Kenji Mizoguchi and the Social Order: My Love Burns

Who is the Mizoguchian woman? Often a role dressed by Isuzu Yamada or Kinuyo Tanaka, she’s the core experiencer of social injustice and hierarchical oppression, confined to restrictive social roles that inhibit, if downright foreclose, the possibility for a personality to emerge. Detractors will (and have) call Kenji Mizoguchi a mere hagiographer of female suffering, to whom the latter appears as an aesthetic object, a critique especially pertinent to his Buddhist films of the 1950s. It’s valid, that though throughout his career, he’s always been compassionate toward the plight of women, many of his films wilt into disheartened cries for change, as in Sisters of the Gion or Osaka Elegy (1936), where its compassion is submerged under waves of pessimism; resolutions of his are as hopeless as the worlds he rebels against, as if life is only livable through a perpetuation of these harmful norms.

By contrast, My Love Burns appears as one of Mizoguchi’s only films where he channels this fundamental sympathy toward a cohesive political statement, unperturbed by hindrances, with a conclusion neither transcendental like Ugetsu (1953), or downtrodden like The Story of the last Chrysanthemums (1939), but materialistic.

My Love Burns was released in 1949, in the middle of the US-Occupation of Japan following World War II. Democracy and liberalism were new ideas inculcated into the country, and disseminated through cinema, with themes of gender equality and female liberation enshrined in new film policies. Many of these films, like Kurosawa’s No Regrets for Our Youth, paint women as vectors of democracy, and end with the intellectual supporter of democracy emerging as the leader.

The intellectual isn’t to be understood in the Gramscian sense, an advisor of the proletariat, but as a distinct leader, passing knowledge onto those benighted, thereby reinforcing some kind of hierarchy. Most of these films appear didactic, revering, preaching, and visually underscoring Western values. While Mizoguchi’s film is part of the same group, given its release date and subject matter, it’s the least offender of overt pandering and uses the restrictiveness of the period to its advantage, likened by Robin Wood to the ways Hollywood auteurs used to circumvent contrivance and formulaicness.

Based on the biography of Fukuda Hideko, a woman’s activist in the People’s Rights movement during the Meiji period, the film plays during the late-1880s, a time of political turmoil following the end of the Tokugawa military reign, where numerous parties vied for newfound ascendancy and power. Eiko (Tanaka), is a school teacher from Okayama, who’s fired after espousing the Liberal Party following an inspiring visit by a feminist. Decried by her parents, betrayed by her boyfriend Hayashi (Eitaro Ozawa), she initially finds solace in her political commitment, and with no place to go eventually joins, and later works for, the party; while there, she experiences the ups and downs of political activism, and the insufficiencies of the party and its paradoxically parochial thinking.

My Love Burns is a lucid portrayal of political (self)-awakening. Eiko carries compassion within her from the beginning, as seen when she tries to save another woman, Chiyo (Mitsuko Mito), from being sold into sex work. Nevertheless, her compassion at this stage is still unstructured, haphazard, aimless. Through her work in the party, she’s introduced to democratic values and political methods, equally imposed on the Japanese population as its directors of the time, and given the tools to think, question her position, see faults in her situation, all initially in line with American policies, yet expanded into a general statement on power. We see this in the way the Liberal leader Omoi (Ichiro Sugai)—figure of Itagaki Taisuke, who abandoned and betrayed his activist groups several times—is introduced, descending from the staircase, visually indicating superiority. He gives passionate speeches, but once in power, his demeanor shifts, the hailed changes neglected.

Mizoguchi preaches democracy and liberal thought as tools for emancipation while highlighting the duplicity of those who spread it, a comment which can be extended from the liberal leaders in the film to the world leaders of the time, who, through the Japanese cinema, may have espoused notions of female liberation, yet always under the precondition of a similarly oppressive structure, the perpetuation of capitalist ideology, which but replicates hierarchical thinking. Near the end, Eiko vows to start a women’s school with Chiyo, and though the film closes with an embrace between the two, the assumption is she may be superseded in the future, for she now carries power, and power is a corruptive, gender-independent, force, persists loosely.

Crucial for Eiko’s growth is the way Mizoguchi frames her. Frequently she’s seen observing; many sequences close with a pan to her somewhere in the background, often behind windows or bars, listening in to a conversation, or watching the assault of women within the factory, and the party’s non-resistance to it (in fact, it’s only Chiyo who ends up retaliating by burning down the factory). She learns through experience, each moment becomes a vital lesson, making it Mizoguchi’s most materialistic film. Sometimes, she vies for the front spaces within the frame, even if she proceeds to cease prominence, as in a sequence with ex-boyfriend Hayashi. It’s only by the end that she finally steps forward, deciding to leave the party leader; she enters the foreground, and doesn’t leave it for the entire scene, remaining there, leaving the benighted leader behind. She finally becomes cognizant of her historical significance, the deed that’s conferred on her, the experiences bolstering her prior intuitive compassion, now fortified through practical and theoretical pillars; in short, she has developed a personality.

Historically, Mizoguchi always found a way to subvert the demands of the contemporaneous social order. Sisters of the Gion and Osaka Elegy, for all their vitriol, are clever inversions of the classic, outlawed, “keiko” class film, refracting its supposed anger and focus toward gender, while the war films are dressed superficially nationalistic enough to appease censors, yet, deliver heartfelt ambivalence and doubt about the culture they represent. Nowhere is this as poignant as in The 47 Ronin (1941), when Mizoguchi’s refusal to show combat sequences, that drove the original text, reveals everything. He may have been an opportunist, exploiting Western interest by a move toward self-exoticizing Buddhism, but such, if anything, merely proves the theory of his subversion, in My Love Burns aimed at the venality and duplicity of Japan’s “new” ideology. Mizoguchi later assessed the film as “filmed from such an impassioned attitude,” where its intensity marred political detail and objectivity; maybe that’s why it’s such a unique, powerful film, a particular snapshot of an ephemeral moment, with a lucidity in message Mizoguchi never returned to.