O-Den jigoku / お伝地獄 (‘O-Den Hell’, 1960)

Obscure Japanese Film #277

Eiji Funakoshi and Machiko Kyo

The early Meiji era (1870s). O-Den (Machiko Kyo) and Naminosuke (Eiji Funakoshi) are young villagers recently married. Naminosuke is suffering from a mysterious illness, but they lack the money to pay for proper medical care. Then Daihachi (Taiji Tonoyama), a man who had wanted to marry O-Den, turns up and gives her the necessary money, but then reveals there’s a catch – she has to sleep with him for it. The two argue on a bridge with rotten railings and Daihichi rather conveniently falls to his doom below.

Taiji Tonoyama

The couple hotfoot it to Tokyo, where Naminosuke is treated by a dashing young doctor, Sugimoto (Keizo Kawasaki), who dresses in the newly-fashionable Western style. He gives Naminosuke a medicine which proves very effective in stopping the pain, but he becomes reliant on it and it’s not long before O-Den is sleeping with the doctor in order to get repeat prescriptions – and so begins her fall into immorality...

Keizo Kawasaki

This Daiei production was based on a novel of the same name from 1935 by Kanji Kunieda (1892-1956), who had previously provided the source material for Tamizo Ishida’s Kenka tobi (1939) and Mizoguchi’s Utamaro and His Five Women (1946) among others, but appears to have remained untranslated in English. His novel was itself based on the story of O-Den (or Oden) Takahashi, who was convicted of murder and beheaded in 1879 at the age of 31. Kodansha’s Japan: An Illustrated Encyclopedia contains the following entry on Takahashi:

Murderess, the most notorious dokufu (wicked woman) of the modern era. Accused of several sex-related murders, Oden was the first woman to be executed by beheading after the Edo period (1600-1868). Born in what is now Gumma Prefecture, she was known from girlhood for her beauty and promiscuity. Her life of crime began after her husband contracted leprosy. When the disease proved incurable, Oden allegedly poisoned her husband and embarked on a career of prostitution, larceny and homicide. Arrested in 1876 for slitting the throat of a used-clothing merchant at an inn in Asakusa, she was convicted and ultimately executed. It was the most sensational crime story of the day, and lurid accounts of Oden’s escapades filled the newspapers. The popular author Kanagaki Robun wrote a spicy novel based on her life, Takahashi Oden yasha monogatari (1879, Tale of Takahashi Oden, the She-Devil), which Kawatake Mokuami adapted as a kabuki play.

I can’t vouch for the accuracy of all of the information in the above entry, but it’s certainly clear that O-Den’s life began to be fictionalised in the very year of her death, and few of her chroniclers seem to have worried much about the actual facts since. Surprisingly, this film version features no throat-slitting, no arrest of O-Den and no execution. It’s also worth noting that, although it’s widely believed that she was the last woman to be executed by beheading in Japan, that’s simply not the case – there were at least a further 22 women put to death in this way in the two years following O-Den’s execution.

O-Den had already been the subject of at least half a dozen previous films, including silent pictures now lost, as well as Nobuo Nakagawa’s Dokufu Takahashi Oden (1958), usually known in English as A Wicked Woman, and a 1935 version of Kunieda’s novel directed by Tamizo Ishida. I doubt that Ishida’s film has survived, but the theme song sung by Kiyozo Shinbashi (who appeared in Sadao Yamanaka’s 1935 film The Million Ryo Pot) has, and you can listen to it on YouTube here. Incidentally, the role of O-Den in Ishida’s film was played by Sumiko Suzuki, who had also played her in a 1929 film. Suzuki (1904-85) is largely forgotten today, but may be known to some as the star of The Ghost Cat and the Shamisen (1938) and she apparently cornered the market in ‘ghost cat’ roles.

This film is so unlike Nakagawa’s version of O-Den’s story from only two years previously that it would be easy to miss the fact that they were inspired by the same real-life person. Director Keigo Kimura, who also wrote the screenplay, avoids the obvious exploitation elements of the story and focuses instead on charting the moral downfall of a woman who begins as a model wife trying her best to help her suffering husband. Having been the one to turn Machiko Kyo into a star in his 1949 film A Fool’s Love and worked with her frequently since, he was perhaps also concerned with providing her with a juicy role, which he certainly did. It’s a very sympathetic portrayal of O-Den which views her largely as a victim of circumstance – or fate – and her journey into cynicism is played perfectly by Kyo. In fact, performances are top-notch all round, with Eiji Funakoshi being especially believable in a difficult role as a man frequently almost out of his mind with pain.

Kimura pays considerable attention to period detail, and we see how the then-recent opening up of Japan has introduced various novel experiences to its people, from the eating of beef to having a photograph taken. In terms of style, he uses mainly long- and medium-shots throughout, with few close-ups and slightly longer takes than usual, allowing plenty of freedom to his actors, something which is especially apparent in Kyo and Funakoshi’s final, dramatic scene together. Kimura also seldom cuts to his main characters when transitioning between scenes, opting instead to focus briefly on random people going about their business: a crouching rickshaw driver tapping his pipe on the wheel of his vehicle, a young child fascinated by a sparkler, an old man enjoying a bottle of beer at a festival. As someone who’s always disliked the received wisdom that everything should be there to move the plot along, I heartily approve of these beautiful moments, and it’s these more than anything that, for me, make this an exceptionally fine film.

A note on the title:

The ‘O’ in O-Den’s name is an honorific prefix seldom used today, while the ‘Den’ (伝) can mean ‘legend’ in English, and the film is sometimes listed as ‘The Legendary Hell’, which makes little sense and, as far as I’m aware, was never an official release title. It does seem odd to use to use ‘O-Den Hell’ as a title without the character の, which would indicate that the English should be ‘O-Den’s Hell’ or ‘The Hell of O-Den’; my guess is that O-Den Hell is a sort of nickname, but I haven’t been able to confirm this.

Thanks to A.K.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

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Time within Memory / 青幻記 遠い日の母は美しく / Seigen-ki (1973)

Obscure Japanese Film #273

Takahiro Tamura

Arai Yohiro

Minoru (Takahiro Tamura) is a middle-aged man who returns to the island of Okinoerabu in the far south of Japan for the first time in over 30 years. He relives long-forgotten memories of his childhood and his widowed mother (Atsuko Kaku), who died there when he was still a boy (Arai Yohiro), and meets an old man (Kamatari Fujiwara) who had been in love with her.

Atsuko Kaku

Based on an autobiographical novel by Jiro Isshiki (1916-88) which won the Osamu Dazai prize on its publication in 1967, this was the first of just two films directed by renowned cinematographer Toichiro Narushima (1925-93), who also worked as his own DP and producer here in addition to co-writing the screenplay. Previously, he had provided first-rate camerawork for mostly ‘new wave’ directors such as Yoshishige Yoshida, Masahiro Shinoda, Noboru Nakamura and Nagisa Oshima after starting out as an assistant cameraman for Keisuke Kinoshita. He clearly learnt a few things from working with such acclaimed filmmakers as, not only is the photography in this film as striking as one would expect from Narushima, but he proves to have a firm hand in other areas too.

Atsuko Kaku

The story is the sort of nostalgic, sentimental material that could easily have become cloying, but Narushima mostly avoids this by preventing his actors from overdoing it and staging his scenes with taste and subtlety, while the device of having the young and old Minoru frequently appearing together - almost as if the older one were a time traveller – works especially well, as does the purposefully non-chronological unfolding of events in the flashbacks (the most dramatic scene is held back until the older Minoru can finally face it). Time within Memory also benefits from its well-used locations and Toru Takemitsu’s score, which provides much of the emotional resonance even if its not one of his greatest.

Yunosuke Ito and Hisano Yamaoka

Delivering a fine performance in only her third film appearance, Atsuko Kaku won the Mainichi Film Concours Award for Best Actress, but for some reason never made another film. Like Tatsuya Nakadai and many other well-known Japanese actors, she was a member of the Haiyuza theatre company. 

Jun Hamamura

As a passive observer of his own past, Takahiro Tamura has less to do despite ostensibly having the lead role, while other notables among the cast include Yunosuke Ito as Minoru’s eccentric inventor grandfather and Hisano Yamaoka as his wife, Taiji Tonoyama as a shopkeeper sympathetic to the young Minoru, and Jun Hamamura as a mumbo-jumbo mumbling shaman. However, it’s Kamatari Fujiwara who impresses the most among the supporting cast when he sings and accompanies himself on the shamisen in a uniquely individual style (assuming he wasn’t dubbed).

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Kamatari Fujiwara

Mori no Ishimatsu / 森の石松 (‘Ishimatsu of Mori’, 1949)

Obscure Japanese Film #267

Susumu Fujita

Takashi Shimura 

Ishimatsu (Susumu Fujita, best-known for playing the title role in Kurosawa’s Sanshiro Sugata) is a poor tenant tea farmer fed up with working like a slave for a pittance. After losing the little money he had in a dice game against gambling boss Shimachidori (Takashi Shimura), he resolves – with the encouragement of tea house hostess Oshin (Kyoko Asagiri) – to abandon agriculture and turn to crime despite the objections of his mother (Choko Iida) and best friend Gosaku (Taiji Tonoyama). He finds employment with the famous yakuza Jirocho Shimizu (Komei Minami) but has little success in his new endeavour until, determined to make a name for himself, he shows reckless bravery in a fight but loses an eye in the process. Now with a formidable reputation to live up to, he falls in love with Ofuji (Yukiko Todoroki), but she won’t marry him unless he gives up his life of crime…

Yukiko Todoroki

Mori no Ishimatsu was said to have been a subordinate of the real life Jirocho Shimizu (1820-93), but it’s unclear whether Ishimatsu was, in fact, a real person. In any case, he had already been the subject of at least half a dozen movies by the time this one was made and would go on to inspire many more, most of which seem to be comedies, which is understandable given that Japanese Wikipedia states that he was traditionally portrayed as ‘a lovable character who is a drunken ruffian but has a strong sense of loyalty and compassion, and is somewhat absent-minded.’

This Shochiku production was based on an original screenplay by Kaneto Shindo and directed by his regular associate Kozaburo Yoshimura. Also frequently comic in tone, with a rather dim-witted hero and the sword fighting scenes emphasising the clumsiness and reluctance of the opponents, their film nevertheless has its serious side and criticises both gangsterism and the exploitation of workers by the old feudal system. Indeed, it was probably these themes that saw it approved by the censors of the Occupation authorities, who prevented many period films from being made at the time (this was Yoshimura’s first) as they felt that such stories often gave tacit approval to feudalism, the mindset of which had allowed the military to take over the government of Japan and lead it into war.

Taiji Tonoyama

As a film, this is no lost masterpiece, but it is a well-made and enjoyable watch which clearly had quite a lot of effort put into it – the period details, for example, look quite authentic, and there is some effective use made of real locations, nifty tracking shots (courtesy of Yoshimura’s regular cinematographer at the time, Toshio Ubukata) and a number of complex, well-staged scenes in which elaborate sets and large numbers of extras are also used. Another asset is the cast, in which Shimura makes a fine villain, while Choko Iida stands out as Ishimatsu’s put upon, sutra-chanting mother. Other notables featured are Koji Mitsui, Sadako Sawamura and an almost unrecognisable Chishu Ryu. 

Choko Iida

Chishu Ryu

Note on the title:

Although it’s often translated as ‘Ishimatsu of the Forest’, there’s no sign of a forest; apparently, the ‘Mori’ of the title actually refers to Mori-machi village, in what was then the Enshu region, and is where Ishimatsu was said to be from.

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Sanmon yakusha / 三文役者 (‘Third-Rate Actor’, 2000)

Obscure Japanese Film #257

Taiji Tonoyama

This late film by the prolific writer-director Kaneto Shindo (best known for his 1964 picture, Onibaba) tells the story of Taiji Tonoyama, an actor who appeared in most of Shindo’s films before his death at the age of 73 in 1989. Tonoyama was a short, prematurely bald Yoda lookalike with sad, baggy eyes, so he was usually to be found among the supporting casts of the many films he appeared in, in roles of various sizes – the only leading roles played by him that I’m aware of were in two Shindo films: The Naked Island (1960) and the previously-reviewed Libido (1967).

Naoto Takenaka

Shindo recreates scenes from the actor’s life with Naoto Takenaka as Tonoyama, placing the focus on his relationships with his first wife, Asako (Hideko Yoshida), and second wife, Kimie (Keiko Oginome), whom he meets when he is 36 and still married to Asako and Kimie is 17 and working as a waitress. Tonoyama was an unlikely womaniser and we also see him picking up various barmaids with apparent ease while simultaneously fighting a lifelong battle with the demon drink. Shindo intersperses these dramatisations with scenes from the films they made together and a straight-to-camera interview with Nobuko Otowa, Shindo’s mistress and eventual wife who frequently acted alongside Tonoyama (Otowa died in 1994, so Shindo must have been sitting on this for at least 6 years). Towards the end, there is also some very brief interview footage with fellow directors Shohei Imamura, Hiromichi Horikawa and Seijiro Koyama.

Nobuko Otowa

Shindo had already written a book about Tonoyama, who had also written a number of books himself, notably a 1966 volume whose title translates as The Irresponsible Ramblings of a Third-Rate Actor (unsurprisingly, these have not made it into English).While I’ve long been a fan of Tonoyama myself, I’m not really sure that Shindo has done his memory a lot of favours by making this film. Although Naoto Takenaka’s performance seems a pretty good Tonoyama impression for the first couple of minutes, he goes on to deliver every line with exactly the same throaty, drawn-out intonation, and it gets old fast. The film is also way too long at over two hours – a one-hour documentary would have been far more preferable in my view, especially as the end result feels so superficial and sentimental, with the repetitive piano and violin music-by-numbers score delivering the coup de grâce to what is easily the weakest Shindo film I’ve seen.

Keiko Oginome

A note on the title:

The film is frequently listed as ‘By Player’ in English, but I’m sure this was never an official release title. It’s also meaningless, and I can only assume that somebody somewhere came up with ‘bit player’ as a translation for ‘sanmon yakusha’ and somehow managed to confuse ‘bit’ with ‘by’.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

English subtitles at Open Subtitles

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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.

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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)

 

Sisters / 姉妹 / Kyodai (1955)

Obscure Japanese Film #197

Hitomi Nozoe and Hitomi Nakahara

 

Keiko (Hitomi Nozoe) and Toshiko (Hitomi Nakahara) are teenaged sisters whose family home is in the mountains close to a hydroelectric dam where their father (Akitake Kono) works. Their three younger brothers stay at home with their mother (Hiroko Kawasaki), but Keiko and Toshiko attend school in the city, so during term time they stay with aunt Otami (Yuko Mochizuki) and uncle Ginzaburo (Jun Tatara).  The relations get on well together, but Ginzaburo is prone to drinking, gambling and cavorting with geisha and Otami sometimes has to hide from creditors. At least Ginzaburo is preferable to their other uncle (Taiji Tonoyama), who beats his wife (Setsuko Shinobu). 

 

Yuko Mochizuki

 

As Keiko’s parents cannot afford to send her to university, they’re already looking for a match for her though she’s only 17. She likes power station worker Oka (Taketoshi Naito) despite his strange passion for dried squid, but his prospects are poor. The more tomboyish Toshiko is only 14 but already has a strong individualistic streak and equally strong opinions. Although the two girls are like chalk and cheese, they’re also unusually close, but seem fated to part sooner or later…  

 

Hitomi Nakahara

 

Shot mostly on location, this character-driven piece produced by the independent company Chuo Eiga has little plot, but plenty of comedy and tragedy in equal measure. Chuo Eiga was something of a haven for leftist filmmakers unable to get their projects accepted by the major studios. Sisters touches on some typical socialist concerns, such as the lay-offs of power station workers, but for the most part wears its politics lightly. The source was a semi-autobiographical 1954 novel by Fumi Kuroyanagi (1912-65), for whom the younger sister, Toshiko, was something of an alter ego. Perhaps for largely practical reasons, the setting has been changed from pre-war Niseko in Hokkaido to post-war Matsumoto in Nagano Prefecture. 

 

 

Director Miyoji Ieki (who also co-wrote the screenplay with Kaneto Shindo) was known for his films focusing on the difficulties faced by young people growing up, and Sisters is typical of his work. Although largely forgotten these days, there’s no doubt that Ieki qualifies as a true auteur due to the consistency of his theme and frequent input in the writing of his pictures. As usual, he elicits fine performances out of his young principals, although it should be noted that Hitomi Nakahara (also featured prominently in Ieki’s All My Children), who plays a 14-year-old most convincingly, was actually 19 at the time and, ironically, one year older than her namesake, Hitomi Nozoe, who plays her older sister. Ieki may not have been the most stylish of directors, but like his films Stepbrothers (1957), All My Children (1963) and The Wayside Pebble (1964), this is an intelligent, sensitive and genuinely moving piece of work.

 

Thanks to A.K.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)