Mikio Naruse's A Wanderer's Notebook｜"Horoki Is Not All of Me"

This week’s film is Mikio Naruse’s A Wanderer’s Notebook (1962).

As I mentioned in Forest of Thought, this film brings to the screen Horoki, the book by the writer Fumiko Hayashi. Horoki has been filmed several times, but my personal favourite is Naruse’s.

Naruse was a filmmaker with an exceptionally high cultural skill in turning literature into film. That filmmaker’s skill came together superbly with the acting craft of Hideko Takamine, who plays Fumiko Hayashi, and the cultural capital of a fine supporting cast, above all Kinuyo Tanaka, Daisuke Kato, Yunosuke Ito, Akira Takarada, Mitsuko Kusabue and Keiju Kobayashi, fell into harmony with them, working the whole into a superb film.

Through this film we can relive how Hayashi’s Horoki came into being, but that is not actually why I rate it so highly. Rather, what defines the film is that it posed, from the side of cinematic context, the question of how Fumiko Hayashi, who had by then been dead for more than 10 years, came to reach the position she held.

For when we ordinary people look at someone who has succeeded as a writer or creator, we see only the brilliant moment, the figure of success, and make no attempt to understand the path and the context that led there.

Of course, this does not mean looking at it as easy comfort for ourselves, telling ourselves that everyone has had their hard times and their years of going unrewarded. It means asking how the people who hold such positions lived their lives up to that point: where they struggled, how they overcame it, and what they are still fighting even now. The perspective of understanding a predecessor’s context, in the sense of “knowing” these things, is what matters to me.

Horoki is the defining example of exactly this. As a young girl, Fumiko Hayashi wandered from place to place because of her parents’ circumstances, and even afterward she could not shake the habit of wandering, drifting from job to job in Tokyo, working among other things as a cafe waitress. But she did not stop writing. She poured every coin she had into a book of poems, wrote poems, children’s stories and prose, and put work after work before the world, content to publish even when there was no payment. Without minding anyone’s eyes, without holding back for anyone, she simply kept writing and simply kept publishing. The film portrays superbly the figure of one human being who, however many times she was turned down, went on believing in her own work to the end.

That itself became Horoki in the end, and the book was so highly praised that she emerged into the world all at once. From then on she was counted among the successful writers, and yet she still did not stop writing.

What Naruse did brilliantly was the structure: from the scene of the celebration held for the success of Horoki, he shifts the film at a stroke to Fumiko Hayashi in her final years. Most films would end happily with that celebration, but here the words spoken by Hideko Takamine as Hayashi leave a lingering resonance.

“If I didn’t write, they’d say Fumiko Hayashi could only ever write Horoki. Horoki isn’t all of me. Horoki isn’t all of me, you know.”

With this line it surfaces that the film had set this scene as its anchor all along, and the deified image of the writer “Fumiko Hayashi” that the viewer had held until then is undone. And then what happens?

What rises up out of that undone context is the figure of the living Fumiko Hayashi.