The Water Magician

The Water Magician is a 1933 silent film (with benshi accompaniment) by Kenji Mizoguchi.

Takino Shiraito (played by Irie Takako) is a water magician in a traveling funfair in northern Chubu, it seems between Kanazawa and Naoetsu. She's famous for her artistry in controlling the long paddles that direct streams of water into shapes and patterns which enthrall her audiences. She meets a miserable carriage driver who rides her into town on the back of his horse after his carriage breaks down. Shiraito has a golden heart and, taking on the role of mother (often portrayed in Mizoguchi films; note too that the boy is an orphan), she resolves to pay his college tuition in dribs and drabs and sends him off to Tokyo so he can become a lawyer.

The story is singular and tragic. The boy does finish his studies, thanks to Shiraito, who despite her struggles manages to send him money regularly. But her will to help him and others ultimately leads to her downfall. Unable to fulfill her promise, of providing the boy with a few yen from time to time, she offers herself to (or is raped by) a usurer, and afterwards is robbed by the carnival's knife thrower. In the commotion he drops a knife which, after Shiraito regains consciousness, she picks up. Certain that the usurer had set up the robbery, and furious she has lost what she had demeaned herself for, Shiraito returns and kills the man during what appears to be an act of self-defense against an attempt to rape her. Later charged with murder, she is as astonished as she is overjoyed to discover that the prosecutor is the very boy she has helped reach the position of authority and high status he now holds. She implores him to carry out his duty, dutifully for her and for him, and this he reluctantly does, and Shiraito is consequently sentenced to death, choosing instead to end her own life right there in the courtroom, while the boy puts a bullet in his head a year later on a bank of the Asano River.

Water as a symbol for purification and the passage of time (one of the last lines: The river flows on as before and as it always will), suicide as an act of ultimate love (to reunite in another—generally accepted as better—world), and the rigid, inescapable confines of social roles . . . these are all themes in this film as well as in others by Mizoguchi. I found most of The Water Magician compelling, and it got me most thinking about the inner-workings of Shiraito. No matter what misfortune was thrown at her, even her inevitable death at a young age, she didn't fail to find enough good around her to press forward, albeit in a self-sacrificial and arguably Japanese sort of way.

Interesting asides:

● Shiraito "bit out her tongue in the courthouse," the benshi tell us. Apparently, suicide by biting off one's tongue was (maybe still is) often used in Chinese literature and films depicting ancient China. This was the first time I'd heard the expression, and in Mizoguchi's film it seems this is literally how she ends herself.

● The Water Magician was adapted from an Izumi Kyoka novel entitled The Righteous and the Chivalrous.

● Shiraito's lover, the boy (Kinya), was played by Okada Tokihiko, who died at the age of 31 from tuberculosis, a year after The Water Magician was made.

Tokyo March

Tokyo March (Japanese: 東京行進曲, or Tōkyō kōshinkyoku) is a 1929 silent film directed by Kenji Mizoguchi which was originally screened with live performances by benshi. Dressed in formal black-and-white Western clothing and in bow-ties, the benshi provided the narration, accompanied by musical performances as well.

This melodramatic love story, only 24 minutes long (what remains of it anyway), incorporates some of the themes that Mizoguchi would become well known for through his later films. These include the trials and tribulations of destitute geisha and other women, social inequality in a rapidly modernizing Japan, water as a symbol of both purification and the unyielding passage of time, and relationships between men (usually from the upper crust) and women (common but not unrefined) in the "lower" (but not necessarily uncultivated) pleasure corners, such as Shitamachi in Tokyo and Gion in Kyoto.

In this short story of a film, Michiyo and her friend Sumie live in Tokyo, "the center of sin and corruption" we are told. Michiyo has never known her father, and her mother has recently died. Yen-less she becomes a geisha to make ends meet. A young man (Yoshiki) and his friend (Sakuma) are playing tennis when they see Michiyo walk by. Yoshiki falls in love at first sight, but then Michiyo changes her name to Orie the following day when she becomes a geisha, and Yoshiki "hates" geisha. After a short while, though, the fire in his heart burns away the hate and he resolves to marry her. Meanwhile, his father (we don't know it's his father yet) appears to be falling in love with Orie, too. When he finds out that his son wishes to marry her, he spits at the idea. After all, they belong to a higher social class than mere geisha. The truth, however, is that he is the father of Michiyo/Orie, and now he must tell his son that she is his half-sister. Dun Dun Duuun!!!

Compelling for its black-and-white scenes of a bustling pre-war Tokyo and for its exuberant, melodramatic benshi performance, Tokyo March is a remarkable early work by a man considered to be the most Japanese director of Japanese directors. There's also a happy ending, which surprised me for a Mizoguchi film.

“Tokyo March” (theme song) composed by Shinpei Nakayama, performed by Chiyako Sato

Longing for the past when the streets in Ginza were lined with willow trees A young beauty becomes a nobody with age Dance to the jazz music and down liquor into the night And the rain that is the tears of the dancers will sprinkle at the break of dawn.

Kenji Mizoguchi's Tokyo March

Kenji Mizoguchi's Tokyo March

In the Realm of the Senses

Never seen anything like this. Intensely disturbing, sexually explicit, beautifully framed and shot, and based on actual events, In the Realm of the Senses is considered a masterpiece by some and extremely controversial filth by others. This 1976 French-Japanese art film was written and directed by Nagisa Oshima, one of Japan's masters of cinema. It has been cut into various, less graphic versions in some countries, it was edited in France and listed as a French production to evade Japan's strict censorship laws, and it was banned in Belgium until 1994 (the only film to be banned there since).

Ian Buruma, in his 2018 book A Tokyo Romance, remarks: "No filmmaker had ever pulled off anything like this before. The movie was both hard core and tender, a cinematic blow for sexual freedom, especially for women."

I've never seen or read anything that inspires so much pity for a man's penis, due as much to its having to constantly service the insatiable Sada as to its ultimate dismemberment. Sada Abe (Eiko Matsuda), a maid at a Tokyo hotel frequented by geisha, but a prostitute in her past, falls hard for the hotel owner, Kichizo Ishida (Tatsuya Fuji). For most of the film the camera is focused on their sexual experimentation and fast-growing mutual obsession. This coupled with Oshima's unique artistry makes the film not like pornography and, along with those miscellaneous onscreen observers to their sexual acts, we're forced into the role of voyeur and then finally of witness to murder and a bloody emasculation.

According to Buruma's book, the real Sada (pictured below) was arrested four days after the actual killing and seemed as happy as could be. The news of her crime and arrest swept the nation. Apparently the public felt deeply sympathetic for her and she was let off the hook. Buruma also mentioned that she opened a bar somewhere in Tokyo afterwards and, according to American author and long-term Tokyo resident Donald Richie, who had been to her establishment, the regulars there would stand up and cup their hands over their genitals each night when the infamous mama-san came in.

The real Sada Abe immediately after her arrest (May 20, 1936 at Takanawa Police Station)