From Book to Screen

Modern Japanese Literature in Films

Keiko I. McDonald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315292397
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Process
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Of all the world s cinemas, Japan's is perhaps unique in its closeness to the nation's literature, past and contemporary. The Western world became aware of this when Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon was awarded the Grand Prize at the Venice film festival in 1951 and the Oscar for best foreign film in 1952. More recent examples include Shohei Imamura's Eel, which won the Palm d'Or (Best Picture) at Cannes in 1997.From Book to Screen breaks new ground by exploring important connections between Japan's modern literary tradition and its national cinema. The first part offers an historical and cultural overview of the working relationship that developed between pure literature and film. It deals with three important periods in which filmmakers relied most heavily on literary works for enriching and developing cinematic art. The second part provides detailed analyses of a dozen literary works and their screen adoptions.

PART I

Shifts in Creative Emphasis

1

The Camera Looks at Melodrama: 1908–1920

The first attempt to make a Japanese film with the so-called cinematographé, took place in the summer of 1897. It offered glimpses of noted sites in Tokyo, among them the famous Nihonbashi bridge. That series of postcard views may be said to have launched Japanese cinema, which soon learned to look for livelier kinds of spectacles. For that, the cinema went indoors, to “views” conveniently framed on stage, in theatrical traditions rich in human interest. In retrospect, it seems only natural that Japanese cinema should have spent its first decade stealing from classical Kabuki and Bunraku theater.

Many cinema scholars have discussed the importance of those early thefts. After all, classical Japanese theater gave the new art of cinema far more than just the plots of plays. The theatrical traditions of Kabuki and Bunraku offered stylistic conventions that were familiar and persuasive. No wonder Japan’s first filmmakers took them up. They were still busy wielding the unfamiliar camera. One might say that camera and filmmaker both were too busy learning for them to have stylistic notions of their own.¹

But of course cameras and filmmakers do just look around. Early filmmakers soon discovered another source of style and subject matter in shimpa, an old stage tradition.

Shimpa, or New School Drama, was itself born out of a reaction against Kabuki stage conventions. Its point of revolt was the use of plays with contemporary settings. Shimpa was a challenge offstage as well as on, given the climate of political ferment in the late Meiji period. Shimpa’s founder, Sadanori Sudo, was a political activist in the jiyu minken undo, the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement. Acting on behalf of the Liberal Party in 1888, Sudo formed a small troupe whose repertoire was chiefly political, favoring plays about student idealists. They performed works in two genres: Soshi-geki, literally “plays about agitators,” and shosei-shibai, “dramas about students.” Both terms gave way to shimpa when that “new school” was founded in 1899.

Sudo’s successor was Otojiro Kawakami. He did much to improve shimpa’s repertoire. He, too, had sought to advance the cause of the Liberal Party, by forming a troupe in 1891. In 1893 he traveled to France, where he had his first experience of Western dramaturgy. It was a revelation he wasted no time sharing with Japanese audiences. The following year, his troupe earned critical acclaim with a detective drama, Igai (Unexpected). That success led to two equally successful sequels. Then, when the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1894, Kawakami returned to what amounted to patriotic potboilers.

Still, shimpa continued to develop, achieving what critics consider its high point between 1906 and 1908. Troupe leaders such as Yoho Ii and Minoru Takada eagerly sought out new acting styles and techniques far removed from Kabuki conventions.

Even so, no amount of revolutionary fervor could break the spell of certain Kabuki traditions. Shimpa’s drive to be thoroughly modern continued to be compromised by some use of female impersonators and formalized acting styles far removed from realism.

Nevertheless, shimpa troupes continued to explore contemporary settings. That led to a more reliable parting of the ways with classical theatrical convention as shimpa playwrights learned to take their cues from a wealth of literary sources.

They were most interested in the works of Meiji writers, whose strong suit was melodrama. Among the novels adapted for shimpa were Roka Tokutomi’s Hototogisu (The cuckoo, 1904); Koyo Ozaki’s Konjiki yasha (The golden demon, 1897–1902); and Yuho Kikuchi’s Ono ga tsumi (My sin, 1899–1900). Kyoka Izumi was a great favorite. Four of his novels were made into shimpa plays: Koya hiziri (Priest from Mt. Koya, 1904); Tsuya monogatari (Wake, 1904); Giketsu kyoketsu (Blood of honor); and Onna keizu (A woman’s pedigree, 1907).

These plays in effect guaranteed that tragedy would be the mainstay of the shimpa repertoire. It was, to be sure, tragedy under the aspect of melodrama, with what today would be called a definite gender bias. One critic describes it this way: “The shimpa tragedy makes a grand display of the ego or will of a woman who endures her fate in tears.”²

The emerging film industry was quick to see the cinematic potential in those shimpa adaptations. After all, they were based on best sellers by major Meiji writers. In 1908, Yoshizawa Shokai, one of the earliest film companies, built Japan’s first studio under glass in Tokyo. Their second production was the shimpa version of Kikuchi’s My Sin.

Yuho’s novel My Sin first appeared in serial form in the Osaka Asahi news-paper in 1899. Its sequel was published the same way. The shimpa adaptation by Yoshizawa Shokai was first staged in October 1900. As we later see, the playwright’s My Sin would foster a natural and fruitful kinship between cinema and modern literature. It was, in fact, the first known example of a film that would come to be known as bungei-sakuhin-eiga (or bungei-eiga), literally “film from a literary work.”

Yuho’s novel belongs to a class of novels popular with Meiji readers. Many were serialized in newspapers and were correspondingly accessible to a general readership. Their protagonists lived in the reader’s world, in everyday circumstances heightened by twists and turns of plot that led, eventually, to a sense that the issue at hand had been somehow resolved.

Needless to say, these novels are not self-consciously literary. Like their readers, the novelists are not at leisure to indulge any great strain of richly associative, ambivalent modes of thought. The novels’ sense of irony is largely satisfied by the kinds of surprises that make good plot. Their sense of drama tends to be schematic, which is to say melodramatic.

What these novels do often share with works of more permanent “value” is a quality of vivid reportage. These novels show us writers examining life in Meiji society. Their readers, like cinema goers from the start, are invited to look at the world around them.

It is easy to see why shimpa took these novels up so readily. What remains to be seen is how the new practitioners of Japanese cinema came to “take it from there,” as it were.

Let us begin with Yuho’s novel My Sin. Its structure is based on a familiar narrative pattern of everyday life put in turmoil by events whose working out entails considerable suffering before matters are resolved by an ending enough like “happy” to satisfy readers. The readers of My Sin, like the shimpa playgoers, would expect to have a good cry at various points along the way. Yuho’s melodramatic plot is guaranteed not to disappoint.

Tamaki is the daughter of a respectable country family. She is happy as a student in Tokyo. All that changes, thanks to a motif familiar to Meiji readers in a rapidly changing Japan: big-city manners and mores are apt to corrupt the young and inexperienced. Especially a young woman. Especially one from the country.

Tamaki is seduced by a medical student, Kenzo. She is pregnant. Kenzo is engaged to another girl, Oshima. Even so, he does the right thing and marries Tamaki. But Oshima will not let go. She pressures Kenzo to divorce Tamaki. Abandoned, Tamaki attempts suicide but fails. Her family takes her in, but her child is given away in adoption. (Separation of mother and child is a familiar motif.)

All may yet be well. The whole affair is successfully hushed up. Tamaki’s suffering is eased by marriage to a count who knows nothing of her past indiscretion. Tamaki bears another child. Her marriage, however, turns out to be a comfortless one. Her husband is increasingly cold and remote. They go to a fishing village where her husband’s family has a summer house. Their little boy drowns. A fisherman’s boy drowns trying to rescue him.

Here the plot takes on the sort of complex twist favored by the serial novel and shimpa. The two boys turn out to be half-brothers, both Tamaki’s children. And the doctor called in is? Kenzo. He comes face to face with Tamaki, the girl he seduced, the wife he abandoned. He is here to certify the death of a boy who is not the fisherman’s son but his and Tamaki’s.

The rest of the novel works out the theme of repentance with yet more dramatic twists to guarantee the heroine’s suffering. Tamaki owns up to her past, which ends her marriage. Kenzo does attempt to atone for his sin by marrying her; but her own idea of atonement takes the form of good works. Tamaki leaves for Taiwan to work for the Red Cross.

In the end, a woman’s self-sacrifice heals all. Tamaki learns that the count is dying in Vietnam. She hurries to his side and nurses him back to life. Now it is his turn to repent. He does, so all ends happily after all.

In spite of its predictably melodramatic character, Yuho’s novel is a serious attempt to portray a modern heroine whose values are deeply rooted in Confucianism. And since, like shimpa in general, My Sin is very much a novel of its time, this story shows how a woman living in the early modern age could still be held captive by feudal values. The melodramatic potential of that tension became very much a part of the shimpa adaptation, which passed on to cinema.

There were sound practical reasons behind early cinema’s interest in melodrama. The first films were limited to effects that could be realized, on the average, in less than a thousand feet of film. The novelty of the medium brought certain limitations with it as well. Moviegoers with few expectations were correspondingly easy to please. It was enough to see the moving “real-life” image; enough to see actors on screen performing pretty much anything.³ The stage frame/ film frame connection was in fact so powerful that many early films took the form of engeki jissha eiga, literally “films of ongoing performance” on the Kabuki or shimpa stage.

Interestingly enough, that early use of cinema anticipates our own experience of the virtuoso, multimedia “event.” The difference is that today’s media mix exhibits a range of hi-tech accomplishments, whereas its analogue in early Japanese cinema was created by the technical limitations of cinema in its infancy. Because early film footages were short and subject to technical quirks, they found a place in a hybrid screening-cum-performance practice called rensageki, or “chain drama.” In such instances, the spectator witnessed a live stage performance interspersed with scenes performed on screen. Movie-house programs from 1910 to 1917 mostly featured this eclectic offering, along with a newsreel, some footage of street scenes, a foreign film, and a domestic “dramatic” picture.

One Japanese historian offers this account of Meiji writers’ work transferred to screen by way of shimpa:

Beginning around 1908, engeki jissha eiga footage of shimpa and Kabuki ongoing stage performance appeared more frequently. Cinema’s ability to put a performance “on record” was an important market asset. Stage plays attracted audiences mainly with scripts and performers. By putting plays on screen, the film industry brought theater-goers into the movie house…. This period of theater/film overlap lasted about ten years. Even though the drama was shot off stage, acting style and directing followed stage conventions.

Such silent films of on-going stage action were presented along with kowairo (dialogue narrators), benshi (commentator) and narimono (musical accompaniment)….⁴

No print of the first film version of My Sin exists, but written accounts describe it fairly well. We know, for example, that the number of scenes had to be drastically reduced. The shimpa adaptation, like the novel, takes the spectator to some half a dozen locales, one of them overseas. Cameraman/director Kichizo Chiba’s My Sin featured just two climactic scenes on the beach, one shot on location at Katase, the other at Enoshima. The “stars” were actors from Nobuchika Nakano’s Shimpa Troupe. Years later, Nakano had this to say about the shooting of his film:

It was October of 1908. Yoshizawa Shokai suggested that I film an on-going shimpa drama. At that time the longest footage available was a thousand feet, so I decided to shoot two scenes to fit in a five to six hundred foot format. One scene showed the beach episode; the other, the two boys drowning. I got a local fire fighting crew to erect poles on the beach. A stage curtain was strung between them. That way, the curtain could be raised to show the beach with the drama taking place….

Once we were costumed and ready to go, we took our places behind the curtain. There we could hear the sound of applause. It was coming from a crowd of onlookers waiting patiently for the curtain to go up.

We could also hear cameraman Chiba complaining. He didn’t see how we were going to photograph “moving people.” …

The scene of the two boys drowning was shot at Enoshima. The two kids were so scared they didn’t want to get in. They bawled and clung to the rocks. We had to force them to act their part. But finally we got our film.⁵

That film was of a very elemental kind. Chiba tried to create the impression of a drama on stage because the screen space was defined by the curtain fixed to the poles. It never occurred to him to think that a film could be made...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Shifts in Creative Emphasis
• Part II. Writing as Directed: A Re-creative Experience
• Conclusion
• Selected Bibliography
• Index