Kon Ichikawa | ビルマの竪琴 (The Burmese Harp) / 1956, USA 1967

the parrot’s brother

by Douglas Messerli

 

Natto Wada (screenplay, based on a novel by Michio Takeyama), Kon Ichikawa (director) ビルマの竪琴

(The Burmese Harp) / 1956, USA 1967

 

 As critic Tony Rayns notes in his essay accompanying the Criterion re-issue of The Burmese Harp, this film was Ichikawa’s twenty-seventh feature, “his first real landmark in his career.” And “nobody in the industry or the press singled him out as a major talent on the strength of the first twenty-six features, all of them company assignments….” What made this feature so different from those others?

     Based on a novel by Takeyama Michio, The Burmese Harp had already received popular success in its literary form. Indeed, it had been an important book in helping to heal the Japanese wounds of World War II. As Ichikawa would later tell Donald Richie, “Oh, but I wanted to make that film. That was the first film I really felt I had to make.” But as Rayns observes, although remaining basically true to the story of the book, Ichikawa made several important changes that brings the film into greater focus, and affects the structure and significance of the work.

     The original novel, like the film, is the story of a Japanese company stranded in Burma at the end of World War II, attempting to escape the British attacks by crossing over into Thailand. Without food, forced to march through often mountainous and always unknown terrain, and given little aid by the unsympathetic Burmese (the extent of Japanese war crimes committed in Burma would later be revealed), Captain Inouye’s soldiers are a frightened and vulnerable lot. Yet, as the novel makes clear upon the return of the survivors to Japan, these men seem in better condition than other war prisoners. The secret, and one of the major themes of both the book and film, is that Inouye has studied music, training his men to sing in a choral style that uplifts their spirits—and, one might add sometimes also sentimentalizes Ichikawa’s presentation of the horrors of war. One of their men, Mizushima, has become an expert on the local Burmese harp, accompanying the men’s choruses, and using the instrument to signal news of his forays as a scout. Dressed in the traditional Burmese longyi, carrying the harp, Mizushima, his fellow soldiers tease, looks just like the locals.

     The power of their music is apparent throughout the film, particularly when it briefly allows them a few friendly moments in a Burmese village where they are well fed before the villagers scurry off to their huts. Recognizing a possible trap, and quickly observing that the village has suddenly been surrounded by soldiers, the captain orders his men to sing as a ruse while they prepare for battle. But the song they sing, “Hanyu no yado” (a Japanese folk song that in English we know as “Home, Sweet Home”) seems to charm the enemy, as their soldiers join in the refrain, coming forward without shooting. The scene might be entirely ludicrous were the Japanese not soon after to discover that they have had no choice but to surrender, since their country had capitulated and the war ended three days earlier. Music, accordingly, is represented not only as a force that crosses national boundaries, but is—for these men at least—a true salvation. They survive because they have not been forced to fight.

      Another Japanese company in the nearby mountains, however, is still battling with the British below. Inouye is determined that his men and all others must survive to return to Japan and help rebuild the country. Mizushima is sent to attempt to explain to the remaining rebels that the war has ended and they should surrender.

       His warring countrymen greet him with disbelief, perceiving him either as an enemy agent or as a traitor. Daring this company’s captain to behave with honor, Mizushima is unable to dissuade the unit, all of which are ultimately killed by the British; Mizushima himself is shot.

       In Takeyama’s original book, Mizushima is “found and nursed back to health by a non-Burmese tribe of cannibals, who plan to eat him (a theme that reappears in Ichikawa’s 1959 film Fires on the Plain), but in the film version, the surviving musician is nursed back to health by a Buddhist monk, which completely alters the perspective of the work, and more thoroughly justifies Mizushima’s later conversion to Buddhism.

       At first, however, Mizushima is not all interested in what he might learn from the monk, going so far as to steal the holy man’s robe as the soldier attempts to rejoin his company at a war camp in the south. Yet his long and painful journey—he must climb the rocky mountains and hills barefoot and is near starvation—radically changes him, particularly as he encounters multiple corpses of his countrymen and other soldiers along the way, all unburied, lying in the open prey to buzzards and other scavengers—one of the worst horrors for a man of a culture that reverences their dead. At one point, he is compelled to drag a few corpses away, burning them, carrying their ashes off.

     By the time Mizushima has reached water’s edge near the prison camp, he has begun to rethink his entire life. Many critics seem determined to understand his acts emanating only from his traditional sense of Japanese values; my former Temple University colleague and friend Joan Mellen, for example, argues in her book The Waves at Genji’s Door that “Mizushima has decided to sacrifice loyalty to a single group for devotion to a larger entity” uniting “himself with the family of ancestors comprised by these dead.” Accordingly, she sees Ichikawa’s film as “whitewashing” the Japanese troops, as a work with a “lack of consistent point of view or personal commitment.”

     I see Mizushima’s transformation, however, not simply as an attempt to reclaim the Japanese dead—although that is certainly one of his stated goals in his letter to his captain, read aloud at the film’s end—but as a recognition, a fact also mentioned in that letter, of the meaninglessness of his previous acts, the horror of war itself. He has no other moral choice, accordingly, but to escape his role as a soldier—Japanese or other—and take on a new role as Buddhist monk. His poignant refusal to recognize his own former comrades as they come upon one another on a bridge—a scene introduced by the director and repeated, in Rashomon fashion, from each point of view—is, in fact, a different kind of traitorous act. As the comrades repeat his name over and over in their questioning looks, he not only denies their existence, but the actions of all his countrymen, of soldiers of every country. In that very denial, however, he has forged a new moral identity, a transcendent existence.

      Yet Ichikawa’s film is not precisely an anti-war film either, and that is perhaps what makes this work so implausibly rewarding. Neither director nor character lash out against the soldiers and their acts; they have only done what all soldiers are taught to do: to kill, to survive, to serve the higher order of their nation. Their continued wonderment about their former colleague and their determination, despite his refusal to recognize them, to have him join them in their return home, perhaps helps to redeem them as well.  It is as if the siren song of music might lure him back, and with him some part of their lost selves. One of the most brilliant images of many stunning visual moments in this film is the company singing at the top of their lungs in an attempt to bring back Mizushima across a wire fence, faced by a group of local Burmese, their faces reflecting both the enjoyment and confusion of their enemy’s vocal performance.

       The captain goes even further; seeing a parrot on the monk’s shoulder, he buys its brother, teaching it to repeat “Mizushima, come back to Japan.” When the men convince a Burmese woman trader (the wonderful Kitabayshi Tanie, speaking an Osaka-accented Japanese) to give the bird to the monk, we recognize it not just as an attempt to regain one of their lost, but, as the trader suggests, the return of one brother to the other, a temporary joining of the two cultures.

    Mizushima’s answer, to return the first bird, whom he has taught to say “I cannot join you,” expresses only the inevitable truth: his spiritual journey can never be reunited to their earthly desires. After the two forces—the men’s voices and Mizushima’s Burmese harp—are once more momentarily and joyfully married, Ichikawa’s camera follows the monk’s silent turn and disappearance into the haze and smoke of the Buddhist landscape where he must remain.

 

Los Angeles, February 29, 2008

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2008).