MUBI's retrospective Yuzo Kawashima's Post-War Japan runs January - April, 2020. Il Cinema Ritrovato will be staging a retrospective on the director in 2020.
Kawashima Yūzō is one of Japan's most beloved directors, and, curiously enough, maybe also one of the most written-about (if we keep such obvious tome-fillers like Ozu, Kurosawa, Ōshima, et cetera out of the picture). Books and special editions of magazines keep coming; only in December 2018, one of Japan's finest publishers of film books with a special interest in post-war stylists and genre masters, Wides Shuppan, celebrated the master's centennial by unleashing a brick of texts on his cinema that feels mighty definite—until something even more extensive will come up, of course.
In the absence of any formalist tics or overt thematic obsessions, Kawashima, it seems, is as much an auteur to love and venerate as he's a character to wonder about—the quirky stuff of melancholic legends one obsessively tries to find in his films, like eg. seeing his ideal of a good man in Saheiji (nicknamed Ino-san or Ino-don) of Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate (1957) and Yoda Gorō of Kashima ari (Room for Let, 1959), both played by Frankie Sakai in two of Kawashima's greatest works. Screenwriter-turned-novelist Fujimoto Giichi, for example, wrote a roman a clef called Ikiisogi no ki (Chronicle of a Raw Life, 1971/74) about their work on Kashima ari; Ikiisogi no ki is often referred to when describing his said-to-be unorthodox working methods, like developing a screenplay from the main set's floor-plan—something that does sound very possible when one looks at not only the kammerspiel'ish Kashima ari but also the very clearly circumscribed worlds of Suzaki Paradise – Red Light District (1956), Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate, Waga machi (1958), or The Graceful Brute (1962), but is of little help when discussing the genius of Tales of Ginza (1955) or The Balloon (1956), which are very much about moving around, visiting a plethora of places and venues in the former's case and an uneasy in-betweenness of spaces in the latter's. While critics do have wondered about the factual accuracy of Fujimoto's description, they are usually willing to agree that it has an irresistible aroma, fits the legend, and makes total sense when understood more as an allegory.
Maybe the reason that Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate is touted as Kawashima's most exemplary film lies in the way it combines these two aspects with its three-stored brothel that is like a small town in which everybody is somehow on the move—and whose most important inhabitant is the already-mentioned Saheiji, who's caught in the place as he can't pay his bill (which he seems to have counted on from the beginning) and who slowly takes over the house from the mustiest, most far-off room by busy-bodying around and about, doing favors left right and center, to finally have everybody in one way or another indebted to him. Is it an accident or a wise joke that in Hungry Soul (1956) people meet at Tōkyō Concert Hall to listen to Symphony of the Space?
Gizen e no chōsen: Eiga kantoku Kawashima Yūzō (Challenge to Hypocrisy: Film Director Kawashima Yūzō) is the title of above-mentioned new study which summarizes very well the Kawashima cult's core: He was a non-conformist will-o'-the-wisp, close in spirit to later provocateur-misfits like Yasuzō Masumura or his erstwhile assistant director Kō Nakahira who prepared the mainstream grounds for what's commonly discussed as Japan's New Wave (with the likes of Tai Katō, Tadashi Sawashima, Seijun Suzuki or Teruo Ishii doing the same in genre film—to brazenly simplify a for more complicated period/dynamic of continued and sustained change inside studio cinema, completely ignoring the input direct or indirect from the various independent spheres). Another name that nails Kawashima nicely is that of a school of filmmaking he claimed to have been part of in those pitch black last months of the Pacific War and the drab early days of occupation: Nihon keichō-ha (The Frivolous Group of Japan); as he mentions this in a magazine text apropos a possible future project with writer Sakunosuke Oda, responsible for the screenplay of his much criticized for mood-wise odd debut feature Kaette kita otoko (1944), he's gleefully aligning himself here with a school of postwar literature: Buraiha (The Decadents), of which Oda was one of the most prominent members.
Already Kawashima's apprenticeship at Shōchiku was highly unusual: Normally an assistant director would become part of a production group connected to one director, work his way up in that context from something like 5th to 1st A.D., to finally the become a director himself (variations of that trajectory exist galore, but this was the basic idea). Kawashima, now, never belonged to any group proper or for too long—instead, in his five years as an A.D. (1939-44), he served under more or less every major director at Shōchiku, including Ozu, Yasujirō Shimazu, Hiroshi Shimizu, Kōzaburō Yoshimura, Minoru Shibuya, Hideo Ōba, and Nomura Hiromasa. Add insult to injury, he was demoted back to A.D. in '46 for some time after his first film’s flop at the box office. This pattern continues with his employment: While most directors remained (or at least tried to remain) with one company, Kawashima moved around quite a bit: he worked for Shōchiku (-'54), Nikkatsu ('55-'57), and Tōhō (plus extended context in the shape of Tōkyō Eiga and Takarazuka Eiga, '58-'63), with intermittent visits at Daiei ('61 & '62). In addition to that, Kawashima even changed lots inside the studios; with Shōchiku and Daiei, he worked for both their Tōkyō and their Kyōto facilities. Put mildly: This is a most irregular career. Note also, that Kawashima's wanderings got ever more driven towards the end of his too short life—another key element in his legend.
Kawashima seems to have always been a slightly sickly and somewhat miserable sight—not ugly, far from it, just someone never quite healthy. In 1946, he was diagnosed with muscles atrophy, a gradually worsening illness that would plague him till his out-of-the-blue death from heart failure at age 45 on June 11, 1963; his demise, in fact, was so sudden that some suspected suicide—while his seemingly intense work on another project, a biopic of ukiyo-e master Tōshūsai Sharaku with Sakai again in the lead, suggested otherwise. Kawashima attributed his damaged physical state always to inbreeding but that might have been merely another way of saying something nasty about his family which he hated with a vengeance, and his father, a moderately well-off shopkeeper, even more. It's curious, though, that a key characteristic of Saheiji and Gorō comes right from Kawashima's old man: self-reliance, the ability to do all kinds of things, many unexpected, like Gorō's baffling linguistic capabilities, or when Saheiji is shown making medicine from (he says) Iris florentina and Coreopsis (both alien to Japan) using a weird, jerry-rigged-looking contraption.
It speaks volumes about Kawashima that he enjoyed serious boozing till the end—rushing the inevitable, one might say. And while drinking seems to have been part-and-parcel of a studio-era director's—legendary—life (if one takes all those stories by all those directors and their assistants about their nightly partying serious, it's a miracle that any movies at all got done as everybody must have been smashed most of the time!), only a few seem to have lived it up as high as Kawashima did in the brothels of Tōkyō and Kyōto—giving Suzaki Paradise – Red Light District and Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate a special place in his œuvre as he's describing a world whose mores and manners he knew extremely well. That said: Would it be too far-flung to say that for Kawashima human society as such is like a brothel—making Mauro Bolognini an interesting auteur to compare him with? The way he describes marital life as well as casual affairs in, for example, Till We Meet Again (1955), Hungry Soul & Hungry Soul, Part II (1956) or The Balloon (1956) has something provisional to it, illicit at times even when officially blessed by society. Human existence is unstable, other people are only so-so reliable. Can there be any relation(ship)s time(s) and circumstance(s) can't touch?
Time always ran out for Kawashima the filmmaker. Untimely death, it seems, was always around him: His mother died at age 37 when Kawashima was merely five, his eldest sister at age eighteen when he was but ten; Sakunosuke Oda, who was one of the few Kawashima called a friend, died at age 33 (it's curious to note that the two other key members of Buraiha were also not long for this world: Dazai Osamu died at age 38, Sakaguchi Ango at age 48). Cemeteries abound in Kawashima's films.
But time is also something weirdly ambiguous in his films. Take Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate,which is set during an era of massive change, and where one never seems to know exactly what time it is—with the watch Saheiji repairs offering also more reason for speculation than certainty, to tragicomic effect in one scene. The chronicle-like Waga machi, then, suggests that the most treacherous of promises lies in the idea of “tomorrow”; while the nice filmmaking-joke in Burden of Love (1955) showing how a car is driving smack through the location shoot of a big sword-fighting scene for a chanbara (which makes the culprit chuckle ruefully about the Kyōto'ness of it all) can be understood as a comment on how the Past can make a sudden appearance in the Now as well as a slightly bitter note on how we make earlier ages look weird and unreal, whether we like it or not (for the fencing looks awkward). On the other hand, in Till We Meet Again, Hungry Soul or The Balloon Kawashima take great pains to show modern buildings and interiors often as unreal: they're either too drenched in light and too symmetrical, or use materials and designs that look tacky. In all that, Kawashima's cinema is about transience, albeit not in any even remotely spiritual way—quite the contrary: Kawashima is brutal in the way that he suggests the worthlessness of any notion regarding posterity or eternity, while celebrating every human's worth and dignity as unconditional and maybe the lone truth that matters. In that, he echoes Sakaguchi's seminal '46 essay on the postwar condition, Daraku-ron (Discourse). Which is maybe why he took, to his surrounding's unending consternation, whatever project that was handed to him disregarding its potential “value”—something can be made out of everything, and who cares anyway, for Sayonara dake ga jinsei da (Life is but farewell), to quote Room for Let’s most famous line, a sentence also engraved in Kawashima's tombstone.
It's difficult to get more anti-bourgeois than that.