The work of Kawashima Yuzo was for a long time almost invisible outside Japan, rarely seen and even more rarely considered. Despite this, he was a key figure in Japanese cinema, someone whose influence on directors like Imamura Shohei was palpable and who, like Ichikawa Kon, bridged classical and post-classical, modern and modernist, eras. To this end perhaps the key feature of his work is his depiction of highly insular worlds, almost self-contained milieus, that at once enrich and entrap characters, feed their dreams and identities at the same time as compromising their ways and means of achieving or securing the same. This is significant as it provides a series of narrative correlatives to the idea of a contextual slippage between different socio-political climates that are attendant on the aforesaid insular spaces. In other words, the presence of contiguous yet entirely discrete worlds-within-worlds signifies different ‘Japans’, different faces or ideas of a country that was at this time in process of seismic change after World War II and the US occupation.

Kawashima, who was frequently desirous of probing beneath the façade of ‘normal’ or civilized Japanese life and uncovering the festering wounds that are in various ways compromising life in the country, was a restless and nomadic figure who traversed the diverse climates of four of Japan’s major post-war film studios and several of its key genres. Here the climate of the gendai-geki (contemporary drama) and the Shakai-mono (often left-leaning social realism) is informed by a direct relevance to the year of production, 1956, when a Government White Paper declared ‘The Post-War is Over’ and when Japan joined the United Nations. More pressingly for Kawashima’s film, this was also the year in which significant steps were taken to outlaw general prostitution. Thus, the location of the title is a topographically as well as morally distinct and disparate space, and this animates the narrative throughout by circumscribing its relevance at a time when its very existence would be a thorn in the national side. It must, officially, be disavowed, supressed, yet returns as though part of a Freudian repressed in the young protagonists (which given the presence of sex and sexuality is especially prominent).

Entering said space is a young couple who will come to represent both this repression and the vitality and irrepressibility of it as a lifeforce that cannot be denied. They are struggling through financial hardship – a man unemployed and his girlfriend returning to try and work as a bar hostess in a largely ramshackle concern on the very margins of the red- light district – something that begins to undermine their relationship. The girl, Tsutae, becomes close to a man who begins to frequent the bar in which she returns to work. Her partner, Yoshiji, is at first something of a layabout, content to be kept even though he says he is ready and willing to work, but for him (as for Tsutae) her job becomes a source of trouble and spells seeming doom for the pair.

Twice in the narrative mention is made in the dialogue of crossing a bridge into, in effect, a different world, that characters taking this trip must be aware of where they are going and what will happen to them. The job Yoshiji ultimately accepts, as a delivery man, and his relationship with a caring and patient waitress seems to portend a viable life in and around the paradise, and to give some meaning to said appellation besides the promise of erotic pleasure, which it immediately signifies. The spectre of prostitution, as the title suggests, is never far from the surface of Suzaki Paradise. The fact of selling oneself for money – a potent metaphor for the transactional nature of relationships delimited by modern capitalism deployed in the 1960s by the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and Rainer Werner Fassbinder – is here in embryonic form and would inform several Kawashima works thereafter.

Moreover, and where symbolism is concerned, the almost perennial presence of site workers, driving lorries of building materials back and forth, underlines the building of new Japan, the reconstruction of a country now in a liminal state between devastation and recession (the latter stated directly in the dialogue) and the looming economic recovery that was at this time just beginning. This is a markedly cyclical film. After separating, Tsutae and Yoshiji ultimately find themselves reuniting and running away together before, in a final scene that precisely mirrors the opening, they return, demoralised and destitute, for another spell at another location like Suzaki Paradise. It is a sly suggestion of the perennial need for such a place and such a service, and an reassertion of the fact that their bodies are in a sense their last bastion of identity and of value, each compelled to return to each other and, just as surely, to once again part – to sell and reclaim themselves before once again going on sale.

This is treated in a matter of fact manner by Kawashima. Unlike Mizoguchi, whose (final) film Street of Shame (1956) was also made this year and in which the outlawing of prostitution is an overt aspect of the narrative, the themes here are not paraded on the surface. This is not, unlike Street of Shame, one of the so-called ‘tendency’ or issue films prominent in classical Japanese cinema. Kawashima suggests social problems but nothing seismic, and only insofar as the immediate horizons of his characters are concerned, and he teases out ribald humour and an unpatronizing blue collar humanity, flickers of real life amidst the twin landscapes of a moribund post-War Japan and its genre cinema.