Yume jû-ya - Ten Variations on Sōseki's Dreams/ II

(image from the movie: The First Dream)

The first segment of the movie follows, using the same house and the same props. A man is working on a manuscript, like Sōseki, sitting at the same small table (only a man of different age). The oddities come immediately into picture. The clock on the wall seems to run backward. A huge Ferris wheel is revolving slowly somewhere in the background, seemingly counterclockwise.

The main oddity is that we are witnessing two parallel actions in adjoining rooms, very different each other. While the main personage is working on his manuscript, with his wife watching him with lovely care, the other room is a small Japanese restaurant, with a very young waitress and an old patron (with a taste for dirty jokes). Everybody seem to know the writer, while ignoring the other people from the parallel action. The wife is nonexistent for the patron and for the waitress, they are in turn nonexistent for the wife.

(image from the movie: The First Dream)

Akio Jissoji made this first segment. It was his second to last film; he died shortly after. A perfect mastership in running the bizarre logic of this vignette: at a certain moment the actors start to move out the props from the stage and we get the impression of watching a movie about making this movie!

The original story is resolved quickly: the wife announces at a certain moment that she will die and asks her husband to wait for her coming back after a hundred years, while we begin to guess that she had been so far alive only in his mind, and the hundred years have just passed.

Here was the mastership of Jissoji: to create an elegant demonstration that our concepts are just conventions, nothing more: time can be made to run forward or backward because it is only our convention. Past and future are pure conventions, and the same goes for all our logic.

The second segment was created by Kon Ichikawa, who also died shortly after. Ichikawa was very well known for his adaptations of some Japanese classics (Sōseki's Kokoro and Mishima's Enjo). Here in telling The Second Dream Ichikawa took a a very different approach than that of Jissoji: he followed very faithfully the text of Sōseki without any initiative of a replica. More than that, the segment created by Ichikawa seems to come from the very period Sōseki wrote his novel! It is black and white, a silent movie with intertitles. It is perfect in its ascetic renouncement of any distance from the original.



(Sōseki)