Muhomatsu no issho / The Rickshaw Man (1943) (world premiere of the 2020 digital restoration by Kadokawa Corporation and The Film Foundation)

Hiroshi Inagaki: 無法松の一生 / Muhomatsu no issho / The Rickshaw Man (JP 1943) starring Keiko Sonoi (Mother), Hiroyuki Nagato (Toshio bambino) and Tsumasaburo Bando (Matsugoro the Rickshaw Man).

Hiroshi Inagaki: 無法松の一生 / Muhomatsu no issho / The Rickshaw Man (JP 1943) starring Tsumasaburo Bando as Matsugoro.

Hiroshi Inagaki: 無法松の一生 / Muhomatsu no issho / The Rickshaw Man (JP 1943) starring Tsumasaburo Bando as Matsugoro who still knows the secret of Gion daiko drumming of Kokura. My screenshot from Taiko Source.

Hiroshi Inagaki: 無法松の一生 / Muhomatsu no issho / The Rickshaw Man (JP 1943) starring Hiroyuki Nagato (Toshio bambino), Tsumasaburo Bando (Matsugoro the Rickshaw Man) and Keiko Sonoi (Mother).

無法松の一生 / Wheels of Fate / L'Homme au pousse-pousse
    JP 1943. Director: Hiroshi Inagaki. 78 min
    Sog.: dal romanzo Tomishima Matsugoro den (1939) di Shunsaku Iwashita. Scen.: Mansaku Itami. F.: Kazuo Miyagawa. M.: Shigeo Nishida. Mus.: Goro Nishi.
    Int. Tsumasaburo Bando (Matsugoro, detto ‘Matsu’), Yasushi Nagata (capitano Kotaro Yoshioka), Keiko Sonoi (la moglie di Yoshioka), Kamon Kawamura (Toshio), Hiroyuki Nagato (Toshio bambino), Ryûnosuke Tsukigata, Kyôji Sugi.
    Prod.: Daiei Film. DCP. Bn.
    The original version was 99 min. 20 minutes of censorship cuts are believed lost.
    Bologna: Il Cinema Ritrovato: Venezia Classici – The Film Foundation 30
    DCP from Kadokawa Pictures
    Original in Japanese with Italian subtitles by Antonella Viardo on the DCP and e-subtitles in English by Sub-Ti Londra.
    Restored by Kadokawa Corporation and The Film Foundation at Cineric in New York and Lisbon, with the cooperation of The Kyoto Film Archive. Special thanks to Masahiro Miyajima and Martin Scorsese for their consultation
    Introduce Andrea Meneghelli.
    Viewed at Teatro Auditorium Manzoni, 31 Aug 2020.

Jacques Lourcelles, Dictionnaire du cinéma: les films, Laffont, Paris 1992, quoted at Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2020: "A film portrait: the flashbacks and present-day sequences, located on the same plane, reveal the different aspects of the character of Matsugoro, The Rebel, an almost legendary figure for the Japanese lower classes. Matsugoro embodies, in his modest condition, some eternal features of the national character: oversensitive pride, courage, devotion, adherence to tradition, respect for the moral code of the time, to the point of sacrifice. Beyond its few experiments (such as the linking sequences and the unfolding of time marked by the visual leitmotif of the ever-spinning rickshaw wheel), the film’s worth is in its spontaneity, its freshness, its bonhomie. In its modesty too, as it understates any character’s dismay, even despair."

"Fifteen years later, Inagaki would shoot an extremely faithful remake of his own film, but in Cinemascope and colour: a more explanatory, more diluted, more outdated work, less touching and less convincing. It was the cuts made by the very strict censorship of the time, Max Tessier recalls (in Images du cinéma japonais, Veyrier, 1981) that pushed Inagaki to undertake the remake. However, everything had been said in the original, allusive and endearing in its form. In the 1958 version, Toshiro Mifune’s overly plodding and overly picturesque interpretation prevents the figure of Matsugoro from ‘coming across’ as well as in the first version. A third adaptation of Iwashita’s novel was made in 1965 by Kenji Misumi." Jacques Lourcelles, Dictionnaire du cinéma: les films, Laffont, Paris 1992, quoted at Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2020

AA: The world premiere of the 2020 restoration of The Rickshaw Man (1943) was screened in the Venice Classics strand of the festival.

I have been looking forward to this film ever since Nagisa Oshima praised it in his Century of the Cinema tribute to the history of Japanese cinema in 1995. In his montage, the excerpt was followed by the most heart-breaking superimposition in Oshima's oeuvre – the Hiroshima mushroom – and a close-up of Keiko Sonoi, the female star of the film, killed from exposure to the atomic bomb in Hiroshima – the only moment in an Oshima film that makes me cry.

In a parallel case, seeing The Rickshaw Man was for me both the greatest highlight of Il Cinema Ritrovato 2020 and the only film that made me cry, but this had nothing to do with Oshima's Hiroshima association, which I had forgotten.

There is a secret and a mystery buried in this movie, perhaps not even conscious to the director Hiroshi Inagaki or his cast and crew, but they have sensed and nurtured it. There is a unique and compelling emotional charge in The Rickshaw Man.

That charge I sensed already in Oshima's excerpt, and in his interpretation, the movie embodied a spirit of ancient, original Japanese humanity, a counter-image to the contemporary reality of militarism, coercion and class society. The Rickshaw Man is also a story of unrequited love transcending class boundaries. Even with anticipations like this, the movie greatly exceeded my expectations.

The action takes place in the city of Kokura (today merged with four other cities into Kitakyushu) on the island of Kyushu in Southern Japan, near the Tsushima Strait and the Korea Strait. Kokura lies between Hiroshima (to the Northeast) and Nagasaki (to the Southwest). The historical city is known for Kokura Castle and Miyamoto Musashi, a philosopher and swordsman well-known in the cinema from films by Daisuke Ito, Kenji Mizoguchi, Hiroshi Inagaki, Tomu Uchida and others.

The year is 1905, that of the Russo-Japanese War. Kotaro, the father of the Yoshioka family, is a captain of the army. When he dies during a military exercise in a rainy season, Matsugoro, a rickshaw man, becomes a surrogate father to his son Toshio, now raised by Mrs. Yoshioka as a widowed mother.

Matsugaro is a notorious brawler, drunkard and troublemaker. The hulk can devour 16 bowls of Udoi noodles. He manages to get into quarrel with the Wakamatsu police kendo teacher. On a rare visit to the theatre, he arrives with a portable stove and cooks garlic, to the consternation of the theatre audience. But he is a superb rickshaw man.

One day, he helps the crying boy Toshio, who has injured himself while playing on stilts, and wins the trust of the Yoshioka family. After Kotaro's death, Matsugoro becomes a reliable surrogate father who teaches Toshio to be brave and face adversity. He escorts Mrs. Yoshioka and Toshio to Sunday festivities, and, at their incitation, spontaneously enters a sprint race which he wins. While helping raise Toshio, Matsugoro himself grows up.

When Toshio lands into fights with other boys, Matsugoro teaches him self-defense skills. Years go by, and Toshio now fails to recognize the humble rickshaw man. But on Kokura Gion Daiko Day, Toshio is accompanied by his teacher from Goko. He wants to hear authentic Gion Daiko drums, and they visit the festival street where a magnificent double-sided nagado-daiko drum is installed on a float.

As the official drummers are clueless about authentic drumming, Matsugoro volunteers to demonstrate. To the amazement of the festival public, he gives a powerful and playful performance of three classic drumming styles, 流れ打ち、勇み駒、暴れ打ち (nagare-uchi, isami koma, abare-uchi). Old-timers who still recognize them have not heard them in years. This scene has became a model of new waves of drummers to the present day. Partly it was, however, an invention by Denji Tanaka for this movie. The drumming we hear is not by Tsumasaburo Bando, who only pantomimes it.

In scenes deleted by the censor, Matsugoro confesses his secret affection to Mrs. Yoshioka. Having failed, he reverts to sake and dies in the snow. Among his estate, a hefty bankbook is found for Mrs. Yoshiko and Toshio, with all his gifts from the family untouched.

The film was shot by Kazuo Miyagawa who during this period was Hiroshi Inagaki's trusted cinematographer. He proceeded in the 1950s to masterpieces by others, including Rashomon, Ugetsu, Ukigusa and Tokyo Olympics. Here he was also in charge of the elaborate on-camera visual effects, enchanting superimpositions achieved by multiple exposures using a method called Kanjin-cho. While the film in general follows an approach of vivid realism, the visual effects introduce a stream of consciousness, a window to dreams, memories, and poetic impressions of the stormy sea. A recurrent visual motif, like a rhyme, is the fast movement of the rickshaw wheels.

After WWII, scenes relevant to the Japanese Empire were removed: a lantern procession to celebrate the Russo-Japanese war, and scenes where Toshio and his schoolmates sing military songs like "Blood of the Amur River"「アムール川の流血や」.

The blunt censorship cuts contribute to an approach of ellipsis. The film at times proceeds in jump cuts, but the impact is not jarring; it's electrifying. The most moving ellipses are the deaths of Kotaro Yoshioka and Matsugoro the rickshaw man.

Although this is a film about a son and his two father figures, the female perspective is central. The mother appreciates Matsugoro for his positive and life-affirming masculinity. In his spirit of cheerful bravery she finds a good model for Toshio.

Matsugoro himself has no good childhood memories. With Toshio he can experience a happy childhood and become a father figure like he never had. His own father was a miserable drunkard, a fate Matsugoro now has a reason to avoid. Flying kites and balloons and observing flocks of birds are among the memorable visual motifs. Simply and eloquently, they convey a yearning to the beyond.

Tsumasaburo Bando gives a great performance in the title role. I have never seen a film of his before, although he has 162 acting credits in the Internet Movie Database. Affectionately called Bantsuma, he was one of Japan's greatest stars from the 1920s till the 1940s, and from 1925 till 1937 he had his own production company, the first Japanese star to achieve that. He was a master of the swordfighting period film genre of jidai-geki. For Bando the role in The Rickshaw Man was exceptional. He had to be persuaded to it by his trusted director Hiroshi Inagaki who had directed his first sound movie.

The rickshaw man is a humble character, performing a heavy chore usually carried out by an animal. But the interpretation of Hiroshi Inagaki and Tsumasaburo Bando is a display of extraordinary humanity and a privileged access to something sacred and timeless. This revelation may have an affinity with Bantsuma's unconventional approach to the samurai tradition in films starting with Orochi (1925).

Kokura Gion daiko statue at south exit of Kokura station. 5 January 2005. Photo © Ian Ruxton (Historian) at English Wikipedia.