Japanese directors often have widely varied careers in terms of genre or medium. Search the filmography of many a celebrated name and, in addition to the festival award winners, you're likely to find porno quickies, TV ads for ramen, or music videos for long-forgotten idols. But most, by inclination, talent or fate, end up being tagged as specialists in a certain genre, or auteurs with a definite style and favorite themes.
Few, however, resist pigeonholing as fiercely as Jissoji Akio. In the 1970s he was a leading director of the Art Theater Guild company - then one of the few outposts of independent cinema in Japan - making films that equaled those of fellow ATG directors Oshima Nagisa, Shinoda Masahiro, Terayama Shuji and Kuroki Kazuo in the boldness of their experimentation and the daring of their themes.
Jissoji was also a key creator of the Ultraman series - an SF action show for kiddies about a family of super-powered, monster-battling space aliens, played by actors in skin-tight red-and-silver suits. Far from regarding his Ultraman work as slumming for a pay check, Jissoji took it seriously, inserting his own philosophic concerns into the scripts. It is somewhat as if Jean-Luc Godard had signed on as a director of the Batman show.
But as jagged as Jissoji's early career path may have seemed to his contemporaries, his leaps over conventional boundaries between art and pop now makes him look like an avatar, though even today it's hard to find anyone quite like him. Many younger Japanese directors would gladly make a costumed superhero movie - the Ultraman franchise, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, and others like it have had a lasting impact on generations of Japanese boys (and not a few girls). But who of this trash-culture-worshipping group could also make the equivalent of ATG's uncompromising cinematic art? The answer is more than zero - but less than one. Not even Jissoji himself is quite an ATG director any more.
Born in Tokyo on March 29, 1937, Jissoji entered the French literature department of Waseda University, an elite private college. While a Waseda student, he joined a film circle and wrote essays on French cinema. Graduating in 1959, he was hired by the predecessor to Tokyo Broadcasting System, one of Japan's major networks, and made his TV directorial debut in 1961. A devoted fan of Nouvelle Vague and Cinema Vérité, he incorporated their techniques into his TBS music shows.
Jissoji also started directing dramas, and in 1965 entered the TBS Film Department. He served as an assistant director to special-effect master Tsuburaya Eiji on the Japanese-French co-production Spies on Parallel Tracks (Spy Heikosen), a made-for-TV film. With Tsuburaya's collaboration, he later directed such popular TV series as Ultraman, Ultra Seven and Operation: Mystery (Kaiki Daisakusen).
In 1969 Jissoji launched his own production company, Danso, which means "gap" or "shift,"implying a break with a past. That same year he made When Evening Falls (Yoiyame Semareba), a 44-minute film, based on a script by Oshima Nagisa, about four students who out of boredom turn on the gas in a sealed room and try to see who can last the longest without passing out. ATG released it together with Oshima's Diary of Shinjuku Thief (Shinjuku Dorobo Nikki, 1969). Soon after Jissoji left TBS to become a film director - one of the first to make this leap from the TV world. With the sponsorship of ATG, he made and released his first full-length feature film, This Transient Life (Mujo), in 1970. Based on a script by Ishido Toshiro, this drama of incest and deceit inspired outrage, but became ATG's biggest box office hit and won the Grand Prix at the Locarno Film Festival.
The story: A rebellious young man quarrels with his rich father, who wants him to take over the family business. He yearns instead to make Buddhist sculptures, but falls into a passionate affair with his sister. She becomes pregnant and tricks an admirer into marrying her, with her brother's support. He then apprentices himself to a Buddhist sculptor - and sleeps with his teacher's much younger wife. All these machinations lead, as might be expected, to a tragic result. Jissoji filmed This Transient Life without a wink of complicity or scowl of disapproval, instead opting for a Bressonian dispassion, a Godardian delight in expressive camera movement and what can only be called a Jissojian interest in erotic extremes.
Jissoji continued to make films for ATG through the mid-70s, with eroticism and spirituality, in all their peculiarly Japanese forms, central concerns. He also continued to direct for television, while extending the range of his activities to concerts, operas and book binding.
In 1979 he directed an Ultraman feature and in 1988, after nearly a decade away from the screen, released Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis (Teito Monogatari), a retro SF/fantasy, scripted by Hayashi Kaizo from a novel by Aramuta Hiroshi. Set from the early years of the 20th Century to the 1923 Tokyo earthquake and beyond, the story concerns the plans of a wealthy industrialist (Katsu Shintaro) to build a new quake-resistant Tokyo and the rage of a demon soldier, Kato Yasunari (Shimada Kyusaku) to destroy the city instead with the aid of Masakado, a super-powered samurai warrior who has been stirring unquietly in his grave for centuries. First, though, Kato kidnaps and impregnates the virginal sister of a Westernized architect with his evil spawn.
The resulting story is a wildly inventive farrago of Japanese history and myth, comic-book mysticism and Hollywood SF, including a CG-assisted re-enactment of the Tokyo quake and stop-motion-animated gremlins that invade the new Tokyo subway system. With effects by Tsuburaya and set designs by frequent Suzuki Seijun collaborator Kimura Takeo, Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis was a striking attempt to equal the Hollywood competition in visual impact and story-telling power. It became Jissoji's biggest commercial hit and inspired two live-action sequels, neither of which he directed, as well as an animated series.
After that Jissoji directed more films and TV programs in the SF vein, including Ultra Q: The Movie - Legend from the Stars (Ultra Q: The Movie - Hoshi no Densetsu, 1990).
He also continued to explore the underside of the erotic in Torture Me, Please - Henrietta (Ijimete Kudasai, Henrietta), featuring a gangster's wife who, to pay off a mountain of debt, descends into an S&M hell, and La Valuse (1990), with a Rashomon-like story about a trial for rape in which the stories of the victim and alleged rapist differ radically. The lawyer for the defense investigates his client's claims, only to find himself plunged into a miasma of falsehood.
In 1994 Jissoji released Watcher in the Attic (Edogawa Rampo Monogatari:
Yaneura no Sanposha), his first feature-length essay into the world of Edogawa Rampo (Taro Hirai). Born in 1894, Rampo was a disciple of namesake Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle who popularized the mystery story in Japan with a local version of Sherlock Homes, Akechi Kogoro. Rampo created his own mix of the erotic and grotesque - called eroguro in Japanese - of which his story Watcher in the Attic is a prime example.
Rampo's work has inspired dozens of films and TV shows since the silent days, including Tanaka Nobobu's 1976 film of Watcher in the Attic. Jissoji's version is soaked in an atmosphere of period eroticism and decadence, underlain with wry humor and canny insight into the baser human passions. As a mystery, it is undoubtedly old-fashioned (it turns, shades of Sherlock Holmes, on the deductions of an amateur detective with an uncanny nose for clues), but Jissoji maintains tension and interest until the twist ending.
The story begins with residents of the Toeikan, a cheap Tokyo rooming house, drinking sake and discussing the impact sound will have on the movies. One, a languid young man named Goda (Mikami Hiroshi) sits apart from the others, blowing smoke rings and thinking how stupendously boring these people are - they don't have an original thought between them! Better to die and be done with it!
Rather than end it all, Goda finds a new interest. One day while he is playing dress up with a woman's wig and lipstick, he accidentally loosens a ceiling board in his closet.
Climbing up, he discovers a dimly lit passage way under the roof leading to the Toeikan's other rooms. Soon he is scampering about like a ninja, making knotholes and moving ceiling boards for a better view. What he sees are the intimate acts - sadistic, criminal or vaguely mad - that reveal infinitely more about his fellow roomers than the various fronts they present to the world.
As the days pass, the keen delight Goda first felt from his explorations begins to fade. He needs a new stimulus. He remembers Endo the dentist (Mutaka Naomasa). a loathsome toad of a man who once boasted to all and sundry of attempting shinju (love
suicide) with the young wife of a colleague, flashing a bottle of morphine, he told Goda and the others that "with this you can die easily and painlessly" Goda decides to steal the morphine and give Dr. Endo a taste of his own medicine. He plots his crime with an ingenuity worthy of a Conan Doyle villain, but has to contend with a lantern-jawed "researcher of human psychology" named Akechi Kogoro (Shimada Kyusaku), who take a disturbingly interest in his fellow roomers.
With its lovingly detailed period atmospherics and stance of ironic detachment from the debauched and deluded goings-on, Yaneura no Sanposha verges on comedy of the artier sort, but Jissoji refuses to go for easy, superior laughs - preferring instead to make the audience see the film's tiny world from Goda's twisted point of view.
Three years later Jissoji returned to Rampo in The D Slope Murder Case (D Zaka no Satsujin Jiken, 1997). Shimada Kyusaku again plays Akechi, who is no longer boarding at the Toeikan, but is again investigating the darker reaches of the human psyche. The year is 1927, the place, the Dangozaka section of central Tokyo, where Rampo himself lived after coming to the city in 1919 from his native Mie Prefecture.
The action begins in a used bookstore much like the one Rampo himself once ran with his two brothers. Instead of an aspiring writer, however, the store's proprietor is one Tokiko (Yoshiyuki Yumi), a ripe beauty with a taste for kinky sex.
Then she turns up dead - strangled by the sort of rope she once used for pleasure.
Suspicion falls on a store employee named Saito who took the dominant role in their S&M revels. Also implicated is Seiichiro (Sanada Hiroyuki), a cross-dressing forger Tokiko hired to copy prints of bound beauties by a famous S&M artist.
Seiichiro throws himself into his work with enthusiasm, making forgeries impossible to tell from the originals. He is so confident of his skill - and jealous of the master he copies - that he destroys the originals and give Tokiko another set of copies instead. Is this warped, if brilliant, man also a murderer?
Akechi is soon on the case, probing his two suspects with his usual foppishly casual, but preternaturally clear-sighted air. He quickly decides that the guilty one is
- but does it matter? The film's most memorable scenes are the, not the unmasking of the perpetrator, but Sanada Hiroyuki's performance as Seiichiro, with a focus, passion and touch of madness that transforms what could have been another genre exercise into a dazzling portrait of the artist who is the real thing in every way - but his art.
In 2005 Jissoji released Ubume (Ubume no natsu), a mystery based on a novel by Kyogoku Natsuhiko considered all but unfilmable. Somewhat in the manner of the Rampo films, the hero, a used bookseller named Kyogokudo (Tsutsumi Shinichi), is a jaded intellectual with unusual powers. Instead of an amateur shamus, however, he is a student of strange phenomenon, while stoutly deny the existence of the supernatural - on the surface at least. One day a nerdy friend, Sekiguchi (Nagase Masatoshi), comes to him with some bizarre news - a woman of his acquaintance has been pregnant twenty months. As if that weren't enough, her husband ran off a year ago, leaving her to deal with her unusual dilemma alone. The woman's sister has asked Sekiguchi and Enozuki (Abe Hiroshi) an eccentric private eye who has the power to see other people's memories, to locate the missing hubby. Also helping out is Enozuki's boyish-but-beautiful sister (Tanaka Rena), who browbeats Sekiguchi, while steaming up his spectacles.
The road to the solution of the film's various mysteries is long and winding, to the say the least. Jissoji tries to faithfully film an extremely talky 600-page novel, which means that the principals, particularly Tsutsumi's bookseller, have to reel off swaths of dialogue, with barely a pause for breath.
They go through their paces with a panache that verges on the comic - but Jissoji, as usual, is after more than chuckles at the verbal pyrotechnics. He is exploring the difficulty of knowing, not only another human being (the bookseller, especially, is a mystery wrapped in an enigma), but the nature of reality itself. In the world of Ubume little is what it seems, including the eternally pregnant heroine.
In 2005 Jissoji also returned to Rampo in Rampo Noir (Rampo Jigoku, 2005), an omnibus film based on Rampo's stories and directed by two newcomers - Takeuchi Suguru and Kaneko Atsushi - and two veterans - Jissoji and pink film "emperor" Sato Hisayaku. All four segments star Tadanobu Asano, but not in a continuing role. Jissoji's segment, The Hell of Mirrors (Kagami Jigoku), again features Akechi (Asano), this time on the trail of a murderer with a most unusual modus operandi - all of his victims are female and all are found dead with a Japanese-style mirror. Suspicion falls on Toru Ikki (Narimiya Hiroki), a mirror maker who takes an unhealthy - or rather unholy - interest in his work.
While his younger colleagues treat their segments primarily as exercises in stylistics, Jissoji is more interested in the psychologies of his two principals, and how they clash in what can only be a struggle to the death. They are a study in contrasts: the deadpan manner of Asan's Akechi is all but unreadable; the mad obsession of Narimiya's Ikki is as plain as a face in a garishly lit mirror. But they are also connected - not only as hunter and hunted, but fellow voyagers into dark realms, though fated for utterly separate destinations.
Jissoji himself has headed in a direction quite different from others who share his interest in eroguro. Unlike Suzuki Seijun, who happily takes leave of reality for self-created surreal realms, Jissoji keeps his feet planted, however tenuously, in the actual. Even in a fantasy like Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis, events unfold in a recognizable Tokyo, in a real historical context.
Unlike Miike Takashi, who loves to mess with his audience's mind by suddenly shifting into the gross, fantastic or absurd, Jissoji has little inclination for jokes or pranks. Instead he sees human complexities in what is usually thought of, even by its makers and consumers, as superficial pulp. He has his comic side, but few, if any, winks and nudges.
It may sound as though Jissoji is quixotically laboring to make artsy silk purses out of pop pig's ears. Instead he is smarter - and subtler. He makes stylish films out of coarse genre material, with depths that are there for the digging. But he is not about to thrust a shovel into the audience's hands. He may have done so in his ATG days, but in his Rampo films his first priority is entertainment. The shovels - and the insights they unearth on the outer limits of the human experience - are optional.