Obscure Japanese Film #158
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| Ayako Wakao |
Tokyo, 1880. Otama (Ayako Wakao) is a young woman back living with her widowed father (Tomosaburo Ii) after having left her husband when she discovered he was actually a bigamist and their marriage was illicit. Unfortunately for her, this means that she is now considered ‘soiled goods’ and finding a suitable husband will be much more difficult. Her father, a street vendor, is getting old and it’s uncertain how much longer he’ll be able to push his cart around.
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| Wakao with Toyoko Takechi |
Their future looks bleak when a conniving old woman (Toyoko Takechi) comes with a proposal: a recently-widowed kimono-shop owner called Suezo (Eitaro Ozawa) wants Otama for his mistress and will provide her and her father with separate places of their own as well as an allowance each if they agree. (Supposedly, Suezo feels that he can’t invite Otama to live with him because his two young children wouldn’t accept her). Seeing no better opportunities on the horizon and worried about her father, Otama agrees.
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| Eitaro Ozawa |
Suezo treats Otama well and everything is fine at first, but she soon discovers that she’s been deceived once again – the old woman had lied to get Otama and her father to agree so that Suezo would cancel the debt she owed him. It turns out that, not only is Suezo a loan shark rather than a kimono merchant, but his wife (Hisano Yamaoka) is still alive and living with him. Despite her disillusionment, Otama continues as Suezo’s mistress as she’s simply not in a position to leave him. But then she begins to have romantic thoughts about Okada (Gaku Yamamoto), a student who walks past her house every day…
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| Gaku Yamamoto |
Based on a short 1913 novel of the same name by Ogai Mori – himself a young medical student like Okada at the time this story is set – this remake of Shiro Toyoda’s better-known 1953 version starring Hideko Takamine (also produced by Daiei) credits the same screenwriter (Masashige Narusawa) and follows the original picture almost scene-for-scene. For this reason, it may well seem superfluous and is probably destined to live forever in the shadow of the earlier film. However, there are some differences, and it does manage to improve on the original in a couple of ways. Toyoda’s film was shot in academy ration – standard for the time – while by 1966, widescreen had long been the norm in Japan, and that’s the format used here. Whether this really adds much in itself is debatable considering that the cinematography in the first film was one of its notable features, especially its striking close-ups of Takamine. What is much better, though, is the music – it may be a little over-dramatic at times, but it’s less cloying than in the 1953 movie, and is also used more sparingly, which helps a great deal too. The other main improvement for me was the casting of Gaku Yamamoto as Okada – he may not be a star actor, but at least he doesn’t resemble a constipated undertaker as the miscast Hiroshi Akutagawa did in the original.
In regard to the casting of Suezo, the choice of Eitaro Ozawa was almost a no-brainer. If you wanted someone to play an unpleasant middle-aged male in a Japanese movie in the 1950s or ‘60s, you probably either went with Eijiro Tono or Eitaro Ozawa – both founder members of the Haiyuza theatre company, incidentally – and Tono had already played the character in Toyoda’s version. Ozawa is good here, but he doesn’t manage to surpass Tono’s memorable portrayal of Suezo as a ridiculous and pathetic character. The real villain of the piece is not Suezo, but the scheming old matchmaker (played to the hilt here by Toyoko Takechi) who cares not a damn whose lives she wrecks if there’s something in it for her.
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| Hisano Yamaoka |
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| Reiko Fujiwara |
The rest of the cast also give strong performances, especially Hisano Yamaoka as Suezo’s wife and Reiko Fujiwara as a woman who, reduced to streetwalking to support her children, serves as a sort of ghost-of-Christmas-future to Otama. Ayako Wakao is well-cast in her role and gives her usual immaculate performance, but I felt that she didn’t quite nail Otama’s dichotomous combination of resigned pragmatism and girlish romanticism as well as Takamine.
For the most part, Masashige Narusawa’s screenplay(s) could be taken as a model of how to adapt literature for the cinema, but there’s one part of the story that bothers me in both films – while Suezo is away for a day, Otama gives her maid the day off and sets about preparing an elaborate meal for Okada, intending to invite him into her home as he passes by so they can finally be alone together. This seems stupid considering that she has no idea if he will be available, or even accept if he is. And it just doesn't seem like something a woman in her situation would do because, if he did accept, somebody would be sure to find out about it and the two would become the subject of a scandal which would do neither of them any good. This absurdity is an invention of Narusawa’s as, in the book, she simply goes to the hairdresser and intends to start a conversation with him when she sees him coming rather than simply exchanging a silent greeting as they usually do.
Although both films are largely very faithful to Mori, the other major diversion from the source material concerns the scene which gives the story its title. (It should be noted here that there are no plurals in Japanese, so the title can be translated as either The Wild Goose or The Wild Geese). In the novel, Okada is persuaded by a fellow student to throw a stone at some wild geese that have alighted in a nearby pond; to his consternation, he hits one and kills it. A comparison is made between the goose and Otama, the implication of which (I think) is that, just as Okada did not mean to kill the goose, neither did he mean to make Otama fall in love with him. In this interpretation, Otama could be said to be the ‘wild goose’ of the title.* However, for some reason this event is absent from the two films. In both, after learning of Okada’s imminent departure for Europe, Otama watches a goose fly away, in effect making him the wild goose.
The director, Kazuo Ikehiro, is far better known for action films, including several entries in the Zatoichi series. He does an excellent job here, but it’s hard to give him a great deal of creative credit as he was more or less following a blueprint created by Shiro Toyoda and Masashige Narusawa. He was active in television as recently as 2022 and, at the time of writing, appears to be alive at the ripe old age of 95.
*This bird symbolism is reminiscent of Chekhov’s The Seagull, which Mori may well have been familiar with in German
translation as he was also a translator of literature from German into
Japanese. Of course, there is a further avian metaphor in the caged bird that
Suezo gives to Otama as a gift and which is later threatened by a snake – the implication
that Otama is in the same position is clear.
Thanks to A.K.
A good translation of the novel by Burton Watson is available as a free e-book here.
DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)
Watch the 1953 version on my new YouTube channel here.
