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.

Okuman choja / 億万長者 (‘Billionaire’, 1954)

 

Isao Kimura

 

Karoku (Isao Kimura) is a tax collector so self-effacing he barely exists, so it’s easy for the people he’s supposed to collect from to send him away empty-handed. These include an unemployed photographer, Juji (Kinzo Shin), and his wife (Toyo Takahashi), who have 18 children and a lodger, Sute (Yoshiko Kuga). Like Karoku, Sute is an orphan who lost her parents to the atom bomb. She believes that the only way to protect peace is for Japan to have its own nuclear weapons and is now devoting all her energy to making them herself. 

 

Yoshiko Kuga

 

Karuko is attracted to his boss’s liberated daughter, Asako (Sachiko Hidari), who works in the same office, and she inspires him to become more aggressive in his collecting, but this only leads to him being bribed rather than paid. Realising the extent of corruption in the tax business, Karuko is persuaded by scheming geisha Hanakuma (Isuzu Yamada) into keeping a record of all the tax evaders. He intends to use this to expose corrupt politicians like Ebizo (Yunosuke Ito), but she has her own ideas…

 

Isuzu Yamada

 

This Shintoho release was produced by the Young Actors' Club (later known as Gekidan Seihai), which had been founded in 1952 and also produced Satsuo Yamamoto’s Hi no hate the same year. According to Japanese Wikipedia,

Isao Kimura, the lead actor, actually lost his family in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. It was Kimura who also appointed Kon Ichikawa as director.

The film was originally intended to be a film adaptation of Marcel Pagnol's play Topaz, starring Junkichi Orimoto, Kobo Abe was initially tasked with writing the screenplay, and had already completed a first draft. However, due to differences with Ichikawa, who had been appointed director, Abe's abstract script was not adopted. Ichikawa's wife, Natto Wada, quickly completed the script, and [cartoonist] Taizo Yokoyama and others contributed their opinions and ideas to the final screenplay, and are credited as scriptwriters…

This film does not have a director's name credit. Initially, it was to be distributed by Shochiku, but, after many twists and turns, it was eventually distributed by Shintoho. However, the producers agreed to cut the final scene, depicting the explosion of the atomic bomb, a blend of reality and hallucination, without Ichikawa's consent. This led Ichikawa to protest and refuse to have his name credited as director... Ichikawa later testified that the reasons for his removal from the credits were that the Young Actors' Club, the producers, had begun production without completing fundraising and were enthusiastic about it, and that it was Ichikawa's first independent production job and he had proceeded with filming without understanding the circumstances.

However, the version I saw does have a credit for Ichikawa as director, so I’m uncertain whether the Wikipedia article is incorrect or the credit was added to later prints. It’s perhaps also worth noting that, though many sources credit Ichikawa as a screenwriter, the film itself does not. 

 

Yunosuke Ito

Anyway, given the circumstances in which it was made, it’s perhaps not too surprising that the resultant film is a messy affair, albeit quite an enjoyable one with sterling work all around from an excellent cast. Though it’s a wacky satirical comedy in the vein of other Ichikawa films such as Pu-san (1953) and The Crowded Train (1957), it gets surprisingly dark in places and the underlying message to Japanese cinemagoers in 1954 seems to have been that the post-war problems of over-population, unemployment, poverty, corruption and atomic weapons meant that they were all screwed. 

Thanks to A.K.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English susbtitles) 

 

Snow Country / 雪国 / Yukiguni (1965)

Obscure Japanese Film #198

 

Shima Iwashita

 

Yasunari Kawabata’s novel Snow Country began to appear in fragmented chapters in 1935, but was not published in its final form until 1948. Set in the mid-1930s at a hot spring resort somewhere in the mountains in the west of Japan’s main island, Honshu, it concerns Shimamura, a writer who rather absurdly writes about Western dancing despite never having witnessed a performance. A married man and father with a certain amount of independent wealth, he’s an idler who travels to the resort alone and meets Komako, a young woman whose company the innkeeper arranges as all of the town’s geisha are already booked for a big party. The two are quickly attracted to one another – Komako  falls for him a little too hard, although Shimamura is more reserved and has no intention of leaving his wife. Still, after returning home from his trip, he finds himself unable to forget Komako and returns to see her on two further occasions, by which time she has become a full-fledged geisha. Shimamura also becomes interested in Yoko, a young woman with whom Komako has an uneasy relationship due to their mutual connection to Yukio, a young man dying of tuberculosis who had been Komako’s childhood friend, possibly fiancée, and is now being cared for by Yoko…

 

Isao Kimura

 

Snow Country was first filmed in 1957 by director Shiro Toyoda for Toho with Keiko Kishi as Komako, Ryo Ikebe as Shimamura and Kaoru Yachigusa as Yoko. This Shochiku version directed by Hideo Oba a mere eight years later is by no means a carbon copy. Most obviously, whereas the earlier film was shot in academy ratio black and white and ran 143 minutes, this film is in colour and widescreen and (mercifully) runs 21 minutes shorter. Oba’s reputation is considerably less distinguished than Toyoda’s – probably rightly so – but in some respects his film does manage to improve on the previous one. 

 

 

As played by Keiko Kishi, Komako came across as childish, over-emotional and actually quite annoying, her mood changing by the minute, whereas Shima Iwashita somehow manages to avoid the pitfalls of playing Kawabata’s heroine, making her appeal for Shimamura much more understandable (although why she should be drawn to him so much is less clear). The music is also an improvement – there was way too much of it in Toyoda’s film, and the quality was also poor, but Naozumi Yamamoto’s superior score is used more sparingly and effectively even if it is occasionally on the syrupy side. 

 

 

On the other hand, as Shimamura, Isao Kimura (a respected actor but not a big star), lacks Ryo Ikebe’s charisma and makes little impression, while Toyoda’s snowscapes were more visually arresting even without the benefit of colour and widescreen. The underwritten character of Yoko is a thankless role in both films, but I felt that Kaoru Yachigusa managed it better than Mariko Kaga does here. Incidentally, Chieko Naniwa – who played the head maid in the earlier picture – somehow managed to get herself cast again here, this time playing the blind masseur. 

 

Mariko Kaga

 

Like the novel, Toyoda began his film with Shimamura’s second visit before flashing back to the first, while Oba has opted for a chronological timeline and also added a little narration from Shimamura which works well. Toyoda had found it more convenient to make Shimamura a painter, while Oba retains the character’s occupation as described by Kawabata, but adds a scene with Shimamura’s wife (played by Kaneko Iwasaki), who is only spoken about in both the book and the first film. One aspect that both films have in common is to resolve some of the ambiguity of the novel, in which it’s never really clear whether Shimamura and Komako sleep together or whether Yoko survives the climactic fire – both filmmakers strongly imply that the relationship is consummated and clarify the fate of Yoko. The two films both have their strengths and weaknesses and it will be a matter of personal opinion which one is preferred, but in my view Kawabata’s famous work is not terribly well-suited to film adaptation. 

 

 

In regard to Hideo Oba, a director best-known for his What’s Your Name? trilogy (1953-54), but still obscure to most, I suspect that his previously-reviewed film The Invisible Wall (1958) was a random assignment that did not especially interest him, whereas this was a project he at least put his heart into even if it’s no masterpiece. Like the other four films I’ve seen by him, it’s well made but not particularly inspired, original or individual. It was his sixtieth film out of the 64 he would direct and his final screenplay credit out of 14, as well as his fourth of five films with star Shima Iwashita, and it’s fans of Iwashita who are likely to find this film most rewarding.

Unfortunately, the colour photography did not look its best on the rather low-res copy I watched. 

 

 DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)