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Mikuni Rentarō, throughout his six-decade career, was one of the most distinctive, popular and versatile Japanese film actors, effectively portraying sensitive heroes, murderous monsters and everything in between. Beginning his career with a leading role in Kinoshita Keisuke’s The Good Fairy (Zen-Ma, 1951) – from which he took the name of the journalist character he played as his own stage name – he worked for many of the most prominent directors of his day, and was particularly memorable as the antagonist in Kobayashi Masaki’s classic Harakiri (Seppuku, 1962). He was nominated for the Japanese Academy Award for Best Actor or Best Supporting Actor ten times, and won the award three times. In 1987, he won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival for Shinran: Path to Purity (Shinran: Shiroi michi, 1987), a film which he co-wrote and directed as well as acted in. For Uchida, Mikuni appeared in The Outsiders, A Fugitive from the Past, the first, second, fourth and fifth installments of the Miyamoto Musashi series (as the priest Takuan), and in Uchida’s final film (also about Musashi) Swords of Death (as Baiken). He continued working until just two years before his death in 2013 at the age of 90.
Kitahara Mie was a popular actress of the 1950s. After making her debut as a teenager with a small role in Ozu’s The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (Ochazuke no aji, 1952), she appeared in a number of films by notable directors before her breakout performance in Nakahira Kō’s controversial juvenile delinquent drama, Crazed Fruit (Kurutta kajitsu, 1956). Her co-star in that film was Ishihara Yūjirō, who soon after became a superstar (the “Elvis Presley of Japan”) as a symbol of rebellious youth. Kitahara and Ishihara appeared as a popular screen couple in 19 more films from 1956 to 1960, while their offscreen relationship deepened. In 1960 they married, and Kitahara quit acting to devote herself full-time to the marriage. By all accounts, however, Ishihara led a very unhealthy lifestyle, leading to his early death in 1987 at the age of only 52. After her husband’s death, Kitahara never remarried, nor did she resume her career.
Tsukioka Yumeji began her career as a star actress in the famous Takarazuka all-female stage revue and made her film debut in 1940, while still in her teens. She appeared in over 90 films, including Sekigawa Hideo’s Hiroshima (1953), about the atomic bombing of that city – her hometown. In the West, she is best known for her performance as Aya, the very modern friend of the heroine, played by Hara Setsuko, in Ozu’s classic Late Spring (1949). She died in 2017 at the age of 94.
Kaneko Nobuo was a prolific character actor. After his memorable early role as the protagonist’s cold, heartless son in Kurosawa Akira’s acclaimed Ikiru (1952), he appeared in over 200 films, mostly playing villains. He portrayed the character of Yamamori Yoshio in all five of the original Battles Without Honor and Humanity series (1973-1974), directed by Fukasaku Kinji. He died in 1995.
Akutagawa Yasushi was a film composer, the son of distinguished fiction writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (Rashomon) and the younger brother of actor Akutagawa Hiroshi. From the early 1950s, he composed music for the films of many celebrated directors, including Kinugasa Teinosuke, Imai Tadashi, Toyoda Shirō and, especially, Gosho Heinosuke and Ichikawa Kon. For Uchida, he also composed the music for Twilight Saloon. He died in 1989.
Kimura Takeo was a prominent art director and production designer of the postwar period. He is particularly well known for his extravagant designs for the films of Suzuki Seijun, such as Gate of Flesh (Nikutai no mon, 1964), Tokyo Drifter (Tōkyō nagaremono, 1966) and Princess Raccoon (Operetta tanuki gotten, 2005). Kimura is also cited in the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest debuting film director of all time, as he completed his first feature, Dreaming Awake (Yume no mani mani), in 2008 at the age of 90. He died in 2010, age 91.
Note: In a previous version of this review, I apologized to the reader for the extremely low quality of the screenshots, which were derived from an inferior print. Recently (that is, in September 2024), a much improved print came into my possession, and I not only have replaced all the screenshots, but have taken the opportunity to re-view the film. Thus, I have kept the Commentary and Analysis section below much as it was, with minor changes, but have added a Postscript below with additional comments and observations. .
A Hole of My Own Making serves as a curiously muted coda to Uchida’s nearly three-decade-long association with Nikkatsu. It’s also strangely unlike his other two 1955 movies, A Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji and Twilight Saloon, which were made for, respectively, Toei and Shintoho. Those were ensemble films with large and diverse casts; this is a chamber piece, and there are only six characters that matter: the wealthy Shiga siblings, Tamiko and Junjirō, their stepmother Nobuko, the two rather strange suitors for the beautiful Tamiko’s hand in marriage, Komatsu and Dr. Ihara, and the mysterious Keiko, Junjirō’s former wife.
Like contemporary movies by Naruse Mikio, this is a melodrama – a “woman’s picture,” to be exact – perhaps the only such film in Uchida’s entire filmography. But unlike Naruse, Uchida and his longtime screenwriter Yagi Yasutarō appeared to have no precise idea what the female audience of the time wanted, and in fact they might not have cared much. Their strategy, it seems, was to use the conventions of the genre to make points about Japanese politics and society.
The narrative could also be considered a dark variation on, and almost a parody of, those Ozu Yasujirō films in which a loving parent tries to persuade an attractive but reluctant daughter – played by, say, Hara Setsuko or Iwashita Shima – to get married. The big difference is that, in this case, there’s no loving parent to nudge the young woman towards matrimony: Tamiko’s father has died, and her mother also passed away under unspecified circumstances. The only parental figure she has is Nobuko, who is as unlike a “wicked stepmother” as can be imagined. But Tamiko’s feelings towards her shift over the course of the narrative from contemptuous indifference to overt resentment and jealousy, even hatred.
In the Ozu films, the marriageable daughters seem admirably decent and level-headed, but Tamiko, deprived of a strong parent she respects, possesses no such common sense or moral compass. Naruse, by contrast, specialized in films about family members who, in various ways, fail one another. But almost none of his films depicted family strife with such unrelenting bitterness as this one does.1
Its dark tone, in fact, contrasts dramatically with the rather upbeat vision of modern Japan of his previous movie, Twilight Saloon, which leads me to suspect that this film is more the screenwriter Yagi’s vision than Uchida’s own. (This movie would be the final collaboration between the two.) I willingly acknowledge that, although the question of the respective contributions to a film by its writer(s) and director is often a complex and fraught one, it’s the director – to the extent that he exercises control over the final cut – who bears ultimate responsibility for the finished product. So it may seem as if I’m unfairly giving Uchida all the credit for those movies I really like, and his screenwriters all the “blame” for those pictures, like this one, for which I don’t care quite as much.
However, Yagi’s contemporary work for such overtly left-wing directors as Sekigawa Hideo (e.g., Hiroshima, 1953) and Imai Tadashi (e.g., A Story from Echigo (Echigo Tsutsuishi Oyashirazu, 1964)) – the scripts for which are much blunter than the ambiguous, ironic tone of most of Uchida’s best work of the 1950s and 1960s – lends credence to the theory that Yagi may have been the dominant figure in this collaboration. Certainly all the talk about postwar Japan becoming an economic colony of America, or the shots of empty Japanese factories and of protest banners against U.S. military bases, are unsubtle in a way that’s quite atypical of Uchida.
This movie would seem at first glance to be the most “anti-American” that Uchida, in his youth a great admirer of all things Western, ever made. But this perception is deceptive. True, one of the main themes of the picture is the corrupting influence of America, but its entire focus is on the corruptibility of the Japanese. The filmmakers seem to suggest that whatever economic, cultural and spiritual hole the traumatized Japan of 1955 has found itself in, that situation is entirely its own fault – specifically for launching a disastrous war.2
Like so many Japanese movies of the era, the characters are schematically divided between tradition-bound and Western-leaning ones. The most traditional characters are the drifter, Komatsu, who seems to have no fixed place in the new Japan, and Nobuko, who’s invariably dressed in kimono, rather than modern clothing, and who also holds morally conservative views. The most painful plot element of the film is Nobuko’s persistent attempts to be a good, traditional stepmother to Tamiko, who just as persistently rebuffs her.
The most “Western” character is, of course, the highly aggressive and amoral Dr. Ihara. Ihara is always disrespectfully touching and patting the women around him in a way that, before the war, would have been literally unthinkable for a Japanese male (or at least one who was not a criminal). It’s significant that, by the end of the narrative, he is heading for America, where, it is hinted, a man so contemptuous of Japanese traditions and manners really belongs.
The two adult siblings, Tamiko and Junjirō, are thus situated uncomfortably between these two extremes. Although the young people almost invariably appear in Western clothing (Tamiko is seen in a kimono near the very end of the narrative), psychologically, they appear to be captive to prewar class assumptions and values that no longer apply in the newly Americanized Japan. So their attempts to adapt to the modern world – Junjirō by playing the stock market, Tamiko by asserting her sexual independence – end in dismal failure.
The character of Komatsu, portrayed by the extremely self-effacing actor Uno Jūkichi, is perhaps the most problematical aspect of the film. He’s almost a cipher: remote, diffident and completely uninvolving dramatically. Yagi and Uchida never make the friendship between him and Ihara plausible, and the unlikelihood of their bond becomes even clearer as Ihara gradually stops concealing his contempt for him.
The only scene in which an audience might actually relate to Komatsu is when Ihara speaks disrespectfully about Tamiko in front of his bevy of female admirers, and his enraged friend savagely beats the doctor (who, of course, fights back just as savagely). But he immediately ruins his one interesting moment by returning, after being evicted from the bar, to apologize to the amazed Ihara. And when Tamiko at last expresses interest in Komatsu near the end of the film, he brushes her off by casually admitting that he’d prefer to be alone: an unanswerable put-down.
In a sense, Komatsu, like Ihara but unlike the members of the Shiga family, is not a loser, but only because he seems to want almost nothing from life, and therefore cannot really “fail.” Komatsu is so dull that he’s at his most fascinating at the very beginning of the movie, when credulous passers-by mistake him, lying asleep in a cave, for a corpse.
By contrast, the vulgar and misogynistic Ihara, as played by Mikuni Rentarō, is a strangely charismatic antihero. It’s rather refreshing to see a mid-1950s Japanese movie in which a professional, “respectable” male – not an “outlaw,” such as a yakuza or a delinquent – goes after what he wants brazenly, without the slightest shame or moral compunction, like a contemporary Hollywood character played by, say, Kirk Douglas. And what Ihara wants most is, of course, sex, which in his mind is totally divorced from any concept of love.
What makes him even more interesting is that there seems to be an element of class warfare in his targeting of both women of the upper-class Shiga family. He may not have deliberately set out to destroy the Shigas, but he gives the impression that he would never regret having done so. In the end, he simply shrugs off Tamiko’s final put-down, when she obliquely and wittily wishes him dead, as an insignificant wound – a mosquito bite. What ultimately separates this movie from a typical Hollywood morality tale is that the “villain” never gets his comeuppance in the end. Indeed, Ihara may yet get his promotion to hospital chief.3
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Thanks for your kind comments. Creating a blog is just a matter of learning by doing. I had to learn everything from scratch. It’s mainly a matter of figuring out what you want on your blog and how to organize it. I’m on free WordPress, but hosted by a paid service. This is working out so far, though it’s become expensive recently.