• 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.