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| Mieko Takamine |
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| Toyohiko Fujikawa |
Tatsunoguchi (Toyohiko Fujikawa) is a recluse who lives in a hut
on a snowy mountain and shoots rabbits for his dinner. One day when out
hunting, he notices a man (Haruo Tanaka) lying in the snow. The man is still
alive and asks Tatsunoguchi to leave him there, but he takes him to his hut and
nurses him back to health. It emerges that the man had wanted to die due to a love
affair that went wrong, so Tatsunoguchi begins to tell him his own story of how
he ended up living in such isolation.
As a student, every Friday Tatsunoguchi had passed a young woman,
Akiko (Mieko Takamine), on his way to university and gradually fallen in love
with her. However, the encounters suddenly ceased and, when he did finally run
into her again three years later, she had already acquired both a husband and an infant son, although her marriage was a failure. Akiko reciprocated Tatsunoguchi’s feelings,
so their love continued to grow, resulting in an on-and-off relationship that
could only ever be platonic dragging on for years and leading to Tatsunoguchi's eventual
self-exile to the mountain…
This Shintoho production was based on a 1938 novel of the same
name by Yoichi Nakagawa (1897-1994) and is the only film adaptation of his work
to date. According to Japanese Wikipedia, the novel ‘garnered
high praise in Western Europe as a masterpiece of romantic literature, comparable to Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther. After the war, it was translated
into six languages, including English, French, German, and Chinese, and was
highly praised by Albert Camus.’ We also learn that
Nakagawa got the story upon which he based his book from a masseur named
Kozaburo Fujiki, who greatly resented the fact that Nakagawa refused to give
him any credit. A feud between the two men lasted for decades, culminating in
the self-publication of a 1976 book by Fujiki with the splendid title The Great Achievement of Shattering the Masterpiece Ten no yugao - A Guide for Reading Novels Carefully and
with Taste.
This literary feud is
arguably more entertaining than the film itself, which is an extremely maudlin
piece of work, an aspect emphasized by the keening violin featured
excessively throughout composer Fumio
Hayasaka’s score. Director Yutaka Abe had already made around 60 films at this
point, and went on to make The Makioka
Sisters (1950) and Confession
(1956). He certainly does a competent job, but the material is so old-fashioned
and sentimental that it has dated very badly indeed and is at times even
laughable today - the animated firework near the end being an especially corny touch.
Leading lady Mieko
Takamine will be familiar to many readers, but who, you may well wonder, was her
co-star, Toyohiko Fujikawa? Well, he seems to have
been born in 1924 and has just two other credits, both in Daiei movies from
1950. According to @Shimo_x2
on x.com, he ‘was not originally an actor but a young president of a
construction company. It seems he also invested in this film, making his
appearance in the movie something of a hobby.’ In any case, he gives a slightly
stolid but perfectly acceptable performance and certainly looks the part of a
leading man.
This film appears to lack an official English title, but is sometimes
listed as ‘The Beauty of the Evening Sky.’ However, the first kanji can be
interpreted as ‘heaven’ as well as ‘sky’ and, while夕on its own means ‘evening’ and 顔 can mean ‘face’ (but not ‘beauty’), the final two
together mean ‘moonflower’, and there is in fact a scene in which Mieko
Takamine admires a moonflower (ipomoea
alba), which bloom at dusk and last only for one night. The English
translation of the book by Akira Ota published by The Hokuseido Press in 1949
is also titled A Moonflower in Heaven.
The cover art is by Jean Cocteau.
Watched with dodgy subtitles.
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