Shoji Yasui Movies
- 1993
Famed onnagata (a man who plays women's parts in Kabuki) Tamasaburo Bando follows up on the success of his directorial debut, Gekashitsu, with this soft-focused romance about love and obligation, based on a novel by Kafu Nagai. Set during the Meiji period (1868-1912), Kaede (Sayuri Yoshinaga) is the former mistress of a wealthy merchant. When he dies, she is forced out on the street and forced to give up her young daughter to the merchant's family. The film opens with her working in a high-class brothel abutting Tokyo Bay. Though she has passionate affection for a drug wholesaler, whom she loves as well, Kaede is swamped with not only debts to the bordello and family obligations -- she is expected to support her parents and her sister -- but also guilt over losing her child. This pain is only increased when Kaede learns that her daughter is being abused. She does the only thing she can: She buys back her child by signing on at the brothel for a longer stint. Meanwhile, her lover tries to buy her out of prostitution, but she refuses in order to pay for her child's freedom. As a result, her lover hangs himself, heaping further sorrow on the downtrodden but elegant heroine. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi
- Starring:
- Sayuri Yoshinaga, Toshiyuki Nagashima, (more)
Set against the final days of World War II, The Burmese Harp portrays the experiences of a group of exhausted, war-scarred Japanese soldiers as they prepare to return to Japan. The film focuses on Shoji Yasui, a soldier known to his comrades for his harp playing, who fails to convince a resistant company to surrender and is presumed dead when a battle destroys their hillside encampment. To rejoin his fellow soldiers, Shoji steals the robes of a Buddhist monk and begins to make his way across the countryside. But along the way, he becomes fixated on the hundreds of abandoned, unburied war casualties and begins to assume the duties of his costume and tend to the bodies. Meanwhile, Shoji's friends mount a search for him, eventually noticing the monk to whom he bears an uncanny resemblance. Director Kon Ichikawa's film was adapted by frequent collaborator (and wife) Nato Wada from a book by Michio Takeyama designed to introduce children to the fundamental principles of Buddhism. ~ Keith Phipps, Rovi
- Starring:
- Shoji Yasui, Rentaro Mikuni, (more)
- 1955
Kon Ichikawa's rich adaptation of Natsume Soseki's classic novel depicts a complex relationship between a student and an older man he calls "sensei." The older man's relations with his wife seems curiously strained to the student. When the boy goes to the country to tend to his dying father, he learns that "sensei" committed suicide. A letter reveals that the older man never recovered from an incident that occurred during his student days. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi
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