歌舞伎の世界を描いた映画A Film of the Kabuki World
Set in the Kabuki world of the Meiji era, this film follows the wandering life of a scion of a great house as he strives toward true artistry, and the woman he loves, who quietly vanishes in his shadow. It is The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (Zangiku Monogatari), made by Kenji Mizoguchi in 1939, in the last years before Japan plunged into the Second World War. Film cannot escape the constraints of its time, yet it is also a rare medium that can become the most radical reaction against those constraints. In the mid-to-late 1930s, as "talkies" (films with sound) rose, Japanese filmmakers worked by trial and error to find new forms of expression after the silent era. That experimentation, the fierce inner struggle over how best to use the new power of spoken dialogue, drove a rare golden age in which the struggle shows itself brilliantly on screen.
The films of this period differ considerably in quality from those of the early 1950s, the period usually called the golden age. Famous works of the 1950s, such as Mizoguchi's Ugetsu (1953), Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953), and Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954), were shot with the technical advances of the postwar years, so their sound is clear and their images beautiful. Film technology in the mid-to-late 1930s, by contrast, gave poor sound, and the film stock itself has deteriorated because it was not cared for during the upheavals of the war. Viewers therefore tend to find these works hard to approach, and they keep their distance.
Even so, the films of this period press upon the viewer with a fierce will that moves the heart directly, in a way that cannot be put into words. I have spent years watching the films of these years again and again, trying to find out what it is, and The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums is the most emblematic of them. If one looks only at the plot, it tends to be seen as a story about the closed world of what Japan calls geido (芸道), the way of art, and the tragic devotion of a woman who gave her life to it. That view grew stronger in postwar Japan, and with it Mizoguchi's reputation has leaned toward "a director who portrayed women magnificently." I feel uneasy about this. Such readings usually come from people who have not entered the inner struggle needed to grasp the "something," impossible to name, that the filmmakers of this era were trying to express. In the act of expressing a "something" that even the makers could hardly put into words, we are all required to make the same universal inner struggle, in a phase where time and space do not exist. That is what it means to live. These makers looked at it most earnestly, and they kept approaching that "something" by spitting out onto the screen the unnameable foreign matter that had gathered in the pit of their stomachs. This is exactly why masterpieces all over the world transcend time and space. This is the truth, and it is a deep ocean that has not yet been grasped and still keeps flowing.
We can grasp this film by reading it through "communal illusion, pair illusion, and individual illusion," which I have been thinking about intensively of late. In this article I will follow the plot of The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums and look at how Mizoguchi depicted the symbolic world of these great movements of illusion. The point to watch is above all the relationship between communal illusion and pair illusion. The film shows a quite complex working: communal illusion erodes pair illusion until it reaches zero, and in the end the pair illusion quietly fades into the communal illusion. This is not simply a case of the pair illusion being lost to the communal illusion.
The story begins in Tokyo in 1885, the eighteenth year of Meiji. Kikunosuke, adopted son of Kikugoro Onoe, head of a prestigious Kabuki house, has become an actor. He enjoys glamorous popularity and is fawned over by everyone around him, but his skill does not match it. His entourage, the theater people, and the geisha never point out his immature art, however poor his acting, because he is the heir of the famous actor Kikugoro. Raised in such indulgence, Kikunosuke vaguely senses the emptiness of having no one tell him the truth, but he can only let a lonely irritation grow in him, and he cannot act. He knows that the moment he steps outside Kikugoro's shadow alone, he will not be able to live.
Walking home through the night wind in this emptiness, he comes across Otoku, the wet nurse of Kikunosuke's younger brother, rocking a baby by the riverbank. To Kikunosuke, empty and alone, Otoku says what no one else has said: "You have the bloom now, but you have no core." The words cut him, the first such words he has ever heard. Yet Kikunosuke had been tormented by the unease of being seen by no one as himself, because he was Kikugoro's heir, and of being told only ornamented words and never the truth. For him this was the first sincere gaze from another person. What matters here is that this is not a physical gaze. It is a gaze in an invisible sense.
The many people around Kikunosuke are not looking at him. They look only at the fame of Kikugoro, the renowned actor behind him, at his house, and at the future in which Kikunosuke is promised the succession. In their eyes Kikunosuke does not exist. They have a clear political aim in fixing their eyes on this nonexistent Kikunosuke: when he takes Kikugoro's name and becomes head of the house, they want him to secure their own standing. Since Kikunosuke himself has vanished in this environment, naturally no one tells him the truth. Left in such an environment, he has only two roads: to drown in empty fame and rot, just as they intend, or to seek the truth and meet someone who will tell him the real thing. No individual can break through such a state unless he meets someone who truly sees him. The person who looked at him sincerely was not a fellow actor or a family member but Otoku, his brother's wet nurse. The gaze of another that he feels for the first time here becomes the origin where Kikunosuke's inner gaze crosses it. This is the beginning of the pair illusion.
Centered on Kikunosuke's struggle at the level of individual illusion, the story depicts the process by which an individual illusion is taken, upside down, into a larger communal illusion that exceeds the individual: the communal illusion formed by the great house of his adoptive father Kikugoro Onoe, or by Kabuki itself. Put the other way, if Kikunosuke assimilated into this communal illusion without resisting and let his individual illusion be extinguished by its erosion, he could live with some standing as heir to this house. But his individual illusion was in conflict with that easy path. It is the question "Is it all right to stay as I am?", which everyone has to pass through, and which matters for us too. For Kikunosuke, breaking out of this struggle, carried by a closed and inward self, is extremely difficult in a Kabuki world with such a strong communal illusion. In the communal illusion of a company, a society, or a nation, there are many ways to escape outward, such as changing jobs, moving, or emigrating, but in a world like Kabuki this is not allowed, so he must break through from within. His closed condition then feels like being crushed until he disappears. What he needs to leave this empty state, where he does not exist at all, is the crossing of gazes and the world of pair illusion that is born from it. This is the cornerstone of the work.
Drawn to Otoku's sincerity, Kikunosuke begins to open his heart to her. But theirs is a love across social ranks, and it meets fierce opposition. Kikugoro and the family, who prize the honor of the Kabuki world, are furious and drive Otoku away. Kikunosuke resists, because the one who saved him from his predicament was not Kikugoro, nor his family, nor his Kabuki colleagues, but Otoku. He chooses the pair illusion that binds him to Otoku over the path of strengthening and prolonging the communal illusion of the house's fame and his own secure future. Kikunosuke leaps outside the communal illusion of the Onoe house. But it is not easy to meet Otoku, who has been cast out of that strong communal illusion. He searches wherever he can, but the Onoe house, on the side of the communal illusion, has forbidden anyone to let Otoku meet him. The two cannot meet, and finally Kikunosuke decides to give up his life in Tokyo and go to Osaka alone. This shows Kikunosuke leaving a communal illusion in which fame was assured and everything prepared in advance, and standing naked for the first time in an outside where that communal illusion does not reach. Here Kikunosuke enters the important stage of rethinking, from the standpoint of his own individual illusion, the strength of the pair illusion and the communal illusion.
What matters here is that, for the pair illusion, it does not actually matter whether the partner is present in front of one's eyes. The world of pair illusion is dense enough that two people can be tightly bound even when one is absent. Kikunosuke, alone in Osaka, trains under Kikugoro's brother-in-law. But Osaka is an outside world where the communal illusion of Kikugoro Onoe in Tokyo does not hold. Edo Kabuki on the Tokyo side and Kamigata Kabuki on the Osaka side each have their own history, and each developed with a different cultural character. However prestigious the house he is heir to in Tokyo, in the Kabuki world of Osaka he is an unknown actor. So in Osaka everyone laughs at his immature acting, attacks him, ignores him, and bullies him, and he goes through terrible times. In Tokyo, confined within Kikugoro's communal illusion, he had never been treated this way, but this is the reality faced by people who step outside a communal illusion. The rules and tacit understandings of a particular communal illusion, and the kinds of evaluation that come with them, do not hold at all once one goes outside. That is the structure of the world.
Kikunosuke keeps training but is worn down by constant anxiety, close to breaking. A year later Otoku, who cannot stop worrying about him, comes all the way to Osaka. Their life together finally begins, but it is not the lavish life of Tokyo. It is a life of extreme poverty. What this shows is that the pair illusion binds two people from beginning to end even when they do not spend time together in each other's presence. Through the power of the pair illusion that binds them, Kikunosuke gradually recovers his vitality. But the pair illusion and the communal illusion belong to different phases, and the action of the communal illusion is merciless. This arises because the communal illusion takes no part in the circumstances of the illusory world that belongs to just the two of them. When the brother-in-law of the Kabuki house who had been protecting Kikunosuke in Osaka suddenly dies, the communal illusion of Kamigata Kabuki, in turn, moves to push him out. No one in Osaka had acknowledged Kikunosuke's immature acting, and jealousy was rampant against an outsider being valued for his origins. Kikunosuke is finally expelled from the Kabuki world. What Mizoguchi depicts here is expulsion from the Kabuki communal illusion led by Kikugoro Onoe in Tokyo, and expulsion from the Kamigata communal illusion led by Fukusuke Nakamura (the brother-in-law) in Osaka. Because these two communal illusions made up the whole of the communal illusion of Japanese Kabuki, Kikunosuke is expelled from it entirely. Having fallen, he must throw himself into a wandering troupe, then called "itinerant actors" (tabimawari yakusha, 旅回り役者), who played in small local theaters as they traveled from place to place.
The life of an itinerant actor, always on the move in extreme poverty, is a bitterly cold trial for Kikunosuke, who grew up in the luxurious world of Tokyo. While he was training as a Kabuki actor in Osaka, Otoku had accepted all of it, however destitute they were. She supported him devotedly, sold her own kimono, and went without food so that he could continue his training. In such a life, mired like a swamp, Kikunosuke's art began gradually to take on a body and was polished into something genuine, bearing the weight of living, but it still needed years to bloom. In the middle of this he was expelled from the Kabuki world. Symbolically, this means Kikunosuke died once.
Once Kikunosuke becomes an itinerant actor, his relationship with Otoku deteriorates rapidly. Otoku wishes him to return to the world of Kabuki and succeed as an actor. Kikunosuke has already come to find the struggle toward such an ideal tiresome, and he has abandoned everything and begun to live recklessly. This shows that the pair illusion of Kikunosuke and Otoku had gained its strong bond in opposition to the communal illusion of Kabuki, and that when the illusion it faced with tension, the communal illusion of Kabuki, disappeared, its reason for being wavered. In other words, for the pair illusion of the two to reach its highest intensity, the communal illusion of Kabuki must in fact exist. This is the interesting thing about illusion. It is a remnant of the fact that for primitive tribes the pair illusion and the communal illusion were not separate.
As a story, a stage is now needed in which Kikunosuke, expelled from the communal illusion of Kabuki, is symbolically reborn. So the troupe of itinerant actors he belonged to collapses in Nagoya, on its tour of the provinces. The two lose all means of living and, at a loss, put up at a cheap inn. After years of such a hard life, Otoku has fallen ill, and the two are driven to the point where they can do nothing more by themselves. Then, just when everything seemed shut in darkness, they learn by chance that Kikugoro's troupe has come to Nagoya, where they are staying, and is performing there. On hearing this, Otoku secretly goes to meet an old friend of Kikunosuke who is an actor in that troupe. The friend and others concerned agree that if Kikunosuke's acting has truly gained depth, as Otoku says, they will give him one last chance in this Nagoya engagement. If he is well received, reforms himself, and returns to Kikugoro's house in Tokyo, they promise to take care of that. But the condition set is that Otoku must part from Kikunosuke, which means never seeing him again. And Otoku had already made up her mind when she brought the proposal.
To have Kikunosuke return to the prestigious world of Kabuki, succeed Kikugoro on fair evaluation, and become a fine actor: this was Otoku's purpose in living and her wish. She lived by the mission of returning Kikunosuke, whose acting had gained depth through hardship, from the dimension of the pair illusion that still bound the two of them to the communal illusion of Kabuki, where he was meant to be. What this implies is Otoku's death. As Kikunosuke performs on the stage in Nagoya, Otoku watches his final appearance, is moved by his superb acting, realizes that she has fulfilled her role, and disappears of her own accord. On the train back to Tokyo, amid glowing reviews, Kikunosuke is thrown into violent confusion by Otoku's absence, but in his heart he knows that she stepped aside herself to return him to Kikugoro. So, as a man who lives for the way of art, he made his return to Tokyo alone.
Back in Tokyo, Kikunosuke is forgiven by Kikugoro, carrying the great reputation won in Nagoya as his offering, and is allowed to rejoin the house. This shows that he has returned to the world of communal illusion as a strong individual. Kikunosuke's individual illusion is entirely different at the beginning, when he was driven out of a particular communal illusion, and at the stage when he returns. The early individual illusion was immature and unable to resist the communal illusion, but the individual illusion of Kikunosuke, having lived through the trials of life in reality, had gained vitality strong enough to stand against the communal illusion as an individual. Yet since the relationship between individual illusion and communal illusion is always one of inversion, an individual illusion cannot transform the communal illusion itself. Why could Kikunosuke do it? Because his individual illusion held Otoku of the pair illusion. More precisely, Otoku's pair illusion and Otoku's individual illusion had been taken into Kikunosuke's individual illusion.
Because of the intensity of the pair illusion bound with Otoku, who by this time had already ceased to exist, he becomes able to give, on returning to the communal illusion, a performance only Kikunosuke could give. This is the great task that has long been laid upon those in Japan who practice gei (芸), art. Having returned to the Kabuki world in Tokyo, Kikunosuke goes with Kikugoro's troupe on its tour to Osaka and moves toward the climax, where he is given a comeback stage in Osaka, the home of Kamigata Kabuki, where he once suffered so terribly. He wins thunderous applause, becomes a first-rate actor in name and in fact, and stands at the center of rejoicing as a worthy successor to Kikugoro. In Kamigata at that time, when a Kabuki actor received such acclaim, there was a distinctive custom, the bright day of the funa-norikomi (船乗り込み), a ceremonial boat procession. Boats carrying the actors move in great numbers along the Dotonbori River in Osaka, wrapped in cheers from the crowds on the banks, something like a victory parade today.
Just as he is about to board the boat, a man appears before Kikunosuke. He is the landlord of the house where he had lived with Otoku in Osaka. Having heard that Kikunosuke was in Osaka, he brings word that Otoku is still in that house, gravely ill and close to death. The house is a poor tenement behind the feverish bustle, and Otoku lies in her sickbed, wandering the edge of death. She knows of Kikunosuke's comeback performance. She listens to the festival music drifting from afar, sure of his success, and is about to draw her last breath in peace. Kikunosuke, who has achieved so much, has been given the great honor of receiving congratulations at the head of the funa-norikomi, the custom of Osaka's Kamigata Kabuki. Shaken by the news that Otoku is in Osaka and near death, he is thrown into confusion. Then Kikugoro, who had once cast Otoku out, tells the bewildered Kikunosuke: "You have the art you have now because Otoku was there. You may take Otoku as your wife."
This is not the communal illusion bowing down before the pair illusion. It is a cinematic expression of extraordinary depth, showing the moment when communal illusion and pair illusion cushion each other and coexist at a very high level. What Mizoguchi depicted in The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums is exactly this decisive world: the pair illusion of Kikunosuke and Otoku was able to stand against the absolute presence of the Kabuki communal illusion led by Kikugoro, and the two coexisted within that fierce tension. For this to be realized, Otoku has to die.
Kikunosuke rushes to Otoku and tells her that Kikugoro has finally allowed their marriage. Moved, she still tells him that Kikunosuke now must show his face to the Osaka audience, who support the side of the communal illusion. Kikunosuke hesitates, unable to leave Otoku, who seems about to die at any moment, but at her firm urging he goes, leaving the words "Please stay alive." As Kikunosuke stands at the head of the boat, amid the sound of the crowd's cheers, Otoku draws her last breath. The expression is superb. From the window where she lies ill, Otoku quietly breathes her last, wrapped in the joy of the audience praising Kikunosuke.
The way this world of pair illusion is depicted leaves one speechless. Otoku's individual illusion gave everything to binding the pair illusion with Kikunosuke, and that pair illusion created the strength for Kikunosuke not to give up on his own future. When Otoku accomplished the great task of returning Kikunosuke to the communal illusion of Kikugoro Onoe's world, where he was meant to be, she extinguished her own existence in the world. Or rather, she had no strength left to sustain it. This could not be done unless the individual illusion were extinguished to that extent. At the same time, because she had so firmly bound the pair illusion with Kikunosuke, her nonexistence comes to dwell in him. The world of pair illusion entered Kikunosuke's individual illusion and gave rise to the strength to stand against Kikugoro Onoe's communal illusion, a very singular phenomenon.
That is the reason we consider The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums a masterpiece, and why it moves us from the depths of our hearts, in a way we cannot put into words.