The opening credits of The Shape of Night introduce us to sex worker Yoshie (Kuwano Miyuki) in close-ups under the neon reds and blues of nighttime Tokyo streets. Cigarette between two fingers and a look of cool detachment on her face, she seems ready for whatever the city can throw at her. But as the sequence drags on, her calm shatters and she begins to look around her in darting, nervous glances as she seeks out potential customers. Though she quickly recovers her icy facade, Yoshie reveals a part of herself that she hasn’t fully armored against her work.
From there, Nakamura Noboru’s film flashes back a few years to the start of Yoshie’s current line of work, finding the woman as a fresh-faced factory worker who takes a second job as a bar hostess for extra cash. One night, a charming young man, Eiji (Hira Mikijiro), flirts with her and they hit it off. Upon returning to her place, though, Eiji rapes her before revealing himself to be a yakuza member and strong-arming her into prostitution to help pay his own dues to superiors. In The Shape of Night’s harrowing centerpiece, Eiji’s bosses punish their subordinate’s failure to make his payments by gang-raping Yoshie, a sickening means of playing on both his affection for her and a rare acknowledgement in gangster cinema of just how reliant organized crime is on sex trafficking for its funding.
The film, written by Gondo Toshidi, also examines the self-righteousness of men who would try to save women from this life. For one, Yoshie’s flashbacks begin as she explains her life story to a client, Fuiji (Sonoi Keisuke), who begs her to give up sex work and be with him. In highlighting the hungry look in the young man’s eye, Nakamura doesn’t shy away from suggesting that even if Yoshie could escape, she would be trading one form of possessiveness for another.
Still, the film shows how both men do care for Yoshie, and how she in turn feels attachment to each despite her open reservations and resentments toward them. That ambivalence is reflected in Narushima Tôichirô’s cinematography, which opts for saturated colors and moments of dreamy, hazy lighting that clash violently with some of the film’s most repulsive scenes of debasement. For all the romanticism of such images, the camera placements that favor surveilling overhead shots of Yoshie or close-ups of her anguished face constantly realign focus onto the manner in which Eiji and Fuiji seek to cage her and limit her opportunities for freedom.
Crucially, the film doesn’t blithely aestheticize Yoshie’s pain. In the gang rape scene, Nakamura cuts away from the yakuza closing in on the woman to place the camera outside the room on a ground-level shot taking in the cluster of the men’s shoes. This not only communicates the sheer, horrific number of gangsters abusing Yoshie without showing the act itself, it also queasily twists the knife of warped social decorum: These career criminals are in the process of a horrific violation, but they still observe customs of good manners in not wearing shoes indoors.
It’s in those smaller observations that The Shape of Night makes its most damning statements on the confused priorities of postwar Japan, highlighting the ways in which the nation’s conservatism has endured by pairing itself with an incongruous, amoral pursuit of wealth indicative of Japan’s economic miracle and Westernization. Despite the power differential between them, the likes of Eiji and Yoshie are as bonded by the alienation of such contradictions as they are driven apart by what it causes one to do to the other.
Image/Sound
Radiance’s transfer lacks any noticeable scratches or debris, and it beautifully shows off the film’s rich colors. Red and greens pop against backdrops of noirish Tokyo nights that reveal stable black levels throughout. Flesh tones are natural and textures look sharp in close-up and in the detail-rich backgrounds of cluttered interiors and bustling streets. The lossless mono track balances a thick soundscape of ambient street noise with clear dialogue.
Extras
Radiance’s disc comes with an interview with the director’s son, Nakamura Yoshio, who recounts his memories of seeing his father’s work in studio preview screenings and recognizing immediately that The Shape of Night represented a breakthrough for the filmmaker. Critic Tom Mes contributes a video essay on Shochiku’s efforts in the early ’60s to lean into both the Japanese New Wave and pink film movements to lure younger viewers to the cinema, and he positions Nakamura’s film as one of a number of movies to straddle the line artfully between erotic titillation and loftier creative vision. An accompanying booklet contains an essay by critic Chuck Stephens that places The Shape of Night in the broader context of other Japanese and international movies of the ’60s that tackled the subject of prostitution as part of a wider social critique, as well as notes from cinematographer Narushima Tôichirô from the film’s release that offer insights into how he and Nakamura approached the film’s vivid aesthetic.
Overall
Radiance shines a spotlight on a lesser-known gem of the early Japanese New Wave with an excellent A/V transfer and contextualizing extras.
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