Yukiko / 由紀子 (1955)

 Obscure Japanese Film #224

 

Keiko Tsushima

1932. Intending to kill herself in a beautiful place, high school girl Yukiko (Keiko Tsushima) travels to Lake Towada in northern Honshu, but her plans are foiled by Kyosuke (Jukichi Uno), an older artist who happened to be contemplating suicide in the same spot. Kyosuke is disabled as a result of contracting polio at the age of 30 and is miserable because his wife has left him and run off with his apprentice.

 

Jukichi Uno

As Yukiko tells her story to Kyosuke, we learn in flashback that she is an orphan brought up by her cold-hearted aunt (Sachiko Murase), who considers Yukiko’s mother to have been a slut as she had Yukiko out of wedlock and who thinks that Yukiko will go the same way. Yukiko’s best friend, Tatsuko (Chieko Seki), has already dropped out of school and become a dancer at the Casino Follies in Asakusa, run by dapper gangster Aoto (Eitaro Ozawa), who has already broken up Tatsuko’s relationship with her fiancé Miyoshi (Isao Kimura). 

 

Chieko Seki

Yukiko finds herself in the awkward position of becoming an intermediary between Tatsuko and Miyoshi, but the result is that she falls out with Tatsuko and becomes close to Miyoshi, who gets in a fight with Aoto, stabs him in self-defence and is forced to flee. Yukiko is then expelled from school for having been friends with Miyoshi, who is now wanted by the police. 

 

Isao Kimura

 

Back in the present, Yukiko and Kyosuke become close companions. Four years pass, and it’s now 1936. When the attempted coup of February 26 occurs, they head south to escape the chaos, and she suggests going to Innoshima island. Her hidden motive is that she knows this is where Miyoshi fled to and is hoping to see him again. She finds him in a remote fishing village where he has now become engaged to fisherman’s daughter Tome (Hitomi Nozoe)…

 

Hitomi Nozoe

This independent production by by Chuo Eiga (who made the previously-reviewed Sisters the same year) was based on a popular radio serial of the time by the prolific Kazuo Kikuta (male, 1908-73), who also provided the source material for Kurosawa’s The Silent Duel (1949), Hideo Oba’s What’s Your Name? (trilogy 1953-54) and wrote the play version of Fumiko Hayashi’s autobiographical Horo-ki filmed by Mikio Naruse in 1962 (the film is known in English as A Wanderer’s Notebook). 

 

Sachiko Murase

It’s difficult to see what director Tadashi Imai saw in this corny and sentimental misery fest – certainly, it’s quite a dull watch and there’s little of interest in it in terms of direction, although he does do an excellent job of recreating the Asakusa of 1932. This neighbourhood was largely destroyed in bombing raids during the war, but the Casino Follies was a real venue located, oddly enough, above an aquarium, and the mock-up constructed for this film looks identical.*

 

Keiko Tsushima

Matters are not helped by the miscasting of the 29-year-old Keiko Tsushima, who’s entirely unconvincing as a high school teenager and immediately looks more comfortable as soon as her character’s finally grown up a bit and shed the sailor suit uniform. The organ music featured prominently on the soundtrack is another poor choice.

 

Eitaro Ozawa and Chieko Seki

The only people to come out of this film well are Sachiko Murase (later the elderly heroine of Kurosawa’s 1991 film Rhapsody in August), whose performance suggests a thin line between puritanism and sadism, and Eitaro Ozawa as the foppish, narcissistic bully Aoto. Ozawa seems to have got into his role a bit too much, in fact, as I swear he’s hitting poor Isao Kimura for real during their big confrontation scene.

*Go to this link if you’d like to compare the two.

Watched with dodgy subtitles.

Sisters / 姉妹 / Kyodai (1955)

Obscure Japanese Film #197

Hitomi Nozoe and Hitomi Nakahara

 

Keiko (Hitomi Nozoe) and Toshiko (Hitomi Nakahara) are teenaged sisters whose family home is in the mountains close to a hydroelectric dam where their father (Akitake Kono) works. Their three younger brothers stay at home with their mother (Hiroko Kawasaki), but Keiko and Toshiko attend school in the city, so during term time they stay with aunt Otami (Yuko Mochizuki) and uncle Ginzaburo (Jun Tatara).  The relations get on well together, but Ginzaburo is prone to drinking, gambling and cavorting with geisha and Otami sometimes has to hide from creditors. At least Ginzaburo is preferable to their other uncle (Taiji Tonoyama), who beats his wife (Setsuko Shinobu). 

 

Yuko Mochizuki

 

As Keiko’s parents cannot afford to send her to university, they’re already looking for a match for her though she’s only 17. She likes power station worker Oka (Taketoshi Naito) despite his strange passion for dried squid, but his prospects are poor. The more tomboyish Toshiko is only 14 but already has a strong individualistic streak and equally strong opinions. Although the two girls are like chalk and cheese, they’re also unusually close, but seem fated to part sooner or later…  

 

Hitomi Nakahara

 

Shot mostly on location, this character-driven piece produced by the independent company Chuo Eiga has little plot, but plenty of comedy and tragedy in equal measure. Chuo Eiga was something of a haven for leftist filmmakers unable to get their projects accepted by the major studios. Sisters touches on some typical socialist concerns, such as the lay-offs of power station workers, but for the most part wears its politics lightly. The source was a semi-autobiographical 1954 novel by Fumi Kuroyanagi (1912-65), for whom the younger sister, Toshiko, was something of an alter ego. Perhaps for largely practical reasons, the setting has been changed from pre-war Niseko in Hokkaido to post-war Matsumoto in Nagano Prefecture. 

 

 

Director Miyoji Ieki (who also co-wrote the screenplay with Kaneto Shindo) was known for his films focusing on the difficulties faced by young people growing up, and Sisters is typical of his work. Although largely forgotten these days, there’s no doubt that Ieki qualifies as a true auteur due to the consistency of his theme and frequent input in the writing of his pictures. As usual, he elicits fine performances out of his young principals, although it should be noted that Hitomi Nakahara (also featured prominently in Ieki’s All My Children), who plays a 14-year-old most convincingly, was actually 19 at the time and, ironically, one year older than her namesake, Hitomi Nozoe, who plays her older sister. Ieki may not have been the most stylish of directors, but like his films Stepbrothers (1957), All My Children (1963) and The Wayside Pebble (1964), this is an intelligent, sensitive and genuinely moving piece of work.

 

Thanks to A.K.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)