Keywords

In the 1950s, Ichikawa Kon (1915–2008) directed a few critically acclaimed war films, among which are film adaptations of Takeyama Michio’s children’s novel The Burmese Harp (1956) and of Ōoka Shōhei’s semi-autobiographical novel Fires on the Plain (1959).1 The former was voted the fifth best film of the year by the major film magazine Kinema Junpō and won the San Giorgio Prize at the 1956 Venice Film Festival, and the latter was voted second best film of the year in Kinema Junpō’s 1959 annual poll and won the Golden Sail at the Locarno International Film Festival in 1961. While his lesser-known, lower-budget films from a slightly earlier period, Hateshinaki jōnetsu (Passion without End, 1949) and Ieraishan (Fragrance of the Night, 1951), do not engage the war directly, they offer fresh insights into the ways in which popular cinema in early post-war Japan addressed the physical, psychological, and social wounds of the war that were still fresh in audiences’ minds. The two films are noteworthy for their intertextual relationship to the so-called continental films (tairiku eiga), a popular film genre during the Pacific War that featured ‘the romantic adventures of Japanese people in China’ (Raine 2018: 165), particularly in their use of popular songs known as ‘continental melodies’ (tairiku merodei) composed by Hattori Ryōichi.2

Understandably, the afterlife of ‘continental films’ in early post-war Japan has been the subject of critical suspicion. Film scholar Michael Baskett writes that ‘the continuity in representations of Japan’s empire in Asia did not end with what Japan scholars have termed the “collapse of empire”’ (Baskett 2008: 144). Baskett argues that Japanese filmmakers’ denouncement of the war during the U.S. occupation (1945–1952) was not accompanied by a critical engagement with the country’s imperial ventures in Asia. As the Cold War and the nuclear arms race intensified, the U.S. shifted its strategic policy towards Japan (known as reverse course policy), moving priority away from the democratisation of the country towards turning it into a critical logistical base for the U.S. war effort. By 1950, the Japanese empire returned onscreen with ‘a post-defeat spin’ (Baskett 2008: 137).3 With no responsibility to engage post-liberated Asian audiences, Japanese filmmakers portrayed Japan’s empire as a mere background against which ‘a new Japanese history of the war’ can be projected (ibid). Moreover, wartime imperial audiovisual culture began to fill the post-war screen in place of the lost empire. ‘[T]he trope of miscegenetic melodrama’, for instance, continued to be deployed to eroticise and fantasise the empire on the post-war screen, obscuring the brutal realities of Japan’s imperial rule in Asia. Drawing on familiar tropes and motifs of wartime cinema, argues Baskett, Japanese cinema of the early 1950s ‘helped revive nostalgia for the Japanese empire by taking audiences back to the pre-war era, not to commiserate or atone, but rather to watch and sing’ (137). But does the repetition of the embodied practices of watching and singing necessarily produce nostalgia? How did early post-war Japanese cinema engage audiences in the drastically transformed socio-political environment by replaying wartime cinema’s erotic fantasy?

The conditions of audiovisual memory have been radically altered in the age of technologically produced mass media. As music historian Berthold Hoeckner argues in his study of the relationship between memory and film music, cinema with sound, especially with music, has become ‘the optical-acoustic unconscious’ that provides us with access in the form of cinematic experience to ‘something […] we seem to have never experienced before we remember’ (Hoeckner 2019: 4–12). In this respect, every cinematic experience is sort of a replay of memory, but of a memory of the previously inaccessible, to which film music offers a sonic access.

Passion without End’s and Fragrance of the Night’s intertextual relationship to continental films and their replay of continental melodies are further complicated by these melodies’ narrative function. Affective commodities par excellence, the popularity of these melodies was something that a newly established Shin Toho Studio (1947–1961) could capitalise on.4 Ichikawa nonetheless skilfully incorporates these songs into the films’ narratives about the fate of wartime romance, replaying them to trigger the affective past in the characters’ post-war present. In her seminal monograph Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film, Amy Herzog writes that ‘the musical moment’ in the cinema presents ‘configurations of time and space completely unlike those found in other filmic works’ (2009: 2). Rather than masking the musical cinema’s penchant for structural and cultural repetitions, and hence its conservative tendency, the musical moment, Herzog contends, thrives on its capacity to ‘make palpable’ the tension between a ‘tendency to reproduce, standardize, and codify certain cultural fictions’ and ‘a transformative drive toward the not-yet-imagined’ (2009: 8, 14). Drawing on Hoeckner’s insights into film music and memory and Herzog’s notion of the musical moment, this chapter analyses musical moments in Passion without End and Fragrance of the Night in order to interrogate the historicity of early post-war Japan that the symptomatic reading of the same films forecloses. Rather than offering a reference point in linear historical time that the audience can look back on and be nostalgic about, I argue, the replay of these melodies in the films’ musical moments condenses time and produces an affective space where the past resurfaces in their narrations of the present and casts shadows into the future.

Ichikawa Kon, Yamaguchi Yoshiko, and Post-war Romantic Melodrama

Ichikawa’s career at Shin (New) Toho Studio was entangled with the cultural politics of the U.S. occupation policy. Between August 1945 and April 1952, Ichikawa directed seventeen films, thirteen out of which were produced partially or entirely by Shin Toho Studio. Following the commercial success of the two-part romantic melodrama Sanbyaku-rokujūgo-ya (Three Hundred and Sixty-Five Nights, 1948), Ichikawa mostly worked on the genre of melodrama at Shin Toho.5 When the occupation loosened censorship on films with Pacific War themes in 1950, the war began making its way back to the silver screen as a background for romantic melodramas (Howard 2016: 545). Censors did not take the combination of the war and romantic melodrama lightly, nor were they convinced by the supposed trivialisation of the war as a mere background.6 Tamura Tajiro’s 1947 novel Shunpu-den (A Tale of a Prostitute), along with its film adaptation Akatsuki no dassō (Escape at Dawn, Taniguchi Senkichi, 1950), is a case in point.7 Set in a brothel in Tianjin, China, Tamura’s story focuses on the physical, sexual and emotional intimacy between a low-ranking Japanese soldier and a Korean ‘comfort woman’ (a euphemism for a military sex slave). Despite its problematic romanticisation and eroticisation of the colonial relationship or even sexual slavery, A Tale of a Prostitute was one of the few early post-war works that dealt with the topic of comfort women. The novel was to be included in the inaugural issue of a literary journal, Japanese Novels (Nihon Shōsetsu), but its depiction of Korean comfort women was called into question when it was presented to the Press, Pictorial and Broadcast (PPB) division of the Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD) and was subsequently suppressed (Kerkham 2013: 167–168). Even though Escape at Dawn’s script that was submitted to CIE in September 1948 had already changed its female protagonist’s ethnicity from Korean to Japanese, which critics viewed as an act of self-censorship, it went through several rewrites and a series of changes until it was finally accepted. In the film released in January 1950, the female protagonist was no longer a prostitute (not to mention military sexual slave) but a singer, and the military brothel was turned into a bar.

No actor embodies the pleasures and pains of romantic melodrama’s entanglement with the war better than Yamaguchi Yoshiko who played the female protagonist in Escape at Dawn. Yamaguchi, formerly known as Ri Kōran in Japanese and as Li Xianglan in Mandarin, and later as Shirley Yamaguchi in English, was a transnational celebrity during the war. A substantial body of scholarship has explored her multilingual singing career and her mobile identity, her star persona during and after the war, and the complex reception of her music and films across the continent over several decades, but her performance in ‘continental films’ is often considered to be the epitome of her audiovisual celebrity (Stephenson 1999; Wang 2005, 2007, 2012; Bourdaghs 2012b; Raine 2018). First introduced in Japan as a singer on Manchurian radio, she became famous in Japan as Ri Kōran for ‘her bewitching appearance and beautiful singing voice in Byakuran no uta (Song of the White Orchid, 1939)’, the first of the continental film trilogy in which she was paired with popular Japanese actor Hasegawa Kazuo (Raine 2018: 171–172). The second film, Shina no yoru (China Nights, 1940), and the third film, Nessa no chikai (Vow in the Desert, 1940), were both big hits but were disapproved by censors and severely condemned by critics. Though often mistakenly placed in the category of the ‘national-policy film’ (kokusaku eiga) and read as ‘an allegory of Japanese government policy toward China’, the continental trilogy was part of the entertainment cinema which was ‘attacked for its promotion of decadent, westernized culture and its pandering to film fans’ and came under government pressure after the Film Law was passed in 1939 (Raine 2018: 175). All of the three films featured Ri’s performance of ‘continental melodies’, a music genre that flourished in the context of the Japanese colonial expansion into, and occupation of, the Asian continent (Pope 1993; Bourdaghs 2012b).

Musical films being the most popular genre of Japanese cinema in wartime Shanghai and especially Beijing, China Nights derives much of its affective power from Ri’s strong, multilingual musical performance—of Japan’s counterfeit Chinese music. Michael Raine regards China Nights’s surprising popularity in occupied Shanghai in 1943 as an example of a ‘disaffiliated reading formation’ that a transnational and transmedia wartime popular culture facilitated (2018: 164). Raine emphasises the importance of a ‘more immediate affective intertext’ for understanding the 1943 Shanghai reception over the dominant allegorical reading of the film, reminding us that ‘the stakes and objects of affiliation were less obvious’ for audiences than the allegorical reading assumes (190). The film’s ‘powerful but ambiguous images of power imbalance’, he argues, provided for Shanghai audiences in 1943 both a ‘respite from politics’ and an ‘emotional matrix’ for coming to terms with the traumatic experience of defeat and occupation (193, 189, 168). In short, grand narratives of resistance and revolution are inadequate for grasping the affective investments of the film’s contemporary audience.

The continental trilogy serves as an intertext for Passion without End and Fragrance of the Night, and music as a source of affective power constitutes a significant element of continuity between them. But while the trilogy might have conjured up ‘fantasies of co-prosperity’ for audiences in wartime Japan, what Passion without End and Fragrance of the Night offered audiences in early post-war Japan under the U.S. occupation might be more comparable to the ambivalent affective space that Raine argues China Nights provided for Shanghai audiences in 1943. As I show in the following paragraphs, the musical moments of these films surely evoke the memory of the colonial fantasy, and yet at the same time they also heighten an awareness of the unsustainability of the fantasy and the peril of carrying the memory of the fantasy into the historical present. In both films, the difficulty of unlearning the fantasy is dialectically related to a painful awareness of irretrievable loss and precarious belonging to a post-war society on the one hand, and an uncertainty of the future on the other hand.

Passion Without End and a Dream Left in the Continent

In the climactic scene of Passion without End, the composer-protagonist Miki is about to commit suicide after learning that the woman whom he secretly admired passed away. His wife Shin arrives just in time, but he tells her to give up on him and confesses his secret admiration for the woman who did not even know his name. Broken-hearted, but in a surprise twist, Shin expresses sympathy for him: after all, they have both suffered from unrequited love. She tries to hold on to a glimmer of hope for a new beginning of their life together and reminds him of his other passion—music. But Miki finds little or no consolation in her words and buries his head in his hands. He tells her that he has no more songs to write, as his lifelong dream has died.

As Miki delivers that line, a symphonic version of the song ‘Soshū yakyoku’ (‘Suzhou Serenade’) enters non-diegetically. Shin rushes over to him, kneels and puts her hands on his lap. ‘No, even if you give up on composition, songs won’t leave you. Your heart soon will be filled with songs again’, she says quietly but firmly, leading to a cut of a close-up of the two.8 But after a long pause, in which she looks away and then back to him, she adds in a whisper, ‘…with sad songs’. She continues her plea, telling him that he does not need to forget about the woman, nor does he have to reciprocate Shin’s love for him. She begs him to just stay alive and to let her be with him. But the sweet melody of ‘Suzhou Serenade’ fades out, and Miki raises his head to look at her only to quickly put it back down. As he holds his head in agony, an upbeat, brass-heavy tune enters, and the scene abruptly cuts to a night club where his old friend Fukuko, played by Kasagi Shizuko, is about to perform Kasagi’s post-war hit song ‘Boogie Woogie Girl’.

The abrupt transition between the two scenes violently fuses the otherwise disparate narrative impulses of early post-war Japan, one melancholic, to borrow Ilit Ferber’s words, ‘self-destructive loyalty to the lost object’ (2013: 20) and the other an exuberant pursuit of ‘bodily pleasure as means to liberation’ (Bourdaghs 2012a: 43). While the tunes of ‘Suzhou Serenade’ and ‘Boogie Woogie Girl’ set the affective registers of the two scenes apart from each other, the two scenes also have something in common: their composer Hattori Ryōichi who served as the film’s music supervisor.

Passion without End’s soundtrack is in fact made up of as many as seven songs composed by Hattori between 1937 and 1949. The film imparts narrative significance to some of these songs by treating them as songs composed by the protagonist Miki. Despite a disclaimer in the opening credits that the film is not a biopic of Hattori, it is tempting to see him as the model for Miki, the composer-protagonist, or at least regard those diegetic songs as historical reference points. It is difficult, for instance, to dissociate the song ‘Suzhou Serenade’—the song Hattori composed for Ri Kōran for her role in China Nights—from Hattori’s musical aspiration and work in the genre of ‘continental melodies’, many of which were popularised by Ri Kōran during the war.9 But with its ‘revisionist’ take on the timeline of Hattori’s compositions, the film attributes the inspiration for the songs featured in the film—except ‘Suzhou Serenade’ and ‘Sekohan musume’ (‘Second-Hand Girl’) from the first scene—to Lady Odagiri whom Miki came to admire after meeting her once during his excursion outside the city, erasing the songs’ historical origins and significance.10 The film’s revisionist, ahistorical narrative about these songs serves as the basis for the protagonist’s fatalist, depoliticised view of history, and his indulgence in the ‘masochistic erotics of doom’ in which the past is repeated compulsively in the present and the present is reduced to what returns in the cycle (Luhr 2012: 6).11 In the absence of other explicit temporal markers in the film, ‘Suzhou Serenade’ stands out as being the only song where history and fiction clearly converge through the euphemism of the ‘dream left in the continent’. In the light of this convergence, the song’s intertextual reference to the wartime continental films and their ideologically loaded depiction of romance enable the fate of Miki’s romance(s) in early post-war Japan to carry historical weight in the early post-war present.

The significance of ‘Suzhou Serenade’ for the film’s narration of the past is established much earlier in the film when the song acts as a catalyst for an extended flashback through which the film tells the afterlife of the dream in early post-war Japan. After the opening credits, the film takes us right into the suicide scene where Shin has just arrived at their apartment. The heavy rain outside, together with the film’s noir-style lighting that captures the two figures in dark silhouette, invokes a sense of entrapment and hopelessness. Looking out of the window at the rain, Miki begins to recount his past and laments his fate. The shot cuts to a view from the outside, showing him standing behind the window as his monologue continues in the voice-over narration. The camera pans to the left, across a cityscape dissolving into another as Miki’s disembodied voice travels back in time and narrates his wishful longing and fantasy, how music became a means to express his frustrations, and that his futile search even led him to China—referred to as ‘the continent’ (tairiku)—where he yet found no consolation. The melody of ‘Suzhou Serenade’ accompanies his voice-over narration and melancholic retelling of his wartime romantic adventure. After his failed adventure, Miki finds himself back in Japan, alone in his dingy apartment with no other place to return to.

The film flashes back three years earlier. After a few dissolves, the camera passes through the blinds and moves to a close-up of a woman hiding her face behind a fan. The woman is no other than Yamaguchi Yoshiko/Ri Kōran. As Yamaguchi reveals herself, her face is lit up to emphasise her glamour, and she begins to sing her wartime hit song ‘Suzhou Serenade’. By turning the non-diegetic recorded music into a diegetic live performance and thus bringing the audience back in time, Yamaguchi’s onscreen performance brings the past back to life. Abstracted from its surroundings and not yet fully integrated into the flow of the narrative, her performance initially occupies an ambiguous space in the film’s supposedly post-war narrative, re-enacting Yamaguchi/Ri’s wartime celebrity.

A following wide shot provides a context for Yamaguchi’s performance by spotting her on the stage at a cabaret hall that Miki provides his music for. Ian Conrich and Estella Tincknell define a musical moment as ‘an isolated musical presence in a non-musical film which is most notable for its potential to disturb the text through its unexpectedness or at times excessiveness’ (Conrich and Tincknell 2006: 2). But emphasising its double articulation, they also argue that the musical moment does not simply disrupt the narrative flow but helps articulate the film’s underlying values and ideas in a new way. Yamaguchi’s cameo appearance and her ‘live’ performance of ‘Suzhou Serenade’ indeed do more than disrupt the narrative with an erotic spectacle and a familiar music: they at once foreground the theme of romance vis-à-vis continental films and undercut its affective optimism. By inserting shots of a hostess smoking by the staircase leading to the hall and others inside waiting for customers in the middle of Yamaguchi’s performance, the film draws a stark contrast between Yamaguchi’s sexual aura and vitality and those hostesses’ ‘kyodatsu condition’ of exhaustion and despair, and between her upward, dreamy gaze, and their empty expression.12 Cut to a young host looking for something, the camera follows him backstage. With ‘Suzhou Serenade’ playing in the background, he approaches a girl—Miki’s future wife Shin—from behind. As Shin vehemently rejects his advance and flees the scene, the background music ceases abruptly and ends what appears to be a caricature of the romantic encounter described in the serenade. Shin storms into the kitchen where Miki is seen getting wasted, and accidentally breaks his guitar string. The cook who was with him back in the continent tells her and the host that the song is ‘the dream he [Miki] left in the continent’, further evoking the sense of loss.

I now return to the climactic scene of the film discussed at the beginning of this section. We listen to ‘Suzhou Serenade’ for the second time as the film completes its flashback, returning us to the suicide scene. The replay recalls Miki and Shin’s first encounter during Yamaguchi’s performance of the song in the cabaret hall as discussed in the previous paragraph, specifically the allure of its fantasy Shin fell for. In the final scene following the climactic one, Miki is seen walking on the seashore and suddenly collapses. A close-up of Lady Odagiri—the source of musical inspiration for Miki who died from an undisclosed cause—and then of Shin are superimposed over the waves washing up on the shore. He hears Shin’s voice telling him that his heart will soon be filled with songs again—with sad songs. He buries his face in a sheet of a music score and weeps, while a symphonic variation of ‘Tokyo Boogie Woogie’, the theme song of the film Haru no kyōen (Spring Banquet, 1947) also composed by Hattori, grows louder in the background. Miki raises his head. The film closes by cutting to an extreme long shot of the sunrise over the horizon.

Hattori indeed continued to compose songs even after his return from Shanghai, some of which are now considered to be iconic songs of the post-war period. But rather than melancholically searching for the blue flower across the sea, many of his early post-war songs were grounded in the impoverished material conditions of post-war Japan, addressing them in comical and satirical ways, and their tunes were more upbeat and energetic (Bourdaghs 2012b: 181).13 The climactic scene links ‘Suzhou Serenade’ (1940) and ‘Boogie Woogie Girl’ (1949)—two songs that were composed and released almost a decade apart—in a narrative sequence, with the dramatic effect of the latter unchaining the audience from the circular structure of doomed romance. It is as if Kasagi Shizuko’s overblown, hyper-energetic performance has to blow off the melancholic overtones of the previous era within the present. But the film’s ending does not quite resolve its musical themes into a unified voice. The echo of sadness in Shin’s voice and Miki’s sob remain present, adding a dissonance to the choral finale of ‘Tokyo Boogie Woogie’ and its celebration of the new era.

Fragrance of the Night and Affective Reorientation

Fragrance of the Night (1951) is another story of a doomed romance that explores the afterlife of continental romance in early post-war Japan. The film title Ieraishan (Fragrance of the Night) was derived from ‘Ye lai xiang’, ‘a light jazz dance tune in the style of rumba’, composed by Li Jinguang (1907–1993) in 1944 (Farrer and Field 2015: 130). Yamaguchi (then as Li Xianglan/Ri Kōran) recorded the song with Pathé-EMI Shanghai in 1944 and performed the song at the concert titled ‘Ye lai xiang Rhapsody’ conducted by Hattori and Chen Gexing in June 1945. The song became an instant hit (Wang 2012: 156). Victor Records released the Japanese version of the song with Yamaguchi in January 1950, a year before the film’s release, consistent with the ‘priority of sound over sight’, which was characteristic of her rise to stardom during the war (Raine 2018: 171). Unlike ‘Suzhou Serenade’, the song was not featured in wartime continental films. Nonetheless, the song is regarded as an example of the post-war revival of Yamaguchi’s wartime songs in Japan which played a crucial role in enabling the sentimentalisation of Japan’s imperial experience (Baskett 2008: 142–144; Wang 2012: 155–156).14 Yiman Wang goes further, arguing that these songs performed a ‘therapeutic function’ (156). She writes, ‘[T]he melodies seemed to be stored in the physical bodies that had survived the war and imperial egomania’, and ‘[b]y reactivating the physically ingrained melodies, these surviving bodies learned to restore their relationship with the past, thereby reorienting themselves vis-à-vis the changed environment’ (156). For Wang, ‘[t]he postwar reprisal of Li’s wartime songs in Japan’ enabled an affective reorientation towards Japan’s imperial past, ‘one aligned with imperial nostalgia’ (156). While embodiment seems to be central to Wang’s understanding of music and memory, there is a conspicuous lack of discussion about what she refers to as ‘surviving bodies’ and how their conditions might have affected the melodies they stored, retrieved and reactivated. In this respect, Fragrance of the Night offers a critical perspective, bringing to the fore the physical and moral crises of the gendered bodies in post-war Japan, and suggesting that affective reorientation was far from complete in the early 1950s. What is more, I argue that the film’s use of the song is anti-therapeutic. Rather than reconstituting a ‘fantasmatic body, which offers a support as well as a point of identification for the subject addressed by the film’, and projecting unity and subjective coherence, the film lends its own cinematic body to the sensorial experience of a ghost of the empire, highlighting its disjunctive and de-centering nature through the non-diegetic sound of ‘Ye lai xiang’ (Doane 1980: 33–34).

The film’s protagonists Akiko and Seki meet in North China towards the end of the war, while the former is working as a comfort woman and the latter as an army doctor. Despite the deteriorating state of the war, they quickly fall in love. One night, a sudden air raid turns their romantic rendezvous into an action spectacle, turning the song ‘Ye lai xiang’ into a multi-sensory metonym and mnemonic of their romance. While hiding in a small hole in the ruins, Seki detects a sweet scent in the air which he immediately associates with Akiko. Akiko corrects him, saying that it is ye lai xiang, pointing at the flowers glowing in the moonlight. A light instrumental version of the song ‘Ye lai xiang’ is played in the background, creating a sonorous and sensual envelope for their romance to glow on the silver screen. A fleeting moment of happiness and aesthetic fulfilment lasts a few seconds until the bombs blast it away.

Following an elliptical fade-out, a superimposed title ‘Kobe in 1950’ appears over a daytime cityscape. The abrupt transition here is reminiscent of the sonic transition from ‘Suzhou Serenade’ to ‘Boogie Woogie Girl’ in Passion without End discussed earlier. The camera tracks back and pans right to reveal Seki now working as a supervisor at a pharmaceutical company’s laboratory. By showing his junior colleague requesting that he look through the microscope, the film establishes Seki’s authority in the lab and associates it with the power of sight. But the film does so only to take this power away from him. After establishing the connection between light and vision on the one hand, and post-war modernity and enlightenment on the other hand, Ichikawa adopts the noir style to portray the murky side of post-war society. In contrast with the brightly-lit high-rise office building in which Seki’s company is located, black-market broker Kameyama’s dingy office, located underneath the elevated railway tracks, is the locus of the film noir motifs of darkness, cynicism, and despair as well as of illicit transactions which were prevalent in early post-war Japan. Extending his deployment of the noir style to the sound design, Ichikawa foreshadows Seki’s tragic death on train tracks at the end of the film through train sounds. But more importantly, the scenes in Kameyama’s office—the noises and vibrations made by the frequent passing of the trains, accompanied by the flickering effects of a ceiling lamp—bear an uncanny resemblance to the bombing scene earlier in the film. The mimetic and auratic continuity between the two scenes thus adds a historical and allegorical meaning to the personal tragedy.

We soon learn that Seki has not forgotten Akiko; he had moved to her hometown Kobe and has been looking for her for the past five years. One day he visits Kameyama, who claims to know Akiko’s whereabouts, only to find out that Kameyama actually has no clue whatsoever. As he leaves the broker’s office, we hear the soft refrain of ‘Ye lai xiang’, The song ‘reprojects’ the romance onto the post-war cityscape in vain (Hoeckner 2019: 68).

Music haunts and takes over as Seki’s power of sight eclipses. When informed by a physician that he will soon lose his eyesight from the bomb blast that put an end to his wartime rendezvous with Akiko, Seki drops his pocketbook in shock. The doctor picks it up for him and asks what is inside. Seki answers, ‘It’s ye lai xiang’. A brief refrain of ‘Ye lai xiang’ accompanies a dissolve into a long shot of Seki standing at a wharf. The next shot shows him covering his eyes with his hands. After a farewell visit to his lab, Seki wanders around the city and finds shelter in a café bar from the rain. ‘Ye lai xiang’ plays in the background as unobtrusive ambient music. It gradually gets louder, and its melodic refrain coincides with the moment in which Akiko spots Seki, the discovery punctuated by a forward zoom towards Seki and followed by Akiko’s monologue. The source of the music in this scene is ambiguous, but its effect is powerful. For one, the refrain’s mnemonic power enables the audience to recall the earlier scene of romance. But insofar as the music was part of a post-war reality that the characters in the film and the film’s contemporary audiences shared, it could have been easily heard diegetically even without a visual proof of the sound source. In fact, we later hear Akiko humming the tune. The music also seems to be part of the focalisation effect that allows the audience to feel the moment with Akiko. In other words, the cinematic refrain does not only reproject meanings created in earlier scenes, but rather, it projects an aesthetic dream yet to be fulfilled by engaging the characters’ and audience’s presents and creating a slippage between the two.

If the café scene takes the form of a promise of affective reorientation vis-à-vis the reunion of the couple and sensory immersion, the scene that follows highlights the difficulty of keeping the promise. When Seki fails to return Akiko’s awaiting gaze, it takes only a few seconds for her to realise that the problem is not with his memory but with his eyesight. Instead of addressing him on the spot, she quietly follows him to the wharf where he presumably visits to remember the time spent on the continent across the water. Yamaguchi’s singing voice accompanies their walk, in anticipation of their reunion. The lyrics of the song explicitly link ye lai xiang flowers to romantic love as Seki longingly looks out at the sea. When Akiko stands in front of him, the music prosthetically enhances his sight, as it were, bringing an image of Akiko into focus.

The film’s musical moments at once celebrate the phantasmagoric experience of cinematic romance and question its sustainability. As Seki and Akiko embrace each other, the film replays the song’s thematic line, taking us back to the original scene through a flashback. As Hoeckner writes, ‘the cinematic refrain not only reprojects meanings created in synchresis, but also takes on, whenever repeated, new images for later reprojection’ (2019: 68). The original scene of romance may indulge audiences in nostalgic sentiments, but its replay—the flashback—highlights the gap between the past and the present, showing Akiko and Seki keenly aware of the gap that generates both the pleasures and pains of remembering. Neither of them is able to answer the question, ‘Were you happy?’, so they try to embrace the moment by telling each other to forget about ‘bad things’. Seki pretends that his vision problem is only minor; Akiko lies about her profession, claiming that she is a telephone operator. In reality, she has not been able to leave her old trade and works at a cabaret hall.

Both Akiko and Seki may have survived the war, but their ‘surviving bodies’, to borrow Wang’s phrase, are shown to be discordant with the song’s idealised image of ephemeral romance that they once cherished. Seki faints at the scene, and an abrupt cut to the cabaret hall reveals Akiko’s real occupation and that she has not been able to keep her promise of finding a ‘proper job’ upon her return to Japan. Furthermore, the continuity between wartime and post-war Japan inscribed in their bodies, or rather, both literal and figurative wounds that their bodies carried over into the post-war era, seems to make their reorientation vis-à-vis the presumably new environment of post-war Japan impossible. Seki’s physical and psychic wound is shown to be irrevocable while Akiko turns to street prostitution in the hope that she can save Seki’s eyes. Despite Akiko’s efforts to make up for their loss and have a fresh start, Seki chooses to leave her and to sacrifice himself by helping Kameyama with his dodgy business in order to post bail for Toshio, his former subordinate in the army. The song ‘Ye lai xiang’ takes on a more ironic meaning as the story progresses and the disparity between the melancholic longing of the song and the reality confronted by the characters widens, with repetitive performances also counteracting the ephemerality of romance that the Japanese lyrics emphasises. The solo wind instrument (probably clarinet) variation played in the scene where Akiko is seen attempting to attract a customer on the street, breaks the arc of the original melody by a chromatic succession with a Spanish-inflected ornamentation, reflecting a troubling means-to-an-end relationship, her willingness to sell her body to sustain the romantic fantasy.

Kameyaka takes advantage of Seki’s request not to tell Toshio about where the bail money came from, and deceives Toshio into thinking that it was Kameyama who bailed him out. Kameyama asks Toshio to return the favour by helping him steal goods from a freight train. Upon learning Kameyama’s scheme, Seki heads out to the train station to stop Toshio. On his way, Seki makes a brief stop at Akiko’s apartment. In response to her plea to build a life together, he promises that this time he will return to her, though his exchange with Akiko’s friend in the hallway suggests that he probably will not come back. When Seki arrives at the station before dawn, Kameyama and Toshio are about to go into action. Still hesitant to tell Toshio the truth, Seki walks towards them in the middle of the railroad tracks and tries to convince Toshio to go home. He gets pushed away by Kameyama and falls. Kameyama hurries Toshio into carrying goods down from the freight train. Seki clambers to his feet in order to follow them but falls onto the train tracks. In desperation, he finally tells Toshio the truth that he paid the bail. The off-screen sound of a locomotive horn announces the arrival of a train. After a brief pause, Toshio realises that he has been deceived. As Toshio grabs Kameyama in rage, the engine sound of a steam locomotive gets louder. Cut to a long shot of Toshio and Kameyama getting into a fight in the foreground: they appear oblivious to the train approaching in the background.

In the final scene, rather than giving audiences an aesthetic experience that reunites the two lovers, the soundtrack of the film creates a formal and affective discordance between the two. Toshio’s scream in terror gets drowned out by the sounds of the train, followed by an abrupt cut to a shot of the window of Akiko’s room taken from outside the apartment building. Akiko opens the window and looks out. Unaware of Seki’s tragic death, she appears hopeful for his return. The refrain of ‘Ye lai xiang’ brings back the now haunting melody of romantic love as perpetually deferred, unfulfilled longing. The fantasy meets its own end in the final image of the film—a ye lai xiang flower that fell out of Seki’s pocketbook onto the railroad track—an overt-literal rendering of the lyrics of the song, ‘the dream of romantic love fades away, leaving ye lai xiang behind’ (see Fig. 8.1).

Fig. 8.1
A photo of a small flower with a thin stem that lies on the train tracks. An open notebook lies face down on the tracks as well. The tracks have small stones and pebbles between the sleepers.

(Courtesy of Shin Toho Pictures, Japan)

A ye lai xiang flower on the train tracks, Ieraishan

Full size image

Conclusion

Quite rightly, critics call into question the revival of the transnational celebrity Yamaguchi Yoshiko/Ri Kōran/Li Xianglan’s wartime songs and the emergence of films reminiscent of continental films towards the end of the U.S. occupation of Japan. But a closer look at the two films, Passion without End and Fragrance of the Night, with special attention to their musical moments and their historically situated re-articulations of the imperial fantasy, reveals a more ambivalent relationship to the imperial fantasy of the recent past. Through their intertextual relationship to continental films and their replay of continental melodies, musical moments in both films constitute a reflexive engagement with the historical present of the late occupation years. ‘Suzhou Serenade’ in Passion without End articulates the tension between the haunting presence of the fantasy (‘a dream left in the continent’) and the post-war reality that betrays it. Fragrance of the Night’s musical moments and replays of ‘Ye lai xiang’ trace the disintegration of the phantasmagoric experience of cinematic romance in the face of the physical and moral crises of the ‘surviving bodies’ in post-war Japan. Though I do not offer an empirical account of how the replays of wartime continental melodies affected individual members of the audience in early post-war Japan, I hope that my analysis of these films shows that it is a more complex one than ‘restor[ing] their relationship with the past’ (Wang 2012: 156). If these films and others from the period fall short of the expectations of dominant critical practices and of cultural politics today, providing a deeper understanding of their historicity is the first step in rethinking the relation of the past to our present.

Notes

  1. 1.

    Japanese names are written surname first, macrons are used to denote long vowels, and Japanese words in the text are italicized. Exceptions are individuals well known in the West or authors who have adopted the Western order of surname last in their English publications.

  2. 2.

    On ‘continental melodies’ (tairiku merodei), please see Bourdaghs (2012b).

  3. 3.

    Building on Kyoko Hirano (1992)’s work, Christopher Howard also notes that ‘from 1950 the Occupation also began to allow a limited number of films with a Pacific War theme.’ See note 43 in Howard (2016).

  4. 4.

    Following the second union strike at Toho, a group of actors and filmmakers left Toho Shin and founded Shin (New) Tosho in 1947. Ichikawa was among the assistant directors who left Toho. For more information about Shin Toho, please see Sharp (2011: 220–222).

  5. 5.

    For Ichikawa’s filmography in English, please see Quandt (2001: 429–437).

  6. 6.

    Sociologist and media historian Shunya Yoshimi doubts that occupation censorship actually achieved any consistent ideological effect due to its inconsistency. But ‘precisely as a result of this inconsistency’, he writes, ‘media producers came ultimately to exercise a certain degree of “self-constraint” or “self-censorship”’. See Yoshimi (2003: 252).

  7. 7.

    It is one of the most well-documented cases of film censorship during the U.S. occupation. See Hirano (1992: 87–95) and Kerkham (2013: 153–175).

  8. 8.

    All English translations of the dialogues in Passion without End and Fragrance of the Night are my own.

  9. 9.

    The song was originally composed for Yamaguchi Yoshio (then Ri Kōran) to sing in the 1940 film Shina no yoru, but she did not release a record of her performance until 1953. Victor Records first produced a record with two other singers, Watanabe Hamako and Kirishima Noboru, in 1940. The performance discussed in this chapter is Yamaguchi’s in the film Passion without End released in 1949.

  10. 10.

    For instance, ‘Yoru no purattohōmu’ (‘Nighttime on the Station Platform’) was originally recorded by Awaya Noriko for the film Tōkyō no josei (The Woman of Tokyo) in 1939, but its release was banned by wartime censors. Awaya also makes a cameo appearance in the film.

  11. 11.

    I am borrowing William Luhr’s description of film noir’s appeal here.

  12. 12.

    On ‘kyodatsu conditions’ in early post-war Japan, see Dower (1999: 87–120).

  13. 13.

    See also Nagahara (2017).

  14. 14.

    Both Baskett and Wang discuss the song in the context of Inagaki Hiroshi’s 1952 film Shanhai no onna (Woman of Shanghai), which features Yamaguchi as a singer in a popular nightclub in Shanghai.