The Blue Beast / 青い野獣 / Aoi yaju (1960)

Obscure Japanese Film #140

Tatsuya Nakadai

Yasuhiko Kuroki (Tatsuya Nakadai) is an ambitious young man working for a magazine publishing company run by Ogawa (Jun Tazaki). When a pay dispute breaks out, the union calls a strike and Kuroki serves as a spokesman for the workers. However, he’s actually a mole working for the management, who are paying him in exchange for inside information. 

Ichiro Nakatani

 

Keiko Awaji

Going for a drink with fellow union member Goda (Ichiro Nakatani), Kuroki is surprised to find his old flame from his student days, Yoshie (Keiko Awaji), working at the bar. It’s the first time they’ve seen each other for 6 years and their former passion is soon rekindled, but Kuroki is unaware that Goda has become suspicious and asked Yoshie to keep an eye on him. 

Yatsuko Tan'ami

 

Meanwhile, Kuroki has been having an affair with Ogawa’s wife, Yoriko (Yatsuko Tan’ami), whom he was hired to tutor part-time while still a student. She had used her influence on her husband to get Kuroki his job, but now she’s just in his way, so he breaks it off by telling her in brutal fashion that she’s too old to be attractive any longer. 

Yoko Tsukasa

 

Koreya Senda

Kuroki next sets his sights on Fumiko (Yoko Tsukasa), the daughter of powerful financier Eto (played by Nakadai’s real-life mentor, Koreya Senda). He knows that if he can get Fumiko to marry him, he’ll be made for life… 

Keiko Awaji and Nakadai

 

Yasuhiko Kuroki is an amoral social climber in the tradition of Stendhal’s Julien Sorel in his 1830 novel The Red and the Black, Dreiser’s Clyde Griffiths in An American Tragedy (upon which the 1951 film A Place in the Sun starring Montgomery Clift was based), and especially John Braine’s Joe Lampton in Room at the Top, filmed in 1958 with Laurence Harvey as Joe. That film was released in Japan in July of 1959, and very likely inspired this one as the similarities are obvious, although the two films end quite differently.

 

The Blue Beast, a Toho production, was written by Yoshio Shirasaka, who wrote a number of films for Yasuzo Masumura, but – more significantly – had also written the screenplay for  The Beast Must Die (1959), in which Nakadai had starred as a similar (though more deadly) antihero. Although the ending of that film seemed to leave things wide open for a sequel, it also called for location shooting in a foreign country, which is probably why it never happened. I’m unsure of the significance of the colour blue, but it seems highly likely that the inclusion of the word ‘beast’ in the title here was intended to tell audiences that this was their opportunity to see Nakadai being... well, 'beastly' again (especially to women).

 

For Nakadai, this was the first of four collaborations with director Hiromichi Horikawa, but it’s not as good as the other one I’ve seen, Shiro to kuro (1963), and it’s also less interesting than The Beast Must Die. It feels rather oddly lacking dramatically, partly because it unfolds all too predictably, but also because – unlike Julien Sorel, Clyde Griffiths and Joe Lampton – Yasuhiko Kuroki lacks anything resembling a sympathetic side. He’s a pretty one-dimensional character, really, and that’s also probably why Nakadai’s not at the top of his game here. Sei Ikeno’s soundtrack, which prominently features the vibraphone and recalls the Modern Jazz Quartet, may also have been too mellow a choice for this type of drama. 

 Thanks to A.K.

Natsuko’s Adventure in Hokkaido / 夏子の冒険/ Natsuko no boken (1952)

Obscure Japanese Film #103

Rieko Sumi

 

 

Natsuko (Rieko Sumi) is a spoiled and stubborn young woman bored by the various men chasing her and the thought of becoming a housewife or socialite. Instead, she dreams of a man who pursues his passion no matter what obstacles he must face. Unable to find such a person, she decides to become a nun, but on her way to enter a convent in Hokkaido she takes the ferry and meets Tsuyoshi (Masao Wakahara). He’s a hunter returning to the island to shoot the bear which, according to the subtitles, ‘dismembered and killed’ his fiancée, Akiko (Keiko Awaji).

Masao Wakahara

 

Convinced that she has finally found the man of her dreams, Natsuko abandons the idea of becoming a nun and decides to follow Tsuyoshi and help him to kill the bear whether he likes it or not. When they reach Sapporo, Tsuyoshi tries to get rid of Natsuko by dumping her on his journalist friend, Noguchi (Teiji Takahashi), who promptly falls in love with her. However, she proves impossible to shake off and follows Tsuyoshi into the countryside to the house of Akiko’s father, Juzo (Takeshi Sakamoto), who accepts her as a guest. 

Yoko Katsuragi and Takeshi Sakamoto

 

Despite her efforts to assist Tsuyoshi in his quest, Natsuko proves more of a hindrance than a help, while Akiko’s younger sister, the 17-year-old Fujiko (Yoko Katsuragi), seems to have become interested in Tsuyoshi herself and to regard Natsuko as a rival. Accustomed to rural life, Fujiko skips along the mountain trails with ease while Natsuko can barely keep up. Meanwhile, Natsuko’s grandmother, mother and auntie (Chieko Higashiyama, Teruko Kishi and Sachiko Murase) want her back home and are hot on her trail…

This Shochiku comedy was the second Japanese feature film in full colour. As the process was so new to Japan, some of the crew had to travel to Hollywood to get advice from the experts there. Like many early colour films, subtlety was not the idea and the costumes and backgrounds were designed to be as colourful as possible in order to dazzle the cinemagoers of the day. Unfortunately, some brief parts of the film are missing, although the soundtrack is complete apart from one sequence; however, the vast majority of the film survives in excellent condition.

Natsuko’s Adventure in Hokkaido is a moderately amusing piece of fluff, so it’s something of a shock to see that it was based on a novel by Yukio Mishima, of all people. The book has not so far been translated into English, but it appears that the film is actually quite faithful and the novel is a similarly lightweight piece. In the Asahi Weekly newspaper (29 July 1951), Mishima explained his motivation for writing it. Here is a rough translation:

Although the story is set in Hokkaido, the main characters are young men and women from the city. However, in the city, young people cannot find anything worthy of their energy. They leave Tokyo with different dreams. I am dissatisfied with the fact that the current era does not provide the means of fulfilling youthful dreams, so I wanted my characters to pursue their dreams among the lakes and forests of Hokkaido, where present-day Japan feels more like a foreign country. 

Fans of the writer Haruki Murakami may also be interested to know that Mishima’s book is said to have influenced Murakami’s novel A Wild Sheep Chase.

 

Rieko Sumi

 

Another surprising aspect of the film is that the star of this expensive production is not terribly well-known. Rieko Sumi (1928-2005) was from Hiroshima, where she suffered exposure to the atomic bomb, though thankfully she made a full recovery and became the first Miss Hiroshima in 1948, leading to her being signed as a new face by Toho. Most of her leading roles were in the early ‘50s, after which she was mainly relegated to supporting parts. I felt that she failed to give much depth to her portrayal of Natsuko, who comes across as a little too unsympathetic, and perhaps that indicates why her career as a leading woman ended early. However, she contributed a moving cameo as an A-bomb survivor who refuses to feel sorry for herself in Kozaburo Yoshimura’s A Night to Remember. 

 

Yoko Katsuragi

In Natsuko’s Adventure in Hokkaido, it’s Yoko Katsuragi who steals the show as the coquettish Fujiko. Given that the film feels like an imitation of the Hollywood style even down to avant-garde composer Toshiro Mayuzumi’s uncharacteristically conventional music score, it’s ironic that Fujiko explicitly criticises Natsuko’s American values at the end of the film. As the Americans had just left when the film went into production, perhaps the filmmakers were unable to resist having a dig at their former occupiers even as they continued to enthusiastically absorb their culture.

In regard to director Noboru Nakamura, at this stage in his career he was just beginning to gain a reputation as a reliable director of literary adaptations. On the basis of Natsuko’s Adventure, there’s little to distinguish him from any other competent director, but his best work was yet to come in films like Downpour (1957) and Koto (1963).  

 

Bonus trivia: actor Yoko Katsuragi married composer Toshiro Mayuzumi in 1953.