Plot details that you may not want to know before watching the film are contained in this analysis.

Watch the film first! Proceed at your  own risk!

Kurosawa Kiyoshi, like many great artists, has grown up alongside his characters – from his earliest 8mm shorts (largely about his own life and passions, as such productions tend to be), to the students and variously troubled adolescents that populate his first professional pictures (pinku eiga/roman porno works like Kandagawa Pervert Wars [1981] and Bumpkin Soup [1982] to his J-horror considerations of growing up in modern Japan and beginning families to more recent allegories of relationships and domestic trauma. This is not to suggest any overt biographical imperative to his work, explicit or otherwise, and it is not necessarily developed through specific aspects of his films (though he has said that his work with Yakusho Koji features this character as an onscreen alter-ego who reflects common generational concerns). Rather, it highlights how his work has changed, developed, one might well say matured but with a desire to cast aside the pejorative implication that his early work lacked maturity. Here, in Wife of a Spy, his first real period piece, there is almost no sense of a direct extra-cinematic resonance; however, it offers a fascinating extension of the above through-line and their concerns with people and societies in states of transition.

The film, for all its ostensible focus on espionage and danger, is fundamentally about a relationship and, as the title suggests, the connection between marriage (and attendant notions of normalcy, domesticity, home and personal life) and industrial intelligence, surveillance and countering national ideology and action. This concern with marriage becomes focused through a story about the eponymous wife and her wealthy and influential industrialist husband. Following a trip to China, ostensibly involving the purchase of materials, said husband, Fukuhara, moves toward working against the apparent biological engineering taking place by the Japanese in Manchuria. This he keeps from wis wife, Satoko, who is incrementally drawn into his plots when she becomes suspicious of those around her following this visit – to Manchuria. She is an upbeat and happy young woman, an actress, and she enjoys the material fruits of her husband’s labour without any overt concern for the Pacific War just beginning around her. She and Fukuhara are, initially, divided along lines of an idealized sense of social consciousness on the one hand and a practical concern for personal happiness on the other, the question posed being one of the fault line demarcating individual responsibilities during times of national crisis or transformation. Fukuhara’s decision to work against Japan utilising a network of contacts in both his own county and China, something that raises his wife’s concerns and carries potentially significant consequences for their married life.  

Co-written by Hamaguchi Ryusuke and made for television, the crux of Wife of a Spy is not the precise mechanics of this plot. Indeed, spying is arguably little present throughout the narrative. The script more or less breezes through the finer points of Fukuhara’s plan once it has been put in place and instead becomes a detailed character piece, the heart of the matter being Satoko’s learning of said plan and her reaction to her husband’s perceived subterfuge. Rather than suspicion, mistrust, cynicism or any overt break in the relationship – especially as there are hints that both have at least potentially strong, romantic relationships beyond the marriage – the couple are brought together by Fukuhara’s activities. Industrial espionage works against Japan but for the edification of a personal sense of ethical conduct. It focuses each of these character’s actions and emotions and in part helps Satoko overcome creeping notes of suspicion and enervation that begin to seep into her mind.  

In offering a summation and re-framing of key concerns, then, the film harks back to and indeed inverts Tokyo Sonata (2008). Though the married couple at the heart of this film are notably younger than in the earlier shomin-geki (home drama) this offers a mirror image in that here a young couple in the past are themselves directly involved in a war whereas the earlier work has a middle-aged married couple in the modern capital whose offspring becomes involved in war by travelling to a foreign battlefield (in Iraq). In both works the wife remains in the dark about her husband’s endeavours, and in both a crisis point is achieved through criminal endeavours. So, if stories of marriages have increasingly predominated in Kurosawa’s work (Creepy [2016] and Journey to the Shore [2017] present other key variations on this theme) then Wife of a Spy adds a layer to the extent that it reframes earlier concerns, indeed includes more overt biographical elements such as the setting (the port city of Kobe where the director was born) and an involvement with filmmaking. In point of fact, just as Creepy ultimately appears to be a purging, a working through of the troubles that have led a married couple to drift apart, then here it is the coming together that is prompted and facilitated by the plot, that involves espionage in China, biological experiments, an engineered plague and treasonous endeavours. It is about knowledge – concealed (as in Tokyo Sonata and Creepy) and revealed. The knowledge that Satoko seeks leads to an understanding, and this understanding facilitates an action that seems driven on her part more by personal proclivities as by any sense of wider conscience or responsibility.

Intriguingly, through these themes and dichotomies the narrative can be read (almost) as a self-aggrandizing, or at least a personal, tract by the director on the power and social use value of filmmaking. Part of the film’s plot – the Hitchcockian elements wherein Satoko is surreptitiously investigating her husband (Notorious [1946] is a key forebear here) – involves looking at films, and she sees both her own work and apparent documentary footage of scientific undertakings. These are revelatory – the one key to a certain success in Satoko’s social circles, her dinner party elite set; the other central to her discoveries and the platform these provide for her plans with Fukuhara – and prove crucial when her suspicions prove unfounded (shades of Joan Fontaine in Hitchcock’s Suspicion [1942]). This film does factor into the plot, but of more importance is the way that the protagonist’s work becomes a means of assessing a personal stake in a project that encompasses a sweeping tide of historical trauma and transformation. Moreover, it describes and defines the world around us (this film looks in places to be avant-garde, like a city symphony) and offers a sense of posterity that helps suggest a post-script pertaining to how events, actions, even lives are encapsulated, how films construct a reality and have uses above and beyond any mere entertainment. How they hold up mirrors.  And whilst one would stop short of describing Wife of a Spy as self-reflexive, nonetheless it has an interest in how film can buttress or shape a relationship with the world around us. 

Perhaps, too, Satoko being an actress has an extra thematic charge – one with regard to how she behaves throughout. Is there is a performative dimension wherein her own feelings for her husband need an external spark to rekindle a relationship that seems to have been subject to suspicion and enervation? The relish with which she jumps into the plot to work against Japan suggests a ready-made means of demonstrating (to herself?) that she is committed to her husband. This is then what resonates beyond the suspense inherent in carrying out the narrative’s clandestine affairs – the emotional tectonics of the relationship, the ties that bind, the mutual risk, secrecy and revelation inherent in lives and actions. These mechanics offer a tense simile or manifestation of marital discord and resolution, though typically for Kurosawa there is a disturbing and potentially ambiguous coda, here set during the destruction at the close of WWII in Japan (sometime after the main events of the narrative). Its apocalyptic intensity – shades of Charisma (1999), Kairo (2001) and Retribution (2006) – is neatly calibrated to suggest a personal as much as a national catastrophe, albeit perhaps a cathartic one that purges the character of being a wife and a spy even though she seemingly committed herself to being both, and in so doing asks questions of the efficacy of these characters, their relations and their fundamental compatibility. Indeed, as the line between a stable reality and the subjective hinterlands contingent on and indexed to the same are exploded (both literally and figuratively) then the war, the seismic changes it wrought on Japan, become a phantasy of personal obliteration and, potentially, of renewal. For a director who has several times offered ambiguous and destructive endings this here is both more historically grounded and more directly resonant to the protagonist. In a narrative of beginnings and endings and subsequent beginnings, of filmmaking as a way of life, these meanings can be ascribed both to the film and its place in its Kurosawa’s canon, looking forward and at the same time as glancing backward to previous avenues of cinematic exploration.