Dirty Girl Things
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Number One-Hundred-Twenty-One
In May 1936, Sada Abe committed the most notorious crime in twentieth-century Japan—the murder and emasculation of her lover. What made her do it? And why was she found guilty of murder yet sentenced to only six years in prison? Why have this woman and her crime remained so famous for so long, and what does her fame have to say about attitudes toward sex and sexuality in modern Japan?
Despite Sada Abe’s notoriety and the depictions of her in film and fiction (notably in the classic In the Realm of the Senses), until now, there have been no books written in English that examine her life and the forces that pushed her to commit the crime. Along with a detailed account of Sada’s personal history, the events leading up to the murder, and its aftermath, this book contains transcripts of the police interrogations after her arrest—one of the few existing first-person records of a woman who worked in the Japanese sex industry during the 1920s and 1930s—as well as a memoir by the judge and police records.
Her story has been told in three different films (Nobuhiko Obayashi’s “Sada”; Nagisa Oshima’s “In the Realm of the Senses”; and Noboru Tanaka’s “A Woman Called Sada Abe”) and a book (William Johnston’s “Geisha, Harlot, Strangler, Star: A Woman, Sex, and Morality in Modern Japan”).
Geisha, Harlot, Strangler, Star steps beyond the simplistic view of Sada Abe as a sexual deviate or hysterical woman to reveal a survivor of rape, a career as a geisha and a prostitute, and a prison sentence for murder. Sada endured discrimination and hounding by paparazzi until her disappearance in 1970. Her story illustrates a historical collision of social and sexual values—those of the samurai class and imported from Victorian Europe against those of urban and rural Japanese peasants.
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Geisha, Harlot, Strangler, Star: A Woman, Sex, and Morality in Modern Japan
The Cruelest Cut
by Yuki Allyson Honjo, Japan Review
On May 18, 1936, Sada Abe strangled her lover Kichizo Ishida with an obi cord. She removed his genitals with a knife, daubed in blood “Sada and Kitchi together” on the sheets, and carved her name on his arm with a knife. She neatly wrapped Ishida’s genitals in a magazine cover and washed her hands. Carrying the souvenir of her lover, Abe stepped out of the inn and into Japan’s collective popular imagination.
When her crime was discovered the next day, it was an instant sensation. With a “sexually and criminally dangerous woman on the loose,” the nation was gripped with “Abe Sada panic”: newspapers printed extra editions and a mad rush of curiosity seekers created a large traffic jam in Ginza. She evaded the police for days and was eventually caught in an inn in Shinagawa, where she had planned to commit suicide. In a widely published photo (Click here for original photo) taken shortly after her arrest, her kimono is slightly disheveled; she has an odd smile on her face. The policemen are smiling as well, and all look rather pleased with themselves.
Abe confessed freely to the crime and was clearly a danger to no one but herself. They asked her why she killed Ishida. “Because I loved him,” she answered. Men could legally control women in any number of ways. Killing him, she said, was the only way she could really and truly “monopolize” and control her man.
As William Johnston, the author of Geisha, Harlot, Strangler, Star: A Woman, Sex, and Morality in Modern Japan points out, Abe’s story still remains current, almost seventy years after the event. While similar crimes have been committed, even in the jaded post Lorena Bobbitt world, Sada Abe remains a well discussed subject of numerous books, essays and multiple films. For example, Nagisa Oshima’s film (1976) In the Realm of the Senses was based on Abe Sada and her relationship with Ishida, as was Noburu Tanaka’s Abe Sada Story (1975) and Nobuhiro Obayashi’s Sada (1998). She became an icon, someone to be feared, and an exotic object of lurid and prurient male fantasy.
This book focuses on the historical Sada Abe. Johnston uses a wide array of primary and secondary sources in Japanese and English to create a multi-dimensional and sympathetic portrait of Sada Abe. In the back of the book, he includes a translation of the published transcripts of Sada’s police interrogations. While Abe’s responses are fascinating, so are the police questions. The police ask, as if this were the normal course of action, “If you loved Ishida so much, why didn’t you bring up the idea of a double suicide?” Johnston’s book argues that while Sada Abe was a unique individual, the difficult circumstances around her life were generally unremarkable for the day.
The youngest daughter of a tatatmi mat maker, she came from middle class, if not affluent, family. Spoiled by her mother, she was allowed to do largely as she pleased as a child. In her teens, she was a victim of an acquaintance rape. While her family defended her (contrary to some of the fictional and semi-fictional accounts of her life) and tried to mollify her with presents, Abe became a surly and uncontrollable teenager. With her parent’s money, she was able to fund her aimless lifestyle. Her father eventually sold her to a geisha house: there is some debate on whether it was Abe’s wish (geisha were glamorous stars of the day) or whether it was punishment for Abe’s sexual promiscuity, which was also not unusual.
Abe soon found that life as a geisha was not all that she imagined. True geisha were accomplished women: they trained for years in the arts, many since they were children. It became evident to Abe that, with her lack of discipline and training, she was unlikely to become a star in the geisha world. As a low ranking geisha, her services were mostly sexual and she spent five years plying her trade. After a bout of syphilis and thus consequently facing regular examinations, she chose to become a licensed prostitute.
After a few years in the trade, she tired of it and its conditions. She attempted to leave the business. However, because of her contract which indentured her to over two thousand yen in services (one thousand yen was sufficient to buy a house at the time), she took an assumed name to evade her creditors. With no real skills to her name, she first took a job as a waitress, became a mistress to various men, then a private prostitute, and then again tried to “go straight” working as a maid in a restaurant named Yoshidaya. The owner was Kichizo Ishida, whom she would eventually murder after a passionate affair.
Johnston’s analysis is particularly strong in setting the sometimes astonishing events of Abe’s life in historical context. As a public health expert, Johnston’s discussion of the sexual mores of the 1930s Japan give us greater understanding of the period and of Abe herself. In the 1930s, sexual values and the boundaries of acceptable sexual behavior were in a period of flux and differed across class boundaries. On the one hand, given the importance of family reputation, virginity was prized among the upper classes to ensure proper succession. Among commoners, women had far more sexual freedoms and sexual experience was expected for women and men alike.
“Modernity,” with import of western Victorian norms, contributed to the “transformation of Japanese values governing sexuality.” In Sada Abe’s day, these dual definitions of acceptable behavior were in conflict. For example, Sada Abe’s sister Teruko had multiple lovers: as punishment, her father sold her into a brothel. Johnston tells us that this was not an uncommon course of action. However, her father bought her back. Teruko later married, and “her sexual history was no obstacle to marriage for somebody of her natal class.”
One of the most extraordinary passages of the book concerns Keijiro Hosoya, the senior judge in the case. He wrote candidly on the case and admitted to frequenting “cafés” where paid “dates” with women were arranged. When reviewing the case Hosoya found himself excited by the candid sexual details.
Contemporary sensibilities supported taboos on sexual intercourse during a woman’s menstrual period; Hosoya did not want the case to arouse the other judges sexually if they might then discover that their wives were having their periods, since they would be without the proper means of relieving their excitement, Consequently, he determined when their wives were having their periods by asking them about who had bathed the children of if their wife had taken a bath, since bathing also was taboo during a woman’s period. This way he established a time when all three wives would not be menstruating, and he set the trial for that time. (Johnston pp. 135-36)
Hosoya ran a tight ship: he tolerated no laughter, applause, or any public display of emotion. Discussion of crime would be a violation of the 59th article of the Meiji Constitution on public morality. He required witnesses to say “Ishida’s extremity” to get around this issue. Clearly navigating this terrain of sexual politics was challenge for the judge.
One weakness of the book is that Johnston spends too much time trying to understand Abe’s motivations and how the circumstances of her life led to her crime:
One particularly revealing thread is her difficulty accepting social boundaries. She remained forever on the margins of society. From adolescence, she lived outside the boundaries of “normal” women, but for her the “abnormal” became the ordinary. Eventually she lost her bearings so completely that murder and mutilation, which to her made a kind of logical sense, became acceptable. (Johnston p. 14)
At the end of the day, we will never really know what drove Abe to strangle her lover and how she justified these actions in her head. Johnston argues that heightened love and passion led to her moment of madness. Indeed, this is an interesting assertion, but it does not lead anywhere. Hundreds of young women had similar stories, but they did not strangle their lovers. Johnston tries too hard to make a connection between the circumstances and the crime.
Abe did not get the death sentence as she desired: instead, she was sentenced to six years in prison. After serving her time, she tried to return to a quiet life, but the persistence of her celebrity drove her out of hiding. Ishida’s penis and testicles were moved to the Tokyo University Medical School’s pathology museum, but they disappeared. In the same vein, Abe’s fate remains a mystery. She too disappeared after 1970, perhaps finally getting the peace and anonymity she craved.
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SADA
A Film by Nobuhiko Obayashi
D V D - R E V I E W - B Y - D E R E K - H I L L
Based upon the life story of the notorious prostitute Sada Abe, who in 1936 murdered and castrated her married lover for reasons that have perplexed the Japanese people ever since (let alone the filmmakers who have committed the tale to celluloid over the years), Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1997 film, Sada, is almost unclassifiable in its fever-dream approach to the material. Rich with character detail as much as it is resplendent with a love for visual style and theatrical artifice, Obayashi seems to be not only attempting to make the story of the infamous Sada Abe but trying to reconfigure and redefine Japanese cinema as well. That he only partly succeeds should not come as a surprise: the film is too long by about twenty-minutes and the mix of low-brow slapstick comedy and ironic melodrama never quite gels with the story’s more tragic and solemn moments. But this type of cinematic blenderizing of disparate genre styles and emotional states is nothing new for Asian audiences, although it can be quite disorienting and baffling to Western eyes who expect a consistency of style and tone (i.e. naturalism) with their drama.
Nevertheless, Sada is frequently haunting, unforgettable, and yes, amusing in a way that Nagisa Oshima’s turgid version of the story, In the Realm of the Senses, never comes close to being. (Sada Abe’s tortured tale of love and death was also made into the film A Woman Called Sada Abe, directed by Noburu Tanaka for Nikkatsu studios.) The big difference between Oshima’s over praised art-house shocker and Obayashi’s film is primarily one of style, although there is also the issue of thematic focus to take into consideration. Oshima’s hermetic interpretation of the story is mainly concerned with the fevered sexual obsession and power-plays that Sada and her lover acted out within the privacy of their ryokan room. Obayashi, on the other hand, relegates the last days of Sada’s sexual delirium to a small part of the film, and instead treats her entire life as a story worthy telling.
With its hyper-stylization, frequently arch performances from the supporting cast, and its almost clinical reappraisal of Japanese cinema, Obayashi’s film should easily be a pretentious mess. But somehow Sada maintains its cinematic equilibrium among all the pretty colors, due no doubt to the striking central performance of Hitomi Kuroki, who was recently seen in Hideo Nakata’s horror film Dark Water. Kuroki manages to convey Sada’s innocence, fragility, strength, and predatory ambition within the most delicate of facial expressions as she generates a fully-realized portrait of a larger-than-life enigma. Tsurutaro Kataoka likewise lends a quiet dignity to his role as Sada’s lover, the respectable restaurant owner Tatsuzo Kikumoto, and beautifully realizes the character’s volatile emotional and physical needs hidden behind his affable, ironic smile and almost whimsical demeanor.
But the real star of the film is director Obayashi himself. In his liner notes to the film, included with the DVD, writer Richard Kadrey aptly compares Obayashi to Baz Luhrmann, whose own frenetic visual style attempts to reconfigure the way we view popular cinema. Director Todd Haynes, who skillfully reworked the melodramatics of Douglas Sirk for modern audiences in his 2002 film Far from Heaven, would also be an appropriate comparison, though Haynes has far more patience with melodrama and a greater visual surety than Obayashi. Obayashi dutifully reenacts Sada’s early years and her climb to the top of the prostitution ladder with the requisite melodrama and tragedy along the way, but his heart isn’t anywhere near as dedicated as Haynes’. If it weren’t for the over-abundance of visual trickery and the magnificent performances of its leads, much of Sada would simply be interminable to sit through.
Sada has been given a low-key yet marvelous release onto DVD from Home Vision Entertainment. The film’s lysergic visual palette always looks stunning, and the frequent black & white sequences are likewise always crisp and sharp. Although listed by some sources (i.e. IMDB.com) as being shot at an aspect ratio of 1.85:1, the film has been given a full-frame (1.33:1) presentation on disc, which looks fine and does not seem to compromise the picture. A theatrical trailer, director and actor filmographies, and liner notes are also included.
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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
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