Assassination

“I would like to be able to take hold of the past and make it stand still so that I can
examine it from different angles.”

– Masahiro Shinoda (1)

In the long history of Japan, few moments were as volatile and violent as the Meiji
Restoration in 1868. 250 years of peace under the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868) (2)
had resulted in cultural and economic stagnation. After American Commodore Perry’s
arrival in Tokyo Bay in 1853 with his “four black ships”, a power struggle erupted between
forces loyal to the Shogunate and those wanting to restore the Emperor as the head of state.

In the midst of this turmoil, powerful individuals emerged whose allegiances changed
direction with the prevailing winds. One of them, Hachiro Kiyokawa (Tetsuro Tanba), rose
from a lowly position as the son of farmers to become one of the most respected and feared
samurai of his age. This figure is at the centre of Masahiro Shinoda’s extraordinary
historical film Ansatsu (Assassination). Donald Richie, the doyen of Western critics of
Japanese film, called it Shinoda’s best film, as did his fellow director Kon Ichikawa.

The historical context of the film is extremely complex, and Shinoda further complicates
matters by recounting events in Kiyokawa’s life from the perspective of several different
characters. The film’s plot also moves backwards and forwards in time. The end result is a
little confusing but these complications make it that much harder to take one’s eyes off the
screen.

After two minutes of expository history, the film shows a map of Edo (old Tokyo) with the
Chrysanthemum seal, representing the Emperor, at its centre. We then see Kiyokawa
crouched before a Shogunate official – the same seal on the wall behind him – who reads
out his official pardon for the murder of a policeman. We next see two key figures of the
Shogunate who figure prominently throughout the film, commenting on Kiyokawa’s
exploits. One of them smokes a cigar, a sign of his corruption by Western customs and
ideas.

Kiyokawa’s antagonist in the film is a samurai, Tadasaburo Sasaki (Isao Kimura). Early in
the film we are shown the grounds for Sasaki’s enmity toward Kiyokawa. Priding himself
on his own fencing prowess, he faces off against Kiyokawa in a kendo match and is
soundly beaten.

Kiyokawa is presented as a powerful, larger-than-life character. Shinoda is so evidently

enamoured of him that he is willing to forgive this character’s sometimes-unsettling
brutality. One of the best scenes in the film shows Kiyokawa’s savage murder of a
Shogunate policeman in broad daylight on a crowded street. After beheading the man in the
blink of an eye (Shinoda freezes the shot of the man’s head rising into the air), Kiyokawa is
chased by an angry mob of witnesses. As Kiyokawa flees from the stone-throwing mob, his
sword still drawn, Shinoda eliminates all the sound other than Toru Takemitsu’s percussive
score. This image of a lone samurai being chased down the road, as onlookers scurry out of
his way, is unforgettable.

Of all the angles from which we are shown insights into the life of Kiyokawa, the most
complex is from the perspective of his mistress, Oren (elegantly played by Shinoda’s wife
Shima Iwashita). Oren recounts in her diary (which Sasaki grudgingly reads) her first night
with him and their shared intimacy when she later becomes the mistress of his house. When
a warrant for Kiyokawa’s arrest is issued after his murder of the policeman, Oren is tortured
by Shogunate officials, but does not divulge his whereabouts. In tribute, Kiyokawa tells his
parents to pray for her.

At the end of the film, Kiyokawa remains an enigma. Oren’s death and, perhaps, the death
of his idealism, have driven him to a dissolute life of sake and prostitutes. The final
sequence of the film is shown entirely from the perspective of Sasaki, who stalks
Kiyokawa, even spying on his visit to a prostitute he calls “Oren”. Sasaki is waiting for his
chance to attack, and he sees his opportunity in a chance meeting he witnesses from a safe
distance. Shinoda freezes the frame as Kiyokawa, in greeting an acquaintance on the street,
stops to remove his straw hat, his hands clear of his white-handled sword.

Our efforts to understand Kiyokawa are paralleled by Sasaki’s efforts to find a point of
weakness in his character, a chink in his samurai armour. A problem arises when we realise
that a lot of Kiyokawa’s behavior isn’t exactly explicable. For instance, he organises his
own army to defend the Shogunate but interrupts its march on Kyoto with the sudden
announcement that he is waiting on orders from the Emperor. And although he is obviously
shaken by his impulsive beheading of the policeman he later unhesitatingly steps up to
behead a group of captured “traitors”.

Tetsuro Tanba’s performance as Kiyokawa is riveting. He exudes an intelligence and

strength that makes the other characters’ fascination with him understandable. There are
two actors in the cast whose faces are probably familiar to non-Japanese filmgoers. Eiji
Okada, who plays Lord Matsudaira, starred opposite Emmanuelle Riva in Alain
Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and was also the captive in Hiroshi
Teshigahara’s Suna no onna (Woman in the Dunes, 1964). Isao Kimura plays Sasaki,
Kiyokawa’s sworn enemy. Cinephiles might recognise him as the actor who played the
novice samurai, Katsushiro, in Akira Kurosawa’s Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai,
1954). In that film, he was a devoted admirer of a master swordsman. In Assassination,
Katsushiro has come full circle, his character admiring Kiyokawa’s swordsmanship while
hating the man and his reputation, determined to beat him when the chance arises.

The music of Toru Takemitsu is so closely integrated with the action that it becomes a key
character in the film. A superb modernist composer, Takemitsu actually preferred to
compose music for film, and he did so for such directors as Masaki Kobayashi
(e.g. Kwaidan [1964], Seppuku [Harakiri, 1967]), Teshigahara (e.g. Woman in the
Dunes, Rikyu [1989]), Kurosawa (Ran, 1985), and thirteen of Shinoda’s films.
For Assassination, he composed a spare but powerful score, making liberal use of
traditional Japanese instruments, particularly the biwa.
A companion piece of sorts to Shinoda’s film is Kazuo Kuroki’s Ryoma ansatsu (The
Assassination of Ryoma, 1974), which follows the last days of Ryoma Sakamoto, a
character who figures prominently in Kiyokawa’s story. Kuroki’s film is markedly different
in style to Shinoda’s: much looser and avant-garde. (It was made for the independent Art
Theater Guild.) Its anarchic imprecision helps reveal the extent to which Shinoda was still
working within a specific filmmaking tradition in 1964. Assassination is a late but brilliant
example of that tradition.
The Thin Line between Truth and Lies:
Masahiro Shinoda’s Samurai Spy
Alongside Kihachi Okamoto’s Dai-bosatsu toge (The Sword of Doom, 1966) and Hideo
Gosha’s Kedamono no ken (Sword of the Beast, 1965), Masahiro Shinoda’s Ibun Sarutobi
Sasuke (Samurai Spy) presents a new type of samurai protagonist: refined from the
prototypes of Akira Kurosawa and Masaki Kobayashi, pitiless, obsessive, even more
alienated. But Shinoda’s films are distinguished from those of his contemporaries by his
pointed use of static pictorialism and theatricality. Shinoda could create stylised montages
as effectively as Gosha or Okamato; but his camera is more as often in repose, resonating
with a subtle tone of apprehension as his characters await the inevitable eruption of
violence.

Shinoda has said in introductory essays to several of his movies that film is a form with the
potential for expressive continuity with the traditional arts of Japan. “The idea that truth can
be approached through deformation and abstraction is essential to all forms of
contemporary art”, he wrote regarding his movie Shinju: Ten no amijima(Double Suicide,
1969) (1). This belief in turn inspires Shinoda, like the Japanese writer Chikamatsu on
whose bunraku or puppet-play Double Suicide is based, to seek “the thin line between truth
and falsehoods”. For Shinoda that material distinction is analogous to the equally thin line
between reality, or verisimilitude, and fantasy in art. Pictorialism and theatricality are the
alternately deforming and abstracting qualities that define that line. Filmic devices from
long takes, with their intensified sense of real-time to low-key lighting or unusual framing,
all of which occur in Samurai Spy, become formal transliterations and analogues to the
deformation and abstraction that Shinoda perceived to be at work in specific painterly and
theatrical traditions.

Samurai Spy’s labyrinthine storyline centres on the legendary title figure Sasuke Sarutobi’s
(Koji Takahashi) pursuit of a man named Tatewaki Koriyama (Eiji Okada), an agent of the
Tokugawa who plans to defect to the Toyotomi faction. From this Shinoda elaborates a
maze of assumed identities and false trails and exploits genre typing, both as expository
shorthand and as a source of viewer expectation against which he may play dramatically.
Because Sarutobi’s pursuit in so often passive, constructed of many individual scenes in
which he literally waits for something to happen, a number of the audience’s normal
expectations are diminished and redirected toward the less predictable supporting figures in
the film, most notably the mysterious, white-hooded Sakon Takatani (Tetsuro Tanba) and
his band of Tokugawa spies who seek Tatewaki to prevent his defection. This results in a
narrative tone that strongly supports an observation made by Sarutobi very early in the film,
just before he and the ronin Mitsuaki (Rokko Toura) eat rice cakes and discuss “Tokugawa
politics” by a tranquil riverside: “I believe nothing is certain these days”.

The few minutes of movie that precede that remark are charged with the unexpected and
uncertain. Under footage of war banners and battle scenes, a disembodied voice establishes
the period. Watercolours of the era are followed by a chase across rooftops that ends with
the fleeing man mortally wounded by Tokugawa spies. Before any of this can be clarified,
another cutaway occurs, and the audience is following another man: Sarutobi. He hurries
through a misty day-lit forest, while a voiceover laments, “I am pursued. I am always
pursued by something.” This complex prologue is less expository then it is evocative. What
information the audience does receive – there are spies involved; people are being killed;
someone is being pursued – is subsumed into the dissociative impact of Shinoda’s graphic
scheme. As if to restrict identification, Sarutobi is often in shadows, hidden behind objects,
masked like a ninja, or seen from the rear. Dizzying effects immediately displace the
measured tones of the opening narration and the stable images of the historical paintings. It
is in this context and at a sensory level that the viewer must embrace Sarutobi’s assertion
that “nothing is certain”.

Shinoda repeatedly uses images full of angular and conflicting lines of force, direct cuts to
unexpected perspectives and actors partially blocked from the audience’s sight by
foreground clutter. Occasionally he reverts to a long take in order to concentrate or
intensify an image and draw the audience “deeper in the story”; but even those have
unstable and unusual elements. The sequence in the communal baths at the inn combines
comic relief, superficial eroticism, and the inherent tension of the long take with a
distancing from Sarutobi’s point-of-view. The camera stays back, panning from one side of
the bathing area to the other, and never gives the viewer a close look at Sarutobi’s face,
never permits a reading of his reaction. Shinoda mirrors this sequence near the end of the
film, when Sarutobi decides that he must act. There the long take underscores the dramatic
tension more typically: withholding a cut heightens suspense and anticipation.

Shinoda is less interested in a striking visualisation for its figurative meaning than for its
sharp sensory impact. If there is a metaphorical value to the dark alleyways down which his
figure must repeatedly move or to opening and closing the scenes with Sarutobi on misty
mountaintops, there is also a prevailing sense of peril or mystery to which all these visual
tropes are subsidiary. Above all there is a constant undercurrent that says that appearances
are unreliable. “Who are you? Enemies or friends?” Sarutobi must ask, because gestures,
faces, and words are no longer trustworthy indices.

Shinoda’s probing for that division between truth and falsehood is a variant of the classic
moral dilemma of a samurai who must choose between duty to clan (giri) and common
morality (ninjo). There is an enforced anonymity in Samurai Spy’s conclusion: having
survived and saved Omiyo (Jitsuko Yoshimura), the young woman orphaned by the battle
that brought the Tokugawa to power, and having symbolically at least withstood the feudal
might of the shogunate, Sarutobi stands with his colleague Saizo Kirigakure and Omiyo in
an extreme long shot as the swirling mists dissipate. The audience is left with only
questions about the nature of the title character, no exploration of his actions or inactions,
nothing more than Sakon’s remark just before he dies: “Sasuke, you are an odd person. You
really are.” Like Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, who hates pathetic people but saves them
nonetheless, Sarutobi is both genre figure and ordinary character, both killer and saviour,
both larger than life and lost in the mists.
Double Suicide and the “fetishism of
space”

It is rare today to find a film as highly stylised as Shinju: Ten no amijima (Double Suicide) –
especially one in which the stylisation is so exquisitely sustained across every level of set
design, performance, sound and dramaturgy.

Based on a bunraku theatre script written by the most famous premodern Japanese dramatist,
Monzaemon Chikamatsu, Double Suicide is a period film set among the merchant class of
Osaka. The inability of a merchant, Jihei, to pay out the debts of his lover, the courtesan,
Koharu, leads to their decision to seek a shinju – a lovers’ suicide – so they can be together in
the next world.

The film’s emphasis on artifice or “staginess” begins in the very first scene, which is set in
a bunraku puppet theatre. Double Suicide adopts the conventions and style of these almost
life-size wooden puppets, with their visible, black-clad, hooded puppeteers, into the form of the
film. Bunraku theatre features the uncanny doubling of the figures of the puppets with those of
the puppeteers – the kurogo. Double Suicide foregrounds this tradition, with the kurogooften
manipulating, directing and assisting the actions of the live performers. At times, actors will
freeze mid-movement and the kurogo will lead the main character through the suspended
scene, or they will kneel watching intently through their black veils as an erotic scene plays out
its role as the next step towards the inevitable shinju. Some critics have described this ghostly
presence of the kurogo as like the hand of fate directing the lives of the characters. While this
reading adds a layer of symbolic meaning to the dramaturgy, the impact of the mute physical
presence of these figures, and the enigma of their function, produces a level of fascination
beyond any question of symbolic meaning (1).

On one hand, the kurogo become one more figurative element in the film’s stunning, high-
contrast, black-and-white cinematography, in which locations and sets – brothels, lampposts,
windows, tombstones and bridges – are constructed in terms of their graphic properties. This
astute attention to the graphic qualities of the set extends to the design of walls and floors and
the relationships between figure and ground that the designs establish. In the early scenes in
the pleasure quarters, actors pass across walls painted with black and white figures
reminiscent of the ukiyo-e woodblock tradition. The lovers’ tryst is filmed from above, the lovers
dressed in black and white kimonos, splayed across and merging into the black-and-white
figures painted on the floor. As the film progresses, the backdrop of the pleasure house
becomes huge ink blotches that provide a graphic cipher of the chaos and breakdown of social
order that is unfolding. In Jihei’s shop these graphic patterns, that start out as calligraphic texts
scrawled across the walls, become single amorphous brushstrokes with ink drips trailing down
the walls. The walls themselves then become mere graphic elements as the kurogo flip them to
reveal a new set. This attention to the sensuous quality of surface detail is an element that has
often been discussed by critics. Donald Richie, when speaking more broadly, has emphasised
the aesthetic values at the centre of much of Japanese art, and its attention to surface pattern
or illusionistic realism. Richie links this to the theatrical tradition of the kabuki stage, in which
light is full and flat, rather than the chiaroscuro use of light more familiar in European art (2).

Tadao Sato has challenged the assumptions of many non-Japanese that traditional Japanese
culture is central to the culture of contemporary Japan. Sato’s claim suggests a need to explore
more closely exactly what Shinoda is doing here (3). A detour into the historical context
of Double Suicide can help to give a perspective on how the film works with and transforms
traditional aesthetics. Shinoda was one of the four original directors of the Japanese New
Wave identified in the late 1950s and 1960s. David Desser locates this New Wave in the
political context of the massive student protest movement in the 1960s, focused particularly
against the renewal of AMPO – the Japan-US Mutual Security Act – and the revival of
traditional authority that it was seen to represent (4). Annette Michelson (who has written
specifically on Oshima) has discussed the development in this period of the idea of cinema as
a tool or weapon for political struggle (5). In Desser’s account, this ideological commitment is
filtered through a challenge to the techniques of the realist shingeki theatre, a movement
influenced strongly by the European realists such as Ibsen, and which the New Wave directors
believed produced a “pernicious” influence on postwar “psychological cinema”. As a former
theatre student, Shinoda had done major studies of premodern Japanese theatre, and,
according to Desser, looked to the potentially disruptive energies of noh, bunraku and kabuki –
before they became incorporated into official culture – as sources to revitalise and reinvent
Japanese cinema as a cinema of protest. Desser’s argument is that Shinoda’s is a “dialectical
return” to the premodern imagination, seeking to revive its “heterodox tendencies” (6). In
Shinoda’s case, he argues, close links with both the Japanese and international avant-gardes
and radical experimental theatre provided part of the impetus to radicalise and overthrow
psychological conventions.

In the first scene of Double Suicide, as the camera scans the doll-like figures and visages of
the puppets, the image is accompanied by the voice of the director in a telephone conversation
with the scriptwriter, talking about the staging of the final death scene, and describing the
“fetishism of space” that the scene should work with. This scene cues us in to one way of
understanding what is happening in this film. Critics such as Audie Bock have written of the
foreclosure of any psychological identification with character, describing the film’s effect as an
“icy aestheticism” (7). Certainly, the film can induce a kind of detachment, and the final death
scene that gives the film its name is as bleak and uncompromising as any in cinema. However,
the flip side of this possible coldness is a rupturing of the conventional dynamics of
spectatorship, and a heightened awareness of this “fetishism of space” that can be riveting to
watch. Artifice is foregrounded here – as viewers, we are always aware that this is
the stagingof a drama that we are watching, and the work with space is a key site of the vitality
of experimentation in the film.

One characteristic theme of the bunraku theatre, played out also in much of classical Japanese
cinema, is a conflict between giri (social obligation/duty) and ninjo (personal feeling/desire).
Shinoda uses the theatrical impulse here to stage a drama of the overwhelming, excessive
power of eroticism to rupture the stultifying, quotidian demands of social convention, a drama
about social repression and the desire for release from it. This opposition is inscribed into the
film through the physical presence of the same actor, Shima Iwashita, playing the two female
roles of wife and courtesan.

Keiko McDonald has outlined the culturally-coded motifs of freedom and constraint that
underpin the construction of space and set design in Double Suicide: lattice windows, grids
and checkered walls as symbolic of entrapment; images of water alluding to Buddhist symbols
of liberation (8). This work with space, however, has a dynamic of its own, as the film moves
from the enclosure of the interior scenes to the vast open space of the film’s ending. Shinoda
had done a major study of the shooting style of classical director Kenji Mizoguchi, and the
heritage of Mizoguchi’s close attention to mise en scène can be discerned in the way Shinoda
works with space. There is a dynamics of spatial energy in operation here in the move from
tightness to release, from the crystallised, claustrophobic sets, to the stark emptiness
underlined by the relentless, haunting Turkish flute of the suicide scene.
 It is indeed revealing that the composer Toru Takemitsu, responsible for the film’s music, also
shares credit for the screenplay. The music in the film is sparse, erupting mostly in key
moments when the power of the erotic or the intensity of the ethical conflict are at their highest.
Shinoda has said that he learned from Takemitsu how to combine images and sound – how to
use sound as the punctuation for images (9) – and the taut relationship between sound and
image, and the collaboration on the script itself, suggest a conceptualisation of these peak
moments as performative knots in which all elements come together, in contrast to the relative
thinness of the more domestic aspects of the film. It gives us a way to understand the energetic
dynamics of the film.

Shinoda has said that “no Japanese can die for freedom but it is very Japanese to die for
aesthetic purity” (10). While many may contest the cultural essentialism of this statement, it
gives us a clue to understand Shinoda’s own drive for a crystalline aesthetic expression that
gives Double Suicide its potency and makes it one of the truly great achievements of Japanese
cinema.

Endnotes

1. For a close reading of how Shinoda revises and radicalises the tradition of
the kurogo, see Yukihide Endo, “The Revisioning of the Real: Film Director Shinoda
Masahiro’s Emphatic Use of Kurogo in Double Suicide”, Nihon Cine
Art: http://eigageijutsu.blogspot.com/2009/02/revisioning-of-real-film-director.html.
2. Donald Richie, “The Influence of Traditional Japanese Aesthetics on the Japanese
Film”, Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and
Japan, ed. Linda C. Ehrlich and David Desser, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1994, p.
154.

3. Tadao Sato, “Japanese Cinema and the Traditional Arts”, Cinematic Landscapes:
Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan, p. 180.

4. David Desser, Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave
Cinema, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1988, pp. 24-5.

5. Annette Michelson (ed.), Cinema, Censorship and the State: The Writings of Nagisa
Oshima 1956-1978, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1992.

6. Desser, pp. 174.

7. Audie Bock, Japanese Film Directors, Kodansha International, New York, 1978, p.
349.

8. Keiko I. McDonald, Japanese Classical Theater in Films, Dickinson University Press,

Fairleigh, 1994, p. 213.

9. Donald Richie, “Notes on the Film Music of Takemitsu Toru”, Contemporary Music
Review vol. 21, no. 4, 2002, p. 7.

10. Shinoda quoted in Bock, p. 347.

Surface Play and Subterfuge: The
Closed World of Masahiro Shinoda’s
Cinema

“If we abandon the gods, what must take their place in order to support the centre of the
culture?… It is difficult to decide what will take the place of the gods. I have never
believed that culture is something one can ‘make.’”

“I must categorize the films of the world into three distinct types. European films are based
upon human psychology, American films upon action and the struggles of human beings,
and Japanese films upon circumstance. Japanese films are interested in what surrounds the
human being. This is their basic subject.”

–Shinoda

I. Way In

Circumstance is a subject, but unlike personal psychology or the struggle for individualism,
it doesn’t offer a particular perspective: just the material for one. “Never as radical as
Oshima, nor as consistent as Yoshida, and certainly never as satirical as Imamura, Shinoda,
on the other hand, is unquestionably the most versatile of the New Wave directors,” offers
David Desser in his book Eros Plus Massacre, even if versatility, a salaryman’s virtue, is
not quite a viewpoint. “[I am] not interested in utopian ideals,” Shinoda has said, more
simply. “I would like to be able to take hold of the past and make it stand still so that I can
examine it from different angles.” Per Desser, Shinoda’s “most significant authorial
characteristic, the comparison between traditionalism and modernism (in terms of both
social norms and aesthetic practice)” is only a playing of worldviews against each other.

Confronted with films in all colours, shapes, and settings, and unable to discern an auteurist
imprint beyond a hodgepodge of motifs—historical backdrops at moments of transition;
occasional theatricality; street processionals; a nihilistic critique of Japanese imperialism—
American critics, sensing that “in pure visual and sound experience his films impress with
lush flamboyance,” have logically posited the means as an end. “The director’s main
concern,” says Donald Richie, is “an exclusively aesthetic one—namely, the shape of men’s
lives, the patterns they make.” “His contribution to the generation of the 1960s has been his
devotion to beauty,” Audie Bock ends her profile on him. “Surface rather than substance,”
writes Carole Cavanagh.

From his early juvenile delinquent films (1960-’62) to yakuza and samurai pieces
(1964-’65) to chamber dramas, Brechtian theater and deconstructed myth (the late 1960s to
the ’70s), and even in his late, naturalist histories (1980s-2002), Shinoda’s films offer a
pictorial beauty that is its own excuse, an art for art’s sake that’s, even so, almost always
positioned politically. The open question remains whether Shinoda’s picturesque sense of
environs and choreographic sense of movement are the product or antithesis of a soulless
landscape: an art reacting against social realities, or just the extension of social role-
playing?

***

No way in, no way out: Shinoda’s story is almost invariably of an outside agent, often a
girl, who rebels against power politics either through some abstract, aesthetic ideal—at
least six of his films follow artists or musicians, and even the equivocating samurai
in Ansatsu (Assassination, 1964) only finds respite in a ballad—or in a viral attack on the
system, whether an authoritarian kingdom or household. “The Japanese have a belief that it
is purer to sacrifice themselves for things invisible than to do so for a political cause.”

But in either case, the agent turns out an unwitting victim of circumstance whose only
expression is in the violence of a local, historical politics that can’t be transcended. Shinoda
has described both Kawaita hana (Pale Flower, 1964), his yakuza reappraisal, and Ibun
Sarutobi Sasuke (Samurai Spy, 1965), his samurai reappraisal, as reflections of the cold
war: a solitary hero, the Japanese idealist in a cultural wasteland, becomes the pawn of
opposing powers whose politics are a mask for power. Almost every Shinoda film of the
period has this set-up of a rebel whose only expression of identity is in picking between
equal superpowers. According to Desser, already as early as in 1961’s Kawaita
mizuumi (Dry Lake), “Shinoda claims that he and [screenwriter] Terayama confronted the
fact that whereas the rightists in Japan typically resorted to terror and violence (as in the
assassination of JSP leader Asanuma), the emerging left was similarly becoming so
inclined.” “Power will never perish,” says Lord Mizuno in Buraikan (1970)—“it will
always be replaced by another.”

In Shinoda’s films, the characters whose dedication to “style” gives the films their own,
lose something like personal expression—whether a sense of morality, feeling, or the
mundane—to mask-like roles and inherited ideals. These films mine a voguish
existentialism, even “nihilism” (Shinoda’s term), in stories of rebels who infiltrate closed
worlds by submitting to their choreography of violence, their external morality of men and
women who are only as good as their sword-fights, their car races, their rockabilly hip
thrusts. The classic beauties turn nihilistic as styles that are their own end: Shinoda gets
surface tension from characters, like the camera, seemingly oblivious to anything but their
own movements.

In the 60s films, scenes of slaughter, flight, and cunnilingus are abstracted by slow-motion
and a biwa’s accompaniment into visual motifs: an appeal to the eye instead of body in a
slow crescendo of repeated thrusts forward. But the realization that the most visceral,
physical moments of Shinoda’s ’60s films are abstracted into unfurling lines of motion
offers only one angle. Another is that these distantiation techniques only make the scene
more immediate, more visceral: the viewer projects himself into the scene by rhythm alone.
These moments seem to compound traditional Japanese virtues of aesthetic
disinterestedness (iki) all at once with a 60s rejection of classical geometries, with
Antonionian fog, and with the invisible hand of Toru Takemitsu, the modernist composer
who used natural rhythms as ostinato, and insisted directors pare down their soundtracks for
the maximal inflection of single sounds. “I will make the film. That’s one voice. Takemitsu
is another voice,” says Shinoda, the director Takemitsu worked with most. “I wanted these
two voices to come together.”(1)

In Shinoda’s ’60s works, the sounds of the scene become the rhythms of the film.
Takemitsu’s music is generally used to dramatize only the least dramatic moments. The
duels in Samurai Spy, a film in which a distant zoom happens upon the key action, are
usually accompanied by bird calls that sometime change pitch and species at crucial
junctures. The teen rock-and-roller of Namida o shishi no tategami ni (Tears on a Lion’s
Mane, 1962), fantasizing a fame perpendicular to his world of class conflict, walks down
busy streets to the sounds only of his footsteps. In Shokei no shima (Punishment Island,
1966), face offs are counterpointed by the slide-whistle of the wind and the breaking sea,
Shinoda’s favourite sound, while shots of the sea are silent or accompanied by Takemitsu’s
warbling strings. An undertaker’s hammering is the film-long beat and metre in Buraikan.
And in Pale Flower, yakuza gambling scenes, set like business meetings around an empty
grave with only the movements of hands, cards, and Shinoda’s swivelling montage, the
pure exteriority of men in ritual is matched by echoing castanets and tap: the rhythms of
dance in the ceremonies of an echo chamber.

However pure that beauty, there’s always some awareness of its expense. “Circumstance,” a
historical reality beyond the studio’s purview, already grates against aesthetics in Shinoda’s
early, pop-JD films like Yuhi ni akai ore no kao (Killers on Parade, 1961), a windshield
view onto a contemporary Yokohama of brutalist architecture and primary-coloured yakuza
who sing a cappella, and are finally wiped out as a gang leader, dripping red paint,
hopscotches his last steps to the sounds of real waves and an imitation train whistle. Yet in
Shinoda the movie’s splay of seemingly arbitrary movements become part of a schema of
effects: matching tracking shots and pans that build an almost classical rhythm of refrain
and response. In the opening jump cuts, as the yakuza line up in a movie studio to shoot an
apple off a girl’s head, miss, and splatter the wall in paint, Shinoda, as Jean-Luc Godard
would a few years later, flaunts violence for a surface beauty on film that only comes at the
expense of any real-world index-point.

That beauty is the painted face of violence will be the more obvious target of recurring,
iconographic posters that give mobsters and militants the cover of societal legitimacy
throughout Shinoda’s ’60s films: Hitler in Dry Lake, JFK in Killers on Parade, the Mona
Lisa in Pale Flower, Abraham Lincoln in Punishment Island, Marilyn Monroe in Kaseki no
mori (Petrified Forest, 1973). “Culture is nothing but the expression of violence,” Shinoda
has said, adding, “also, human tenderness is unthinkable without violence.”

Violence is an art form, but art is unthinkable without violence: is that aestheticism or its
critique? All of Shinoda’s films seem to teeter between material interpretations of violence
as beauty’s root throughout Japan’s history, and Shinoda’s own abstraction of violence into
something beautiful. Art of circumstance or circumstances of art? Circumstance is a web of
arts in Shinoda: by 1964 an extended sword fight in Assassination is shot with a gliding
tracking shot, almost absent of sound, in the attenuated motions of Kabuki. As late
as Futuro no shiro (Owl’s Castle, 1999), the athletes’ rehearsals for battle and Kabuki are
nearly the same; Buraikan follows a failed Kabuki actor (Tatsuya Nakadai) who becomes
an unwitting revolutionary instead. It was in Kabuki that Shinoda “found that violence is at
the root of all human passion, the fundamental enthusiasm of the human being.”

Art and politics again: Shinoda has repeated that his nihilism comes from his desire to kill
himself at age 15 at the emperor’s surrender of god status, and the ongoing search and
failure since then to find anything on earth worth dying for, even while the formal illusions
and hierarchies of culture—everyday and aesthetic—have had to be maintained. “I wanted
to know, ‘Where are our gods? Have they gone?’… The origin of drama started in a
religious form, trying to communicate with God especially in the Noh and Kabuki theatre.
The main theme is to bring death into the world.” And: “In my films, I have tried to show
the present through the past and history, coming around to the truth that all Japanese culture
flows from imperialism and the emperor system. What characterizes Japan is the imposition
upon the people of absolute power and authority without the right to question and debate…
I find, however, that politics leads to nothing, and that power politics remains empty.”

Buraikan, Shinoda’s comedy about underground Kabuki actors who stage an underground
rebellion on a soundstage in the 1840s, gives Shinoda’s most easily distilled thesis that men
are dolls, beautiful and hollow, and, as in the traditional Japanese fables Shinoda would
adapt, led on by the superficial beauty of enchantresses: both Shinoda’s leading ladies,
Kaga Mariko and his wife, Iwashita Shima, have a doll’s cat-eyes and glutted lips behind
which may lie anything or nothing. But these dolls are never quite allegories for
experience: in Shinoda, allegory seems impossible in a world in which meaning is
localized, historically determined, and life is lived not only for but as the external grace of
good puppeteering. When the endings of Chinmoku (Silence, 1971) and Setouchi shonen
(MacArthur’s Children, 1984) call for allegories of Christ and politics—a priest projects
himself into the role of Christ as a martyr for humanity; a baseball match between America
and Japan pits brute modernity against hangdog tradition—Shinoda sheds larger statements
for local concerns: the priest is not Christ and will help his tortured brethren better in
apostasy and submission to the state; a dog grabs the ball and the game ties. In Buraikan, a
revolutionary sets fireworks in defiance of Lord Mizuno, who responds that there can’t be
fireworks, he outlawed them; in the outskirts of town a matriarch marvels: “how beautiful!”

God withdraws as a source of meaning and leaves materialism to rule itself. Even self-
sacrifice seems less defiant than inevitable. Unlike Yukio Mishima’s beautiful suicide
in Yûkoku (Patriotism, 1966) or the classically Japanese, tragic martyrdoms in Masaki
Kobayashi, one of Shinoda’s favourite directors, resignation is rarely noble in Shinoda: the
traditional coupling of ninjo (personal feeling) and giri (social obligation) seems to become
a duel between self-destructive urges, lust, and material gain at one end, and an absurd,
historically determined system of oppressive morality and debts on the other. In both, men
are puppets to their own lives.

Two compass points for Shinoda, Oshima and Kobayashi, posit in very different ways a
struggle of the personal against the political, one that collapses as the two become mirrored
reflections: the victim of the state turns victimizer, while violence, as in Shinoda, is the
fulcrum of both expression and suppression. But where Kobayashi’s films schematize a
clear pattern of disillusionment, an impossible ninjo against an inescapable giri, Shinoda’s
show illusion, however beautiful, on all sides: personal desire becomes self-interest within
the context of a time.

And where Oshima’s films seem framed by an irreducible metaphysic of guilt, sadism, and
alienated subjectivity, all affirmed in the battle against them, Shinoda’s movies see these
things as historical vectors rather than inescapable worldviews. Spy Sorge (2003) opens
with a quote by the Chinese writer Lu Hsun: “Hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be
said not to exist. It is just like roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to
begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made.” But even in this message of
hope, there’s no way out.

***

Asked how to avoid sentimentality in late, character-based histories like MacArthur’s

Children, Shinoda said one needed to play character interests against each other—again, a
balancing of views—but added: “What I most wanted to do with this film was to shoot the
school ground. And I wanted to do it from the vantage point of the corridor that connects
the classrooms. After receiving your training in the classroom, you come out and feel the
wind or the rain in that corridor.” Padded by sentimental coming-of-age stories and viscid
melodies, these late films have drama in background detail and historical setting: the
anecdotal MacArthur’s Children climaxes around the point when a girl needs to pee in a
’40s straw outhouse, and asks a boy to sing a traditional Japanese anthem so he won’t hear.
But at the same time Shinoda’s approach to history as a stage for classical narrative was
being developed by directors as different as Maurice Pialat, Edwad Yang, and Hou Hsiao-
hsien, in films in which history is inscribed even in the gestures of how one hangs around.

Shinoda’s ’70s films, often accompanied by oneiric Takamatsu scores, are more
expansively realized. The Petrified Forest charts culture clash in mundane detail while
insanity spreads as a disease; in the historical films, characters move through the static
frame and stop to watch street processionals without realizing they’re part of the passing
crowds as well. Hanare goze Orin (The Ballad of Orin, 1977), perhaps Shinoda’s
culminating work, tracks a travelling goze, the blind singer Iwashita, through 70 locations,
all four seasons, and a series of exploitations recalling Kenji Mizoguchi’s Saikaka ichidai
onna (The Life of Oharu, 1952) except that, without the onus of a transcendental
martyrdom, the goze has a sex drive as well. Her lover is not the love of her life but one
more important than the rest, and even her sacrifice to him, repeating Silence, is to an ideal,
invisible love. At the dawn of industrialization and militarization, the blind leading the
blind are matched with marching soldiers, and what starts as fable ends in a particular time
and place.

But it is Shinoda’s ’60s films that hew closest in form to life as the art of circumstance.
Using every abstraction the Japanese New Wave had taken against convention—freeze-
frames, overhead shots, 180-degree cuts, handheld Cinemascope, and high-contrast smears
of white scene detail against preponderate blacks at night—Shinoda arranges them in films
like Tears on the Lion’s Mane, Pale Flower, Samurai Spy, Assassination, and Punishment
Island into a coherent syntax of matching tracks, scene bridges, and symmetrical openings
and closings.
As with his slow-motion abstractions to music, Shinoda gets his dynamism in these movies
from a concatenation of alternating angles, speeds, and motions. One pattern is to start with
a hero’s close-up, then pivot centrifugally around him through 90-degree cuts till the
camera has full scope of the scene and can circle on its own: the character becomes the
scene’s central axis. But the technique slows and hardens in the mid-to-late ‘60s: a five-
minute circling pas de deux in Utsukushisa to kanashimi to (With Beauty and Sadness,
1965), a seven-minute stage at the showdown of Punishment Island, a three-minute, deep-
focused poison preparation in Petrified Forest. Still the characters, never points of access
into the scene, are staked in the center of rooms like ornamental pillars. Except for Double
Suicide, there are relatively few point of view shots in Shinoda: where classic Hollywood
grammar works its way through a scene from the inside-out, through characters’ viewpoints
onto it, Shinoda, like many of his peers, works from the outside-in so that the characters are
set up as one object among many in a composition. The effect of near-silent montages,
frequent in Samurai Spy, is usually of characters gliding in a weightless world and
propelled by their own momentum. In the debates of Assassination, the characters playing
out their political roles seem to become abstractions of themselves.

II. Way Out

The exception that could prove a rule is Double Suicide, Shinoda’s 1969 adaptation of a
Chikamatsu play that begins as a backstage documentary as both Shinoda and the hooded
stagehands, kuroko, talk on the phone. Shinoda, on the location he’s found for the
graveyard finale: “But it captures the space on stage, the nothingness, a sort of fetishism of
space, the vivid contrast between that and the bodies of the couple… the essential image
needs to be captured.”

A thesis to decode the meaning and intent of Shinoda’s formal conceits seems unavoidable
in a film that shows set changes, Shima Iwashita playing the double role of courtesan and
wife, and ancient lovers performing their duty in suicide alongside kuroko performing their
own duties on-stage to assist the killings, and off, answering the phone. The puppets, critics
have said, are symbols of “Shinoda’s sense of the powerlessness of ordinary men,”(2) the
stagehands symbols of the artist meting fates out at will, the Brechtian approach the marker
of a stringent social conscience. “The emphasis on the artificiality of the drama serves the
purpose of distancing the audience in a Brechtian fashion. The audience cannot identify
with the individual characters, and is therefore forced to observe, much the same way as the
kurago [sic].”(3) The whole thing is symbols, from the calligraphy on the walls to
Iwashita’s double performances, each coded in traditional make-up. “Shinoda is
commenting upon the significance of roles and signs in society. Cast in the role of
courtesan, Iwashita becomes eroticized; cast in the role of wife, Iwashita becomes de-
eroticized… And the very conventions that make Koharu an object of desire and Osan an
index of obligation are the ones that inevitably drive Jihei to suicide.”(4) “The strain of
tensions between the boundedness of the puppet play—the confines of the genre—and the
limitlessness of cinema are immediately apparent.”(5) Or did Shinoda say that it’s cinema
that frames the empty void of the stage to give it, almost arbitrarily, subject, context, and
meaning—a fetishistic form?
If Double Suicide, a ningyo joruri (puppet play) adaptation, were demonstrating that men
live as puppets—victims of circumstance in their theatrical formalities—it would, as Desser
says of Shinoda’s Yasha-ga-ike (Demon Pond, 1979) only be institutionalizing old
conventions as new ones. Shinoda’s explosion of puppet plays would be a puppet play, its
code of meaning inescapable. And this is very nearly what happens a couple years earlier in
Imamura’s documentary Ningen jôhatsu (A Man Vanishes, 1967): as the characters over tea
discuss the nature of truth, as elusive to the documentarian as the vanished man, Imamura
has his stagehands disassemble their room as he announces that “nobody knows the truth…
this is a stage set, but you all talked as though it was really a cozy room. The set took on the
life of a real room… This is fiction.” The moment is as much an attack on the
manipulations of the subjects and filmmaker as their complicity with the audience: reality is
simply the stage on which truth is manufactured.

By 1969 in Japan, more attempts at taking to the streets seemed to end in a hall of mirrors.
Imamura’s trick-reveal, simultaneous to the French New Wave’s collusions between reality
and fiction, ends with a line, “the film is finished, but reality is not,” matching Jean Rouch’s
statement at the end of La pyramide humaine (The Human Pyramid, 1959) that “it’s not
what happened within the film that mattered, just what happened outside of the film… the
film ends, but life goes on.” But where Imamura indicts daily life as a set, Rouch sees a
stage for revolution. By 1969, some Japanese directors seem to be trying for this theatre of
revolt as well in mock-documentaries: Hani Susumu Hani’s Hatsukoi: Jigoku-
hen (The Inferno of First Love, 1968), Shûji Terayama’s Sho o suteyo machi e
deyou (Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets, 1971), Yoshishige Yoshida’s Erosu
purasu Gyakusatsu (Eros Plus Massacre, 1969), and Nagisa Oshima’s Tôkyo sensô sengo
hiwa (The Man Who Left His Will on Film, 1970) all concern filmmakers who may be
inventing and projecting themselves into the world on-screen as a political act of
revolution.(6) Or, alternately, may be trapped, like Imamura’s ruffled subjects, in their own
subjective perceptions. Or objective habits. Or, alternately, may not be able to project
themselves into their world of revolution at all except by—in more than one of those films
—playing the projector light over their naked bodies.

In the Oshima, in particular, the mysteriously dull footage of houses from a dead man is
unsatisfactory to the communist cell that watches it both because its intentions are illegible
and because intentions, wherever they are, are necessarily subjective, and thus inadmissible
to communal spirit: the footage belongs neither to the realm of subjective intentionality nor
familiar, objective fact, but as unprocessed material in-between, and though the
communists are attempting to overthrow both personal subjectivity and societal objectivity,
they struggle to find either intention or indexicality in the film to make sense of it. Each
needs the other. The footage needs some fundamental truth-value, as in Imamura or Rouch,
in order to become meaningful as a contextualized stage, with props and a premise, for
fiction and a revolution.

In some way these are also the questions of Double Suicide, a film severed from both
subjective intentionality—the film is a staging and weaving of cultural traditions beyond
any individual worldview—and any notion of objective realism—the closed world of ritual
and ceremony that, as usual in Shinoda, men create and are created by. Are the actors and
filmmakers witnesses or agents on-screen? Whose life is led when truth is a communal
manufacture? Where is the worldview, and in 1969, the world?

The answer of Chikamatsu’s paper merchant to sophomoric questions of obligatory

conventions is to flee from one lover to the other, while defaulting on his debt—however
emotional, invariably expressed in economic terms—to whatever woman he’s just left. As
Carole Cavanagh points out, paper, “on which the source text is calligraphed, and… on
which all the private promises and legal contracts binding the characters together are
written… draws together story, design, cinematic construction, and theme.” The merchant’s
worldly ties are in paper, though as Cavanagh goes on, it is the contractual bond between
the merchant’s two women—the wife asking the courtesan not to lead her husband to
double suicide—that provides the “humanizing” touch. But this ostensible liberation and
act of understanding is also what dooms the characters to more economic debts, as the wife
tries to repay the courtesan by buying her freedom, and to the final suicides of the lovers,
each alone. Even suicide is worldly: a symbol of money repaid, and thus a social currency.
Every attempt of the characters to take agency of their lives results in subjugation to it:
they’re all passive witnesses. And when the merchant, like the revolutionary in Eros Plus
Massacre, tries to knock down the shoji—paper walls—he only reveals the larger stage.

In an inversion of A Man Vanishes, in which the stage is fake but the filmmaking real, here,
the merchant’s rooms are the film’s only reality to believe in against an artificial studio.
Unlike his contemporaries, Shinoda doesn’t stage a fictional documentary but a
documentary of a fiction. In Double Suicide, Shinoda’s opening discussion about a tentative
ending is neither the voice of an original authorial figure nor a faithful interpreter of
Chikamatsu subjected to the dictates of the play, any more than the kuroko, whose faces are
visible under the hoods as they sing like a Greek chorus, are shorthand symbols for the
heavy hands of fate, nor, exactly, victims of the play’s demands. As Shinoda looks for
bodies that will serve as presences over an absent space, his own role, like that of
the kuroko, becomes one of a living performer playing his part willingly, and in the present
tense, within the film’s discourse of documentary footage, long takes and diegetic realism,
against the abstraction of the sets, the two-dimensional compositions, the traditional Kabuki
acting. Not just a naturalist qualification to Kabuki, he’s also an elemental cog in a vast,
material puppet machine: like so many Shinoda characters, a tool of his own actions.

The scaffolding of Double Suicide, then, certainly isn’t so simple as puppeteer and puppet,
author and player, fate and victim, intention and sign, or even giri and its actors, the
courtesans to social custom. It also isn’t so simple as ninjo vs. giri, since in the film’s
complete exteriority, ninjo, personal desire, is already bound up with giri: personal desire,
again, can only be expressed economically, and the concern of the play is not how a man
and his mistress can run off together, but how they can do so within (not against) both their
(financial) bonds to the people around them. Nor is the space even as simple as a
predetermined staging of a predetermined plot of predetermined social conventions that
Shinoda has undermined by placing such formalities over an indeterminate blank void: that
would still be a thesis, a supposedly “Brechtian” revelation that there is no basis for their
roles, that there is no origin for their strings, and that their “fated” actions are of their own,
material devising in an empty world to which they’ve given arbitrary limits. Even that
would imply some measure of potential intentionality on the part of the main characters,
 and they have none: the acting is traditionally declamatory, coded, and seen only through
the sympathetic gazes of the kuroko watching a spectacle. Both the set and the kuroko are
totally devoted not only to deconstructing the play as play, but to making it as beautiful as
possible.

Instead, the tentative space of Double Suicide is one of inscription, the pure exteriority of
signs: one of paper sets covered in words and pictures, sets in which characters can write
their own histories on paper, but only in the worldly language of economic terms, and can
only act as signs, so that Iwashita’s wife is coded by her blackened teeth, a traditional
Kabuki make-up. Yet against the void, blank canvas of the graveyard, this writing of bodies
on the ground, bodies seen and heard breathing and mostly watched walking, are some sign
of material life that recalls Artaud: “The actors with their costumes constitute veritable
living, moving hieroglyphs,” for whom words and signs are valued not for what they
signify, but “for their shape and their sensuous emanations.” The bodies, performing
specific, gestural variations on coded movements, become analogous to the calligraphy on
the set’s walls that has a phonetic, meaningless meaning only at certain alignments, but is
always expressive as an artist’s abstraction: frequently the writing on the walls breaks down
to lines and curves and ink blots in which the original letter is hardly discernible. Similarly
the characters, initially so coded, and even because of such codes, become almost pure,
performing bodies without a pretense of interiority: as in dance, the differences between the
character and the actor collapse in a costumed body no longer signifying anything but itself
moving on-set. They are signs floating free from any meaning but their own action, beauty.

Double Suicide is not only a documentary of its impossibility as a documentary, but a real,
beautiful documentary of bodies moving in rhythm across spaces: the film it is closest to
might be Michael Powell’s Herzog Blaubarts Burg (Bluebeard’s Castle, 1963). Radical and
traditional, its self-reflexive stagings are both another anti-establishment exposure of a
manufactured landscape as well as a sort of foundational myth. The lovers die alone at the
hands of the dutiful kuroko, but a final, handheld overhead shot restores them both to their
ideal, eternal companionship as well as to the opening, handheld sequence, and thus the
outermost layer of the text and set: Japan, 1969, where a kuroko answers the phone and
dead lovers on the ground give a nearly standard image of the time—climaxing in films
from Eros Plus Massacre to Akio Jissoji’s Uta (Poem, 1972) to Yuke yuke nudome no
shojo (Go Go Second Time Virgin, 1969). Projected onto some eternal present that’s as
much 1720 as 1969, the lovers are still just agents of their times.

Endnotes

1. Shinoda interview, disc feature on Samurai Spy Criterion Collection DVD.

2. Joan Mellen, program notes for Shinoda retro at MoMA in mid-1970s.

3. Claire Johnston, Criterion DVD notes. Reprinted from Focus on Film #2, March/April 1970.

4. David Desser, Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave
Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 177.

5. Nina Cornyetz, “Scripting the Scopic: Disinterest in Double Suicide,” in The Ethics of Aesthetics
in Japanese Cinema and Literature: Polygraphic Desire, London: Routledge, 2007.
Pale Flower
Freda Freiberg

Pale Flower/
Kawaita hana (1963 Japan 96 mins)

Prod Co: Shochiku Dir: Shinoda Masahiro Scr: Baba Masaru, Shinoda Masahiro, adapted
from a story by Ishihara Shintaro Phot: Kosugi Masao Mus: Takemitsu Toru

Cast: Ikebe Ryo, Kaga Mariko, Fujiki Takashi, Hara Chisako, Tono Eijiro, Miyaguchi Seiji

Like Imamura and Oshima, Shinoda Masahiro was a university-educated intellectual who
was employed by Shochiku as an assistant director in the early 1950s and felt stifled by the
company’s conservatism. But Shinoda was less openly rebellious than the other two and
took the opportunity to learn a great deal about camera technique, editing and shot
composition by working conscientiously as an assistant to all of the company’s leading
directors.

At Waseda University Shinoda had specialised in theatre history and lacked training in
visual art. When finally allowed to direct in the ’60s, he broke dramatically with Shochiku
tradition by employing radical young poet (later noted underground playwright) Terayama
Shuji to write scripts and emerging avant-garde composer Takemitsu Toru to compose
discordant scores for his films. However, long after he had left Shochiku and had achieved
critical recognition for his period set art movies (especially Double Suicide/Shinju: Ten no
amijima, 1969), he admitted that he learnt a considerable amount when working under
Shochiku stalwart Ozu Yasujiro, and had studied his methods.

Pale Flower/Kawaita hana (1) is both a genre movie and an art movie. It is a contemporary
yakuza film, made at the start of the golden age of the genre (which lasted from 1963 to
1973), although it was Toei and Nikkatsu rather than Shochiku that became specialists in
the genre. It stars Ikebe Ryo as the world-weary yakuza hit man, Muraki. Ikebe was often
cast in supporting roles alongside stars Takakura Ken and Tsuruta Koji (Japan’s “John
Wayne” and “Robert Mitchum”, respectively) in Toei yakuza movies. Its narrative, like that
of many other yakuza films, opens with the hero’s release from gaol; involves gang
warfare, shifting alliances, betrayals and reprisals; and features a young opponent who
becomes the hero’s buddy and acolyte. But the hero loves a lady more than his buddy, and,
unlike many examples of the genre, does not end up dead in his buddy’s arms after a
sacrificial bloodbath. The film’s settings of bars, racecourses, gambling dens and dark
streets are also characteristic of the genre, but Pale Flower is much darker than most –
night scenes predominate and the darkness of night is weighted with symbolism. Shinoda
does include the yakuza “cut-finger apology” ritual, but he is not interested in the giri-
ninjocode that the yakuza genre inherited from the samurai movie. His hero is not
motivated by devotion to his boss (both gang bosses are portrayed as stupid old men) or to
any political or social code; he is a true loner, an existential outsider like Albert Camus’
Meursault. He is attracted to the mysterious young woman Saeko, whom he recognises as
his soul mate, a fellow thrill-seeker bored with life. On the one occasion when he is
tempted to consummate relations with her, he abstains, his motivation ambiguous. Is it
because the man of action must repress sexual desire and not become emotionally
dependent on a woman? Is it because sex would destroy the high romantic ideal she
represents? Is it because he recognises the unbridgeable class barrier between them? Sex is
available to him with Shinko, his regular woman, the woman who loves him, the woman he
 rejects. Shinko lives in her wicked stepfather’s clock shop where the clocks tick ominously
and symbolically, almost as if they had escaped from an Ingmar Bergman movie. More
culturally and generically incongruous are the repeated images of the “Mona Lisa” in the
décor and the use of Dido’s aria, “Remember Me”, from Henry Purcell’s opera, Dido and
Aeneas, to accompany the hero’s final grand gesture for his lady-love. The last exchange of
looks between Muraki and Saeko suggests that the thrill of the kill surpasses, or at least
substitutes for, sexual orgasm. This is part of a pattern established in the film, as they have
previously shared the thrill of high-stakes gambling and high-speed driving.

The stunning romanticism of the assassination sequence – the majestic bearing and slow
ascent of the hero to the arena; the removal and replacement of diegetic sound by an
operatic aria; the choreography of the killing in dream-like slow motion; and the gazes of
Muraki’s audience, buddy and lady, riveted by the spectacle, admiring his performance – is
balanced by the cynicism of the epilogue. We see that Muraki’s grand gesture has changed
nothing; he is, in the end, impotent and ineffectual. The two old gang bosses are still in
charge; the girl is dead; and he is back in prison, serving out his sentence for murder.

Alongside the climactic operatic sequence, the film offers other set-pieces of breathtaking
artistry, notably the gambling scenes involving the flower card (hanafuda) games and the
hero’s nightmare. In the gambling scenes the composition of shots is very theatrical and
formal; there are abrupt cuts from one set-up to another – ceiling shot, subjective shot,
group formation shot, medium close-up – while the soundtrack features the metronome-like
click-clack instructions of the caller. In the nightmare sequence, which precipitates
Muraki’s offer to perform the execution of the rival boss, even though it isn’t his turn, the
darkly discordant music of Takemitsu and the psychosexual imagery create a surreal vision
of what Chris Desjardins calls “existential dread as a lived-in experience” (2).

Pale Flower’s script was adapted from a story by Ishihara Shintaro, the early post-war
novelist who produced popular fiction about rebellious and delinquent Japanese youth, and
whose works were regularly adapted to the screen. He was not a great writer – Mishima
Yukio called his style “a hotchpotch of rough-hewn brevity and romantic babble” (3) – and
he eventually abandoned writing for a political career, becoming a right-wing Japanese
nationalist. With the inspired assistance of Kosugi Masao’s widescreen black-and-white
cinematography and Takemitsu Toru’s avant-garde music, Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” and
Purcell’s Dido, and a great performance by Ikebe Ryo, Shinoda transformed Ishihara’s
potboiler into a work of art.

Endnotes

1. The literal translation of the Japanese title is actually “Dry (or Dried) Flower”. Hana, the word
for flower, can here refer to both the girl, Saeko, and to the gambling cards which are
called hanafuda (flower cards). O-hana and Hana-ko are common Japanese women’s names. The
word kawaita is close in sound to the words kawaii (cute, charming) and kawaiso (sad, pitiful).
2. Chris Desjardins, Outlaw Masters of Japanese Film, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2005, p.
114.

3. Mishima Yukio, “Introduction”, New Writing in Japan, ed. Yukio Mishima and Geoffrey Bownas,
Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1972, p. 21.
Streaming Auteurs: Masahiro
Shinoda
By Marc Walkow on February 24, 2017

The wealth of older Japanese films available on U.S. home video is sometimes
astounding, if you take into consideration what was released on VHS, then
laserdisc, DVD, and finally Blu-ray. But the number of titles available with English
subtitles, while large, still pales when compared to the depth and breadth of
Japanese film history. For every Akira Kurosawa, whose entire feature filmography
has been made available to English-speaking viewers on home video, there’s a
Yasuzo Masumura, whose works available in translation are limited, for a variety of
reasons, and represent only a tiny portion of his entire creative output.

Like Masumura, Masahiro Shinoda is another filmmaker well-known in his home

country as one of the primary figures of the Japanese New Wave movement of the
1960s. But Shinoda is known abroad primarily for one film, Double Suicide (1969),
his highly theatrical adaptation of a Chikamatsu play, performed and shot in the
style of bunrakupuppet theater. Thankfully, and due to the rise in popularity of
video streaming services such as FilmStruck, the Criterion-TCM partnership, more
than half of the director’s exceptionally diverse filmography is available to watch at
home via streaming only, including Double Suicide and the director’s other two
films previously available on home video: the brilliant and brooding gangster
noir Pale Flower (1964) and Shinoda’s last film as a studio contract director, the
bizarre, convoluted ninja saga Samurai Spy (1965).

Shinoda began his career at Shochiku Studios in 1953 as an assistant director, and
in 1960 he was allowed to write and direct his first feature, made very much in the
studio house style and built around the Japanese cover version of a popular 1959
Neil Sedaka song. The result, One-Way Ticket to Love (1960), was a clichéd but
entertaining black-and-white youth melodrama, set in the showbiz world, about a
down-on-his-luck saxophone player who gets involved with a young woman he
saves from a suicide attempt one rainy night, only to watch her fall in with a
handsome pop singer. Shinoda’s original script turns a critical eye on the poisonous
aspects of the then-nascent talent-management culture, like its intrusions into
performers’ personal lives, and it often feels like a pop-romance film from
neighboring studio Nikkatsu, but with the addition of more adult themes and social
realism. Nevertheless, as a debut film its naiveté is evident, a deficiency Shinoda
quickly addressed in his follow-up feature.

Dry Lake (1960), available on FilmStruck under its alternate title Youth in Fury,
could be considered Shinoda’s true debut, in that it’s a much more mature film,
addressing issues that would come up as regular themes in his later works. Again
mirroring the Nikkatsu style, Dry Lake echoes that studio’s then-popular “Sun
Tribe” movies by depicting the lives of bored rich kids and their dissatisfaction with
mainstream Japanese society. Among them, an opportunistic poor kid (who
worships dictators and has posters of Hitler, Roosevelt, and Mussolini on his
bedroom walls) pinballs between a conservative politician and left-wing
demonstrators, all leading to a violent finale. Dry Lake is especially significant in
that it marks Shinoda’s first collaboration with three other artists who would
become regular partners throughout his career. Avant-garde poet, playwright, and
future filmmaker Shuji Terayama contributes a cynical and complex screenplay
which not only casts a skeptical eye on the political scene in general, with its lead
character alienated from both the left and the right, but also incorporates
contemporary events like the then-current, massive protests against the renewal of
the Japanese-American Joint Security Treaty. Terayama would go on to write four
more of Shinoda’s films, most of them among his best works. Composer Toru
Takemitsu, who had contributed to the soundtrack of the Nikkatsu “Sun Tribe”
film Crazed Fruit (1956), turns in a jazzy score as perfectly in sync with the
contemporary events of the film as his later dissonant works were with Shinoda’s
more existential explorations; he eventually scored 16 Shinoda films in all. Finally,
actress Shima Iwashita here makes her first appearance in one of the director’s
films; she went on to appear in nearly every one of his subsequent works and the
pair were married in 1967.

Shinoda and Terayama continued their collaboration with Killers on Parade (1961)
and A Flame at the Pier (1962), both of which are known by alternate titles My
Face Red in the Sunset and Tears on the Lion’s Mane, respectively. Both films are
major leaps forward in Shinoda’s career, with Flame consistently mentioned as one
of the director’s own favorites. Killers on Parade is a madcap, candy-colored, pop-
art nonsense comedy following a group of assassins, members of the “Killer’s
Association,” who devolve to infighting when a non-accredited hit-man turns out to
be a better marksman than any of them. It’s Frank Tashlin meets Mr. Freedom,
filtered through the eye of Seijun Suzuki, and it’s one of the most brilliant satires
Japan ever produced. A Flame at the Pier takes a more serious tone as it riffs
on On the Waterfront in its monochrome tale of a rebellious rock-and-roller put to
work as muscle for the yakuza strikebreakers who control the Yokohama docks in
cahoots with corrupt corporate bosses. Once again, screenwriter Terayama avoids
the usual clichés of the genre and no party is spared from his criticism, not even the
heroic union. Takemitsu returns to the fold to contribute a terrific orchestral score,
not as experimental as his regular works but reminiscent of classic Hollywood
composers like Herrmann or Bernstein.

Shinoda made four films between Killers and Flame, two of which are available on
FilmStruck. Love Old and New (1961; aka Shamisen and Motorcycle) addresses
one of his most familiar themes in the conflict between generations, but feels like a
backward step for the director after Youth and Killers, with a traditional and
limited view of women and a point of view uncharacteristically in step with the
older generation of the story. Our Marriage (1961) is better in its examination of
parent-child relations in a rural fishing village, and a family whose two daughters
can’t decide whether to marry for love or for money. The ending, in which disparate
groups—rural/urban, young/old, blue-collar/white-collar—all come together to
move forward as a group, also seems to anticipate and encourage Japan’s economic
progress in the early part of the ’60s.

Around this time, Shinoda was being wooed by fellow Shochiku director Nagisa
Oshima to break away from the company and start his own production company,
but Shinoda stuck around a little while longer and closed out his studio career with
three of his best films. He made his first period swordplay film
with Assassin (1964)—Japanese title is actually “Assassination”—available on DVD
only in the U.K. but thankfully part of the exclusive FilmStruck package here.
Tetsuro Tanba stars in the stark black-and-white tale, based on historical incidents,
of a disillusioned swordsman during the period when Japan was struggling with
the transition from Shogunate to Imperial rule. Told heavily in flashbacks and by
others’ personal testimony à la Citizen Kane, the atonal Takemitsu score combines
with the avant-garde cinematography by Shinoda’s regular DP Masao Kosugi to
create a genre masterpiece that’s also a stunning art film. The film looks years
ahead of its time, not only incorporating hand-held shots, rare for a period samurai
film, but also switching to first-person perspective for the climactic assassination,
forcing the viewer to assume the perspective of the killer. It’s a complex, but
breathtaking piece of cinema. Shinoda’s modern-day, color follow-up, With Beauty
and Sorrow (1965) is equally powerful, with Mariko Kaga as the young student and
lesbian lover of a famous painter seeking revenge against her mentor’s ex-lover, a
married novelist who impregnated her two decades earlier. Based on a Kawabata
novel, the film excavates the pathological and poisonous emotions of crazy women
and selfish men, once again set to Takemitsu’s brilliant score.

By the late ’60s, Shinoda was making films independently, though they were almost
always distributed or co-financed by various major studios. The Petrified
Forest (1973) is from Toho, and another adaptation of a novel, this time one by
future conservative Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara, who had also written “Sun
Tribe” movies during Nikkatsu’s heyday, and a pair of earlier films for Shinoda,
including Pale Flower. But Forest, despite its pedigree and effective score, again by
Takemitsu, feels unfocused and incorporates too many bizarre leaps of logic to be
an effective film. A medical school student reconnects with an old flame, who
manipulates him into murdering an abusive lover with a deadly poison the student
coincidentally happens to be studying in his classes. The student’s pesky mother
also gets involved, in ways which shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who’s seen a
typical film noir, and the story turns into a rather backward-looking tale of sin and
wrongdoing.

Shinoda made a much better film from what was likely a better piece of original
literature with his storied adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s tale of religious faith put to
rigorous test in feudal Japan, Silence (1972). Screened in competition at
Cannes, Silence is something of a mixed bag but comes off in the end as a powerful
rendition of Endo’s novel, as well as an effective piece of cinema in line with
Shinoda’s prior works. Working for the first time with Rashomon cinematographer
Kazuo Miyagawa, the film captures wild and gorgeous locations for the story of a
pair of Portuguese priests on a mission to find a lost colleague in a land where
worshipping or teaching Christianity has been forbidden, under punishment of
torture or death. The new adaptation by Martin Scorsese, shot in Taiwan due to a
lack of appropriate locations in 21st-century Japan, trades in Shinoda’s Japanese-
speaking priests for a gaggle of anachronistic, English-speaking peasants, and
features as much sketchy acting in English on the part of its Japanese cast as
Shinoda’s version does of the Europeans acting in Japanese. Most interestingly,
though, Shinoda casts Japanese actor Tetsuro Tanba in the role of the lost friar,
played in Scorsese’s edition by Liam Neeson, with Tanba acting in both Japanese
and English (effectively, since he had been a translator during the postwar
Occupation). It’s an interesting, and possibly brilliant choice, depicting a European
character who’s “gone native” with an actor who’s obviously of a different race. Co-
written by Endo himself, the earlier film’s screenplay is tighter and more focused
on the struggles of the priests to survive in such a hostile environment at all, let
alone carry on their teachings; it also notably ends as the novel does, with a brief
coda about Rodrigo’s endeavors after he recants, instead of Scorsese and
screenwriter Jay Cocks’s extremely personal (and extremely Western) addition of
smuggled crosses and buried treasure.

Shinoda continued to explore different elements of the period film throughout the
1970s, with his brilliant Buraikan (1970; aka The Scandalous Adventures of
Buraikan), a kabuki-infused tale written by Terayama and starring Tatsuya
Nakadai as a wannabe actor in love with a pricy geisha (Iwashita). Nakadai’s con
man finds himself aligned with a group of anti-government cultural rebels
assembled from the least respectable, lowest echelons of society, in a fight against a
local politician who is outlawing petty vices in an attempt to cure the public
morality. Hyper-theatrical in style, with amazing production design, it’s a surreal
masterpiece. Equally surreal, though perhaps less effective in execution despite its
high ambitions, is Shinoda’s retelling of the fable of the sun
goddess, Himiko (1974), starring Iwashita as the titular shaman of the sun-god
people, at war with the mountain and land gods for the spirits and lives of the early
peoples of Japan. Produced by the Art Theatre Guild and Shinoda’s own company,
it’s the kind of experimental cinema that no studio would have financed, complete
with a discordant Takemitsu score, extreme violence, and butoh dancers gamboling
in wild costumes and various states of undress. Himiko is, surprisingly, a perfect
flip-side to Silence, with both equally about political power and religious faith, and
a pair of cultures colliding violently over the two. Both films also feature impressive
location photography in remote areas, though FilmStruck’s version of Himiko is
unfortunately missing the final four minutes of the film, which transitions the tale
of prehistory into the modern age in a surprising way; Criterion has said that this
issue will be addressed soon.

Shima Iwashita, so powerful in Himiko, contributed a pair of even more astounding

performances in Shinoda’s next two films, though her characters couldn’t have
been more different. In The Ballad of Orin (1977), Iwashita is a blind shamisen
player and singer, exiled from her troupe for moral lapses, and wandering the road
on her own in the 1920s Taisho period of Japan, during the country’s war efforts in
Siberia. She bands together with a soldier on the run (Yoshio Harada), and the pair
forge a curiously celibate partnership as they tour the countryside on the run from
various parties who seek to do them harm. Beautiful and sad, with gorgeous
location photography from all over Japan by Miyagawa and another fabulous
Takemitsu score, it harkens back to some of the best woman-centric film stories of
Japan’s cinematic history, and compares favorably with the best works of
Mizoguchi and Naruse.

Smaller in scale, but equally powerful, is Iwashita’s prior film for Shinoda, Under
the Blossoming Cherry Trees (1975), in which she plays a samurai’s wife kidnapped
by a hulking mountain barbarian (Tomisaburo Wakayama), after he kills her
husband and entourage during a robbery. Manipulating him into carrying her back
to his cabin, then killing his other half-dozen wives, she sets about to destroy his
life, seemingly in revenge for his actions but possibly because she’s something other
than human. The pair move into the capital, where Iwashita’s character encourages
her new husband to bring her fresh heads of noblemen and merchants, which she
treats as toys or pets. The macabre story finds the pair slowly going crazy together,
and the final third takes a dive into horror, making it one of Shinoda’s most
atypical films but a genre classic in its own right, with Takemitsu’s jangling score
setting the perfect macabre tone.

Iwashita also stars in Shinoda’s later period film Gonza the Spearman (1986),
which took the Silver Bear in Berlin and, like Double Suicide, was based on a
Chikamatsu play that follows a pair of adulterous lovers on the run. Miyagawa and
Takemitsu contribute once again, and although the first half of the film setting up
the pair’s flight is a bit rote and conventional (featuring far too many plot devices
advanced by one character clandestinely overhearing the conversation of another),
the movie gets its blood boiling during the second half, which depicts the injustice
of their plight and the rage of Iwashita’s family, who want to kill her for her
shameful misdeed. It all culminates in one of the most shocking and well-staged
swordplay sequences in any of Shinoda’s films.

Shinoda retired from filmmaking after his 2003 espionage epic Spy Sorge, and
only made a half-dozen films after Gonza, but one of them is also part of Criterion’s
FilmStruck streaming package, and it’s a wonderful piece of entertainment, even if
it’s not quite in the same league as the director’s earlier output. Moonlight
Serenade (1997) echoes—perhaps intentionally—the nostalgic works of Nobuhiko
Obayashi (most notably his 1986 wartime coming-of-age saga To the Fields,
Mountains and the Seacoast) in its flashback tale of a man, his memory stirred by
news footage of the Kobe earthquake, who remembers his childhood there during
and after the war. Most of the film takes place on a ferry making the long crossing
between the Japanese mainland and southern island of Kyushu, with a rogues’
gallery of characters crisscrossing the episodic plot, all of them carrying various
secrets or regrets left over from the war, and a hope for a brighter future. None of it
is particularly weighty, but the nostalgic perspective was very popular in Japanese
film at the time. Shinoda includes both a benshi silent film narrator who treats the
other passengers to an illegal screening of a Tsumasaburo Bando samurai movie—
outlawed by MacArthur’s Occupation edicts—and a sequence in which the main
character’s father takes him to see Casablanca at a local theater. It’s the kind of
sentimental celebration of cinema easily excused by fellow film-lovers.
All Our Yesterdays
The past is always present in the films of Masahiro Shinoda

By Tom Mes in the September/October 2010 Issue

Masahiro Shinoda has long been enshrined in the Western canon of

great Japanese directors as one of the key figures of the Japanese
New Wave. A usual suspect in the writings of such key critical
gatekeepers as David Desser, Donald Richie, and Audie Bock, he’s
a logical choice for retrospective treatment.

Born in 1931 and raised during wartime, Shinoda entered Shochiku

studios in 1953 after his mother’s death forced him to abandon his
studies (he majored in theater history) and find a job. Serving as
an assistant to every major director from the studio stable
(including Yasujiro Ozu on Tokyo Twilight in 1957), he came to
admire some of his mentors deeply, but grew dissatisfied with the
system of in-house development. “The main thing I learned,” he
once said, “was that if I became a director myself, under no
circumstances would I use the kind of scripts Shochiku was then
using.”

Shinoda would soon get the chance to put his money where his
mouth was. As the Sixties dawned, the film industry was beginning
to feel the heat from television. Attendance figures had declined
rapidly from their mid-Fifties heyday, when the number of tickets
sold reached one billion a year. In an attempt to cater to shifting
demographics, Shochiku decided to give three promising upstarts
their first shots. The “Sun Tribe” craze of youth films that began in
the wake of Takumi Furukawa’s Season of the Sun and Ko
Nakahira’s Crazed Fruitin 1956 had proven that the young were still
buying cinema tickets.

Following the debut films of Oshima and Yoshishige Yoshida,

Shinoda was hired to write and direct One-Way Ticket for Love (60),
under the condition that he build it around a Neil Sedaka hit song.
Though it proved a box-office failure that temporarily relegated
Shinoda back to assistant status, he returned to directing the
same year, aided by the success of Oshima’s Cruel Story of Youth .
He made three films scripted by poet and soon-to-be
countercultural hero Shuji Terayama: Dry Lake (aka Youth in Fury ,
60), Killers on Parade (61), and Tears on the Lion’s Mane (aka A
Flame of Youth, 62). Tackling such torn-from-the-headlines issues
as the protests surrounding the controversial U.S.-Japanese
Security Treaty and corporate corruption, this trio solidified the
reputations of both director and screenwriter.

However, Shinoda would soon abandon contemporary subjects,

setting himself apart from his peers. Beginning with 1964’s The
Assassin (aka Assassination), he began to gravitate toward period
material. His aim was to “take hold of the past and make it stand
still so that [he could] examine it from different angles” in order to
better examine the present and what was happening in society
around him. “Filmmakers should bear witness to the politics of
their age,” he declared.

Set during the tumultuous last days of the feudal shogunate in the
mid-19th century, The Assassin is a very subjective biopic of
Hachiro Kiyokawa, a masterless samurai hired by the shogun to
combat rebel forces intent on restoring the emperor to power.
Kiyokawa’s life as a government-sanctioned killer is recounted
almost entirely through the eyes of others—eyewitnesses from
both sides of the power struggle. What emerges is a portrait of a
pragmatist who switches allegiances whenever it suits him, but
also a man who can be branded neither hero nor villain.
Kiyokawa’s times were characterized on all levels by confused
decision-making, ill-advised action, and emotional responses to
problems that required rational thinking. Those in authority were
particularly unsure as to the best way to counter the threat of
American gunboats that had taken up position in Tokyo Bay in
1846.
Seen today, what is remarkable about The Assassin is how far
removed it is from both the scathing pamphleteering of Oshima
and the increasingly inward works of Yoshida. It has far more in
common with the later films of Kinji Fukasaku—all frenzied action,
freeze-frames, flow-chart narrative, and unwritten history. Donald
Richie provided a pointer to the kinship between the two
filmmakers when he likened the many scenes of backroom political
scheming to “feudal newsreels.”

Unlike Fukasaku (and Shohei Imamura), what interests Shinoda is

not so much the history that Japan forgot but the patterns of
behavior that are repeated throughout that history into the
present. The confusing historical narrative of The Assassin and
Kiyokawa’s wavering loyalty only serve to blur the distinction
between the old power and the new: whether it be militarist or
imperial rule, there is no real change.

It is this point that emerges as the dominant motif in the director’s

Sixties and Seventies work. Pale Flower (64), made just before, is a
contemporary tale whose yakuza milieu makes it feel like a period
piece. Every gesture in this netherworld is ceremonial and handed
down from centuries gone by. Inversely, Shinoda has described his
swashbuckler Samurai Spy (65)—about a lowly swordsman who is
mistaken for a double agent and subsequently badgered by both
sides of a conflict—as an allegory for Japan’s position during the
Cold War.

Shinoda was a teenager when Japan surrendered in August 1945.

The country’s defeat and the subsequent relegation of a formerly
divine emperor to mortal status sowed in the young man a distrust
of authority and a curiosity about what aspects of the Japanese
character could have led the country into war. “All Japanese
culture flows from imperialism and the emperor system,” he once
told Joan Mellen, and his film gives the impression that little has
fundamentally changed through the ages. Tradition endures: the
contemporary hero of Tears on the Lion’s Mane is just as subject to
an invisible system of giri (obligation) as the 17th-century
protagonist of the Monzaemon Chikamatsu adaptation Double
Suicide (69). The only solution the early-20th-century townsfolk of
the ghost tale Demon Pond (79) come up with to end a devastating
two-year drought is to sacrifice the prettiest girl in town to the
Dragon God said to reside at the bottom of the eponymous pond.

This distrust of authority and resignation to the unchanging nature

of the national character engender a certain aloofness in Shinoda’s
work. Combined with the director’s aestheticism and his
fascination with the beauty of decay and destruction (as in the
slow voluntary spirals of beautiful young women in Pale Flower and
his 1965 Kawabata adaptation With Beauty and Sorrow), his
viewpoint has been categorized as nihilistic. Pale
Flower scriptwriter Masaru Baba objected so strenuously to
Shinoda’s treatment of his material that the film’s release was
delayed by almost a year.

This quality, however, makes Shinoda’s work more universal and

perhaps even more enduring than many of Oshima’s political
polemics from the same period. The farcical action in The
Scandalous Adventures of Buraikan (70), a kabuki-style portrayal of
life on the fringes of the floating world of old Edo, revolves around
the local lord’s puritanical program of “reforms” that includes the
banning of prostitution, public performances, and fireworks. Seen
today, the film plays like an allegory of then-Tokyo politician (and
former Shinoda collaborator) Shintaro Ishihara’s attempts to
sanitize the Japanese capital’s seedier districts.

During the Eighties, Shinoda began to take the investigation of his

formative years more literally, making MacArthur’s
Children (84), Takeshi: Childhood Days (90), and Moonlight
Serenade (97), a loose trilogy of nostaligia-driven films about
growing up in a postwar Japan. Borderline sentimental, these saw
the director drift off into what Alex Jacoby termed “middle-age
conformism.” This was further confirmed by Gonza the Spearman,
Shinoda’s 1986 return to the cradle of Shochiku after 21 years as
an independent. Like Double Suicide, it was adapted from a
Monzaemon Chikamatsu play by scriptwriter Taeko Tomioka, but
unlike its radically stylized predecessor, the result is classical,
static, and dull—notwithstanding its Silver Bear prize in Berlin.

The former radical stylist unfortunately remained lackluster, even

after he began dabbling with CGI. Chronicling the true story of a
German spy who passed Japanese military secrets to the Russians
during World War II, Spy Sorge (03) has the turgid splendor of a
would-be epic. As a historical film, it is an even greater
counterpoint to The Assassin than Gonza the Spearman was
to Double Suicide. A pet project of the director’s, it is a three-hour-
plus, shot-on-video abomination. When the movie failed to set the
box office on fire, Shinoda wisely retired.