Morality Tales on Fallen Women: Films by Kenji Mizoguchi

Women of the Night

The new Criterion box set of four films by Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi presents a different side to Japanese film. The theme of these four films is “fallen women”.. and they range from Osaka Elegy in 1936 to Street of Shame in 1956. One that has caught my interest is Women of the Night from 1946. Set in Osaka in the immediate aftermath of World War 2, three sisters do their best to survive, having lost or been separated from loved ones by the war. They are driven to compromising relationships with men or outright prostitution.

One curious feature of the film is a mission called the House of Light. It provides a safe space for prostitutes to “go straight” and leave the life behind. One of the men there gives a short talk about not defiling the body.. and I found myself wondering what kind of place this is. Could it be a Christian mission? The end of the film presents the above view of the Virgin Mary with child. The image stands in counterpoint to the life of the women we have been watching through the film.. and perhaps it offers some hope at the end. It would seem to confirm, at least partially, my notion that the mission to prostitutes was meant to be understood as Christian.

I watch these films by Mizoguchi trying to decide on how they compare to the contemporary works by Yasujiro Ozu. One tentative point of comparison is in the idea of the “issue” film. In the films I’ve seen by Ozu, I don’t see any real challenge to Japanese values or culture. Ozu sees clearly the sacrifices and losses imposed by traditional values. He also portrays the fading of those values as postwar Japan takes shape. But he is never advocating anything or really critiquing Japanese values. He is unfolding the internal dramas generated by the world around him.

Mizoguchi on the other hand is actually pointing out problems in Japanese contemporary values. Osaka Elegy involves a young woman who becomes a mistress for her boss so that she can bail out her father and get money so that her brother can graduate from his school. But despite saving her father and brother, she is turned out by them for the shame she brings to them. Mizoguchi is pointing his finger at something wrong in his society. Women of the Night does this to an even greater extent. Good women are being driven by adverse circumstances into a life of squalor. The main character at the conclusion tells the other prostitutes “There mustn’t be any more women like us ever again!”:

Women of the Night

I think I hear the director making his point there. He’s taken a look around and seen something he thinks is wrong.. and pointed it out. The film could be seen as an antecedent to something like the Swedish film Lilya 4-ever (2002) in which a young girl from Russia falls into prostitution and sexual slavery. That film wants to make the same point as Mizoguchi: “This should not happen!”

This comes back around to the introduction of Christian imagery at the end of Women of the Night. Maybe there’s something in the “issue” film that demands redemption, and thus makes relevant Christian symbols? A critique of contemporary social values might leave Mizoguchi open to the creative use of imagery from outside the Japanese mainstream (recognizing that Christians have long been present as a minority in Japan). I don’t know for sure how to explain this. But I also know that nothing like this would pop up in a film by Ozu.