Rhapsody in August

Rhapsody in August (八月の狂詩曲, Hachigatsu no rapusodī or Hachigatsu no kyōshikyoku)^[a] is a 1991 Japanese film by Akira Kurosawa based on the novel Nabe no naka by Kiyoko Murata.^[6] The story centers on an elderly hibakusha, who lost her husband in the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki, caring for her four grandchildren over the summer. She learns of a long-lost brother, Suzujiro, living in Hawaii who wants her to visit him before he dies. American film star Richard Gere appears as Suzujiro's son Clark. The film was selected as the Japanese entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 64th Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee.^[7]

Rhapsody in August
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay by	Akira Kurosawa
Based on	Nabe no naka by Kiyoko Murata
Produced by	Hisao Kurosawa
Starring	Sachiko Murase Hidetaka Yoshioka Richard Gere
Cinematography	Takao Saito Shoji Ueda
Music by	Shin’ichirō Ikebe
Distributed by	Shochiku
Release date	25 May 1991 (1991-05-25)
Running time	98 minutes
Country	Japan
Languages	Japanese and English
Box office	¥820 million (Japan rentals)[1] $9 million (overseas)[2]

Rhapsody in August is one of only three sole-directed Kurosawa movies to feature a female lead, and the first in nearly half a century. The others are The Most Beautiful (1944) and No Regrets for Our Youth (1946). However, Kurosawa also directed most of the female-led Uma (1941), on which he was credited as assistant director.^[8]

At the 15th Japan Academy Film Prize, the film received nine nominations, including for Picture of the Year, Director of the Year, Screenplay of the Year, Best Actress for Murase, and Best Supporting Actor for Igawa, and winning for Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography, Outstanding Achievement in Lighting Direction, Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction, and Outstanding Achievement in Sound Recording.^[9]

Plot

Rhapsody in August is a tale of three generations in a post-war Japanese family and their responses to the atomic bombing of Japan. Kane is an elderly woman, now suffering the consequences of older age and diminishing memory, whose husband was killed in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Kane has two children who are both married and both of whom grew up in postwar Japan. She also has a brother now living in Hawaii whose son Clark (played by Richard Gere) has grown up in America. Finally, there are Kane's four grandchildren, who were born after the Japanese economic miracle who have come to visit her at the family country home near Nagasaki in Kyushu.

Kane's grandchildren are visiting her at her rural home on Kyūshū one summer while their parents visit Kane's brother in Hawaii. The grandchildren have been charged with the task by their parents of convincing their grandmother to visit her brother in Hawaii. The grandchildren take a day off to visit the urban environment of Nagasaki. While in Nagasaki the children visit the spot where their grandfather was killed in 1945 and become aware, at a personal level, of some of the emotional consequences of the atomic bombing for the first time in their lives. They slowly come to have more respect for their grandmother and also grow to question the morality of the United States for deciding to use atomic weapons against Japan.

In the meantime they receive a telegram from their American cousins, who turn out to be rich and offer their parents a job managing their pineapple fields in Hawaii. Matters are complicated when Kane writes to Hawaii telling her American relatives about the death of her husband at Nagasaki. Her own two children, who have now returned from Hawaii to visit her, feel that this action will be viewed by their now Americanized relatives in Hawaii as hostile and a source of friction. Clark, who is Kane's nephew, then travels to Japan to be with Kane for the memorial service of her husband's death at Nagasaki. Kane reconciles with Clark over the bombing.

Clark is much moved by the events he sees in the Nagasaki community at the time of the memorial events surrounding the deaths which are annually remembered following the bombing of Nagasaki. Especially significant to Clark is the viewing of a Buddhist ceremony where the local community of Nagasaki meets to remember those who had died when the bomb was dropped. Suddenly, Clark receives a telegram telling him that his father, Kane's brother, has died in Hawaii and he is forced to return there for his father's funeral.

Kane's mental health and memory begin to falter. Her recollections of her lost spouse have never been fully reconciled within her own memory of her lost loved one. She begins to show signs of odd behavior in laying out her husband's old clothing as if her husband might suddenly reappear and need them to put on. When a storm is brewing, her mental health seems to confuse the storm for an air raid warning of another atomic bomb attack and she seeks to protect her visiting grandchildren by employing folk remedies, which confuse her children and especially her grandchildren. As the storm later intensifies again, Kane becomes more disoriented and mistakenly confuses the storm for the atmospheric disturbance caused by the bombing of Nagasaki which she witnessed visually from a safe distance when her husband was killed many years ago. In her disoriented state, Kane decides that she must save her husband, still alive in her memory, from the impending atomic blast. With all her remaining strength, she takes her small umbrella to battle the storm on foot on the way to warn her husband in Nagasaki of the mortal threat still fresh in her mind of the atomic blast which she cannot forget.

Cast

As a practicing Buddhist, Gere played the role of Clark in Kurosawa's 1991 film. Gere in Italy in October 2007.

• Sachiko Murase as Kane (The Grandmother)
• Hisashi Igawa as Tadao (Kane's Son)
• Narumi Kayashima as Machiko (Tadao's Wife)
• Tomoko Otakara as Tami (Tadao's Daughter)
• Mitsunori Isaki as Shinjiro (Tadao's Son)
• Toshie Negishi as Yoshie (Kane's Daughter)
• Hidetaka Yoshioka as Tateo (Yoshie's Son)
• Choichiro Kawarazaki as Noboru (Yoshie's Husband)
• Mieko Suzuki as Minako (Yoshie's Daughter)
• Richard Gere as Clark (Kane's Nephew)

Production

Development and pre-production

Based on the novel Nabe no naka by Kiyoko Murata, Kurosawa read the book and started development on the film during the production of Dreams (1990).^[10] He wrote the screenplay by himself and made several changes to the original story, which focuses on the perspective of the grandmother who becomes increasingly unable to tell the difference between illusions and reality.^[11] Finishing the script in about fifteen days, he decided to change the location of the story to the outskirts of Nagasaki, making the protagonist's deceased husband a victim of the atomic bomb dropped on the city in 1945.^[12] With a budget of $10,000,000 ($24.1 million in 2024), Rhapsody in August was produced by Kurosawa Production and financed by Shochiku and Feature Film Enterprise No. 2 (an investment partnership of at least eighteen companies, including Imagica and Hakuhodo). It marked Kurosawa's first film produced solely by Japanese studios since Dodes'ka-den (1970).^[10]

When she received the script for the film, Sachiko Murase was initially reluctant to accept, but was impressed by Kurosawa's understanding of the suffering inflicted by both sides of the Second World War and considered his attitude and direction to be compassionate and gentle. Despite harboring reservations about the difference between herself and the characterization of Kane, she did not ask to change the character's personality. Richard Gere was cast after Kurosawa asked if he was interested in the role of Clark at a party that celebrated Kurosawa's birthday and 1990 Oscar award. Kurosawa was struck by his interest in Asia and practice of Lamaism; when he was told about the role, Gere offered to act in the film for free but accepted the offer of a minor fee.^[13]

Production

Location shooting in Nagasaki began on 22 August 1990, the film's climax at the elementary school with Richard Gere was filmed over three days from the 24th. That summer was an especially hot one, Kurosawa filmed multiple retakes but Gere's schedule made it difficult to finish early.^[14] Additions to the script were made during filming, Kurosawa increased Gere's role in the film, but his contract was only for three weeks. Nearly 100 staff members were traveling across Japan which caused logistical problems as they were filming during the Obon holiday, meaning accommodation and transportation were difficult to book.^[15]

To film a scene that showed ants marching in a straight line, Kurosawa employed a professor from the Kyoto Institute of Technology to create a pheromone trail leading to Richard Gere's feet. Working with assistant director Toru Tanaka, they encountered difficulties when the ants continually fanned out in different directions instead of following the trail. Realizing the soil was absorbing the pheromones too quickly, the production team replaced, dried, and remixed the soil with cement. Later scenes involving the use of ants also required a large amount of effort, with Tanaka spending three days on a shot composed of the ants climbing a rose bush.^[16] According to Donald Richie, the scene could not be completed because the ants were at the wrong altitude, and was only finished after the crew moved the location of the shoot from Gotemba to sea-level Kyoto.^[17]

Kurosawa told Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1990:

I have not filmed shockingly realistic scenes which would prove to be unbearable and yet would not explain in and of themselves the horror of the drama. What I would like to convey is the type of wounds the atomic bomb left in the heart of our people, and how they gradually began to heal.^[18]

Production finished quickly, and the film was ready to view three months before Shochiku's scheduled release date.^[11]

Themes

Death and memory of the atomic bomb

In a 1991 Kinema Junpo feature upon the release of the film, Reiko Kitagawa wrote on the link between grandmother and grandchildren, seeing in the natural world an analogue to the memory of the atomic bomb itself. The children experience death through the songs they sing, the remains of a large tree (serving as a reminder of the deceased youngest brother who lived in the forest near a large tree struck by lightning), the waterfall, the twisted jungle gym, and the storm.^[19] Whereas Kitagawa views Kane's umbrella in this scene to be a symbol of life, Nishimura views the sequence to be symbolic of her death and ascension to heaven.^[20][21]

Release

The film was distributed by Shochiku, the first time Kurosawa had partnered with the company since directing The Idiot (1951).^[10]

Reception

Contemporary opinion

Rhapsody in August received mixed reviews on its release in 1991. At the Tokyo Film Festival, critics of Japanese militarism said Kurosawa had ignored the historical facts leading up to the bomb. Japanese cultural critic Inuhiko Yomota commented: "Many critics, myself included, thought Kurosawa chauvinistic in his portrayal of the Japanese as victims of the war, while ignoring the brutal actions of the Japanese and whitewashing them with cheap humanist sentiment."^[22] Kurosawa's response was that wars are between governments, not people, and denied any anti-American agenda.^[23] Some critics made much of the fact that the film centered on the film's depiction of the atomic bombing as a war crime while omitting details of Japanese war crimes in the Pacific War. When Rhapsody premiered at Cannes, one journalist even cried out at a press conference, "Why was the bomb dropped in the first place?"^[23] Others at Cannes, especially Americans, were outraged at the lack of mention of Japanese atrocities during the war.^[24][25] Kevin Thomas and Desson Howe specifically criticized Kurosawa's failure to mention Pearl Harbor despite the American relatives in the family being from Hawaii.^[26][27]

Writing in Kinema Junpo on the film's release, Yu Hamano praised the film's structure, in particular emphasizing how the film switches from stillness to motion in order to capture the conflicting emotions that permeate the film.^[28] Nishimura also focused on the film's structure, believing it employed a jo-ha-kyu rhythm adopted from Noh theatre that informs a dreamlike and symbolic approach to the theme of death.^[21] Conversely, Suzanne Shearman wrote that the film was not dreamlike at all, rather it depicted a mundane family life that shows Kane as overcoming tragedy by forgiving the past through interactions with her family. Shearman called the final scene "ambiguous and haunting" and considers Kurosawa's handling of the Second World War to advocate for a humanist condemnation of violence evident as a theme in his work since his first film, Sanshiro Sugata (1943).^[29]

Roger Ebert wrote that the film was viewed as a disappointment at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, was "not one of [Kurosawa's] great films," and was part of a shift in Kurosawa's style toward more fanciful imagery.^[23] Vincent Canby of The New York Times argued that the film's message was targeted toward a Japanese audience rather than a Western audience, describing Kurosawa's message as being: "if Japanese, those of the children's parents' generation, are so convinced that Americans are unforgiving, it also means that the same Japanese are equally implacable."^[24] Chicago Reader film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum praised the film as "a beautiful reminder from octogenarian Akira Kurosawa that he's still the master...The pastoral mood and performances of this film are both reminiscent of late John Ford, and Kurosawa's mise en scene and editing have seldom been more poetically apt."^[30]

The significance of Clark's apology to Kane is controversial. It can be narrowly interpreted as an apology for being inconsiderate of Kane's feelings when urging her to visit her brother in Hawaii,^[25] but can also be more broadly interpreted as an apology for the death of Kane's husband, and by extension, an apology for the bomb on behalf of Americans.^[24][27]

Retrospective opinion

Rhapsody in August has an approval rating of 60% on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 15 reviews, and an average rating of 6.1/10.^[31]

Legacy

In 1990, shortly before the film's release, the mayor of St. Paul, Minnesota, James Scheibel, visited Nagasaki and learned that there was no sculpture in the Peace Park from the United States, a point mentioned in the film. Rhapsody in August was screened in St. Paul in 1991 as part of the efforts to raise funds for the Constellation Earth sculpture, which was donated to the Peace Park and formally unveiled in September 1992.^[32]

See also

• Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• Hibakusha
• Japanese-American
• Cinema of Japan
• List of submissions to the 64th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film
• List of Japanese submissions for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film

Notes

1. The Japanese title (八月の狂詩曲 Hachigatsu no rapusodī) is also known as Hachigatsu no kyōshikyoku. "八月" means August, and "狂詩曲" means rhapsody. Both are Japanese kanji words. "狂詩曲" is usually pronounced "kyōshikyoku." When this film released in Japan, 1991, Kurosawa added furigana "ラプソディー rapusodī" to the word "狂詩曲" contrary to the standard usage of Japanese.^[3][4][5] So the correct romanization of the official Japanese title is Hachigatsu no rapusodī. But, often, the Japanese title has been cited without the furigana in various media. This is the reason why the misreading Hachigatsu no kyōshikyoku has become more widely known than the correct pronunciation.