Obscure Japanese Film #268
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| Kiyoshi Atsumi |
1944. Private Nishiyama (Kiyoshi Atsumi) comes down with a fever while serving in China. He’s sent to hospital to recover, but develops pleurisy, making him unfit for service. When the rest of his platoon hear he’s to be sent home, they all write letters to their loved ones and give them to Nishiyama to deliver. However, Nishiyama has to wait months before he can get a passage on a ship back to Japan, by which time the rest of his platoon have been wiped out. He decides that the least he can do is deliver the letters, but this proves to be no easy task in the turmoil of Japan and he spends the next 8 years travelling the length and breadth of the country trying to track down the recipients…
After reading the 1960 novel Isho haitatsunin (‘Death Letter Delivery Man’) by Red Angel author Yorichika Arima (1918-80), actor Kiyoshi Atsumi – a very popular star thanks to his role as Tora-san in the long-running series – set up his own production company to turn it into this film in collaboration with Shochiku. Naoyuki Suzuki, the award-winning screenwriter of Tomu Uchida’s A Fugitive from the Past (1965) and a specialist in literary adaptation, came on board to write the script, while Tadashi Imai – always passionate about material with an anti-war theme – was hired to direct, shooting on many different locations across Japan.
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| Chieko Baisho |
Aside from the Chieko Baisho segment, which feels rather awkwardly shoehorned in (perhaps to give Atsumi’s regular Tora-san co-star something to do), the episodic structure of the film works quite well, keeping tedium at bay and avoiding much in the way of repetition, while Atsumi’s completely straight, low-key performance is a definite asset and folk singer Hitoshi Komuro’s solo guitar score generally hits the right notes. Given the nature of the story, the film could have been unbearably mawkish, but as we see Atsumi deliver the letters to sundry familiar character actors, there’s not always the big emotional scene one might expect – in some cases the recipients have become quite indifferent by the time he gets round to them. The letters themselves are not always kind either, and one hapless father receives a hate-filled missive from his dead son saying that it should be the old who die, not the young. In other cases, Nishiyama finds himself stirring up trouble rather than bringing closure to the bereaved, and all the while his commitment to his quest means that he misses out on various opportunities in his own life. Is he really helping people or has he just made a rod for his own back due to a bad case of survivor’s guilt? Indeed, the real strength of this film is its questioning nature – there’s no sense of certainty that Nishiyama has done the right thing, and its quite rightly left for him – and us – to ponder.
DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)
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