Like his midcentury peers and mentors, Kozaburo Yoshimura directed films that attempted to make sense of cultural whiplash, particularly the full-fledged industrial Postwar modernization of Japan. Through the lens of female protagonists—often housewives, sex workers, or in the case of Bamboo Doll of Echizen (1963) a mix of both—studio system mainstays like Yoshimura sought to represent people caught in between the oppressive throes of stubborn traditions and modern economies. Based on a novella published the same year of its release, Echizen’s drama kicks off in the immediate aftermath of a funeral. The death of a local craftsman sets a doomed romance in motion. His son, the 21-year-old Bamboo artisan Kisuke (Junichiro Yamashita), having just taken over the family trade, marries Tamae (Ayako Wakao), a sex worker who regularly serviced his late father.
In an almost fairy tale-like manner, the narrator introduces the film’s primary setting, the small hamlet of Takegami as a “forgotten and forlorn place.” The camera surveys a cluster of ramshackle properties, untouched by the tides of change. Kisuke’s workshop and home are entrenched in a forested mountain ridge, its foliage either snowcapped or drenched by ceaseless rainfall. For the first 20 minutes of the film, it is not even possible to tell that the film is set in Postwar Japan. If the drama was in fact a banal tale tucked away in the serene backdrop of a 16th century feudal conflict, most audience members wouldn’t bat an eye. It may have been precisely Yoshimura’s purpose to intensify this feeling of a place lost in time, for the film’s central domestic tension is one that transcends period.
It becomes immediately clear that this hastily pursued union is nothing but problematic. Kisuke, who supposedly lost his mother at a young age, is a compulsive man-child. His obsessive drive to court Tamae, but adamant revulsion at any sign of intimacy, points to a whole host of unresolved oedipal desires. Wakao’s characterization of Tamae resists the clear-cut polarities of either submissive or overtly rebellious female archetypes. In Kenji Mizoguchi’s Streets of Shame (1957), also starring Wakao as a cunning brothel worker, there is at least the possibility of women sacrificing their bodies as a stepping stone to get ahead in the unforgiving climate of capitalism. In Echizen, Yoshimura doesn’t even allow for such a pyrrhic reprieve. No matter how hard Tamae tries to move on from her burdened past, it follows her through to her tragic demise. No longer able to bear her poised, disarming smile, Yoshimura presents a once dignified woman exhausted, barren and reduced by her environment.
Bamboo Doll of Echizen screens this afternoon, December 9, and on December 11, at Film at Lincoln Center on 16mm as part of the series “Kozaburo Yoshimura: Tides of Emotion.”
