Ornamental Hairpin and the Poetic Life
from Ornamental Hairpin by Hiroshi Shimizu
Ornamental Hairpin by Japanese director Hiroshi Shimizu is an understated film with a haunting quality. The tone comes through in the opening scene as a band of kimono dressed women walk through a deep forest, the bright sun through the trees giving a hazy ethereal glow to the group. Considering that it was made in 1941, the year of Pearl Harbor and aggressive Japanese expansion in the Pacific, the opening feels like a decisive step away from the events that must have been on everyone’s mind. The remainder of the film takes place at a spa amidst natural scenes, the war never explicitly figuring into discussion. It could be compared to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but without the magical events.. and with realism understood as the guiding aesthetic principle.
The central event occurs when a young man (Nanmura, a young Chishu Ryu) steps on an ornamental hairpin in the natural spring. The hairpin does grievous injury to his foot, and he spends the rest of the film limping around with crutches. The ornamental hairpin turns out to belong to a geisha (Emi), who when learning about the injury caused by her pin comes back to the spa to apologize to Nanmura (apparently a soldier sent to the spa to convalesce). We learn that she is unhappy with her life back in Tokyo, and so she stays at the spa and a relationship of some kind develops between her and the young man. Then as quickly as it began, it’s over.. everyone leaves. The film consists entirely of this shimmeringly vague period at the spa.. and viewers are given no very explicit advice as to how it is to be interpreted.
The text on the box for the new Criterion edition is a great example of one easy misreading:
Nanmura tracks down the owner of the lost object, Emi, and, believing that his injury was some form of divine romantic intervention (“It’s like the sole of my foot has been pierced by poetry!”), falls for her. Though it begins with the makings of a perfect comic “meet-cute,” Ornamental Hairpin goes on to pragmatically deconstruct Nanmura’s and Emi’s desires: for him, all is poetic, and therefore illusory; for her: life with a cruel patron has become unbearable, and she doesn’t want to return to the city.
By this interpretation the relationship at the spa is a brief romantic moment that inevitably falls apart. Since this film has been unavailable in the US until this box set was released (can’t even be gotten from Netflix yet!), there’s not a lot of reviews out there to read. This interpretation, although I suspect a common one, misunderstands the nature of the film, beginning with the initial import of the line “It’s like the sole of my foot has been pierced with poetry!”
from Ornamental Hairpin by Hiroshi Shimizu
This comes from the mouth of Nanmura, but it is immediately amplified and interpreted by the older scholar sitting next to him. We see a young man who is aware of the poetic and beautiful moments of his life, and expresses them through a line like this, but that poetic moment is transformed into a narrative by the older scholar, who decides that the young man is love-sick and dreaming of a beautiful young woman connected to the hairpin. As one watches the film, it’s evident that Nanmura is completely passive in the construction of this narrative around himself, while the older scholar is busy at work selling the narrative. This leads to absurd scenes such as the one below in which one of the men at the spa tries to warn Nanmura not to be too “disappointed” with the woman, who might not be beautiful:
from Ornamental Hairpin by Hiroshi Shimizu
When Emi arrives to reclaim her ornamental hairpin, she is inducted into the poetic narrative by the scholar. At no point does Nanmura give evidence that he is “in love” with Emi.. and we only see them in group settings, so there’s no real intimacy. But Emi is little by little sucked into the larger narrative peddled by the scholar:
from Ornamental Hairpin by Hiroshi Shimizu
The film can be seen as a warning of the use of narrative to interpret people and their motivations. In this case a romantic narrative is conjured out of the slimmest of things (a hairpin!) and made into an accepted fact for the people at the spa. Even Emi accepts it and begins to see in it a basis for leaving her old life in Tokyo.
Throughout Nanmura is a cipher. What motivates him? What is he after? We never know. He clearly has a poetic sensibility, but it is one that isn’t connected to any particular narrative, either personal or national. His philosophy is something like: live in the moment. The most eloquent version of this is when the two young boys at the spa are discussing with him what to write about, and they point out how their days are all the same. Nanmura tells them to focus on the unique events they have overlooked in their catalogue of sameness:
from Ornamental Hairpin by Hiroshi Shimizu
This is the true context for understanding his earlier statement: “It’s like the sole of my foot has been pierced with poetry!” By poetry he hardly meant romantic love, but rather attention to small events that give life meaning. Each event is a one-off, to be understood in itself. We always find Nanmura engaged in inconsequential actions, but which are somehow infused by him with fun and meaning. When the scholar goes on a lengthy diatribe about the quality of the food at the spa (another example of narrative construction), Nanmura simply notes that he can’t complain because he gets a steep discount. This puncturing quality gives Nanmura a negative quality (making him hard to interpret), but he clearly represents a non-judgmental, non-constructive approach to living.
Now what to do with Emi? She’s a sympathetic character, and although we aren’t sure about the details of her past, we root for her to leave it behind. During her time at the spa she is finding herself, and tells a friend that she wants more “meaning” in life:
from Ornamental Hairpin by Hiroshi Shimizu
That makes the ending of the film tragic, since she’s shown walking one last time through the natural scenes where she spent time with Nanmura and others. She has to go back to Tokyo and we have no evidence that a brighter life awaits her there. The meaningful life has fled, and the romantic narrative turned out to be an illusion. Ironically the scholar earlier in the film was building up the romantic narrative out of hopes of avoiding a “tragedy” if Nanmura should be disappointed. But in reality the tragedy is caused by the narrative itself, and the buy-in of Emi.
The scholar is a humorous figure, even if we naturally dislike such an overbearing person. He is constantly at work verbally crafting and enforcing the way people should see the world. There are hints too that he is a cultural hardliner.. and I would assume friendly to the Japanese war effort. Here is his line as he first processes the “It’s like the sole of my foot has been pierced by poetry!” line:
from Ornamental Hairpin by Hiroshi Shimizu
We can assume the scholar is the man mentioned at the start of the film who objects to the recitation of Chinese poetry at the spa. This character who stands for nationalism is also the one strongly pushing the romantic narrative. Here I see a (subtle) critique of Japanese nationalism, engaged in its own ideal story-making on the national level. The character who provides a real counter-philosophy to the scholar is Nanmura, whose easy-going poetics of everyday life presents another path of getting through life. Certainly one that is more open to others (and to ornamental hairpins and Chinese poetry!).
