Almost immediately after Akira Kurosawa’s death, Japanese film-makers brought to the screen three of his still unproduced screenplays, all of which were based on stories by Shugoro Yamamoto. The Sea is Watching was the last of these and in many ways the most unexpected.
Directed by Kei Kumai, it is so utterly different from what we expect from Kurosawa (or from Kumai, for that matter) that it seems to have wandered into the 21st century not just from a different age but from a different planet. Set in a small brothel in a small entertainment district in a small coastal town, it is a story of two prostitutes. Oshin is the long-clichéd hooker with a heart of gold who keeps falling in love with her customers. Kikuno is more cynical, claiming to be the wife of a dead samurai who has seen it all in her fall to this position.
Oshin sends all her money to take care of her sick father. She first falls in love with Fusanosuke, a naive young samurai who hides with her for the night after accidentally stabbing a man while drunk but does not have sex. In his later sexless visits, he tells her that, just as the skin and the hair can be regrown, so can her purity.
The other women in the house, overhearing the conversation and thinking he wants to marry her, decide to take on Oshin’s regulars so she can become pure again, only to see him eventually visit to tell Oshin about his return to his father’s favor and his upcoming wedding to the girl to whom he has long been betrothed. Oshin’s next love is quite different. Ryosuke has been mistreated all his life and has turned to crime but Oshin convinces him not to kill himself.
Meanwhile, Kikuno has two regulars. One is a yakuza whom she may be in love with but who wants her to leave only so he can sell her to a different house, and the other is an old man who wants her to become his mistress.
The madam becomes ill, leaving Kikuno in charge, until a typhoon hits, destroying the neighborhood and eventually leaving Oshin and Kikuno alone on the roof hoping for rescue.
As the brief precis indicates, we have seen all this before except perhaps the typhoon, though we have seen similar stories in settings destroyed by earthquakes or great fires. The women and the activities of the house could have come from a movie by Mizoguchi or Naruse or Kawashima or any number of other writers and directors during the fifties or sixties, and later would even make occasional appearances in movies by Kumashiro or even Gosha. Even the one sex scene is played with both people still clothed. But if this kind of “women’s picture” was still being made in the nineties or the 21st century, I haven’t come across any other examples thus far.
As a director, Kei Kumai was an unlikely person to take up the story. He had never been a part of the circle around Kurosawa and his movies were distinctively non Kurosawa-like. He had dealt with a similar subject almost thirty years earlier in Sandakan #8, but with the cool, distant manner he had used in most of his other movies (though the Sandakan street looks much like the street in this movie). Here, he opts for stereotyped performances that never really probe the interiors of the characters such as had been the strength of all Kumai’s best films. The visual look is that of the extreme artificiality often adopted in Japan’s earliest color films, producing a movie that looks closer to Yamada’s super-nostalgic Final Take than to Kurosawa or any other earlier notable director, with the possible exception of Tai Kato without the long takes and low camera. 
Beginning with an obvious model of the town, we are completely in a world of studio settings, the small street of brothels blocked off by a house at one end and a wall of a green hillside at the other. The photography uses warm and even lighting without shadows. We see shots of the roiling sea but never see the tidal surge pour over the green hillside, only watching it at various stages inside the house. The scenes on the roof have a night sky that could be a painted drop or CGI but either way are intentionally and obviously artificial.
The two previous films from posthumous Kurosawa scripts had dealt with samurai life – After the Rain, directed by Kurosawa’s assistant on his late films but a version of Samurai from Nowhere that may have been an old script from the sixties, and Dora-Heita, a script written by the Four Knights (Kurosawa, Kinoshita, Kobayashi, and Kon Ichikawa) in the seventies and finally filmed by Ichikawa, the only one of the group still living in 2000. Kurosawa had shown little interest or particular sympathy for women in his movies, with No Regrets and The Most Beautiful being his only films with female leads (respectively Setsuko Hara and Yoko Yaguchi, whom he later married). After he met Mifune, he operated in a very masculine world, even after Mifune and he parted, with the old lady of Rhapsody in August the shining exception. I have not been able to trace a date on the Yamamoto stories used, but since the writer died in 1967, it is possible that this screenplay actually originated in the fifties or sixties when Kurosawa was writing a number of screenplays for others to keep some money coming in while he painstakingly worked on his meticulously perfectionist shooting schedules.
The movie was marketed as a Kurosawa film in America and as such got a wider release than would have been otherwise available to a Kumai movie and was generally treated respectfully by American reviewers, as it was in Japan. Nevertheless, it seems more a throw-back to an earlier era of film-making than a part of the revival of period films that was going on at about the same time, little more than a collection of clichés that we would not expect from either Kurosawa or Kumai.
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