Inoru hito / 祈るひと (1959)

Obscure Japanese Film #242

Izumi Ashikawa

Tsutomu Shimomoto

Yumeji Tsukioka

Yuji Odaka

Akiko (Izumi Ashikawa) is the only child of her father (Tsutomu Shimomoto) and mother (Yumeji Tsukioka) and is approaching marriageable age. She has always regarded her academic father as cold and remote and seen little evidence of love between her parents, so she’s keen not to make a mistake in choosing her own husband. Pressured into going on an arranged date with the boorish Hasuike (Yuji Odaka), she’s far from impressed when he takes her to the cinema to see a grade-Z western, but as she begins seriously thinking about her options for the future, she finds herself looking back at the past...

This Nikkatsu production was based on a novel of the same name by Torahiko Tamiya (1911-88) originally published as a serial in a women’s magazine the year before. His work is unavailable in English, but also provided the basis for the previously-reviewed Love is Lost (1956) and Stepbrothers (1957) among other films. Featuring some voiceover narration from Ashikawa’s character, the film unfolds in a sometimes confusing flashback structure and wanders off into some subplots of dubious relevance. However, despite these flaws, the film turns out to be a surprisingly serious and thoughtful story of a young woman finding out who her parents really are – and, by extension, who she really is. It’s also very nicely-handled by director Eisuke Takizawa, who elicits good performances all round and also made the recently-reviewed picture The Samurai of Edo.

On a cultural note, there’s a scene in which Akiko visits a bar popular with students where they sing Russian folk songs in Japanese and all seem to know the words, an odd phenomenon also featured in the 1956 film Gyakukosen. Incidentally, although there’s a close-up of the poster for the film Hasuike takes Akiko to at the cinema, I was unable to identify it despite translating the text – was it such a low-budget piece of crap that it’s vanished without a trace or was it a fictional film that never existed in the first place?

Inoru hito is sometimes translated (incorrectly in my view) as ‘The Praying Man’, which I don’t think was ever an official English title. While the standard translation of inoru is ‘pray’, it can also be interpreted less literally as ‘hope’, while hito is genderless and can be read as ‘person’ / ‘people’ / ‘human(s)’, etc. As there's a scene in which Akiko is shown in a praying posture, it seems likely that the title refers to her, and there’s certainly no male character it could relate to. A better English title, then, might be ‘One Who Prays.’

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Film at Amazon Prime Video Japan

The Samurai of Edo / 江戸一寸の虫 / Edo issun no mushi (1955)

Obscure Japanese Film #241

Rentaro Mikuni

In the last years of the Tokugawa shogunate, six people are sentenced to exile for attacking two arrogant British VIPs who had broken etiquette by going through a torii on horseback, beaten a Japanese man who tried to stop them, and entered a shrine without removing their boots. Government official Aoki (Rentaro Mikuni) objects to the sentence and resigns in protest, choosing to become a ronin rather than serve a regime he does not believe in. He shacks up with former prostitute O-Tatsu (Michiyo Aratama) and spends his days lying around drinking sake until one day he’s approached by the Shinchogumi, who want to expel the foreigners from Japan and are seeking his assistance. Reluctant at first, he eventually decides to help and, in the process, meets rich man’s daughter Tae (Michiko Saga), with whom he falls in love…

Michiyo Aratama and Mikuni

This 123-minute period drama is one of the more ambitious productions to have come out of Nikkatsu studios. Adapted by regular Kurosawa collaborator Ryuzo Kikushima together with the obscure Michio Otsuke (whose only other credit appears to be a 1956 movie about kamikaze pilots*), it was based on an untranslated novel of the same name by Minoru Nakano (1901-73) serialised in the Sunday Mainichi magazine in 1955, the same year the film was produced. Nakano does not seem to have been an especially well-regarded writer, although Mikio Naruse made two films in 1935 based on his work, The Actress and The Poet and Wife! Be Like a Rose! His Japanese Wikipedia page states that he co-founded an organisation named the Cultural Patriotic Association during the war years and fell out with his friend the comic actor Roppa Furukawa when the latter criticised Nakano’s support for the war.

Michiyo Aratama

The obvious anti-foreigner sentiment in The Samurai of Edo would have prevented such a film being made during the years of American occupation (which ended in 1952). Although the behaviour of the British men at the beginning of the film is outrageous, it’s an entirely fictional incident as far as I’m aware. The film’s xenophobia, which waxes nostalgic for the days when all the gaijin were kept out of Japan, may well be one reason why it’s not better known.

In regard to the main cast, there’s a strong performance from Rentaro Mikuni in the leading role even if – as was typical for him – he’s perhaps a little too unsympathetic to invest in emotionally. At one point, Mikuni gets to beat the crap out of a mob of samurai single-handed, something which he pulls off very well. Given his famous pursuit of realism – also evident in the scene in which he spits blood out of his mouth – one can only feel sorry for the actors playing his opponents. The female stars fare less well. Michiyo Aratama, who’s probably best-remembered these days for her role in The Human Condition (1959-61), gives a better performance than her doormat role deserves, while Michiko Saga (daughter of Isuzu Yamada and star of The Mad Fox) looks pretty enough but is defeated by her thinly-written part.

Photographed by Kazue Nagatsuka, a veteran from the silent days who later became known for his work with Seijun Suzuki, it’s a good-looking and well-made film which also has a decent score by Yojimbo composer Masaru Sato, even if there’s a little too much of it. There’s also a little too much of the film itself in my view, as I can’t say that the two-hours exactly flew by… Still, if you’re a fan of jidaigeki of this period, I would say check it out if you get the chance as there are certainly some things to enjoy here.

This is actually the first film I’ve seen by director Eisuke Takizawa, who had been an actor in the silent days before turning to directing in 1928; he subsequently made 84 films before passing away in 1965. His only brush with international recognition came with a Golden Bear nomination at the 1958 Berlin Film Festival for Byakuya no yojo (aka The Temptress and The Monk). Anyway, based on the evidence of The Samurai of Edo, he may be worth investigating further as its flaws are mostly in the material itself rather than the handling of it, which is more than merely competent throughout.

The original title references the Japanese saying 一寸の虫にも五分の魂 (issun no mushi ni mo gobu no tamashii), which can be translated as ‘even little worms have souls’, ‘a tiny insect also has a spirit’, etc, or – more literally – ‘even an insect measuring 1 sun (about 3 cm) has a soul (heart) measuring half that size, or 5 bu (about 1.5 cm)’ [Google AI Overview etymology] or ‘it is said that even an insect less than an inch in size has a soul equal to half its body length’ [imidas.jp translated by Google]. 

* Nake, Nihon kokumin: Saigo no sentoki (‘Cry, Japanese People: The Last Fighter Plane’)

Film at Amazon Prime Japan (no English subtitles)

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Kaze no aru michi / 風のある道 / (‘Windy Road’, 1959)

Obscure Japanese Film #240

Izumi Ashikawa

Naoko (Izumi Ashikawa) is a young woman still living at home with her father (Shiro Osaka), mother (Toshiko Yamane) and younger sister Chikako (Mayumi Shimizu). Her older sister Keiko (Mie Kitahara) has just got married, and Naoko is expected to marry wealthy ikebana master Kosuke (Yuji Odaka). However, when she meets Kobayashi (Ryoji Hayama), a teacher of special needs children, she finds herself drawn to him despite the fact that he doesn’t have a pot to piss in…

Ashikawa, Yuji Odaka and Mayumi Shimizu

Ryoji Hayama

Based on an untranslated novel of the same name by future Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata which was published as a serial in a women’s magazine during 1957-58, this Nikkatsu production is the sort of material more usually associated with Daiei Studios. Although the plot hinges on one massively-unlikely coincidence, it’s not as contrived as some that I’ve seen and the film is generally a well-made and enjoyable watch. Having said that, it’s actually the parents who turn out to be the most well-rounded and interesting characters here, which I doubt was the original intention.

Toshiko Yamane and Shiro Osaka

Masayoshi Ikeda’s music is a slightly eccentric mish-mash of styles, but quite effective on the whole, and the rather cheeky audience-teasing climax even features a passage that sounds similar to John Williams’s famous cello piece from Jaws. Another memorable use of music in the film is the counterpoint provided by the upbeat tune which plays on the jukebox while Kosuke is getting Naoko drunk so that he can have his wicked way with her.

Mie Kitahara

It’s surprising to see Mie Kitahara in such a small role here as she was, I think, Nikkatsu’s top female star at the time, but it’s an example of how Japanese studios back then tried to squeeze as much out of the stars they had under contract as possible – Kitahara featured in seven films released in 1959, which was actually taking it easy in comparison to some. This film is, instead, a vehicle for Izumi Ashikawa, who was touted as Japan’s answer to Audrey Hepburn and was a decent if unremarkable actor. She married fellow actor Tatsuya Fuji in 1968 and promptly retired but is still with us at the time of writing at the age of 90.

Ashikawa and Yamane

The director of this film, Katsumi Nishikawa (1918-2010), was especially well-known for films based around female stars, the previously-reviewed A Portrait of Shunkin (1976) being a good example. He worked in a wide variety of genres but never quite made the top rank, although he’s one of the few directors to have his own museum (located in Tottori Prefecture – click here for further information).

The Maid’s Kid / 女中ッ子 / Jochukko (1955)

Obscure Japanese Film #239

Sachiko Hidari

This Nikkatsu production stars Sachiko Hidari – best-known for The Insect Woman (1963) and A Fugitive from the Past (1965) – as Hatsu, a young woman from snowy Akita Prefecture who goes to Tokyo to work as a maid in the house of middle-class couple Kyohei (Shuji Sano) and his wife Umeko (Yukiko Todoroki). 

Shuji Sano

Yukiko Todoroki

At first, Hatsu seems like the stereotypically naive country bumpkin, but she’s also a hard-working, cheerful bundle of energy who turns out, in many ways, to be the perfect maid. The family also includes two young boys who have been left to their own devices by their parents and become totally out of control. When Hatsu develops a strong bond with the younger child, Katsumi (Teruo Iba), he begins to be mocked by his classmates, who call him the ‘son of a maid’...

Teruo Iba

Based on a just-published novel by female author Yuki Shigeko (1900-69), The Maid’s Kid was directed by the underrated Tomotaka Tasaka, who also co-wrote the screenplay together with Katsuya Susaki. Tasaka had a tendency to make long films, and this one is no exception at 142 minutes, but he also had a rare gift for never making them feel overlong. In fact, his readiness to linger on a shot feels quite modern today in the wake of the Slow Cinema movement. He also makes excellent use of real locations and elicits fine performances from all involved – most notably Hidari, of course; it’s difficult to imagine any other actor pulling this role off as well as she does here. It’s the sort of drama that stands or falls on its main performance, and Hatsu could easily have ended up seeming too unconvincingly saintly if played by a less skilled or less suitable star. Other familiar faces among the supporting cast include Chieko Higashiyama, Tanie Kitabayashi and, in one of his earliest film appearances, a pre-cheeky Joe Shishido.

Perhaps the main point of the story is that a person’s social status bears no correlation to their worth as a person; Kyohei and Umeko say they don’t believe in titles like ‘master’ and ‘mistress’, but they act with oblivious selfishness and disregard for Hatsu, at times treating her more like a slave than a servant so that she barely gets a moment’s rest. At one point, she’s even rebuked for not understanding that some people are more important than others. However, another strength of the film is that, although the couple’s hypocrisy is quite evident to the viewer, they are not reduced to one-dimensional villains and are portrayed as basically decent, if misguided, people.

Tasaka’s avoidance of melodrama and intelligent handling of the material is complemented by the work of his regular cinematographer Saburo Isayama as well as by Akira ‘Godzilla’ Ifukube’s fine score. The film was ranked 7^th best of its year by Kinema Junpo magazine, but is less well-known than it deserves today. It was remade in 1976 as Dongurikko by director Katsumi Nishikawa in a version starring the singer Masako Mori.

Thanks to A.K.

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