Colin Marshall

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Mikio Naruse, 1960)

I don't know how it is over there, but we midcentury-Japanese-film-loving Westerners tend to think of our form of choice as pretty much being all about Ozu, and if we need two great filmmakers, it's somewhat about Mizoguchi as well. True, the period also saw releases from auteurs of Kurosawa and Imamura's caliber that hold up today — the former's High and Low is one of my favorites, with The Bad Sleep Well not far behind — but those guys worked well into the 90s. Ozu and Mizoguchi passed this mortal realm in 1963 and 1956, respectively, and thus forever remain creatures of that era.

Western cinephiles thus bring their names up together often, but another director merits membership in the fold; the "duo" of Yasujirō Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi should rightly become the "trio" of Yasujirō Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi and Mikio Naruse. Naruse, a fellow Shochiku intern alonsgide Ozu and a onetime boss of Kurosawa who lived from 1905 to 1969 and put out his final film in 1967, seems to have possessed the same cinematic skill of his two colleagues but for whatever reason has remained almost completely known outside Japan. Number of pictures made: 89. Number of pictures available as Netflix DVDs: one.

That single rentable DVD, though, is When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, which possesses the strength of at least five regular ol' midcentury Japanese movies. From what I've read, it's also representative of Naruse's later period — which, to certain specialized film critics, seems to mean his better period — where geishas, bar hostesses, wives and mothers come up against Japanese life's harsh realities. As Wikipedia quotes Naruse as saying, "From the youngest age, I have thought that the world we live in betrays us; this thought still remains with me."

Japanese film of the 50s and 60s could hit a fairly vertiginous height of melodrama, so it's deservedly noted that Naruse here refrains from treating his central character, a widowed Ginza bar hostess named Keiko, as some sort of Job figure. Still, she's pressed on all sides: wrong side of 30, no husband, obligated to lay out heaps of cash on luxurious clothes, clung onto by an ineffectual brother and his polio'd son. She could start her own bar, but doesn't quite have the scratch. She could get married, but promised her late husband she wouldn't. She could get a bit more support by sleeping around, but then would risk tarnishing her all-important reputation. A homely businessman seems to offer the way out, but he turns out to be a deluded compulsive con man with a shack by the power plant, a worn-down wife and a couple kids who circle around on a tricycle in the dirt all day. Hmm.

This sounds like a downer, and maybe it downs some viewers, but I find more of a richness in it. I won't do any better than (former Marketplace of Ideas guest) Philip Lopate, who in his Criterion essay observed that Naruse takes no "cheap, feel-good shortcuts," nor does he indulge in "facile apocalyptic bleakness." Complaining about the mainstream prevalence of the former has, with good cause, become standard movie-critic copy, but taking the latter pose and calling it realism constitutes, I would submit, even more of a threat to cinematic quality. "No one is that good — or that evil — in a Naruse movie," Lopate continues. "He neither ennobles nor demeans, but shows realistically the ways that we are all mixed, contradictory creatures."

So, richness and complexity of life? Check, and then some. That would be enough for me to put out a solid recommendation, but Naruse also delivers it in an aesthetically interesting fashion; this thing brims with early-60s "cool," neatly suited to its multilayered black-and-white photography. Events move along in a highly measured fashion, which, combined with the even, stylized surface, really makes me realize what Kurosawa meant when he likened Naruse's work to "a great river with a calm surface and a raging current in its depths." The understated method of transmission renders the material that much more effective. Keiko's voiceovers, on the other hand, may or may not lend richness; as much as I like the line "The best go home by car. Second-rate ones by streetcar. The worst go home with their customers," it probably would've been better illustrated than stated. But how could that xylophone jazz score not make up for any artistic lapse, large or small?

Big Man Japan (Hitoshi Matsumoto, 2007)

Superhero narratives that try to answer the question "But what would they be like in real life?" have returned to fashion lately, but I haven't quite gotten comfortable with them. Returning to Alan Moore's 1985 Watchmen, something like the ur-text of realistic superheroism, I found myself, bizarrely, enjoying it in inverse proportion to the degree of superhero-y stuff going on at a given moment.

Here's what I think is behind that. In my interview with Ramin Bahrani, we wondered aloud about those who don't seem to find the world interesting enough as it is. Can someone really be so bored with life that they can find in reality no remaining stories worth telling, no characters worth observing? The aphoristic nature of only the boring being bored makes it no less true, and if you're so unfascinated by existence that you need to fabricate a Death Star or an elven army or a man who can eject claws from his knuckles, well, you do the math. Such flights of fancy have long spoken to me a poverty of imagination, not a richness.

That said, the fantastical stuff sometimes works. Rare as I find those occasions, they do happen. Moore pulled it off in Watchmen by telling an essentially realistic human story in garish superhero mufti. (Which makes one question the necessity of said mufti, but still.) Star Trek, at its best, is simply about a bunch of personalities that have to bounce against one another when confronted with various external (and sometimes literal, in the case of the crashier alien races) impacts. Taking reality and tweaking one miniscule component of it — endow the protagonist with rudimentary telepathy, say, which may or may not be hallucinatory — has proven to be fertile, though underexploited, creative soil.

So there's potential in them thar hills, but my feeling is that those mining this potential have been doing it all wrong. Recent films like The Dark Knight and Superman Returns have explored the deep, pervasive angst of the modern superhero, and probably not without cause: a costumed crimefighter's live would be damn lonely my its very nature. But I find angsty superheroes, in whatever incarnation, no less preposterous than regular superheroes.

Hitoshi Matsumoto's Big Man Japan sheds light on why. Superheroes aren't the stuff of tragedy, of hard drama: they're the stuff of dark comedy! The title hero is a weary, divorced fellow living on a thin gruel of government stipend and advertising revenue between the monster battles for which he's electrically transformed into a sloppy, towering brawler with Eraserhead hair. But fewer Japanese than ever show an interest in vaguely nationalistic battles in their streets between cartoonish titans; sponsorship and coverage are down, and an incompetent, chain-smoking agent doesn't seem to be the solution. Occupational malaise bleeds into every facet of the Big Man Japan's life, which appears to have been ruined by the once-heroic dynasty of which he's the current endpoint.

This is all revealed through "documentary" segments which follow the hapless Masaru Daisatô from his miserable meals of seaweed ("I like it because it only gets big when you want it to" — which is also why he likes his umbrella), to his seedy, listless trips to the karaoke bar to his complaints about his ex-wife's tight-gripped custody of their daughter to his endurance of endless anti-Big Man graffitti from the public. Contrast this with the fights, where an increasingly bewildered Daisatô in Big Man Japan form reluctantly beats down a series of low-rent giant destructive creatures: a building-destroyer with a comb-over, a lethargic stink-emanator, one whose only weapon is his eyestalk. (Naturally, most of them possess that eerie, uniquely Japanese monster combination of grotesque body fronted by relatively realistic human face.)

What the film understands — and more than puts across — is that superheroism is less a tortured struggle of vigilance and moral responsibility than a tremendous pain in the ass. This obtains especially under the Japanese conditions Matsumoto illustrates: nobody, the sullen Daisatô included, cares about much of anything beyond status-seeking, whining about perceived entitlements, feeding their vices and giving their dogs ridiculous English names. This doesn't add up to a Yukio Mishima-style call to return to the militaristic "greatness" of Japan's imagined past, but one can't help noting the unimpressiveness of the mainstream society that's grown in its absence.

Dr. Akagi (Shohei Imamura, 1998)

Last week's Marketplace of Ideas broadcast featured an interview with Kim Hendrickson of The Criteron Collection, producer of their new Shohei Imamura three-disc box set. It's a fantastic package, including three of the filmmaker's early-1960s releases. They're excellent films and have drawn the lion's share of Imamura's critical acclaim, but I'm beginning to think I prefer his more restrained later career to his brasher earlier. I maintain that 1979's Vengeance is Mine is the finest serial-killer movie ever crafted. 1997's The Eel

skillfully sheaths a vaguely sinister core in the charming sensibility of many of Japan's films of that time.

A big fan, Mr. Waggish serves up one of the sharpest takes on Imamura I've read in the blogosphere (though I daresay he underestimates Mizoguchi and Ozu in drawing comparisons):

There are very few other directors who deal with the world in such an all-encompassing totality, without the desire to tie it down into a preconceived structure. As I’ve said elsewhere, Imamura convinces you that the world continues infinitely beyond the frame, and that he could show you any part of it if he so desired.

Imamura put this skill on display in the early films, but it's not absent in the later ones. Dr. Akagi, the man's second-to-last release, has the same feel: he could show you anything, but he does show you the trials of a white-suited WWII-era country doctor who puts his nose to the grindstone on his country's hepatitis problems, real or imagined, even as the bombs fall, and that's no accidental choice. Waggish writes that "it displays for the first time what Imamura believes constitutes virtue in the rotten world he’d portrayed for the previous forty years." I'd say that's right; while not portrayed as a saint — he's often clownish, and sometimes appears to stand on the very edge of sanity — Akagi keeps his head out of service to the emperor and on service to humanity. He professes the (officially mandated) desire to devote himself to Japan and all she stands for, but he clearly just cares about helping people; observe his treatment and later recruitment of a torn-up Dutch prisoner of war.

The 1990s, for reasons I can't begin to discern, brought a bunch of Japanese movies built around small groups of eccentrics forced together by circumstances. Dr. Akagi is no exception: the middle-aged title diagnoser of hepatitis — the film's Japanese name translates to "Dr. Liver" — is a bit of a goof with his sock-tucked pants and straw boater, and his immediate coterie includes an unpredictable morphine-addicted surgeon, a drunken monk, the aforementioned Dutchman and a near-child prostitute who's taken a real shine — a real shine — to old Akagi. Imamura assembles this motley crew organically; it doesn't feel like eccentricity for eccentricity's sake, or at least there's enough sleight of hand going on to make it seem that way.

This is reinforced by the fact that holy men getting wasted, surgeons getting blasted, the daughters of prostitutes raised explicitly to be prostitutes — "Remember," cautions the girl's mother, "no freebie lays" — and morally impeccable wartime doctors treating and harboring The Enemy are just a few drops in the greater Imamura current. The man was as fascinated by and revealing of large-scale hypocrisy and irrationality in Japanese society in 1998 as he was in 1961. Politics, nationality, homeland, ideology: these things meant nothing to Imamura, who perhaps depicted nothing more, over his entire career, than the simple act of survival — whether over poverty, repression, chaos or hepatitis — and the vagaries it entails for the everyman. Akagi isn't obviously a stand-in for Imamura and his principles, but hey, close enough.

(Also, the film has a surprising retro jazz score that absolutely, unexpectedly fits. But Imamura was always deft with music.)

Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

If his body of work is anything to go by, Haruki Murakami bears ambivalence toward a great many things: his homeland, the literary establishment, his generation, the stability of identity and the conventions of narrative structure, to name but a few. Even if he doesn’t really feel that way on a personal level, you’d be hard pressed not to get the impression after reading his new career-spanning short story collection, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, the form of which casts the author’s signature themes into sharp relief. For those who embrace Murakami’s -- and, to an extent, modern Japanese literature’s -- Spartan prose, on-and-off surrealism and oblique plotting, this book serves 24 pure helpings of the drug of choice.
    The remaining majority of the literati may be left with bewilderment-furrowed brows, but Murakami has never written to capture the mainstream. After his novel Norwegian Wood (of which this collection’s “Firefly” was a prototype) spread epidemically, the mild novelist fled Japan to escape the vagaries of notoriety. The spurning of easy acceptance runs all the way through this collection, from Murakami’s very first venture into short story composition to a cluster written, very recently, in a flurry of near-obsessive inspiration. Some pieces are reasonably clear allegories, as when a baker’s disastrous attempt to feed his newly-invented cakes to a pack of inexplicably well-regarded tasting crows parallels the tension between a young Murakami’s unorthodox work and the existing Japanese literary scene. Others stonewall with their sheer peculiarity; one wonders who on Earth could immediately unpack the symbolism of a job interview that turns out to be conducted by a stressed-out miniature bird.
    Working with a small fraction a novel’s word count, Murakami pitches his short works of fiction between slices of life and thought experiments. Like the author, the protagonists are sometimes, though not always, Japanese men born soon after the war, and they share a tendency to linger and observe their life even as it happens to them, drifting where they’re taken and reflecting upon the current moment as a distant memory. Generally, the tone and – even in translation – the language work together, to addictive effect. His writing conjures, as one character observes of his mysterious, tightrope-walking temporary lover, the presence of “some indefinable but persistent something.”
    From a critical perspective, this frustrates. Murakami’s fiction oscillates so rapidly between arid truth and wild fantasy, between sharp insight and bizarre construction that pinning it down nears impossibility. Few writers of his generation have managed to articulate the mindset of the 1960s as elegantly as when he states that “everything was simple, and direct. Cause and effect were good buddies back then; thesis and reality hugged each other like it was the most natural thing in the world. And my guess is that the sixties were the last time that’ll ever happen.” Then again, few writers of his – or, indeed, any – generation can spin almost plausible tales of talking monkeys who scurry through cities, stealing peoples’ names.
    Stephen King’s chief talent, it’s often said, is a knack for juxtaposing the mundane details of real life with vivid, harrowing descriptions of the horrific. Haruki Murakami’s talent, by the same token, is the ability to juxtapose what read like prosaic internal monologues against the shifting, dreamlike buildups they depict, with the occasional cultural – usually musical – reference inserted for grounding. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is the trophy case this skill has built, an exhibition of pure, concentrated Murakami. Though the uninitiated will likely prefer a gentler introduction along the lines of Norwegian Wood or the novel Sputnik Sweetheart, devotees will wish the book’s continuation on into infinity.