The Strangling / Kosatsu (1979)

In one of the most shocking opening scenes of its era, The Strangling begins with just that – a father strangling his own high-school-aged son. The rest of the movie tries to explain how it came to happen.

In flashback, Tsutomu seems to have been a good son in a good family. His father (Ko Nishimura) is a little on the pompous and repetitive side, but there is no cruelty at home. His mother (Nobuko Otowa) is intensely devoted to him, perhaps a bit too much but not all that excessive considering that he is the family’s only child and only son. In a situation that many American middle-class families will understand, the family has moved Father’s business (a bar) to live near a great prep school so that Tsutomu will have a leg up on his chances to get into Tokyo University, after which Father assumes the boy will be set for life (Tokyo University is the Harvard/Yale of Japanese universities). They encourage him to study, but they don’t pressure so much that he starts to resist. He does not argue with his parents or play hooky from school. The only real conflicts Tsutomu has are about how loud he plays his stereo, an argument that occurs in every teenager’s family in the developed world. So everything seems within the broader parameters of normal. We are a long way from the tortured alienated youth facing a dead-end life seen in other seventies movies like Youth Killer or Shindo’s own Live Today.

Then sex rears its head. He gets a crush on a girl from his class. On a walk beside the river, he kisses her, which turns into an attempted rape, but she gets away. She nevertheless seems to continue to be attracted to him. He imagines her having sex with her step-father, then receives a phone call from her asking him to come to a hotel in the mountains. There she tells him her step-father did in fact try to rape her. She stabbed him, hid him in a closet, and came here.

She decides she wants share sex with Tsutomo which they do but in the snow rather than the hotel room, so he does not stay the night as originally planned. The next day he and his family learn that she has jumped off a cliff, leaving a note about her dead step-father. Something snaps in Tsutomu, and he trashes the house, beats both his parents, and claims he has always hated them both. The threats and arguments go on for days, including an argument with his mother that turns into an attempted rape, until one night he drinks himself into a stupor and Father strangles him. The parents try to commit suicide but can’t bring themselves to finish the job and so turn themselves in to the police.

Shindo seems to go out of his way to avoid making social indictments; The Strangling is no exposé of unfeeling parents or of poverty or of a society that leaves many of its people behind. If there is is anyone to “blame,” it might be the pressure on Tsutomu and all the other students to study, study, study. This is a pervasive social pressure. We often see them in class, but the teacher never actually teaches a subject, just insists that they constantly study. After the girl’s death, reporters interview other students about her, and they all say they didn’t really know her, not because she was a loner but because they mostly just spent all their time studying. Though Father often talks at dinner about the importance of study and, more importantly, the connections to be made at University, he does not confine Tsutomu to his room or fight with him if the boy takes an hour off. The pressure to get into not just a university but a “good” one is simply everywhere in the air for all the teenagers of this social class that we see.*

Amazingly, Father and Mother are not shunned after their crime. Otowa tries to hide from the neighbors, but they are really trying to offer comfort and support. They all rally around the parents, chipping in for a lawyer, offering to testify, gathering signatures on a petition for mercy. They regularly appear all together as a sort of chorus, offering all the possible explanations and solutions that clichés can provide (though never directly addressing the camera as a real chorus would do). Absolutely no one seems horrified by this shocking crime.

As we have seen elsewhere, the criminal system is utterly different from what we see in America. Father immediately and in detail pleads guilty, which would normally end the case. The judge wants to know more about the whys and wherefores, and the end result is a very brief sentence to be served on probation.

Still, at the heart of the movie is a mystery that never becomes clear. There simply seems to be no connection between Tsutomu’s brief love affair and his family, who knew nothing about it and certainly never tried to interfere in it. His snap has a teenager’s irrationality, but we normally go to drama to find explanations for what on the surface appears to be irrational. Shindo simply says, “Here is what happened, make up your own mind.”

This is an original script by Shindo, which makes me wonder if, like Live Today, it is based on an incident in the recent news. However, I can find no hint of that in the very limited critical commentary available about the movie, so it is only a guess. Ko Nishimura emerges from his supporting actor obscurity to give a fine performance, while Nobuko Otowa once again reminds us that she belongs among Japan’s greatest actresses. That alone would make the movie worth seeing, but her performance is inside a powerful and fascinating movie.

* My wife had a Japanese friend who remembered her preparation for college entrance exams as very intense but added that once she actually got in to the university there was very little pressure on studying or exams and the students were pretty much left on their own. Thus, I tend to believe this as an accurate depiction of the situation. (Much the same thing seems to happen at Oxford or Cambridge in Great Britain — very hard to get in, very hard to flunk out, and the connections last you for your whole life.)