Time within Memory / 青幻記 遠い日の母は美しく / Seigen-ki (1973)

Obscure Japanese Film #273

Takahiro Tamura

Arai Yohiro

Minoru (Takahiro Tamura) is a middle-aged man who returns to the island of Okinoerabu in the far south of Japan for the first time in over 30 years. He relives long-forgotten memories of his childhood and his widowed mother (Atsuko Kaku), who died there when he was still a boy (Arai Yohiro), and meets an old man (Kamatari Fujiwara) who had been in love with her.

Atsuko Kaku

Based on an autobiographical novel by Jiro Isshiki (1916-88) which won the Osamu Dazai prize on its publication in 1967, this was the first of just two films directed by renowned cinematographer Toichiro Narushima (1925-93), who also worked as his own DP and producer here in addition to co-writing the screenplay. Previously, he had provided first-rate camerawork for mostly ‘new wave’ directors such as Yoshishige Yoshida, Masahiro Shinoda, Noboru Nakamura and Nagisa Oshima after starting out as an assistant cameraman for Keisuke Kinoshita. He clearly learnt a few things from working with such acclaimed filmmakers as, not only is the photography in this film as striking as one would expect from Narushima, but he proves to have a firm hand in other areas too.

Atsuko Kaku

The story is the sort of nostalgic, sentimental material that could easily have become cloying, but Narushima mostly avoids this by preventing his actors from overdoing it and staging his scenes with taste and subtlety, while the device of having the young and old Minoru frequently appearing together - almost as if the older one were a time traveller – works especially well, as does the purposefully non-chronological unfolding of events in the flashbacks (the most dramatic scene is held back until the older Minoru can finally face it). Time within Memory also benefits from its well-used locations and Toru Takemitsu’s score, which provides much of the emotional resonance even if its not one of his greatest.

Yunosuke Ito and Hisano Yamaoka

Delivering a fine performance in only her third film appearance, Atsuko Kaku won the Mainichi Film Concours Award for Best Actress, but for some reason never made another film. Like Tatsuya Nakadai and many other well-known Japanese actors, she was a member of the Haiyuza theatre company. 

Jun Hamamura

As a passive observer of his own past, Takahiro Tamura has less to do despite ostensibly having the lead role, while other notables among the cast include Yunosuke Ito as Minoru’s eccentric inventor grandfather and Hisano Yamaoka as his wife, Taiji Tonoyama as a shopkeeper sympathetic to the young Minoru, and Jun Hamamura as a mumbo-jumbo mumbling shaman. However, it’s Kamatari Fujiwara who impresses the most among the supporting cast when he sings and accompanies himself on the shamisen in a uniquely individual style (assuming he wasn’t dubbed).

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Kamatari Fujiwara

Confession / 色ざんげ / Iro zange (‘Confession of a Love Affair’, 1956)

 

Yuasa (Masayuki Mori) is a middle-aged painter in the process of divorcing his wife (Hisano Yamaoka) and in love with the much younger Tsuyuko (Mie Kitahara), who reciprocates his feelings. However, Tsuyuko’s father (Ichiro Sugai) is dead set against the match and packs her off to America in the hope that she’ll forget about Yuasa. While she’s gone, Yuasa decides he’d better accept the situation and gets married instead to another much younger woman, Tomoko (Keiko Amaji), but she just likes the idea of being married to a famous painter and continues to see her former student boyfriend, Kunihiko (Joe Shishido) on the sly. Then Tsuyuko returns from America…

 

Mie Kitahara

 

This Nikkatsu production was based on a novel originally published as a serial between 1933 and 1935 by Chiyo Uno (female, 1897-1996). The character of Yuasa was based on the painter Seiji Togo (1897-1978), with whom Uno had an affair that lasted from 1930-34. The story must have seemed old-fashioned even in 1956, and it’s doubtful that the film was very successful commercially as Uno’s work was not adapted for the screen again until 1984. Nikkatsu is also a studio not known for its tragic love stories and would soon focus its attention on producing gangster movies aimed at the youth market. 

 

Masayuki Mori and Keiko Amaji

 

The fact that the central character of Yuasa never really convinces or comes to life leaves this film dead in the water. The other characters are constantly making a fuss about what an amazing artist he is, but we see no evidence of this except a not particularly impressive portrait of Tsuyuko dressed like Little Bo Peep. As we never see the beginning of their relationship, it’s impossible to understand how these two were drawn to each other in the first place. Worse still, it seems that we’re expected to sympathise with how hard life must be for Yuasa as a wealthy middle-aged younger-woman magnet who lives a life of idleness. When Tsuyuko’s father understandably prevents him from getting what he wants, Yuasa mopes his way through the remainder of the film wallowing in self-pity, Masayuki Mori rarely deviating from his patented Staring Into The Void expression. 

 

Kinuyo Tanaka

 

Joe Shishido

The cast also includes Kinuyo Tanaka (wasted here as a friend of Yuasa’s) and a thin-faced Joe Shishido before the cheek job, but it’s the great Hisano Yamaoka who steals it here as the ex-wife who’s probably supposed to be a shrew, but for whom I felt quite sympathetic, though not quite as much as I did for Yuasa’s second wife Tomoko when she complains about being, ‘Bored, bored, bored!’ 

 

Hisano Yamaoka

 

This is the first film I’ve seen by director Yutaka Abe (1895-1977), who had lived in America from around 1912-24 and worked in Hollywood, first as an extra and later as a featured actor. This experience led to him becoming a director after his return to Japan, and he directed his first film there in 1925. I can’t say that I was much impressed by his work in Confession, in which he lets the same scene between Mori and Shishido play out twice (first on a beach, then again immediately afterwards in a hotel room) and uses waves crashing against rocks as a visual metaphor for passion – something I’m pretty sure was a hoary old cliché even then.

Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

Thanks to A.K. 

 

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.