I started my third viewing of The Insect Woman in roughly twenty years intending simply to fast-forward through it to do a bit of fact-checking, but within about ten minutes I was completely engrossed, as fascinated as I was the first time.
The Insect Woman of the title is Tome, a peasant woman we follow from her birth in 1918 to the present, which suggests some kind of symbolic figure for modern Japan. This was encouraged by its original Japanese title, which was (roughly) Japanese Entomology. But one of its points seems to be that the life of the people at the bottom goes on about the same no matter how much Japan seems to change in those years. Imamura inserts historical references and newsreel material, but in most cases they are simply time markers and things that Tome regards as inconveniences. The war is simply an opportunity for her to run away from home to work in a factory, but though she claims patriotism, it’s a silk mill. The great protests of 1960 just make her taxi go out of its way and increases her fare. The busy American airbase sending bombers to Korea is just noise that she doesn’t even notice while she pushes the baby of the woman she works for.
The only historical event anyone seems to actually notice is the television report of the royal wedding, and even that is merely an inconvenience for Tome, since she can’t get any of her prostitutes to leave the TV long enough to answer a call from a customer.
Tome (Sachiko Hidari) is one of the most fascinating female characters in anyone’s film history, crude, tough, scheming but not particularly bright so all her schemes are such small scale that they rarely help her. There is no attempt to make her either likeable or villainous, either by Imamura or Hidari. She is simply what she is, a woman trying to get by. Perhaps more importantly, the world is what it is, and it doesn’t really change for most people, no matter how much fashions, wealth, or politics may appear to change. Life for Tome and people like her is a circle, and the same things keep happening. Just as she informed on her boss, so too does her maid inform on her. Born without a positive ID for her father, she herself has a daughter for whom the father is unclear, and we end with the daughter pregnant after a months long affair in Tokyo telling her farmer lover that he’s really the father of her coming child.
The two things in particular that don’t change are family and sex. These are persistent themes in Shohei Imamura’s movies, but the most striking aspect of Insect Woman is that the most sacred of Japanese institutions, the family, is seen as utterly immoral. This is Ozu turned on its head, to say the least. We have often seen women in movies sacrificed for the sake of the family, but this is something different. The family is a group of selfish women, controlled by the vicious grandmother who seems to live forever, who tricks Tome out of the patriotic war work to go have sex with the landlord’s son and even wants to kill Tome’s baby since it is a girl. Tome’s poor half-witted “father” has no say and has no value to the group except as a workhorse. Only Tome and her daughter Nobuko love him.
And there the film gets more than a little kinky. As a child, Tome asks her father Chuji if, since they sleep together, they are married and he agrees, a conversation repeated years later with her grandpa by Nobuko. Subtitles here give us a problem, since “sleeping with” means two quite different things in English. Nevertheless, Chuji later beats up the landlord’s son because he “sleeps with” Tome, so some help with the Japanese text would be helpful. Certainly, when Tome eventually finds a man in Tokyo who makes her happy, she insists on calling him Daddy or Papa.
A moment of real happiness for Tome with her Tokyo “Daddy”
When the man changes his interest to Nobuko, she calls him Papa as well, so the association of Dad and sex is quite strong for both women. As Chuji is dying, he asks for Tome’s breast, and she offers it to him.
Interestingly, Tome manages to make it through the Occupation without resorting to prostitution. She works in a mill and becomes a labor organizer, only to be dumped and fired by her lover once he is promoted to management. We next see her as a maid for Midori, a woman living with a GI and their child. She gets involved in a strange religious sect that demands full confession in a group setting and there meets a woman who hires her as a maid in her inn, that quickly becomes a clandestine brothel after the government closes the official ones. She is pressured into prostitution, has a miscarriage, rats out the women who are working on the side, and then informs on her boss to the police, which allows her to set up her own string who do outcalls from her apartment. She falls in love with a businessman Karasawa, who also pressures her to sleep with men he needs favors from, but she is genuinely in love and shocked when her daughter comes to borrow money for her farm and takes away the businessman. We last see her climbing the hill to her daughter’s farm to try to persuade her to come back to Karasawa.
There is a striking amount of skin for the date, with bare breasts from several actresses including Hidari but even more bare legs. We have of course seen legs in earlier Japanese movies but usually only on dancers. The shots here are surprising because there is so much physical contact with the legs, including Chuji sucking a sore high on Tome’s thigh and Karasawa feeling up and kissing both her and Nobuko’s legs, including some angles that come treacherously close to crotch shots. The women are quite direct in their appraisals of men, with Tome and Midori marveling about how “huge” the GI is, and Midori later found living with a Korean man who follows her around to her jobs but whom Midori stays with because he is so amazingly good in bed. Sex is ever-present in Imamura’s movies but it is neither celebratory nor brutal, liberating nor confining; it just is, and the ways it exerts its power are many and varied.
There is also a reminder that wealth is a relative concept. Karasawa can’t even afford a car, going to and from his shop on a scooter. Reality rears its head for him, too, when in a passionate moment with Nobuko, his false teeth pop out.
Imamura pulls out all the directorial stops, with freeze frames to mark the passage of time, key emotional scenes played in a series of stills, a wide variety of angles, quick cutting within scenes, and overexposures. None of this, however, appears to be designed to shift focus to the director. It does provide remarkable variety and help maintain interest for a film that covers about 45 years in the life of a less than admirable heroine. The movie was tops on Kinema Junpo‘s list but was also the top grossing Japanese film of the year,¹ which I must assume surprised everyone involved.
¹ Mark Schilling, No Borders, No Limits (Godalming, UK), p. 19.
