• 太陽の季節 (Season of the Sun)

5/2/26 (Sat)

Takumi Furukawa wrote and directed this highly successful 1956 adaptation of Ishihara Shintaro’s sensational best-seller of one year earlier, which gave the movement its Sun Tribe name.

The plot is not much different from the subsequent Sun Tribe masterpiece Crazed Fruit, also based on an Ishihara novel. As I commented there, the film

“features a group of bored rich 20-year-olds, who grew up in the shadow of defeat with no memory of Japan’s pre-war past and no sense of a future. They spend their time idling away their days in sailboats, nightclubs and cars in a bid to fight off tedium, devoted mainly to gambling, drinking, picking fights, dancing and especially hunting women, albeit just for momentary pleasure (including orgies) rather than anything as permanent as romance.”

However, Season, at least in its film version, is less focused than the later work. It tries too hard in its nihilism to a point that doesn’t make sense. The lead’s rejection of the main female character may have seemed cool on paper but is not realistic as presented, especially when she tells him she’s pregnant. I’m sure the idea is that he’s wedded to his all-embracing apathy – a protest against the passion that drove the previous generation to war – to an extent that destroys him and others around him. That is, the willful disengagement of the Sun Tribe generation is no better than the blind nationalism that preceded it. A powerful theme, suggesting that the young are as caught up unthinkingly in a national mood as their parents were. But the main character seems to be striking an attitude rather than feeling it. The film needs a more credible story to work, which Ishihara achieved in the later Fruit.

The most infamous scene in the book, when the protagonist pierces a shoji screen with his erect organ, was only briefly alluded to here in film’s best scene. The high school kid, an aspiring boxer, has taken a shower and goes to his room, where the woman is waiting. She tells him to punch the bag for her, which he does in a near orgiastic fashion that gets her aroused and into his bed.

Nagato Hiroyuki as the lead is not an exciting actor and doesn’t have the natural magnetism to pull this off. He doesn’t have any sense of danger or mystery and definitely doesn’t have the body of a boxer. I don’t understand the attraction that the female characters are supposed to feel for him. The film would have been a different experience with someone more innately sexy or broody.

Minamida Yoko (Nagato’s future real-life wife), on the other hand, is near perfect as the woman, making her gradual fall from feigned indifference to obsession completely believable. Hailing from a rich family, she appears to be supplying funds for their outings, which may have increased the lead’s resolve to stay unattached. I’m not sure if she was supposed to be playing a high schooler here given her looks and poise; she was engaged to be married until her fiancé suddenly died. Her cool attitude was thus perfectly grounded and well played. Hers was the performance of the night.

Ishihara Yujiro makes an unspectacular debut as a minor character (he achieved stardom with the subsequent Fruit), while his brother Shintaro, who authored the book, makes a fleeting appearance. Other Sun Tribe members like Okada Masumi are present as well.

The boxing scenes are farcical; surely they could have found someone to choreograph those more realistically. The sight of the teenagers picking up women, sailing, drinking, fighting and such, drifting through life with no clear goal or concern (even for sex), must have been a Blackboard Jungle-type experience for audiences then, but comes off as old-fashioned now as presented here. The movie is valuable only in setting the stage for much better films to come.