• 乳房よ永遠なれ (Forever a Woman)

3/3/24 (Sun)

This 1955 work is Tanaka Kinuyo’s third directorial effort but the first that she started from scratch. (The first two were based on scripts by Kinoshita and Ozu and staffed partly by their assistants.) The film was formerly known in English rather startlingly as The Eternal Breasts, which is closer to the Japanese but makes it sound like a very different kind of film; the Japanese title would probably be rendered better as, “Breasts, Be Forever With Me”. The change in the English in this case was probably for the better. The real-life Fumiko was only famous for four months from publication of her efforts to her early death, but she is considered one of Japan’s three seminal female poets of the 20th century. She passed away only a year before the film. The film’s title is taken from the book written by the real-life reporter, who revealed that, as presented in the film, they had a physical relationship.

Fumiko manages to break away from an abusive marriage that she had been forced into, though losing custody of her eldest child in the process. She pours her bitterness into the tanka poems she writes for her poetry circle. She is criticized by some in the group for expressing her feelings so openly, going against the ambiguity that characterizes traditional tanka. But one member, who she secretly loves, is impressed by the poems’ originality and sends them to a famous poetry magazine. To her surprise, they are accepted.

Her joy, though, is short-lived as she learns she has breast cancer. She receives a double-mastectomy in hopes of halting the disease, but that drastic move has unexpectedly severe physical and psychological effects. The removal of her breasts makes her feel less a woman, causing her to sink into self-pity. Her apathy leads to recklessness, which causes her problems, as when she tells the happily married friend that she secretly loves him.

Still, she continues to write even as her condition worsens, and her work becomes a sensation. Her cynicism is all-embracing: when a reporter comes to interview her, she assumes he is just using her illness as a sympathy tool to sell papers and refuses even to see him. Gradually he wins her trust, and she manages to lure him into a physical relationship. The pleasures of sex despite her scarred body helps to heal the psychic scars and allows her to die in peace.

Tanaka’s view is unsparing: we see Fumiko painfully feeling the lump in her breast, collapsing before a morgue, lying on the operating table (breasts exposed). Her almost demented insistence on exposing her scarred torso to her shocked friend, her sexual aggressiveness toward the reporter, and her poetry itself are her means of defying her wounds. Tanaka can’t entirely escape the melodramatic, as in the husband’s maliciousness toward his passive wife as well as the death scene, and Fumiko is not entirely sympathetic with all her moaning. But the strength of the heroine’s will at the end, though somewhat gothic, is impressive.

Tsukioka Yumeji was fine as Fumiko, especially in her crazed bath scene with those wild eyes, and Hayama Ryoji and Mori Masayuki do solid work as the reporter and the man who Fumiko truly loved. But the real star is Tanaka, who really does bring something different to the table as a female director with her fearless portrayal of female psychology and sexuality, showing the sometimes-unpleasant lead character warts and all. An impressive work.