Gate of Flesh: Suzuki's Post-War Brothel Melodrama

Taijiro Tamura published Nikutai no mon in 1947, two years after the surrender, and it landed on a country that had just discovered its own body. The postwar Japanese literary vogue was called nikutai bungaku — literature of the flesh — and its premise was blunt: the state had spent a decade demanding the spirit and disposing of the body, so the body was the only thing left that had told the truth. Tamura’s novel, about a gang of street prostitutes squatting in the rubble of Tokyo, was a sensation. It was filmed almost immediately, in 1948, and filmed again several times after, and the version everyone now argues about is the one Seijun Suzuki made for Nikkatsu in 1964.

Seventeen years is enough time for scandal to cool into material. Suzuki’s Gate of Flesh arrives at the novel with the shame safely historical and the studio’s appetite for skin freshly commercial, which by rights should have produced a cynical object. It produced something a good deal stranger and considerably angrier.

The setup

Tokyo, 1946. The city is ash. A group of women have claimed a bombed-out building as territory and work the ruins around it as panpan — the street prostitutes who serviced the occupying American army and, in the popular imagination of the time, embodied everything humiliating about the defeat. They are a gang in every meaningful sense: they hold a patch, they enforce a hierarchy, and they operate under one law that everyone in the group understands. Nobody gives it away. Sex is transacted. A woman who sleeps with a man for love has stolen from all of them, and the punishment is administered in-house.

Into this arrives Maya (Yumiko Nogawa), young, newly alone, and quickly absorbed. And into it also arrives Shintaro Ibuki (Jo Shishido), a demobbed soldier on the run after violence involving an American, who takes shelter in the women’s building and detonates it simply by being there — the first man to enter their economy without paying into it.

Shishido plays Ibuki as a slab. He is bull-necked, sweating, sardonic, and mostly horizontal, and he functions less as a character than as weather. Nogawa is the film. Her Maya moves from terrified through hardened to something more complicated, and she does it without the score telling you when.

The colour scheme

Suzuki’s most famous decision here is also his simplest. Each woman in the gang wears a single saturated colour, and wears it every day: one is red, one is green, one is yellow, one is violet. It is a costume choice with no naturalistic justification whatsoever — these are destitute women in a bombed city, and they are dressed like a set of poster paints.

It works on three levels at once, which is why it is the best idea in the film. Practically, it makes four interchangeable characters instantly legible in a widescreen frame — you always know who is speaking from across a room. Thematically, it turns the women into a gang, a uniformed unit with insignia, which is precisely the reading Suzuki wants: they are an army, formed in the wreckage of the army that failed them. And morally, it makes the film’s exploitation impossible to consume innocently. The colours are so loud, so obviously artificial, that you cannot forget you are watching a Nikkatsu product shot on a soundstage. Suzuki hands you the lurid thing and simultaneously points at the price tag.

The rest of the visual scheme runs the same play. Walls fall away to reveal painted skies. Light changes colour mid-scene with no source. A room becomes a stage, then a memory, then a room again. Suzuki learned this from the theatre and from the poverty of the programme picture, where you cannot afford a real ruined Tokyo and so must invent something better than one. What he built is a Tokyo that looks like a set because it is a set, and looks like a hallucination because that is what the period felt like from inside.

Why it works

The punishment scenes are the reason this film has a reputation, and they are also where the argument lives. When a woman breaks the code, the others string her up and beat her. Suzuki shoots these sequences with everything he has — the colour, the choreography, the duration — and they are unmistakably designed to be watched. Nikkatsu wanted skin and got it.

What complicates the transaction is the logic Suzuki puts underneath. The code exists because it is the only law these women have ever made themselves. Every previous law they lived under — the empire’s, the family’s, the occupation’s — was written by someone else and used them up. The code is theirs. So they enforce it with a ferocity rooted in sovereignty rather than sex, and Suzuki keeps that legible even at the height of the lurid. The women are defending the only sentence they were ever allowed to write.

That is a genuinely serious idea sitting inside a genuinely disreputable film, and Suzuki refuses to resolve the tension in either direction. He will not let the exploitation off the hook by going tasteful, and he will not let the seriousness off the hook by going straight. The film is aroused and disgusted by the same footage, which is an honest account of what the occupation actually was.

The ancestor

The forebear here is Kenji Mizoguchi, who spent forty years making films about women sold, and whose Street of Shame in 1956 gave the fallen-woman melodrama its bleakest and most bureaucratic form — women in a brothel, discussing money. Suzuki inherits Mizoguchi’s subject and violently rejects Mizoguchi’s manners. Where Mizoguchi observes from a respectful long shot, Suzuki gets in among it and turns the lights up. If you want Mizoguchi at his most severe on the war and what it cost the people it did not conscript, Ugetsu is the place to go, and the double bill is instructive: the same wound, dressed by two directors who agree on nothing about how a wound should look.

The other line runs forward. Nikkatsu’s action business collapsed at the end of the 1960s, and in 1971 the studio saved itself by turning its whole production line over to softcore — Roman Porno, the industrial erotica that kept the factory alive for a decade and trained a generation of directors. Gate of Flesh is one of the loudest signposts pointing that way, and our primer on pinku eiga and the Roman Porno years picks up the story where this film leaves it. For the art-house end of the same argument — sex, occupation, national shame, filmed without a studio’s commercial alibi — Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses is the other bookend.

Gate of Flesh also began Suzuki’s loose run of films with Yumiko Nogawa about women in the sexual economy of the war and its aftermath, sometimes called the flesh trilogy. She is the constant, and she is the reason the run holds together.

The case against

It is exploitation. There is no version of this argument where it stops being exploitation, and the defence I have just made can be turned into an alibi very easily by anyone who wants one. The camera lingers where the studio wanted lingering. The beatings are staged for pleasure. A reading that says the artifice critiques the leering is a reading that Suzuki makes available, and it is also exactly what a clever director would say afterwards.

There are structural problems too. Ibuki is a device rather than a person, and the film’s middle sags whenever it follows him. The melodrama in the last act is thick even by 1964’s standards. And Suzuki’s theatrical flourishes, which are thrilling in Youth of the Beast and delirious in Tokyo Drifter, occasionally here just stop the film for a moment of design.

I think it survives all of that, because the anger is real and it is aimed correctly — at the men who lost the war and then charged the women for it. The film knows who it is furious with.

The verdict

Gate of Flesh is the Suzuki film that his admirers reach for last and probably ought to reach for second. It has none of the cool that made Branded to Kill a permanent reference point for other directors, and it has something those films lack: a subject he actually cares about. The pop machinery is identical. The target is a real historical crime.

It circulates on disc in the West and appears in repertory Suzuki seasons, generally billed as the disreputable one. Take the billing as a recommendation. Sixty years on, the colours have not faded and the argument has not been settled, which is more than most respectable films from 1964 can say.

Spoilers below

Maya breaks the code. She falls for Ibuki, gives herself to him for nothing, and the gang does what the gang has always said it would do: they string her up in the ruined building and beat her, and Suzuki films it at length, in colour, with the other women’s uniforms blazing around her.

The cruelty of the sequence is that everybody in it is right. The women are enforcing the only law they own. Maya has broken it. There is no villain in the room, only a code doing what codes do, and Suzuki’s refusal to nominate anyone as the guilty party is what lifts the scene above its own leering. He has spent the film building a small society from scratch in the rubble, and then he shows you that a society is a machine for punishing the people inside it.

What follows leaves Maya outside the group, in the ash, on her own terms. Suzuki gives her no music and no redemption and no future, and the last note is closer to Mizoguchi than anything else in the film — a woman standing in the ruins of the thing that was supposed to save her, having paid for the privilege of choosing.