“The Woman’s hair was reddish blonde. Lifeless and fake-looking. The color suited her rough skin.” 1
2. The opening sequence says a
great deal rather simply. With the camera set low, the redheaded woman walks toward
us astride cars and trucks in the middle of a busy road. Framed by the ground
and the arc of a distant overpass, she emerges from the behind the crest of the
road. Just as in the opening lines of the book (written above), the first visual
detail is the woman’s hair. The woman is established immediately as an object
(the hair), and as a motion contrary to the industrial currents of the day (a
meaning more significant to Kozo [the driver of the truck in question] than herself).
Cut to a shot that scans the ocean and the surrounding seaside industrial
landscape, and ends on the emergence of an oncoming truck. Elegantly quick editing
captures the woman and the truck’s crossing with a sense of electricity. After
the freeze-frame title, the film cuts to a close-up of dirt being dumped from
that same truck at a construction site. The sounds of heavy machinery resound. 
3. Kozo; Marlon Brando to the redhead’s Maria
Schneider, is introduced with every bit of his malingering and unscrupulous
character on display. Kozo delivers the truck and conspires with his friend/coworker
Takao to leave early. A young woman, yet to be named, sidles Takao to give him
a lunch. He is indifferent. These events are intercut with another sequence in
which Kozo and Takao (in different clothes) have secluded this same young woman
in what looks like a seaside parking-garage and gang rape her. The oppositional
sounds of the ocean during the rape, and of machinery during the excavation, amplify
the already disjunctive nature of the time/place shifts and establish a kind of
seasick violence to both acts. The back and forth cutting conceals how
Kumashiro favors the “long take,” and prefers simply to slowly zoom in and out,
or apply handheld techniques to keep actions immediate. The events at the
construction site emerge as the present. Driving away, Kozo and Takao reveal through
ebullient conversation that the rape occurred three months prior and that the
woman victimized - the woman who now clamors for Takao’s attention - is their
boss’s daughter Kazuko.
4. In as unsavory and pointed a way as John
Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), sexual
rape is used to reflect the rape of resources (material and human). Herein lies
the film’s subtext - a vague but physical revelation about the rapacious
development of ¾ century Japan earned on the backs of laborers who feel no
connection to the result, or even the process. “Buildings come down and go up at a pace unmatched in other cities of
the world; six months’ absence from a major Tokyo district is sometimes enough
to render it virtually unrecognizable.” 2 To underscore this point during the rape, Kazuko
realizes the futility of her resistance and shouts “Okay okay!! But not here.”
Kozo replies, “Any place’s the same,”
and the rape continues as planned. The backfire comes later when Kazuko, the
brunt of some revenge act against her father’s rule of law, becomes pregnant
and expects Takao to “take responsibility.” Her logic dictates that Takao is
the father because he was the first one inside her. This thread ironically
produces the only opportunity for tenderness in the whole film because Takao eventually
rises to the occasion, and the two bolt to Kyoto to start a new scraping life
together.
5. “The days when a laborer rhythmically dug a
hole and mixed cement with a shovel were over. In three or four hours an
excavator could to the work of five men working three days. ….Instead of
swinging a pick you pulled a handle. Though he [Kozo] loved cruising around in
trucks, [He] hated being sent out by the company to operate excavators and
bulldozers at other work sites.” 1
6. Later that day, Kozo picks up the redheaded
woman at a gas station bus stop in the rain, not realizing they had passed
earlier. He brings her back to his squalid cramped apartment, and the two commence
a symbiotic coital escapade devoid of identity. As long as the rains defer
construction jobs, Kozo and the redhead isolate themselves indefinitely. Their
malaise is existential but their ultimate act of reclusion is diverting rather
than introspective. Uniquely, Kozo and the redhead understand and assert that very
aversion. Whenever they feel an admission or inquiry bubbling up, they dive
into antidotal sex acts as a proxy. What raises the couple’s entrenchment above
a mere exercise in salacious misogyny (a benchmark of the Pink Film industry)
is their intent towards mutual exploitation and adherence to anonymity (another
quality shared with Last Tango).
7. Kumashiro presents
his content not intellectually, but within a framing that is bodily. Thus it is
dangerous to flirt too strongly with conceptualization when discussing The Woman With Red Hair without overstepping
the bounds of a story deliberately concerned with surface values. French
conductor Yannick Nezet-Seguin of the Philadelphia Orchestra poignantly
observes of his own discipline, “the
first quality of a conductor is to be absolutely without afterthought, without
anything between the mind and the gesture. As soon as we start to think about
the physicality of the thing, I think we are lost.”
8. Nakagami, author of the source novella, is
even more insistent of the redhead’s anonymity than Kumashiro, simply calling
the story Red Hair and not The Woman With…, She is defined by façade
even in the title. Only the fact that she has two children (one three years and
the other four), the impression that she is escaping an abusive relationship,
and that she learned her favorite sexual position from her husband, are expressed.
Yet Kumashiro makes it stirringly evident that her history claws from within. Director
and author alike, fully appreciate the potential of withholding her history. The
audiences’ curiosity is activated without ever being satiated. All throughout,
torrents of emotion swell within the redhead and in true bipolarity, they spurt
out of her in sudden episodes of tears, which she alternates with sexual
elation and banal conversation.
9. “On the way home from Sakoto’s [Kozo’s
Cousin] house, the woman wept. But Kozo had no interest in finding out about
the woman’s past. All he needed was a warm body….The woman washed her tear
streaked face at the sink and dried it with a towel, and a few minutes later
spoke in a voice that sounded as if it was someone else who had been weeping so
pitifully.”1 Kozo
does in fact wonder about her past, with a shallow insecurity about the source
of her sexual prowess, but he quells that curiosity, as does she, by diving
into more unthinking sex.
10. With his short story Red Hair as no exception, author Nakagami Kenji (1946-1942) is
venerated for giving voice to the Burakumin minority of Japan, himself a
Burakumin – the prejudice against whom was virulent in the early to mid 20th
century. Nakagami speaks of alienation from within an unspoken alienation, and breaks
open a gritty, unkempt, sexually unhindered, morally ambiguous swath of society.
Kumashiro’s film, made shortly after the publication of Red Hair, has the same brazen spirit of marginal individuals writhing
in marginality, which cannot help but reflect something of Japan’s then-modernity.
Like the terseness of Nakagami’s prose, Kumashiro’s use of rough Kansai accents
and carefree popular music places the film in time and buoys his characters’
evasions of a reality that is only ever shown in periphery. 
11. The
Woman With Red Hair is
elementally diametric to an upcoming film in the OCCUPY NOWHERE column; Teshigahara
Hiroshi’s Woman in the Dunes (1964). Where Red Hair - awash with rain, water, the sea, menstrual fluids,
semen, sweat, saliva, urine - has fundamentally to do with saturation and evasion,
Dunes pervades with depravation –
sand, heat, dryness, scraping, the panic of a man imprisoned, and his
industrious efforts to get out of a massive sand pit that he finds himself
stuck in with a woman. Both films have to do with forms of decay, and the
fragmentation of human identity into body parts, instincts, and textures. Both
films depict in different measure, and with different meanings of the word “pleasure,”
how “the search for pleasure involves
taking hostages and exerting control over a limited environment when the world outside
is beyond one’s control.”1 However the glaring divide is that Dunes’ captivity is forced, and Red Hair’s hostages are elective. (Zimmerman)
12. Kozo and the Redhead’s alienation is
essentially nonparticipation-as-protest against working-class / status-quo
distastes, and a reaction to the rapidity of change. Kozo cares little for his specialized skill in
the professional sphere because it is ultimately abstract to him. In the
interim of a rainy season that halts construction, Kozo is addicted to acts of
penetration in the intimate sphere; in bed with the redhead where they perform
all manner of sexual acts which are direct and appraisable to them both. The
film’s entire metaphoric potential is drawn across this thread; industry and construction
which level history in architectural terms, parallel to sexuality which is here
used to level the past in sensual terms. The finitude of the couple’s escapism,
and the fact that mitigating circumstances (the weather) have allowed that very
escape, becomes clear to them. The final lines of the film, uttered
unexpectedly by the redhead reveal this awareness. “It’s raining again, we can stay in bed all day. But its not always
going to rain like this.”
13. Nakagami ends his story where it began;
with hair. “The woman with red hair
pressed her lips to Kozo’s throat. Her lips were wet and unbelievably warm,
thought Kozo. The red hair shone.” Kumashiro interprets by freeze-framing
the woman’s face and hair in a throw of pained ecstasy as the credits roll. She
remains an object…. but an object by her own design.
1. Nakagami Kenji, Eve Zimmerman (translation by),
“The Cape: and other stories from the Japanese ghetto.” Stone Bridge Press,
2008.
2. Donald
Richie, “Introducing Japan.” Kodansha, 1978.
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