Yume miru hitobito / 夢見る人々 (‘People Who Dream’, 1953)

 

Yoko Katsuragi

 

 

 

Shinya (Masao Wakahara) is an architect who returns home from ‘the South’ for the first time since the war to find that his fiancée, writer Yuriko (Mieko Takamine) has married someone else, his family home has been destroyed in an air raid and his parents killed, and his half-sister and her husband have spent his inheritance. Needless to say, he’s not a happy bunny. However, his father’s friend’s granddaughter, Sumiko (Yoko Katsuragi), still loves him even though he only thinks of her as a younger sister…

 

Masao Wakahara

 

This Shochiku production was based on a 1952 newspaper-serial novel by Nobuko Yoshiya, the Christian-lesbian writer who also supplied the source material for Flower-Picking Diary (1939). In this case there’s no sign of Christianity nor lesbian love, and the two more unconventional female characters – company president Fujie (Sadako Sawamura) and her tomboyish daughter Ioko (Kyoko Kami) – seem to be present mainly to serve as comedy relief. Speaking of comedy, one amusing moment which feels unintentional comes at the beginning when a blind war veteran solicits donations on a train and seems able to tell when people are holding out money to him even when they say nothing. 

 

Kyoko Kami, Wakahara and Sadako Sawamura

 

The awkward subject of the war is always present in the background of the story, but only occasionally comes to the fore, and it’s entirely unclear what Shinya has been doing for the seven or eight years since the conflict ended. We know only that he has testified on behalf of a former sergeant, Arakawa (Jun Tatara), to save him from being sentenced as a war criminal. Many of the characters are portrayed as victims of the war in various ways, and there’s never really an acknowledgement of any guilt – the closest we get is a scene in which Shinya’s father’s friend, Shibata (Eijiro Yanagi), finally forgives his son, who had incurred his wrath during the war by daring to express the opinion that Japan would lose. 

 

Mieko Takamine

 

In terms of the cast, the forgotten Masao Wakahara as Shinya – described at one point as looking ‘like (Charles) Boyer’ – seems to have been quite a big star at the time, but his performance here is on the wooden side, which is perhaps why his career petered out early once his Boyer-esque looks began to fade. Mieko Takamine does her best with an underwritten role, but it’s Yoko Katsuragi as Sumiko who really becomes the heart of the film. She was an underrated actor whose girlish looks often prevented her from getting the more interesting dramatic parts, but it’s not for nothing that she was a favourite of Keisuke Kinoshita as well as this film’s director, Noboru Nakamura, for whom she made six pictures. One of these was Nakamura’s previous film, Natsuko’s Adventure in Hokkaido, in which she had also co-starred with Masao Wakahara. Regarding Nakamura, his direction is certainly highly competent, but his best work was yet to come in films such as Koto (1963), The Shape of Night (1964) and The Kii River (1966). 

 

 

Thanks to A.K.