A Story from Chikamatsu: From a Distance

Another urgent question asked with particular eloquence by A Story from Chikamatsu and the trilogy was how to reassess and possibly recuperate Japanese cultural traditions after so many had been effectively co-opted for nationalistic causes. While Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff both discovered spiritual and redemptive power in well-known folktales, The Life of Oharu reshaped Ihara Saikaku’s celebrated picaresque novel into a feminist critique of feudal Japan’s systematic subjugation of women. With A Story from Chikamatsu, Mizoguchi turned away from literature and toward theater, adapting a popular tragedy from Japan’s arguably most renowned playwright, Monzaemon Chikamatsu, originally written for the Bunraku puppet theater and later realized as a Kabuki play. Working with Yoda and legendary cameraman Kazuo Miyagawa, Mizoguchi transformed Chikamatsu’s drama of doomed love and intractable social pressures into a rigorously cinematographic work that innovatively channels theatrical traditions in order to push to a new level the detached perspective often described as a grounding principle and moral tenet of his style. 

Mizoguchi’s iconic films have been celebrated for avoiding the close-up and thus rejecting the kind of screen glamour and direct appeal for audience identification with the actor that remained a driving force of star-driven studio-era cinema, in Japan as in Hollywood. A Story from Chikamatsu is exemplary here for the carefully modulated distance it maintains between camera and characters, a distance that frequently recalls the fixed position of a theater audience before a stage. Mizoguchi’s deliberate limitation of the viewer’s perspective is especially notable in the film’s many interior scenes during which crucial actions ignite or occur just offscreen. One striking example is when the dedicated apprentice, Mohei (Kazuo Hasegawa), is caught using his master’s seal to sign a blank receipt for a small personal “loan” he promised as a favor to the master’s wife, Osan (Kyoko Kagawa). The very instant Mohei presses the seal to the empty page, a voice is heard offscreen accusing him of theft and forgery. 

Another good example of Mizoguchi’s tightly controlled framing occurs shortly after, when Mohei naively confesses to his favor turned crime, only to be savagely berated by his outraged employer. Rather than show the action directly, Mizoguchi locates the camera first at a remove, in the boudoir of Osan, who sits folding clothing until the sudden commotion compels her to rush outside to Mohei’s defense. Subtly presaging the fateful bond that will unite Mohei and Osan, Mizoguchi makes dynamic use of offscreen space to reveal how characters are both contained and destabilized by larger forces they cannot fully comprehend. There is, indeed, an almost film-noir logic of simultaneously cruel and absurd fatalism at work in A Story from Chikamatsu that gives calamitous weight to even the smallest misstep, like Mohei’s clumsy attempt to borrow that small sum of money from his wealthy master. An accumulation of white lies and mistaken identities thus sets into motion Mohei and Osan’s sudden transformation into criminal lovers.

The larger forces limiting and controlling mobility in A Story from Chikamatsu are legible in the film’s expressive mise-en-scène, which often embeds characters in busy and highly detailed settings, such as the bustling publishing house where the film opens and where its principal characters are introduced. In this way, for example, Mohei first appears as a background figure only partly visible on the floor of his crowded attic room, almost hidden behind a column and under a heavy duvet, where he lies stricken with a cold. The next shot moves closer to Mohei but with the camera now placed directly behind his reclining figure and pointed at his back, as he speaks to the boy assistant who has come to ask for instructions. This pointed delay in revealing the face of beloved stage and screen actor Hasegawa, shown a few moments later only when he reluctantly rouses himself from bed, underscores Mizoguchi’s insistence on defining a controlled distance between actor and audience and reminding the audience that its perspective is always partial and deliberately controlled.