• 花よりタンゴ (Hana Yori Tango)

5/26/26 (Tues)

The late Inoue Hisashi’s 1987 comedy was being performed by his theater group Komatsuza for the first time in 22 years. It’s another of his plays obliquely criticizing events surrounding the war. He said in a program note that for all the patriotic cheering from all sides during the war, he could find no one afterwards who would admit responsibility for it. The title is a pun on the Japanese idiom hana yori dango (rice cakes before flowers), that is, prioritizing the practical over the aesthetic. The substitution of tango for dango rice cakes suggests that he sees culture or spirit as necessary sustenance to make it through the war-driven devastation.

Tokyo, 1947. Four daughters of a former count have seen their fortunes plunge since the war and now run a struggling dance club in Ginza. The oldest is a dance teacher; the second, a would-be writer who is waiting for her husband to be repatriated; the third (sort of – daughter of the father’s mistress), an aspiring singer; and the youngest, around the same age as her half-sister (meaning the father was doing double-duty – what a jerk). They are determined to maintain the family’s dignity and keep the club going, but they meet an unexpected challenge: their former chauffeur, having grown rich from black market dealings, now wants to buy them out and open a souvenir shop for the GIs who are still occupying their country.

That is, the family wants to teach Western high culture in the form of dance to the Japanese, while the man wants to sell out his country’s culture by pawning off low-end trinkets to foreigners. The eldest sister is trying to resist and plans to raise money by selling the family’s treasured collection of original Sharaku woodblock prints to a collector for a significant sum. Those plans are derailed when an unearthed wartime bomb goes off, destroying the collection and leaving the family at the mercy of the chauffeur.

After several twists, it turns out that the chauffeur is betrayed as well. The real villain is the state, which was secretly buying up the property to build an entertainment complex, making the land impossibly expensive. The man is then mugged in the streets and robbed of his money, leaving him with nothing, while the family is summarily ejected from their dance hall and must start over. The man vows to help them, putting their relationship back where it started. Their only recourse is to move on.

The music was a mixture of jazz standards, Japanese pop songs of the day, and original numbers played live by an on-stage pianist. The dances were nicely choreographed, led by the eldest sister, played by a graceful former Takarazuka star. Inoue’s writing is always full of highlights and surprises, but most memorable here were the scenes with the faces covered white with DDT (used by occupation forces to prevent typhus) and the woman’s repeated slapping when she accuses the nouveau riche guy (wrongly) of causing mayhem in the community with his yakuza-like actions. Inoue created distinctive characters, marred only by the overacting that characterizes the Komatsuza troupe. Within those limits, Takahashi Katsumi as the former chauffeur and Edamoto Moe as the woman searching for her brother were most effective. I hope we don’t have to wait another two decades for the next showing.