Significant Letters

Mori Masayuki reunites with the love of his life and has to confront the fact that she slept with an American soldier in 1953's Love Letters (恋文). The first film directed by actress Kinuyo Tanaka, only the second female director in the history of Japanese cinema, it pales in comparison to the Ozu and Mizoguchi films that obviously influenced her, in terms of shot composition, editing, plot, and performances. It is an interesting artefact, though, of the first year following the U.S. occupation.

Mori plays Reikichi, a former soldier whose fluency in English has gotten him a job translating. He runs into an old friend (Jukichi Uno) who asks him to translate some letters for a group of women under his employ. It turns out, these women are small time gold diggers, nearly prostitutes, who need help corresponding with the Americans they slept with during the occupation. Mori swallows his disgust and helps them out but he boils over when he talks to Michiko (Yoshiko Kuga), the woman he loves, about her own affair with an American GI.

As someone who studied English and presumably at one time had an interest in foreign culture, Mori's character seems poised to make a relatively balanced argument, so when he throws in Michiko's face the fact that her lover may have personally killed some of her compatriots, the cut is deeper.

Ultimately, Tanaka mainly wants to draw a distinction between Michiko and the cheap floozies who were really only after cash, a simplistic morality that comes off as gossipy and compares poorly with Mizoguchi movies like Street of Shame.

Mori Masayuki, who's normally good in Kurosawa and Mizoguchi movies, is bland and uninteresting here. I suspect Tanaka, like a lot of actors and actresses turned director, didn't like to give actors much direction. Maybe she got better at that as she went along.