At the very end of the Second World War, Shusaku Kawamoto (Hiroyuki Nagato), a traumatised, tubercular soldier refused medicine by the army (as he’s not in a fit state to fight), is nursed by innkeeper’s daughter Shinko (Mariko Okada), who’s been forced to abandon studies in Tokyo to return to the rural Akitsu Springs. Returned to physical and mental health through—improbably enough—witnessing her copious tears on the announcement of defeat and by her youthful vivacity, Shusaku, still mired in despair, falls in love and proposes a suicide pact which she first laughingly dismisses, and to which she then assents (‘if you really love do me’); yet at the moment of proposed liebestod, she giggles as the ropes he binds her with tickle, thus accomplishing, through bathos, her second act of rescue. Presumably in disapproval at this rash act (though, typically, the film’s narrative essentially streamlines any but the most vital of plot points), he’s forced to leave her by mother—and thus begins a futile process of recreation, as he periodically revisits the Inn, now managed by Shinko after her mother’s death and living in hope of his never-to-be-permanent return.
Despite the film’s seventeen-year scope and its opening the day before the announcement of Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, this is not a historical film; rather, having set up the lover’s encounter against this backdrop in the first twenty minutes, as the film continues, any kind of historical context seems to be stripped further and further back, as the pattern of Shusaku leaving and returning (while in the meantime getting married, starting a family, and embarking as a career as a writer in the shadow of his successful elder brother in Tokyo) establishes itself at near-interminable length. Though the sociopolitical aspect is important—whether the skewering of patriarchal militarism in the drunken soldier who hunts for the teenage Shinko with his sword in the name of military honour, the adaptation to American influence (Japanese songs now have to be performed with ‘swing’ inflection)—the film quite deliberately seems to strip all but the bare bones of plot in favour of a kind of decontextualised repetition of the core situation. In a sense, it’s melodrama taken to its zenith, as an endless series of (anti)climaxes, each time accompanied by the three main themes of Hikaru Hayashi’s score associated respectively with the stirrings of mutual passion, the dread of the suicide pact, and the strains of yearning and waiting. Brief shots of Shisaku’s life outside Akitsu Springs—drinking in bars, jealous of his brother’s literary success, neglecting his wife, flirting with a shop assistant—succinctly establish him as a self-centred asshole, yet they’re all essentially peripheral to what can only be described as a kind of paradoxically minimalist maximalism: melodrama as a ritual of repetition, of the same overblown gestures, from the lovers fleeing and chasing each other, literally striking poses as if in theatre, opera, ballet, to the more banal rituals of renting a room, drinking sake, smoking a cigarette, going away without saying goodbye. The film turns the melodramatic ritual of parting into a kind of repeated tic, ‘you hate to see me leave’, ‘let me see you leave this time’, as Shisaku’s repeated avowals that this will be the last time ring more and more hollow and the relationship itself becomes more and more a cipher for a lost moment of possibility that was, in actuality, the encounter of a traumatised, suicidal soldier caught in the thick of war and a teenage girl saddled with a kind of empty mythology less about the specific love object—whose qualities can hardly have been revealed in much detail over the space of a few days (or 20 minutes of film)—as the about the idea of feminine waiting and masculine arrival. Thus, the youthful Shinko’s proclamation ‘I’ve done something! I’ve saved a life’ when Shusaku credits her for his recovery comes up against her later bitter announcement, ‘I’ve done nothing’, in which her management of the inn after her mother’s death—itself a replay of her mother’s own frustration with the inn with which she’s saddled after remarriage—is not so much framed as an index of feisty survival, Scarlett O’Hara or Stella Dallas style, more a kind of existential footnote. Thus, if Shinko suggests a generational advance in terms of gender roles, of toughness and capability, even when not bound to the patriarchal norms of arranged marriage which she rejects, she’s is bound to an impossible love which—as in the suicide pact itself—remains an irresolvable cul-de-sac.
Yoshida has spoken of his rejection of the postwar humanism—of an unbounded faith in progress and the essential goodness of people—that he associates with the Americanised optimism exemplified by Kurosawa, one which Yoshida’s more radical generation firmly distrusted. Likewise, Yoshida, who would later revise his criticism of Ozu to write a major book on Ozu, also avoids any of the dramas of restraint, resignation, obligation and fatalism associated with the latter. (Worthy of note, too, is Okada’s own prior work with Ozu—astonishingly, this, the first of her long series of collaborations with Yoshida, whom she would also marry, was already her one hundredth cinematic role.) Statements of disappointment—that’s the lot of humanity—that might, in Ozu, form a devastating climax, are here offered by Shusaku as pat apologies for treating her as a kind of nostalgic accessory, a permanently available holiday in the country, ‘tomorrow will be another day’: resignation as pronounced when it’s at the bottom of a sake bottle as when it seeps into the affected pipe that replaces frantic cigarettes and despairing maladjustment with bourgeois, patriarchal complacency (on his last visit, Shusaku orders a razor – ‘I want a shave’ – treating his mistress as a kind of extension of his wife. Shinko’s own commitment to the despairing romanticism to which Shusaku’s youthful proclamations have doomed her is in turn belied when, having slit her wrists with the same razor, she faces the water, looks at the camera, and screams: for all the subsequent, climactic moments of heightened tragedy, Shusaku holding her body in his arms beneath billowing cherry blossom and billowing strings, it’s that moment that sticks in the memory. We’re forced to ask: what precisely do we make of the film’s conclusion, apart from a general sense of being ‘moved’ by the swelling music, the classic tragedy of a love-death, and the rest? If we weep, who do we weep for, and why? As such, the film also turns the mirror on its audience: Shinko, who throughout the film is essentially used by Shisaku for his own purposes, with diminishing and expendable returns, is first encountered in essence performing in front of a series of mirrors as she introduces herself in unconventional fashion, and in the absence of the usual obstacles—familial or societal convention, the weight of circumstance and the like—it’s the audience itself who suddenly have to face the uncomfortable question of what this is all for. Shisaku’s nostalgic addiction to an experience that was never quite the grand amour both he and Shinko imagine—her tears at the defeat of Japan inspire him to continue living with their passion, and her laughter in the face of suicide again inspires him to continue living, and his visits in subsequent years serve as little bursts of nostalgic recreation that help him adjust to his dissatisfactions with a life of quiet success; perhaps even her death will serve as an instance of artistic inspiration, rather than traumatic self-reckoning.
In the merest fragments of carefully off-kilter composition, Yoshida at times anticipates the deliriously off-centre framings of the later radicalism trilogy (perhaps most notably in ‘Heroic Purgatory’): we see Shinko between window panes as a in a prison, shot in profile from the side at odd angle, faces crammed just too high or too low onto the screen, the close-ups suddenly too close, the familiar settings of the film suddenly too claustrophobic. But that’s not where the real subversion lies: rather, even in this exercise in high budget repertory film making, the contradictions within the form itself are stretched to their limit precisely by being inhabited so fully, while also remaining palatable as a mere exercise in following the demands of the genre to the letter. And thus, by flattening out and removing narrative motivation, by not developing the romance, by rendering the narrative a series of performances, gestures and affects rather than any sort of theory of love—all while sticking to the conventions of rich costume, colour, music, grand event and grand feeling—the melodrama starts to collapse from within.
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