A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors. Alexander Jacoby
but the plot was rooted in the native traditions of shinpa, while long, static dialogue scenes were clearly conceived for the benshi to explain.
Hatanaka’s next film as director, Children of the Street (Chimata no ko, 1924), was a socially conscious account of urban child poverty; though also extant, it lacks the fame of its predecessor. After co-directing Easygoing Dad (Nonkina tōsan, 1925) with Tokuji Ozawa, Hatanaka returned to the theater. His postwar career included acting roles in some noteworthy Nikkatsu films, such as Tomotaka Tasaka’s The Pram (Ubaguruma, 1955) and Tadashi Imai’s Darkness at Noon (Mahiru no ankoku, 1956).
1921 Kantsubaki / Winter Camellias
1924 Chimata no ko / Children of the Street
1925 Nakayama Yasubei / Yasubei Nakayama
Nonkina tōsan / Easygoing Dad (co-director)
HAYASHI Kaizō
(b. July 15, 1957)
林海象
Hayashi is the movie brat of modern Japanese directors: his films, often shot nostalgically in black and white, have essayed postmodern reworkings of classical genres. Before directing, he worked with Shūji Terayama’s Tenjōsajiki theatrical troupe, a background faintly visible in the carnivalesque elements and surreal touches of To Sleep So as to Dream (Yume miru yōni nemuritai, 1986) and Circus Boys (Nijūseiki shōnen dokuhon, 1989). Both these early films showed definite promise. The former was a film buff’s joke: a silent film, shot in lustrous monochrome, in which two private detectives discover a kidnapping victim trapped in a fragment of an old chanbara. Though something of an exercise, the film played wittily with the way in which a star’s filmed image ultimately supplants the real, mortal self. More emotionally affecting was Circus Boys, a bittersweet account of the different paths taken in life by two brothers brought up in a traveling circus. Here the black and white visual poetry spoke for a human rather than an aesthetic nostalgia, creating a low-key poignancy in its sense of the difficulties and disappointments of adult life compared to the simplicity of childhood dreams.
In The Most Terrible Time in My Life (Waga jinsei saiaku no toki, 1994), Hayashi again opted for black and white, turning modern Yokohama into a moody backdrop to a marvelously well-judged pastiche of film noir. Though admittedly a little too reminiscent of a minor Truffaut twenty-five years too late, it was given human depth by Masatoshi Nagase’s superb performance as inept private eye Maiku Hama, and the ending was genuinely cathartic. Hayashi made two more films featuring the same character, but these, relatively blandly shot in color, suffered from the diminishing returns characteristic of most sequels. Nevertheless, Hayashi later revived the character for a television series in which each episode was directed by a filmmaker of note; Shinji Aoyama’s contribution, The Forest with No Name (Shiritsu tantei Hama Maiku: Namae no nai mori, 2002), later received a cinema release in its own right.
Hayashi’s attempts to parody other genres have proved less successful. Zipang (1990), was a wild jidai-geki set in a stylized medieval Japan vaguely inspired by Marco Polo’s misapprehensions; spectacular art direction did not compensate for its overall vacuity. Even sillier was Cat’s Eye (1997), a paper-thin, crudely characterized and clumsily plotted adaptation of a manga about a trio of female cat burglars. Nevertheless, Hayashi has remained willing to experiment with new approaches, even attempting a hyperrealist style in The Breath (Umihōzuki, 1996), which used only ambient light to film a story about a washed-up detective investigating a disappearance in Taiwan. With his first American film Lost Angeles (2000), Hayashi brought his penchant for pastiche to a realist genre, producing a spoof documentary about the experiences of a Japanese rock band in the United States. However, this was rather poorly received, and Hayashi has not since realized a theatrical feature. Even his best films clearly owed much to his collaborators, particularly art director Takeo Kimura and cinematographer Yūichi Nagata (significantly, his monochrome films have proved much better than his color ones). But the directorial flair and wit of Circus Boys and The Most Terrible Time in My Life should not be discounted.
1986 Yume miru yōni nemuritai / To Sleep So as to Dream
1988 Idea (short)
1989 Nijūseiki shōnen dokuhon / Circus Boys / The Boy’s Own Book of the 20th Century (lit.)
1990 Zipang / Zipang / The Legend of Zipang
1991 Figaro Stories (co-director)
1994 Waga jinsei saiaku no toki / The Most Terrible Time in My Life
1995 Harukana jidai no kaidan o / Stairway to the Distant Past
1996 Wana / The Trap
Umihōzuki / The Breath
1997 Romance (short)
Cat’s Eye
Chinnanē / Born to be Baby (short)
1998 Otome no inori / A Maiden’s Prayer (short; unreleased)
2000 Lost Angeles
HIGASHI Yōichi
(b. November 14, 1934)
東陽一
Known in the West mainly for one film, Village of Dreams (E no naka no boku no mura, 1996), Higashi has in fact produced an oeuvre of consistent intelligence and unobtrusive political commitment along liberal and progressive lines. His feature debut, People of the Okinawa Islands (Okinawa rettō, 1969), was hailed by Joan Mellen as “aesthetically the single finest example of the new documentary [then] emerging in Japan.” Using a hidden camera to record forbidden footage of American installations, Higashi produced a critical examination of the continuing U.S. military presence on Okinawa at the time of its reversion to Japanese rule. His next film and first fiction feature, Gentle Japanese (Yasashii Nipponjin, 1971), also dealt with the legacy of the Okinawan experience in World War II; it recounted the political awakening of a young man who, as a baby at the time of the defeat, had survived a mass suicide on the island. In Satori (Nihon yōkaiden: Satori, 1973), Higashi used a supernatural story to examine the anxieties of modern Japanese.
Higashi’s most critically acclaimed film in Japan was Third (Sādo, 1978), a powerful semi-documentary study of the life of a juvenile murderer in a reformatory, scripted by Shūji Terayama. The extreme understatement of Toshiyuki Nagashima’s lead performance, and the precision with which the camera picked out details in the bare prison environment, gave some scenes a near-Bressonian austerity. After this, Higashi switched his focus to women protagonists in a sequence of subtly feminist films. No More Easy Going (Mō hōzue wa tsukanai, 1979) was a melodrama about a college student who, torn between two unsatisfactory lovers, finally learns that she must live without them both. Natsuko (Shiki: Natsuko, 1980) subtly chronicled a 20-year-old woman’s quest for personal and professional fulfilment, while Manon (1981), vaguely inspired by the Abbé Prévost’s novel, followed the protagonist’s relationships with numerous men. Second Love (Sekando rabu, 1983) was about a woman trying to deal with the unmotivated jealousy of her insecure, younger second husband. These films were noted for their unusually strong heroines. In contrast, The Rape (Za reipu, 1982) and Metamorphosis (Keshin, 1986) dealt with the oppression of women in a patriarchal society.
During the nineties, Higashi adapted Sue Sumii’s epic novel, The River without a Bridge (Hashi no nai kawa, 1992), set in the Meiji and Taisho periods, about discrimination against the burakumin underclass. The same theme was touched on obliquely in Village of Dreams, a delicate account of the childhood of twin brothers in rural Shikoku during the late forties. Despite its hints of social criticism, the ultra-picturesque settings and elements of magic realism (the group of witches perching in the trees to comment on events) slightly over-sweetened the tone, but the film was atmospheric and affecting. In The Crying Wind (Fūon, 2004), Higashi used the same magical realist approach in a return to the Okinawa setting of his earliest features. The adult stories, in which now elderly protagonists come to terms with their memories of wartime traumas, were somewhat glib, but Higashi again showed his skill at dramatizing the intense emotional lives of children. My Grandpa (Watashi no guranpa, 2003) focused on a slightly older