Growing Up / Adolescence/ Takekurabe (1955)

The step from childhood to adulthood is a common subject in movies, but rarely has the view of that process been as bleak as in Gosho’s Takekurabe. This transition is usually depicted either as a loss of innocence or the escape into freedom, but here it is closer to the loss of hope, an end not of youth alone but of life. As such, it is one of the darkest versions of “life as it is” that I have come across, even darker than Gosho’s own Inn at Osaka made at about the same time.

Set in the 1890s, Takekurabe eventually comes to focus on three boys and a girl, though it takes a while for us to sort that out, in part because they are not introduced with clear exposition and in part because the available version on YouTube has greyed out and has lost its detail.

Nor are we helped by casting, since all of the boys are real teenagers beginning (often very brief) careers. The one identifiable face is a real surprise, Hibari Misora playing very straight indeed as Midori, the young girl who has been prepared for years to be an oiran, an expensive prostitute with the appearance and manners of a geisha but without the training in music and dance.She seems to be living in a house of other girls in a similar position, some of whom seem quite young but who always wear the headress and kimono of the oiran, even while playing childish games in the house. They all belong to the man only referred to as the master, which adds a kink to the selling of girls I don’t recall seeing before — Midori and her friends are clearly still children bought and then held in waiting until menstruation begins, and the master has supported them, dressed them beautifully, and supported their parents for some time. We even see a scene where the parents come to thank the master and encourage Midori. But there seems to be no limit to her term, as we have seen in so many other films. She is not here for a fixed term but for life, or until she is too old to attract customers and is kicked out, like the woman who has been caring for the girls.

Midori is just beginning to understand what the oiran life means when her time comes. She visits a woman she calls sister to bring her medicine and finds a sad, lonely, depressed woman who is pressured into going with the man even though she is ill. But most of all there is the woman in charge of the household (Isuzu Yamada) who was herself an oiran and is now hanging on alone while watching the young girls follow in her footsteps and trying to drink herself to death.

Around Midori are three principal boys. She seems to have an actual crush on Shinnyo, who is thrown into complete depression when his father, a Buddhist priest, sells his sister to be a rich man’s “concubine.” The rich man has built her a separate house, but she begs to come home because she hates the man and hates his wife even more, who constantly visits her to attack her. The father firmly sends her back, and Shinnyo goes to Kyoto to be trained as a priest himself, leaving behind Midori as well. As we have seen before, the position of concubine or mistress, though financially far more secure, is somehow considered to be lower in status than the brothel prostitute, for all the boys know Midori’s future and all respect her and even love her. Shinnyo even promises to be her first customer.

Shota is the money-lender’s son, already starting his own lending book among the youngsters. Sangoro is the poorest, who is so poor he can’t tell his father the rickshaw man he was beaten up because the father would make him go apologize to all the better-off boys who had beaten him. He at least seems cheerful at the end — having always been poor, simply finding a job with reasonable pay seems a good future to him.

The movie begins with a fight among the boys and there is something about revenge by small gangs from each street that leads to later fights but why is not particularly clear to the viewer. This means that it takes some time to sort out the principal characters and get to the real story. Similarly, there is a festival, as there almost always is, but it appears to be simply a way to mark the passage of time, and the boys’ fights there seem to also lead to nothing.

As Midori is escorted off to begin her work, she enters not with the traditional geisha parade, but through the back door, a drawbridge lowered over the drainage ditch, which when pulled up leaves a solid blank wall that closes her in and marks the end of all her previous life. One of the title translations is Adolescence, but the essence of the film seems to be that for the Japanese, there was no adolescence; you went from child to adult, and the wall between the two was as solid as the wall that hides Midori from her friends and her past.

Of course,  the appearance of Hibari Misora as Midori is a surprise and almost a shock. She was the most up-beat and positive star of films of the fifties and sixties. Gosho coaxes a subtle and sensitive performance from her, fully justifying her casting. Nevertheless, given her other movies and the sprightly poster shown on IMDB, the movie must have startled many of her fans.

Though there were a number of significant movies about women in 1955, they were in general a very bleak bunch: Floating Clouds, Kokoro, Policeman’s Diary, and Tattered Wings all joined this movie on Kinema Junpo’s list, and I haven’t been able to find a copy of Shumai, which may fit right in. Because Midori is so young, this may be the bleakest of the bunch.

The version on YouTube, as you can see from the screen captures, is not particularly clear. There are almost certainly a number of subtleties we miss, but I have not been able to find a copy from another source. Even with the faded print and low resolution, however, it is clearly worth a look.