Yoshimura was widely viewed as an heir to Kenji Mizoguchi, and, when Mizoguchi died in 1956, he replaced him as director of his final project: a tragicomic account of a farmer-turned-merchant and his destructive obsession with wealth. Mizoguchi had collaborated with his regular screenwriter, Yoshikata Yoda (1909-91), on a script adapted from a number of the stories of Ihara Saikaku, the great Edo-period satirist and chronicler of the mores of the merchant class, whose prose had already furnished the plot for Mizoguchi’s Saikaku ichidai onna (The Life of Oharu, 1952).
Yoshimura avowedly made the film as a memorial to his late colleague. One may only speculate as to what Mizoguchi might have made of the material, but Yoshimura’s dry humour and harder-edged style is arguably more in keeping with Saikaku’s wry vision than Mizoguchi’s elegance and grace. Joseph Anderson and Donald Richie write that the film was “filled with excellent satire on the inception of capitalism”, and see the film as a dig at the expense of Japan’s commercial capital, whose inhabitants were stereotypically noted for an obsession with wealth. But they also judged the film to be a “period-drama meaningful to contemporary audiences”. No doubt the theme seemed particularly relevant as postwar Japan rushed to embrace Western-style capitalism.
“Kinema Junpo” critic Jun Izawa praised Yoshimura’s ability to draw in the viewer with sharply crafted, “smart, fast scenes” such as the striking opening. But he expressed reservations about the development of the main character, suggesting that he “takes on an independent existence, as if Yoshimura’s hand has been lifted”. Nevertheless, the central performance by Ganjiro Nakamura (1902-83) is one of the film’s definite assets. Himself an Osaka native, Nakamura had had a distinguished career in kabuki theatre. The postwar decline of kabuki in Western Japan impelled him to move into film and television, where he enjoyed a successful second career, working for such canonical filmmakers as Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu and Kon Ichikawa.

Alexander Jacoby e Johan Nordström