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Paper short abstract:

In Hashiguchi Ryōsuke’s film Hush!, an unusual “love triangle” between a thirty-something gay couple and a single straight woman opens up the possibility of a novel kind of family - an arrangement the film validates compared to the options of rootless promiscuity and normative heterosexual monogamy.

Paper long abstract:

The Japanese poster for Hashiguchi Ryōsuke’s film Hush! (Hasshu, 2001) used the tagline “21st-century pregancy reveal”; in France, the film was advertised with the slogan “La nouvelle famille”. These phrases point to a concern with the redefinition of family norms which, if anything, seems all the more contemporary two decades on.

At the heart of Hashiguchi’s film is the contradiction between personal inclination and free choice, on the one hand, and the defining limits of biology and society on the other. In films such as A Touch of Fever (Hatachi no binetsu, 1993) and Like Grains of Sand (Nagisa no shindobaddo, 1995), the director, himself openly gay, explored the challenges facing young gay people in Heisei-era Japan. The focus of Hush! is broader; the film reflects on the difficulties faced both by homosexual and heterosexual characters who chafe against the limited options open to them, and contrives a novel solution.

Hush! dramatises an unusual “love triangle” - the relationship between a thirty-something gay couple and a single straight woman. After a series of unsatisfactory romantic relationships, Asako (Kataoka Reiko) wants a child without wanting a husband or boyfriend; Katsuhiro (Tanabe Seiichi) and Naoya (Takahashi Kazuya) are happily partnered, but as a same-sex couple have written off the possibility of having children. In a fashion somewhat reminiscent of screwball comedy, a chance encounter brings the trio together to fulfill each other’s goals.

Hashiguchi juxtaposes the choices made by these characters with the contrasting options of rootless promiscuity and normative heterosexual monogamy, both of which the film finds unsatisfactory. In the context of the relatively conservative social mores and political environment of early twenty-first century Japan, a country which when the film was made (and indeed still at the time of writing) did not recognise same-sex marriage and in which surrogacy is not widely accepted, the alternative that the film proposes can be fulfilled only through serendipity and is arguably imagined as a form of wish fulfillment. Yet it nevertheless hints at new and more flexible options for family formation.

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Kimura Sotoji’s seminal Karayuki-san (1937) was the first film to deal with the controversial issues of prejudice and discrimination against returning prostitutes and children of mixed heritage. This paper performs a close reading on the film as well as contextualizing its production and reception.

Paper long abstract:

The name "karayuki-san" was originally rendered in Chinese kanji characters meaning "going to China," and in the latter half of the 19th century became a name used for people who went abroad to earn money. However, it gradually began to be used to refer to Japanese girls and women who, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were trafficked from often impoverished agricultural prefectures in Japan to destinations in East Asia, Southeast Asia, Siberia (Russian Far East), Manchuria, British India, and Australia, as sex workers.

In post-war films and documentaries such as Karayuki-san, the Making of a Prostitute (Karayuki-san, Shohei Imamura, 1975), Sandakan No. 8 (Kei Kumai, 1974) and Whoremonger (Zegen, 1987) the brutal realities of the Japanese sex trade in South-East Asia is examined in great detail. Yet in the 1930s and 1940s, there were already films negotiating this problematic legacy. The first, and arguably the finest, among the pre-war films is 1937 Kimura Sotoji’s masterpiece Karayuki-san.

Kimura tells the story of Yuki, played by star Irie Takako, who returns to Shimabara, Kyushu, after having lived for 12 years in Singapore as a prostitute. She returns home together with her mixed blood son Anton, after her English husband has passed away. Having returned in a state of relative wealth, Yuki, Anton, and the other former prostitutes that came back together with them, are ostracized from the local community and continuously suffer from discrimination.

Kimura, a director previously linked to the Japanese proletarian film movement, and famously of a progressive political orientation, depicts the fate of Yuki and Anton with a shocking level of detail and frankness, and at its release, the film was the subject of widespread debate within both film journals and the daily press. This paper performs a close reading on the film as well as contextualising its production and reception.

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Paper short abstract:

A close analysis of Naruse Mikio’s silent film Nasanu naka (1932) delves into the director’s visionary play with narrative and film-stylistic conventions regarding sexuality, family and female agency as he situates an outdated melodrama within the spectacle of modern urban life.

Paper long abstract:

When Naruse Mikio made Nasanu naka (No Blood Relation) as a silent film at Shōchiku in 1932, the material was already seen as old-fashioned and related to the worn mode of shinpa-style cinematic melodrama. Yet the Kinema Junpō critic at the time admitted that he cried watching it while hailing its ‘fresh’ qualities.

Naruse’s version features a woman, Tamae (Okada Yoshiko), who leaves Japan to pursue a film career in Hollywood and returns to claim her daughter, whom she had left with her husband. The child, however, has formed a strong emotional bond with the father’s new wife, Masako (Tsukuba Yukiko), which Tamae proves unable to sever, prompting her to return to America alone. I argue that while Naruse builds on melodramatic shinpa dynamics as structural ‘bookends’, the film, on both narrative and stylistic levels, plays out a more nuanced version of the classic clash between the traditional Japanese and the Western-influenced female characters, family values and female sacrifice.

The urban environment, steeped in body-focused modern consumerism (with costumes provided by Mitsukoshi), serves as a backdrop for Tamae’s world of female agency, sexuality and the foreign(ised) other. The usual Modern Girl-trope, however, is undermined by her role as a mother keen to win back the love of her daughter. In another unusual twist, the stepmother is here portrayed as the kimono-clad purer model of selfless motherly love, untainted by sexuality and childbearing, who makes a simple home in the suburbs. Stylistically, the emotional climax of relinquishing the child to the stepmother occurs off-screen, granting Tamae a sense of autonomy uninhabited by the camera. As she decides to leave the child not through the acceptance of insurmountable fate common in shinpa, but by recognition of the consequences of her earlier socially-sanctioned life choices, she is still offered a clear path towards opportunity that shinpa heroines are often denied. Moreover, through the frequent use of rapid track-ins to characters’ faces (cf. Russell 2008), Naruse exaggerates the close-up as silent cinema’s and shinpa’s classic access-point to a character’s emotional interiority in order to situate the film firmly in the transition to sound film.