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| Hibari Misora |
This
Shochiku production was the second film version of a famous short story by
future Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972). First published in
1926, it's a semi-autobiographical piece based on a solitary walking trip he
took as a student around the Izu Peninsula in the year 1918. Attracted to a
young dancer who is part of a small group of travelling entertainers, the
narrator (named Mizuhara in the film) contrives to fall in with them. The others
are Eikichi, a man of 23 who is the leader; his 18-year-old wife Chiyoko; her
mother; and Chiyoko’s 16-year-old sister, Yuriko. The dancer, named Kaoru, is Chiyoko’s youngest
sister. Although disconcerted to find that she is only 13 (he had judged her to
be 15-16*), he finds himself deeply moved at the group’s friendliness towards
him, and this greatly helps to mitigate his low self-esteem.
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| Akira Ishihama |
While
the story is often characterised as one of unrequited youthful love, there’s
more to it than that. Like Kawabata, the narrator/Mizuhara is an orphan with no
close family left alive, and Kawabata is said to have been concerned as a young
man that this fact may in some way warp his personality. Despite the extremely
low status of travelling entertainers in Japanese society at the time, the
family in the story are not unhappy and enjoy a warm relationship with one
another. It’s clear that the narrator is pathetically grateful to be accepted –
almost adopted – by these outcasts, and this aspect of the work is equally as
important as the theme of young love.
Even
in its unabridged form, Kawabata’s story is not really long enough to sustain a
feature-length film, so screenwriter Akira Fushimi expanded it, mainly by giving the family of
entertainers a more detailed backstory, introducing a rival for Kaoru’s love
and adding a minor sub-plot about a young boy pursuing Mizuhara from village
to village to return some money he had dropped. Incidentally, it was Fushimi
who had also written the screenplay for the first adaptation, a silent film
made by Heinosuke Gosho in 1933. However, for this one he wrote a fresh script
with a number of differences, the most notable being that the character of
Eikichi is far more sympathetic in the second version, in which he is played by
Akihiko Katayama. This is more faithful to Kawabata.
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| Akihiko Katayama |
The
silent version had starred a 22-year-old Kinuyo Tanaka alongside the
26-year-old Den Ohinata, whereas this one stars 16-year-old Hibari Misora as
Kaoru and 19-year-old Akira Ishihama as Mizuhara. Misora was best-known for her
singing ability, but gets surprisingly few opportunities to sing here, while
Ishihama will be familiar to many as the young samurai forced to commit seppuku with a bamboo sword in Harakiri (1962). Although these two
actors are the right age for their characters, I felt that their acting
abilities were a little too limited to really put across their feelings as
described by Kawabata, but director Yoshitaro Nomura is also partly to blame
for this. Compare the final scene on the boat with what Kawabata had written
and you’ll probably see what I mean. Here’s what Kawabata wrote (as translated
by J. Martin Holman):
I lay down, using my bag as a
pillow. My head felt empty, and I had no sense of time. My tears spilled onto my bag. My cheeks
were so cold I turned my bag over. There was a boy lying next to me. He was the
son of a factory owner in Kawazu and was on his way to Tokyo to prepare to
enter school. The sight of me in my First Upper School cap seemed to elicit his
goodwill.
After we talked for a while, he
asked, "Have you had a death in your family?"
"No, I just left
someone."
I spoke meekly: I did not mind
that he had seen me crying. I was not thinking about anything. I simply felt as
though I were sleeping quietly, soothed and contented.
I was not aware that darkness had
settled on the ocean, but now lights glimmered on the shores of Ajiro and
Atami. My skin was chilled and my stomach empty. The boy took out some sushi
wrapped in bamboo leaves. I ate his food, forgetting it belonged to someone
else. Then I nestled inside his school coat. I felt a lovely hollow sensation,
as if I could accept any sort of kindness and it would be only right. […]
The lamp in the cabin went out.
The smell of the tide and the fresh fish loaded in the hold grew stronger. In the
darkness, warmed by the boy beside me, I let my tears flow unrestrained. My
head had become clear water, dripping away drop by drop. It was a sweet, pleasant
feeling, as though nothing would remain.
But
in the film, Ishihama can barely manage a single tear and Nomura decides to end
it with a shot of Misora staring blankly at the water, followed by a shot of a
single geta (wooden sandal) floating
off. Personally, I felt that Nomura had rather missed the point of the ending
and also not shot what he did as effectively as he could have – a shame, as other
parts of the film are a good deal more impressive.
After
the success of his 1958 film Stakeout,
Yoshitaro Nomura became best-known for his intelligent and twisty crime dramas,
often based on Seicho Matsumoto stories, and films from this earlier stage in
his career are not easy to see. The nature of the story meant that the bulk of
it had to be shot on location, and this is something that Nomura seemed to
relish. Despite his odd lack of focus (for the most part) on the emotions of
the two main characters and the performances of the two leads, he was a
talented filmmaker and this is most obvious in a sequence which occurs around
21 minutes in, contains no dialogue and lasts for just under three minutes. It
simply features Mizuhara walking by himself during a heavy rain shower and
pausing to take shelter in a doorway, through which he watches a baby crying
alone until a boy (presumably the baby’s older brother) runs up and stares at
him, at which point he hurries on. There’s a sense that even the crying baby is
better off than Mizuhara because at least it has a big brother to look after
it. This beautiful sequence does nothing to advance the plot but expresses
Mizuhara’s loneliness perfectly without even requiring Ishihama to do much in
the way of acting. Most of the film and this scene in particular are also
helped by Chuji Kinoshita’s restrained score – one of his better ones, with the
exception of his use of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ at the end, which can’t help but feel
corny. Anyway, despite my quibbles, this film is well worth seeking out and quite likely the best film version of the story to date.
*Other
sources may give different ages depending on which age system is used, and the
two translations of the story into
English do not agree. The first, by Edward Seidensticker, appeared in 1954, was
slightly abridged, and described Kaoru as being dressed and made-up to appear
15 or 16, but turning out to be only 13. The second translation, by J. Martin
Holman, appeared in 1997, was unabridged, and described Kaoru as looking 17 or
18 but actually being 14. The discrepancy is due to the fact that Seidensticker
used the standard system of counting age in the West, whereas Holman used the
traditional Japanese system, which considered a person to be one year old at
birth and for their age to increase by a year not on their birthday, but at the
turning of the New Year. This system is no longer used in Japan.
Thanks to A.K.
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