A Cold War Gamble: Japan and Shinoda Masahiro’s Pale Flower (1964)

An ultra-stylish, pitch-black noir associated with the so-called Japanese “new wave,” Shinoda Masahiro’s¹ opaque 1964 drama Kawaita hana (“Pale Flower”) would seem an unlikely site for Cold War history, this despite its director’s insistence to the contrary. After all, it is a film firmly ensconced in the shadowy world of the yakuza. Unlike several roughly contemporaneous Japanese films, Shinoda’s does not foreground the historical forces of that international conflict. Instead, Pale Flower, whose Japanese title translates more faithfully as “withered flower” or “dry flower,” remains fixed on the yakuza’s illicit world, with its illegal gambling dens, simultaneously rigid code and shifting system of allegiances, the ever-present threat of violence, and orchestrated murder. Still, despite the film’s surface suppression, even effacement, of the looming poles of American and Soviet influence and threat that defined that ideological struggle, Shinoda’s subsequent claim that the film was intended as a Cold War allegory is useful—but not in the form he asserts. On the Criterion release of Pale Flower, Shinoda suggests that the film offers a protagonist standing in for a Japan trapped between yakuza bosses, who stand in for the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. But the allegory critiques the position in which Japan finds itself not in the late 1940s, newly defeated, but in the early 1960s, when the nation’s geopolitical location rendered it an indispensable, if not entirely willing, ally to America, containing the spread of communism in Asia. And the parallels are considerably looser and broader than the term “allegory” usually indicates, accommodating a broader yet more incisive analysis of Japanese culture.

That a filmmaker working in the postwar era—particularly a filmmaker as preoccupied with history, including in its unfolding form, and an artist as formally restless and experimental as Shinoda—seized on the Cold War as a moment of crisis for Japan is unsurprising. But the genre vehicle of a yakuza eiga modeled stylistically on American film noir, rather than programmatically modeled on sheer historical narrative, suffuses the critique with a startling pessimism, by which these generic, formal, and tonal elements—hanafuda, yakuza eiga, taiyozoku, gambling, murder, and especially the Bible-black, film noir fatalism that pervades the film—exposes and examines this proud postwar nation as an agentless vehicle buffeted by the opposing forces of communist East and capitalist West.

The Narrative

Based on a story written by Ishihara Shintaro, the leading figure of the taiyozoku (“sun tribe”) genre, and visually rendered as a widescreen noir in rich black and white, Pale Flower tells the tale of Muraki, a middle-aged yakuza freshly released from prison after serving three years for the killing of a rival. Returning to Tokyo and his employer, he finds that the politics have shifted, with a tenuous alliance formed between the two former rival gangs to prevent a third’s encroachment. Although he is called on occasionally to perform tasks for his employer, Muraki spends most of his time aimlessly, purposelessly marking hours and days. He is a man who gambles by day at the horse track and by night in the illegal dens frequented by yakuza. Near the film’s outset, in one of these nocturnal and otherwise predominately masculine environs, he is introduced to someone who identifies herself as Saeko, a beautiful, implacable, and intense young woman gambling large sums of money. They strike up an unlikely and platonic relationship when she expresses interest in even higher stakes games. He agrees to introduce her to this underworld of high-stakes gambling. As they interact in his apartment, in gambling dens, and one memorable street race in her sports car, it becomes apparent that she is on an escalating and reckless path towards self-destruction, which links her to the historical taiyozoku, the so-called “sun tribe” generation of postwar Japanese youth.

The two have a falling out after he spots her at a tony country club where she is on a matchmaking date. He loses contact with her when...