Story of a Prostitute / Shunpu den (1965)

Yumiko Nogawa

For all of his career, Seijun Suzuki was a contract director who was required to shoot whatever movie was assigned to him with whatever cast was assigned to him. Since he worked at Nikkatsu, this almost always meant modern-dress crime and action movies that were heavily male-centered. In most of his earlier movies, he showed himself to be a director who could make the tritest of material and the lowest of budgets look fresh and inventive.

In the mid-sixties, however, Nikkatsu started to test the waters of sexploitation films, looking in particular at movies that had been much censored during the Occupation that might be made more sensational in the new cultural climate. Several of these ended up on Suzuki’s desk, including Gate of Flesh, filmed in 1949, and Desertion at Dawn, a much- censored Kurosawa script from 1950 not currently available that was filmed by another director after Kurosawa started work on Rashomon. Desertion at Dawn now became Shunpu den, one of the most difficult Japanese movies of the mid-sixties to discuss or even describe.

Essentially, it is our old friend the love triangle. Harumi was a Japanese prostitute in Tenshin, China, who was jilted by her Japanese lover when he brought back a wife from Japan. She bites off his lip and impulsively volunteers to join the comfort women at a military post somewhere near the Manchurian border. There, she becomes the favorite of the Adjutant but falls in love with Mikami, the Adjutant’s orderly.  But the Adjutant is in love with himself and with humiliating everyone else and shows no sign of any interest in Harumi beyond sex,  while Mikami is in love with humiliation itself (and a virgin as well), so the sides of the triangle never connect.

This is one of the earliest movies I have found to focus on the “comfort women,” an issue that continues to sour relations between South Korea and Japan to the present day. They are seen, but only as a sidelight, in films as early as Desperado Outpost or Human Condition. Here, however, there is no hint of the slavery aspects of the issue. The women are depicted much like prostitutes in brothels we have seen in other movies, perhaps marginally better. The women are all technically volunteers and there is no hint of anyone being sold into the business, as was still common back in Japan itself, and a couple of women even turn around and go back.  They  are paid. The one Korean woman in the group complains she is only paid half what the Japanese women receive, but she still has the option to move to another brothel or presumably to leave if she could figure out some place to go.

Shunpu den is one of three sexploitation movies made by Suzuki, all eventually starring Yumiko Nogawa. Like Suzuki, Nogawa was a contract player far down the studio ladder trying to be noticed and promoted to A features. Being a woman, the option available to her was to take off her clothes and to be beaten up, as she first did in Gate of Flesh.* As we might expect from a low budget exploitation film, there is more than one scene of nudity, though all of it is Nogawa’s, reversing the traditional American pattern that only the supporting women take off their clothes. This even includes pubic hair in one scene, which indicates the censors weren’t watching or no longer cared.

Neither Suzuki nor Nikkatsu after its postwar resumption of production were ever noted for any sympathy for women, so the very fact that Harumi is the focus is unusual. And there is no doubt that this is Nogawa’s movie; except for some battle sequences, she is in every scene. She attacks the role with a feverish intensity that reminded me of Shirley Yamaguchi in Sengoku burai, and curiously enough Yamaguchi did play the original character in Desertion at Dawn. But this approach is so intense that it is difficult to feel serious sympathy for Harumi. Thus, though the movie takes the shape of a standard josei-eiga, the central woman comes off almost as unlikable as the two male leads.

Its brutal depiction of Japanese Army life matches that of The Human Condition. The Adjutant’s basic approach is to slap around his subordinates, all of which is accepted because he is an officer, and that carries over into his relation with Harumi, where every encounter is not a transaction so much as a rape. We see the lunacy of an Army Code that seems to value death more than military value. Mikami is wounded in battle and captured on the verge of death. When he is left behind by the Chinese who have treated his wounds, his unit sends him for court-martial and execution for refusing to die. To prevent the stain on the unit that a court-martial would provide, he is ordered to be murdered on the way to his trial, though he is saved from that by a guerilla attack yet decides to kill himself anyway.

That brutality carries into the comfort women scenes as well. The Adjutant is the only man we see who actually knocks the women around; most of the rest are so grateful for someone to have sex with — eleven women for a thousand man battalion — that they would never risk losing them to injury. But there is no attempt to disguise the de-humanized industrialization of the sex. The enlisted men march up, stand in line, enter one by one, salute (!), drop their pants, and get to it.

A customer salutes Harumi

As soon as they are finished, they pull up their pants, salute, and open the door to the next man.** The women are on a strict schedule: enlisted men from 1-4, non-coms from 4-8, and officers only for the rest of the night. We are not told if the women are paid differently for the various ranks, though it is assumed that they will treat the officers with more care and at least pretended interest.

Mikami  is a tortured soul, but we never quite understand what it is that tortures him. His subjection to the Adjutant is so intense that at times it begins to look homo-erotic, especially when coupled with the scene in which Harumi practically has to rape him rather than vice versa. But this is overlaid by his complete subservience to the idea that he can’t be a real Japanese man unless or until he dies.

In other words, it is a much more complex movie than we have any right to expect from a movie about a prostitute who falls in love with a soldier. It also looks better than we might expect.

 

Though clearly shot on the “Chinese village” set on the backlot, there are often moments of unexpected beauty and a tremendous amount of imaginative “new wave” effects, including freeze frames, slow motion, under- and over-exposure, and a surprising freeze when the Adjutant enters Harumi’s room and the screen image is torn apart like a photo being ripped up. There are also some of Suzuki’s signatures, with rain and wind to heighten the emotion of major scenes, concluding in a final windstorm that would make even Kurosawa blanch.

Double suicide in the wind

Yet all of these contribute to the emotional power of the film. Naozumi Yamamoto passes up his usual jazz inflected music to provide a haunting score delivered completely by  choral singing with only minimal instrumental accompaniment, which gives it an other-worldly effect at times. Thus, the movie seems more like an unknown Shinoda or Imamura movie of the same era than one of Suzuki’s.

Another way to say this is that it looks like Suzuki cared about the movie, that he had some kind of personal investment in it. This is not to imply that Suzuki’s other movies were casual or sloppy. His earlier movies were slick, tight, and inventive, always getting the most from his script and his budget. But as the sixties progressed, he seemed to start trying to see just how far he could push the studio, shooting straightforward trite screenplays with a visual anti-realism that completely undercut the script, until at last he got fired.  Story of a Prostitute just feels different, as if it were a movie he really wanted to make rather than a movie he was assigned to make. The visual trickery and the unexpected music all heighten the emotional power when they appear, rather than undercutting or distancing the emotion as usually happened in Suzuki’s later films. This may simply have been Suzuki’s attempt to make yet another prostitute story look different from all the others, or it might have been his attempt to make a “serious” movie. It is still a little known movie, even today when Suzuki is much admired and copies are available from Criterion, and no interviewers I have found ever asked him about the movie, so we shall never know what he intended. What we are left with is a great woman’s picture from a man who didn’t make women’s pictures.

* To a certain degree, this paid off for Nogawa. She would headline two fairly long-running series, “Cat Girl Gamblers” and “Woman of the Night,” and would on occasion manage to work at other studios. But the success was also a curse, in that having become a B movie star she would never be given an A movie role of similar size. In the next decade, Meiko Kaji would find herself in a similar position.

** The Japanese were hardly the only army to do this. See, for example, Jacques Brel’s song “Next,” about his experience in the French army. Offhand, the only movie I can recall that really shows this kind of sexual assembly line is the Chinese Nanjing! Nanjing!, which was not intended to show the Japanese in a good light, to say the least.