Saikaku ichidai onna

Kenji Mizoguchi (1952)

Set in late-seventeenth-century Japan, The Life of Oharu, with a screenplay by Kenji Mizoguchi’s frequent collaborator Yoshikata Yoda, is based on The Life of an Amorous Woman, a 1686 novel by (as the film’s original title suggests) Ihara Saikaku, pioneer of the ‘floating world’ genre in Japanese literature.  While the story is technically fictional, the social system that drives it is, presumably, historical fact.  Because that obnoxious system was, to this viewer, a hitherto closed book, I sometimes found myself reacting to The Life of Oharu as enraging polemical exposé rather than drama.  One way or another, though, it’s impressive cinema.

In late middle age, the eponymous heroine (Kinuyo Tanaka) recalls, in extended flashbacks, her unhappy past and the stages of her inexorable fall from grace.  Born into a noble family, the young Oharu loves the page Katsunosuke (Toshiro Mifune) but the rules of feudal society forbid relations between two people of such unequal social rank.  The lovers are caught together, Katsunosuke is executed and Oharu’s disgraced family is banished from the imperial court.  After her mother (Tsukie Matsuura) intervenes to prevent Oharu from committing suicide, her samurai father Shinzaemon (Ichiro Sugai) sells his daughter, now unmarriageable within her class, as a concubine to Lord Matsudaira (Toshiaki Konoe); according to expectations, she bears him a son but is paid only a pittance for doing so and sent back home.  With the family in debt, Shinzaemon arranges for Oharu to work as a courtesan.  She subsequently becomes a servant in the household of a client, the wealthy merchant Sasaya (Eitaro Shindo); his jealous wife Owasa (Sadako Sawamura) finds out that her husband got to know Oharu in Kyoto’s red-light district and she’s forced to leave the household.  Her fortunes look set to change with a happy marriage to kind, humble Yakichi (Jukichi Uno), a maker of fans.  He is then attacked and killed by robbers.  Oharu next resides in a temple with an order of Buddhist nuns; when a male intruder attempts to rape her and Oharu is found in her cell undressed, she’s ejected from the temple.  To keep herself alive, she becomes a streetwalker on the outskirts of Kyoto.  She’s at the end of her tether when her mother arrives with news that Lord Matsudaira has died and that his heir, Oharu’s son, wishes her to live with him.  Oharu arrives at the new lord’s grand home to learn that her shameful past will condemn her to virtual solitary confinement there.  She runs away, choosing to see out her days as an itinerant nun.

I was absorbed, aghast, by Oharu’s tribulations but not so much as to blind me to brilliant images created by Mizoguchi and his cameraman, Yoshimi Hirano.  (More obscuring was the often crepuscular look of the film, which is in black and white:  I wasn’t sure how much the murky visuals were a stylistic device, how much a matter of BFI’s print showing its age.)  I think it will be hard to forget the sight of courtesans scrabbling for the handful of coins that a rich man tosses to the floor of a brothel; or a bunraku puppet show whose action chimes with events in the main story; or the faces of the Buddha carved in a temple wall that, at the start and near the end of the film, morph into the faces of men Oharu has known.  There’s a startling series of sequences in Sasaya’s home.  Oharu brushes her mistress Owasa’s hair, only to discover that it’s a wig and that Owasa is desperate her husband shouldn’t find out she’s bald.  Suspicious that Sasaya prefers Oharu to her, Owasa then unwisely punishes her servant by forcing her to cut off her own hair.  Oharu, in her turn, also takes revenge:  she contrives to make the family cat run off with Owasa’s hair weave while the woman’s asleep in bed with her husband.  He thus discovers his wife’s terrible secret.

There’s a malign feline flavour too to a later episode.  Oharu, repeatedly branded a whore in the course of her life, is now a mutton-dressed-as-lamb prostitute.  She has a chance encounter with an elderly Buddhist teacher (Takashi Shimura) and his young male pupils; the teacher proceeds to use her as an object lesson in the ghastly futility of carnal pleasures.  He asks Oharu to remove her veil and show her painted face.  ‘Everybody take a good look,’ the old man says, ‘You see that?  You still want to sleep with women now?  You all want happiness in the next world. … However, if you’d rather steep yourself in the impermanence of earthly life, then follow the example of this goblin cat in human form’.   As she takes her leave of the group, Oharu angrily imitates the movements and sounds of a cat.  A poignantly different, equally remarkable feature of the soundtrack is her occasional laments, sung to the accompaniment of a samisen.

The plot seems shaky at a few points.  The narrative jerks forward to Oharu’s short-lived happiness with Yakichi and the writing’s on the wall as soon as he sets off one morning, assuring his wife he’ll bring her back a fine sash when he returns later in the day.  (When his body is found, his hand is still holding the promised sash, one of the items of clothing removed by Oharu during the temple assault.)  More important, the episode is relatively weak because Yakichi’s death feels like an extra misery imposed on the heroine, as distinct from being a natural consequence of the tyrannical patriarchy that governs her life.  Her well-meaning mother’s surprise news that Oharu’s son, whom she has longed to meet, wants to meet her, immediately sounds too good to be true, and instantly proves to be.  In the scenes on the son’s estate, it’s not clear how Oharu manages to evade a posse of his male servants both in order to get to see her son face to face and then to make good her escape.  But Kinuyo Tanaka plays her role with such integrity, and is so convincing at whatever   age, that Oharu’s emotional responses to events are always believable.  Only a year after the release of The Life of Oharu, Tanaka had embarked on her own directing career in cinema, one of the first Japanese women to do so.

In the mid-1970s, Kenneth Tynan wrote a series of extended profiles for the New Yorker, including one of Tom Stoppard (published in December 1977).  In it, Tynan describes, inter alia, the friendship that developed between Stoppard and A J Ayer, leading light of logical positivism and likely inspiration of the philosopher protagonist of Stoppard’s play Jumpers.  Tynan joins the pair for lunch and the conversation turns briefly to Eastern philosophies, which Ayer ‘pooh-poohs …with Hegelian vehemence, dismissing Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and Buddhism in a single barking laugh. “They have some psychological interest, but nothing more than that,” he adds. “For the most part, they’re devices for reconciling people to a perfectly dreadful earthly life. …” ‘   I don’t like to agree with Ayer’s sweeping brush-off but I’ve never forgotten it.  The conclusion to The Life of Oharu brings his sentiments vividly to mind.

15 September 2022