• 清作の妻 (Seisaku’s Wife)

11/2/24 (Fri), Tokyo

This 1965 work was being shown at the Tokyo Film Festival as part of a tribute to director Masumura Yasuzo on the 100th anniversary of his birth. It is the time leading up to the outbreak of war with Russia in 1904. The attractive Okane (Wakao Ayako) has been forced by her desperately poor family to serve for the past three years as mistress to a wealthy but much older man. When he dies and leaves her a small fortune, she returns with her mother to their old village. Unfortunately the villagers, partly jealous of Okane’s newfound wealth, deride her for having sold her body, however unwillingly, and refuse to have anything to do with her. She, in return, makes no attempt to ingratiate herself with them or help with the village work.

Meanwhile, Seisaku (Tamura Takahiro), a local lad, returns from military service in China and is hailed as a hero. Wartime fever has infected the entire village, which sees serving and dying as a glorious act. Seisaku, determined to improve village morale, has forged a large bell that he clangs early each morning to rouse the people to work. They reluctantly do so in deference to him.

Okane, however, ostracized in any case, refuses to play along. This intrigues Seisaku, and slowly but surely they come to fall for each other. His family had set their eyes on a more conventional village girl and are shocked that he would take up with a fallen woman. They do everything to discourage the marriage, but Seisaku stands firm. Okane, unloved by others, grows increasingly attached to Seisaku. She brings a kimono to his sister in an attempt to win the family’s approval, but the conservative mother, concerned about the family’s image, rejects her. Isolated from the world, Seisaku becomes everything for Okane.

When he is sent to war, she is almost unbearably lonely. After six long months, she receives notice that he is lightly injured and, to her joy, sent back home alive. However, he is soon called back to the war with Russia, the villagers practically wishing death upon him in glorious service to the nation, as if the failure to die was a disgrace.

Okane does not subscribe to the idea of war as honorable and is distraught at the idea that her lover may never come home. She pleads desperately with him to stay, but Seisaku, the “model soldier”, is determined to do what he perceives as his duty. Facing the possibility of losing him forever, she goes mad. She grabs a nail and, in her torment, stabs his eyes out.

She runs away as he screams, but is caught by the villagers and brutally beaten. She is sentenced to prison for two years. In the interim, the villagers wrongly accuse Seisaku, now blind and helpless, of conspiring with Okane in order to avoid serving in the war. They call him a traitor, throw rocks at him, and shun him and his family. He comes to understand what Okane went through. When she returns from prison, she tells him tearfully to inflict whatever punishment on her he’d like, including murder. He grips her and, after a tense moment, says only, “You’ve lost weight”, a signal of his forgiveness. He has seen through the hypocrisy of wartime hysteria and realizes that she is all he needs. In the end, we see them slogging up the fields, where she tills the soil as he watches silently.

Despite the Russo-Japanese War setting, the director is obviously commenting on WWII, which he experienced as a soldier. The frenzy whipped up by government propaganda, leading people actually to see war as desirable and death as honorable, must still have been a raw topic at the time and is presented warts-and-all in a country where some reflection was needed.

There was a silent film version in 1924 that was itself a huge critical and commercial success thanks in good part to a sensational debut by Urabe Kumeko, one of Japan’s first stage and film actresses. That film, apparently no longer extant, ended more conventionally with the couple’s suicide due to Urabe’s guilt and Seisaku’s despair. The remake is considerably more optimistic in its view of the redemptive power of love.

There was clumsy editing at times and too much reliance by screenwriter Shindo Kaneto on dialogue to describe events (e.g., “I hear that so-and-so has done so-and-so”). Seisaku’s conventional self-image of his wartime role and village standing clashed somewhat with his unconventional love for the detested Okane; the process by which he fell for Okane (and vice-versa, for that matter) wasn’t altogether credible as presented. The blinding reminded me of the reverse case in Shunkin, when the man gouges out his own eyes to remain close to the woman he loves.

The most impressive part of the film was the depiction of the small-minded villagers and their passionate conviction in their cause against all logic. Their behavior was frighteningly real, especially in light of the similar obsessive thinking among the Covid and climate-change brigade and antifa movement, which brook no opposition or even debate. The numerous scenes where the war-mad villagers are welcoming or seeing off the soldiers were superb. The ending was also extremely effective with the sole sound of the tilling to the very last frame.

Wakao was overpowering throughout, from her defiance of village morals to her obsessive love for Seisaku. She was easily the film’s greatest asset on the acting side. Tamura as Seisaku had less of an emotional range but got the job done. The character actors, particularly the females, were all very fine.

I wish the director had taken more time in developing the initial relationship between the two leads, as we have to take their love largely as a given. But the extremes of their relationship were less interesting than the extremes of propaganda-driven hysteria. An impressive work.