• 惜春鳥 (Farewell to Spring)

7/30/19 (Tues)

Kinoshita Keisuke’s (Twenty-Four Eyes, Like a Wild Chrysanthemum) 1959 Farewell to Spring — the poetic Japanese title refers to a bird that awakens wistful memories of spring, i.e., lost youth — has been called Japan’s first gay movie, but that definition would have to be stretched fairly liberally. One man’s return to his hometown after university spurs the old gang of five to get back together, a reunion that proves bittersweet.

The university kid, Iwagaki, the only one of the group who got the chance to leave their poor mountain village in the northern Aizu region, has returned under something of a cloud after an unwise affair with his sponsor’s mistress. He has brought back a rather disdaining attitude towards his old life and country friends. As his own family has since left town, he stays with his friend Minemura in an inn owned by the latter’s family, who are none to happy to be giving a room away for free at a time when business has already been hit hard by anti-prostitution laws.

Meanwhile, Makita, the illegitimate product of an affair between his mother, a bar hostess, and a married man, is in a relationship with his father’s stepdaughter. That is opposed by both his own mother, who wants him to take over the bar, and the girl’s mother – i.e., his father’s wife. The latter sets up a marriage with another of the gang, Teshirogi, a politically active union worker at a local factory who is poor but hails from respectable samurai stock. The stepdaughter is in love with Makita and wants to marry him regardless of her parents’ wishes, but Makita, beaten down by pressure from all sides, has become apathetic to life (or at least feigns such) and is unwilling to fight for himself. Determined to have Makita despite his passivity, the girl begs Teshirogi to refuse her parents’ marriage proposal. Teshirogi essentially ignores her since the feudalistic arranged marriage system, which contrasts completely with the ideals he espouses as a union activist, works in this case to his financial advantage (in another irony, the family are successful pawnbrokers). He does ask Makita’s intentions but takes the noncommittal answer for permission to carry through. Comradeship comes second to his personal needs.

Iwagaki’s past begins to catch up with him, prompting him to desperate measures. When he is caught stealing from Minemura, an outraged Teshirogi calls the police, a move that is conversely opposed by the victim himself in the name of the group’s long history. Iwagaki’s subsequent arrest leads to a sharp conflict among the group over the nature and meaning of friendship. The continued purity of Minemura and the group’s fifth member, the disabled Masugi, stands apart from the more hardened stance that life has imposed on the others. Makita is finally shaken when his uncle commits double suicide with a geisha over their socially impossible relationship. That ultimate commitment to love and desire for freedom awakens Makita to the possibilities of life, spurring him to action against the cynical Teshirogi.

An important metaphor in the film is the Byakkotai (White Tiger Forces), a group of teenage soldiers in Aizu in the 19th century who, believing (mistakenly) that their lord’s castle had fallen, committed suicide rather than give in to the enemy. Their legacy is celebrated to this day, and a monument in their honor, which features here, is a big tourist spot. A sword dance commemorating the story is repeatedly performed throughout the film, setting the powerful bond between the idealistic young soldiers against the gradual fraying of the modern-day friends as time and reality take their toll.

Whether the close male relationships are supposed to be gay is unclear, though certain scenes will carry unmistakable homoerotic overtones in Western eyes, as when the naked friends passionately embrace in the bath upon Iwagaki’s return, crying, “I missed you so much!” Teshirogi hints openly at one point that Masugi’s feelings for Iwagaki are not quite kosher, a comment not intended in a friendly way. (Masugi is the only one who does not have a female relationship, trapped perhaps by his disability.) Still, the film does not dwell on this, and if the signals are coded, as some claim, the code is pretty obscure. While the director himself was reportedly gay, it might be going too far to see the film in that light; his films always tend toward the sentimental, which may be part of the perception gap here. (When the curators of a gay film festival in Tokyo in 2009 screened a silent movie called福寿草 (Pheasant’s Eyes) about a young girl’s infatuation for her sister-in-law, they came under sharp criticism from the late director’s family for taking what was intended as a sweet story of a girl’s innocence and presenting it as a lesbian fantasy.)

The one colossal turn-off in the movie is the traditional songs, which are way overused and date the material badly. I assume these are folk songs intended to evoke an era or region, but they quickly wear out their welcome from the very first number, which was so grating that I almost turned the whole film off before it began. I’m glad I stuck with it, but it makes the film difficult to recommend wholeheartedly. (The original musical score, it should be noted, is itself very fine.)

That’s a shame because the film offers a well crafted story with complex characters and is an irreplaceable portrait of a lost era. Some of the individual scenes, like Masugi limping frantically to the station to save his friend, are highly memorable on their own. With the big caveat of those irritating songs, this is very much worth a look.