Scarecrow Deep Dive: Japanese Literature, Part 6
The Izu Dancer, The Dancing Girl, and A Ghost Story (this time on DVD)
Welcome to Scarecrow Deep Dive, where I write in-depth posts about titles or sections at Scarecrow Video. The purpose is to show off the glory that is Scarecrow to people who may not be aware of how vast and important its collection is, especially as it’s available to the public.
Today I’m writing about the sixth title in the Animation - Japanese Literature section.
Kawabata Yasunari (1899-1972) made history as the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature (he won in 1968) and is best known for novels such as Snow Country. He scored another first in Animated Classics of Japanese Literature, as their adaptation of his 1926 short story “The Izu Dancer” (Izu no Odoriko 伊豆の踊子) was the first episode of the series, premiering on Friday, April 25, 1986. The episode captures the poetic qualities of Kawabata’s prose in picture form through an animation style that shows no white around people’s eyes, as if they were dolls, and less detailed pencil work.
Mizuhara (the narrator), a high school student from Tokyo, and Kaoru1, a poor, wandering teenage dancer, spend a flirtatious summer together. Kaoru is part of a traveling band of musicians from Oshima, comprised of her brother Eikichi, his wife Chiyoko, and their mother, Otatsu.2 At first, Mizuhara is allowed to tag along, but when he asks to go with Kaoru to the movies on his last night with them, her mother forbids it because, “A Tokyo student could never love a minstrel girl,” and she recognizes that Kaoru is no longer a child. Even though she agrees with Eikichi that Mizuhara is “a nice boy,” she says, “Sometimes even good people do things they shouldn’t.”
The next day, Kaoru meets Mizuhara at the docks. He gives her a red comb that he promised her and says he’ll visit them in Oshima, but we get a sense from the music and how they say goodbye that this will be the last time they see each other. A poignant, elegant adaptation of one of Kawabata’s earliest forays into fiction.
The more interesting adaptation, at least considering its point of view, is “The Dancing Girl” (Maihime 舞姫 - Episode 10). Weirdly enough, it begins and ends with a female narrator, but in between the narrator is male. In this one, we follow Toyotaro, a Japanese man who goes to Germany to work for the Japanese government and falls in love with Ellis, a poverty-stricken local woman, who dances at the theater and whom he eventually marries. This relationship, however, doesn’t sit well with his colleagues, who get him fired from his job over false accusations. His one shot at redemption, however, involves leaving his wife and returning to Japan to work for a diplomat. If he doesn’t, he may never see his homeland again. Except that by this point, she is pregnant with their child.
Why this one is unique is that it deals with a Japanese protagonist living outside his homeland in the early 1900s, giving us insight into how the Japanese viewed the Western world and its inhabitants. If this were a Western tale, the protagonist would easily choose to be with his wife and damn the consequences, but the strong sense of duty that Japanese people feel makes this a gut-wrenching and unpredictable decision, especially when he’s pressured to leave his wife by his best friend, which makes this the tenser of the two tales.
Based on an early work of the same name by Mori Ohgai3 (1866-1922), the tale’s setting makes sense, as Mori studied military medicine and hygiene in Germany for 4 years (and was fluent in German). He also translated many German works into Japanese, including those by Goethe and Schiller. Of his original works, his most well-known is the popular novel The Wild Geese (Gan 雁,). Unlike the first episode on this DVD, the drawings in this one are detailed and well-suited for the melodrama than ensues.
The third tale on this DVD is “A Ghost Story,” which was covered in Part 3.
Like other DVDs in the series, this disc includes an Author and Synopsis section on each episode, plus trailers. Some of the information from this article comes from what’s included there.
You can watch all the episodes from this series on this YouTube channel, though without the DVD extras, and at a slightly lesser quality.
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SOURCES
Articles on Wikipedia
Animated Classics of Japanese Literature
IMDB
Animated Classics of Japanese Literature: The Dancing Girl of Izu
Fun fact: I interviewed Sumi Shimamoto, who did the voice for Kaoru (and by that point had lent her voice to The Castle of Cagliostro and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind), during Sakura Con 2015.
Based on Wikipedia, in the story there’s also a maid that travels with the troop, and the mother is Eikichi’s mother-in-law, not his (and Kaoru’s) mother. In addition, Mizuhara is in college, not high school, and he appears to not be named in Kawabata’s story, as far as I could tell in reading the sample available on Amazon.
How his name is spelled on the box to denote a long ‘o’ sound.