'Kuruwa' yori Muho ichidai / 「廓」より 無法一代 (From 'Red Light District': The Lawless Age, 1957)

Obscure Japanese Film #265

Tatsuya Mihashi and Michiyo Aratama

1906, the 39^th year of the Meiji Era. Kanta (Tatsuya Mihashi) and O-Gin (Michiyo Aratama) arrive in Chushojima, the red light district of Fushimi City near Kyoto, with the intention of setting up their own brothel with the help of O-Gin’s somewhat reluctant uncle (Jukichi Uno). They find an ideal property, but are less lucky in finding prostitutes – of the three they initially hire, one (Haruna Kaburagi) comes down with a venereal disease and has to be hospitalised, another (Harue Tone) is planning to abscond with her yakuza boyfriend (a pre-cheek-job Joe Shishido) and the remaining one, Kikuno (Izumi Ashikawa), is unable to reconcile herself with her new profession and is utterly miserable. If that weren’t bad enough, Kanta finds himself in conflict with Ikarigawa (Misao Shimizu), the local yakuza boss, and the Salvation Army are spreading anti-prostitution propaganda. It’s a tough life being a ponce…

Jukichi Uno

Joe Shishido

This Nikkatsu production was based on the first part of a bestselling trilogy of novels entitled Kuruwa by Katsumi Nishiguchi (1913-86) published between 1956 and 1958. According to Japanese Wikipedia, Nishiguchi had himself been born into a family that owned a brothel in Chushojima, and Nikkatsu’s website states that Kanta was based on his father. In 1957, prostitution was a hot topic in Japan as the Prostitution Prevention Law had just been passed and was due to come into force the following year, hence there were a number of films on the topic produced around this time, most famously Kenji Mizoguchi’s Akasen chitai, but also Yuzo Kawashima’s excellent Suzaki Paradise: Red Light District, another Nikkatsu production starring Mihashi, Aratama and Ashikawa released the previous year to this one. Nishiguchi, a member of the Japanese Communist Party, seems to have been strongly opposed to prostitution despite his family background, and this film has an obvious anti-capitalist message at its heart.

Izumi Ashikawa (front) and friends on display for passing customers

Tatsuya Mihashi

Tatsuya Mihashi, the film’s leading man, would have had little sympathy with Nishiguchi’s communist beliefs – the actor had been a prisoner of war in Siberia, and subsequently refused to take any plane that flew over Russian airspace. Mihashi was known as ‘the Japanese Cary Grant’ due to his alleged resemblance to the Hollywood star, though I can’t really see it myself. In any case, this is one of the best roles he ever had in the movies.

One interesting aspect of this film is the choice to make the perpetrators rather than the victims the main protagonists as one can hardly root for people like these. However, they’re certainly not one-dimensional villains – Kanta seems to have become obsessed with money only as a result of witnessing how the poor can be victimised by the rich and powerful with impunity, and he has a reckless courage in taking on a gang of yakuza single-handed. For her part, O-Gin’s love for her husband is strong enough to override her misgivings, at least at the beginning. The rounded performances by the two leads also ensure we never completely despise them and, in fact, do root for them in one way, at least – by hoping they will come to see the error of their ways. But perhaps that’s not easy for them in a world where the other local business owners see it as their right to exploit women by forcing them into sexual slavery. By showing all this so clearly, the film forces the audience to think seriously about Japan’s uncomfortable history with prostitution and the price that is paid when people decide to choose money over morality.

Misao Shimizu

The unconventional ending strongly suggested to me that there was supposed to be a sequel, but for some reason one was never made. I think the film may have rubbed people’s noses in it a bit too much to have been a box office success, but this is pure speculation on my part. In any case, this is a very well-done film all around and the best I’ve seen so far by director Eisuke Takizawa, here working from a screenplay by the prolific Toshio Yasumi.

A note on the title:

The film begins by displaying the character 廓 (kuruwa), then 無法一代 (muho ichidai) is superimposed over the top. Most Japanese sites list the film as 「廓」より　無法一代  (‘Kuruwa yori Muho ichidai’, which is perhaps best translated as ‘From Red Light District: The Lawless Age’), but sometimes the film is listed simply as Muho ichidai, omitting the reference to the title of the novel. Others have translated muho ichidai as ‘Outrageous Generation,’ but in my opinion this is a poorer fit for the material and was never an official English title as far as I can see. I believe the standard Japanese for ‘red light district’ is akasen chitai; kuruwa is an alternative which I suspect had fallen out of use or was only used in a specific area, but if anyone knows better, please leave a comment below. 

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Forever, My Love / 佳人 / Kajin (‘Beautiful Woman’/ ‘Good Person’, 1958)

Obscure Japanese Film #252

Ryoji Hayama

1943. Shigeru (Ryoji Hayama) is a student returning from Tokyo to his hometown of Toyooka in Hyogo Prefecture on western Honshu (then part of the San’in region). There, he will have a farewell party before going off to war, but most of all he hopes to see his childhood sweetheart, Tsubura (Izumi Ashikawa), who has been unable to walk since contracting polio at an early age. This has caused her to be largely housebound and live rather like one of the dolls in glass boxes we see in her home.

Jukichi Uno and Sachiko Murase

On the train, Shigeru replays memories from their childhood when, as a boy (played by Hayama’s own kid brother, Kunio Yamaguchi), he would visit her and her kindly mother (Sachiko Murase), while her stern father (Jukichi Uno) looked on disapprovingly. Shigeru would often stop off at the tofu shop, where the girl, Tokie (Miori Karuhata), was jealous of his love for Tsubura. One day, she lured him into the back and seduced him despite the fact that he was yet to reach puberty (the film later backtracks on this somewhat and suggests that they did not go all the way).

Nobuo Kaneko

Izumi Ashikawa

Tsubura gives Shigeru three stones in a pouch, which he carries with him throughout the war. When he finally returns, it’s on the very day that she’s to be married to the local villain, Tachio (Nobuo Kaneko), who had previously run off with Tokie before abandoning her after six months. Now, he’s taken advantage of Tsubura and her mother’s hardship after her father’s death and pressured her into marriage in order to improve his social status. When Shigeru tries to visit her, Tachio won’t even let him in the house, so there’s little he can do but accept the situation. As he walks off despondently, he runs into Tokie (now played by Misako Watanabe), who is now working as a bar hostess (and, it’s implied, is also engaged in some form of prostitution). Initially, she tries to seduce him again, but he’s still too much in love with Tsubura. When Tokie is offered a job keeping the books for Tachio, she becomes a go-between for Shigeru and Tsubura, delivering messages between the two. Meanwhile, although it’s always been assumed that Tsubura is unable to have sex, she finally has her first period – something her mother hopes to keep secret from Tachio, who has begun bringing prostitutes home and forcing Tsubura to watch while he has sex with them...

Ryoji Hayama and Misako Watanabe

This Nikkatsu production was based on the debut novel of Shigeo Fujii (1916-79), who worked in magazine editing and had managed to get it published as a magazine serial the year before. According to Japanese Wikipedia, it ‘was highly praised by Yasunari Kawabata and nominated for the Akutagawa Prize’. When Nikkatsu bought the rights, he quit his day job and devoted himself full time to writing. Wikipedia also notes that, ‘During his lifetime, he believed that, "If I have saké, I don't need anything else." His clumsy and impulsive personality made him feared by editors, and sometimes even made them dislike him.’ Three further films (all obscure B-movies) were adapted from his work, but he’s remained unknown outside Japan. Like his protagonist, Fujii was also from Toyooka and apparently coached the actors in the local dialect. Unfortunately, I have to say that I found the story to be a contrived and excessively sentimental one, though it seems that such fare was eagerly lapped up by quite a large part of the Japanese cinemagoing audience at the time.

Izumi Ashikawa

The emerging new wave filmmakers of the era, on the other hand, had little patience for this kind of material and, although the sexual frankness of the piece is something you wouldn’t see in a Hollywood picture of this era, it sits awkwardly in what is at heart an old-fashioned (even for its day) tearjerker. As I’ve come to expect from director Eisuke Takizawa, the film is very well-made and it’s hard to find fault with the direction, only in what is (to me, anyway) the poor choice of material.

In terms of the cast, nominal star Izumi Ashikawa first appears 33 minutes in (the childhood prologue is a lengthy one) and I almost felt sorry for her in being stuck with such a role – Tsubura is so ridiculously self-sacrificing it’s actually kind of annoying. For his part, Jukichi Uno manages to escape his nice guy image briefly and play a bit of a bastard pretty well (intriguingly, his name does not appear on the poster, whereas Chishu Ryu’s does, suggesting that Uno took his role; perhaps it was felt that the gentle father of the Ozu films would not be accepted in such a part). However, the best performance comes from Misako Watanabe, who makes the perhaps unlikely character of Tokie feel more like a real human being than anyone else manages to do here. Watanabe, who won a Blue Ribbon Award for her performance in Shohei Imamura’s Endless Desire the following year and is also a well-respected stage actress, is still with us at the time of writing at 93 and has been acting as recently as 2024.

Misako Watanabe

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

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Shirobamba / しろばんば (1962)

Obscure Japanese Film #248

Toru Shimamura

This Nikkatsu production was based on the autobiographical novel of the same name by one of Japan’s major writers, Yasushi Inoue (1907-91). The book was translated into English by Jean Oda Moy in 1991, but Inoue’s sequel, Zoku Shirobamba, has been neither filmed nor translated, and the fact that Nikkatsu never made the sequel suggests that this film was not especially profitable. The story concerns Inoue’s own childhood in Izu in the early Taisho period (1912-26) when Inoue was around seven years old, and the title refers to the white aphids that the children would try to catch in the autumn.

Izumi Ashikawa

Inoue’s alter ego is Kosaku (played here by Toru [later Miki] Shimamura), whose rural upbringing is unusual in that his parents, though living, are absent, and he’s brought up by his late great-great uncle’s mistress, known as Granny Onui (Tanie Kitabayashi). He’s all she’s got, so she spoils him, and he’s very attached to her as a result. The only other person he really likes is Sakiko (Izumi Ashikawa), whom he calls his elder sister although she’s actually his aunt. Unfortunately, she looks down on Onui and there’s no love lost between the two women. Sakiko lives in the ‘Upper House’ nearby with Kosaku’s other relations, but he feels uncomfortable there and avoids them. Kosaku gets the highest grades in his year at school and his family has a higher social status than his classmates’, so he feels different to the other boys and great things are expected of him.

Jacket of the novel in English translation

Reading the novel in translation a while ago I was reminded of the films of Keisuke Kinoshita and wondered if the book had ever been filmed; looking it up, I found that not only had it been, but that the screenwriter was none other than Keisuke Kinoshita himself. However, it’s directed not by him, but by Eisuke Takizawa, who seems to have been Nikkatsu’s director of choice for their more prestigious literary adaptations during this period (not a genre they’re widely remembered for).

Jukichi Uno

I had high hopes for this film but, although its superficially faithful, one of the strengths of the book is its lack of sentimentality, and it was disappointing to see the story sentimentalised as it has been here, especially in regard to composer Takanobu Saito’s clichéd use of mandolin and harp. There’s also been an overall softening of tone – to give a couple of examples, in the book, the schoolteachers think nothing of dishing out corporal punishment, and Sakiko is an arrogant snob, while here the teachers (one of whom is played by a twinkly-eyed Jukichi Uno in old man make-up) are far more genial and Sakiko – perhaps partly due to the casting of popular star Ishikawa – is a much gentler character.

Tanie Kitabayashi

Talking of casting, I felt that a lack of imagination was evident in hiring 51-year-old character actress Tanie Kitabayashi to do her old granny act yet again when Sachiko Murase would have been a far better fit for the complex character described by Inoue. Well-made though it is, ultimately I couldn’t help feeling that the film would have had more depth if it had been cast and scored differently and directed by Kinoshita or Miyoji Ieki instead of Takizawa.

A note on the title:

The title can be written as Shirobamba or Shirobanba in English; the character ん is usually written as ‘n’ in translation, but when pronounced before a ‘b’, it’s natural to close the mouth more fully, so it comes out sounding more like an ‘m’. This is also the reason why both Tetsuro Tanba and Tetsuro Tamba can be considered correct.

Thanks to A.K.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

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Mogura Yokocho / もぐら横丁 (‘Mole Alley’, 1953)

Obscure Japanese Film #244

Shuji Sano

This Shintoho production was based on episodes from a number of autobiographical novels by Kazuo Ozaki (1899-1983), one of which gives this film its title. Ozaki is renamed Kazuo Ogata here and played by Shuji Sano. In the originals, Ozaki was writing about his life as a struggling author in the 1930s before winning the coveted Akutagawa Prize in 1937. Perhaps for budgetary reasons, director Hiroshi Shimizu chose not to recreate the period and, in one scene, Ogata’s wife (played by Yukiko Shimazaki) goes to the cinema to see the 1952 French-Italian co-production The Seven Deadly Sins. However, apart from a few minor details such as this, the film could almost be set in the 1930s as there is no mention whatsoever of the war or of issues specific to the post-war period. Instead, it focuses entirely on the problems of the young couple as they try to find ways of paying the bills and avoiding homelessness while he maintains a writing career and she becomes a mother. 

Yukiko Shimazaki

Ozaki was a respected literary author in Japan, but almost none of his work has been published in English. His mentor was the better-known Naoya Shiga, who has several works published in English, including the novel A Dark Night’s Passing and the collection The Paper Door and Other Stories. Humour and anger at injustice are said to be among the prime characteristics of Ozaki’s work, which Mishima reportedly described as being like ‘Naoya Shiga in a kimono.’ Incidentally, there have been only three other films based on his writing: Koji Shima’s Nonki megane (1940). Tadao Ikeda’s Tenmei Taro (1951) and Seiji Hisamatsu’s Aisaiki (1959), none of which are easily accessible.

Shimizu co-wrote the screenplay with Kozaburo Yoshimura, already a well-established director himself by then, and this film seems to have been their sole collaboration. Shimizu was at this point dividing his time between making his own independent pictures and working for Shintoho. Unsurprisingly for a Shimizu picture, it’s an understated piece which avoids melodrama for the most part and has very little plot but plenty of gentle humour. On the other hand, it’s not one of his most characteristic or memorable films – unlike Tomorrow will be Fine Weather in Japan, for example, which feels like it could only have been made by Shimizu. 

If leading lady Yukiko Shimazaki, who plays Ogata’s rather child-like wife, is unfamiliar, that’s perhaps a symptom of Shimizu’s lack of interest in working with big names – she was not a major star, although she had been active in films from 1950 and went on to appear in Seven Samurai. She was also a chanson singer and, in 1963, she left the film business and opened her own chanson bar in Ginza named Epoch, which she ran for many years. A more familiar face among the supporting cast is Jukichi Uno, who plays a kindly landlord and seems to have appeared in almost every shomin-geki made during this period. 

Jukichi Uno

A note on the title:

As far as I’m aware, ‘Mole Alley’ is not an official English title. While ‘alley’ seems a fair translation of yokocho (which can also be translated as ‘side street’, ‘lane’, etc), mogura can also mean ‘creepers’ or ‘trailing plants’ as well as ‘mole’. Mogura Yokocho is the name of the street that Ogata and his wife move to, but whether that street is named after moles or creepers is unclear.

Bonus trivia:

Three well-known Japanese writers are glimpsed briefly in the Akutagawa Prize ceremony scene: Fumio Niwa, Kazuo Dan, and Shiro Ozaki (no relation to Kazuo Ozaki). 

Japanese DVD to be released 13 May 2026

Thanks to A.K.

Devil’s Gold / 魔の黄金 / Ma no ogon (1950)

Obscure Japanese Film #236

Masayuki Mori 

Iwaki (Masayuki Mori) is a gold prospector who has been in the mountains for 13 years – including the entire war – and finally struck it rich. He had originally gone there after being rejected by Tsukie (Chieko Soma), the woman he loved, for not having enough money. Returning to society, he is at first mocked for his uncouth appearance until people realise he’s carrying a fortune, at which point he becomes the toast of the town.

Chieko Soma

Takashi Shimura

Iwaki’s prospecting partner, Akutsu (Takashi Shimura), had died from exposure not long after they struck gold, so he hires Azuma (Eijiro Tono), a drunk who claims to be a detective, to track down Akutsu’s son. Meanwhile, Tsukie turns up, but she’s now married to a sick architect (Jukichi Uno) and is after Iwaki’s money. The only honest person Iwaki encounters is the maid, Tokiko (Michiko Hoshi), at the hotel he stays at, but she’s involved with a poor fisherman, Ichiro (Ichiro Izawa)...

Eijiro Tono

Jukichi Uno

Ichiro Izawa

This Daiei production was based on a novel by the largely forgotten Shu Sekikawa (1912-87) and was the fourth major feature film to be directed by Senkichi Taniguchi. It was also the first of Taniguchi’s features not to have been co-written by Akira Kurosawa, which may be one reason why it’s not as good as the director’s previous three – I doubt that Kurosawa would have been satisfied with the script of this one, which Taniguchi co-wrote with newcomer Takeo Matsuura.

Michiko Hoshi

Taniguchi was an avid mountaineer and, as in his debut feature Snow Trail (1947), there’s some impressive location shooting in the wintry mountains, but the bulk of the story takes place in an urban setting. As a film, it’s not very characteristic of Japan and the influence of Hollywood is obvious throughout. The score by Godzilla composer Akira Ifukube is effective, but unfortunately this is a story which not only unfolds all too predictably, but relies on a couple of annoyingly implausible coincidences.

Mori before and after his trip to the barber

It’s a surprise to see the usually suave Masayuki Mori in such a rough part, but he rather overdoes it and I couldn’t help wonder if Takashi Shimura – wasted here as he all too often was in a small (and in this case poorly-written) role – might have been a better fit. In fact, much of the acting is too broad for my taste, although the women are a notable exception. I personally think they’re usually better actors than the men on the whole, perhaps because they feel less need to show off, and this seems especially true in Japanese films of the post-war period for some reason. As for the two female stars here, Chieko Soma retired from acting at the age of 40 in 1962 and is presumably deceased, whereas Michiko Hoshi was acting as recently as 2013 and appears to be still with us at the time of writing at the ripe old age of 98.

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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.

Heat Wave Island / かげろう / Kagero (‘Heat Wave’, 1969)

Obscure Japanese Film #223

 

Nobuko Otowa

Produced by Kindai Eiga Kyokai, an independent company formed by director Kozaburo Yoshimura, screenwriter Kaneto Shindo and actor Taiji Tonoyama in 1950, this crime drama was directed and co-written by Shindo and features Tonoyama in a supporting role as the head of an island village. Shindo’s long-term muse and mistress Nobuko Otowa plays Otoyo, a bar hostess who turns up dead at the beginning of the film when a dog carrying a human hand (an idea obviously nicked from Yojimbo) leads the cops to her corpse. Otowa, an actor always willing to do anything for her art, has to play a partially-excavated cadaver, but gets to pop up in flashbacks as a a living being throughout the rest of the movie. 

 

Rokko Toura

 

As the title suggests, it’s set during a heatwave, and a murder investigation is soon underway led by sweaty detectives Oishi (Oshima favourite Rokko Toura) and Iino (future director Juzo Itami), who have to traipse all over the islands of the Seto Inland Sea to interview sundry witnesses played by Shindo’s favourite character actors, including Jukichi Uno, Tanie Kitabayashi, Eitaro Ozawa and, of course, the aforementioned Taiji Tonoyoma. The dogged police begin to suspect that following Michiko (Masako Toyama), a young woman who worked at Otoyo’s bar, may lead them to the killer…

 

Masako Toyama

 

The little-known Masako Toyama, who has one of the principal roles here, was apparently a theatre actor whom Shindo had cast as a result of seeing her in a camera commercial. She had actually already made one film before this, a Shochiku action picture known in English as Pursuit of Murder: Shinjuku’s 25th Hour (1969), and she would go on to appear in at least nine more movies. IMDb has her listed (incorrectly I think) as Masako Tomiyama. 

 

Taiji Tonoyama

 

Anyway, the film is stylishly shot by cameraman Kiyomi Kuroda and has an interesting score by Hikaru Hayashi, although it’s one that works better in certain scenes than others, sometimes lending a strange feeling of detachment rather than enhancing the suspense. Both Kuroda and Hayashi had worked on Shindo’s best known films, Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968). 

 

Tanie Kitabayashi

 

What surprised me most about the film is how much it reminded me of Castle of Sand (1974), Yoshitaro Nomura’s big hit movie adaptation of Seicho Matsumoto’s 1961 novel of the same name. Heat Wave Island must surely have been an influence on that later film, right down to the permanently perspiring policemen. On the other hand, the plot of Heat Wave Island is also very much like something that Matsumoto might have written, and he was undoubtedly an influence on the original screenplay written by Shindo and Isao Seki (an assistant director on Onibaba and other Shindo films). 

 

Jukichi Uno

 

Unsurprisingly for Shindo, there’s also a leftist social commentary aspect to the film, as Joan Mellon pointed out in her 1975 book Voices from the Japanese Cinema:

Kagero has been highly praised by both [Donald] Richie and [Richard N.] Tucker. Its locale is again the Inland Sea, the same setting as The [Naked] Island [1960]. Ten years have elapsed and the people who might have been the heroes of the earlier film have moved to the cities. Lacking skills, they are absorbed inevitably into the lumpen proletariat as petty criminals, prostitutes and dealers in drugs. Richie holds that the film far transcends the level of melodrama:

From the brilliant opening it becomes apparent that he [Shindo] is making a statement on the relation between love and death; from other parts of the film (“cops are poor – criminals are poor: it is the poor chasing the poor”) it is apparent that a social statement is being made; finally, Shindo is making a film about what happens when sudden affluence reaches a simple people. 

The islands around the Seto Inland Sea, where poverty is high and employment low, certainly make for an interesting and often photogenic setting, as one of the cops muses at one point, saying,

The beauty of this scenery made them poor. The islands are beautiful because they’re made of granite soil. The soil can only grow wheat and potatoes. When it rains, the soil erodes and the fields wash into the sea. The beautiful white soil is a symbol of infertility. It’s a symbol of poverty. 

Heat Wave Island is a fascinating film even if the plot is arguably a little over-complicated and, though Otoyo seems a remarkably unsympathetic character at first, things turn out to be a lot less black and white as the story unfolds. 

 

Juzo Itami and Rokko Taura (centre)