Shojo yutai / 処女受胎 (‘Immaculate Conception’, 1966)

Obscure Japanese Film #146

Ayako Wakao

 

This Daiei production stars Ayako Wakao as Aiko, a modernist oil painter who has hit a creative wall. Searching for inspiration, she comes to believe that having a child will solve her problems but, having no desire to get married, she decides to try artificial insemination. One of the sperm donors at the clinic she attends is a student, Satoru (Takao Ito), who likes to feel that his sperm is going to beautiful women. When he sees Aiko visiting the clinic and learns she is a patient, he pressures a nurse, Keiko (Sanae Nakahara), to ensure that it’s his seed that Aiko receives…

 

Based on a novel by Jugo Kuroiwa, (who had also supplied the source material for With My Husband’s Consent), this is a silly story in questionable taste and with a very poor ending. The film relies heavily on its star, who I believe has even more costume changes here than she did in Ojo-san – although in this case some of the clothes look like they could have come from Primark. In fact, the whole thing looks like it was shot on the cheap and in a rush, which may partly be due to shrinking budgets at Daiei at the time. However, the film’s short running time of 82 minutes and total lack of name actors other than Wakao also suggests that it was most likely a B-movie which played at the bottom half of a double bill. 

Takao Ito basks in Shima's trademark sunset lighting

 

Director Koji Shima had a weakness for the orange glow of sunset in his colour films, and this is featured in a number of scenes here. He also liked to make dramatic use of harsher kinds of weather, so it’s no surprise to see a rainstorm at one point. Another Shima trademark is his use of symbolic shots, which are mostly absent from this film, apart from this rather clumsy one which again indicates that haste was the name of the game in making this movie:

Sanae Nakahara and Takao Ito

 

I love a good dream sequence, but the one featured here is pretty mediocre and rather obviously shot through a layer of gauze (as are, for some reason, the scenes at the beginning of the film in which Aiko searches for inspiration in a windy field, at a flamenco dance and at a diving pool). 

 

All in all, Shojo yutai is a very shallow treatment of the theme of artificial insemination which tries to redeem itself with some awkward moralising towards the end before getting really weird in the final scene, when talk of Aiko viewing men as mere ‘fertiliser’ causes one character to act in a most peculiar fashion. 

 

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

DVD at Amazon Japan.

Kemono no tawamure / 獣の戯れ/ The Frolic of the Beasts (1964)

Obscure Japanese Film #47

Ayako Wakao

 

Koji (Takao Ito) is a student working at a ceramics shop in Tokyo owned and run by middle-aged author Ippei, a writer of highbrow literature (Seizaburo Kawazu). Despite having a beautiful younger wife, Yuko (Ayako Wakao), Ippei is also a philanderer who condescendingly boasts of his affairs to Koji. However, the shoe is soon on the other foot when Koji begins an affair with his boss’s wife…

Takao Ito

 

One evening, Koji escorts Yuko home only to discover that Ippei is there in bed with a stripper. When Yuko protests, Ippei slaps her around, causing Koji to lose his temper. He pulls out a wrench he happened to have in his pocket and attacks Ippei with it. Ippei survives, albeit in a brain-damaged state, while Koji goes to prison. 

Seizaburo Kawazu

 

Meanwhile, Yuko breaks with convention and becomes Koji’s sponsor, enabling him to be released into her care after serving two years. She is now living with the disabled Ippei in a coastal village on the Izu Peninsula, running a flower farm where Koji will work. This strange triangle results in an emotional hothouse which can only end in tragedy. 

Ito, Wakao and Kawazu

 

This brief synopsis simplifies the non-linear narrative of both the film and the book it is based on, a short 1961 novel by Yukio Mishima which finally appeared in English translation in 2018. Screenwriter Kazuo Funahashi (1919-2006) also wrote the screenplays for Listen to the Voices of the Sea (1950), The Temple of Wild Geese (1962) and another Mishima adaptation, Sword (aka Ken, 1964). His adaptation is pretty faithful to the book, although some of the subtle psychological nuances are inevitably lost, resulting in a slightly more conventional melodrama than the original. For example, when Koji finds the wrench, he conceals it from Yuko in the book, but not in the film as, without the insight into Koji’s mind that the text provides, this would have made it appear that his attack on Ippei was premeditated. According to translator Andrew Clare, Mishima’s original is also filled with references to the Noh theatre, but whether this would have been apparent to the average reader or viewer even in Japan is questionable. 

Ayako Wakao

 

The other main departure from the novel is the ending. This is more surprising given that the story originally ended with Yuko, but for some inscrutable reason the filmmakers chose not to give the final scene to their star. Incidentally, Ayako Wakao had acted opposite Mishima in Yasuzo Masumura’s Afraid to Die a few years earlier and was an actress that the author – an avid moviegoer – greatly admired. She later appeared in both stage (1970) and film (2005) versions of his novel Spring Snow.

Ito and Masao Mishima

 

Aside from Wakao, the most familiar member of the cast is Masao Mishima, who pops up as a much more benevolent priest than the one he played in The Temple of Wild Geese. However, Seizaburo Kawazu (1908-83), who plays Ippei, had a long career in the movies stretching back to 1928 and appeared in Yojimbo as the gang boss Seibei. In what was probably one of his best later roles, he’s very good here playing a character who undergoes a dramatic change.

Seizaburo Kawazu and unknown

 

The subtle music is the third and final film score by avant-garde composer Yoshiro Irino (1921-80), whose contribution to the picture is tastefully sparse and restrained, while the director, Sokichi Tomimoto (1927-89), is about as obscure as it gets. He was a Daiei contract director forced into TV work a few years after this and few of his films are accessible. On this evidence, he certainly had some talent at least as the film is well-staged and shot throughout even if there is little evidence of a particularly individual style. The following year, he worked with Wakao again on a Seicho Matsumoto adaptation, Forest of No Escape. 

Watched without subtitles.  

DVD on Amazon Japan

 

Ito and Wakao