Suicide is a solitary act but the ripple effects of such a death spread pain in an insidious manner through the lives of those connected to the individual who has so abruptly departed. First time filmmaker Natsuki Nakagawa (中川奈月) explores these ripple effects in her intense 60-minute drama She is Alone (彼女はひとり/ Kanojo wa hitori, 2018).
The story centres on Sumiko, played brilliantly by the up-and-coming actor Akari Fukunaga (福永朱梨), a high school student who has lost her mother to suicide. Rather than reaching out and talking to family and friends, Sumiko internalizes her grief. This leads to a cold relationship with her father and a destructive relationship with her childhood friend, Hideaki, played with great sensitivity by Kanai Hiroto (金井浩人). Sumiko is blackmailing Hideaki and as the layers get peeled back on their relationship, we begin to realize that there is a lot more going on in this twisted coming-of-age tale.
The film draws on elements of the thriller and the Japanese ghost story genres. During the Film Talk: Tokyo University of the Arts at Nippon Connection, I learned that Nakagawa is an admirer of the work of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who was her mentor at Tokyo University of the Arts. Her film does emulate the mood of his films, helped in a great part by the fact that she was able to work with Kurosawa’s cinematographer Akiko Ashizawa (芦澤明子). It is a strong debut feature and I hope that Nakagawa continues to grow as a filmmaker.
The Scent of
Pheasant’s Eye: An Episode from the Tales of Flowers (1935)
乙女シリーズその一花物語福壽草
Shōjo shiriizu sono hito - hana monogatari
fukujusō
For their 10th
anniversary, Camera Japan Festival in
Rotterdam presented a benshi
performance with piano accompaniment of the rarely seen silent film The Scent of Pheasant’s Eye: An Episode from
the Tales of Flowers (乙女シリーズその一花物語福壽草 / Shōjo shiriizu
sono hito-hana monogatari fukujusō, 1935).
The revival of this film occurred in 2008/9 with screenings at the
National Film Center in Tokyo (2008), who has a 35mm print of the film, and at
the Tokyo
International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (2009). Screenings of the film
have featured benshi performances by either
Midori Sawato or Ichiro Kataoka. The film’s first international screening is
believed to have been at the 2013 Pordenone Silent Film Festival.
The Story
The film is
based on a story found in Tales of
Flowers (花物語/Hana Monogatari,
1916-1924) by Nobuko Yoshiya (吉屋信子, 1896-1973).
The 52 stories of romantic female friendships in this collection
were very popular with female students of the day. Yoshiya was a prolific and commercially
successful writer who is considered a pioneer in lesbian literature. Her same-sex (dosei-ai) romances were considered acceptable because they depicted
lesbianism as a phase on the road to a culturally acceptable heterosexual
marriage.
The “pheasant’s
eye” of the title English common name of the flower fukujusō
(フクジュソウ / Adonis ramosa). In the original kanji it means luck (福/fuku), long
life (寿/ju), and herb(草/sō). It belongs to the family of flowers named
after mythological figure Adonis. In
East Asia, the fukujusō is a rare yellow
flower found mainly in central and northern Japan. In the context of this story, the flower is a
metaphor for the rare beauty of the young female protagonists. This is made clear by the opening quote from
Yoshiya herself: “I dedicate this to the lovely young flowers.”
The Scent of Pheasant’s Eye tells the
story of a high school girl called Kaoru Sakamoto who falls in love with her
sister-in-law Miyoko. Her crush actually
develops before she has even met her brother’s new wife. It is an arranged marriage and the "sisters" only
meet on the wedding day. A romantic
young girl, Kaoru and her friends are the kind of girls who would be likely to read
Nobuko Yoshiya’s novelsand
fantasize about their ideal romantic partner.
As the friendship blossoms between Kaoru and Miyoko, Kaoru grows jealous
of any affection Miyoko shows Kaoru’s brother.
Kaoru’s schoolmates and family act as foils for her moody
behaviour. The drama of any romance is
kept light with comedic moments such as the slapstick scene where the two young
ladies are being photographed together in nature and the photographer falls
into the water. The physical comedy in
the film shows the influence of the American silent greats like Buster Keaton,
Charlie Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd. The lesbian love affair is suggested via the
female gaze and evocative mise-en-scène,
but no direct dialogue. Miyoko is
equally flirtatious with her husband as she is with his sister, causing the latter
to indulge in jealous temper tantrums.
The Cast
Star billing
is given to Naomi Egawa in the role
of Kaoru Sakamoto. She gives a
melodramatic performance, putting on a hilarious “jealousy face” every time her
sister-in-law shows her brother some affection.
The benshi, Kataoka-san, told
me that Kaoru’s “jealousy face” had the audience at the 2009 Tokyo
International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in stitches. Egawa’s film career seems to have just been
in the 1930s. In contrast to Egawa’s
melodramatics, Matsue Hisamatsu puts
in a more subtle performance as Miyoko, the object of Kaoru’s intense
affections. Hisamatsu’s film career was even
briefer than that of Egawa.
The best
actors in this film are Akira Kichōji
(credited under his real name of Mitsuhiko Okazaki) as Kaoru’s brother Mitsuo,
and Buman Kahara (also credited under his
real name of Keiji Ōizumi) as her father. Both men went on to have long and
varied careers as character actors. Kichōji’s best known films are Seven Samurai (1954), where he played one
of the farmers, and Japan’s Longest Day
(1967), while appeared in films such as Shōhei Imamura’s My Second Brother (1960) and Pigs
and Battleships (1961). With his
expressive face, Kichōji plays Mitsuo as a very charming man. However, the show-stealing performance of the
film is that of Kahara who opens the film with a hilarious slapstick bicycle
ride which would have been right at home in a Buster Keaton film.
The Cinematography
The real
star of Scent of Pheasant’s Eye for
me is the extremely innovative cinematography.
The film opens with a POV shot of Kaoru’s father, a town councillor,
coming home by bicycle. I am not sure how they shot it, but it does indeed look as though they mounted the camera on an actual bicycle. At first, the councillor's form of transportation is unclear, we only know that it is a bumpy ride and get
to enjoy, from his perspective, the bemused farmers’ greetings of this
well-known local figure. When we do
finally get to see a shot of him, it is played for comic effect. His way has been blocked and he berates
whoever is blocking his way. When the
camera finally widens the shot, we see that he has been telling off a cow
rather than a person. Such visual gags
are frequent in the film, giving us a welcome respite from Karou’s sometimes
over-the-top melodrama.
The unusual
framings of dialogue and action seem fresh and innovative for the time. By the mid-1930s in the USA, the classical
Hollywood style had largely been standardized and this film would have broken
all those rules. It seems surprising
that this film has remained hidden from international scholarship for decades. The cinematographer is Asakazu Nakai (中井朝一, 1901-88), who went on to become
a frequent collaborator of Akira
Kurosawa. The film gave me a thirst
to see more of his early work, as I have only seen the films for which his
cinematography is renowned, like Stray
Dog (1949), Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood (1957), High and Low (1963) and Ran (1985). In total, he made over 130 films in his long
and successful career, but his pre-war work has been little seen or written about.
The Director
Not a great
deal is known about the director Jirō
Kawate (川手二郎, b. 1904 – d. unknown). He was born in Nagano Prefecture and it is
said that his admiration for the renowned film and kabuki actor Bando Tsumasaburo (阪東妻三郎,
1901-53) inspired him to get into the film industry himself. He first worked as an extra, then as an
assistant director, before becoming a director in 1932 for Shinkō Kinema.
In 1936 he
moved to what is now Toho Studios, where he made several films of the genre Kulturfilm (文化映画 / Bunka eiga). He then returned to his hometown to work in
real estate, but nothing is known about his life since he retired from the film
industry.
A photo posted by Cathy Munroe Hotes (@nishikataeiga) on
Ichiro Kataoka’s benshi performance was, as always, stellar. He performed together with the Dutch silent
film pianist Kevin Toma. Toma and Kataoka met for the first time on
the day. They had a chance to talk to
each other beforehand and did a sound check together, but they did not rehearse
together. One could liken their
improvisational performance to jazz music.
Kataoka played off of the script that he wrote for the film in
2008. Much of the film’s dialogue was
preserved, but I noticed that he added his own interpretation to scenes. I have seen him perform in Germany with
projected subtitles of his script, but this film only had the NFC English subtitles of the title cards (done by the amazing husband and wife team Dean
Shimauchi), so non-speakers of Japanese missed out on some of the poetic
touches Kataoka brought to the film, such as his description of the changing
seasons. One moment that needed no
translation was his hilarious interpretation of a scene in which two deaf old
men play Go together but only have one ear trumpet to shout at
each other through.
The pianist,
Toma, does not play silent movie standards.
He composes his own music, improvises, and often adds themes from some of
his favourite composers. During this
performance he apparently used a melody from a piece by Toru Takemitsu. The film was consisted of three 35mm reels
that were on loan from the NFC but the cinema had only one projector, so Toma
had to improvise during the long reel changes. On the whole it was a lively performance much enjoyed by the audience.
Incidentally
after the performance I discovered that Kataoka is from Nerima (a ward in
Tokyo). This was a funny coincidence, I thought to myself, because Nerima is famous for its daikon radishes, and there is a memorable scene in The Scent of Pheasant’s Eye where Mitsuo
flirts with Miyoko as she washes a long row of daikon in the river. When I asked Kataoka about this, he laughed
and told me that The Scent of Pheasant’s
Eye was actuallyshot in Nerima and
because of this, he would be doing a benshi performance of the film in Nerima
next year. Keep your eyes open for the
event next year Tokyoites – it is worth watching!
Along with Teruyo Nogami, cinematographer Takao Saitō (斎藤孝雄, b. 1920) is one of the few surviving members of Akira Kurosawa’s core group of regular collaborators.
1. Toho Studios
A native of Kyoto, Saito entered Toho Studios as a camera assistant in 1946. His first film at the studios was Kurosawa’s One Wonderful Sunday.
2. Not a Manga-ka
He is sometimes confused with the manga-ka Takao Saitō (斎藤隆夫 aka さいとう・たかを, b. 1936) – same name when Romanized, different spelling in Japanese. The manga-ka does have a cinema connection however, as films like King Kong (Merian C. Cooper/ Ernest B. Shoedeck, 1933) and The War of the Worlds (Byron Haskin, 1953) were highly influential on his artistic development.
3. Asakazu Nakai
Saito began as an assistant to Asakazu Nakai (1901-1988), a cinematographer who worked on more Kurosawa films than any other. They worked together for over 40 years beginning with No Regrets for Our Youth (1946).
4. Camera B in Kurosawa’s 3 Camera Set-Up
Starting with Seven Samurai, Kurosawa used multiple cameras and more than one cinematographer. Saito was always assigned camera B, and given free rein to film as he pleased. “Whenever Kurosawa looked at the dailies”, recalls Teruyo Nogami in Waiting on the Weather, “he would murmur, ‘Interesting,’ and linger with pleasure over what the B camera had turned out. Today, Saito is the last cameraman to enjoy Kurosawa’s full confidence.” (Nogami, p.111)
5. Teruyo Nogami
Nogami has described Saito’s role on set as being “wifely. . . crucial, yet inconspicuous. He was proficient at both panning shots and dolly shots, using a telephoto lens of 500 or 800mm so that the picture had speed and the rough, protruding quality that Kurosawa liked.” (Nogami, p. 111)
6. Toshiro Mifune
Saito was the cinematographer on the only film ever directed by Toshiro Mifune: The Legacy of the 500,000 (Gojuman-nin no isan, 1963).
7. Chris Marker
During this close-up of Saito’s face in AK, Chris Marker reflects: “those were the eyes which saw Mifune being riddled with arrows in Throne of Blood, or stabbing youthful Nakadai in Sanjuro.”
8. Alex Cox
Speaking in Alex Cox’s documentary about Kurosawa’s later years, Saito said that “when he wrote a script, he already had a picture of every scene in his mind. So when he showed me the actual storyboards, they were all very practical showing exactly what to do. He was very easy for a cameraman to work with.” (Kurosawa: The Last Emperor, 1999)
9. Albert Pyun
Saito acted as a mentor to the Hawaiian-American cult film director Albert Pyun. Toshiro Mifune had seen one of Pyun’s films at a festival and invited him to come to Japan to do an internship. Pyun cites his time working as an assistant under Saito as a transformative moment in his career (see Planet Origo).
10. Awards
Saito was nominated for an Oscar for Kurosawa’s Ran (1985). Together with his co-cinematographer Shōji Ueda, he won Japanese Academy Awards for Best Cinematography for Madadayo (Kurosawa, 1993) and Rhapsody in August (1993).
.
(斎藤隆夫 aka さいとう・たかを, b. 1936) – same name when Romanized, different spelling in Japanese. The manga-ka does have a cinema connection however, as films like 
(Merian C. Cooper/ Ernest B. Shoedeck, 1933) and 
(Byron Haskin, 1953) were highly influential on his artistic development.
, Kurosawa used multiple cameras and more than one cinematographer. Saito was always assigned camera B, and given free rein to film as he pleased. “Whenever Kurosawa looked at the dailies”, recalls Teruyo Nogami in 
, p.111)
: The Legacy of the 500,000 (Gojuman-nin no isan, 1963).
, Chris Marker reflects: “those were the eyes which saw Mifune being riddled with arrows in 
, or stabbing youthful Nakadai in 
.” 
’s documentary about Kurosawa’s later years, Saito said that “when he wrote a script, he already had a picture of every scene in his mind. So when he showed me the actual storyboards, they were all very practical showing exactly what to do. He was very easy for a cameraman to work with.” (Kurosawa: The Last Emperor, 1999)
(Kurosawa, 1993) and 
(1993). 
(Akira Kurosawa)
(Akira Kurosawa)
(Akira Kurosawa)
(Akira Kurosawa)
(Akira Kurosawa)
(Senkichi Taniguchi)
(Akira Kurosawa)
(Akira Kurosawa)
(Akira Kurosawa)
(Akira Kurosawa)
(Akira Kurosawa)