Daikon to ninjin / 大根と人参 / (‘Radishes and Carrots’, 1965)

 

Chishu Ryu

 

 

 

Yamaki (Chishu Ryu) is a typical middle-aged salaryman who has worked his way up into a comfortable senior management position. He’s been married to Nobuyo (Nobuko Otowa) for 28 years, has four adult daughters and is a creature of habit who rarely deviates from his daily routine. As his younger brother and subordinate co-worker Kosuki (Hiroyuki Nagato) says, he’s ‘as ordinary as radishes and carrots’. 

 

Hiroyuki Nagato and Nobuko Otowa

However, problems begin to pile up – a friend (Kinzo Shin) has cancer but hasn’t been told, Kosuki has embezzled money from the company and is expecting Yamaki to bail him out, and he’s been getting into increasingly aggressive arguments with his best friend, Suzuka (Isao Yamagata), to whose son his youngest daughter (Mariko Kaga) is sngaged. 

 

Isao Yamagata

Mariko Kaga

One day, his family are shocked when he fails to return from work. Unbeknownst to them, he’s gone off to Osaka, where he becomes involved with a cheerful call girl (Miyuki Kuwano) and her eccentric pimp (Daisuke Kato), who also has a Chinese medicine business he wants Yamaki to come in on with him…

 

Miyuki Kuwano

 

Daisuke Kato

This Shochiku comedy features an all-star cast which also includes Ineko Arima, Mariko Okada and Yoko Tsukasa as Yamaki’s other three daughters as well as Ryo Ikebe and Shima Iwashita, although some of these big names (especially Ikebe) are given precious little to do. At the beginning of the film, we’re presented with statistics informing us that over 80, 000 people go missing per year in Japan – a phenomenon which seems an odd topic for comedy. The film originated from an idea by Yasujiro Ozu, no less, who took his inspiration from a short story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa entitled ‘Yamagamo’, which centres around a quarrel between two old friends, and worked up a treatment with his regular collaborator Kogo Noda which remained unfinished. It seems likely that the theme of a man who goes missing was added later by credited screenwriters Yoshio Shirasaka and Minoru Shibuya, the latter of whom directed the film (his penultimate feature). 

 

Nobuko Otowa and Mariko Okada

 

Shima Iwashita

Although this is actually the first film I’ve seen by Shibuya, he was known for somewhat cynical comedies and it’s clear that Daikon to ninjin  is far closer to his usual style than it is to Ozu’s. In fact, one of the pleasures of the film is seeing its unlikely lead, Chishu Ryu, send up all those ‘perfect father’ roles he played for Ozu over the years. There’s also some surprisingly frank sexual dialogue that would not have been found in an Ozu picture. While Yamaki’s disappearance is not really given sufficient motivation, and the film does seem a rather messy, cobbled-together affair, it remains quite entertaining and likeable, and certainly worth a watch for anyone with an affection for the Japanese actors of the era.

Thanks to A.K. 

 

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

 

The Blue Beast / 青い野獣 / Aoi yaju (1960)

Obscure Japanese Film #140

Tatsuya Nakadai

Yasuhiko Kuroki (Tatsuya Nakadai) is an ambitious young man working for a magazine publishing company run by Ogawa (Jun Tazaki). When a pay dispute breaks out, the union calls a strike and Kuroki serves as a spokesman for the workers. However, he’s actually a mole working for the management, who are paying him in exchange for inside information. 

Ichiro Nakatani

 

Keiko Awaji

Going for a drink with fellow union member Goda (Ichiro Nakatani), Kuroki is surprised to find his old flame from his student days, Yoshie (Keiko Awaji), working at the bar. It’s the first time they’ve seen each other for 6 years and their former passion is soon rekindled, but Kuroki is unaware that Goda has become suspicious and asked Yoshie to keep an eye on him. 

Yatsuko Tan'ami

 

Meanwhile, Kuroki has been having an affair with Ogawa’s wife, Yoriko (Yatsuko Tan’ami), whom he was hired to tutor part-time while still a student. She had used her influence on her husband to get Kuroki his job, but now she’s just in his way, so he breaks it off by telling her in brutal fashion that she’s too old to be attractive any longer. 

Yoko Tsukasa

 

Koreya Senda

Kuroki next sets his sights on Fumiko (Yoko Tsukasa), the daughter of powerful financier Eto (played by Nakadai’s real-life mentor, Koreya Senda). He knows that if he can get Fumiko to marry him, he’ll be made for life… 

Keiko Awaji and Nakadai

 

Yasuhiko Kuroki is an amoral social climber in the tradition of Stendhal’s Julien Sorel in his 1830 novel The Red and the Black, Dreiser’s Clyde Griffiths in An American Tragedy (upon which the 1951 film A Place in the Sun starring Montgomery Clift was based), and especially John Braine’s Joe Lampton in Room at the Top, filmed in 1958 with Laurence Harvey as Joe. That film was released in Japan in July of 1959, and very likely inspired this one as the similarities are obvious, although the two films end quite differently.

 

The Blue Beast, a Toho production, was written by Yoshio Shirasaka, who wrote a number of films for Yasuzo Masumura, but – more significantly – had also written the screenplay for  The Beast Must Die (1959), in which Nakadai had starred as a similar (though more deadly) antihero. Although the ending of that film seemed to leave things wide open for a sequel, it also called for location shooting in a foreign country, which is probably why it never happened. I’m unsure of the significance of the colour blue, but it seems highly likely that the inclusion of the word ‘beast’ in the title here was intended to tell audiences that this was their opportunity to see Nakadai being... well, 'beastly' again (especially to women).

 

For Nakadai, this was the first of four collaborations with director Hiromichi Horikawa, but it’s not as good as the other one I’ve seen, Shiro to kuro (1963), and it’s also less interesting than The Beast Must Die. It feels rather oddly lacking dramatically, partly because it unfolds all too predictably, but also because – unlike Julien Sorel, Clyde Griffiths and Joe Lampton – Yasuhiko Kuroki lacks anything resembling a sympathetic side. He’s a pretty one-dimensional character, really, and that’s also probably why Nakadai’s not at the top of his game here. Sei Ikeno’s soundtrack, which prominently features the vibraphone and recalls the Modern Jazz Quartet, may also have been too mellow a choice for this type of drama. 

 Thanks to A.K.