The Temple of Wild Geese / 雁の寺 / Gan no tera (1962)

Obscure Japanese Film #36

Ayako Wakao

In the second of her three films for Yuzo Kawashima (the others being Women are Born Twice and Elegant Beast), Ayako Wakao stars as Satoko, the mistress of Nangaku Kishimoto, a famous painter (Ganjiro Nakamura) who falls ill. When his friend Jikai, a Buddhist priest (Masao Mishima), comes to visit him on his deathbed, Kishimoto asks him to look after Satoko once he’s gone. The funeral soon follows, but Satoko is unable to attend for fear of scandal, so instead she visits Jikai’s temple a week later to burn incense in tribute. Jikai tells her of Nangaku’s last wish and forces himself on her. Satoko resists at first, but soon gives in and, for lack of a better option, goes to live with him at the temple. She endures Jikai’s embraces without complaint but soon begins to feel sympathy for Jinen (Kuniichi Takami), a young acolyte who works at the temple, where he lives in a tiny, cramped room resembling an animal’s cage and is treated like a slave by Jikai.

Masao Mishima gets some good news from Ganjiro Nakamura

 

Set in Kyoto during the 1930s, the story is reminiscent of Yukio Mishima’s novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kon Ichikawa’s 1958 film version of which also featured Ganjiro Nakamura – although in that film it was he who played a randy and none-too-pious priest. Like the stuttering acolyte portrayed by Raizo Ichikawa in that film, Jinen secretly despises his master, whom he sees as cynical and corrupt. Kawashima’s film is an extremely faithful adaptation of a prize-winning 1961 novella by Tsutomu Mizukami, an author better known for his Seicho Matsumoto-like social crime thrillers such as Straits of Hunger (Kiga kaikyo), brilliantly filmed in 1965 by Tomu Uchida. The Temple of Wild Geese contains strong autobiographical elements as Mizukami himself had been harshly treated as an acolyte in his youth. However, the similarities to Mishima’s work are far from coincidental as Mizukami went on to write Gobancho Yugirirou, a 1962 novel inspired by the same incident (filmed by Tomotaka Tasaka the following year) and, in 1979, a non-fiction account of the case entitled Kinkaku enjo (The Burning of the Golden Pavilion).

Kuniichi Takami

 

In an effort to avoid spoilers, I’ll just say that things get quite dark in this film until a jarring transition to colour at the end when Dixieland jazz bursts out on the soundtrack and we find ourselves in the present day as tourists visit the temple to see the famous paintings of wild geese by Nangaku which decorate the interior. The credits sequence at the beginning is also shot in colour and makes good use of the same paintings, but the rest of the movie is superbly shot in black and white by Sword of Doom cinematographer Hiroshi Murai, who comes up with some quite striking compositions. Sei Ikeno’s suitably ominous music score is also a plus.

 

Stout character actor Masao Mishima had perhaps his largest and best screen role here as the saké-guzzling, acolyte-abusing dirty old priest, and certainly makes the most of it. His incessant humming was an especially good touch, I felt, and in his hands Jikai comes across as even more despicable than he does in the book. It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that the film’s release was the subject of indignant protests by many among the Buddhist community in Japan at the time. The star of the show, however, is Ayako Wakao, whose performance is flawless as usual. The role is an almost perfect fit for her, while the little-known Kuniichi Takami is also a good choice as Jinen, although he understandably lacks the slightly misshapen head of the book’s protagonist.

 

Wakao and Takami

 

So, why, despite excellent work in every department, is the film somehow less compelling than it should have been? I think there are a number of reasons. Firstly, the story lacks an obvious central character with whom we can identify. Although Satoko is sympathetic, she’s so pragmatically accepting of her fate that it’s hard to relate to her, while Jinen, with his talk of the black kite that hides half-dead snakes, fish and rats in a hole at the top of a tree, in which they squirm around in a kind of hellish menagerie,* is too creepy to win us over. I was surprised that Kawashima included this in the film but it’s quite well done. Although the pause button reveals the use of a puppet for the shot where the bird drops a snake into the hole, it’s not obvious when watching at normal speed. But it’s also an indication that this may be a rare case of a film being too faithful to its source for its own good. Kawashima shows little feel for pace, with some shots going on too long, while the music is used too sparingly and the final 15 minutes seem largely superfluous, especially the eccentric epilogue. Wakao’s big scene just before the prologue is a rare deviation from the novel, but one which seems completely over the top and was obviously motivated solely by the desire to give the star a moment of high drama to go out on. Still, despite these quibbles, I consider The Temple of Wild Geese to be an unusual film of overall high quality which is well worth seeing.

The puppet shot

 

The original novella is available in a fine English translation by Dennis Washburn published by the Dalkey Archive in 2008 in an omnibus edition with the same author’s Bamboo Dolls of Echizen (also turned into a film starring Ayako Wakao). 

* Author Mizukami later wrote an entire book based on this - see my review here.

 

Teigin Incident: Death Row Prisoner /帝銀事件 死刑囚 / Teigin jiken: Shikeishu aka The Long Death (1964)

Obscure Japanese Film #35 

 

Kinzo Shin

The debut film from director Kei Kumai (who also wrote the screenplay) is a docu-drama without stars which tells the true story of the Teigin Incident, one of the most notorious and bizarre crimes in the history of post-war Japan. On 26 January 1948, a man visited a bank in Tokyo just after closing time claiming to be an official from the health department. He informed the bank manager that he was there to protect the staff from an outbreak of dysentery in the area and it was necessary for them to take an oral vaccine. The manager gathered the staff together and the man demonstrated the correct way to take the medicine, apparently swallowing a dose himself to show that it was safe. The staff all took the ‘medicine’ together but within a very short time had been rendered helpless as a result of cyanide poisoning. The man stole 164,000 yen in cash and a cheque for 17,000 yen and left. He had even given a dose to the 8-year-old son of one of the staff, poisoning 16 people in total. Including the boy, 11 died at the scene, with one further victim expiring in hospital later. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the crime was the calmness with which the man had carried it out – although there seems little doubt that he knew the poison would be fatal, the survivors said that his hands had not even trembled as he administered it.

The police arrested a painter named Sadamichi Hirasawa on suspicion of the murders. There were three main reasons for this: there was proof that he had been given a business card which matched the one that the man had presented at the bank but he was unable to produce it; he resembled the description given by the survivors; and he had recently deposited 130,000 yen into his bank account, but refused to reveal the source of his windfall. Hirasawa eventually confessed, but later withdrew his confession, claiming to have been coerced by the police under considerable duress. Doubts about his guilt were also fuelled by the fact that most of the witnesses could not identify him confidently. Nevertheless, the court found Hirasawa guilty and he was sentenced to death, although the sentence was never carried out and he was to die in prison in 1987 at the age of 95.

The Teigin Incident was a big news story in Japan in its day, and one which ran for a long time due to the numerous legal appeals and occasional uncovering of possible new evidence. It also gave birth to a number of conspiracy theories. Perhaps this explains why Nikkatsu Studios thought a film about the case may prove popular even without stars. Kumai clearly believed Hirasawa to have been innocent and was hoping to raise awareness about what he saw as a miscarriage of justice. Personally speaking, from what I’ve read about the case, I believe he was probably guilty. One theory as to why he would not explain the source of his bank deposit is that he had been earning money by painting pornographic pictures and was ashamed to admit it; in my view, it’s difficult to believe that he would not have owned up to that under the circumstances. It would be a strange person indeed who would prefer to be thought guilty of murdering 12 people including a child rather than be exposed as a clandestine painter of lewd pictures. It is also worth noting that some of the works of respected Japanese masters such as Hokusai and Kyosai were pornographic in nature, so would this really have been considered such a shameful thing to have done? Furthermore, Hirasawa’s alibi was that he was walking close to the scene of the crime at the time; considering he had lived in that area in the past but was at that point living in Hokkaido, this must be the world’s worst alibi. 

 

Kumai chooses not to focus on any one character; instead, he concentrates his attention on details of the investigations by both the police and the press. He frequently crams the frame with large groups of policemen and journalists (often seen fanning themselves or wiping the sweat from their necks), painting a picture of post-war Tokyo as a hot, overcrowded and oppressive place just as he would in his later film Wilful Murder (1981), which has a great deal in common with this one. Wilful Murder differs in approach mainly in giving us a central character to identify with (the crusading journalist played by Tatsuya Nakadai) and is arguably more engaging for that reason. Kumai works hard to make his film more than a compilation of scenes of men explaining stuff by throwing in a couple of fights and generally keeping things moving as much as possible. His next film, A Chain of Islands, covered similar ground but used a fictional story, and he would go on to expose other incidents he viewed as injustices his country had tried to sweep under the carpet in a number of future works, such as Sandakan No.8 and The Sea and Poison.

Teigin Incident: Death Row Prisoner is a rather talky picture that tells a complex story, but it’s certainly well-made and features an effectively ominous score by Godzilla composer Akira Ifukube and atmospheric black and white camerawork by Umetsugu Inoue favourite Kazumi Iwasa. The large ensemble cast are mostly fine, while gaunt character actor Kinzo Shin nabs the key role of Hirasawa and portrays him with heartfelt sympathy as being unambiguously innocent. A familiar face from many Japanese films of the era, this was likely the highlight of his on-screen career.

Teigin Incident: Death Row Prisoner seems to have received some screenings abroad under the title The Long Death, but I was unable to find a subtitled copy. 

Nice use of a poster for Kurosawa's Drunken Angel (1948)