East-West Film Journal, Volume 7, No. 2

EAST-WEST FILM JOURNAL VOLUME 7· NUMBER 2 Approaching Japanese Melodrama I JOSEPH A. MURPHY Adapting (to) the Margins: Hot Summer Winds and the Stories of Hisaye Yamamoto 39 ROBERT M. PAYNE Korean Cinema and the New Realism: Text and Context 54 ISOLDE STANDISH Where Is "The Nation"?: Public Discourse, the Body, and Visual Display 81 JANE C. DESMOND The Tourist/Traveler Gaze: Bertolucci and Bowles's The Sheltering Sky lIO YOSEFA LOSHITZKY Book Reviews JULY 1993 The East-West Center is a public, nonprofit education and research institution that examines such Asia-Pacific issues as the environment, economic development, population, international relations, resources, and culture and communication. Some two thousand research fellows, graduate students, educators, and professionals in business and government from Asia, the Pacific, and the United States annually work with the Center's staff in cooperative study, training, and research. The East-West Center was established in Hawaii in 1960 by the U. S. Congress, which provides principal funding. Support also comes from more than twenty Asian and Pacific governments, private agencies, and corporations and through the East-West Center Foundation. The Center has an international board ofgovernors. Approaching Japanese Melodrama JOSEPH A. MURPHY A SMALL FILM FESTIVAL has been held for each of the past three years in the city of Kanazawa, three hundred miles from Tokyo on the Japan Sea coast. Organized by a prominent Tokyo film critic, and sponsored by Kirin Beer, the Izumi Kyoka Film Festival concentrates on film adapta tions of the fiction of Izumi Kyoka, a writer active from 1893 to 1939. According to the program notes for the first festival, Kyoka's works "laid the mythological and logical foundations for the establishment of film as melodrama" (Yomota 1990). The theme of the 1992 festival was naki, or "crying." With respect to the question of whether today's busy, affluent Japanese have time or inclina tion to cry anymore, the six films selected for the festival were said to offer a glimpse into a time and place when people shed tears freely. The films were, of course, melodrama. The designation of a film as melodrama can be a source of some com fort to the English-speaking critic, suggesting the mobilization of a host of familiar categories. Since the early 1970S melodrama has been constituted as an important object of study in Anglo-American film criticism, with several major compilations and readers coming out in the last few years. 1 Christine Gledhill notes, however, that "how far the melodramatic aes thetic extends to non-Western cultures" remains "a matter of debate" (Gledhill 1987, 2). And so the question may arise, why try to think about these films in terms of melodrama at all? Well, first of all, that's what they are called, the Japanese word merodorama being derived from melodrama and writ ten in katakana, the script used to mark foreign loanwords. But beyond that, the kind of pejorative, common-sense notion of the word against which 1970S Anglo-American film criticism worked seems to extend quite well to a Japanese context. A scenario-writer for Shochiku Films, for 1 2 JOSEPH A. MURPHY example, in a tenacious defense of melodrama's association with mass cul ture, describes his chagrin at reading popular movies continually dis missed by reviewers as "trite melodrama," "syrupy, old-fashioned melo drama," or "insulting, unbearable melodrama" (Yamauchi 1986, 97). And in literary criticism the Shimpa theater, whose adaptations of Kyoka stor ies acted as a medium for many of the film versions, is nearly synonymous with "old-fashioned melodrama." At the same time, the Izumi Kyoka Film Festival is organized quite unapologetically to celebrate the importance of Kyoka's melodramatic work. I would like to take up the question of Japanese melodrama in the con text of Anglo-American criticism. Beginning with a discussion of the notion of melodrama as it emerges in film criticism of the 1970s, I will sug gest that the apparently radical gesture of rehabilitating a despised form tended to leave in place a number of hierarchical assumptions relating to value and genre. I will then take up work by Christine Gledhill and Mitsu hiro Yoshimoto, suggesting that some of the most interesting recent dis cussions pose a dilemma for the critic who wishes to approach Japanese melodrama. Gledhill's introductory essay for Home is Where the Heart Is (1987) forcefully articulates feminism's claim for a stake in the critical reappro priation of melodrama. I will suggest, though, that the notion of influence implicit in the historical narrative she constructs can only treat a non Western melodrama as derivative or separate. Yoshimoto's "Melodrama, Postmodernism and Japanese Cinema" (1991), on the other hand, by positing Japanese melodrama without appealing to positive family resem blances, questions a reading of melodrama based on a notion of a positive entity existing in the West and enables a forceful argument for the irreduc ible importance of global power relations in understanding melodrama in postwar Japan. I will argue, however, that in carrying this out on the level of the nation-state, emphasis on the alterity of Japan may elide difference within Japan, a choice that leaves unposed the question of Japanese melo drama's affiliation with women's culture. Both these critics offer powerful tools and materials to deal with melo drama. I hope that by maneuvering Yoshimoto's and Gledhill's work into a mutually critical position, I can construct a reading that learns from both. Due to the economics of international film distribution and the politics of cultural exchange, studying film in an Anglo-American context is most APPROACHING JAPANESE MELODRAMA 3 likely to bring one into contact with two types of Japanese film: those made by acknowledged auteurs like Kurosawa or Ozu, or otherwise selected by the critical institution as valuable, and the interlocking cate gory of films thought to be accessible to a Western audience. One of the advantages of a different principle of selection, such as that which orga nizes the Izumi Kyoka Film Festival, is that one sees a spectrum of films, from acknowledged masterpieces (Mizoguchi's Taki no shiraito, 1933), to less well known works by major artists (Kurihara, Shimazu, Naruse, Makino, Ichikawa, and Shinoda have all made one or more Kyokamono), to forgotten popular works. I have chosen to work mainly with Teinosuke Kinugasa's A Woman's Pedigree (Onna keizu, 1955).2 Of the six films at the 1992 festival, 3 this highly legible narrative is perhaps the one least pos sessed of the kind of alternative practice often associated with Japanese cinema (Elsaesser 1986). I hope to show that Kinugasa confidently deploys a mainstream style to produce a film clearly recognizable as part of the melodramatic aesthetic, but that careful attention to the function of par ticular devices helps us resist the notion that this is derivative of a pre existing Western model. Further, I will argue that placing the film within the political context of postwar Japan, to which it explicitly alludes, can not be done without reference to questions raised by feminist treatment of melodrama. THE 19705: PUTTING MELODRAMA ON THE MAP Our story of a complex negotiation between Japanese melodrama and Anglo-American criticism begins appropriately in Soviet Russia in the 1920S. Intellectuals in the new revolutionary society, including Blok, Lunacharsky, and Gorky, passionately concerned with the practical need for entertainment and instruction for the masses, make popular melo drama the object of spirited discussion. In 1927, several careful studies of the formal characteristics and evolution of the genre appeared, including Boris Tomashevsky's French Melodrama of the Beginning of the XIXth Century and Sergei Balukhatyi's Poetics of Melodrama (Gerould 1978, 152- 154). Comparison with the situation in 1920S America can bring out the anomaly of the Russian Formalists' attitude. Here, melodrama was scorned even by the silent movie industry. Advertisements and reviews of films now considered to be quintessentially melodramatic, such as Grif- 4 JOSEPH A. MURPHY fith's Way Down East (1920), were touted as bringing new depth and real ism to the "old-fashioned," "quaint," or "wooden" melodramas on which they were based. 4 The tactic revealed here, of resolving anxiety about the status of film as a popular medium by appealing to critical norms of high culture, shaped trends in film criticism until well into the 1960s. Attempting to demon strate, for example, "the Shakespearean or Mozartian qualities in the oeuvres of Howard Hawks, John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock" betrays a dis comfort with the fitness of stylistic and narrative categories specific to the cinema (Gledhill 1987, 5). Similarly in postwar film criticism, appeals to such concepts as order, harmony, composition, realist-humanist them at ics, or the notion of individual creative vision implicit in auteurism can be shown to have been shaped by contemporary trends in literary or fine art criticism. 5 In the 1960s, critics centered on Cahiers in France and Movie in En gland began to address this anxiety in a new way and unapologetically took popular Hollywood cinema of the 1940s, 1950S, and early 1960s as their object. The editorial manifesto of the first issue of Monogram (April 1971) places it explicitly in this movement, noting that "if there is any sin gle point which unites the contributors to Monogram, it is their belief in the cinema, its relevance and excellence, both past and present," and that this cinema "does have a tradition, and that this tradition is to a large part constituted by the American cinema." Constructing a tradition by the analysis of the specific formal and narrative qualities of mainstream cin ema was a liberating acknowledgment of film's status as popular form and industry.

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