Edo Girl Detective (Hibari
Torimonocho)
Director: Sawashima Tadashi
Year: 1958
Production Company: Toei
Running Time: 85 minutes
A small attractive woman with thick manicured
eyebrows that slope downward like rushing trains on course for a head on
collision and finely cut eyes that sparkle with humorous grace begins to
sing while encased in her traditional kimono. One might expect a high-pitched
feminine vocal to come out of the mouth of this petite woman but instead
comes a deep tremulous bluesy sound that feels as if it originated from
the bottom of a gin bottle deep inside her. It carries the pain of every
damaged heart and every broken promise in its melody. It feels as if the
song should be sung under the dim lights of a street lamp waiting for another
lonely night to pass. The singer is Hibari Misora and the style is Enka.
Many have termed Hibari as “Japan’s Greatest Entertainer of the Twentieth
Century” and Enka was a form of music that contained the collective angst
of the country.
The music reminds me of the tragic tone of Edith
Piaf and though the two singers were physically continents apart their
styles were formed in the desperate times of post WWII. Hibari was born
in Yokohama in 1937 and came of age in the post war ruins. Her father was
a fish seller and possibly unknown to many of her later fans was her partial
Korean ancestry on her grandfather’s side. Her mother was intent in getting
Hibari into show business and the girl showed inordinate talent at a very
young age. At the age of nine she appeared in a talent show and stunned
the audience with her grown up world weary voice though the judges considered
her a near aberrant life form and were almost suspicious that there must
be some slight of hand going on – no small girl could really sing like
this.
Three years later she cut her first album with
Nippon Columbia – the record label she was to stick with over her career
– and debuted in her first movie, “Sad Whistle” (Kanashiki Kuchibue) in
which she plays an orphan looking for her lost brother. The song “Sad Whistle”
was released and sold 450,000 copies and she was an overnight star at twelve
years old. The next year she was in “Tokyo Kid” in which she sings some
of her trademark lyrics “I have dreams in my right pocket, chewing gum
in my left pocket”. At a concert in 1956 the audience madly rushed in for
seats and ten people were killed in the process. A year later a young female
fan threw acid on Hibari’s face because she wanted her idol to be more
“normal”, but Hibari recovered with only minor injuries (a fellow actor
next to her was not so lucky and was blinded).
Her songs spoke to the tough times that Japan
was going through and she quickly became enormously popular with an overwhelming
output of songs, movies, concerts and TV appearances. Over her career she
was to make around 150 films and 300 records (some 1,400 songs) and became
the highest paid entertainer in Japan during the fifties. This was a driven
life propelled to a large degree by her mother who was a constant presence
and a simple need to be successful. Her life was show business and she
appears to have had left little time for her private life. She was married
for two years to actor Akira Kobayashi, but it didn’t work out and after
being divorced in 1964 she never remarried. As musical taste began to change
in the late 1960’s and 70’s with the emergence of the J-Pop sound, her
songs lost their popularity among the new generation, but her fans from
the past stayed fiercely loyal to her. When she died in 1989 at the age
of 52 her funeral procession was attended by thousands of mourners.
I am not sure where “Edo Girl Detective” falls
in terms of importance in Hibari’s film career – but it is a charming if
slight affair and certainly gives Hibari lots of opportunity to display
her skills as she sings and fights with equal élan. The character
she plays is Oshichi – or at least that is the name she goes by. In truth
she is a princess but finds life behind the protection of her brother and
the high walls to be quite dull so she takes on another identity and lives
in a small cozy house with her comic relief assistant Gorohachi and pretends
to be a singer. She also likes to think of herself as a girl detective
– an Edo version of Nancy Drew – and so when a young woman is murdered
after a singing contest Oshichi decides to investigate. She soon runs into
a group of samurai who warn her to keep her nose out of the affair, but
she tells Gorohachi that she has to continue because “I’m a detective,
I can’t back down”.
When a large force of samurai surround her, she
takes out her short sword and fends them off until Sasaki (Azuma Chiyonosuke),
a sleepy eyed alcohol imbibing ronin, gives her a hand – for a price. He
wants payment per kill and as she later cheerfully tells him “I owe you
for forty now”. Another woman is killed and Oshichi begins to track back
the trail to a robbery of three golden hairpins four years previously from
the Matsunaga Clan. To enable her sleuthing she takes on various disguises
– as a man, a geisha, a fencing student, a royal lady in waiting and a
kabuki performer – all these giving Hibari a chance to have some fun and
show her range. The film rarely pauses and when it does it’s usually for
a song – one of the best being a drunken pal song between Oshichi and Sasaki
– and for me it was a nice light introduction to this legendary performer.
My rating for the film: 7.0
Tokyo Kid