Repast (めし, 1951)

Women form the central concern of the films of Miko Naruse (成瀬 巳喜男, 1905-1969). Women play the main protagonists, the thematic concerns usually revolve around issues concerning women, his audiences were mainly women, and the narratives are often based on stories by women writers. Naruse’s 1951 hit film Meshi (めし/ Repast) is adapted from the final, unfinished novel by popular writer Fumiko Hayashi (林 芙美子, 1903-1951). He would later to go on to make five other films based on her literary output including Hourou-ki (A Wanderer’s Notebook, 1962) which was based on her autobiography.

If I were a teacher of Japanese, I could imagine using Naruse’s Meshi to teach students about one radical difference between men and women in Japan: the use of language. The different usages of language between men and women in Japanese is apparent in all family dramas, but in Meshi it is foregrounded by film’s title, which is also a key motif throughout the film. The difference between men’s and women’s Japanese rarely comes across in the subtitles because it is difficult to translate. The translators of Meshi had a real problem translating the title in particular and I’m not sure that they were successful. ‘Repast’ is a rather formal-sounding French loan word and it's in my estimation, a bit of an archaic word for a meal in English. In contrast, the Japanese word ‘meshi’, as I will elaborate in a moment, is very informal. I can’t really criticize whoever came up with the title ‘Repast’ though, because there would also be the complication of the different usages of words for meals among different regions of English speakers (supper and tea have very different meanings depending on what side of the Atlantic you are one for example). The noun ‘meal’ itself also has multiple meanings just to add to the translation difficulties.

Focusing on the Japanese meanings of ‘meshi’ though, the first dilemma when translating the title of the film is that it can mean both a meal and rice. As rice is the staple of all traditional Japanese meals ‘gohan’, the synonym for ‘meshi’, also means both a meal and rice. ‘Gohan’ is the word that most students of Japanese will learn and it is what women will use with each other and when talking to men. It is more polite than ‘meshi’, which men will use with each other and when talking to their wives.

In Naruse’s subtle depiction of a marriage, the husband Hastsunosuke ‘Hatsu’ Okamoto (Ken Uehara) often uses very blunt expression ‘Meshi ja nai ka’ to ask his wife Michiyo (Setsuko Hara) if supper is ready yet. It would be similar in English to a husband asking his wife ‘Isn’t supper ready yet?’ in a tone that implies that the meal should already be on the table. After five years of marriage, the shine has worn off. Their relationship is strained due to troubles making ends meet and Hatsu, worn out from his job, doesn’t see how the long, lonely days working as a housewife are affecting Michiyo. Her one solace is in the scraggly, tail-less cat who seeks her affection.

Michiyo’s feelings about living in Osaka are emphasized through the theme of ‘meshi.’ She finds that the imported , overpriced rice sold by a local woman tastes funny and longs for rice from back home. Without family in Osaka, Michiyo has grown tired of the endless chores of cooking and cleaning and wonders if she should return to Tokyo and find work for herself. Her husband works long hours and has become distant from her, leading her to lavish all her love on a mangy, tail-less cat.

The catalyst for change comes in the guise of a niece, Satoko, who drops in unexpectedly from Tokyo. Satoko has come to escape her parents and their marital expectations of her and seems to have a little crush on her uncle. Flirty, young, and naïve, Satoko’s presence reminds Michiyo of the woman she used to be, as does a reunion with her Tokyo friends. These women are important because they show the limited chances women had in the 1950s. Each suffers from their own situation (single vs. married) and thinks that the others have it better. After this interlude with her friends, Michiyo comes home to find that Satoko and her husband have done very little to contribute to the day’s chores and she decides that the time has come to make a change in her life.

From a modern perspective, Hatsu seems like a real jerk of a husband and in a lot of reviews of this film, Hatsu is described as being a stereotypical patriarchal husband. Thinking about him in the context of 1950s Japan, I actually found him quite a sympathetic character – especially when contrasted with the husband in Yama no Oto (Sound of the Mountain, 1954), another Naruse film starring Ken Uehara and Setsuko Hara as a couple with marital problems. Hatsu shows early signs of being a good guy – although he is curt in the usual way with his wife, he shows great patience when she’s angry with him and never responds with anger himself. Apart from his lack of contribution to household chores (which is sadly even today typical behaviour for men in many Japanese families), he also shows good judgment for the most part throughout. For example, he is always honest with his wife, telling her where he goes and with whom. He does not spend money overly rashly and avoids bad business decisions (ie the Marugaki scheme) despite heavy peer pressure. He also seems completely oblivious to the women who throw themselves at him during Michiyo’s absence.

While Naruse does give the husband’s perspective lots of screen time, our thoughts are never far from Michiyo. Unlike Fumiko Hayashi’s unfinished novel, which was written in the first person, Michiyo’s motivations throughout the film seem deliberately ambiguous. In doing so, Naruse allows his audience to use their own experience to interpret Michiyo’s actions and thoughts. This is only broken in the final scene on the train (no spoilers follow), where Michiyo is given a voiceover narration that explains her ultimate choice. This final scene was reportedly tacked on by the studio producers, much to the dismay of many critics. I think that it could have been left ambiguous with no voiceover dialogue. For me, the scene in the restaurant with Michiyo and her husband made the ending satisfying – especially when Michiyo laughs through tears as only Setsuko Hara can. This is a film that can be really appreciated by people, especially women, who have been married for a long time because it asks its audience to consider what happiness in marriage really means to them.

Setsuko Hara ¤ Michiyo Okamoto
Ken Uehara ¤ Hatsunosuke ‘Hatsu’ Okamoto
Yukiko Shimazaki ¤ Satoko Okamoto (niece)
Yōko Sugi ¤ Mistuko Murata (Michiyo’s sister-in-law)
Akiko Kazami ¤ Seiko Tomiyasu
Haruko Sugimura ¤ Matsu Murata (Michiyo’s mother)
Ranko Hanai ¤ Koyoshi Dohya
Hiroshi Nihon’yanagi ¤ Kazuo Takenaka (cousin)
Keiju Kobayashi ¤ Shinzo Murata (Michiyo’s brother)
Akira Ōizumi ¤ Yoshitaro Taniguchi

Mikio Naruse The Masterworks I / Japanese Movie

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2009

Akira Kurosawa: a Century of Cinema

The Venice Film Festival will be celebrating the centenary of the birth of Akira Kurosawa a few months early with a panel on Monday. The discussion will feature a number of prominent guests including Peter Cowie, Donald Richie, Teruyo Nogami, Michel Ciment, Richard Corliss, and Italian critic Aldo Tassone. Here is the blurb from their website:

To mark the imminent 100th anniversary of his birth, the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa will be the subject of the international panel that will be held at the Venice Lido on Sunday September 6, 2009 at 3 pm in Sala Pasinetti (Palazzo del Cinema), organized by the 66th Venice International Film Festival (2-12 September) and moderated by Peter Cowie, film historian, author and founder of The International Film Guide.

On 23 March 2010 Akira Kurosawa would have been 100 years old. Given that his discovery in the West came as a result of the Golden Lion he won at the 1951 Venice Film Festival with Rashomon, and that the festival awarded him a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 1982, it is significant that his profile and his achievements as a filmmaker should be discussed in Venice this year.

The participants in the meeting chaired by Peter Cowie (Great Britain) will include some of the world’s best-known experts on Kurosawa’s work, such as Teruyo Nogami (Japan, writer and for many years Kurosawa’s chief assistant), Donald Richie (United States, writer, director and critic, authority on the culture of Japan – where he has been living since 1947 – and author of the ‘definitive’ study of Kurosawa, as well as firsthand witness to a half-century of his activity), Michel Ciment (France, writer and critic, editor of the magazine Positif), Richard CorlissTime) and Aldo Tassone (Italy, critic, director of the France Cinéma festival and author of several books on Kurosawa). (United States, critic for the weekly

The panellists will address the multiple aspects of Kurosawa’s figure and work, including: his vision of society and politics; the comparison between Kurosawa and the other great Japanese filmmakers; his relations with Eastern and Western culture (Shakespeare, Gorky, Dostoevsky, van Gogh); the enthusiastic reception given to Kurosawa by American culture and cinema; comparisons with other great Japanese auteurs such as Ozu and Mizoguchi; their numerous remakes; his sources of inspiration in Japanese culture; Kurosawa’s work on the set; his talent as a painter; his use of colour and music; the difficulty he often had in getting funding for his films in Japan; his love of history and the lessons that he has offered to each new generation.

For more information, go to the offical website.

Akira Kurosawa The Masterworks Blu-ray Disc Collection I [Blu-ray]

Japanese Movie

Sky Colour Flower Colour (空色花色, 2005)

© Tomoyasu Murata Company

This short puppet / mixed media animation by Tomoyasu Murata (村田朋泰) features the female character from Indigo Road (藍の路, 2006), the third film in his Michi (Road) Series. A key theme in each of the first three films of the series is loss: the death of a child (Scarlet Road), the death of a dog and the moving away of a childhood friend (White Road), and the dissolution of a relationship (Indigo Road).

Although there is no explicit suggestion in the title Sora Iro Hana Iro (Sky Colour Flower Colour) that this film belongs to the Road Series, fans of Murata’s puppet animation will spot the connection immediately. The woman, with her short black hair, white shirt, and expressive eyes is unmistakably the same puppet used in Indigo Road. The piano music that opens the film is also very similar to the piano themes in the Road films whose main protagonist is a pianist. Both Sakamaki Fumikazu (composer for Scarlet Road and White Road) and Tatsuhide Tado (composer for Indigo Road and Lemon Road) are credited alongside Murata himself for the music in Sora Iro Hana Iro.

© Tomoyasu Murata Company

The film opens on a train platform set against a bright white background with the woman sitting on the bench changing the film in her camera. She looks up to see an adult dog at the edge of the platform looking at her. Both the white background and the dog suggest the film White Road. The dog is a similar size to the adult dog in white road but has different coloring.

Towards the end of the first scene, the woman and dog stand together watching an indigo, computer animated butterfly as it passes through the station and flies into the fields. This again is a reference to Indigo Road, in which the man finds a broken butterfly on the ground after the woman has left him – a butterfly which was alive in flashback scenes.

The butterfly, a symbol of spiritual transformation that appears often in Japanese animation, links the opening scene to the following scene in which the woman and dog stand together in a lush green Japanese forest. I say Japanese forest, because my husband (a keen birder who has spent many years in Japan) recognized the hiyodori (brown-eared bulbul) on the soundtrack – a very common bird native to Japan. The locations of the Road Series are unclear and likely purely an imaginary realm inspired by Murata’s own travels and aesthetic interests. Indigo Road looks like it’s set in a central European town, while Lemon Road could be set in rural Arizona. Murata has a love of old technologies, such as TVs and radios, and his puppet sets look like a slightly worn version of the 1950s.

© Tomoyasu Murata Company

The woman and the dog wander the forest side-by-side, always facing now in the same direction, like the elderly couple in Ozu’s Tokyo Story and the woman pauses occasionally to take photos. A car, that looks like it is driven by the woman, passes through the forest at the end of this scene, but as it goes by, we see the backs of the woman and dog walking into the forest. This doubling of the main protagonist also happened with the pianist in Indigo Road when he was cleaning the toilet. At this point, it becomes apparent that with Sora Iro Hana Iro, Murata has not made a straight-forward narrative story, but rather series of subjective impressions to tell us more about the state of mind of this female protagonist, whom I shall call the photographer from now on.

© Tomoyasu Murata Company

The piano theme returns with the return of the butterfly, and the photographer looks up through the trees at the bright sky. Bathed in the rosy colour of the setting sun, she sits down on a bench and closes her eyes, and we are treated to an ethereal dream sequence (likely computer animation) of neon and pastel figures of children, a carousel and floating lights that at times look like glowing fireflies and at other times like stars. This sequence (particularly the children, the carousel, and the bright colours on a black background) are very similar to the themes and aesthetic of another Murata film Merry-go-Round (2008).

© Tomoyasu Murata Company

The dream sequence ends by repeating the shot of the road through the forest with the car returning. This time the car stops and we are granted a closer shot to confirm that the photographer and the dog are both in the car watching the backs of themselves going into the woods. On this surreal note, the film fades to black and the piano theme continues over the credit sequence.

My interpretation of this film is heavily influenced by my knowledge of Murata’s other films, and it’s hard to say how much meaning I would have read into the film if I watched the film ignorant of his other works. In a way, it was a relief to find that the woman was alive – though with the dream-like imagery of this film she may only be alive in a spiritual sense. The deaths of loved ones are made clear in Scarlet Road and White Road, but in Indigo Road it wasn’t clear if the woman had died or left. For me, Sora Iro Hana Iro, tells me that the woman, an artist in her own right and not just the housewife she seemed to be in Indigo Road, has left to go on a spiritual journey. The colours of this film, are much more optimistic that Indigo Road, and so I have the impression that her journey is a positive one of growth for her. The title suggests the red colour of the flower that is a symbol of the Road Series, and the sky changes with the scenes (white, blue, rosy, and black night sky). The butterfly suggests that she is undergoing some kind of a spiritual transformation in her life.

Although the film seems to have actually been completed the year before Indigo Road, they seem to be partner films. And, there are many connections between it and the most recent installment in the series Lemon Road (檸檬の路, 2008). Sora Iro Hana Iro is a truly beautiful short film which, like most Murata films opens up more questions than it answers, but is an aesthetic treat all the same. As will become clear when I review Lemon Road in the next few days, Murata seems be mixing media more and more with his films. In many ways, he seems to be taking up the mantle of Tadanari Okamoto (岡本 忠成, 1932-1990), a puppet animator who challenged himself with each new project to try out new methods and push the boundaries of animation made by hand.

Sora Iro Hana Iro and Merry-go-Round are two of 20 shorts (including animatied company logos) available on the DVD The Dream is Crouching (夢がしゃがんでいる) and can be ordered online at tomoyasu.net (within Japan) or by contacting his company for orders outside of Japan.

Tomoyasu Murata Sakuhinshu - Ore no Michi

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2009