Miss Oyu

Miss Oyu (お遊さま) is a 1951 film directed by Kenji Mizoguchi and based on Junichiro Tanizaki's 1932 novella entitled The Reed Cutter (蘆刈). The story revolves around two sisters and their relationship with a man named Shinnosuke. He falls in love with the older and more refined yet childish sister, Oyū Kayukawa, but although she's a widow he's unable to marry her since she has a son from her previous marriage—a custom of some upper crust families at the time (early Meiji era) that disallowed women to remarry while caring for a paternal orphan.

Shizu, the younger woman, is heartbroken by her sister's loneliness and misery and determined to sacrifice her own happiness for Oyū. Shinnosuke, after having met with a number of prospective marriage partners, and choosing none, at first mistakes Oyū for her sister, Shizu, with whom he was supposed to meet. Eventually Shinnosuke and Shizu marry, but on their wedding night they agree that the marriage will be "formal" rather than romantic. In other words, Shizu and Shinnosuke will be "brother and sister" while acting under the eyes of society as a happy, upstanding husband and wife. This is so Oyū and Shinnosuke, the true lovers, can spend time together. Oyū is unaware of their pact.

As you might expect from a Mizoguchi-Tanizaki combo, the results here are tragic. Oyū and Shinnosuke must ultimately separate for the sake of social decency. This is after her son dies, partly due to her neglect and lapse of duty. Another son is on the way though. Between Shizu and Shinnosuke, surprisingly, years later, after they have finally entered into some form of intimacy. Times are economically tough for them. They've moved far away and haven't spoken with Oyū for years. The big problem, however, is that Shizu can't take being a mother and wife, and the role in time kills her. It seems she was only able to draw happiness in a sacrificial role, for her sister. In despair, Shinnosuke finds Oyū's home and leaves the newborn for her to find outside. He won't talk to her. Just leaves the baby in the care of a woman responsible for her own son's death. Then off he goes, to wander despairingly among the tall reeds between beach and mountains.

There's plenty that could be written about the film. Like how Mizoguchi has used scenes of nature, either kempt and well-ordered or wild and jumbled, to parallel and drive the plot. Or those potent tracking shots, close-ups, and framing. Or the part of sex, if any, or asexuality, in the story. Or a comparison between the film and novella. But Mizoguchi particularly focused on portraying the peeling away and defiance of social rules as a necessity for love and freedom. And also how these rules tamp down the human spirit, leading to forms of deviance, possibly a greater moral decay, certainly psychological trauma, and then solitude and certain death.

This isn't my favorite Mizoguchi, but it won't slip easily from memory. Quite a few scenes show an idyllic Japan, with bucolic vistas and lush gardens and exquisite homes. It's as visually interesting as its story is compelling. Then there are the musical performances, reminiscent of other Mizoguchi films, like in The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (1939) and The Water Magician (1933). Oyū plays the koto. And other songs are used to tell, rather than just add to, the narrative. A good film by one of Japan's greatest directors.

River of Time

Drawing from his experience as a journalist in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Ethiopia, Swain looks back on his love affair with Indo-China, the fall of Saigon and then Phnom Penh, the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime, and the transformation of Cambodia. Also the Vietnamese boat people, the lifestyles and adventures of nerve-frayed (or jaded, or conflict-addicted) war correspondents, and his three months of captivity at the hands of Ethiopian guerrillas. It’s rich in his nostalgia and vivid in its descriptions and it’ll stick in the memory. The reader might not always agree with Swain, or how he approaches certain topics, but will appreciate the writing itself and his candor in sharing a very personal experience. I got the impression he wrote this primarily, or perhaps entirely, for himself, to capture his time in those places of a fading past, which makes it all the more compelling.

Excerpt from the epilogue of Jon Swain’s River of Time:

I was in Indo-China for only five years. But I know that in my heart I will be there all my life. I will always lament its romantic past and sentimentalise the grand adventure of death we lived through in the midst of such ravishing beauty. Perhaps I am deceived by unworldly dreams. Perhaps I weave too many illusions about the past. But I don’t believe it was just a romantic fantasy. After years of travel, I have encountered nowhere like Indo-China, and I am not alone in this. Whole generations of westerners who went out there as soldiers, doctors, planters or journalists like myself, to document the sorrow, the tragedy and the stories of its wars, lost their hearts to these lands of the Mekong. They are places that take over a man’s soul. The pain of memory endures alongside this nostalgia. Some memories remained buried in a body bag so deep within me that it was years before I let them out.

Something Strange Across the River

Kafū Nagai’s short story “Something Strange Across the River” (1937) brings us to the streets of early 1900s Asakusa (then the center of Shitamachi “low city” culture and entertainments) and Yoshiwara and surrounding districts. Plenty of nostalgia for how things had been during the narrator’s/Nagai’s youth (“the old, nostalgic world made manifest as muse to my exhausted heart”), and some of this yearning for days past and the imagery reminded me a little of Yasunari Kawabata’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (1929). I enjoyed most the descriptions of this then-waning world our protagonist walks us through across the Sumida River, like:

I pushed aside the high grass and climbed up the hillside of the embankment. There were no objects to obstruct my view of the street I’d just come up. The rambling old towns, empty lots, and developing areas could all be seen. On the other side of the river, corrugated iron roofs spread out in all directions, broken here and there by the towering chimneys of the baths, all of it cast in the glow of the setting summer sun. At one end of the sky the colors of sunset grew weaker and colder as they drifted away. The moon shone bright, as if night had already come. Between the iron roofs, in the gaps that showed the streets, neon signs crackled to life, and the echoes of radios clicking on here and there rose up from the town.

Also interesting/amusing was the narrator’s disdain for the Ginza area and “inner-city” and its “distasteful sorts”, as in:

There are other sights to be wary of in Ginza. The middle-aged man, for example, in his perfectly cut foreign suit and distasteful countenance, his hair perfectly styled, his occupation nebulous, swinging his cane as he walks down the street and sings to himself, berating the young women and the children who cross his path.

I don’t think the story itself will stick in my memory for very long, but it was certainly worth the read for the picture of this time and place.