The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums

What Kenji Mizoguchi’s Masterpiece Expresses

Set in the world of Meiji era Kabuki, this story traces the wandering life of a scion born to a prestigious family as he strives to acquire true artistry and the presence of the woman he loves who quietly fades away in his shadow. This is The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (Zangiku Monogatari) released by Kenji Mizoguchi in 1939 which was the final era before Japan plunged into World War II. Film is an unavoidable reflection of its times yet it is simultaneously a rare medium that possesses the aspect of being the most radical reaction against those very regulations. In particular, Japanese cinema from the mid-to-late 1930s was an era where creators engaged in trial and error to forge new methods of cinematic expression as they transitioned from the silent era amidst the rise of what were called “talkies” or films with sound. This process of trial and error became the driving force that birthed a rare golden age in which the fierce internal intellectual struggles of creators concerning how best to apply the new characteristic of spoken dialogue to Japanese film were magnificently reflected in their expression.

However, the films of this era are quite different in quality from Japanese cinema of the early 1950s which is often called the Golden Age. Famous works representing the 1950s such as Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1953), Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953), and Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) were filmed with the premise of postwar technical innovations, so the sound is clear and audible, and the visual beauty is superior. On the other hand, film technology of the mid-to-late 1930s suffered from poor audio quality and the premise that the visuals themselves have deteriorated because the film stock of that time was not managed properly during the turmoil of World War II. Therefore, works from this era tend to be shunned due to a feeling that they are inevitably unapproachable.

Nevertheless, an intense will that shakes the heart directly in a way that cannot be put into words presses upon the viewer in the films of this period. I have been watching films from this era one after another for many years to explore what the true nature of this identity is, and The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums is a symbolic film among them. Generally, if one looks only at the plot of this film, it tends to be seen as a story depicting the closed world of what is called “Geido” or the Way of Art in Japan and the tragic devotion of a woman who martyred herself for it. This perspective is a view that gained traction in postwar Japan, and accompanying this, the evaluation of Kenji Mizoguchi is also biased toward the assessment that he was “a film director who portrayed women magnificently.” However, I feel a sense of discomfort with such thinking. This is because such perspectives are mostly developed by facile people who do not possess and do not engage in the internal struggle to grasp the unknowable existence of the “something” that filmmakers of this era tried to express. In the dimension of expressing “something” that is difficult for even the creators themselves to put into words, we are supposed to require the effort to engage in a universal internal struggle that we share in a phase where time and space do not exist. That is what it means to live, but the reason films called masterpieces around the world transcend time and space is precisely that these creators gazed at this most earnestly and continued to approach that “something” by vomiting out the unknowable foreign object accumulating in the depths of their gut through cinematic expression. This is the truth, but that truth is a profound ocean that has not been grasped yet continues to flow.

We can grasp this film by interpreting it from the perspective of “communal illusion / pair illusion / individual illusion” which I have been thinking about intensively recently. Therefore, in this article, I will look at this work by Mizoguchi which fully depicted this symbolic world of the movement of great illusions while tracing the synopsis of The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums. The point of attention when viewing the dimension of illusion in this film is largely the relationship between communal illusion and pair illusion. It shows a considerably complex function and working where the pair illusion eventually fades quietly into the communal illusion in the process of the communal illusion eroding the pair illusion to reach zero. This is not something simple like the pair illusion being lost due to the communal illusion.