When the Cookie Crumbles / 砂糖菓子が壊れるとき / Satogashi ga kowareru toki (1967)

Obscure Japanese Film #262

Ayako Wakao

with Takashi Shimura

Kyoko (Ayako Wakao) is a young model who allows herself to be photographed nude in order to pay her mentally-ill mother’s hospital bills. She subsequently attracts the attention of elderly film studio head Kudo (Takashi Shimura), who offers her a movie deal. He also wants to marry her, but to her he’s just a father figure; nevertheless, she’s devastated when he dies. She then goes on to have relationships with a young reporter (Masahiko Tsugawa) and a university professor (Eiji Funakoshi) before marrying a baseball star (Jun Fujimaki), and later a bespectacled, pipe-smoking writer (Takahiro Tamura). Kyoko’s relationships never seem to work out as each of the men is smitten by her looks rather than the person within. Failing to find the emotional fulfilment she craves, she becomes increasingly unstable and develops an addiction to sleeping pills…

Masahiko Tsugawa

Eiji Funakoshi

Jun Fujimaki

Takahiro Tamura

This Daiei production was based on a 1966 novel by Ayako Sono (1931-2025), a right-wing Christian whose work also provided the basis for Masahiro Shinoda’s Epitaph to My Love (1961) and a few other films; it was adapted by Sugako Hashida (1925-2021), probably Japan’s most successful female writer of TV drama. The story was based on the life of Marilyn Monroe, and it’s not hard to figure out which characters are Japanese versions of Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller. Admittedly, the idea of Ayako Wakao in effect playing Marilyn Monroe is intriguing if only for its weirdness, but the film proves to be less interesting than it sounds and Wakao’s breathy performance is not one of her best. The problem is that she’s required to be extremely sensitive and over-emotional in practically every scene, which soon becomes tiresome, while there’s too much repetition in seeing her stumble from one unsuitable relationship to another, rendering it largely ineffective as drama. It does, however, provide plenty of opportunities to display the star in an endless array of outfits, not to mention sporting every variety of haircut you can imagine bar an actual skinhead or peroxide job. In other words, it’s another of Daiei’s Ayako Wakao fashion parade / costume-change pics, which seemed to be a bankable formula for them at the time.

It may seem surprising that this film was directed by the leftist Tadashi Imai, but he’d been struggling to find film work and stuck in the doldrums of television for the previous couple of years. When Joan Mellen – who had published a feminist biography of Monroe in 1973 – questioned him about it in her interview with Imai for her 1975 book Voices from the Japanese Cinema, he had this to say:

“I was asked to make the film by Daiei. ...I am one of those Japanese directors who cannot afford to make only the films I want to make, so I accepted. In some respects I enjoyed making it, but it is not a film I really want to talk about. … Directors in Japan are not very wealthy and often they have to do films they don’t especially like.”

Indeed, there was nothing I could see that marked the film out as a Tadashi Imai picture, but at least it enabled him to resume his cinema career even if his best work was behind him.

A note on the title:

Although When the Cookie Crumbles seems to be the official English title, the English expression is more usually 'that's the way the cookie crumbles', which is used in a similar way to 'c'est la vie' when you have to accept the inevitable. The Japanese title translates more literally as 'the moment the sugar candy breaks', which I think does not mean quite the same thing, and it’s pretty clear that the ‘sugar candy’ in question is Kyoko / Marilyn.

Watched without subtitles.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

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Anchin to Kiyohime / 安珍と清姫 / (‘Anchin and Kiyohime’, 1960)

Obscure Japanese Film #261

Ayako Wakao

The Heian era. Kiyohime (Ayako Wakao) is the feisty daughter of a village headman. Out hunting a fox one day, she fires an arrow at it, but hits a handsome young monk, Anchin (Raizo Ichikawa), in the arm (presumably there was no cappuccino around in those days for her to spill on him). Apparently confusing the first aid procedure for arrow wounds with the one for snake bites, she sucks his wound and spits out the blood, then bandages it and invites him back to her place to recuperate. As a monk who takes his religion seriously, he spurns her company because he wants to avoid temptation; she takes this as an insult. To get revenge – in a literally ‘steamy’ scene made much of at the time – she follows him to a hot spring in which he’s taking a moonlit bath, strips off and makes as if to seduce him, then laughs in his face when he begins to give in to temptation. He runs off and confesses to a priest who advises him to go and stand under a waterfall until he stops thinking about her (is this the origin of the cold shower treatment?). Meanwhile, she decides that she really loves him after all, but of course everyone else in the movie is determined to keep them apart…

Raizo Ichikawa

This Daiei production was based on a legend about the ancient Buddhist temple of Dojoji in Wakayama Prefecture. The legend had been the basis for numerous Noh, kabuki and bunraku (puppet) plays, but the sole writing credit here goes to screenwriter Hideo Oguni, a frequent Kurosawa collaborator. Unfortunately, in this case he came up with such a corny load of old tosh that the only reasonable way to atone for it would have been to commit hara kiri. Even at a mere 85-minutes, it feels incredibly drawn-out and plods on predictably at a glacial pace before finally reaching its climax, in which either Ayako Wakao turned into a giant snake, or I had begun to hallucinate as a result of brain-rot brought on by the previous 75 minutes, I’m really not sure which.

This was the tenth of 19 films in which Ayako Wakao and Raizo Ichikawa – two of Daiei’s biggest stars – appeared together, and they were rumoured to have been lovers at the time. I don’t know about that, but they were certainly very flirty in a joint magazine interview quoted at this Japanese Raizo Ichikawa fan blog. In any case, one can only pity them here for being lumbered with such unconvincing characters and risible dialogue. Director Koji Shima throws in a couple of his trademark storms and makes it all look quite pretty in an artificial sort of way, but this one’s a lost cause, although – not too surprisingly, perhaps – it was a box office success at the time. All in all, it’s the sort of story that works much better in Kihachiro Kawamoto’s 20-minute puppet film version of 1976 entitled Dojoji, which you can watch on YouTube.

Incidentally, anyone visiting Wakayama Prefecture can visit Dojoji, where there is a picture scroll depicting the story of Anchin and Kiyohime, and request a monk to tell the story (with the option of English, I think). For more info, visit Dojoji’s English web page.

At the time of writing, masochists can watch the film with English subs on YouTube. 

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Their Legacy / 家庭の事情 / Katei no jijo (‘Family Circumstances’, 1962)

Obscure Japanese Film #243

So Yamamura

Junko Kano and Ayako Wakao

Utako Shibusawa and Mako Sanjo

Upon retiring, widower Misawa (So Yamamura) decides to give each of his four unmarried daughters 500,000 yen to do with as they wish. The eldest, Kazuyo (Ayako Wakao), is regretting having an affair with a married colleague (Jun Negami) and decides to quit and open a café. Second daughter Fumiko (Junko Kano) gives hers to her boyfriend (Jiro Tamiya) so that he can pay off his debts. Third daughter Miyako (Mako Sanjo) only reluctantly accepts the money and just wants to stay at home with her father. The youngest, Shinako (Utako Shibusawa), works in an accounts department and decides to become a moneylender while fighting off the attentions of a persistent co-worker (Hiroshi Kawaguchi). Meanwhile, Misawa has a relationship with gold-digger Tamako (Murasaki Fujima), although a matchmaker (Haruko Sugimura) is trying to interest him in getting married again to Yasuko (Mayumi Kurata)*…

This Daiei production was based on a magazine serial by Keita Genji (1912-85), whose works were also the source for the previously-reviewed Daiei movies The Most Valuable Wife (1959) and Kirai Kirai Kirai (1960), both of which offered similar fare. Like those, this is a light comedy, a genre not typically associated with director Kozaburo Yoshimura or his screenwriter Kaneto Shindo (although it was by no means the only occasion on which either filmmaker dabbled in comedy). Presumably, then, this was a studio assignment, but it’s well-made and entertaining, and I wasn’t left feeling they had just phoned it in.

Although Ayako Wakao – curiously, the only one who seems to be playing it totally straight – is top-billed, in this case she’s really just part of an impressive ensemble cast which also features Eiji Funakoshi, Keizo Kawasaki and Eitaro Ozawa, most of whom make the most out of the material. If you enjoy Daiei films of this era and like these actors, Katei no jijo is an enjoyable time-passer, with Sei Ikeno’s score helping to heighten the comic effect, although the black-and-white rush hour prologue and epilogue, while fun, seem a bit random to me as I couldn’t really see how they related to the main story. (I could also have done without the close-up of Eitaro Ozawa eating...)

Jiro Tamiya

Incidentally, in one impressive scene, real-life karate black-belt Jiro Tamiya gets properly thrown by another real-life karate black belt, Jun Fujimaki, who also appears here playing a love rival to Tamiya’s character.

Keita Genji’s story was remade by Katsumi Nishikawa for Nikkatsu in 1965 as Yottsu no koi no monogatari (‘Four Love Stories’).

*Although both IMDb and eiga.com state that Tamako is played by Yasuko Nakada and Yasuko is played by Murasaki Fujima, this is incorrect.

Murasaki Fujima as Tamako

Mayumi Kurata as Yasuko

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

Thanks to Coralsundy for the English subtitles, which can be found here.

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I’ll Cry Alone / 帯をとく夏子 / Obi o toku Natsuko (‘Natsuko Unties Her Obi’, 1965)

Obscure Japanese Film #235

Ayako Wakao

Eiji Funakoshi

Natsuko (Ayako Wakao) is a former hot spring geisha who has become the exclusive mistress of company president Sakuma (Eiji Funakoshi in unconvincing old man make-up). He’s under pressure from his sister Kanako (Yumeji Tsukioka) to marry Taeko (Noriko Hodaka) as it will be good for the company and, although he wants to continue seeing Natsuko on the side, Natsuko is not happy with the idea.

Yumeji Tsukioka

Kyoko Enami

A chance of a different future seems to present itself when Sakuma begins a liaison with unlikely window cleaner Sumiko (Kyoko Enami) and Natsuko runs into (literally) the teacher she had a crush on at school, Kenji (Mikijiro Hira). However, he’s now reduced to working as a garage mechanic and unable to keep her in the luxury to which she has become accustomed…

Mikijiro Hira

This Daiei production was based on the ‘Natsuko’ series of stories by Seiichi Funahashi* serialised in the literary magazine Shincho between 1952 and 1961. The first batch was published as a novel entitled Geisha Konatsu in 1952, and Toho had produced two films about Natsuko using that title in 1954/55 with Mariko Okada starring. Funahashi was also the author of the source material for Story of a Blind Woman (also 1965) and the two versions of Portrait of Madame Yuki (1950 and 1968). Unfortunately, as I felt was the case for those stories, this is another that’s unlikely to resonate much with viewers these days.

Although the film has a clear message in favour of female independence, coming as it does after we have watched Natsuko fawning over two undeserving men for most of the film, it feels tacked on almost as an afterthought. Considering the deeply-ingrained sexism of the society that Natsuko is forced to inhabit, a more hard-hitting approach would have been preferable, but the tone is fairly light here, with some scenes simply played for laughs (of which, admittedly, there are a couple). This half-heartedness is probably because the real reason for the film’s existence was simply to provide another vehicle for Ayako Wakao; at the time, much was made of the fact that she wore only kimono in this picture – but, of course, a different kimono for each scene.

Directed by veteran Shigeo Tanaka with the same competent indifference he brought to the earlier Wakao costume-change flick Tokyo Onigiri Girl (1961).

*Sometimes listed as Seiichi Funabashi, but I think that’s incorrect.

DVD at Amazon Japan

Thanks to A.K. and to Coralsundy for the English subtitles

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The Ladder of Success / 夜の素顔 / Yoru no sagao (‘The True Face of the Night’, 1958)

Obscure Japanese Film #170

Machiko Kyo in the moonlight scene

 

1944. Akemi (Machiko Kyo) is a traditional dancer entertaining the troops at a military base in the south of Japan. When an air raid interrupts the performance, she’s escorted to safety by Wakabayashi, a navy pilot (Jun Negami) with whom she ends up having a fling. Three years later, made homeless by the war, Akemi arrives in Tokyo having travelled there in the hope of becoming a disciple to famed dance teacher Shino (Chikako Hosokawa). When her request is denied, she breaks down in tears before leaving, but Shino’s patron, Inokura (Eijiro Yanagi),  who was listening in the room next door, feels sympathetic and urges Shino to change her mind, which she does. The maid is sent to fetch Akemi back and finds her waiting with an expectant smile on her face knowing that her crocodile tears would do the trick…

Chikako Hosokawa

 

1953. Akemi has helped Shino build up a successful dance school with over 50 students. However, after she encourages her mentor to star in a new show, Shino is mocked by the press for being too old. To add insult to injury, Akemi seduces Inokura and Shino discovers them in flagrante. As a result, Akemi is expelled, but – with the support of Inokura – goes on to start her own dance school, which is soon a great success. However, her most promising pupil, Hisako (Ayako Wakao), turns out to be just as scheming and two-faced as Akemi and it looks like a case of what goes around comes around… 

 

Ayako Wakao and Machiko Kyo

 

This Daiei production makes a great star vehicle for Machiko Kyo, although there’s surprisingly little dancing considering that Kyo was herself a trained dancer. In any case, she gives a rich and varied performance as a character who turns out to be less one-dimensional than she first appears. The first indication that there’s more to Akemi than meets the eye is during a memorable scene (perhaps the film’s best) in which she has a moving moonlit encounter with an elderly female shamisen player reduced to busking door-to-door (played by Hisako Takihana, a former star of the silent screen and wife of film director Tomotaka Tasaka). The old lady sings the song which gives the film its Japanese title and, for Akemi, she’s something of a Ghost of Christmas Future. 

Wakao and Kyo

 

The film is a little less rewarding for Ayako Wakao fans as, while her role is an important one, she has considerably less screen time than Kyo as well as a less multifaceted character to portray. Having said that, she certainly has her moments here and, if you’ve ever wanted to see a catfight between Machiko Kyo and Ayako Wakao (albeit a rather one-sided one), this is the film for you. For their part, the men are pretty forgettable, although Eiji Funakoshi’s role as an avant-garde composer who collaborates with Akemi’s dance troupe provides the film’s composer, Sei Ikeno, with an excuse to conjure up some interesting sounds for the soundtrack, including a musical saw. 

 

 

The first part of the film is in monochrome but, instead of black and white, a blue filter is used (the same effect which reappears in the later moonlight scene), which just seems odd. My guess is that this was done because the fact that the film was in colour was an important selling point in Japan in 1958, where colour films were not yet as common as in Hollywood. In fact, the film's posters state 'All natural colour' quite prominently. Perhaps the studio felt that, had they used standard black and white for the sequences set in the 1940s, some patrons might assume that the whole film would be like that, or at least feel cheated that part of it was. Another peculiarity of the film is a long split-screen montage of Akemi and her pupils travelling all over rural Japan to give dance performances outdoors. Otherwise, it’s a fairly typical Daiei production, although a little longer than most at two hours. It’s the sort of story one might have expected to come from the pen of Toyoko Yamasaki, but in fact Kaneto Shindo’s screenplay was an original work. The director is Kozaburo Yoshimura, who frequently collaborated with Shindo, and had a reputation for bringing out the best in female stars such as Machiko Kyo – a reputation which this film certainly supports. Even though it lapses into full-on melodrama at the end, Kyo’s performance alone is enough to make this one worth watching. 

 

 

Jun Negami

 

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

The Wild Goose / 雁 / Gan (1966)

Obscure Japanese Film #158

Ayako Wakao

 

Tokyo, 1880. Otama (Ayako Wakao) is a young woman back living with her widowed father (Tomosaburo Ii) after having left her husband when she discovered he was actually a bigamist and their marriage was illicit. Unfortunately for her, this means that she is now considered ‘soiled goods’ and finding a suitable husband will be much more difficult. Her father, a street vendor, is getting old and it’s uncertain how much longer he’ll be able to push his cart around. 

Wakao with Toyoko Takechi

 

Their future looks bleak when a conniving old woman (Toyoko Takechi) comes with a proposal: a recently-widowed kimono-shop owner called Suezo (Eitaro Ozawa) wants Otama for his mistress and will provide her and her father with separate places of their own as well as an allowance each if they agree. (Supposedly, Suezo feels that he can’t invite Otama to live with him because his two young children wouldn’t accept her). Seeing no better opportunities on the horizon and worried about her father, Otama agrees. 

Eitaro Ozawa

 

Suezo treats Otama well and everything is fine at first, but she soon discovers that she’s been deceived once again – the old woman had lied to get Otama and her father to agree so that Suezo would cancel the debt she owed him. It turns out that, not only is Suezo a loan shark rather than a kimono merchant, but his wife (Hisano Yamaoka) is still alive and living with him. Despite her disillusionment, Otama continues as Suezo’s mistress as she’s simply not in a position to leave him. But then she begins to have romantic thoughts about Okada (Gaku Yamamoto), a student who walks past her house every day…

 

Gaku Yamamoto

Based on a short 1913 novel of the same name by Ogai Mori – himself a young medical student like Okada at the time this story is set – this remake of Shiro Toyoda’s better-known 1953 version starring Hideko Takamine (also produced by Daiei) credits the same screenwriter (Masashige Narusawa) and follows the original picture almost scene-for-scene. For this reason, it may well seem superfluous and is probably destined to live forever in the shadow of the earlier film. However, there are some differences, and it does manage to improve on the original in a couple of ways. Toyoda’s film was shot in academy ration – standard for the time – while by 1966, widescreen had long been the norm in Japan, and that’s the format used here. Whether this really adds much in itself is debatable considering that the cinematography in the first film was one of its notable features, especially its striking close-ups of Takamine. What is much better, though, is the music – it may be a little over-dramatic at times, but it’s less cloying than in the 1953 movie, and is also used more sparingly, which helps a great deal too. The other main improvement for me was the casting of Gaku Yamamoto as Okada – he may not be a star actor, but at least he doesn’t resemble a constipated undertaker as the miscast Hiroshi Akutagawa did in the original. 

 

In regard to the casting of Suezo, the choice of Eitaro Ozawa was almost a no-brainer. If you wanted someone to play an unpleasant middle-aged male in a Japanese movie in the 1950s or ‘60s, you probably either went with Eijiro Tono or Eitaro Ozawa – both founder members of the Haiyuza theatre company, incidentally – and Tono had already played the character in Toyoda’s version. Ozawa is good here, but he doesn’t manage to surpass Tono’s memorable portrayal of Suezo as a ridiculous and pathetic character. The real villain of the piece is not Suezo, but the scheming old matchmaker (played to the hilt here by Toyoko Takechi) who cares not a damn whose lives she wrecks if there’s something in it for her. 

Hisano Yamaoka

 

Reiko Fujiwara

The rest of the cast also give strong performances, especially Hisano Yamaoka as Suezo’s wife and Reiko Fujiwara as a woman who, reduced to streetwalking to support her children, serves as a sort of ghost-of-Christmas-future to Otama.  Ayako Wakao is well-cast in her role and gives her usual immaculate performance, but I felt that she didn’t quite nail Otama’s dichotomous combination of resigned pragmatism and girlish romanticism as well as Takamine. 

 

For the most part, Masashige Narusawa’s screenplay(s) could be taken as a model of how to adapt literature for the cinema, but there’s one part of the story that bothers me in both films – while Suezo is away for a day, Otama gives her maid the day off and sets about preparing an elaborate meal for Okada, intending to invite him into her home as he passes by so they can finally be alone together. This seems stupid considering that she has no idea if he will be available, or even accept if he is. And it just doesn't seem like something a woman in her situation would do because, if he did accept, somebody would be sure to find out about it and the two would become the subject of a scandal which would do neither of them any good. This absurdity is an invention of Narusawa’s as, in the book, she simply goes to the hairdresser and intends to start a conversation with him when she sees him coming rather than simply exchanging a silent greeting as they usually do. 

 

Although both films are largely very faithful to Mori, the other major diversion from the source material concerns the scene which gives the story its title. (It should be noted here that there are no plurals in Japanese, so the title can be translated as either The Wild Goose or The Wild Geese). In the novel, Okada is persuaded by a fellow student to throw a stone at some wild geese that have alighted in a nearby pond; to his consternation, he hits one and kills it. A comparison is made between the goose and Otama, the implication of which (I think) is that, just as Okada did not mean to kill the goose, neither did he mean to make Otama fall in love with him. In this interpretation, Otama could be said to be the ‘wild goose’ of the title.* However, for some reason this event is absent from the two films. In both, after learning of Okada’s imminent departure for Europe, Otama watches a goose fly away, in effect making him the wild goose. 

 

The director, Kazuo Ikehiro, is far better known for action films, including several entries in the Zatoichi series. He does an excellent job here, but it’s hard to give him a great deal of creative credit as he was more or less following a blueprint created by Shiro Toyoda and Masashige Narusawa. He was active in television as recently as 2022 and, at the time of writing, appears to be alive at the ripe old age of 95. 

  *This bird symbolism is reminiscent of Chekhov’s The Seagull, which Mori may well have been familiar with in German translation as he was also a translator of literature from German into Japanese. Of course, there is a further avian metaphor in the caged bird that Suezo gives to Otama as a gift and which is later threatened by a snake – the implication that Otama is in the same position is clear.

Thanks to A.K.

A good translation of the novel by Burton Watson is available as a free e-book here.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

Watch the 1953 version on my new YouTube channel here.