Tsuruhachi and Tsurujiro

With Yamada Isuzu and Hasegawa Kazuo as its female and male lead, the film was endowed with two movie legends in the making. Yamada Isuzu as the mature samisen player in partner with the male-centred and restrained Tsurujiro played by Hasegawa.

However being a performing artist in the 1930s in Japan, and in fact anywhere else in the world, with the depression and the second world war looming large, is not an easy job. Love, friendship, financial problems intermingled with great performances in their partnership to bid for the meijinkai as great Japanese performers with honour. Throughout, Naruse has made a great tapestry of a delicate feelings of two human souls. A must for Japanese movie lover.

This film involves two teenage musicians known simply as "Jiro" (Isuzu Yamada) and "Toyo" (Kazuo Hasegawa) who have trained together for a very long time and have finally achieved popular success in Tokyo. Naturally, being young and so well acquainted, the two of them have grown quite attracted to one another even though neither have expressed their emotional feelings as each of them prefer to concentrate on their music instead. To make matters even more difficult is the fact that Jiro is often overly critical of Toyo's musical ability even though she is one of the best shamisen players in Tokyo. This criticism continues until one day the two of them have an intense argument which causes each of them to go their separate ways. It's only then that they realize how much each of them meant to the other. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this was a pretty good film which has managed to withstand the test of time quite well. Of course, being produced in Japan prior to World War 2, the overall picture quality isn't that great but even so there is a certain depth to the story that more than compensates for it. Having said that, I recommend this picture for any viewers who might be interested in a romantic drama of this type.

Isuzu Yamada sings folk songs and Kazuo Hasegawa accompanies him on the shamisen. They are very popular performers. Backstage, they quarrel constantly about how to play and sing, usually instigated by Yamada. Heihachirô Ôkawa proposes to Miss Hasegawa, and she accepts him, but then there's a scene in which the leads confess their love for each other. They decide to get married after they open their own theater. When Yamada discovers that Miss Hasegawa has borrowed money from Ôkawa, he accuses her of being the other man's mistress. They break up the act, she marries Ôkawa, and Yamada tries a solo act and goes to drink and playing small towns.

Even though I am fascinated by the wealth of fine Japanese film makers from 1929 through the middle 1960s -- and Mikio Naruse, the director of this movie, is one of them -- I still struggle to understand the details of Japanese culture: the warbling, non-western singing, the shamisen (which I think of as a Japanese banjo), and the vaudeville-circuit-like life of these performers, With this sort of rough translation, I can understand the story, and it's nice to see this Japanese equivalent of a plot of many an American musical, with its cultural differences in that the story ends with sacrifice instead of happiness. That's the Japanese style of a satisfactory ending, far different from the Hollywood style, in which the boy and girl get together for the big production number at the end, followed by a happily-ever-after marriage.