Onna no saka / 女の坂 (‘A Woman’s Uphill Struggle’, 1960)

Obscure Japanese Film #190

 

Mariko Okada

 

After one of her uncles dies, Akie (Mariko Okada), a spirited young woman from Hakone, inherits his confectionary business in Kyoto. The company, Kagimura, is famous for an agar-based sweet called Kyo shigure, but the master confectioner, Taniji (Minpei Tomimoto), is the only one who knows how to prepare it properly and he’s in prison after accidentally killing an employee in a fight (which, oddly, nobody seems too bothered about). Akie originally intends to turn the premises into a dressmaking business instead, but when Tajiji is released, he makes Kyo shigure for her and she’s so impressed that she decides to revive her late uncle’s business. 

 

Nobuko Otowa

 

One day, Akie’s mother, Keiko (Nobuko Otowa), arrives with a companion, Yaoi (Keiji Sada). He’s a woodblock artist who has come to Kyoto to sketch some maiko (apprentice geisha), and Keiko has suggested that he stay with Akie instead of at an inn as she has plenty of space. Akie and Yaoi fall in love, but he’s already married with two children – and what exactly is the nature of his relationship with Keiko?

 

Keiji Sada

 

Like the previously-reviewed WeddingDay, Sweet Secret and Ai sureba koso, this was distributed by Shochiku but produced by Kindai Eiga Kyokai, an independent company formed in 1950 by director Kozaburo Yoshimura, screenwriter Kaneto Shindo and Taiji Tonoyama, the latter of whom appears here as one of Akie’s uncles. The story was cobbled together from two novels by Hisao Sawano (1912-92), both of which were published the same year the film was released. Sawano was best-known for his novel River of the Night, filmed by Yoshimura in 1956. 

 

 

For the first hour, the film is as light and insubstantial as a soufflé, and appears to be a simple rom-com made as a vehicle for Mariko Okada, who undergoes innumerable costume and hairstyle changes and whose charm the picture relies heavily upon. However, the tone eventually becomes more serious, even throwing in a suicide that seemed to me entirely superfluous. The message of the movie is very clear by the end, but it’s also a rather simple and conservative one, basically implying that one should not break the conventional rules of society as there are good reasons for them and the best thing to do if disappointed in love is repress your feelings and work, work, work! 

 

In my view, this is a minor effort from director Kozaburo Yoshimura, though it’s not without interest. For no good reason, it throws in Ganjiro Nakamura as an avant-garde potter, and there’s a surprisingly sensual moment when Akie sucks the pipe smoke from Yaoi’s mouth, while Toshiro Mayuzumi’s score is inventive and steers admirably clear of cliché. On the whole, though, Onna no saka is likely to be best enjoyed by fans of Mariko Okada. 

 

 

Bonus trivia: Kyo shigure appears to be a genuine dessert, although I have no idea whether it was created before or after the film existed, or even especially created for it. Those with a sweet tooth can find out more here (in Japanese). 

 

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

Yojohan monogatari: Shofu shino / 四畳半物語 娼婦しの (‘Tale of the Four and Half Mat Room: Prostitute Shino’, 1966)

Obscure Japanese Film #189

Takahiro Tamura and Yoshiko Mita

 

Shino (Yoshiko Mita) is an amateur geisha working under the name of O-Shige at a modest geisha house run by the money-loving Taneko (Michiyo Kogure), where she also lives. This means that she lacks the musical and dancing skills of a true geisha and simply sleeps with men for money – not because it’s the life she wanted to lead, but because she has taken it upon herself to pay off his father’s debts so that he can avoid prison. Shino is involved with Ryukichi (Shigeru Tsuyuguchi), who works informally as Taneko’s procurer, but he’s a lazy sponger, so she’s naturally not in love with him. 

 

Tamura, Mita and Tsuyuguchi

 

One day, Tadasu (Takahiro Tamura) visits the geisha house as a new client. Compared to most of her customers, he’s kind and gentle, and the two fall in love. However, being a former samurai reduced to pickpocketing, he can’t afford to buy her freedom. He resolves to go straight, but meanwhile Ryukichi becomes jealous of their relationship and begins plotting revenge… 

 

 

Like the previously-reviewed Cards Are My Life, this was one of just five films written and directed by Masashige Narusawa, who was more usually a screenwriter only. This one is an adaptation of a short story by Kafu Nagai first published in 1917 – a story which went on to have a controversial history when a second, pornographic version appeared and began to circulate on the black market. Nagai claimed that somebody else had added the explicit material without his knowledge, but many thought he had written it himself. After the later version was finally posthumously published in 1972, the magazine publisher responsible was taken to court and charged with obscenity. In any case, although Toei studios based their film on the earlier version, their choice of it as material was one of the tentative steps they were taking at the time to introduce more eroticism into their films as a means of competing with television, where such adult themes were not allowed. 

 

Yumiko Nogawa and Yoshiko Mita

 

As a film set in a single location, albeit with quite an elaborate exterior set as well as the interior one, this was also probably quite a cheap film to make, although it never looks it. Narusawa (who had studied under Mizoguchi) uses long takes with few close-ups and little cutting – a style I’ve always admired as I feel that it promotes naturalistic acting and makes the viewer feel less led by the nose than in the many films which frequently cut from one close-up to another. Cinematographer Juhei Suzuki – who shot 13 Assassins (1963) and Tales of the Inner Chambers (1968) – also deserves credit for his mobile camerawork, which enabled Narusawa to have only 39 cuts in the entire film.

 

 

On the other hand, the performances are adequate but not exceptional and the story is not terribly compelling, featuring as it does the types of characters and situations we’ve seen many times before. Narusawa retains the framing device used by Nagai (here featuring narration by a mostly-unseen Eijiro Tono), but I’m not sure it added much. The one really poor choice, though, is the easy-listening jazz score by Harumi Ibe, which just seems out of place in a Japanese period film, especially when the strummed guitar and accordion kick in, which lend a distinctly inappropriate French flavour to the proceedings!

Thanks to A.K. 

Ths Shogun and His Mistresses / 大奥(秘)物語 / Ooku maruhi monogatari (‘Secret Tales of the Inner Palace’, 1967)

Obscure Japanese Film #188

Masaya Takahashi

 

Three stories set in the vast and labyrinthine inner chambers of Edo Castle during the reign of the sixth shogun, Ienobu Tokugawa, who held the title from 1709-12. (Nearly 50 at the time, Tokugawa is portrayed here as a somewhat younger man by the 37-year-old Masaya Takahashi.) With the exception of the shogun, only women are permitted in the inner palace, where power plays and factional battles are the norm… 

 

Junko Fuji (left) and Reiko Hagi

 

In the first story, Fusa (Reiko Hagi) is brought to the castle at the request of concubine Okon (Junko Miyazono), who is in poor health and no longer able to bear children, in the hope that she will catch the eye of the shogun and have his child, thus weakening the position of the rival faction of women headed by Osume (Naoko Kubo). However, the shogun prefers the maid that Fusa brought with her instead, Omino (Junko Fuji). But when Osume gets pregnant first, Omino conspires with Okon’s senior attendant Matsushima (Isuzu Yamada) to get pregnant secretly by another man and claim that it’s the shogun’s child…

 

Kyoko Kishida (left) and Tomoko Ogawa

In the second story, the shogun has his eye on the innocent Shinonoi (Tomoko Ogawa) for his next bed partner, but she enters into a lesbian relationship with her mistress, Urao (Kyoko Kishida, in another lesbian role after Manji). But Shininoi has no choice but to obey when summoned to the shogun’s boudoir, which leads Urao to become dangerously jealous… 

 

Kaneko Iwasaki (lying) and Yoshiko Sakuma

 

In the third story, Ochise (Yoshiko Sakuma), a maid to senior lady-in-waiting Asukai (Kaneko Iwasaki), is about to finish her three years of indentured servitude, after which she plans to leave the castle and marry fabric dyer Chokichi (Kunio Murai). No prizes for guessing what happens when she too catches the eye of the lustful shogun…

 

Kunio Murai and Yoshiko Sakuma

 

This Toei production was based on an original screenplay with four contributors, none of whom are especially well-known. Its director, Sadao Nakajima, started out as an assistant director around 1959 at Toei’s Kyoto studios – which meant that most of the films he worked on early on had period settings – before directing his first film, Female Ninja Magic, in 1964. With this debut, he (together with Kyoto studio head Shigeru Okada) was responsible for introducing a new eroticism to the jidaigeki (costume drama) genre, something which is also in evidence in The Shogun and His Mistresses. Although these films were classified as ‘for adults only’ at the time, it should be noted that they were not pornographic, though other filmmakers would copy the template and add nudity and more explicit sex scenes in the years to come. As is often the case, Nakajima’s career was more schizophrenic than that of many directors in the West, and went on to encompass a wide range of material from yakuza flicks and sex documentaries to more highbrow (or at least middlebrow) period dramas. His Meiko Kaji vehicle Jeans Blues: No Future (1974) has a minor cult following, while his passion project The Seburi Story (1985) was nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Nakajima’s career as a feature film director ended in the late 1990s, but not quite – he can be seen playing the part of a director at Toei Kyoto studios (much like himself) in Uzumasa Limelight (2014) and returned to the director’s chair one last time at the age of 84 for Love’s Twisting Path (2018) before passing away in 2023. 

 

Isuzu Yamada and Junko Fuji

 

The most striking direction in this film occurs towards the end of the first story, when Omino arrives at the secluded house with the aim of being impregnated by a stranger and we hear the cries of the cicadas reaching fever pitch on the soundtrack before we get a POV shot from the bottom of a well down which the old lady who owns the house drops her bucket. No other scene is quite as memorable, but it’s a strong film overall, although not without its technical flaws – the wire attached to a fake firefly is visible at one point, while more depth of focus would have been preferable in some scenes, when the actors in the background are reduced to blurry blobs. 

 

Tomoko Ogawa and a blurry Kishida

 

But these niggles are more than made up for by the quality cast, excellent score by Hajime Kaburagi (which utilises traditional instruments to great effect) and the fact that, with all the colourful kimono on display, this is exactly the type of film that benefits most from colour cinematography. The film was a huge hit, which not only spawned two sequels directed by Nakajima, but created a whole new subgenre of female-oriented jidaigeki which came to be known in Japan as ‘Ooku’ (inner palace) stories and would include the previously reviewed Tales of the Inner Chambers. 

 

Isuzu Yamada

 

Bonus trivia:

Most of the young actresses featured in the film had never worn the type of kimono known as uchikake before, so jidaigeki veteran Isuzu Yamada (on loan from Toho) had to spend half a day training them how to walk without falling over. 

Director Tadashi Imai was originally attached to the project, but his reluctance to emphasise the erotic aspects of the story led to him being taken off it by studio head Shigeru Okada.

Thanks to A.K.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles) 

 

Kyoko Kishida