photo of a young man and woman from 10th Century Japan embracing

The Mad Fox (Koiya koi nasuna koi; 恋や恋なすな恋), 1962

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Commentary and Analysis

“I am in confusion unto madness…”

“All we foxes, from the time we were small, have learned this: Man is vicious and cruel…”
– Dialogue from the film

A Legend and a Play

The play that inspired this movie – in many ways Uchida’s strangest surviving film – was itself inspired by the life of the Merlin-like sage Abe no Seimei, who lived in the 10th Century and the very beginning of the 11th. The three facts most often noted about this man was his mastery of onmyōdō, a method of divination derived from Chinese philosophy, his (related) success as an astrologer and his exceptional longevity (for the time), which was completely free of all major diseases. Though Abe no Seimei really existed, he is treated in Japan as a legendary figure to whom all sorts of strange and embarrassing tales have became attached like so many barnacles.

A drawing of an old man, the astronomer Abe no Seimei
Abe no Seimei, as rendered by the 19th Century painter, Kikuchi Yōsai (partial image)

Perhaps the most nonsensical of these legends was the belief that Abe no Seimei was only half-human. According to the story, he was the offspring of a mortal father named Abe no Yasuna and a female fox named Kuzu-no-ha, who was possessed of extraordinary intelligence and supernatural powers. It was from this bizarre bit of folklore that, in the early 18th Century, playwright Takeda Izumo I,1 the owner of the Takemoto-za Bunraku Theater, composed the Bunraku and Kabuki plays, Ashiya Dōman Ōuchi Kagami, nearly 800 years after the alleged events occurred.

So it’s important to understand while watching The Mad Fox that, no matter how surreal the behavior of the characters may seem, particularly in its last half-hour, most of the plot is a more-or-less faithful rendering of the events of Takeda’s play. These include the female fox character marrying a human and raising a half-fox child, her identity being exposed by the sudden appearance of the real woman whose human form she had assumed, and the fox-woman’s composition of a waka poem of farewell, written upon a shoji screen in the hut she had shared with the hero, using a pen held in her teeth. (It is said to be a measure of the skill of a great kabuki actor to be able to play simultaneously the roles of the human Kuzu-no-ha and the fox Kuzu-no-ha, including writing the poem on the screen with the pen held in his teeth, in flawless calligraphy.)

I’m recounting all this background in order to note a very odd thing about the movie, which is that the filmmakers almost totally ignore the fact that the half-fox baby in the final scene will grow up to be the famous Abe no Seimei… which would seem to be the point. It’s possible that this lapse may be due to the fact that, for a Japanese audience, the legend is so famous that the identity of the child wouldn’t need to be stressed.

Yet I think it’s far more likely that Uchida and his screenwriter, Yoda Yoshikata, writing his third and final script for the director, simply don’t care about Abe no Seimei. Rather, they are solely interested in the baby’s father, Abe no Yasuna, and his relationships with the two human women – and one female beast – with whom he is erotically obsessed to the point of madness and beyond. In its ultimate impact, this movie feels less like a sober fairy tale film, such as Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et La Bête, 1946), than like one of Luis Buñuel’s gloriously mad surrealist comedies of his final years. Call it That Obscure Object of (Japanese) Desire.

Game of Scrolls

One of the most interesting aspects of the film is that, for its first forty-five minutes, though beautifully and richly stylized to emphasize the artificiality of the world of the court, it is also startlingly realistic in its depiction of the harsh power relationships of that cruel world. Sakaki’s origin story as described in the spoken prologue – in which she’s plucked from an obscure provincial childhood to be molded into an elegant court lady – suggests the story of Cinderella. But the subsequent narrative more closely resembles an adult tale of sinister and bloody palace intrigue, such as Game of Thrones.2

Tragicomic ironies abound. The “wise” Yasunori – “master of yin and yang” – can interpret all manner of cosmic phenomena, but fails to notice that, right under his nose, his evil wife and one of his disciples are plotting to kill him. Yasuna privately complains to Sakaki that the astrologer cares more about the Emperor than the people, but when she quite logically asks why he’s never confronted his master with this criticism, the callow Yasuna has no reply. The naïve Sakaki then interprets his cowardly unwillingness to speak out as a sign of his “gentle soul.”

In the end, this pretty young couple is neither clever nor ruthless enough to prevail against the evil forces around them. (Sakaki warns Yasuna that they must guard the scroll with their lives, yet she carelessly leaves in her bag the key to the chest for the widow to easily steal.) And it’s only through the highly implausible intervention of a servant girl, who frees Yasuna from his prison, though too late to save Sakaki, and an even more improbable fire in the widow’s room that Yasuna manages to survive at all, though with his mind destroyed.

The heir to the throne in 10th Century Japan meets in his court with his advisors
The Crown Prince meets with his advisors

I don’t think it’s ever been pointed out that the two scenes that Uchida includes immediately after Yasuna’s meeting with Kuzo-no-ha – the first, in which the Crown Prince’s court debates what to do about the missing Golden Crow, and the second, in which Iwakura (the dead widow’s brother) and Dōman discuss the scroll and their plans to find and execute Yasuna – together represent a structural flaw in the narrative. These are, after all, virtually the only scenes that do not include either Yasuna or one or more of the female characters played by Saga Michiko, so they violate the movie’s otherwise scrupulously-maintained point-of-view. Those two scenes are also, as staged, somewhat pedestrian and unmagical, so they clash with the tone of the movie as well.

Three men in ancient Japan confering in a house
Iwakura (left), who has his own agenda, meets with Dōman (right, rear) and Akuemon (right, foreground)

Yet I think the film benefits greatly from their inclusion. These scenes stress the stark nature of the world from which Yasuna has escaped by going mad: a nest of venomous snakes, driven by base greed and the will to control and dominate. In his Blu-ray commentary, noting that the film is one of the rare jidai-geki of its time set in the very distant past of the Heian period (i.e., the 8th through the 12th Centuries), Jasper Sharp remarks, “The Mad Fox might seem not to have any pertinence to modern-day society.”3

I would disagree. I believe that in his postwar work, as opposed to his prewar movies – which apparently included relatively few period films – Uchida was trying to expose the root of evil in all times and places: the lust for wealth and power.  And what he discovered of human wickedness is as true in this fairy-tale world, in which men wear strange conical hats and women sport false eyebrows, as it is in the ruthless and alienated modern Japan he depicts in A Hole of My Own Making.4

For me personally, one of the most chilling moments in the movie occurs during the Crown Prince’s audience with his advisers. After one of the sages describes the natural disasters that the people fear may occur in the wake of the mysterious white rainbow – erupting volcanoes, ashen lakes, uncontrollable floods – the courtiers all laugh at the outlandishness of these terrors. But with the modern phenomenon of climate chaos, such unheard-of natural upheavals don’t seem to me at all far-fetched, and the officials’ smug laughter reminds me of the arrogance of today’s climate change deniers.

To me, these grim, realistic scenes prove that this movie is not an exception within Uchida’s body of work, but thematically consistent with it.

The Mad Human and the Sane Fox

Immediately after Yasuna goes insane, the narrative, quite intelligible and effective up to this point, becomes problematic. Though Ōkawa Hashizō dances quite well5 and conveys a moving vulnerability in his role, his character is, frankly, not a very interesting lunatic. For one thing, unlike the pretend-crazy Hamlet, Yasuna’s condition is never used by the filmmakers to challenge the corrupt social order of the film’s world. For another, Ōkawa relies overly much on acting clichés to convey derangement: blank stares, giggling, hollow smiles and the like. And when Yasuna clutches his head to signal his confusion, he seems to be suffering from nothing that a strong dose of Tylenol wouldn’t cure.

A man wearing a woman's robe dances on a turntable in a field of artificial yellow flowers
Yasuna’s mad dance, as he revolves on a turntable covered with yellow “flowers” (the Kabuki was the first theater in the world to make use of a revolving stage)

Furthermore, because of the hero’s madness, quite a bit of dead time, from a dramatic point-of-view, transpires between the demise of Sakaki and the scene more than 20 minutes later in which the fox Kon (played by the same very good actress, Saga Michiko), arrives to take over the narrative. And for Western viewers with little patience for stories hinging on animal-human transformation, not to mention interspecies sex – though of course Western literature has its own venerable tradition of such tales, going back to Ovid and beyond – this narrative turning point may itself be a bridge too far.

Animated image of foxes leaping in a field
A skulk of foxes, leaping through the woods (courtesy of Toei Animation), comes to the rescue of Yasuna…

On the other hand, the fox-human subplot can very easily be interpreted metaphorically in class-based terms. When Yasuna is attacked by Akuemon and his hunters, and Kon summons the fox community to aid him, they appear as farmers with fox faces, attacking the hunters not with swords or spears, but with hoes and scythes. Indeed, if, in the synopsis above, one were to substitute for “fox” the word “peasant,” the narrative gains not only in sense but in poignancy.

Shot of men with fox masks and the clothes and implements of Japanese farmers
… and assuming the form of human farmers (with fox faces), they take on Yasuna’s enemies,

When the old fox grandfather warns Kon not to fall in love with Yasuna and abandon the fox world for the human one, his role is not dissimilar to that of Byakki the Phoenix – the character played by Takakura Ken – in Uchida’s The Outsiders, who warns his fellow tribal members, the Ainu, from intermarriage with the dread “shamos” (Japanese). And when Kon, about to abandon her human husband forever, declares, “The griefs of the realm of animals exceed the human by hundreds of times,” she could be speaking in code for the oppressed lower classes in all times and places.

Theater of War

This film conveys visually many of the same savage criticisms of the ancient Japanese world as Uchida’s earlier “classical” films derived from theater, such as Chikamatsu’s Love in Osaka and Hero of the Red-Light District, but in an even more stylized way. The utter lack of privacy – and hence the mortal danger – of the world of the court is emphasized by showing the dwellings of these overdressed people as akin to beautiful dollhouses (or stage sets) in which everyone is more or less exposed.

Man and woman in house in 10th Century Japan, talking
Yasuna and Sakaki in her room, in medium shot…

In the first scene in which Yasuna and Sakaki confer alone, which occurs about thirteen minutes into the film, the couple is seen from a high angle, and the director’s very formal composition stresses the diagonals of the room. It’s a beautiful, elegant space.

Man and woman in 10th Century room, seen from outside
Then Yasuna and Sakaki from outside, in long shot…

However, after Yasuna tells Sakaki that she’s the only one in the world who understands him, the film cuts to a medium long shot of the same room as seen from just outside, and then to an extreme long shot of the room as seen from Dōman’s room.

A man from a distance watches the room with the man and the woman
From his room, Dōman gazes wistfully at the couple, seen in extreme long shot

Dōman gazes longingly through a curtain at Sakaki (whom he secretly loves), before being interrupted by his jealous lover, Yasunori’s wife. The villainous characters can thus easily witness the alliance between the two innocent young people, and plot together to foil it.

Uchida was a lifelong lover of theater, and he seemed determined to load onto this dreamlike narrative every theatrical effect he could think of: Kabuki, Noh, Bunraku, even avant-garde styles. Certain scenes, such as Yasuna’s dance or Kon’s hasty departure, are narrated by an offscreen reciter in an alien sing-song voiceover, describing the emotions of the characters in a manner suggesting to me the benshi narrators of silent films, which existed in Japan well into the 1930s, during Uchida’s early years as a director. The overall effect is overwhelmingly presentational and anti-naturalistic.

A woman is revealed on stage in a constructed "hut" as a disembodied hand draws back the curtain
Kon as Kuzo-no-ha is revealed in her “home”: the Kabuki stage

In the film’s final act, there is no longer even a perfunctory attempt to disguise the narrative’s theatrical artifice, as this part of the movie begins with a curtain being pulled back by a disembodied hand, revealing a kabuki stage and its naked props and painted backdrops. In a paradoxical way, this part of the film is the most “real,” as everything we see actually is as it appears to be: the artificial elements of a theatrically-created world, including a doll representing the fox-child. Even the “special effects” of this scene – the “flying” fox and the walls of the hut falling away – are achieved by mechanical rather than filmic means.

So was it Uchida’s intention merely to create a campy parody of this ancient material? Not at all. If it were, he wouldn’t hesitate to provide for the audience the trite happy ending it would demand of such a work. Yet Uchida frustrates this desire.

After Kon flies off to the forest of Shinoda, leaving Yasuna, his sanity apparently restored, clutching their baby, with the human girl Kuzu-no-ha close by and the Golden Crow in his possession at last, the main narrative threads have been resolved and all seems well. But then we flash back to Yasuna’s mad dance in the meadow, an event that occurred before his first encounter with either Kuzu-no-ha or Kon, as if the last hour of the movie had been merely his deranged hallucination. As before, we see him pull the dead Sakaki’s kimono over his head and collapse on the field, unconscious. Then, startlingly, his motionless human form is replaced by a stone monument, unmistakably implying that he has died.

It should also be noted that, unlike Yasuna, and with the exception of Yasunori’s evil widow, all the villainous characters – Dōman, Akuemon and Iwakura – apparently survive beyond the narrative’s end.6 It’s as if the director’s tragic sense, and his personal experience of war and revolution, would not allow him to contemplate an ending in which the virtuous triumph… an ending that, for him, would have been just as delusional as poor Yasuna’s mad visions.

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Footnotes

  1. Not to be confused with his son, Takeda Izumo II (1691-1756), who was also a Bunraku playwright, and who also served as owner of the same theater.
  2. It should be noted that, whereas most modern performances of Takeda’s 18th Century play include only Act IV, depicting the exposure of Kon as a kitsune and her abrupt departure, Uchida goes out of his way to include as well the parts of the play depicting the dark intrigues of the court and their destructive consequences. It should also be noted that in the film version, as opposed to the play’s original plot, Sakaki is actually innocent of the theft of the scroll, making the events of this early segment of the narrative even more disturbing than they are in the film’s source work.
  3. Sharp, Jasper (audio commentary), The Mad Fox (Blu-ray release). Arrow Video, 2020. ASIN: B0863TW7JG.
  4. In his Blu-ray commentary, Sharp makes the interesting point that, particularly with the graphic scenes of Sakaki’s torture, this film can be considered a transitional work between the elegance and restraint of Japanese Cinema’s classical era (the 1920s through the late 1950s) and the much more overtly violent films Japan produced from the late 1960s onward. Ibid.
  5. Scholar Keiko McDonald suggests that Uchida created the “mad dance” scene specifically to exploit Ōkawa’s skills as a dancer. McDonald, Keiko I. Japanese Classical Theater in Films, p. 106. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994. ISBN: 9780838635025.
  6. In folklore, Dōman in later life became the arch-nemesis of the son of Yasuna, Abe no Seimei, who is depicted in this film as an infant.

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