Rhapsody in August

Rhapsody in August
is a 1991 Japanese film by Akira Kurosawa based on the novel Nabe no naka by Kiyoko Murata. 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.
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.
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
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
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.The film marked Sachiko Murase's last feature appearance. The role of Clark was originally offered to Gene Hackman, who declined due to health reasons. Richard Gere volunteered for the role after reading the screenplay, but Kurosawa was initially reluctant to cast Gere due to his age and image.
Other than Murase and Gere, most of the cast were child actors. Two of the child actors had previously appeared in Dreams.
Reception
Rhapsody in August received mixed reviews on its release in 1991. 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.
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?" Others at Cannes, especially Americans, were outraged at the lack of mention of Japanese atrocities during the war. Kevin Thomas and Desson Howe specifically criticized Kurosawa's failure to mention Pearl Harbor despite the American relatives in the family being from Hawaii.
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." Kurosawa's response was that wars are between governments, not people, and denied any anti-American agenda.
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."
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."
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, 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.
Legacy
In 1990, shortly before the film's release, St. Paul, Minnesota mayor James Schiebel 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.
Richard Gere purchased the Buddhist temple constructed for the film and had it re-built at his vacation home in the United States.
See also
Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Hibakusha
Japanese-American
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
References
External links
Rhapsody in August at the Japanese Movie Database
1991 films
Films directed by Akira Kurosawa
Films about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Films about nuclear war and weapons
Films based on Japanese novels
1990s Japanese-language films
Films set in Nagasaki
Films shot in Nagasaki
Shochiku films
Films with screenplays by Akira Kurosawa
Films about widowhood
Anti-war films about World War II
Japanese drama films
Foreign films set in the United States