The Masters of Cinema Series

Catalogue

Vengeance is Mine

by Jasper Sharp, 2006

Although Shohei Imamura had made his debut some two decades earlier with Stolen Desire (1958), until Vengeance is Mine – an unflinching portrait of callous psychopath Iwao Enokizu released in 1979 – the director remained virtually unknown outside of Japan. Much can be attributed to the fact that Nikkatsu, the studio that distributed his early work, had shown little interest in pushing their films onto overseas markets. Even though Insect Woman (1963) had been entered into competition at the 1964 Berlin International Film Festival (winning a Best Actress Silver Bear for its lead, Sachiko Hidari), previous to this, only Imamura’s 1961 classic, Pigs and Battleships had seen distribution in the West (in France as Filles et Gangsters).

Hailed in Japan as one of the most visionary moviemakers of the 1960s – due to a series of works that explored the grey areas between: the rational and the irrational; man and beast; personal experiences and official history; between the illusional objectivity of documentary and the unconcealed subjectivity of an auteur’s fictional narrative – Imamura, though critically and publicly established, had nevertheless experienced difficulty in adapting to the changed filmmaking climate of the 1970s.

Vengeance is Mine was Imamura’s first work of fiction since the costly failure of The Profound Desire of the Gods (a.k.a. Tales from a Southern Isle) for Nikkatsu in 1968, a 170-minute epic whose lengthy on-location shoot sent its budget spiralling out of control. The film depicted a primitive tribe living in near-Stone Age conditions on a remote island, far from the Japanese mainland at the southern extreme of the Okinawan Archipelago. The community, ruled by superstition, is forced to face the future when an engineer, sent as a delegate from his company in Tokyo, arrives on the island with the aim of constructing a water mill.

With the tribal community serving as a microcosm for ‘Japan the nation’, The Profound Desire of the Gods saw Imamura pursuing his interest in anthropological subject matter, analysing society through the behaviour and interactions of its members. However, the emotionally fraught shoot and the disappointing performance at the box office nudged Imamura away from large-screen fiction for a while, with the film effectively acting as an end marker for the period known as the New Wave (nuberu bagu) of Japanese cinema.

Imamura spent much of the 1970s making documentary works (mainly for television) many of which developed the concerns of The Profound Desire of the Gods into studies of national identity – the nature of “Japanese-ness”. The three-part In Search of Unreturned Soldiers (parts 1 and 2 were completed in 1971, with part 3 following in 1975) looked at the lives of those who had remained overseas in areas of South East Asia where they had been posted during the Pacific War, opting to stay rather than return home to Japan. Karayuki-san: The Making of a Prostitute (1975) revealed the hidden history of girls from Japan’s outcaste burakumin (or eta) class forced to find work as prostitutes in the nation’s overseas colonies in the early decades of the twentieth century, a subject he would later return to with the fictional work Zegen (1987).

Imamura felt by the end of the decade, however, that he had reached the limits of what he could express through documentary, and was eager to return to the world of dramatic fiction – albeit fiction firmly rooted in fact. His Vengeance is Mine script was based on Ryûzô Saki’s biographical novel of cold-blooded sociopath Akira Nishiguchi, who for 78 days roamed Japan conducting a string of grisly murders until his arrest on 4 January 1964.

Whilst studios throughout the 1960s had appeared willing to grant an unprecedented amount of creative leeway in order to nurture their more talented filmmakers, the tastes of Japanese audiences in the 1970s had turned more conservative, and the rising yen was forcing the film industry into a crisis of confidence. Imamura was aware that in order to realise his story on a suitable budget certain concessions would have to be made.

Vengeance is Mine, produced by Imamura Productions (the company he founded in 1965), needed the large distribution network that only a major company could provide, and so Imamura approached Shochiku for funding. At the time, it was seen as one of the more conservative studios – famed for their long running and perennially popular Tora-san (or Otoko wa Tsurai yo! _) series starring Kiyoshi Atsumi and directed by Yôji Yamada – but they were now eager to strike out into more adventurous territory. Imamura, alongside screenwriter Masaru Baba (_Pale Fire), honed the script for several years to a level at which Shochiku were willing to invest in it. In spending the additional time researching the case, Imamura turned up a few new details that Saki and the police had missed.

With both a higher budget and a more conventional structure, not to mention a considerably more nihilistic subject matter than was the norm for the director, Vengeance is Mine seems at first glance a world away from the ironic social comment of his early works, which celebrated the effusive, irrepressible energy of downtrodden lowlife characters and their communities. The film achieves much of its bleak but chilling efficiency through the portrayal of its central character, Iwao Enokizu, a man without a visible shred of humanity, who is not averse to brutally murdering those who have the misfortune of straying into his life and who get too close to him. With his dominating central performance, Ken Ogata would become Imamura’s actor of choice during the 1980s in the films Eijanaika (1981), Ballad of Narayama (1983), and Zegen (1987).

Vengeance is Mine appears distant from the humour and humanism of both his earlier and later works, yet the angle from which Imamura approaches the material, with its flat documentary stylisation, its lack of moral judgment, and its rigorous attention to character and detail, highlights a number of threads that run throughout his oeuvre, threads that developed through his own experiences growing up in the ruins of post-war Japan.

Shohei Imamura was born in Tokyo on 15 September 1926. Too young to fight in the war, he was nonetheless, like all Japanese, heavily affected by its aftermath. The son of a physician, he was eighteen when the war ended, and the year marked his entry into Tokyo’s reputable Waseda University to study Western History. During this period, the social upheaval of the Occupation years opened his eyes to an entirely new world from the one he had been brought up in. Whilst at university he earned his living through buying black market cigarettes and alcohol from American troops and selling them on to his professors. “That was the only time in my life I was well off, although I spent all I made on drink. I was surrounded by prostitutes and other low-life types, who had a great influence on me.”¹ Many of Imamura’s early films focus on characters from the lower orders – prostitutes, pimps, pornographers, and black-marketeers – people who act out of impulse and basic survival instinct.

Imamura was one of a generation of young directors including Nagisa Oshima, Yoshishige Yoshida, and Masahiro Shinoda who in the early years of the 1960s became known collectively as the New Wave of Japanese cinema. The term, coined by critics to draw parallels with the French Nouvelle Vague, was somewhat artificially imposed, as none of the directors initially saw themselves as belonging to any broader, more cohesive movement in the same vein as their French counterparts: Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, etc. had done. They all made films as individuals, under different production conditions and with different filmmaking philosophies.

Yet similarities do exist between the individual practitioners of the Japanese New Wave that stretch beyond their shared status as young directors practising a new and very different style of cinema than that of the previous generation. Imamura received his training at a major studio, as did Yoshida, Shinoda, and Oshima. With the latter three it was Shochiku, whereas Imamura leapt from Shochiku to the newly re-established Nikkatsu studios when it started production again in 1953. During their early years at the studios, all served as Assistant Directors, as part of the sempai-kohai (senior-junior) mentoring system that was the norm in the Japanese film industry until the late 1970s.

The younger directors also railed against the large studio works of the 1950s, family-oriented dramas laden with sentimentality and nostalgia, and a sense of what Oshima termed “post-war victimisation.”² They saw the maudlin and conservative works of those that embodied the Golden Age of the 1950s, directors such as Kenji Mizoguchi, Mikio Naruse, Keisuke Kinoshita, and Yasujiro Ozu, as refusing to address subject matter and political issues relevant to the younger après guerre generation that they themselves were a part of.

During his brief spell at Shochiku, Imamura worked as one of five assistants for the now internationally-renowned giant of Japanese cinema Yasujiro Ozu on the films Early Summer (1951), The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice (1952), and Tokyo Story (1953). As Imamura himself said, he was “basically just a clapper boy”.³ However, the older director’s well-ordered world and scrupulous portrayal of the middle classes was the very antithesis of what Imamura sought in his cinema. “I wouldn’t just say I wasn’t influenced by Ozu. I would say I didn’t want to be influenced by him.”⁴ Fortunately, after moving to Nikkatsu, Imamura found a more compatible mentor in the form of Yuzo Kawashima, a director little known outside of Japan, but highly regarded at home for films such as The Sun Legend of the Tokugawa Era (1957). Kawashima’s love of low-life settings and ribald humour proved a far more decisive influence, and the two soon became close friends and soul-mates. Imamura later wrote a book dedicated to the older director, Life is But Farewell: The Life of Yuzo Kawashima, published in 1969.

The New Wave directors’ break with filmmaking traditions manifested itself in a number of ways, both technically; through their use of location shooting and experimentation with documentary techniques, and in their subject matter; focusing on the unprivileged masses and their anger at social injustice. It was also natural enough to hold strong leftwing political views in those days. The Communists had opposed the expansionist plans of the militarist government before and during the war, and, thereafter, they were all for the discontinuation of the Imperial system, seeing Emperor Hirohito as being complicit with the wartime regime.

Like Oshima, Imamura left the studio where he made his first seven films and formed his own production company, Imamura Productions. However, whereas Oshima departed from Shochiku under something of a black cloud after the company pulled his Night and Fog in Japan from distribution in 1960, Imamura’s final three works of the 1960s, The Pornographers, A Man Vanishes, and Profound Desire of the Gods were all distributed by his former employers, Nikkatsu.

Imamura himself succinctly summed up the crucial difference between his own grounding and that of Oshima in an interview with Audie Bock: “I am a country farmer, Oshima is a samurai.”⁵ Whilst Oshima’s work belongs to a more polemic, essayist tradition, tackling issues with an intellectual rigour, and a singular focus, in films such as A Town of Love and Hope (1959), Death by Hanging (1968), and Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (1969), Imamura presents us, perhaps, with a wider picture.

Imamura’s stories unfold on broad canvases, packed with detail and teeming with life. Like a cinematic equivalent to the medieval Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel, his characters are vulgar and absurd, yet full of a boundless energy that the screen can barely contain within its frame. Capturing the particulars of the low-caste world in all their glorious disorder, with his god-like perspective he draws our attention to details we might otherwise have missed, as if he were a scientist gazing at the organisms in a sample of pond life on a microscopic slide.

Critic Max Tessier labeled him “Japan’s Modern Entomologist”,⁶ and it’s a comparison that fits well with his work. He named his 1963 film about an impoverished country girl lured to the big city to make her living as a prostitute Nippon konchuki (Entomological Chronicles of Japan – commonly known in the West as Insect Woman), the script motivated by the appearance of an insect circling his ashtray as he was writing it. “I thought to myself that my character found herself in somewhat of the same situation,”⁷ he told Tessier.

Indeed, animal and insect metaphors feature heavily in Imamura’s work. Pigs and Battleships is set around a US naval base in the town of Yokosuka during the occupation years, where the impoverished masses eke out their existence ravaging through the pig bins set outside the perimeter fence of the base, where local girls turn tricks for the American interlopers and a massive black market emerges around the sale of stolen slabs of pork meat. The movie culminates with scenes of a rioting rabble of warring black-marketeering gangsters intercut with shots of pigs set loose and running wild through the neon-lit streets surrounding the base. Intentions of Murder (1964) makes heavy use of the visual metaphor of a caged mouse and a silkworm to symbolize both the wretched situation of a lower-class housewife stuck in a loveless and only semi-legitimate marriage, and her newly awakening awareness of her ability to use this situation to her advantage. The writhing creature that lends its name to the The Eel (1997), similar in expressive function to the oversized carp that thrashes around in the cramped aquarium in The Pornographers (1966), serves as a visualisation of the primordial subconscious of the guilt-wracked ex-con protagonist who has just been freed from jail after violently murdering his wife.

Much of Imamura’s work strives to explore, not only the similarities, but the differences between man and his fellow denizens of the natural world. He sees his characters as being deeply connected to their immediate environment, and takes great pains in its faithful depiction, without making so basic an assumption that it is environment that forms and shapes man. Rather, his characters remain almost anonymous, blending into the background.

Multiple sequences of Vengeance is Mine are shot from a distance – and from slightly above eye level – yet the director uses long lenses to keep us physically close to the subject. In such a way, Imamura displays an objectivity and moral ambivalence that is often at odds with the actions of the figures he portrays. Yet he can be seen to revel in their petty foibles, inconsequential words or actions that reveal much about their personalities but little about their higher motivations. He doesn’t manipulate or steer his audience into any moral interpretation, and his rigorous approach covers and includes material that might fall outside the scope or interest of other filmmakers’ treatments of his subjects. Imamura has more than once described his films as “messy”, but there’s clearly a method to his madness.

With Vengeance is Mine, Imamura moved his magnifying glass away from the plight of the unrefined masses to the newly emerging lower-middle class. His focus, Enokizu, is a soulless construct who has turned his back on his roots and reinvented himself. He spits in the face of his father Shizuo (Mikuni, who also appeared in Imamura’s Profound Desire of the Gods), a devout Catholic who, in an early flashback, elicits the anger of his young son when he gives up his fishing boats, during the war, to the navy. Later on, during Enokizu’s time spent evading the police, he masquerades as a lawyer and a university professor, severing contact with his family and keeping his true identity secret even from Haru, the brothel madam with whom he shares a bed. The use of flashbacks to tell the story over several distinct time periods, and through a number of points of view, also add a psychological element to Enokizu’s characterization left wilfully absent from Imamura’s earlier works.

Released in the US in 1979, Vengeance is Mine_’s subject matter proved far more commercially oriented than his earlier experiments and its success led to Imamura’s international breakthrough, bringing his name to prominence among cinephiles worldwide. He was later to score further success when _Ballad of Narayama, a radical reworking of the folk legend first filmed (in Kabuki style) by Keisuke Kinoshita in 1958, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1983. When The Eel (1997) triumphed at the same festival fourteen years later, he became one of only three directors to win the award a second time.

Imamura’s legacy is greater than merely bringing Japanese cinema back into the international spotlight. In 1975, he founded the private Film and Radio Institute of Yokohama (now known as the Yokohama Academy of Visual Arts, based in Shinyurigaoka), which served as a vital training ground for several of today’s most interesting and important directors, including documentarist Kazuo Hara (The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987)) and current icon of cult cinema, Takashi Miike (Audition (1999), Ichi the Killer (2001)). His son, Daisuke Tengan, has also become a notable force within the industry, scripting three of Imamura’s later works, The Eel, Dr Akagi (1998), and Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (2001), as well as Miike’s Audition. Further, in 2002 Tengan made his directorial debut with Aiki.

Gruelling yet compelling, naturalistically staged yet meticulously constructed, Vengeance is Mine succinctly bridges the early and late phases of Imamura’s filmmaking career. A painstakingly matter-of-fact depiction of a man whose actions place him outside the realms of human comprehension, it is a pivotal work from one of the most significant directors in the past half-century of world cinema, and one whose cold, clinical presence retains the power to chill and haunt to this day.

Footnotes

¹ Interview by Toichi Nakata, printed in Shohei Imamura (Cinematheque Ontario Monographs, 1997), edited by James Quandt, p. 111

² Ibid.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Bock, Audie. Japanese Film Directors (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1978), p. 289

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Tessier, Max. “Shohei Imamura: Entomologiste du Japan Modern” from Le Cinéma Japonais au Présent, (Paris, 1984) pp. 105-115, reprinted in Quandt, pp. 45-57

⁷ Ibid.