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

The Kii River / 紀ノ川 / Kinokawa (1966)

Obscure Japanese Film #152

Yoko Tsukasa

 

Wakayama, 1899. Hana (Yoko Tsukasa) is a young woman from a highly-respected family who marries slightly below her class as her husband, Keisaku Shintani (Takahiro Tamura), is judged to be a young man of exceptional promise. However, their married life gets off to an awkward start when Hana joins her husband to live in his family home, which is also shared by his brother, Kosaku (Tetsuro Tanba). He takes an instant dislike to her, perhaps because he resents her for being from a family of higher status, or perhaps because he’s secretly in love with her himself. Meanwhile, Keisaku spearheads an ambitious engineering project to build flood defences along the Kii River which will protect the surrounding farmlands in the event of heavy rain.

Takahiro Tamura and Tetsuro Tanba

 

As the years pass, the influence of the West increases and the modernisation of Japan begins. People begin to wear Western clothes more and more, and even express their appreciation of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. We see the introduction of new consumer items such as ready-made cigarettes and bicycles, as well as new ideas, including democracy, communism and the emancipation of women. Kosaku eventually mellows towards his sister-in-law, who has a daughter, Fumio (Shima Iwashita), with whom she has little in common. Fumio is an outspoken rebel who leads a protest when one of her teachers is unfairly dismissed and regards her parents’ ideals as hopelessly out-of-date. But after Fumio has a daughter of her own and Hana enters old age as the family prepare to face the tribulations of World War Two, their animosity too will fade… 

Shima Iwashita

 

Keisaku’s obsession with building flood defences may be symbolic of a desire to control the forces of nature – something which the Shintani family learn on multiple occasions is the one thing their wealth and status will never enable them to do. There is also symbolism of a weirder variety in the motif of the white snake which lives in the attic and will drop dead onto the tatami below at the very moment the mistress of the house expires. 

Yoko Tsukasa

 

Running nearly three hours, this major Shochiku production was based on a 1959 novel of the same name by Sawako Ariyoshi (1931-84), whose work had also provided the source material for Keisuke Kinoshita’s even longer The Scent of Incense (1964), and would go on to form the basis of films such as Yasuzo Masumura’s The Wife of Seishu Hanaoka (1967), Tadashi Imai’s The Time of Reckoning (1968) and Shiro Toyoda’s The Twilight Years (1973). Ariyoshi was from Wakayama, where this story is set, and elements of it are said to have been based on her own family’s history. However, she had little in common with the character of Hana, being more similar to that of Fumio, although neither character should be taken as her alter ego. English translations of her work include this novel (as The River Ki), The Twilight Years, and The Wife of Seishu Hanaoka (as The Doctor’s Wife).  

Yoko Tsukasa

 

Director Noboru Nakamura had already made three films with Shima Iwashita at this point, including the excellent Koto (1963). Her performance is sometimes a little on the broad side here, whereas Yoko Tsukasa’s is quite understated. It was Tsukasa who won most of the major Japanese film awards for her performance in The Kii River, largely (I suspect) because she is convincing in regards to the ageing of her character from around 20 to 70. This is reminiscent of the transformation of Machiko Kyo in A Woman’s Life (1962), another female-focused period family saga of a type which seems to have been popular in Japan around this time. Personally, though, I felt that the strongest performance here comes from Tetsuro Tanba as the surly brother-in-law, although the reasons for his change of attitude towards Hana are not entirely clear. 

Tetsuro Tanba

The Kii River is beautifully shot by cinematographer Toichiro Narushima, whose credits are few but who also shot Koto, The Shape of Night (1964, again for Nakamura) and Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (1983). I’ve rarely seen a film with so few close-ups, and one thing I’ve always liked about Japanese cinema is that close-ups are generally used far more sparingly than in Hollywood. Another strength of the film is the score by Toru Takemitsu, which is also used sparingly, and features his brilliant modernist take on traditional Japanese music. 

 

Yoko Tsukasa

When made into films, such sagas spanning periods of many years are often limited in the amount of depth possible in regard to their characters and can rely too much on skipping from one melodramatic incident to the next. The film in question is also guilty of this to some extent – there seem to be a lot of sudden deaths occurring sporadically throughout – but the aesthetics of the film are of such a high standard that it remains a true cut above the rest. For these reasons, The Kii River may fall slightly short of masterpiece status, but certainly deserves recognition as a classic of the Japanese cinema.

Shima Iwashita