CW: references to sexual violence, rape, and incest
The Insect Woman (1963) is not a happy film. It neither romanticises nor glorifies Japanese people or their culture as is popular today. Rather, Shohei Imamura is the type of director who is more than willing to rip up Japan’s carefully maintained social facade, burn its remnants to a crisp, and direct his camera at the ugliest and vilest parts of post-war Japan.
When I first sat down at the Art Gallery of New South Wales for a viewing of Shohei Imamura’s classic, The Insect Woman (or The Japanese Entomological Chronicles), as part of the Japanese Film Festival program, I was struck by the roughly-cut-together montage of countryside vignettes. The transitions between scenes felt unnatural – as if crudely assembled by an editor who chose scene endpoints while blindfolded. Yet as I continued watching, the rough crudeness of both the countryside and its inhabitants seemed perfectly reflected in how Imamura curated his transitions. The film moved at a pace so natural to the modern audience that one might say Imamura was as avant-garde as Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein.
Like many of Imamura’s films, The Insect Woman is fertile ground for his obsessions: the women who survive on the narrow, iniquitous fringes of a post-war world. Once of age, Tome Matsuki (Sachiko Hidari), our heroine is forced out of home by her relatives and left to toil in sweatshop conditions in a factory making munitions for the Imperial Japanese Army. The city is equal parts progression and poverty, an A-Bomb world of cults, sects and sex work, and most pertinent for Tome: the gradual descent into prostitution. Again and again, we are reminded of how Tome resembles the crawling beetle in the opening scene. Both in her weakness as a woman and her naive temperament, she is a small creature to be caught, then toyed with, mangled and tortured like a cat’s prey, and finally discarded.
But even with the endless tragedy, Imamura allows us to see the more light-hearted aspects of life, ending the scenes with a still shot, sometimes even accompanied by Tome’s insert of a Katuata (a traditional poetic form similar to a Haiku), ironically sung with over-the-top melancholy; he is not such a cynic about human life that he would take the humans out of the lives he depicts.
But what makes Imamura’s film so achingly beautiful is the way he confronts human ugliness in all its authenticity. Tome is subject to a fall from grace worthy of William Shakespeare or John Milton: separated from her father, the only person who has truly loved her. We watch as she transforms into a mirror image of the Madame (Tanie Kitabayashi) who forced her into sex slavery — a cunning and selfish woman devoid of sympathy for others. It is the stripping of the social facade of women in the film, poor women born from mistreatment and poverty, and the sympathetic yet thorough exploration of their psyches that makes the movie worth watching. These women fall so far from the idealised Japanese woman, also called Yamato Nadeshiko, who is typically soft-spoken, elegant, gentle, and far above petty concerns. Instead we get the real and multifaceted experience of beaten and corrupted heroines in all their flaws.
For all the timeless themes in the film, Imamura’s treatment of the complex familial-sexual sphere makes the film somewhat impenetrable to non-Japanese viewers. His depiction of incest is meant to portray the essential divorce of sex and love in his vision of Japan; if anything, Imamura shows us that while sex is extremely accessible, love is impossible. The Insect Woman is therefore sprinkled with sex scenes, but never cheaply so. The early scenes feature Tome’s childhood and the almost sexual undertones to the relationship with her mentally disabled father, Chuji (Kazuo Kitamura). Viewers will undoubtedly squirm watching Chuji violently suck on Tome’s thighs to relieve a pus-filled wound, and again when she asks him to drain milk from her breasts because her teething infant can no longer feed properly. Yet we also see natural fatherly love and protective instincts when Chuji unhesitatingly beats a woman for trying to marry Tome off without his knowledge, and later thrashes the landlord’s son half to death for forcing himself upon Tome and impregnating her.
While Imamura masterfully explores the resilience of the Japanese spirit, his treatment of incest has alienated international audiences. The director once expressed surprise at his work’s overseas reception, offering the cynically Japanese observation that perhaps his films could not truly be understood by non-Japanese viewers. Perhaps Imamura’s insistence on depicting the perverted sentiment — that fathers are the only male figures who truly love and care for a woman’s body and yet they too violate its sanctity — is precisely what makes Imamura’s film such a challenging watch.
The loss of the war and the forced opening of the country are among the most explored topics in Japanese art. But with Imamura, nothing is dwelt upon. No misfortune warrants incessant brooding, no tragedy merits depression; one must continue living. Instead, the Westernisation and fast-growing change in post-war Japan is shown silently but powerfully: it forms the background of the characters’ lives. In one scene, Tome pushes a stroller around an American Air Force base while humming Japanese folk songs (Owaiyare, specifically); in another scene she contemplates marriage to a G.I. in the kitchen of a woman who has already undertaken such a step, both of them surrounded by pyramids of Western consumer goods and all the latest appliances.
Owaiyare returns throughout the film, serving as a motif for childhood, for the traditional Japan that still lives in the souls of our characters. Similarly, the opening scene of the struggling insect comes back in the end — Tome attempts to return to her village, over hills of dirt. It is with this ending that Imamura masterfully captures both the weight of his heroine’s suffering and her irrepressible will to live. He celebrates a particular Japanese spirit of a particular age, a spirit forced into the new world by nuclear hellfire, yet a spirit unbroken. In a word, the ‘insect’ women of Japan are survivors, people who hung on to life with a tenacious bitterness to their last, dying breath; so too are they the foundation of modern Japan. This film is their story.
