Daikon to ninjin / 大根と人参 / (‘Radishes and Carrots’, 1965)

 

Chishu Ryu

 

 

 

Yamaki (Chishu Ryu) is a typical middle-aged salaryman who has worked his way up into a comfortable senior management position. He’s been married to Nobuyo (Nobuko Otowa) for 28 years, has four adult daughters and is a creature of habit who rarely deviates from his daily routine. As his younger brother and subordinate co-worker Kosuki (Hiroyuki Nagato) says, he’s ‘as ordinary as radishes and carrots’. 

 

Hiroyuki Nagato and Nobuko Otowa

However, problems begin to pile up – a friend (Kinzo Shin) has cancer but hasn’t been told, Kosuki has embezzled money from the company and is expecting Yamaki to bail him out, and he’s been getting into increasingly aggressive arguments with his best friend, Suzuka (Isao Yamagata), to whose son his youngest daughter (Mariko Kaga) is sngaged. 

 

Isao Yamagata

Mariko Kaga

One day, his family are shocked when he fails to return from work. Unbeknownst to them, he’s gone off to Osaka, where he becomes involved with a cheerful call girl (Miyuki Kuwano) and her eccentric pimp (Daisuke Kato), who also has a Chinese medicine business he wants Yamaki to come in on with him…

 

Miyuki Kuwano

 

Daisuke Kato

This Shochiku comedy features an all-star cast which also includes Ineko Arima, Mariko Okada and Yoko Tsukasa as Yamaki’s other three daughters as well as Ryo Ikebe and Shima Iwashita, although some of these big names (especially Ikebe) are given precious little to do. At the beginning of the film, we’re presented with statistics informing us that over 80, 000 people go missing per year in Japan – a phenomenon which seems an odd topic for comedy. The film originated from an idea by Yasujiro Ozu, no less, who took his inspiration from a short story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa entitled ‘Yamagamo’, which centres around a quarrel between two old friends, and worked up a treatment with his regular collaborator Kogo Noda which remained unfinished. It seems likely that the theme of a man who goes missing was added later by credited screenwriters Yoshio Shirasaka and Minoru Shibuya, the latter of whom directed the film (his penultimate feature). 

 

Nobuko Otowa and Mariko Okada

 

Shima Iwashita

Although this is actually the first film I’ve seen by Shibuya, he was known for somewhat cynical comedies and it’s clear that Daikon to ninjin  is far closer to his usual style than it is to Ozu’s. In fact, one of the pleasures of the film is seeing its unlikely lead, Chishu Ryu, send up all those ‘perfect father’ roles he played for Ozu over the years. There’s also some surprisingly frank sexual dialogue that would not have been found in an Ozu picture. While Yamaki’s disappearance is not really given sufficient motivation, and the film does seem a rather messy, cobbled-together affair, it remains quite entertaining and likeable, and certainly worth a watch for anyone with an affection for the Japanese actors of the era.

Thanks to A.K. 

 

Onna no saka / 女の坂 (‘A Woman’s Uphill Struggle’, 1960)

Obscure Japanese Film #190

 

Mariko Okada

 

After one of her uncles dies, Akie (Mariko Okada), a spirited young woman from Hakone, inherits his confectionary business in Kyoto. The company, Kagimura, is famous for an agar-based sweet called Kyo shigure, but the master confectioner, Taniji (Minpei Tomimoto), is the only one who knows how to prepare it properly and he’s in prison after accidentally killing an employee in a fight (which, oddly, nobody seems too bothered about). Akie originally intends to turn the premises into a dressmaking business instead, but when Tajiji is released, he makes Kyo shigure for her and she’s so impressed that she decides to revive her late uncle’s business. 

 

Nobuko Otowa

 

One day, Akie’s mother, Keiko (Nobuko Otowa), arrives with a companion, Yaoi (Keiji Sada). He’s a woodblock artist who has come to Kyoto to sketch some maiko (apprentice geisha), and Keiko has suggested that he stay with Akie instead of at an inn as she has plenty of space. Akie and Yaoi fall in love, but he’s already married with two children – and what exactly is the nature of his relationship with Keiko?

 

Keiji Sada

 

Like the previously-reviewed Wedding Day, Sweet Secret and Ai sureba koso, this was distributed by Shochiku but produced by Kindai Eiga Kyokai, an independent company formed in 1950 by director Kozaburo Yoshimura, screenwriter Kaneto Shindo and Taiji Tonoyama, the latter of whom appears here as one of Akie’s uncles. The story was cobbled together from two novels by Hisao Sawano (1912-92), both of which were published the same year the film was released. Sawano was best-known for his novel River of the Night, filmed by Yoshimura in 1956. 

 

 

For the first hour, the film is as light and insubstantial as a soufflé, and appears to be a simple rom-com made as a vehicle for Mariko Okada, who undergoes innumerable costume and hairstyle changes and whose charm the picture relies heavily upon. However, the tone eventually becomes more serious, even throwing in a suicide that seemed to me entirely superfluous. The message of the movie is very clear by the end, but it’s also a rather simple and conservative one, basically implying that one should not break the conventional rules of society as there are good reasons for them and the best thing to do if disappointed in love is repress your feelings and work, work, work! 

 

In my view, this is a minor effort from director Kozaburo Yoshimura, though it’s not without interest. For no good reason, it throws in Ganjiro Nakamura as an avant-garde potter, and there’s a surprisingly sensual moment when Akie sucks the pipe smoke from Yaoi’s mouth, while Toshiro Mayuzumi’s score is inventive and steers admirably clear of cliché. On the whole, though, Onna no saka is likely to be best enjoyed by fans of Mariko Okada. 

 

 

Bonus trivia: Kyo shigure appears to be a genuine dessert, although I have no idea whether it was created before or after the film existed, or even especially created for it. Those with a sweet tooth can find out more here (in Japanese). 

 

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

The Woman Who Touched Legs / 足にさわった女 / Ashi ni sawatta onna (1952 and 1960)

Obscure Japanese Film #183 and #184

Fubiki Koshiji

 

 

Machiko Kyo

The romantic comedy Ashi ni sawatta onna began life as a magazine serial by the now-forgotten Nadematsu (or Nadeshiko? or Bumatsu?) Sawada (male, 1871-1927) and was first filmed in 1926 (the year of publication) by director Yutaka Abe. The story (in the two existing film versions anyway) tells of Saya, a pickpocket in Osaka who uses her good looks to get close to men in order to steal their wallets. She’s just served three months in prison and is on her way by train back to her home village for the first time in many years. However, she’s not the usual criminal type, and it emerges that her father was suspected of being a spy and committed suicide, so she has been stealing in order to hold an expensive memorial service for him and thereby get revenge on the villagers who ostracised him. Also on the train are Saya’s grown-up but childlike younger brother, a bumbling detective (who previously arrested Saya but is now on vacation), and a pretentious, slightly-effeminate best-selling crime writer who learns about Saya and wants to use her as the basis for his next novel.  

Tokihiko Okada, Yoko Umemura and Koji Shima

 

In the 1926 film – which won the first ever Kinema Junpo Award for Best Japanese Film – the leading roles of the female pickpocket, the crime writer and the detective were played, respectively, by Yoko Umemura, Tokihiko Okada and future director Koji Shima. The former two died tragically young – Yoko Umemura (a favourite of director Kenji Mizoguchi) died at 40 following complications from appendicitis while working on Mizoguchi’s Danjuro Sandai (1944); Tokihiko Okada (the father of Mariko Okada) died at 30 from tuberculosis in 1934. Like the vast majority of Japanese silent films, that version is long lost and it’s unlikely that it still existed when Kon Ichikawa made the first remake for Toho in 1952, although he may well have seen it in his youth. Incidentally, according to Donald Richie in A Hundred Years of Japanese Film, rather than featuring a motley bunch of characters and having the bulk of the story set on a train, ‘The original Abe movie was about the upper-middle class in a hot spring resort.’ When he made the film, Abe had actually not long returned from a decade in America, during which time he had acted in a number of Hollywood films, so there’s little doubt that his work was heavily influenced by this experience.

Ryo Ikebe

 

Ichikawa modelled his version on Hollywood’s screwball comedies of the 1930s, and top-billed Ryo Ikebe as the detective appears to be attempting to emulate Cary Grant. It’s certainly the most animated I’ve ever seen Ikebe on screen, but not his most successful performance in my view. On the other hand, Fubuki Koshiji, who plays Saya, is a natural comedienne and is in her element here. It’s a little surprising to see So Yamamura mincing his way through his performance as the presumably gay writer, but he stops short of full-on caricature, thankfully. One nice touch is that his character’s niece is played by Mariko Okada, whose father had played Yamamura’s role in the 1926 original. 

 

So Yamamura and Mariko Okada

Sadako Sawamura and Yunosuke Ito

Eiko Miyoshi

A terrific supporting cast also features Yunosuke ‘why the long face?’ Ito, Sadako Sawamura, Sawamura’s brother Daisuke Kato and ex-husband Kamatari Fujiwara, and decrepit old lady specialist Eiko Miyoshi. It’s a jolly ride which zips by in a fast-paced and entertaining fashion, although some of the one-liners were no doubt lost in the subtitles I auto-translated from Japanese. 

 

Kyo with Hajime Hana

 

Daiei produced a colour remake a mere eight years later, directed by Yasuzo Masumura. Although Kon Ichikawa and his wife Natto Wada are again credited with the screenplay, it appears to have been revised – whether by Ichikawa and Wada or by Masumura I have no idea, but in neither version does the story make a great deal of sense. In any case, the 1960 version seems more calculated as a vehicle for a particular star – in this case, Machiko Kyo, who plays Saya in a more blatantly sexy manner than Fubuki Koshiji, although she’s arguably less of a natural for comedy. The detective is played as a much more slow-witted character by the far less well-known Hajime Hana, but I found him more amusing than Ryo Ikebe, while Eiji Funakoshi is slightly less effeminate as the writer than So Yamamura had been. 

 

Jiro Tamiya and Eiji Funakoshi

Shiro Otsuji, Kyo and Haruko Sugimura

Other notables in the cast include Haruko Sugimura in the role formerly played by Sadako Sawamura, and Jiro Tamiya and Kyoko Enami making early appearances in minor roles. Perhaps the most notable difference is that Masumura puts far less emphasis on Saya’s motivation for being a thief and, in fact, drops the memorial ceremony scene entirely – the cynical Masumura would probably have considered this mere sentimentality. Personally, I wouldn’t consider either version a must-see, but I slightly preferred Ichikawa’s on the whole. He was obviously into it anyway, as he also directed a 45-minute TV version in 1960 with Keiko Kishi as Saya, Frankie Sakai as the detective and Tomo’o Nagai as the writer.

 

Note on the title:

The original novel and 1926 film have a slightly different title from the remakes: Ashi ni sa hatta onna (足にさはった女), which could be translated as The Woman with a Scar on Her Leg. Although the remakes are usually referred to in English as The Woman Who Touched Legs (or similar), the 1952 version at some point had the English title of Doubledyed Detective, while the 1960 version has also been known as A Lady Pickpocket in English. Furthermore, it’s not entirely clear what is meant by the Japanese title. Ashi can mean leg, legs, foot or feet and, as there are no articles or possessive pronouns in Japanese, it’s anyone’s guess whether it should be ‘her leg/foot’, ‘the leg/foot’, ‘a leg/foot’, ‘his leg/foot’, ‘their legs/feet’, etc. While it might be necessary to touch somebody else’s leg when stealing a wallet from their trouser pocket, I think the title is intended to refer to Saya’s legs – which she uses to attract men in order to get close enough to pick their pockets – rather than those of her victims, so The Woman Who Used Her Legs would seem a better title. 

 

Thanks to A.K. 

1952 version DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

1960 version DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

English subtitles for 1960 version courtesy of Coralsundy