Destins de femmes

Tadashi Imai directs three sad tales from the short stories of Ichiyo Higuchi.

In the first, Yatsuko Tan'ami visits her parents. She had made what everyone considered a brilliant marriage when she was 17, marrying a man far wealthier than her modest upbringing. However, although she has born him a son, his continual cruelty has driven her to consider divorce. On the way home, her rickshaw man turns out to be a childhood friend, who had started well, but lost everything.

In the second story, Yoshiko Kuga is a maid in a wealthy household. Her uncle has been sick and unable to work, and she is asked to get two yen to pay the interest on a loan. Her mistress had agreed, but now refuses to lend her the money, but there is 20 yen in a drawer.....

The third story is about the hard life of the Number One girl at a bar in the Yoshiwara Red Light District, who dreams of a better life; there is also a poor man with a bickering wife and a boy, who obsesses over her.

Ichiyo Higuchi was born in 1872 in modest circumstances that grew steadily worse, as her father failed in one occupation after another. At 14, she began to study at the Haginoya, a leading school of poetry. There she felt out of place amidst the rich and pretty girls. Eventually she decided to write literature about the people she knew, the poor and outcast. She died in 1896 of tuberculosis. Her formal Japanese writing is still admired, and she is considered the first important woman writer of modern Japan. In 2004, her picture appeared on the 5000-yen note, the third woman who appeared on Japanese currency .... and far more than she ever earned in her lifetime.

Higuchi Ichiyo (1972-1896) was one of the most important writers of the Meiji period, and one of the more famous female writers to come out of Japan. Higuchi died to tuberculosis at the very young age of 24, leaving behind a body of work consisting mostly of short stories. These stories depicted the usually-rather-sad lives of Japanese women of the day.

Imai Tadashi (1912-1991) was a famously left-wing director, who often set his films into the past, to criticize the politics of his contemporary society. For a director like him, Higuchi's stories would seem like the natural thing to adapt into a film. And indeed this film, Nigorie (An Inlet for Muddy Water, 1953) was at the time of its release, a critical darling, that received numerous film prizes, over numerous better films.

I really like Imai's work. At best, he is not-unlike Kobayashi in the raw way he clashes with feudal values, and not-unlike Mizoguchi in the way he shows sympathy to people of the past. Yet he is instantly recognizable in his storytelling. I like many of his angrier films like Himeyuri no To (A Tower of Lillies, also 1953), Yoru no tsuzumi (Night Drum, 1958), Adauchi (Revenge, 1964) and Echigo Tsutsuichi Oyashirazu (A Story from Echigo, 1964) better than I do this film.

There's a few reasons. I have, in general, a problem with episodic films. Whereas it must feel like a cool tool in storytelling for the filmmaker, I find that these films often have trouble keeping up the cohesion in narrative or in quality. Also pacing becomes a harder thing to manage, since each episode is supposed to serve as both an independent whole and part of the larger structure. Imai is very interesting in the subjects of his films, but he isn't the best at creating a functioning story arc or pacing. Usually his films feature great endings, but also a second act that kind of drags. Such is the case with this film, too, where the middle episode is easily the weakest.

We open up with the story "The Thirteenth Night", the shortest episode, which deals with a wife, who returns to her family, not being able to face her cruel husband any longer. This episode is set during one night, it's atmospheric, and doesn't go on for too long. Especially the final minutes made the short narrative feel rewarding. The acting is good, and the points that Higuchi's short story was trying to make, are told in a clear-cut manner.

After the first episode we go from marriage-criticism to class-criticism, and from the middle-class to a poor maid, played by Kuga Yoshiko. Her uncle and adoptive father (Nakamura Nobuo) is sick, and Kuga's character asks the lady who employs her to loan two yen for this purpose. She is not willing to do this, the nice woman that she is, so Kuga feels the temptation to steal the money. Imai has criticized class society much better in his other films. The characters in this one are one-dimensional, which makes it harder to invest in the film. Also it is pretty slow.

The third episode, which is the title story, is about the women at a brothel. O-Riki (Awashima Chikage) is the most popular girl, though tormented by her personal past. O-hatsu (Sugimura Haruko) has a husband who frequents O-Riki, and this is, among other things, tearing up their marriage. Meanwhile, Awashima's character has a romance with a stranger played by Yamamura So. This story could have been a movie on its own, really. It's dirty (or muddy), tense and thought-provoking. But the fact, that it's in a movie with two other episodes, really lessens the impact that it has. And of course you are inevitably going to make the necessary Mizoguchi comparisons...

This movie has a lot going for it, though functional pacing is not one of those things. There were a number of good performances, specially in the last episode which gave people time to shine. A modern viewer is bound to view this in at least somewhat feminist light, due to the source author, as well as one of the adapting screenwriters Mizuki Yoko. There were several good scenes that showed the hardships that women were forced to go through in those times. And yet these female fates depicted by Imai probably spoke to the contemporary audience as well. Not one of the director's best (or the year's best), but worth a look anyway.

Portmanteau films were popular worldwide during the early 50's, and this atmospheric trio of episodes of ascending length reminiscent of Maupassant based on tales by the Meiji period short story writer Ichiyo Higuchi (who died of tuberculosis aged 24 in 1896) was an acclaimed Japanese contribution to the genre.

The cast of characters becomes larger and more intertwined with each episode relentlessly depicting women crushed by the combined dead weight of patriarchy and impecuniousness - in which men tend to appear marginally but (usually with unfortunate results) pivotally - and is rendered bearable to sit through by director Tadashi Imai's dynamic mise en scene and vivid use (particularly in the final episode) of depth of field and by the excellent performances.

The first story starts very slowly. Almost nothing happens in the first five minutes. But stick with it. After this initial lull, the proceedings slowly but inexorably draw you in and they don't let go.

This is a movie that really stays with you after the finish. At just over two hours, with three entirely unrelated stories, it felt too short, and I would have been happy to watch at least one more hour. And I'm at somewhat of a loss to explain just what is so good about it.

Higuchi Ichiyo is one of Japan's foremost writers, and these three stories cover her main theme of the suffering of ordinary women. Certainly the writing and scripting are faultless. The feelings of the women in these stories have their feelings and actions explained simply and clearly, yet with great depth and complexity. And although tending to feverish melodrama at times, the actresses give top-notch performances, while the actors mostly play with admirable restraint and refinement.

Much of the action occurs at night, and the stark black-and-white cinematography underlines whatever emotion and feeling is appropriate for each scene.

Despite the apparent slowness and even naiveté of some sections, there are surprises in store as well. Overall, memorable and highly recommended.

This film can claim a very important, though perhaps dubious, distinction among Japanese films released during that country's so-called "Golden Age" of cinema, which (according to me) lasted from 1949, the year of Yasujiro Ozu's Late Spring, to 1965, the year of Akira Kurosawa's Red Beard. Within that time span, 1953 is often considered to have been Japan's greatest film year, the equivalent of 1939 in Hollywood. Ozu's universally-acclaimed Tokyo Story, Kenji Mizoguchi's most famous classic, Ugetsu, and many other celebrated movies were released in 1953. (The only other possible candidate for Best Year would be the following one, 1954, which saw the release of Kurosawa's magnificent Seven Samurai, two masterpieces by Mizoguchi -- the great Sansho the Bailiff and A Story from Chikamatsu -- Keisuke Kinoshita's much beloved modern saga, Twenty-Four Eyes, and a host of other more or less wonderful movies.) Yet among the impressive roster of 1953 films that the film critics of Japan, in their annual Best Ten awards, given out by the venerable cinema magazine Kinema Junpo, had to choose from, they picked this film (originally titled Nigorie), directed by Tadashi Imai, as the best of the bunch. It also swept the best film prize in two other Japanese awards that year, the Blue Ribbon Award and the Mainichi Film Concours. This is fascinating, because there's not a critic in Japan today (or anywhere else) who, if they've even seen this work, would rate it higher than Tokyo Story or Ugetsu. Indeed, in the two most recent Kinema Junpo polls for best Japanese films of all time (1999 and 2009), An Inlet of Muddy Water is nowhere to be found, although over a hundred films were cited in the first poll and nearly two hundred in the second.

First, a word about Tadashi Imai. During the Golden Age, Imai was the most honored director in the Japanese industry except for Ozu. There were a number of interesting reasons for this. Imai was considered a committed Leftist, a fact that impressed critics of the day. His films consistently tackled social issues of the wartime and postwar eras, a trait which said "serious artist" to critics then. Furthermore, at a time when the half dozen major studios completely dominated the industry, he refused to submit to their censorship, producing his work independently (although a few other prominent directors, including Kaneto Shindo, also did so).

So should we sneer at these critics and their "shockingly" bad preference? No, because though they were clearly wrong to prefer Imai to Ozu or Mizoguchi, picking "Muddy Water" as best film was not a crass or idiotic choice, because it turns out to be a really excellent "Golden Age" film: intelligent, sensitive and evocative. Based on three grim stories, all set during the Meiji era, by the esteemed writer Ichiyo Higuchi, who died near the end of the 19th Century at the age of 24, the tales provide a devastating portrait of the low status of Japanese women then -- which was certainly not irrelevant to gender relations in mid-20th Century Japan.

In the first story, an unhappy wife, who has abandoned her philandering, verbally abusive husband, seeks shelter in her parents' home. The father, speaking for the dominant culture, reminds her of her duty to serve her awful husband and her young child (and also urges her to think of the financial situation of her family, who are accepting money from the rich husband). Now considering her desire for a bit of happiness in life selfish, the unfortunate girl resolves to return to the husband. She is transported back by a rickshaw driver whose drunken rudeness startles her -- until she realizes that he's an old childhood friend. The evocation of youthful happiness by these two unhappy adults is delicately and sensitively rendered, and the tale ends with a kind of sigh of resignation.

In the second story, a young, orphaned servant girl serves a rich, miserly mistress. (It's not clear why she never seeks other employment.) When she's forced to ask her employer for a two-yen loan to help the sick uncle who raised her, the woman promises her the money, then reneges. Given charge of a sum of money by the rich woman, the honest but desperate girl yields to temptation and steals the two yen. The resolution of this plot reminded me curiously of the stories of O. Henry. Yoshiko Kuga usually played very modern women, and so seems a bit uncomfortable in a rare period role as the servant girl. But she gives a fine, intelligent performance.

The last, longest and best of the stories is set in a brothel in Tokyo's Yoshiwara (red light) district. The beautiful O-Riki (Chikage Awashima) is the Number 1 girl in the house, and it's easy to see why. Beneath her hardened exterior, however, she harbors romantic dreams that won't go away, as she reveals to a mysterious customer, Asanosuke (So Yamamura). Meanwhile, she avoids a former customer named Gen (Seiji Miyaguchi), a laborer whose expensive addiction to O-Riki has ruined himself and his family. (She does this, she tells Asanosuke, for the man's good and her own.) Meanwhile at Gen's home, his long-suffering wife (the great Haruku Sugimura) begs her husband to forget O-Riki and think of herself and her son. Instead, for reasons that become clear only at the end, he kicks both wife and child out of the house.

It goes without saying that all this ends very sadly for all concerned. It also goes without saying that Awashima, Yamamura, Miyaguchi and, particularly, Sugimura give superb performances, and the restrained ending is quite moving. This is a classic Golden Age movie. The films of Tadashi Imai, who has fallen into obscurity, are hard to find, but I intend to try to seek out at least some of them.