Love for an Idiot / Love of a Friend / Chijin no ai (1967)

When Tanizaki began publishing Chijin no ai in 1924, it became a sensation that was something like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise. Though its “modern girl” Naomi was not a ‘flapper’ in the American sense, the depiction of her western ways and sexual freedom both scandalized and titillated readers. Though the story seems not to have been adapted to film in the twenties, it had two notable versions in two later eras when the nature of the “modern girl” was once again a major issue in Japanese society. The one made in 1949 with Machiko Kyo in her first leading role is not available, but Masumura’s 1967 version here catches exactly the societal confusion about the woman’s role in the new Japan. It is also funny, I should add.

Jyoji’s co-workers tell him he should get a wife, but he says he already has a pet cat. When he arrives home, the cat turns out to be a girl called Naomi. She is absolutely everything the traditional housewife or daughter should not be – she doesn’t cook and the apartment is a pig sty (After decades of pristine, pure Japanese rooms in movies, it is a genuine shock to walk in on an apartment that looks like an American college boy’s apartment with clothes everywhere, dirty dishes, beds not made, magazines all over the floor, etc.). She also has appalling taste, going for the eye-popping psychedelic colors and patterns of the time or tasteless fake fur trims in her clothes, and, like a real cat, she almost never does what he tells her to do. She is, in fact, the worst young Japanese woman/wife we have seen since Shozo, A Cat, and Two Women, also based on a story by Tanizaki. But the odd thing about all this is that it seems to be what he actually wants. His one real obsession is for her to learn English, though for a reason we are never told. She is terrible at it, generally refusing to study at all, though she later takes “lessons” with handsome young college boys that obviously do not involve much in the way of book studies.

When we first see Jyoji and Naomi, they have been together for a year but have never had sex. He found her in a coffee shop, where he thought she looked Eurasian (hence he tells his co-worker the cat is a mix-breed), and as far as I can tell, bought her for a year from her sluttish mother. For the most part, he insists she study English and takes pictures of her, both dressed and nude, though never sharing the pictures with anyone. He even gives her her baths, sudsing her up like a dog or a child. On the last day of their year, she declares she wants to get married and finally gets him into bed. He pays her mother all his savings and the family register is changed (though he says the official wedding will have to wait two or three years), but she continues to act just as before, with addition of the English students and with regular sex with Jyoji.

She takes Jyoji to a party where she can show off her dress and her expensive necklace. There’s a surfer guitar band and lots of other young people, and she has a fine time dancing with her boyfriends and even with Jyoji himself. One of the guys piles them all into his sportscar, but the car breaks down outside Jyoji’s house, leading to one of the weirdest four-in-a-bed scenes you’re likely to see anywhere. Eventually Jyoji throws her out but finds that he is lost without her, and when she comes back to pick up some of her clothes, takes her back.

In their first scene, they play horsey, with her riding him childishly around the room. At various stages of the movie this recurs, but in the last scene, she tells him “At last you get it!” and she rides him around to demonstrate that she is now completely in charge of him and the relationship.

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But this is not just a young girl taking advantage of an older man; she steamrollers the college boys just as effectively.

In a way we have a Frankenstein story. Jyoji wants her to be a “modern girl,” which in his mind seems to equate with the learning of English, and she becomes one (though still without learning English), which also means that in Japanese terms, she becomes a “monster.” But she is not in search of equality or even social freedom, nor does she seem to want to kick Jyoji out of her bed. She still acts more like a spoilt child than a woman out to turn the tables on a man’s world.

There is no doubt Jyoji eventually falls in love with her, pathetically lying on his bed among the photo albums or playing horsey with no rider.

But there is no real indication he fell in love with her when he met her. He really does seem to have originally seen her as a pet, just as he describes her to his co-worker. Nor is he a man trying to restore his virility through a young woman. He is only 31, and although her age is unclear, he makes no attempt to have sex with her until she in effect forces it on him. The subtitles say he wants her to go to university but there is no sign she could have even graduated from high school. She seems to have been a really young teenager when he first took her in, and he tells her they have to wait for marriage until she has finished growing up, commenting as we view  her photos that he can see her body changing and growing more womanly.

In other words, it’s all more than a bit kinky – or complicated, to choose a less judgmental term. But it is more than just a kinky comedy; even more than the Americans in the sixties, Japanese society did not know what to make of the “new” young woman, and here Naomi reflects that confusion: sexual freedom, tastelessness, search of “fun,” but at the same time still looking for a husband yet on different terms, along with the new artistic freedoms forcing their way onto the screens in terms of nudity in particular. Even from this distance, we are still not sure who is exploiting whom, if anyone is in fact being exploited at all. And poor Jyoji, our Everyman, is even more confused than we are.

As Naomi, Michiyo Yasuda spends a lot of her time in her underwear, bikinis, or nude, with only some well-placed soapsuds hiding pubic hair. Interestingly, she does have him shave her neck, but he recoils from trying to shave her armpits. Even so, she is more than just a body; she has the same spunkiness and spontaneity as Hitomi Nozoe in Masumura’s Giants and Toys and is as cute as any sixties teen magazine cover girl in any country, a fore-runner of the endlessly interchangeable Japanese female teen pop stars of the 21^st century. Jyoji is Shoichi Ozawa, a generally self-effacing character actor whose best prior role had been as the slow-witted husband in Story from Echigo.

The colors are brash, the music is mid-sixties rock brash, and the direction and editing are energetic and flamboyant as well. How accurately this adaptation reflects Tanizaki’s original is a matter for literary criticism, but it certainly reflects many of the confusions of its own time.