Niwatori wa futatabi naku / 鶏はふたゝび鳴く (‘The Cock Crows Twice’, 1954)

Obscure Japanese Film # 259

Eijiro Tono and Yoko Minakaze

After a man trying to find oil in order to revive the fortunes of his dying seaside town commits suicide, the locals blame Fumiko (Yoko Minakaze), a young woman who had rejected his sudden offer of marriage. Fumiko lives with her father, Tokinosuke (Eijiro Tono, great), who has been going to pieces since his wife ran off with another man. Ostracised by the townsfolk, Fumiko heads towards the sea with the intention of ending it all, but is spotted by an itinerant oil worker (Shuji Sano) who prevents her from going through with it. He and four other men have been left stranded since the suicide of their boss and Fumiko is moved by their kindness and relates to their outside status.

Shuji Sano

Sachiko Hidari, Minakaze and Yoko Kozono

It emerges that Fumiko has two female friends, Yoko (Yoko Kozono/Kosono) and Taniko (Sachiko Hidari), with whom she has made a suicide pact, each carrying a deadly pill in a locket around their necks. Yoko’s reason for being miserable is that she’s the daughter of a concubine (Sadako Sawamura), while Taniko’s is that she’s physically disabled and has to walk with a crutch. The women have agreed that they will all commit suicide together. Meanwhile, the stranded workers are debating whether to flee the town and escape the debts they’ve incurred or stick it out, hoping that a long-awaited telegram will arrive telling them to come to a new oil field. Then Kurama (Yunosuke Ito), an embezzler on the run from the police, arrives and claims to be an oil surveyor who intends to restart the drilling…

Yunosuke Ito

This Shintoho production has an unusual story which is a creation of Rinzo Shiina (1911-73), who wrote the original screenplay and had written the novel on which director Heinosuke Gosho’s Where Chimneys are Seen (1953) had been based. However, there are certain similarities to Vittorio De Sica’s Miracle in Milan (1951), which I strongly suspect influenced this film. With all the talk of suicide, it first appears to be a rather bleak drama, but gradually transforms into a comedy. It’s not like any other Gosho film I’ve seen, and I found it quite engaging and charming in the way it takes delight in continually subverting our expectations. For example, when Fumiko’s wealthy aunt who has been turning down her father’s requests for money appears, we expect that she’ll be a terrible harridan – especially as she’s played by Eiko Miyoshi – but this proves not to be quite the case.

Eiko Miyoshi

It’s surprising to see Yoko Minakaze (1930-2007) in the lead role. She doesn’t look like a film star and, indeed, wasn’t one, but for some mysterious reason I felt her lack of star quality somehow worked in this film’s favour. Coming from the theatre, she enjoyed a long career on stage as well as screens both big and small, but this may well be her most major role in movies.

It’s worth noting that screenwriter Rinzo Shiina had converted to Christianity in 1950 and it’s easy to see how his beliefs influenced this work. It’s also perhaps the reason composer Toshiro Mayuzumi used choral music for his score, although this is one element I didn’t particularly care for. In most respects, though, this film is a gem and it’s also beautifully shot by Joji Ohara, who won a Mainichi Film Concours Award for Best Cinematography for his pains, making this a film crying out for a good quality release.

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Summer Storm / 夏の嵐 / Natsu no arashi (1956)

Obscure Japanese Film #112

Masahiko Tsugawa and Mie Kitahara

Director Ko Nakahira’s first film following his famous ‘sun tribe’ movie Crazed Fruit again stars Mie Kitahara and examines the lives of disaffected youth in post-war Japan. The film opens dramatically with a brief but attention-grabbing pre-credits sequence in which we hear a startling scream from Kitahara, who is standing on a windy beach and shouting out to sea. “How unfair! You’ve gone forever, that’s so unfair. I’ll never forgive you for this! Never!” she yells before rushing into the stormy ocean. This scene is repeated again at the end of the film, by which point of course we have the context to understand it. 

 

Ryoko (Kitahara) is a young woman living with her family after having been raised by another woman they call ‘Aunt Maki’ (Ayuko Fujishiro) until she was 13, at which point Aunt Maki remarried and sent Ryoko back to her birth mother, Mitsu (granny-specialist Tanie Kitabayashi playing her real age for once). 

 

Tanie Kitabayashi

As a result, Ryoko not only feels unwanted by both women and resents them, but has grown up to be a cold and cynical person. Although she works as a teacher at a special needs school, it’s a job she has taken mainly because her parents were against it (for reasons which are unclear). The family live in a Western-style house and are practising Christians. Mitsu takes religion especially seriously and is insufferably self-righteous; Ryoko sees her sister Taeko (Yoko Kozono) as a carbon copy of her mother and despises her for this reason. Their father (Yo Shiomi) is an antiques collector with his head in the clouds most of the time, and the only family member Ryoko feels any kinship with is her younger brother Akira (Masahiko Tsugawa), mainly because he’s adopted. 

 

Masahiko Tsugawa

Into this already dysfunctional household steps Akimoto (Tatsuya Mitsuhashi), a young man who is newly-engaged to Taeko. He’s full of self-loathing after having survived a suicide pact with a former girlfriend who died. When Ryoko is introduced, she suffers a shock – by pure coincidence, Akimoto is the same man she once had a one-night stand with on a camping trip. Trouble begins when the two realise they still have feelings for each other…  

 

Tatsuya Mihashi

In an attempt to follow the huge success of Crazed Fruit (based on a Shintaro Ishihara story), Nikkatsu studios chose to adapt another controversial Akutagawa Prize-nominated story by an angry young author – in this case a female one, Michiko Fukai (1932-2015). This is the only one of Fukai’s stories to have been filmed, and her literary career seems to have been a short one. To my knowledge, none of her stories have been translated into English. Although information about Fukai is scarce on the web, she was apparently influenced by Luchino Visconti’s portrayal of self-destructive emotions in Senso (1954), which had been released in Japan as Natsu no arashi, or Summer Storm, and whose title she borrowed. 

Tatsuya Mihashi and Yoko Kozono

 

The film features a considerable amount of voiceover narration by star Mie Kitahara, and is quite a dialogue-heavy piece of work in itself. It’s extremely well-directed by Ko Nakahira, who helps to hold the interest with some unusual staging; for example, he has Kitahara play a whole scene lying face down on the floor at one point, while in another, Ryoko and her colleague Kido (Nobuo Kaneko) exchange lines in a sweltering staffroom while each try to commandeer the one electric fan available. Unfortunately, Ryoko and Akimoto are both such self-pitying characters that they soon grow tiresome, and they are also given to saying things like “I crave exhilarating drama that makes my head reel!” (Ryoko). Perversely, it’s only when Akimoto realises that Taeko doesn’t love him that he wants to marry her. “You can’t understand my delight at the living death she promises me!” he exults. It’s hard to imagine real people saying such things, and I doubt it would sound any less pretentious in Japanese as the subtitles by Stuart J Walton are excellent. For these reasons, the film ultimately left me cold, and I suspect that it was a good deal less well-received than Crazed Fruit considering that it’s nowhere near as well-known and there were no further collaborations between Ko Nakahira and Mie Kitahara, or adaptations of Michiko Fukai’s stories. Where Crazed Fruit successfully tapped into the zeitgeist, Ryoko and Akimoto are both a bit too weird for most people to relate to; consequently, Summer Storm’s themes of suicide and incest feel like a slightly misjudged attempt to appeal to the supposedly nihilistic and rebellious youth of the time through mere shock value. 

 

Bonus trivia: Mie Kitahara (b.1933) was one of Japanese cinema’s biggest stars of the late 1950s and is still alive at the time of writing. After making 20 films with fellow star Yujiro Ishihara in the space of five years, she married him and retired from films in 1960, subsequently appearing in only one TV drama in 1964. Known as Makiko Ishihara since she quit acting, she co-managed her husband’s production company for many years and continued to run it after his death in 1987.