Like many Japanese directors his age, Kichitaro Negishi got his start at the legendary Nikkatsu studio making the only thing the studio found to be profitable in the late ‘70s: the Roman porno genre. His young compatriots at the company saw artistic opportunity in the freedom this studio gave them for their erotic thrillers and comedies, but Negishi’s successes at the studio (such as 1979’s Wet Weekend and 1981’s Female Teacher: Dirty Afternoon) led to even mainstream appeal. Similar-minded (and similarly successful) directors banded together with an experimental venture called the Director’s Company which, like the Art Theatre Guild before it, promised avant-garde Japanese filmmaking in a period of severe economic downturn in the nation’s film industry. While Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Shinji Somai’s films enjoy plenty of distribution in the West, most of the other Director’s Company members linger in relative obscurity. Negishi is no exception — his Detective Story (1983) and Eien no 1/2 (1987) were lauded at festivals in Japan, but saw no hope being appreciated in a Western market that was beginning to grow weary of even Akira Kurosawa. These were also light humanistic dramas, the kind that couldn’t fit with Western conceptions of Japan’s media output: samurai, sex films, and anime.
Negishi has made no concessions to these Western preconceptions in Yasuko, Songs of Days Past, but perhaps the world is finally ready to look at the legacy of one of the more important Japanese directors of the past few decades. The film reverberates between the ripples of a soft romantic drama and small explosions of melodrama that have also appeared in Negishi’s late works, but this is also a reflective film for Negishi as he looks back at the magnetic work of one of Japan’s premiere poets of the twentieth century.
The Yasuko of the title refers to Yasuko Hasegawa (Suzu Hirose), a budding actress at Shochiku Studios in 1920s Japan and the muse of the film’s protagonist, the poet Chuya Nakahara (Taisei Kido). The 17-year-old Nakahara roller-skates around a Kyoto that still resists much of the Westernization trend, but Yasuko finds his foreign fashion (more Parisian painter than the standard business suit that signaled Western assimilation) and intense love of poetry charming. They live together — much to the consternation of the women at Shochiku — and host Nakahara’s friends, though Yasuko believes that Nakahara’s passion may never be fully directed toward her. Now in Tokyo, their relationship strains further thanks to the appearance of Hideo Kobayashi (Masaki Okada), a literary critic who supports Nakahara but shows more serious feelings for Yasuko than the immature poet could muster. The love triangle forms and reforms, years pass, and the three artists meet again and again, until they can meet no more.
Though Negishi fills the film with energy at choice moments, this is neither the erotic competition of Lubitsch’s Design for Living nor the romp of Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962). Most of the film is comprised of interior medium shots that purposefully exclude a character in order to create a subtle rift in the relationship; any rejection is sullenly but gracefully accepted, and the three continue on. Yasuko’s fear of hereditary madness and some cynical acts of psychological warfare lead to a few screaming matches, but the film sticks with a mostly quiet examination of art and love in a slowly changing Japan. Just as Nakahara may have confused his love of Yasuko for his love of the poetic spark she inspired, Kobayashi admits to Yasuko that it was through loving her that he could truly “talk” with Nakahara and his work. Artist and critic have revitalized each other through their muse-intermediary, who also has confused passion for love.
Every once in a while, the camera will pull back to give a glimpse of this miniature world that these Westernized Japanese artists inhabit. Outdoor studio sets for Shochiku’s silent films, a Western-style fair complete with roller rink and shooting gallery, and a theater with benshi narration keep the characters moving through this quickly developing time and thankfully add some variety to the otherwise claustrophobic interior shots of their small rooms.
However, hardly any tension arises from this emphasis on Westernization. Though Nakahara is known for his identification with Arthur Rimbaud (in age, talent, and style), the film never presses further on what made Nakahara’s poetry feel new or dangerous. The three seem completely isolated from the changing world around them such that Nakahara’s poetic outbursts are treated like moments of temporary madness. The film’s production design keeps hinting at a world that these three are responding to and will continue to help form, but Negishi keeps the trio away from it, lest their pressure cooker of a relationship suddenly run cold. While Yasuko, Song of Days Past wonderfully showcases Negishi’s sense of subtle drama, it also circumvents nearly everything that made these historical characters interesting.
Published as part of IFFR 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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