Demon / Kichiku (1978)

Ken Ogata had been a major star on TV since the mid-sixties, usually playing samurai heroes. His occasional big-screen appearances had been in supporting roles, some fairly large but for the most part not particularly memorable. Then suddenly, in 1978-79 he catapulted to the position of one of Japanese film’s most highly regarded actors by appearing in two of the most disturbing movies ever made in Japan (a title for which there is a great deal of competition). In Demon, the first of these, he plays a man who tries to kill his own son, and in Vengeance is Mine, he provides one of the most harrowing portraits of a serial killer from any nation.

In Demon, Ogata is Sochiki, a basically nice guy struggling to keep his printing business above water. Unknown to his wife Oume (Shima Iwashita), he also has a mistress and that mistress has three of his kids, while Oume has had none. When Sochiki is facing bankruptcy and has no money for his own household, much less a second one, the mistress appears with the three children, aged 5, 3, and 1, and then without warning disappears, leaving them behind.

Needless to say, Oume is not pleased by this and she makes the lives of the children and Sochiki into a living hell. Eventually, she chokes the baby by shoving its mouth full of rice after finding it playing in the rice-maker, then when the baby gets sick from this she suffocates it to stop the crying. Sochiki’s horrors are much quieter but more disturbing for that. He takes the three-year-old daughter into downtown Tokyo, and after ascertaining that she only knows him as “Daddy” and can’t identify him by name or address, tries to distract her in a department store and leave her, but she gets frightened by the crowds and catches up to him. He takes her up to the observation deck of the Tokyo Tower and, while she is concentrating on the view through a telescope, trying to find her house, he dashes into the elevator and leaves her behind to the mercy of strangers.

The boy is older and more aware of what has been going on, and Oume continues to pressure Sochiki to get rid of him. Sochiki takes him to the ocean where he rescues him from the edge of a cliff. Later in the day, however, when the boy has fallen asleep, Sochiki throws him off the edge of the cliff. Police become involved eventually, for the boy miraculously survives. He knows his father’s name and address and Sochiki is arrested, but when the two confront each other, the boy disowns his father in a scene that destroys Sochiki (and won Ogata a wad of awards).

Underlying the story of the mistreatment of children is the story of the struggling family. Seicho Matsumoto’s original story had been written in 1957, and though there is no attempt to make this a period movie, it still has the feel of Japan in the fifties. The struggling print shop and home reminds us of Haha in particular, but there are numerous other similar shops in fifties and early sixties movies, and we have seen many children abandoned or given away to other families in similar financial crises. Similarly, the small businessman with a mistress was a regular theme but by the seventies. greater prosperity seems to have meant that only successful businessmen could afford two women, at least in the movies. Still, that greater prosperity left many hard-working people behind.

Throughout, it is unclear who the titular demon is, but then Japanese nouns have no plural forms so this could easily be the Demons. Certainly, Iwashita turns into the wicked step-mother.

Nevertheless, she has some perfectly good reasons to resent having to suddenly act as mother to her husband’s illegitimate children, since she has foregone having her own children due to the poverty of their existence. If Sochiki had kept his penis and his money at home, they could have had children of their own and also might not be in such desperate financial straits. This does not justify the murder of the baby, certainly, but it does make her more complex than a simple villain. Her performance is detailed and complex as well, reminding us yet again that she was a genuinely great actress as well as a beautiful star. In many ways, Ogata’s actions are far more disturbing, precisely because he seems to be a basically nice guy who deeply regrets what he thinks he has to do yet does it anyway.

Over a long career, Nomura established himself as a director of high quality in a variety of genres within the studio system, like Imai or Toyoda in Japan’s previous generation or William Wyler in America, but he  regularly produced his best work in movies adapted from fiction by Matsumoto. These often involved seaside cliffs, or very young children who seem to know more than they can express, or both as in Demon. With the epitome of professional photography by frequent collaborator Takashi Kawamata, it is a harrowing look at a poor family trapped by economic and social traditions that lead them to do the unthinkable.