love and death; from other parts of the film (“cops are poor – criminals are poor: it is the poor chasing the poor”) it is apparent that a social statement is being made; finally, Shindo is making a film about what happens when sudden affluence reaches a simple people. 

The islands around the Seto Inland Sea, where poverty is high and employment low, certainly make for an interesting and often photogenic setting, as one of the cops muses at one point, saying,

The beauty of this scenery made them poor. The islands are beautiful because they’re made of granite soil. The soil can only grow wheat and potatoes. When it rains, the soil erodes and the fields wash into the sea. The beautiful white soil is a symbol of infertility. It’s a symbol of poverty. 

Heat Wave Island is a fascinating film even if the plot is arguably a little over-complicated and, though Otoyo seems a remarkably unsympathetic character at first, things turn out to be a lot less black and white as the story unfolds. 

 

Juzo Itami and Rokko Taura (centre)

 

Kenka tobi / 喧嘩鳶 (‘Fighting Firemen,’ 1939)

Obscure Japanese Film #222

 

Kazuo Hasegawa

 

This Toho Eiga production was based on a newspaper serial novel by Kanji Kunieda (1892-1956), who specialised in stories set in the Edo period and also wrote the source novel upon which Mizoguchi’s  Utamaro and His Five Women (1946) was based. The story of Kenka tobi concerns the genuine historical phenomenon of the samurai firefighting gangs of the Edo period, who were often in fierce competition with each other. 

 

Isuzu Yamada

 

The film features four of the big stars of Japanese cinema in the late 1930s: Kazuo Hasegawa, Isuzu Yamada, Ranko Hanai and Yataro Kurokawa. Directed by Tamizo Ishida, who also made Fallen Blossoms (1938) and the previously-reviewed Flower-Picking Diary (1939), it was a big budget production originally released in two parts and featuring impressively large sets (much of which goes up in flames) and hundreds of extras. 

 

Ranko Hanai

 

Kenka tobi zenpen (‘Fighting Firemen Part 1’) ran 73 minutes and, while I was unable to find a reliable running time for Part 2 (Kenka tobi kohen), I think it’s safe to assume it was a similar length. What we are left with is an 89-minute version cobbled together from the two original parts, so it’s likely that nearly an hour has been chopped out, and there are certainly elements of the story that are a little unclear. 

 

Yamada and Hasegawa

What remains has Kichigoro (Hasegawa), a firefighter from the Kaga-tobi gang, coming to the rescue of Omon (Hanai) when some villains try to abduct her in the street. Omon is the sister of the Ha-gumi gang’s Jirokichi (Kurokawa). She falls in love with Kichigoro, but this is complicated as he belongs to the rivals of her brother’s gang (shades of Romeo and Juliet) and also because Koina (Yamada), a geisha who knows him as a client, is already in love with him…

 

Hasegawa and Yataro Kurokawa

 

Although it’s a meller aimed squarely at the box office, there’s a good deal of subtlety in Ishida’s direction here, and it’s really very well staged and shot throughout, while performances are free from the hamminess you might expect from this type of material. With so few early Japanese talkies available in such good quality before it mostly became military propaganda, Kenka tobi is a rare treat. I doubt that we’ll ever get to see the original two parts in full and would not be surprised if they no longer exist – it was quite common in the Japanese cinema at the time for studios to make two-part films, then edit them down to a single feature and apparently bin the rest. Other examples that spring to mind are Kon Ichikawa’s 365 Nights (1948) and The Burmese Harp (1956), and The Spider Man (1958).

A remake appeared in 1961 under the title Edokko-hada, directed by Masahiro Makino. 

 

Thanks to A.K. 

Watch on my YouTube channel here (with English subtitles) 

Towering Waves / 波の塔 / Nami no to (1960)

Obscure Japanese Film #221

 

Ineko Arima and Masahiko Tsugawa

 

Wakako (Miyuki Kuwano), the daughter of corporation director and ministerial candidate Tazawa (Hiroshi Nihonyanagi), meets Onogi (Masahiko Tsugawa) by chance while exploring an ancient dwelling in Kamisuwa in Nagano Prefecture. Although she’s attracted to him, they go their separate ways and she assumes they’ll never meet again. However, sometime later she runs into him while he’s in the company of Yoriko (Ineko Arima), but Wakako is unsure about the nature of their relationship.

 

Miyuki Kuwano

 

It turns out that Yoriko and Onogi have been having an affair since they met by chance while watching a Russian theatre troupe perform The Lower Depths. When Onogi noticed that Yoriko, who happened to be sitting next to him, looked like she was going to vomit during the performance, Onogi – perhaps happy for an excuse to  leave – escorted her out, and their relationship began. 

 

Koji Nanbara and Kyoko Kishida

 

Yoriko is unhappily married to Yuki (Koji Nanbara), a political fixer who’s having multiple affairs of his own, including one with Hideko (Kyoko ‘Woman in the Dunes’ Kishida). Given that Onogi is a junior prosecutor, it’s no surprise that he ends up investigating Yuki in relation to a corruption case, and it just so happens that Wakako’s father is also involved, thereby guaranteeing much hand-wringing and misery for everybody involved…

 

Hiroshi Nihonyanagi

 

This Shochiku production was based on a novel by Seicho Matsumoto published the same year and contains so many unlikely coincidences that it should have received some kind of booby prize for Most Contrived Plot. However, the book was a best-seller in Japan and was also adapted for TV no fewer than eight times. It was also said to have been responsible for making the Aokigahara Forest at the base of Mount Fuji a popular suicide spot. 

 

Ineko Arima

 

One expects better from director Noboru Nakamura, best known these days for The Shape of Night (1964), which also starred Miyuki Kuwano, although it’s the underrated Ineko Arima who’s the top-billed star here. Unfortunately, they’re both wasted in this, as are the rest of a mostly strong cast that also includes talented character actors Sadako Sawamura (as Wakako’s mother) and Ko Nishimura (as a slippery lawyer). There are some nice shots here and there, but overall this is easily the least impressive of the nine Nakamura films I’ve seen so far.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

Thanks to A.K.

Asu wa Nihon bare / 明日は日本晴れ (‘Tomorrow will be Fine Weather in Japan’, 1948)

Obscure Japanese Film #220

 

Michitaro Mizushima and Wakako Kunitomo

 

Like writer-director Hiroshi Shimizu’s earlier Mr Thank You (1936) and Dawn Chorus (1941), this film is set almost entirely in (or at times just outside) a bus and was shot on location. In this case, there are similarities with Maupassant’s famous story ‘Boule de Suif’, which had also served as the basis for Mizoguchi’s  Oyuki the Virgin (1935) and John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) and had appeared in Japanese translation by 1938 (if not earlier). Although most internet sources credit Shimizu with the screenplay, the opening titles of the film credit Shin’ichi Sekizawa. ‘Mingo’ at Filmarks.com states that Sekizawa used John Steinbeck’s 1947 novel The Wayward Bus as inspiration, but points out that the film has little in common with it (other than the basic idea of a bus full of random people having their journey interrupted). 

 

Wakako Kunitomo

 

In any case, like Maupassant, Shimizu and Sekizawa throw together a motley assortment of characters to represent a microcosm of society – specifically, post-war Japanese society in this instance. The tart with a heart is Waka (Wakako Kunitomo), who happens to be an old flame of bus driver Seiji (Michitaro Mizushima), and was forced to prostitute herself during the war to provide for her sick father. Her presence is resented by bus conductress Sachi (Sachiko Mitani), who of course is in love with Seiji, but if this all sounds like a terrible bunch of old clichés so far, don’t let that put you off. 

 

Shinobu Araki

 

More unexpectedly, a former general (Shinobu Araki) is portrayed very sympathetically as a man carrying a burden of sincere guilt and attempting to make amends. Also on the bus are a masseur who was blinded in the war (Shin’ichi Himori), a porter who lost a leg in it (well played by real-life amputee Gosho Shoichi, who also appeared in Shimizu’s Children of the Beehive and its first sequel) and Mie, a teenage girl who was orphaned by it. Intriguingly, the only character portrayed in an unsympathetic light is a fortune-teller (Seijiro Mayama), who is depicted as lazy and selfish. Why Shimizu and Sekizawa chose a character of this particular profession to be so negative about we can only speculate, but my theory is that he represents the empty promises of a better future that were made to the Japanese people by their militaristic government; virtually everyone on the bus is in some way a victim of the misplaced trust they put in authority. 

 

Shin'ichi Himori and Gosho Shoichi

 

Running just over an hour and lacking any big stars, this might be a modest little movie, but Shimizu makes excellent use of the restricted setting and mountain road locations, while the acting is remarkably strong all round. It’s also a thoughtful film with a positive, humanist message, but it wears it lightly and Shimizu was not one to beat you round the head with it. 

 

Seijiro Mayama

 

If it seems surprising that a film by Hiroshi Shimizu should be quite so obscure, that’s because it was considered lost until 2022, when it was finally found in a Shochiku warehouse (strange, as it was an independent production distributed by Toho) and screened for the first time in 74 years.

Watch on my YouTube channel with English subtitles here. 

Thanks to A.K.