A hundred sailors are assembled in a room and told that they will be divided by lottery into three groups – 60 to go to the Philippines, 30 to go to submarine duty, and 10 to prepare another facility for men who will turn out to be kamikaze pilots. Sadazo is sent to the Philippines while his bunkmate Keita is chosen to stay in Japan. Sadazo gives Keita a postcard to deliver to Sadazo’s wife Tomoko, if Keita survives. After four years, Keita discovers the card as he is packing to emigrate to Brazil and decides to visit Sadazo’s family before he leaves.
This would normally be a set-up for a highly sentimental look back at the war years, but Kaneto Shindo has never been a sentimental film-maker. For one thing, the card is not written by Sadazo and given to Keita to avoid the censors. Rather, it is a card from Tomoko, and he simply wants her to know that he got it and was happy to receive it. Shindo had himself been one of only six survivors from the lottery depicted, but Keita is not his alter-ego and the movie is not autobiographical. Shindo had returned to Tokyo to try to find his way back into the movie business, and though he may have been haunted by survivor’s guilt, he had never referred to any personal wartime experiences in any of his own films.* Keita, by contrast, is a fisherman. He comes home to find his wife has run away with his father, and after four years of “being an idiot” as his uncle says, unable to bring himself to kill even the fish he catches, he sells out to his uncle.
There is certainly nothing sentimental in Tomoko’s life which, as so often in Shindo’s movies, becomes the real subject. She is a sort of Everywoman for all the traditional, rural families. Her father intended to sell her to a brothel, from which she was saved only by Sadazo. Since he had to sell his field to get the money, they lived in abject poverty, share-cropping in the fields of others. Nevertheless, she had become happy with Sadazo, and after he was killed promised to stay to care for her in-laws. She even married the second son, who in turn was drafted and killed on his way to Okinawa. 
For Tomoko, daily life is a grind, working in the field, carrying water up the long hill from the river each day, cooking and cleaning and caring for the parents. It is the only thing she knows and the only life open to her. After the father-in-law dies of a heart attack while working beside Tomoko and mother-in-law hangs herself, Tomoko is alone. She lives something close to the life of the couple in Naked Island, disguised only by the fact that it is filmed in pristine color.
As if things weren’t bad enough for her, the world around Tomoko is a farce. From the ludicrous parades for the draftees to the empty urns returned to her to the barren parades for her in-laws’ bodies to the local “official” Kichiguro who manages to survive the war unharmed and now wants her for his mistress, everything is just a bit off-kilter.
This comes to a ludicrous head when Kichiguro challenges Keita to a fight, thinking Keita is trying to move in on “his woman.” It is a most unusual blend of farce and realism.
Shindo had earlier made forays into farce, starting at least as early as Iron Crown.** and reaching its peak in the sex farce of Owl. Shinobu Otake had shown herself in several of these to be the perfect replacement for the late Nobuko Otawa, an actress who would and could try to do anything.
But unlike Otake’s roles in Owl or Will to Live, here she is the “straight” character while the world around her grows ever more ludicrous. Shindo’s use of crisp photography and horizontal compositions gives more than a hint of the theatrical, yet these are some of the most common approaches taken by Japanese film-makers throughout the previous century. He even channels Mizoguchi in a single take of about five minutes in which Tomoko releases all her frustration about the war, the emotional loss of her beloved, and her anger at those who somehow survived.
This approach, however, gives the movie a split personality. Visually, it is bright and clean, far too clean for such dire poverty or for any other aspect of post-war Japan, even a village so far removed from the bombings and Occupation troops. Ren Osugi as Kichiguro seems to be in a different movie from the rest of the cast until the broadness of his performance makes sense in retrospect, after his dragon dance, his fight with Keita, and his later attempt to gain sympathy for his “injuries.”
Made when Shindo was 97, it is tempting to see Postcard as a rather odd summation of Shindo’s life and career. However, he had been making his “last movie” since 1986 (only Manoel de Oliveira directed longer, with his last film at the age of 104). Each movie since that date had been different, showing his continuing search for new stories to tell and new ways to tell them. Using a very specific incident from his own life, Shindo could have made an autobiographical film about the post-war years. Instead, Postcard reveals or reminds us that Shindo’s fundamental theme was the lives of those left behind by society and in particular the women who had to shoulder the daily burdens of traditional life. Since I hope to write a long appreciation of Shindo and his work as soon as I find copies of some more of the missing movies, I won’t go into detail here.
* He had been a co-writer on The Battle of Okinawa and Under the Flag of the Rising Sun, but those movies were adapted from other sources and had nothing to do with his own life. Children of Hiroshima did not look at the bomb but at the stories of the survivors.
** For all practical purposes, his 1968 Strong Women, Weak Men, marketed under the English title of Operation Negligee, is a lost film, though from its title it was probably a sex comedy of some sort.
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