Osaka Elegy

Osaka Elegy (Japanese: 浪華悲歌, Naniwa Elegy) is a 1936 film written and directed by Kenji Mizoguchi and featuring many of the same actors as his other 1936 picture, Sisters of the Gion.

The film starts off with a spat between Sonosuke Asai (Benkai Shiganoya) and his wife Sumiko (Yoko Umemura). He has “married up” in the family, she reminds him, after he expresses his longing to return to their sweet honeymoon days. He now despises her.

Sonosuke, who owns a drug company, invites one of his employees, telephone operator Ayako Murai (Isuzu Yamada), to dinner. She is reluctant to go with him. In the next scene she discusses another matter with her love interest, Susumu Nishimura: Ayako’s father has embezzled 300 yen from his company and will likely be arrested if the money isn’t paid back toot sweet. Susumu tells Ayako he can’t help her. Discouraged, she returns home and gets into an argument with her father, who calls her ungrateful after she reproaches him for being irresponsible with money and for failing to deal with the consequences of his crime.

She resolves to pay back the money herself and agrees to serve as Sonosuke’s mistress in a well-appointed apartment he provides. They attend a Bunraku puppet show, where Sumiko catches them together. Yoshizo Fujino, a colleague of Sonosuke, comes to his friend’s rescue, assuring Sumiko that the young Ayako is actually there with him. Sumiko doesn’t appear convinced, and the affair doesn’t last much longer as she tracks her husband down at his love nest. She finds him in bed feigning a fever, with Ayako dressed almost like a geisha and standing at his bedside. Sumiko has her husband taken home.

Ayako pays back the money her father took but is then made to feel responsible and guilty (by her younger sister, no less) for her brother, who, because of their father’s squandering and unemployment, will not be able to complete his university degree unless the rest of his tuition is paid. So she becomes Yoshizo Fujino’s mistress to acquire enough money to help him. She eventually does get the cash and sends it home, but her father hides it, telling his son and other daughter that Ayako is reckless and selfishly unconcerned for her family.

But as far as Ayako is aware, her family’s problems are behind them, and she can once again pursue the romantic love she initially sought with Susumu. She even tells him she had only been playing the role of the mistress; if he truly loves her, he'll understand why she did it and love her all the same.

This romantic outcome, however, does not transpire. Instead, Ayako is made to feel she has done wrong, that she's “seduced” older men for money. And Susumu, who now acts like an obedient little boy both to Ayako and to the police chief, meekly accuses her of orchestrating the whole thing while casting himself as a victim of her manipulation. Scorned by her father for being a “delinquent” and for bringing shame to the family, and left defenseless by her younger sister and older brother, she is cast out, now dressed in Western-style clothing.

Alone and with nowhere to go, she wanders the night. She stands melancholic on a bridge (suggestive of suicide) and stares down at a clump of refuse floating in the river (symbolizing personal “pollution”). She then encounters a doctor, an acquaintance of Sonosuke, and boldly asks if there's a “cure for female delinquency.” He tells her he has no idea and walks off. The question is left to the audience—a shot of Ayako walking directly toward the camera, her beseeching eyes seemingly fixed on us.

Mizoguchi depicted the roles of Japanese women in his films. Not as a feminist, but rather as an enthusiast of sorts, or a feminisuto, as Ian Buruma suggests in his 1984 book Behind the Mask:

Mizoguchi is often called a feminisuto in Japan. As with all Japanese-English terms, one cannot be too careful with this. Mizoguchi was never a fighter for women's rights. There is no evidence that he seriously considered possible, or even thought desirable, a real change in the state of affairs he so movingly depicted in his films. It would be more accurate, as the American film critic Audie Bock pointed out, to define a feminisuto as a worshiper of women. This Mizoguchi undoubtedly was.

Mizoguchi explored the suffering of women who had taken on certain roles or were pressed into them. Did he derive some sadistic enjoyment from this suffering? According to Buruma, the prostrate position was Mizoguchi’s favorite when filming women in submissive roles. He was a frequent patron of brothels in Kyoto in the 1920s and a self-proclaimed transmitter of venereal disease, who may have passed on the syphilis that killed his wife. Many of his female characters seem to reflect aspects of this feminisuto side, while the men often share his desires and inclinations. Yet he counterbalanced this with a weighty sense of guilt and responsibility. In Osaka Elegy, that guilt is not just Ayako’s; it's also directed at the audience, or society as a whole, which she transfers to us, or at least makes us aware of, with her imploring gaze at the very end.

The women Mizoguchi focused on can often be placed into the categories of whore or mother (or matriarch), with a few others fitting the roles of romantic lover or daughter, or at least attempting to do so. In Osaka Elegy, Ayako strives for romantic love, while a male-dominated society and her financial dependence force her into the whore role. Only when Susumu agrees to marry her does she make a sudden, almost mechanical shift toward the role of mother, and Susumu in turn takes on something like the role of a prepubescent son.

Yet she is unable to remain in this role, no matter how quickly she tries to secure it, practically skipping into the kitchen to prepare a grand meal for her man. She has already revealed who she's been, and while Japanese society might eventually forgive her for the transgressions she is accused of (“Hate the crime, not the person,” as the police chief tells her), she is nevertheless banished for a time. This perceived failure is not her playing the role of the whore; that kind of moral judgment is less central here. Rather, she's punished for disrupting social harmony, for creating unease among respectable citizens, and for failing, in the eyes of others, to properly fulfill the roles expected of her.

This is one of my favorite Mizoguchi films, not just for its style and narrative, but for the way it leaves you with an uneasy sense of complicity.