Japanese comics or manga are often stereotyped in the West as exploitations of sex and violence. They actually are far more various. The manga of Tsuge Yoshiharu take us into a dream world that is at once strange and familiar, disturbing and funny. His work engages the imagination, erotic and otherwise, but remains private, elusive. It inspired Takenada Naoto’s 1990 Muno no Hito, a film about a failed manga artist who sells rocks by a river bank. Then, in 1993, after a fourteen-year absence from the screen, Ishii Teruo scripted and directed Master of the Gensenkan Inn, a four-segment anthology based on Tsuge’s manga.
Sano Shiro plays Tsube, a struggling manga artist who resembles the young Tsuge. But though narrated by Tsube as autobiography, the film quickly passes into a quirky realm that has only a tentative relationship with reality. Ishii gives his own distinctive stamp to this material, while staying true to Tsuge’s eccentric, humanistic vision.
The third and title segment plunges us into the eerie, twilight world of the Japanese ghost story. Tsube arrives in a town whose buildings look like stone mausoleums, whose inhabitants are grotesquely wrinkled old women, and whose skies are gloomy and gray. The women excitedly tell him that he is a double for the master of a local inn - the Gensekan. One of them, the mistress of a candy store, tells him the story of how the master came to live there. In a flashback, the master, who is indeed a ringer for Tsube, stops at the Gensekan and is greeted by the inn’s ancient maid and its voluptuous mistress (Mizuki Kaoru). The mistress, however, has a tick that twists her face and renders her all but speechless.
When the new guest goes to the bath he sees the mistress, unclothed, praying fervently at a shrine blazing with candles. The scene that follows promises more cleverly metaphoric erotic humor, but ends with a graphic attempt of rape. Escaping from her attacker, the mistress crawls to a steamed up mirror and writes “heya de” (“in my room”) on it with her finger. The progression from rape to lovemaking to love is common enough in Japanese films. Ishii films it as inevitable, if not quite desirable. We see violence, but we also recognize a mutual desire. Wearers of social masks who live outside normal society, these two are meant for each other.
At the end of the film, the cast leaves their seats in a tiny theatre and come up on stage to applaud their characters’ creator. Tsuge seems to be pleased with their work - as well he should be. Ishii also deserves a hand for a film that is not only a homage, but a harmonious collaboration between two large, unique and very strange talents.
Mark Schilling