Where to begin with Kinuyo Tanaka

Kinuyo Tanaka was among the most popular stars of pre-war Japanese cinema. In fact, she was so well loved that her name sometimes appeared in the titles of her films, such as in Hiromasa Nomura’s Kinuyo’s First Love (1940) and Kinuyo the Lady Doctor (1941).

She worked with Heinosuke Gosho on Japan’s very first talkie, The Neighbour’s Wife and Mine (1931), and appeared in films by several other major directors, such as Hiroshi Shimizu and Yasujiro Shimazu as well as some of those she’d come to be closely associated with after the war such as Yasujiro Ozu, Mikio Naruse and Kenji Mizoguchi. 

But in 1949, Tanaka experienced a moment of crisis on her return from a goodwill tour to the US when her overtly westernised appearance was heavily criticised by fans still enamoured with her 1930s star image of demure and self-sacrificing womanhood. When she announced her intention to become a film director in 1953, some critics read it as a reaction to just this crisis. On the completion of her first two films as director, many refused to take her seriously, attributing her success to the influence of the directors who had supported her, such as Keisuke Kinoshita, Naruse and Ozu. 

She was not Japan’s first female director (she was preceded by Tazuko Sakane, who worked primarily in non-fiction), but she was the second. And, in her time, she was also the only female filmmaker operating within the Japanese mainstream.

Tanaka’s first two films as a director were scripted by either Kinoshita or Ozu, but Forever a Woman (1955) is the first she began entirely independently. Like many of her films it explores contemporary notions of femininity – in this case through the true story of a female poet who escapes an unhappy marriage but is forced to surrender one of her children to her former husband, and is then diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. 

Tanaka’s unflinching camera often frames her heroine behind bars and then quite literally imprisoned behind the gate that will forever separate her from her children. The character expresses her fears and resentments through her poems, interpreting the loss of her breasts as an attack on her womanhood and maternity, but finally reclaiming her femininity through the fulfilment of her sexual desire. 

Adapted from a recently published novel, the film is scripted by frequent Naruse collaborator Sumie Tanaka (no relation). Naruse had encouraged Kinuyo Tanaka in her directing aspirations by taking her on as an assistant. Nevertheless, the vision of maternity she presents in Forever a Woman stands in direct contrast to that she had embodied in one of Naruse’s most cheerful films, Mother (1952), in which the self-sacrificing title character is required to surrender her desire for romantic fulfilment in order to fully conform to the maternal ideal.

Scripted by Kinoshita, Tanaka’s assured debut Love Letter (1953) is a freehanded melodrama meditating on the postwar future as an embittered veteran re-encounters his first love but rejects her on learning she had been the mistress of an American serviceman. The film’s perspective is novel in its insistence that it’s the man who must change in order to facilitate a better society, yet it shares something in common with the roles Tanaka had played for Kinoshita in the late 1940s, such as the war widow searching for her place in Phoenix or the ageing heroine of Marriage (both 1947) who is unable to marry because her family need her salary.

Featuring a script co-written by Ozu and Ryosuke Saito, The Moon Has Risen (1955) also contemplates romance and modernity as a feisty young woman tries to set her sister up while falling for a childhood friend. It may bear the hallmarks of classic Ozu, but it’s shot with a distinctive sensuality largely absent from his cinema. Tanaka had played some of her feistiest roles for the director in the 1930s in pictures such as Dragnet Girl (1933), and later reunited with him as the exasperated mother of Equinox Flower (1958). 

Girls of the Night (1961), meanwhile, echoes Tanaka’s role in Mizoguchi’s Women of the Night (1948) in sympathetically exploring the life of a young woman sent to a reformatory for sex workers in the wake of the Prostitution Prevention Law. Tanaka may be best known as Mizoguchi’s muse, taking the starring role in classics such as The Life of Oharu (1952), Ugetsu Monogatari (1953) and Sansho Dayu (1954), yet their working relationship came to an abrupt end when he attempted to block her desire to direct. 

In her last major screen appearance, she brought this same sympathy to a moving performance as a former sex worker once trafficked abroad in Kei Kumai’s Sandakan No. 8 (1974) and would make a final cameo in Yasuzo Masumura’s new-age odyssey Lullaby of the Earth (1976), which similarly revolves around a young woman tricked into sexual slavery.

The only one of Tanaka’s films to be set in the historical past, Love Under the Crucifix (1962) is a bold exploration of societal repression juxtaposing the use of the crucifix as a traditional method of execution for sexual transgression with the growing influence of Christianity in the late 16th century. Some historical knowledge of the era’s major figures – such as Hideyoshi, the warlord about to bring peace, and zen tea master Sen no Rikyu, whom he later orders to commit seppuku – is undoubtedly helpful in unpacking the film’s rich detail.

The Wandering Princess (1960) is a sumptuous romantic melodrama set against the turbulent history of Japan and China in the mid-20th century as a Japanese noblewoman agrees to marry the brother of the former Chinese emperor, now a puppet king of Manchuria. A familiarity with the lives of ‘last emperor’ Puyi and his family, who were used by the Japanese to legitimise the Manchurian state, is useful in parsing the background drama, though there is an unavoidable discomfort in the film’s idealised presentation of the Manchurian expansion. 

Even so, this deeply felt treatise on female oppression and lack of the freedom to love is presented with Tanaka’s characteristic sensitivity and sensuality.

A retrospective of Kinuyo Tanaka’s films runs at BFI Southbank and the Edinburgh International Film Festival in August.