Kon Ichikawa's 'The Makioka Sisters'

In August, Philadelphia might as well be Fargo. The Mann Festival— long since degraded to pop status— is over. Few theaters are open. Even my local Bala Cynwyd library shuts on Sunday.

The assumption, apparently, is that all people in their right minds are at the shore, or doing their painful civic duty by attending a Phillies game.

One exception in the wasteland, however, is the film series at International House, which shows great oldies you won't necessarily find on Netflix and might want to see anyway on a screen for which they were designed.

(You might also want to see them in company. Films were once a public event that, like theater, were meant to be experienced with others. That was before people kept tuning into their I-Pads, blinding you like random ushers' searchlights distributed through the hall.)

International House, on the Penn campus, is currently offering varied fare from the Janus collection. It's not an ideal venue, but then art theaters have always tended toward the scruffy side, and it's the only such place in town.

Anti-war masterpiece

More to the point, International House often presents films that are never commercially released in Philadelphia. One such was Kon Ichikawa's adaptation of Junichiro Tanizaki's classic novel, The Makioka Sisters.

We've seen some truly awful adaptations of late, notably Joe Wright's of Anna Karenina and Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby. The Makioka Sisters occupies a place similar to these classics in Japanese literature. Ichikawa's 1983 version was the novel's third screen adaptation, all of them Japanese. I know nothing of the other two, but this one is a sly masterpiece that demonstrates how great literature can become great film.

Ichikawa (1915-2008) was one of a quartet of master Japanese filmmakers of the last century, among whom the best known in the West is Akiro Kurosawa. Ichikawa was a chameleon talent who excelled in all forms: dramatic, comedic and documentary.

In the wake of World War II, he produced two of the most impassioned anti-war films ever made: The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain. The latter— about Japanese soldiers stranded on the Philippines at the end of the war, abandoned by their officers and finally reduced to cannibalism— is almost unbearably harrowing. It's even more remarkable in that the Japanese remain, to this day, notoriously reluctant to face responsibility for the vast destruction they inflicted in their Pacific wars of the 1930s and 1940s, not least upon the ordinary foot soldiers abandoned to their fate.

Japan's commercial elite

The Makioka Sisters, a family saga about four siblings whose fortunes and personalities reflect the changing mores of imperial Japan, would seem to be far removed from such concerns. As the film begins, the sisters are shown in graceful montage against a background of cherry blossoms, the classic symbol of Japanese aestheticism and refinement.

But neither they nor their environment are quite what they seem. The sisters themselves are heirs of a family of shipping magnates— that is, the products of Japan's new commercial elite— and their traditional style of dress and deportment is in reality a nouveau riche affectation for a culture that's rapidly waning.

Also significantly, Ichikawa stamps his film with an historical date: 1938, the midpoint of the long war that began in 1931 with Japan's invasion of Manchuria and would culminate in its unconditional surrender to the United States in 1945. It was also the year, for students of that war, of the so-called Rape of Nanjing, the slaughter of up to 300,000 residents of the Chinese city by occupying Japanese forces that stands as the one of the great atrocities of history.

Bush's advice

Ichikawa makes no mention of this rampage in his story, for his protagonists would almost certainly have been unaware of it, as many Japanese to this day remain (except in the vague and dismissive way that most nations bury the more unsavory parts of their history). The sisters know that a war is going on, of course; there is a bit of rationing and an occasional mention of patriotic troops abroad, and a scene in which a servant weeps at the loss of a child in battle.

In short, the war is as yet a minor inconvenience for Japan's cultivated civilian elite, a background noise to the business of living. Viewing The Makioka Sisters today, one is inevitably reminded of President George W. Bush's post-9/11 advice to Americans: Go shopping. All empires are, finally, alike.

The war that's not quite real is an extension of wider social change about which the sisters are likewise in denial, although they are themselves its product. Elder siblings Tsuruko (the noted and very fine actress Keiko Kishi) and Suchiko (Yoshiko Sakuma) are married. Their chief responsibility is to arrange suitable marriages for their younger sisters, Yukiko (Sayuri Yoshinaga) and Taeko (Yuko Katagawa).

Romance as commerce

By tradition, the sisters must marry in order of age, so that although young Taeko has an ardent suitor, her marriage must await that of the demure but choosy Yukiko, who maintains an almost caricatural façade of traditional maidenhood as one candidate after another is presented to her, only to be dismissed.

Yukiko is no longer in the first bloom of youth, and her suitors are middle-aged businessmen who research the Makioka clan as one would conduct due diligence about a commercial acquisition. In one horrific-hilarious scene, the most repellent of these gentlemen lays out his findings about the family as if on a spreadsheet.

The crisis of Yukiko's spinsterhood is brought to a head by Suchiko's discovery that her husband, Teinosuke (Koji Ichizaka), himself displays an unseemly interest in her (more emphasized in the film than in the novel).

Tension and scandal

At the same time, Tsuruko's world, centered as it is on her native Osaka where the family's business has been rooted, is threatened when her businessman-husband Tetsuo (Juzo Itami, later an important Japanese director in his own right) is transferred by his firm to Tokyo. Tetsuo cannot reject the transfer without destroying his career, but Tsuruko's higher social position— the pseudo-aristocracy of older money— makes it impossible for Tetsuo to compel her to follow him. And all this is complicated by Taeko, who wants to start a business of her own, and whose reckless taste in men leads to an episode of blackmail.

Thus behind the façade of haut bourgeois respectability that the elder sisters strive to project, there lurks a good deal of tension and no small breath of scandal.

The issues are mostly resolved in the end— Tsuruko decides that her higher duty is to her husband; Yuchiko falls in love; Teinosuke wistfully buries his passion; and Taeko winds up with a bartender— but not before the radically destabilized social and class relationships of Japanese society are laid bare. Ichikawa achieves this outcome— as does Tanizaki— with a detached and ironic style that belies a deep seriousness of purpose. The sisters are observed but not mocked; we see them entangled in the conflicting imperatives of their time and place, but striving through them for their own happiness.

They remain loyal to one another too, despite all that divides them, and the film's closing shot— a reprise of the opening montage of cherry blossoms— is enriched with all we have learned about human frailty and social dislocation, but also about enduring love.♦


To read a response, click here.