Set in the Taisho period (1912-26), this unjustly neglected film tells the story of a boy who finds a new political awareness after his mother is forced to take a job in a geisha house to pay his tuition fees. It was based on a novel by Seijiro Shimada (1899-1930), who achieved teenage celebrity on publishing the first episode of Chijo in 1918. The book won praise from established writers such as Rashomon author Ryunosuke Akutagawa, and became a bestseller. Shimada’s mental health deteriorated after a notorious love affair, and he was confined to a mental hospital, where he died aged 31.
Shimada’s socialist principles accorded with those of screenwriter Kaneto Shindo, whose script highlights class and labour issues. Accordingly, this is one of Yoshimura’s most explicitly political films. Set in the city of Kanazawa (a socalled “little Kyoto”), and sharing with Itsuwareru seiso a focus on geisha, it is a kind of pendant to Yoshimura’s Kyoto-mono. Like Kyoto, Kanazawa had escaped serious damage during World War II, and cinematographer Yoshihisa Nakagawa provides a striking record in colour of the beauty of the city before its modernisation.
“Kinema Junpo” critic Seizo Okada celebrated the film’s colour, coherence and precise depiction of customs, while complaining that parts of the film were “too superficial and light”. He asserted that Yoshimura’s “too smooth style will have to be deliberately and consciously roughened, so that […] he can forcefully dig deeper into the tumour of humanity”. He suggested the that film evoked “the sentiments of [Yoshimura’s] lost youth”, and remarked on the contrast between the realistic presentation of the middle-aged Tokyo financier played by Shin Saburi (1909-82) and the more romanticised depiction of the young lovers, played by Hiroshi Kawaguchi (1936-87) and Hitomi Nozoe (193795). These two performers had co-starred earlier in the same year in Yasuzo Masumura’s proto-New Wave film Kuchizuke (Kisses), and their presence lends an air of modernity and freshness to Yoshimura’s drama.

Alexander Jacoby e Johan Nordström