Twin Sisters of Kyoto / Kyoto / Koto (1963)

Based on Kawabata’s last novel, Koto is as quiet, subtle, and allusive as its source. Its story of twins separated at birth is common throughout the world, but I don’t think it has ever been told with less melodramatic development than here. As with some of Ozu’s seasons movies, every potential outburst of drama is underplayed or suppressed, so that, although a great deal happens, an American viewer can easily end up thinking they missed almost all of it.

Chieko is now twenty, but knowing she has been adopted by her parents, believes she is born to be unlucky because she was abandoned by her real parents. Her adoptive mother explains that she was not abandoned but in fact stolen when she was found left alone in a chair. On a trip with her friend to view the cedars, the friend spots a young woman called Naeko whom she thinks looks like Chieko, but nothing more is thought of it until later, at the Gion Festival, both women end up praying at the same shrine. Chieko eventually returns to the village in the cedars, where Naeko tells her that she did in fact have a sister who was abandoned. In any American film, this would lead to a flood of tears and an attempt to bring the sisters together, and in fact Chieko does want to know Naeko better, but Naeko resists.

At that same festival, Hideo, a young man in love with Chieko, mistakes Naeko for her and eventually gives her the obi he designed and wove at Chieko’s request. Realizing he can never marry Chieko, who is socially above him, he proposes to Naeko, but she refuses because she understands he really wants her as a double for Chieko. The sisters part in the snow, with Chieko set to marry a good businessman who will be adopted into the family and take over the business (and whom she quite likes), while Naeko returns to her village and a life of manual labor.

This is told as elegantly and subtly as possible by the director Noboru Nakamura. For example, one of the most critical scenes occurs in Hideo’s shop. It has become clear from various glances and little more that Hideo is in love with Chieko. Hideo is weaving in the background while in the foreground his father reminisces about the great debt he owes to Chieko’s father, who designs and sells the obis the family weave. Apparently casually, he comments about how far above them the family is and how Chieko will obviously find a rich and successful husband. Hideo’s loom pauses as he freezes, still far in the background, then after a few seconds resumes weaving. Nothing is said, no swell of music on the soundtrack, but in a moment his whole life has changed. Many other critical moments are handled with the same deft understatement.

Interestingly, though Shima Iwashita plays both Chieko and Naeko, they are not identical twins. When Chieko’s friend first sees Naeko, neither Chieko nor we can see much resemblance except that they are both pretty.  Though Hideo does manage to confuse them, there is never any doubt for the audience which is which. The (uncredited) makeup modifications are quite subtle, having to do with skin color and slightly different shaping of the faces. Yet there is never any doubt that, though there is a close family resemblance, they are not identical.

At the same time, there is no obvious effort to make this an actress’s showpiece. The typical approach in a Euro/American version of such a story would have been to make the two vividly different in personality, one crude and slutty and the other prim, for example, or one open-hearted and the other snobbish, selfish, or scheming. None of that is on view here. The two women are much the same in personality, and there is no anger on Naeko’s part that class issues separate them in the end.

Set in Kyoto in the sixties, it would seem to be a movie about changing times, but in practice it is a movie about how times are not changing for the old Kyoto families. We see cars and the bus, but in Chieko’s world, as well as in Naeko’s working class village world,  things are as they have always been. Chieko could go to college, but decides to stay home to learn father’s business. That business is declining, but only because he has lost interest in the day-to-day affairs, preferring to design or practice calligraphy alone in the woods and leave things to a manager, who may be skimming a bit, though this too is only subtly sugggested. The man she picks for a husband is also the man the family arranges, who drops out of college to take over the family business and even be adopted into their family.* Chieko was in fact abandoned because of the traditional belief that twins were unlucky and only one should be kept. The obis are individually designed and individually woven by hand. The local festivals are still important to the locals, not just for tourists, though we do see tourists over-running one of the temples in the distance behind a scene. The geisha tradition is still important, as we see when Chieko’s father regularly visits a house where he has his eye out for a 14-year-old who is just beginning her apprenticeship and won’t really be “available” for another two years, and his wife says she prefers he do that rather than spend weeks alone in his forest retreat.

But the world is not completely insular. Chieko’s father studies prints of Klee’s works to help gain inspiration for new designs and has Persian carpets on the tatami mats. The mother complains that their old “household workers” are now “employees,” who even close up the shop early one day to go to a union meeting. Still, these changes have minimal effect on the story, and there is often the feeling that it has stepped out of time, except for the occasional car or business suit. This sense of timelessness is furthered by Takemitsu’s sparse score, mixing western and Japanese instruments together. Yet it never feels nostalgic for a more beautiful past; throughout it remains a family story.

Visually, the film is a love-song to Kyoto itself. Only the two festival parades look like stock footage, while the rest of the film looks like it was all shot on location, even in scenes you know could not possibly have been. The greens are lush even as the seasons change  (cedars and pines stay green year round) and  Toichiro Narushima’s  photography is comparable to that in Akitsu Springs. The split screen effects for the double scenes are seamless and undetectable.

The year 1963 was another very good year for Japanese movies, and it can serve as  an example of the tremendous breadth of the output of the time. Kinema Junpo’s list for the year included Insect Woman, High and Low, Sanada fuunroku, She and He, Graceful Brute, Mr. Everyman, Legend of a Duel to the Death, and An Actor’s Revenge, as well as Koto. And that doesn’t count Yoso and Suzuki’s Youth of the Beast and the great chanbara 13 Assassins or  jidai-geki like Bushido or Third Shadow Warrior that did not make their list at all, nor any popular comedies or musicals. No matter how one feels about their individual quality, none of those movies looks or feels like any of the others. By contrast, American movies at the time were in such a parlous state that the NY Film Critics didn’t even bother to give an award for 1963 and the Academy Awards were dominated by Tom Jones, an English movie through and through, and by design awards for Cleopatra.

Koto is a lovely, quiet movie, very “Japanese” in the sense that westerners often think of traditional Japanese art, a reminder amongst all the ferment of the film industry of the era that traditions were still strong in society as well as in the film business.

* This was a fairly common social custom for a family without a male heir, and  we have seen it in many movies, but I only just  noticed that, once the new husband has been adopted, he is now technically married to his sister.