• 恋文 (Love Letter)

3/2/24 (Sat)

This 1953 work marked actress Tanaka Kinuyo’s debut as director, using a script by Kinoshita Keisuke. This is the first fictional film by a female director in Japan.

The film is set in 1950, when Japan was still under occupation by the US. Reikichi and Michiko have known each other since childhood and were deeply in love. When Reikichi was sent to war, Michiko was married to another man against her will. After being repatriated, the dejected Reikichi obsessively re-reads the letter she wrote telling him the news and is unable to rouse himself to get a proper job. Learning that she is now widowed, he hangs out at train stations every day in hopes of finding her again. Meanwhile, he gets a job with his friend helping women write letters in English and French to squeeze money out of former Occupation soldiers that they had befriended, claiming poverty, pregnancy, lovesickness or other sob stories. He writes with disdain and looks down upon the women, but carries on.

He is shocked one day when he overhears the long-sought Michiko reciting such a letter to his colleague, revealing that she not only lived with a foreign soldier after losing her husband but actual bore him a child, who died. Confronting her, he is unable to accept her actions and uninterested in the circumstances. He rejects her in a brutal manner, essentially spiting himself and his own happiness. When his colleague finally talks sense into him (saying startlingly, “All of us in Japan were responsible for the war… Let he who is without sin cast the first stone”), he goes to her home in hopes of reconciling with her (“forgiving her”, as he puts it), only to learn that she has been seriously injured in a car accident. The film ends rather abruptly showing him in a taxi racing to the hospital.

The basic premise strongly recalls the much better wartime flick Waterloo Bridge (1940), where a man is similarly unable to forgive a woman for doing what she had to in order to survive the war. The woman here claims not to have been a full-on streetwalker but to have fallen for just one foreign soldier, though she acknowledges that it doesn’t matter in the eyes of the world whether it’s one or many. Also as in the earlier film, she is recognized by prostitutes who claim she worked with them and walks into traffic in what appears a suicide attempt, though in this case she survives. The film is at least an improvement over A Hen in the Wind, which starred Tanaka as a woman begging her husband for forgiveness for allowing poverty and her child’s medical needs to drive her to brief prostitution.

The film makes clear that Reikichi needs redemption as much as he believes Michiko does. He is too proud to look for normal work befitting his university education, lives in his little brother’s apartment (where he does “unmanly” chores like laundry and cooking), and maintains an unforgiving moral code that war and deprivation have left behind for everyone else. He can’t seem to accept that the world has changed. He continues to brew in self-pity even as his entrepreneurial brother hustles to set up a small book stand, and accepts the letter-writing job even as he despises what it represents. The film is especially unsparing in its indictment of his scorn for the fallen women, even extending to the woman he claims to have loved.

All of which would be more convincing if Tanaka hadn’t presented actual streetwalkers in the film as such stereotypically “bad women” types, with no consideration of what they might be going through as a result of wartime deprivation. When they recognize Michiko as a former co-worker, Reikichi’s brother refuses to believe them, insisting to them dismissively that Michiko is different from them. Michiko herself not only makes no attempt to defend them but actively dissociates herself from the group. That seems to undercut what Tanaka was saying about women at the time. The inconsistency is a serious flaw and makes this much inferior to films on a similar theme, most notably the works of Mizoguchi, many of which Tanaka herself appeared in.

Tanaka’s direction can be overdone, especially in the more melodramatic moments, but she does a great job with more dynamic camerawork in outdoor scenes in the streets and train station. She makes a welcome if brief appearance as one of the women seeking a letter. Tiny cameos by the likes of Kinoshita and Chishu Ryu suggest her pull among movie personalities of the day. Mori Masayuki plays his usual dour type, while Kuga Yoshiko is too pitiful and passive to be sympathetic – it was hard to believe that she was directed by a woman. Uno Jukichi and Dosan Juzo did well as Mori’s colleague and younger brother, and Kagawa Kyoko was a particularly bright spot as the bookshop worker who has an eye for the younger brother.

The theme of salvation and forgiveness is a nice idea but couldn’t survive the weak presentation. The movie is widely acclaimed, but I suspect that’s for the well-meaning intentions behind it rather than the work itself. A standard weepie in the end.