Their Legacy / 家庭の事情 / Katei no jijo (‘Family Circumstances’, 1962)

Obscure Japanese Film #243

So Yamamura

Junko Kano and Ayako Wakao

Utako Shibusawa and Mako Sanjo

Upon retiring, widower Misawa (So Yamamura) decides to give each of his four unmarried daughters 500,000 yen to do with as they wish. The eldest, Kazuyo (Ayako Wakao), is regretting having an affair with a married colleague (Jun Negami) and decides to quit and open a café. Second daughter Fumiko (Junko Kano) gives hers to her boyfriend (Jiro Tamiya) so that he can pay off his debts. Third daughter Miyako (Mako Sanjo) only reluctantly accepts the money and just wants to stay at home with her father. The youngest, Shinako (Utako Shibusawa), works in an accounts department and decides to become a moneylender while fighting off the attentions of a persistent co-worker (Hiroshi Kawaguchi). Meanwhile, Misawa has a relationship with gold-digger Tamako (Murasaki Fujima), although a matchmaker (Haruko Sugimura) is trying to interest him in getting married again to Yasuko (Mayumi Kurata)*…

This Daiei production was based on a magazine serial by Keita Genji (1912-85), whose works were also the source for the previously-reviewed Daiei movies The Most Valuable Wife (1959) and Kirai Kirai Kirai (1960), both of which offered similar fare. Like those, this is a light comedy, a genre not typically associated with director Kozaburo Yoshimura or his screenwriter Kaneto Shindo (although it was by no means the only occasion on which either filmmaker dabbled in comedy). Presumably, then, this was a studio assignment, but it’s well-made and entertaining, and I wasn’t left feeling they had just phoned it in.

Although Ayako Wakao – curiously, the only one who seems to be playing it totally straight – is top-billed, in this case she’s really just part of an impressive ensemble cast which also features Eiji Funakoshi, Keizo Kawasaki and Eitaro Ozawa, most of whom make the most out of the material. If you enjoy Daiei films of this era and like these actors, Katei no jijo is an enjoyable time-passer, with Sei Ikeno’s score helping to heighten the comic effect, although the black-and-white rush hour prologue and epilogue, while fun, seem a bit random to me as I couldn’t really see how they related to the main story. (I could also have done without the close-up of Eitaro Ozawa eating...)

Jiro Tamiya

Incidentally, in one impressive scene, real-life karate black-belt Jiro Tamiya gets properly thrown by another real-life karate black belt, Jun Fujimaki, who also appears here playing a love rival to Tamiya’s character.

Keita Genji’s story was remade by Katsumi Nishikawa for Nikkatsu in 1965 as Yottsu no koi no monogatari (‘Four Love Stories’).

*Although both IMDb and eiga.com state that Tamako is played by Yasuko Nakada and Yasuko is played by Murasaki Fujima, this is incorrect.

Murasaki Fujima as Tamako

Mayumi Kurata as Yasuko

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

Thanks to Coralsundy for the English subtitles, which can be found here.

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Yaneura no onna tachi / 屋根裏の女たち (‘Women in the Attic’, 1956)

Obscure Japanese Film #187

 

Yuko Mochizuki

Residing in a small seaside town in which fishing is the main industry, Okin (Yuko Mochizuki) is a single mother with a modest noodle restaurant where business is slow, so she hires former stripper Harumi (Mayumi Kurata) to serve the customers and keep them entertained, successfully increasing the number of male punters as a result. 

 

Yasuko Kawakami

 

However, Okin has an innocent teenage daughter, Oko (Yasuko Kawakami), who is about to graduate from high school and comes home one day to find her mother has gone to the shops and Harumi is upstairs having sex with a man. When Okin finds out, Harumi confesses that she had taken money from the man and offers to split it with her. Being a pragmatic woman who knows an opportunity when she sees one, Okin soon dismisses her qualms and it’s not long before she has half a dozen prostitutes living upstairs and noodles have become a mere afterthought. 

 

Kyoko Kishida

 

Each of the women has their own sad story, including Mary (a young Kyoko ‘Woman in the Dunes’ Kishida), who has been separated from the child she had by an African-American G.I. Meanwhile, Oko attracts the attention of Kawai ((Eiji Funakoshi), a seemingly nice guy who gives her a lift on his bike one day only to take her into a secluded spot and rape her…

 

Eiji Funakoshi

 

This Daiei production is a well-made and mostly well-acted film which deserves recognition for dealing frankly with some controversial matters. It’s surely no coincidence that, like Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame and Kawashima’s Suzaki Paradise: Red Light District, it appeared in 1956 when the question of prostitution was a hot topic in Japan (it was finally outlawed the following year, five years after the American occupation ended). 

 

 

Women in the Attic suffers from a number of flaws – some plot threads are left frustratingly unresolved, while the transformations of both Okin from noodle woman to brothel-keeper and Kawai from nice guy to rapist are too abrupt to be fully convincing. There’s also, yet again, the misogynist cliché of a woman falling in love with her rapist – an unexpected element considering that the film was based on a novel published in 1950 by female author Sakae Tsuboi, who had also written Twenty-Four Eyes and provided the source story for Five Sisters (1954). However, it’s entirely possible that this was an invention of director Keigo Kimura and his co-adaptor, Toshiro Ide and, to be fair, this unfortunate aspect is somewhat balanced out by a scene in which Harumi confronts Kawai and slaps him so hard she nearly takes his face off. 

 

Mayumi Kurata

 

Another point that bothered me is the following: Okin’s motivation for her new business venture is supposedly to give Oko a better life by being able to pay for her to have classes in ikebana and dressmaking, and thereby find a good husband. Of course, it’s no surprise that Oko is the one she ends up hurting the most, but the explanation given for this is that Kawai won’t marry her because she’s the daughter of a madam, whereas it seems clear from what we’ve seen of him that this is just an excuse on his part and that he’s simply a louse who would never have married her anyway. But perhaps I’m nitpicking too much – these misgivings aside, this certainly remains an interesting film worth seeing, partly for its refusal to vilify Okin, opting instead to portray her as a well-meaning but unfortunate and rather foolish woman. 

 

 

Yuko Mochizuki, the unlikely star of this film, may have lacked film star looks but was a consummate actress who won awards for her roles in Kinoshita’s A Japanese Tragedy (1953), Naruse’s Late Chrysanthemums (1954) and Imai’s The Rice People (1957). A socialist, she later became a politician and even directed three films (with running times of 40-50 minutes): Umi o wataru yujo (‘Friendship Across the Sea’, 1960) about children being repatriated to Korea; Onaji taiyo no shita de (‘Under the Same Sun’, 1962) which dealt with the discrimination suffered by mixed-race children; and Koko ni ikeru (‘Living Here’, 1962), a documentary commissioned by the All Japan Liberal Labour Union portraying the daily lives of labourers and their families (see https://www.repre.org/repre/vol44/topics/tatsumi/).

Thanks to A.K. 

Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)