Waga ai / わが愛 (‘My Love’, 1960)

Obscure Japanese Film #232

 

Ineko Arima

Niizu (Shin Saburi) is a newspaper reporter who drops dead in the street after a night of heavy drinking. At the wake, his wife (Yatsuko Tan’ami) is surprised when a mysterious guest turns up to pay her respects. This is Kiyo (Ineko Arima), a young woman who has been Niizu’s mistress for the past three years while he was in the mountains working on a labour of love, a book entitled A History of the Chinese Salt Industry (sounds riveting!). 

 

Yatsuko Tan'ami

In flashback, we learn how Kiyo first met Niizu during the war when she was a teenager and was living with her aunt and a geisha named Hideya (Nobuko Otowa), who Niizu regularly slept with. One night, Niizu, Hideya and Kiyo were all sharing the same room when Niizu made love to Hideya while Kiyo kept her head turned away and covered her ears. When they were finished, Hideya went to use the bathroom and Niizu took the opportunity to say to Kiyo, ‘When you grow up, let’s have an affair.’ Instead of being creeped out by this, she fell in love with him and started keeping a scrapbook of his newspaper articles. When they met again a few years later, it was she who initiated their affair...

 

Arima

This Shochiku production involved many of the same talents that made the previously-reviewed film The Hunting Rifle (1961). Like that later picture, it was directed by Heinosuke Gosho, shot by Haruo Takeno, scripted by Toshio Yasumi based on a Yasushi Inoue story, scored by Yasushi Akutagawa and featured Shin Saburi and Nobuko Otowa. It’s safe to assume, then, that Waga ai was a commercial success as Shochiku would not have green-lit The Hunting Rifle otherwise. However, it suffers from several of the same fatal flaws as that later picture and I doubt it would be well-received by audiences today, which is perhaps why the only way to see it is via an old VHS transfer.

Shin Saburi

Nobel Prize nominee Yasushi Inoue was a very talented writer but, like many Japanese authors of the 20th-century, he was extremely prolific and divided his efforts between writing highbrow literary material and more commercial works to pay the rent, so that the quality of his work varied greatly. Without an English translation, I’m not sure how the 1952 story ‘Tsuya no kyaku’ (‘A Guest at the Wake’) which provided the basis for this film sits on that spectrum, but, for me anyway, the story is the fundamental problem here, consisting as it mostly does of  sentimental claptrap meets male wish-fulfilment. Indeed, it’s a complete mystery why Kiyo would fall in love with a craggy-faced, middle-aged, married drunk old enough to be her father and basically insist on becoming his uncomplaining slave; feminism must have been a completely alien concept to the people responsible for this film. Perhaps if Niizu had been played by someone more charismatic than Saburi, it might have helped a little, but probably not much – the picture is also sabotaged by the cloying clichés which make up Yasushi Akutagawa’s dreadful score.