I thought I was a drinker until I visited Japan. During my eight years in the US Navy, I visited bars all over Asia: in South Korea, Hong Kong (before the handover), Thailand, Guam, and the Philippines. I was stationed in Okinawa for three years and, tired of the crush and hustle of the “drinkie” bars that serviced us servicemen, I favored the far quieter and less crowded hostess bars up and down the side streets of Okinawan city outside Kadena Air Force Base. I frequented the relatively genteel hostess bars, all yakuza-owned, and once spent practically a whole night being entertained by a particular woman until closing time. At 4 AM. When I walked out of the bar, the street was jammed with Japanese men all tottering in the direction of home.
Japanese artists - painters, writers, and filmmakers - have favored bars and the districts where they are concentrated as settings for their work. Among the filmmakers, three of the first generation, who began with silent films in the 1920s and early ‘30s, and who reached maturity in the ‘50s, Mizoguchi, Ozu, and Naruse frequented bars in their domestic, present-day dramas, called shomin-geki, because it was there that men and women found release, but also disappointment. Mikio Naruse was not well known in the West during his lifetime, but thanks to the insistence of Donald Richie and others, his greatness is by now firmly established. In 1960, he made When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, about Keiko, a woman who works as the mama-san in a hostess bar above a narrow street, and it is heartbreakingly beautiful. The woman finds, at a time when she is especially tired of her work entertaining middle class men, her practiced smile affixed to her face, a chance to change her life. She lunges at it, only to be deceived once more.
The film opens on “an afternoon in late autumn” in Ginza where, so the narrator (Keiko) tells us, “Bars in the daytime are like women without makeup.” Inside a closed upstairs bar called Lilac, a small wedding party is in progress. The women who work in the bar are throwing a farewell party for one of their co-workers, who is escaping the bar into marriage. One of the women, older than the others, says that marriage is what every woman wants. Junko, one of the younger and more headstrong women, denies it. “I’m going to open my own place,” she says. But it costs a million yen, as Keiko knows too well. She has been lectured by the bar’s owner about the revenue dropping for two consecutive months. The reason is as simple as it is terrible: Keiko won’t sleep with her wealthier clients.
“Between 11:30 and midnight, the Ginza’s 16,000 hostesses head home in droves. The best go by cab, the second-rate take the train, and the worst go off with their customers.”
From the outside, life in these innumerable tiny bars in Ginza is invariably cheerful, but from the inside it is hopeless. The women who work in them are stigmatized as unmarriageable. Their only chance is to establish a list of customers and canvas their help to open a bar of their own. One of Keiko’s girls, named Yuri, accomplishes this, and even entices away some of Keiko’s customers. But Yuri gets herself into serious debt and tells Keiko she’s going to fake a suicide attempt to ward off her creditors.
All Keiko seems to do is work in the bar all night and collect debts all day (customers in the bar charge drinks to their tab).
What lifts the film out of moralizing melodrama, one that illuminates the restrictive lives of the women while also condemning them for their poor choices (as if there ever was any real choice), is that it never feels fabricated. The Carton bar and the hundreds of other bars like it, is a world unto itself, with its own rules and hierarchies. This world is a cycle of indebtedness today and collection tomorrow. When Yuri’s attempted suicide backfires and she winds up dead (she mixed her nonlethal dose of sleeping pills with brandy), people to whom she owed money turn up at her funeral to collect from her mother.
Keiko isn’t at all the “bad” woman Hollywood would’ve made of her. She is trapped in an inhuman system that gives her no choices at all. Being a hostess gives her independence, but she has to squander her life abiding by the draconian rules of the game.
What the film exposes most powerfully is the disastrously constricted life of a Japanese woman, whose only option in attaining a life of her own is through marriage. Keiko married a man ten years older than her when she was just 18. He was a kind man, but he was killed in a street accident, leaving Keiko completely on her own. Her brother’s only son got polio and his wife abandoned them. So she sends them an allowance of 20,000 a month.
One of the strange take aways from the film is how ineffectual good husbands are. Keiko’s husband was good to her, but he was hit by a truck. Keiko’s husband was good to his wife, but she left him and their crippled child. Even the man Keiko seems most attracted to, a banker named Fujisaki, turns out to be a shit. The men in her world want only one thing from her, but she resists giving it to anyone, in deference to the memory of her dead husband. She even has a shrine to him in her expensive apartment. When she weakens – only once – she is cheated.
The cast has a number of familiar faces. Tatsuya Nakadai is Komatsu, the bar’s manager. One would think he’s seen everything and isn’t susceptible to any emotion, least of all love. But he loves Keiko and, when he proposes that they marry and open a bar together, she refuses, telling him they know each other too well. In other words, her cynicism is the equal of his and she is as remote from romantic love as he is. Masayuki Mori is Fujisaki, whose attraction to Keiko is just another aspect of his possessiveness. Once he possesses her, he loses interest. Ganjiro Nakamura is old Koda, who tries to entice Keiko into his bed with the million yen she needs to open her own bar. When she tells him she needs time to decide, Junko, a pretty young hostess, throws herself at him. Junko gets her own bar instead. Daisuke Katsu, one of Kurosawa’s regulars, plays Sekine, a bogus factory owner who proposes marriage to Keiko, except he’s already married. When Keiko is taken in by his proposal and finds out the truth (his wife calls Keiko’s number), she returns to the bar and goes on a bender, winding up in bed with Fujisaki. In the morning, Keiko tells him she truly loves him, despite vowing to never love another man. He tells her he’s been transferred to Osaka. “If you’re ever in Osaka, give me a call.”
Through it all, Hideko Takamine, who was Naruse’s favorite lead actress, is movingly genuine, putting up a tough front only to protect her unhappiness and longing. She ascends the stairs of her bar in the final scene (she is shown climbing the stairs several times in the film, each time pausing halfway, as if she’s steeling herself for another night of false merriment and broken promises) the sense of the fatality of the moment is overwhelming. Keiko will prevail.
In a telling statement, Naruse said, “From the earliest age, I have thought the world betrays us; this thought still remains with me … Among the people in my films, there is definitely something of [this] … if they move even a little they quickly hit the wall.” *
* Donald Richie, Japanese Cinema: Film Style and National Character (New York: Anchor Books, 1971) p. 73.
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