A TALE OF SORROW AND SADNESS (1977)

The clue’s in the title, really, because the only joy to be found in Seijun Suzuki’s comeback movie is in its brash cinematic stylings. 10 years prior, the director had been unceremoniously dismissed by Nikkatsu for making insultingly unintelligible movies. Seems his innovation, experimentation, and slick Pop Art aesthetic were too much for the studio executives. So, it’s heartening to see that he hasn’t learned his lesson because A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness / 悲愁物語 / Hishu monogatari is an uncompromising return to form.

However, it can’t be called a crowd-pleaser and will appeal most to those with a keen interest in 1970s Japanese cinema, eager to place it within the context of Suzuki’s remarkable career. So, this nicely cleaned-up high-definition transfer, with new sympathetic subtitle translation, is a welcome addition to the growing number of Suzuki movies surfacing on Blu-ray from Radiance Films, following the Underworld Beauty (1958) + Love Letter (1959) double-bill earlier this year, which may be a better place to start for Seijun Suzuki newbies.

Not one of the key characters has a good time or comes through unscathed, and none are likeable. That said, there’s nothing to dislike about Reiko Sakuraba (Yōko Shiraki), our vulnerable protagonist who readily relinquishes her freewill to chase some kind of validation in the form of fame and fortune—a treatise on success versus happiness. She’s increasingly exploited and victimised by nearly everyone she interacts with—objectified as a commodity before being systematically dehumanised.

Of two rival clothes manufacturers, both with delusions of fashion, one hires an international gymnastics champion as their spokesperson and model. So, the other feels they can no longer compete and, with three months to get their own advertising campaign ready, decide they need a similarly iconic model although their budget is comparatively limited. They scour the sports press for a young up-and-coming starlet on the cusp of success and it’s Reiko who catches their eye. Or rather it’s her bikini body and her recent run of high scores as a pro-golfer. She has yet to win a major golfing trophy so she’s also affordable. They decide to acquire her and train her as a model while simultaneously coaching her for a major national tournament. It’s a gamble as she must become a champion to pull off the planned publicity with any effectiveness.

Rather than approach her directly, agency representative Keisuke Tadokoro (Masumi Okada) hires her boyfriend, Seiichi Miyake (Yoshio Harada) to bring her onboard. On the golf course, the two men are contemptuous of the game that they have never mastered in the way that Reiko has. Miyake blames the equipment, smacking a golf club over its head before discarding it with disdain. Is this how they will treat their new model? Do they see her simply as a tool that will take the blame for their shortcomings and doesn’t deserve care and respect? While Reiko will be provided with a big house, nice car, and couture clothing, it’s Miyake who’ll get the pay cheques as her Svengali manager and promoter.

What at first seems like a manly lack of tenderness soon reveals itself to be the cruel streak of a detestable misogynist. Harada delivers a complex and convincing performance throughout, bringing the darker side of the 1970s ‘man’s man’ into the light. The sexual liberation of the ’70s resulted in increasingly independent women who threatened traditional masculinity. Insecure men, who are always plentiful, often overcompensated with even more macho posturing. Thus, we’re wrong-footed in the opening act to expect Reiko to fall victim to masculine vindictiveness. So, it’s a surprise when it’s another woman who increasingly insinuates herself into her life as the villain of the piece.

When Miyake is driving Reiko home late at night, he’s involved in a hit-and-run accident which is shot in a suitably confusing and disconcerting way. From an extreme wide-shot of a suburban cityscape, we see headlamps travel down impersonal, deserted streets before hearing the obtrusive screech of brakes. Suddenly, a slow-motion mid-shot cuts in as we see a woman bounce off the wing of the car. Ostensibly to protect Reiko’s image and avoid a scandal, Miyake drives on without stopping. However, the woman turns out to be Kayo Senba (Kyoko Enami) who we’d seen briefly in an earlier scene among a crowd of Reiko’s autograph-hunting fans. It seems this was no accident after all as she’d thrown herself against the car.

Instead of a golfing drama we now find ourselves in an unconventional stalker story. It’s an examination of the darker side of fandom. Kayo is a distillation of ‘the fans’ and their, often unrealistic, demands as they begin to think they’ve entitlement over the person or thing they’re a fan of. Slowly resentment replaces respect. Admiration turns to envy, which is symbolised by several shots of Kayo’s distorted, green-tinged reflection as she becomes more deranged and manipulative, changing from friend to fiend. It’s Kyoko Enami’s unhinged performance that really drives the narrative and, in the scenes they share, she completely overwhelms newcomer Yōko Shiraki.

Sadly, the issues touched upon in a film made more than four decades ago still seem all too relevant. I’m thinking of the ongoing legal battles of K-Pop group New Jeans, a.k.a NJZ, which have made global headlines over the past few months. Having attempted to extricate themselves from a contract, because they felt bullied and exploited, a Seoul court ruled that they did not qualify as employees and therefore didn’t have the protection of workers’ rights. (Here’s hoping that dispute eventually results in a more positive outcome than the movie does.) The media may have changed but similar tales of woe keep surfacing in our hyper-commercialised entertainment industry, particularly behind-the-scenes of the Asian Idol series.

A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness is set in the early decades of Japan’s emergent Idol system where entertainment conglomerates promote new faces and package them as stars across more than one medium. So, an Idol may be a singer, actor, model, show host, brand spokesperson—basically they are positioned as a mega-social-media-influencer whose presence becomes ubiquitous. The entertainment agency owns and controls an Idol’s public-facing persona including aspects of their personal life which must seem aspirational although there’s often a dating ban so that they appear ‘available’.

After being effectively blacklisted for a decade, Seijun Suzuki’s return to feature directing was a departure from the sort of films he was associated with. In his B-movie days, he was best known for yakuza crime dramas. A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness never quite becomes a crime thriller but exploits similar tropes with advertising agencies and promotors in place of politicians and gang bosses. Though there’s a copper in one scene (Jô Shishido in a brief cameo).

From the early-1960s Seijun Suzuki’s experimental style began to assert itself more prominently. He started to rely on the narrative power of colour-coded lighting and costume and to deploy mise-en-scène in ways that emphasise aspects of story with Tokyo Drifter (1966) being the prime example and perhaps his most enjoyable film of all. This approach often helped bring cohesion to fragmented narratives that jump between seemingly incongruous scenes and shock the viewer with sharp cutaways. A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness is no exception and much of the dialogue is delivered impersonally, interrupted by jarring edits. Rarely are the people facing each other as they converse, serving as formal elements in Suzuki’s choreographed scene blocking.

Reiko’s younger brother, who she cares for in loco parentis, appears in several dreamlike scenes that have no obvious connection with the film’s common narrative time and space. In these colour-faded sequences shot among falling Sakura blossoms, he meets a young girl who claims to be a neighbour with seemingly omnipresent knowledge of his private life. She may even be an imaginary friend that he opens up to, inadvertently revealing darker aspects of his personality.

The story, credited to Ikki Kajiwara, began as an outline for a sports manga, but the adaptation by regular Suzuki collaborator Atsushi Yamatoya steers the script away from any preconceptions associated with this hugely popular genre. It’s not really about sport at all and apart from a few scenes of Reiko playing the all-important tournament, there’s just a brief training montage where she practices in simulated weather conditions, jogs through woodland dragging old tyres by a rope, grips the golf iron with bloodied hands.

Given equal emphasis are the scenes of her being coached, My Fair Lady-style, on how to pretend to be happy and how to move her eyes in a charming way while balancing an apple on her head. She must appear and behave like some ideal. Yet she’s continually disparaged by Miyake as stupid and vain. But is she? Or is she roleplaying what lesser men may find attractive in a woman?

The only time she seems to achieve genuine happiness is the night of her tournament win which culminates in a shower scene shot as fine art photography with light delineating her curves as she slightly sways, appearing and disappearing in blackness. It’s visually interesting and perhaps symbolic of her as she truly is, almost invisible in her unadorned nakedness… her identity merging or subsumed by Miyake’s as we realise that she’s not alone in the shower. It’s no surprise that cinematographer Masaru Mori cut his teeth on many ‘pink’ films—usually tastefully shot erotic exploitation movies.

When Seijun Suzuki was fired a decade earlier, he was a jobbing director of B-movies. The controversy surrounding his dismissal and his subsequent suing of the Nikkatsu studios attracted considerable media attention along with support from fellow filmmakers. He eventually won his case and, although he received minimal compensation, it changed the film industry landscape. Other lesser-known directors began to be reappraised and gain recognition for their work on films that would otherwise have faded into obscurity. Suzuki went on to establish himself as one of the more relevant stylists of Japanese cinema and directed another nine features and a handful of TV movies. Perhaps, without his 10-year hiatus and subsequent comeback, we may not be talking about him today.

JAPAN | 1977 | 93 MINUTES | ‎2.35:1 | COLOUR | JAPANESE

Limited Edition Blu-ray Special Features:

• High-definition digital transfer.
• Original uncompressed PCM mono audio.
• Audio commentary by critic and author Samm Deighan (2025). The expected potted biographies of cast and crew appear along the way as she places the film against a contextual backdrop of Japan’s post-war cinema and the films of Seijun Suzuki. She covers his dismissal, legal battle, and post-hiatus career. She draws interesting parallels with our contemporary culture, such as the Idol system in Japan, both then and now. It’s a perfectly functional and informative commentary with a focus on technical and historical aspects which becomes a little repetitive at times and misses opportunities for more critical analysis and discussion of what we’re actually seeing whilst listening.
• NEW 20-minute interview with editor Kunihiko Ukai (2025)… who was assistant editor to Akira Suzuki on A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness, in which he recalls being fascinated by the court hearing following Seijun Suzuki’s dismissal and feeling very fortunate when he finally got to work on one of his films. He discusses the typical B-movie production process and places Seijun Suzuki in context with this and the more experimental filmmaking opportunities it afforded. He then talks about editing every evening when the daily rushes came in so that when shooting wrapped, a rough cut of the film was already in place. He recalls editing scenes out of sequence and relying on the director’s sense of rhythm and colour-coding of elements such as lighting, costume, and even nail varnish. He remembers that Yōko Shiraki was out of her depth as a newcomer in a lead role and that the shoot was often a difficult one. He describes the director as easy-going, friendly, charming and fond of telling jokes.
• Trailer.
• NEW and improved English subtitle translation. A vast improvement with more accurate character names and a better, conversational turn of phrase.
• Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Sam Smith.
• Limited edition booklet featuring new writing by Jasper Sharp and an archival review of the film. Not available at time of review.
• Limited edition of 3000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings.

Cast & Crew

director: Seijun Suzuki.
writer: Atsushi Yamatoya (based on the novel by Ikki Kajiwara).
starring: Yōko Shiraki, Yoshio Harada, Kyoko Enami & Masumi Okada.