PALE FLOWER  (Kawaita Hana)^[1]

Shinoda Masahiro

1963

Shochiku production. Cinematography: Kosugi Masao. Music: Takemitsu Toru.

Starring Ikebe Ryo and Kaga Mariko

Adapted from story by Ishihara Shintaro

Like Imamura and Oshima, Shinoda was a university-educated intellectual who was employed by Shochiku as an assistant director in the early fifties and felt stifled by the company’s conservatism. But he was less openly rebellious than the other two and took the opportunity of learning a great deal about filmic technique, editing and shot composition by working conscientiously as assistant to all of the company’s leading directors. At Waseda University he had specialized in theatre history and lacked training in visual art. When finally allowed to direct in the 60s, he broke dramatically with Shochiku tradition by employing radical young poet (later noted underground playwright) Terayama Shuji to write scripts and emerging avant-garde composer Takemitsu Toru to compose discordant scores for his films. However, long after he had left Shochiku and had achieved critical recognition for his period art movies (especially Double Suicide),  he admitted that he learnt a lot from working under Shochiku stalwart Ozu Yasujiro, and had studied his methods..   

Pale Flower is both a genre movie and an art movie. It is a contemporary yakuza movie, made at the start of the golden age of the yakuza movie (which lasted from 1963 to 1973), although it was not Shochiku but Toei and Nikkatsu that became specialists in the genre. It stars Ikebe Ryo, as the world-weary yakuza hit-man, Muraki. Ikebe was often cast in supporting roles alongside stars Takakura Ken and Tsuruta Koji (Japan’s John Wayne and Robert Mitcham, respectively) in Toei yakuza movies. Its narrative, like that of many other yakuza movies, opens with the hero’s release from gaol; involves gang warfare, shifting alliances, betrayals and reprisals; and features a young opponent who becomes the hero’s buddy and acolyte. But the hero loves a lady more than his buddy, and does not end up dead in his buddy’s arms after a sacrificial bloodbath. The film’s settings of bars, race-courses, gambling dens and dark streets are also characteristic of the genre but this film is much darker than most – night scenes predominate and the darkness of night is weighted with symbolism. Shinoda includes the yakuza cut-finger apology ritual, but he is not interested in the giri-ninjo code that the yakuza genre inherited from the samurai movie. His hero is not motivated by devotion to his boss (both gang bosses are portrayed as stupid old men) or to any political or social code; he is a true loner, an existential outsider like Camus’s Meursault. He is attracted to the mysterious young woman Saeko, in whom he recognizes a soul-mate, a fellow thrill-seeker bored with life. On the one occasion when he is tempted to consummate relations with her, he abstains, his motivation ambiguous. Is it because the man of action must repress sexual desire and not become emotionally dependent on a woman? Is it because sex would destroy the high romantic ideal she represents? Is it because he recognizes the unbridgeable class barrier between them? Sex is available to him with Shinko, his regular woman, the woman who loves him, the woman he rejects. Shinko lives in her wicked stepfather’s clock shop where the clocks tick ominously and symbolically, almost as if they had escaped from an Ingmar Bergman movie. More culturally and generically incongruous are the repeated images of the Mona Lisa in the décor and the use of Dido’s aria, “Remember Me”, from Purcell’s opera, Dido and Aeneas, to accompany the hero’s final grand gesture for his lady-love. The last exchange of looks between Muraki and Saeko suggests that the thrill of the kill surpasses or at least substitutes for sexual orgasm. They have previously shared the thrill of high-stakes gambling and high-speed driving.        

The stunning romanticism of the assassination sequence – the majestic bearing and slow ascent of the hero to the arena, diegetic sound removed and replaced by the operatic aria, the killing choreographed in dream-like slow motion, and the gazes of his audience, his buddy and his lady, riveted by the spectacle, admiring his performance – is balanced by the cynicism of the epilogue. We see that his grand gesture has changed nothing; he is, in the end, impotent and ineffectual. The two old gang bosses are still in charge; the girl is dead; and he is back in prison, serving out his sentence for murder.

Apart from the climactic operatic sequence, the film offers other set-pieces of breathtaking artistry, notably the gambling scenes involving the flower-card (hanafuda) games and the hero’s nightmare. In the gambling scenes the composition of the shots is very theatrical and formal; there are abrupt cuts from one set-up to another – ceiling shot, subjective shot, group formation shot, medium close-up – while the sound track features the metronome-like click-clack instructions of the caller. In the nightmare sequence, which precipitates Muraki’s offer to perform the execution of the rival boss, even though it isn’t his turn, the darkly discordant music of Takemitsu and the psycho-sexual imagery create a surreal vision of what Chris Desjardins calls “existential dread as a lived-in experience”.^[2]   

The script was adapted from a story by Ishihara Shintaro, the early postwar novelist who produced popular fiction about rebellious and delinquent Japanese youth, and whose works were regularly adapted to the screen. He was not a great writer – Mishima Yukio called his style “a hotch-potch of rough-hewn brevity and romantic babble”^[3] – and he eventually abandoned writing for a political career, becoming a right-wing Japanese nationalist. With the inspired assistance of Kosugi Masao’s wide-screen B&W cinematography and Takemitsu Toru’s avant-garde music, Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Purcell’s Dido, and a great performance by Ikebe Ryo, Shinoda transformed his potboiler into a work of art, .              

Freda Freiberg

^[1] The literal translation of the Japanese title is actually Dry (or Dried) Flower. Hana, the word for flower, can here refer to both the girl, Saeko, and to the gambling cards which are called hanafuda (flower cards). O-hana and Hana-ko are common Japanese women’s names. The word kawaita is close in sound to the words kawaii (cute, charming) and kawaiso (sad, pitiful)

^[2] Chris Desjardins, Outlaw Masters of Japanese Film, Palgrave Macmillan 2005, p 114

^[3] Mishima Yukio, Introduction to New Writing in Japan, edited by Yukio Mishima and Geoffrey Bownas, Penguin Books, 1972, p 21