Review: Shohei Imamura's "Nishi Ginza Station"

Nishi Ginza Station (Nishi Ginza Eki-mae). 1958. Written and directed by Shohei Imamura. Cinematography by Hisanobu Fujioka. Music by Toshiro Mayuzumi. Released by Nikkatsu Corporation.

Cast: Frank Nagai, Shinichi Yanagisawa, Ko Nishimura, Masahiko Shimazu, Hisano Yamaoka, Shoichi Ozawa, Kyoko Hori.

Nishi Ginza Station (1958) was Imamura's second film, a studio assignment made as a vehicle for popular singer Frank Nagai. Imamura was able to use this as a vehicle for himself as well, indulging in a playful formalism that breaks the narrative in a number of ways. Nagai appears right at the beginning, addressing the camera. “What an interesting place!” he says of the train station where much of the film takes place. He will tell us “a good story” about the married couple we will follow for the rest of the film. “But first,” Nagai says, “Let’s listen to my song … Hey! Music!” He pops up throughout the film to comment on the action, a device that amusingly anticipates Jonathan Richman’s musical interludes in the Farrelly Brothers’ There’s Something About Mary, among other films. After the credits sequence, which appears in neon lights, various people in the station break out into song, prompted by Nagai’s jazzy start.

We are then introduced to a woman complaining about the inaccurate station clock. Her kids knock over the ladder of the man working on it, and trailing after is her meek, henpecked husband. These two form the central couple of the film. Jutaro is a Walter Mitty-esque character who daydreams about romancing a native woman on a deserted island. This foreshadows Imamura's later portraits of primitive societies such as Profound Desire of the Gods (1968) and The Ballad of Narayama (1983). Jutaro works in his wife Rinko’s pharmacy, and his life is regulated down to the minute. He has to take regular doses of a “body energizer,” and he is monitored on this by his wife’s employees. When his wife and kids go away on a two-day trip, Jutaro takes this opportunity (egged on by his veterinarian friend) to taste a bit of freedom. They go to bars and get drunk, and Jutaro finds the courage to attempt an extramarital affair with Yuriko, who works in the pen shop across from the pharmacy.

The film alternates between Jutaro's fantasies and his real life, with Nagai as a commentator or a silent observer (or in a couple of cases as the man in the moon, and a cave wall carving). Compared to the films he would make later, Nishi Ginza Station is a minor work. However, many of the elements that would come to the fore later, such as his bawdy humor and his experiments with form, can be seen here in embryo.

Travelling Actors

Stolen Desire (Nusumareta Yokujo). 1958. Directed by Shohei Imamura. Written by Toshiro Suzuki, based on the story "Tent Theatre" by Toko Kon. Produced by Kazu Otsuka. Cinematography by Kurataro Takamura. Edited by Tadashi Nakamura. Music by Toshiro Mayuzumi. Art direction by Kimihiko Nakamura. Released by Nikkatsu Corporation.

Cast: Osamu Takizawa (Taminosuke Yamamura), Shinichi Yanagisawa (Ezaburo Yamamura), Hiroyuki Nagato (Shinichi Kunida), Michie Kita (Chigusa Yamamura), Yoko Minamida (Chidori Yamamura), Kimiko Nanazato (Sayoko), Masako Urushizawa (Midori).

Stolen Desire (1958), Imamura’s first feature film, and the first of three films he released in that year, is his delightful tribute to the “earthy” citizens of the Kawachi district of Osaka. From this film onward, Imamura expressed his interest in what were considered the lower rungs of Japanese society. One of the lowest were actors, especially the traveling kabuki actors we follow in this film, whose troupe is constantly referred to in the film as a “beggar theater.” This colorful lot includes Shinichi (Hiroyuki Nagato), the troupe’s stage director, whose ambitions for elaborate and artistic productions are often frustrated by his less-than-disciplined cast; Chidori (Yoko Minamida), an actress married to Eizaburo (Shinichi Yanagisawa), a star of the troupe whom Shinichi is in love with; Chidori’s sister Chigusa (Michie Kita), another actress who is in love with Shinichi, and is jealous of Shinichi's obvious affection for her sister.

The film begins with a narrator’s voiceover extolling the fact that 13 years after World War II, there is now “no trace” of the war, and that the people there have been pretty much unchanged for hundreds of years. We focus in on the troupe’s last performance of “The Loyal 47 Ronin.” As always, the kabuki performance opens with a striptease show, after which most of the largely male audience exits the theater before the actual play. The narrator amusingly notes that although students almost never attend these shows, there is a sign prominently displaying student discounts. The performance is aborted after an actor onstage refuses to say his lines, complaining that he hasn’t been paid. The fight moves outdoors, with one of the actors trying to grab the cash box from the ticket seller’s hands, culminating in Shinichi going after the fighting actors with a hammer.

The troupe is forced to leave after their stage is taken down by workers in need of timber. The troupe leader says he cannot pay them and they should go their separate ways. However, the actors say that they will stay with him. Shinichi sticks with them also, even though a friend of his has offered him a job directing television. He also remains there because of his longing for Chidori.

They move on to another village, and after raucous negotiations with the local landowner Fujita, the owner of a brush factory in the area, they set up a tent in a paddy field. The actors are an immediate sensation, especially the actresses whom the men chase after and sometimes peep in on when they are dressing for bed. The men especially enjoy the opening strip show, and the troupe plays to packed houses. The conflicts and love triangles continue here also.

Imamura’s love for these passionate, uncouth, and rowdy people comes through beautifully here, and the film is an often hilarious experience, made all the more so by not following a conventional narrative, but instead being a freewheeling and lighthearted portrait of these people. Imamura would continue his examination of the lower classes for the rest of his career, which would include darker portraits of those even lower in society than actors -- prostitutes, pimps, killers, primitive societies -- which were always interspersed with sensualist and bawdy humor. Stolen Desire is a remarkable debut film that contains many hallmarks of the even greater work to come.

Disappearing Acts

A Man Vanishes (Ningen Johatsu). 1967. Produced and directed by Shohei Imamura. Cinematography by Kenji Ishiguro. Edited by Matsuo Tanji. Music by Toshiro Mayuzumi. Production design by Ichiro Takada. Sound recording by Kunio Takeshige. Released by Nikkatsu Corporation.

Cast: Yoshie Hayakawa, Shigeru Tsuyuguchi, Sayo Hayakawa, Shohei Imamura.

A mystery without a solution, A Man Vanishes (1967) is a fascinating study of the eminently collapsible boundary between reality and artifice. More precisely, it suggests that what we think of as “reality,” and how we behave in this framework, is as much a construction as any work of fiction. Initially, the film seems to be an example of the cinema verité documentary style prevalent in the 1960s. A voiceover informs us that even on the “small island” of Japan, hundreds of people a year can easily vanish among the crowds of people, never to be seen again. The film is ostensibly a study of one of these "johatsu," or missing persons. We focus in on the particular case of Tadashi Oshima, a man who disappeared one day on his way to work, and the efforts of his fiancée, Yoshie Hayakawa, to find him. The camerawork is handheld, and fly-on-the-wall observant. There is little music, and all indications point to the idea that this is a document of Yoshie’s search, with an "investigator," actor Shigeru Tsuyuguchi (the rapist from Intentions of Murder), accompanying her to interview people who knew him in order to find out where he is and why he disappeared so suddenly.

However, there are signs that Imamura is up to something different here, beginning with the credits sequence, in which a medium attempts to contact Oshima. This is rather odd, since he is apparently still alive. “The unhappy spirit of a woman haunts him,” the medium says of Oshima, and this explains why he cannot love any woman. The medium reappears at other points in the film, sometimes as brief flashes.

The film delves into the investigation, revealing the many layers of personality and history that exist beneath the surface of this apparently ordinary salesman and the lives of those connected to him. Among other details, we learn that he had embezzled money from his company over a two-year period, and kept a mistress while he was away on business, who he may or may not have gotten pregnant. The animosity between Yoshie and her sister Sayo also surfaces in the course of this search. Yoshie disapproves of her sister’s relationship with a man she is not married to. She also comes to suspect that Sayo may have had an affair with Yoshie.

The verité veneer begins to drop away as we see how Imamura is manipulating certain actions, as he would in a drama. At one point, Yoshie confesses she is beginning to fall in love with Tsuyuguchi; he tells Imamura that this would be “awkward.” We see discussions between Imamura and his crew (in which Yoshie is frequently referred to as “The Rat”) in which they discuss how the film is going and where they want to take it.

The “documentary” aspect of A Man Vanishes, already questionable and extremely flimsy, completely collapses at the end of a long scene in which Yoshie, increasingly agitated, interrogates her sister about the fact that several people have reported seeing Sayo and Oshima together. They argue at either end of a dinner table, with Imamura sitting silently between them. A fishmonger is brought in, who confirms that he did indeed see the two of them together. Despite all this, Sayo strenuously insists that everyone who saw them together is mistaken. It is a lengthy and repetitious scene, with neither side willing to budge. Sayo then turns and asks Imamura, “Director, what is truth?” Imamura answers, “I don’t know what’s the truth. Nobody knows the truth.” At this point, the film’s most audacious and astonishing gambit occurs: Imamura yells to the crew, the walls fall away, and it is revealed that the scene we’ve just witnessed has been occurring on a soundstage. A narrator informs us that everything we have seen up to that point is fiction, although this fiction is indeed based on actual disappearances.

The camera crew moves to the street, and the argument resumes as a growing crowd gathers. Even though the scenario has been revealed to be fictional, the arguments on either side become increasingly passionate, resulting in an irreducible impasse. Both sides insist that their version of reality is the truth, and nothing is resolved. Imamura and Yoshie speak to each other in a voiceover at the film’s conclusion. “The film is finished, but reality is not,” Imamura says. A Man Vanishes is one of Imamura’s most idiosyncratic and unsettling films, in its radical fracturing and questioning of cinema’s representation of what appears in front of the camera.