Burden of Life / Jinsei no onimotsu (1935)

The Burden of Life seems an awfully heavy title for the gentle shomin-geki it accompanies. The family we meet is generally happy. Mother and Father get along well. Two of the sisters are already married and the third is about to be married, while the 9-year-old son is essentially just a typical 9-year-old boy. The …

Warm Current / Danryu (1939)

Danryu, which only fairly recently appeared on YouTube, marks one of the turning points in pre-war Japanese movie-making. It is a movie in which questions of marriage turn completely on female love rather than social status or familial arrangements. As usual for Japanese films, it takes us a while to reach the real story. Hibiki …

Island of Evil Spirits / Akuryo-To (1981)

Island of the Evil Spirits takes us once again into the popular world of detective Kindaichi. He has been called to a small island by a man who appears to have died just before Kindaichi arrived. Before he is done, he has found the deep secrets of the island’s most powerful families that have resulted …

Home Diary / Family Diary / Katei nikki (1938)

In general, Japanese movies looked at the contrast between the traditional arranged marriage and the marriage for love through the story of a woman. Though based on a novel by a woman, Shimizu’s Home Diary approaches the issue through the lives of two male college friends. Shuzo (Shin Saburi) is first seen saying farewell to …

Marching Song / Shingun no uta (1937)

Rather by accident, just as I was finishing my comments on movies of the seventies, I stumbled onto several movies about WWII that I did not know existed when I initially wrote about the movies of the period. Some of these turned out to be interesting movies in their own right, as well as interesting …

New Road / Shindo: Zempen Akemi no maki & Kohen Ryota no maki (1936)

By far the best of Gosho’s pre-war movies to survive, The New Road also takes him into a realm far from the shomin-geki for which he was famous at the time. Set in the world of the genuinely wealthy and westernized, it is a complex and detailed examination of the conflict between the old ideas …

Kinuyo’s First Love / Kinuyo no hatsukoi (1940)

I wish I had found Kinuyo’s First Love two years ago when I was writing primarily about movies made in the thirties, for it provides so much cultural information that would have been helpful as I wrote about other movies. It also provides a bittersweet story told without melodramatics of the type that came to …

The Incident / Jiken (1978)

The Incident, as it is continually referred to, is the killing of a young woman whose body was found in the woods several days after her death. Although based on an award-winning mystery novel by Shohei Ooka, there isn’t much apparent mystery. Hiroshi is soon arrested and at his arraignment in court admits he killed …

Castle of Sand / Suna no utsuwa (1974)

As in most countries, movies in Japan had often depicted police and criminals. However, the modern police procedural was still a very new idea in the seventies, with Castle of Sand possibly the first Japanese movie to follow a case from the police point of view in a step-by-step investigation process such as might actually …

Hunting Rifle / Ryoju (1961)

In its plot, Ryoju is something out of the Douglas Sirk/Lana Turner mold from the fifties -- a passionate love affair full of secrets that destroys marriages, ruins lives, and even leads to suicides. But it is a Japanese movie, and that means it has all of these things except the outward show of passion. …