Notes of an Itinerant Performer

『歌女おぼえ書』

Dir. Hiroshi Shimizu. 1941, 97 mins. 35mm print courtesy of the National Film Archive of Japan. In Japanese with English subtitles. With Yaeko Mizutani, Ken Uehara, Hideo Fujino, Kyoko Asagiri, Reikichi Kawamura. Afforded the opportunity to work with Mizutani, a then-retired legend of the Japanese stage, Shimizu devised this story of a hard-up traveling singer who, taken in by a kindly old tea merchant, becomes devoted to his family upon his death. Largely due to its atypical period setting in the late Meiji era and its theme of female self-sacrifice, and perhaps also its intricate deep focus staging, Shimizu’s film has drawn comparison to similar works by Kenji Mizoguchi, but in contrast to the latter’s stately tragic melodramas, this sad, often ambivalent, but ultimately optimistic work strikes a swift pace and matter-of-fact tone, placing it firmly within the former’s poetic realist universe. 

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