Tanizaki’s story Shunkinsho has captivated Japanese film-makers since it first appeared in the mid-thirties, starting with Shimazu’s 1937 adaptation. Kaneto Shindo’s Sanka sheds new light on the story without removing any of its mystery, while also marking a new direction for Shindo’s later work.
I have dealt with the plot in some detail when discussing Shimazu’s version, so I won’t repeat it here. Shindo leaves nothing from that movie out, but he does add some details and try to clarify some other points. Now we have a narrator, Nobuko Otowa, who was a maid in the household and who wrote down Sasuke’s dictated version of the story. However, the narrator clarifies none of the central mystery – Sasuke’s abject devotion to Shunkin nor her own possessive relationship to him. Otowa can only observe from the outside, and only once does Sasuke talk to her about his feelings.
Shindo takes about twenty minutes longer than most other versions, which gives us loooong scenes of his leading her around or being scolded by her in his music lessons. He takes on tasks that would normally have been given to maids, such as bathing her or dressing her. He is utterly devoted, even to her bowel movements, which he collects from the special toilet built for her and carefully buries around the yard as if they were sacred objects.
Eventually their relationship becomes sexual, though we never know how it began or how she initiates each session, for it is clear that Sasuke would never, ever so much as suggest sex even as he warms her feet on his chest at bedtime. Though freer times for the film-maker in the 1970s means this part of the story can be more clear, the clarification leaves us as unsatisfied as before. He loves her with utter devotion, but it is also absolute subservience – he has no life but her, giving up all of his life to be close to her at every moment, eventually blinding himself for her. She is utterly dependent on him, but there is never a sense that she actually cares for him in any way. Though he worships even her bowel movements and fathers several children for her (all of which are immediately given away to poor families far away), there is never a hint of any love for him on her part. Is this the purest form of true love, or is it an illness?
Distributed by the Art Theater Guild, the movie is in 4×3 but unusually for both ATG and Shindo, it is in color. The photography by Kyomi Kuroda, Shindo’s personal cinematographer, is pristine, sharp, and elegantly composed with each scene simultaneously austere and lush. Even more than in the days of Ozu and Mizoguchi, every scene is simplified, with not so much as a spare vase in a room. Despite the intense reds in many indoor scenes and the luxuriant greens outdoors, there is a coldness to the film that matches Shunkin’s attitude to Sasuke.
As Sasuke bathes and dresses Shunkin, there are numerous scenes with her partially or even fully nude, as well as some theatricalized “dream” scenes when Sasuke blinds himself, and there is even one actual sex scene, but there is never a sense of either erotic sensuality or exploitation to those scenes.*
Shindo himself appears on screen as a man trying to fill in the gaps in Sasuke’s written version of the story, teasing more and more from a resistant Otowa in her retirement home through cigarette bribes and offers of money, but his presence only adds another layer of the inexplicable. Is he merely a device to get Otowa talking, or does he have some deep connection to the story? We never know, any more than we know why in some shots he is bleeding from his mouth and in others is perfectly normal.
Most of Shindo’s later movies would deal with the problems of the artist, a subject in which he had not shown much interest in the past. Perhaps this grew out of his preparations for his documentary portrait of Mizoguchi, or perhaps the new concerns led him back to Mizoguchi. (Shunkin’s treatment of Sasuke’s shamisen playing is not all that different from Mizoguchi’s treatment of the young Shindo’s screenplays depicted in Shindo’s first movie.) As a portrait of the artist as a young woman, Shunkin remains the bitch she was in Shimazu’s film. Her blindness made her wealthy father treat her as a little princess, fulfilling every whim, and it seems to ask if she could have shown her genius at the shamisen and koto without the personal life on her pedestal, or if her artistic genius justifies all her other failings. But it offers us no more answers to such questions than did Tanizaki or the other film-makers who have dealt with the story.
* As Shunkin, Tokuko Watanabe made her first film appearance. The role is almost silent, and all her lines are delivered in a cold, brief monotone, usually no more than two or three words at most. She would spend most of the rest of the seventies in Nikkatsu pinku films.
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