Machiko Kyo

When news of the death of Doris Day broke on Monday, I felt inhibited to comment on it. Then I learned yesterday that Machiko Kyo had died on Sunday, and I was moved incalculably more by the news of her death. Let me explain why. I watched Doris Day in movies throughout my boyhood and I have to admit that she exuded somewhat of a "goody-two-shoes" image, too wholesome and maternal. In short, sexless.  She was perfect for the era, I suppose, an era of scrupulous obsequiousness in American film. Not one of the movies she appeared in - yes, not even Hitchcock's remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much - caused a ripple in the cinematic ocean. I remember items like Please Don't Eat the Daisies, Yours, Mine and Ours (1968) and her TV show (1968-1973), which used her popular rendition of that insufferably chipper song "Que será, será," with lingering nausea. Only later did I learn of her career as a singer during the Big Band era. She had a singing voice identical to her image: sunny, cheerful, and completely bland.

Ordinarily I wouldn't be writing any of this if Day's death hadn't completely upstaged that of Kyo, whose immortality is assured by her appearance in a handful of magnificent Japanese films: Rashomon, Ugetsu, Floating Weeds, and The Key (aka Odd Obsession). These films will be treasured for as long as the film medium is around. She will also be remembered for minor roles in Mizoguchi's Red Light District and Teshigahara's Face of Another. I suppose everyone who saw her in these films, men and women, was a little in love with her.

But something else italicizes the death of Machiko Kyo, and it was the same at the death, in 2015, of Setsuko Hara. She takes with her yet another large piece of cultural history - the legacy of the Japanese film, once a booming industry that, in the space of a few years in the late 1990s, seems to have vanished. Since then, only a handful of films, most of them directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, have kept the glory of the Japanese film fresh in people's minds. Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse, Kobayashi, and Imamura are names that are prominent in every cinephile's memory, standing proudly alongside Renoir, Fellini, Bergman, Ray (Satyajit, not Nicholas), Antonioni, and Buñuel.

I will remember Kyo from her first breathtaking appearance in Rashomon, when a sudden breeze blows her veil away from her face as she is riding past Toshiro Mifune sitting under a tree. I will remember her as the ghost Lady Wakasa in the mesmerizing Ugetsu. And I will remember her as the actress, already relegated to "mature" roles in her group of Kabuki actors in Floating Weeds. Of course, there is the difference that these three films are towering works of art to which she contributed her beauty and grace. The word "exquisite" is overused when Westerners write about certain aspects of Japanese culture. Machiko Kyo justifies the renewal of the word.

So it's goodbye to Doris, but au revoir Machiko.