237th
Meeting
– Tuesday, August 12th
2003
"Ugetsu (a
classical Japanese story collection)
Cinematized"
A
talk and film presentation
by Dr. Paul McCarthy
Present: Hans
Bänziger, Bonnie Brereton, John Butt,
John Cadet, Kanokwan Mibunlue Cadet, Jim Campion, Guy Cardinal, David
Engel,
Charlotte Favre, Louis Gabaude, Penelope Hall, Celeste Holland, Julia
Hoover,
Robert Jones, Otome Klein, Peter Kunstadter, Sally Kunstadter, Lix
Maëlenn,
Pierre-Yves Mossmann, Richard Nelson-Jones, Adrian Pieper, Renee Vines,
Theo de
Visser, Roshan ?hunjibhoy. An audience
of 24.
Paul’s
background: BA
in English literature and Japanese (double major) from U.
of Minnesota,
1966; Ph.D. in East
Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University,
1975 (specializing in Japanese literature). I have taught
Japanese,
English, and Comparative Literature at universities in the US and Japan. Currently Professor
of
Comparative Cultures at Surugadai
University, Saitama, Japan. Articles
on Japanese novelists Tanizaki Jun'ichiro and Mishima Yukio;
book-length
translations of novels, short stories, and memoirs by Tanizaki
Jun'ichiro and
Umehara Takeshi. Currently working on a translation of a
cultural/historical
work on the Horyuji (temple) in Nara,
by Umehara Takeshi.
The full text of Paul’s
presentation:
Ugetsu
monogatari by Mizoguchi
Kenji : the family as Threatened Ideal.
Director Mizoguchi's cinematic masterpiece bears the title of, and was
inspired
by, Ueda Akinari's literary masterpiece of the Edo
period. But of the nine stories that make up Akinari's work (written
and
published in the 1760's-70's), Mizoguchi has used only two. The opening
and
closing scenes are based on Asaji ga yado, while the longest section,
dealing
with Genjûrô's life with the ghost-woman Wakasa no hime,
depends on Jasei no
in.
Even in the case of these two stories, however, the plots, names and
natures of
the principal characters, and, above all, the tones of the
eighteenth-century
tales and the twentieth-century film, are very different. A detailed
comparison
is impossible here, but, to put the matter in a few words, whereas
Ueda's tales
are more emphatically eerie and supernatural, and humanly "cooler",
it seems to me, Mizoguchi injects a great deal of twentieth-century
humanist
"warmth" into his film, while retaining important supernatural
elements. The balance of and interplay between these two very different
aspects
of the film, Ugetsu monogatari, greatly enhance its power to move us,
the
contemporary audience.
Let us first note the historical context Mizoguchi chooses for his
tales: The
Sengoku period, the time of "the country at war". The firm rule of
the Kamakura Shogunate and the lighter grip of the Ashikaga were far in
the
past, and the imposed feudal order of the Tokugawa Period was in the
future.
The Sengoku Period in the 16th century was one of near chaos and
anarchy, every
man for himself, "the world gone topsy-turvy" (gekokujô, the
lowly
winning out over "their betters").
In
the first scene of the film,
the camera does a slow pan over a village, the surrounding fields and
mountains. The mood is tranquil, pastoral, idyllic. We see a man hard
at work
baking clay pots in his kiln, while his wife busily assists him and at
the same
time watches over their infant son. They are a poor, hard-working but
happy family.
The man, Genjûrô, takes this first batch of pots to a
nearby market town and is
delighted at the profit he makes from their sale. A little too
delighted
perhaps: we see in him a tendency toward the vice of greed. He buys his
wife a
gorgeous silken robe, evidence both of his sensitivity to beauty and
his very
real love of his wife, Miyagi. She is pleased and grateful, but warns
him that
things may not always go so well and insists that all she really wants
is he
beside her in their home. Miyagi is thus seen to be prudent in her
awareness of
the uncertainties of life and to value her husband's love, what might
now
almost be called "family values", rather than the luxuries that money
can buy.
Meanwhile,
a parallel story is
unfolding. Genjûrô's younger brother Tôbei,
discontented with farming, hopes to
become a samurai. In the disordered world of Sengoku, this is not an
impossible
dream. His first attempt, however, is a failure, for he lacks even the
armor
and weapons which are the minimum equipment of a samurai. His wife,
O-hama,
mocks and scolds him for his folly. She is as much of a prudent realist
as her
sister-in-law Miyagi, but a far tougher character: not the forbearing,
docile
wife of Japanese tradition, but a wife who "wears the pants" in the
family. There is a slightly comic aspect to this role reversal (the
weak
would-be samurai and his strong stay-at-home wife), but a serious point
is
being made: as with the other couple, here too the wife is the prudent,
stable
center of the family while the husband goes off in search of "glory".
Thus,
already in the first few
minutes of the film, its main themes are adumbrated. But soon there is
a real
threat to the quiet little world of the two couples; soldiers are
sighted about
to enter the village. Genjûrô is unwilling to leave his new
batch of partially
baked pots--all his work will go for nothing, and no profit will be
made. Here,
the theme of male shortsightedness and greed for gain appears in
clearer form.
Miyagi frantically persuades Genjûrô to leave the pots in
order to save his
life, and succeeds at the last moment. Her concern is to escape with
her
husband and their little son, to safety in the surrounding hills. Most
of the
shots have been "distanced" up to now, without close-up. But as Miyagi
rushes to pick up her sleeping child and carry him to safety, the
camera
approaches her, and we are given a close-up shot (rather rare for
Mizoguchi) of
her anxious, loving, maternal face.
The family escape, and the intruders finally leave the village.
Genjûrô, venturing
back to check his pots, is delighted to see they are perfectly baked
and
decides to go to a market town to sell them. And so "the journey"
begins. Thinking there will be safety in numbers, Genjûrô,
Miyagi and child set
out along with their relatives, Tôbei and O-hama. The family
group begins to
row across the nearby Lake
Biwa,
and the mood of the
film changes dramatically. Up to now, we have had a rather gritty
realism: the
world of work, war and its dangers, and sudden flight. But now the
scene is of
the surface of the lake, covered with mist, and the boat which O-hama
rows to
the rhythm of a folk-song she sings, and distant drumbeats. There is an
eeriness to the scene even before an apparently empty, unmanned boat
drifts
into view. A ghostly boat, they think at first. But as it drifts nearer
they
hear groans and, looking inside, see a man in his death-agony.
"Pirates" he says, and with his dying breath warns them to take care
lest they lose everything--their possessions, their wives, and their
very
lives. Again the theme of lawlessness, violence and death has made an
appearance, as in the earlier scene of the soldiers' attack. We return
again to
a more realistic world, without mist, folksongs, mysterious drumbeats,
and
ghostly ships. The party decide they should split up. In view of the
threat of
pirates, Miyagi and the boy are put ashore and told to make their way
back to
the village. The camera lingers on the figure of Miyagi, following her
as she
walks along the riverbank, showing her to us in profile, full-face, and
finally, at the end of the scene, from the back, as she anxiously waves
goodbye
to her husband and the others and prepares to set off with her child,
for home.
Now
the film divides into four
separate stories: the tale of Genjûrô selling his pots in
the market; Miyagi's
attempt to reach the safety of home; the adventures of Tôbei as
he tries to
become a samurai; and the ups-and-downs of his wife O-hama, whom he has
left
behind. The scene shifts from one story to the other, the colorful
adventures
of the husbands being contrasted with the painful fates of their wives
in
ironic and pathetic juxtaposition.
First,
Genjûrô: As he sits in
the market place selling his pots, an elegant young woman and an
elderly
lady-attendant approach, make several purchases, and direct him to
deliver them
to the Kutsuki mansion on the edge of town. The young woman is played
by Kyô
Machiko, known worldwide for this role, and also for her part in
Kurosawa
Akira's ‘Rashômon’, and much admired by Tanizaki
Jun'ichirô as embodying his
ideals of female beauty and seductive power. With her cold,
aristocratic beauty
and dominating ways, she stands in clear contrast to Miyagi's more
modest ways,
as portrayed by Tanaka Kinuyo, one of Mizoguchi's favorite actresses.
The
Lady and her elderly
attendant offer to guide Genjûrô back to the mansion to
deliver his wares. In
what is a kind of michiyiku, the two women take the lead as they make
their way
slowly, in single-file through a wilderness of pampas grass, at last
reaching the
gate the mansion, shown momentarily to the audience in a highly
dilapidated
state - a brief foreshadowing of the mansion's true nature. Lady Wakasa
wears a
filmy over-robe as a veil over her head - perhaps to screen her fair
skin from
the sunlight, but also intimating to the audience her "veiled",
hidden nature. An awed and bewildered Genjûrô is forced to
enter the mansion
and accept a meal. The long corridor, first dark then gradually lit by
lamps,
reminds one of the hashigukari in a Nô theater. The meal is
served using
Genjûrô's own dishes and bowls, and Lady Wakasa
extravagantly praises the
potter's skill. She tells him he must not fail to advance his art, to
realize
his remarkable talents to the full. When he asks "How?" the elderly
attendant’s immediate, and amazing, reply is, "Marry Lady Wakasa!
Take her
as your wife this very night!" As Lady Wakasa throws her arms around is
neck, Genjûrô protests weakly that he is already married,
but then sinks to the
floor under the weight and determination of the Lady's passionate
embrace.
It
is a seduction scene that
echoes Japanese folk-traditions regarding fox-women and other
supernatural
creatures that ensnare men into carnal relations. The marriage is
enacted with
an exchange of cups, and Lady Wakasa performs a solemn dance with a
fan; her
movements reminiscent of a Nô actor's and her dead-white face the
very image of
a Nô mask, Suddenly a deep male voice joins in with a
Nô-like chant, and we are
told it is the spirit of her father, rejoicing that at last his
daughter has
found a husband. If there has been any doubt that we are now in the
realm of
the supernatural, this scene dispels it. In the morning, it is solemn,
beautiful, but eerily disturbing to see Lady Wakasa bustling about the
bedchamber in a wifely way. "Surely you have not forgotten what we did
last night,” she says coquettishly. The supernatural aura of the
night before
is quite gone - it is morning, and they are husband and wife.
There
follows several idyllic
scenes of marital bliss: Genjûrô in an onsen bath, attended
from above by a
fully-dressed Lady Wakasa. (When she slips off her robe and joins him
in the
bath, the camera slides discreetly away). Genjûrô
picnicking on a grassy lawn,
chasing Lady Wakasa, who coyly runs, pauses almost long enough to be
caught,
then runs again, leaving Genjûrô lying panting on the
grass. (Again, when the
two actually embrace, the camera averts its gaze.) These are lovely,
lyrical
scenes, light counterweights to the heavy eeriness of the marriage
scene from
the night before. We feel Lady Wakasa's beauty, rejoice in her evident
happiness, and rather envy Genjûrô, who declares at one
point "This is
heaven (tengoku)!"
But
what, in the meantime, has
become of Miyagi and her child, whom we, along it seems with
Genjûrô, have
almost forgotten? Mizoguchi shifts the scene to her, exhausted, with
the child
strapped to her back, and just enough food to keep them both alive as
they
struggle to make their way home. They are attacked by starving soldiers
who,
desperate for the little food Miyagi has, stab her with a spear and
make off
with it. It is a remarkable scene cinematically, with two "levels"
shown simultaneously: as the wounded Miyagi crawls on the ground and
then
painfully rises to her feet in the foreground, in the background the
starving
soldiers begin wearily to fight among themselves over the food they
have taken
from her. It is a combination of two "distance-shots", one medium-,
the other far-distanced, superimposed one upon the other. Miyagi is
gravely
injured but still able to totter along. As the scene ends, we, the
audience,
are left in doubt as to her survival, an ambiguity which will become
crucial to
the film's ending.
Now
the film turns to the other
couple. Tôbei has managed to equip himself with some armor and a
spear and we
see him crawling through the grass near a battlefield, like an animal
in search
of its prey. He comes upon a retainer performing kaishaku (assistant at
a
ritual suicide) for his mortally wounded lord. Attacking from behind
without
warning, Tôbei easily kills the retainer and steals the lord's
severed head. He
presents the head to the general in charge of the opposing army,
claiming to
have made the kill himself. As a result, he is given full armor and
command of
a band of foot soldiers: he has realized his ambition and become a
full-fledged
samurai--indeed, a mini-general, through cunning and deceit. (Mizoguchi
clearly
has even less admiration for the military-man than he has for the
artisan-merchant!)
Again,
as with Genjûrô and
Miyagi, Mizoguchi cuts away at once to show us what has become of the
wife
O-hama while the husband follows his dreams of glory. We see her
wandering by
herself and then suddenly set upon by a band of soldiers who capture
her, take
her to a Buddhist temple, and rape her. The rape-scene is not shown,
only heard
as the camera focuses on one of O-hama's discarded sandals in the grass
outside. After they are finished, the soldiers contemptuously toss her
a few
coins (a foretaste of what her fate will be). She leaves the temple,
whose
sanctity has been violated along with her chastity, and we see her from
behind
(like Miyagi in the earlier parting-scene on the shore). Her body
shakes with
shame and fury, and she shouts: "Look at me, Tôbei! Are you happy
now? Oh,
Tôbei you fool!"
And
Tôbei is foolishly happy,
for we see him riding on horseback though a town, surrounded by his
foot
soldiers and full of pride in a recent victory. He leads his men into a
wine-house cum brothel and begins a drunken lecture on the finer points
of strategy.
His vanity and vulgarity know no bounds (Another stunning Mizoguchi
caricature
of the military). In the midst of his boasting, he catches sight of a
harsh-voiced prostitute arguing with a customer who has tried to leave
without
paying. It is, of course, O-hama. She has followed the course he left
her to,
the course mapped out for her by her rapists - exchanging sex for
money. There
is a dramatic confrontation in which Tôbei is abashed and ashamed
and O-hama
bitterly angry and accusing. She pummels him with her fists, and then
grabs
him; the two of them falling to the ground in a furious, sad embrace,
ironically reminiscent of the passionate "fall" of Genjûrô
and Lady
Wakasa on their wedding-night. The camera, as always, slips away before
anything
directly sexual is shown.
The
film now returns to Genjûrô.
He has settled into his comfortable life in the Kutsuki mansion, and we
see him
making some purchases in a fine shop. But when he asks for them to be
delivered
to his new address, the shopkeeper shudders, turns aside, and orders
him to
leave. On his way home, he is stopped by a yamabushi, a Shinto-Buddhist
mountain ascetic, who warns him that his face shows the signs of death,
that he
has somehow fallen into the hands of evil spirits. The ascetic performs
a
Buddhist rite of exorcism, reciting sutras and inscribing on
Genjûrô's skin
powerful protective spells in Sanskrit letters. When
Genjûrô returns to the
mansion, his strained manner arouses the suspicions of Lady Wakasa, who
tries
to embrace him. She starts back, burned by the spiritual power of the
Sanskrit
letters. She weeps and rages, as her elderly attendant explains that
Wakasa is
the daughter of a ruined noble family, who died before ever having
known the
joys of love. She has returned from the dead to satisfy her longings.
Though we
may pity her, we surely are meant to share Genjûrô's horror
at the thought of
his having had carnal relations with a ghost. Also at work is the
Buddhist idea
of lust as a defiling attachment, condemning self and others to endless
cycles
of pain. Wakasa is literally an embodiment of unsatisfied lust.
Genjûrô grabs a
nearby sword (a Buddhist symbol of the wisdom which cuts through
attachments)
and slashes at the figure of Lady Wakasa, which retreats before him. He
loses consciousness
(out of panic and horror this time, rather than ecstatic pleasure, as
before).
When he awakens the next morning, it is not to a scene of comfortable
domesticity, as earlier, but to the barren ruins of the Kutsuki
mansion. It has
been this way, he learns, for decades. This, and the events of the
previous
night, constitutes his awakening from his vain dreams of luxury and
voluptuousness, paralleling Tôbei's encounter with his
wife-turned-harlot in
the brothel.
It
is nighttime when Genjûrô
makes his way home. The village is there, his house is there. He enters
his
house and walks quickly through it. It appears, in this very brief
scene,
dilapidated and deserted, with no sign of Miyagi. He goes outside,
walks around
the house, reenters it and lo! there is Miyagi cooking food over the
fire.
There is a joyful reunion, loving but not sexual. She welcomes him
home, serves
him food and sake and shows him his little boy fast asleep. At last,
exhausted,
he falls asleep, and we watch Miyagi continue her wifely work, covering
her
husband with a warm robe, mending and sewing, until close to dawn.
Sometimes
she pauses, covered in shadow and lost in thought. Then she works on.
Morning
comes and with it the
village headman. When Genjûrô calls for Miyagi, the headman
says, "Are you
dreaming?" and explains that she was killed by a band of samurai.
Genjûrô
seems unable to take it in, but there is no sign now of Miyagi, or of
the pots
and dishes and mended garments of the night before. In a wonderfully
expressive
moment, Mizoguchi has Genjûrô go to the mat where Miyagi
had been sitting, and
reach out, as if to touch her for a moment. But he touches only air.
The
final scenes of the film
show a return to normal life for the two brothers. Tôbei throws
his armor and
spear into the pond, scolded as ever by his tough-minded wife O-hama.
It is
slightly comic (as are most of Tôbei's scenes) but O-hama reminds
Tôbei, and
us, of the price she has had to pay for his foolishness. ("Anta wa baka
da
kara..."). Without a word, he begins to work energetically in the
fields.
And
Genjûrô? He weeps at
Miyagi's graveside, then hears her voice telling him if she can no
longer be
with him in the flesh, what is important now is that he returns to
work,
creating beautiful dishes, the sight of which will give her pleasure,
too. Our
last sight of Genjûrô is of him at his potter's wheel, his
wife's place beside
him now empty, but only physically. Their little son takes an offering
of food
to his mother's grave; she seems very near.
The
last scene is a reversed
repetition of the very first scene in the film: the camera moves away
from the
grave and the village and out toward the surrounding fields and
mountains. We
know that a natural order and rhythm has been reestablished: there are
no more
marauding samurai nearby to rape and kill, Tôbei tills his
fields, O-hama cooks
lunch for the little community, and Genjûrô makes his pots,
no longer
threatened by an anguished, lustful ghost but protected by the serene,
loving
spirit of Miyagi. The new generation represented by the boy, is linked
by bonds
of love and filial piety to those who came before. Nature surrounds
them all,
protective and nourishing.
Mizoguchi
thus strongly affirms
one form of the traditional Japanese family, with the wife/mother at
its core.
He has shown how various destructive forces, both internal and
external, can
threaten this vital social institution and central human nexus. Among
the
former are such vices as greed, ambition, vanity, and lust. A moralist
in the
best sense, Mizoguchi opposes his male character’s vices with
Miyagi's love and
fidelity and O-hama's strength and commonsense.
The
external force that most
threatens the family in the film is, of course, war. It is war that
leads to
O-hama’s rape and Miyagi's murder. Ordinary soldiers are shown to
be almost
uniformly brutal; burning villages, stealing food from women and
children,
raping and murdering. Their leaders are arrogant and (in Tôbei's
case, at
least) liars, cheats, and boasters. The historical context of this
overwhelmingly
negative view of war in important: Mizoguchi made his film in the early
1950's,
with the memory of the brutality and destructiveness of the Pacific War
still
fresh in his mind and the minds of his audience. The kind of
self-serving
beautification of the war which has taken place in the Japan of the
1990's
(idealized portraits of Tojo Hideki, the depiction of the Imperial
Japanese
Army in Indonesia as a liberating force, loved and supported by the
native
population, etc., etc.) would have been unthinkable in 1950's. People
knew too
much and remembered too well. A similar phenomenon can be observed in
the United States,
as right-wingers attempt to justify the Vietnam War, two or three
decades after
its humiliating (for American) conclusion. And as the threat of war
grows
stronger and wider in the wake of the September 11 disaster,
Mizoguchi's
message seems as timely as ever.
For
me, Mizoguchi is the most
impressive of Japanese directors. An artist in his use of the camera
and
staging of scenes; a moralist in his essential view of human life and
society;
a progressive in his hatred of war and fundamental respect for women; a
conservative in his cherishing of family and social ties, and in his
reverence
for the rhythms of everyday life and work in the midst of enduring
Nature.
After
an interesting and
informative question and answer session, the meeting adjourned to the
Alliance
Cafeteria were, over drinks and snacks, members of the audience
enthusiastically engaged Paul in more informal discussion on some of
the finer
points of Japanese cinematography.
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