Libido / 性の起原 / Sei no kigen (‘The Origin of Sex’, 1967)

Obscure Japanese Film #253

Taiji Tonoyama

An unnamed 51-year-old man (Taiji Tonoyama) suffering from some kind of nervous breakdown is recuperating in a mental hospital when he learns about the death of an old friend. Feeling depressed, he wants to prove to himself that he’s still alive, so he tries to have sex with the young female patient he’s sharing a room with (Kayo Matsuo). She’s not too pleased about this when she wakes up to find him on top of her, so she fights him off and runs for the doctor (Naoyuki Kanno aka Tadahiko Sugano). When the doctor arrives, he tells the man he has to leave immediately. The man’s wife (Nobuko Otowa) comes to take him home and, although dismayed by what her husband has done, she remains surprisingly sympathetic.

Kayo Matsuo

The couple have a son (Hideki Hayashi) and daughter (Miyoko Akaza) in their late teens who pay little attention to their usually meek father. However, when the son learns from the doctor what his father has done, he decides to track down the female patient and attempt to seduce her himself…

Miyoko Akaza and Hideki Hayashi

Writer-director Kaneto Shindo throws any pretence at realism out of the window here – of course, no mental hospital would have a male and female patient sharing the same private room, and there are numerous other issues one could take with the story, but he seems entirely unconcerned with such matters here. One matter he does seem concerned with is the generational differences he perceives regarding male-female relationships. Throughout the film, Shindo contrasts the relationship between the father and his wife with that of the developing one between the son and the young woman, and seems to be suggesting that the son believes himself to have the upper hand, but doesn’t – although he may have the strength to make a woman submit physically, that’s all he has, and it’s she who retains power over him. However, this is not really what stays with you at the end of the film.

Tonoyama and Nobuko Otowa

Regular Shindo collaborators composer Hikaru Hayashi and cinematographer Kiyomi Kuroda help to make both the sound and visuals of this typically eccentric work consistently interesting throughout. At times, the film plays like a comedy, and certainly parts of it are quite funny, the comic highlight being when Tonoyama has to give a guided tour to the world’s most taciturn man (Hideo Kanze). Ultimately, though, this is not a film likely to leave anyone smiling, and perhaps the laughter is supposed to catch in our throats as we see the apparently ridiculous protagonist struggling to come to grips with ageing, failure and mortality, while his wife’s devotion remains unshakeable. So, while it appears that Shindo set out to make a film with a sexual theme, it becomes more concerned with the father’s mid-life crisis (which, admittedly, is partly due to his impotence, yet not in merely sexual terms). However, it’s also possible that this was what Shindo intended all along, and the sex angle was simply a means of selling the film to the public – the poster promised Awakened sexuality! Lost sexuality! A groundbreaking and controversial film from the genius director Shindo, known for Instinct! A film exploring humanity through the theme of ‘sex’. (Instinct refers to Shindo’s previous film, which was also known as Honno or Lost Sex, so it seems that that film must have been successful at the box office in Japan anyway.)

Taiji Tonoyama, who was indeed 51 at the time but looked older, had co-founded the production company (Kindai Eiga Kyokai) which made this film together with Shindo and Kozaburo Yoshimura in 1950. Tonoyama appeared in most of Shindo’s films, but – being a short, bald man with sad, bulging eyes – he rarely had such a substantial one as this and its great to see him featured more prominently for a change. He has a staggering 346 credits on IMDb and is probably best-remembered for another rare lead he played in Shindo’s Naked Island (1960). He died in 1989, but Shindo liked him so much that he subsequently wrote a book about him, which he followed with a feature film Sanmon yakusha (2000). The title means ‘third-rate actor’ which is how Tonoyama had referred to himself in the title of his own 1966 book, which translates as The Irresponsible Ramblings of a Third-Rate Actor.

Bonus trivia:

The title sequence featuring lava lamp bubbles was designed by the famous artist Taro Okamoto, who also did the titles for Shindo’s Mother (1963), Onibaba (1964) and Yoshida’s Escape from Japan (1964).

Thanks to A.K.

If you enjoy this blog, feel free to Buy Me a Coffee!

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)