• 槍の権三 (Gonza the Spearman)

10/31/25 (Fri)

The Tokyo Film Festival was screening three films this year in honor of Shinoda Masahiro following his recent death. Shinoda has his highs and lows, and the selection reflected both sides, the former in Pale Flower, an undisputed masterpiece, and the latter in the ridiculous Demon Pond. So I chose this adaptation of a classic Chikamatsu Monzaemon piece, which I’ve seen on stage in both Bunraku puppet drama and Kabuki. Shinoda’s last Monzaemon work, Double Suicide, felt like a way-too-purposeful attempt to look avant-garde and totally cool, so I went to this warily.

The play is beautifully written, but the tangled web of societal obligations makes it hard to take seriously at times. I almost wondered if Chikamatsu was making fun of that. Gonza is a spearman in the employ of a large clan. He is informally engaged to a woman, but Sai, the wife of a famed tea master, wants to marry him off to her daughter. A mixture of misunderstandings and evil intentions leads to accusations of adultery, and the codified structure of society proves impossible to overcome.

One problem is that Gonza is rather a jerk. He promises himself to a young girl in one scene (“If I am ever untrue, may I fall instantly from my horse and be trampled to death”), only to promise himself to a higher-ranking woman with an equally emphatic oath in the very next scene in order to advance his career. He is also shown buying another woman in a brothel at one point, and we can assume these are not the only ones. Hard to sympathize with this guy.

Sai insists that Gonza call her his wife after they’ve been wrongly accused of adultery, based flimsily on the idea that actually being lovers will make it possible for her husband to kill them. She has already hinted broadly that she desired Gonza herself despite setting him up for her daughter – she tells the latter, apparently not entirely in jest, that if the daughter doesn’t take him, she will instead – and she certainly doesn’t let the age difference bother her. (The daughter, Gonza, the wife and the husband are each ten years apart. In the play, the difference was twelve years with all born in the Year of the Rooster, a more interesting choice.) The two never feel like lovers and only consummate their relationship after much pushing by Sai. The ending is neither tragic nor heroic, just a result of bad choices on all sides.

In the final battle, Gonza and Sai each insist on being killed by the husband, which sounds like parody. The deaths are appropriately brutal and bloody. (In the puppet play, the husband first lops off Gonza’s left hand, forcing the latter to fight one-armed. That must have been a step too far for Shinoda.) There was an interesting variation in the stage production that I saw when the husband throws down his sword in disgust after killing Gonza, suggesting that he himself is uneasy with societal expectations. But that was not duplicated here.

This all works wonderfully on stage thanks to the sharp characterizations and the distance that the puppets provide. As a film, it teeters on the preposterous. That’s not helped by the performances. Pop star Go Hiromi is too lightweight to carry this off, including a rather high voice. He never had a real film career, and this movie shows why. Iwashita Shima is fine given the material, especially when she’s allowed to let loose toward the end, and others are generally fine (other than Takenaka Naoto, who’s already hamming it up at that young age).

It is gorgeously filmed by no less than Miyagawa Kazuo, which makes up for a lot of flaws. I just wish Shinoda had been more adventurous in rethinking the film for the modern era. Chikamatsu soon found himself out of style even in his own day – he later revised some of his own pieces to meet public demand for fewer words and greater action, and very few of his shows were played as originally written in subsequent years. Mizoguchi is still the gold standard for Bunraku/Kabuki adaptations with the great The Story of Chikamatsu, brilliantly adapted from a work by the playwright. This film is a disappointment.