女房を早死にさせる方法 / Nyobo o hayajine ni saseru houhou / How To Make Your Wife Die Early [1974]

Release date: June 1st, 1974[?]

Director: Susumu Kodama

Studio: Toho

Cast: Yosuke Natsuki, Miyoko Akaza, Shigeru Oya, Yukiko Kobayashi, Akihiko Hirata, Michiko Tsukasa, Kenzo Tabu, Hisao Toake, Chiharu Kuri, Naoko Yusa, Chikako Natsumi, Koji Wada et al.

Availability: No home media or streaming release. Very infrequent theater screenings.

____

Hell of a title, there.

This is a follow-up to our look at Susumu Kodama's unreleased The Woman I Chose, and, like that film, How To Make Your Wife Die Early also went unreleased following its completion. Unlike The Woman I Chose, though, this one eventually did get shown in theaters; it seems like it began production around January of 1971 and was finished a few months later, but it took three more years before audiences would get to see it.

Early draft script dating from January 1971.

I'll copy-paste Kinema Junpo's synopsis from its early May 1971 issue here wholesale, since it's the only plot description we're going to get:

Shunichi and Yumiko Kudo [Natsuki & Akaza, respectively] are about to celebrate their seventh wedding anniversary. Shunichi is an architectural designer, and Yumiko was a fashion model in the past, but lately their relationship has started to [sour]. Moreover, Shunichi is devastated to learn that his mentor, Dr. Ishimatsu [Toake], has married a woman younger than Yumiko. At this time, Shunichi meets Yoko [Tsukasa], the daughter of the owner of the drive-in "Route 70," and his ["seven-year itch"] resurfaces.

Yokoyama [Hirata], Shunichi's colleague and a globe-trotting architect, scoffs at Shunichi. Yokoyama, a self-proclaimed playboy and bachelor, whispers devilishly that Shunichi's freedom allows him to have a love affair with Yoko, and teaches Shunichi various ways to commit the perfect crime of slowly killing his wife. 

Meanwhile, Yumiko reunites with her friends from her modeling days: Maki [Yusa], Nana [Kuri], and Kyoko [Natsumi]. Maki had just recently lost her husband, who was twenty years older than her, but her expression is surprisingly cheerful. Are they after the inheritance?

Maki may have killed her husband through some clever means. If Maki demanded sex every night, it would have been very effective on her husband, who had a weak heart. Nana and Kyoko smiled devilishly at the prospect of reuniting with Yumiko. They were jealous of Yumiko, who had been the most popular girl in her prime and seemed happy even after marriage, and plotted to destroy her family life. They taught Yumiko how to get rid of her husband and introduced her to the playboy Michio Kihara [Wada]. However, the murderous intent that had been instilled in her by others naturally faded with time. And before long, their peaceful married life resumed.

A peculiarity that I've noticed while reading reviews on sites like Kinenote and Filmarks is that sometimes users will randomly decide to review a movie that they watched not recently or even semi-recently but just at any given point during their life, even if "any given point" means "thirty years ago". Thanks to Kinenote user 銀夢来夢, who saw the movie in 1974 and reviewed it in 2013, we can learn about what Toho was doing with this movie when they finally got around to releasing it:

I watched this on June 23, 1974, at the Toho theater in Kochi. It was distributed by Toho. At the time, it was often shown as part of a double feature in regional theaters. The film shown alongside it was "Three Old Women" [Sanbaba], also distributed by Toho.

So, from the sound of it, this movie's release was a matter of "somebody go tell the intern to dig around in storage, we need another movie for our double bill". Three Old Women wasn't the only movie it double-billed with, either; in 1974 it also played alongside another Yosuke Natsuki feature called Awesome Guys [Sugoii yatsura]. I've found some indication that the Awesome Guys double-bill may have actually taken place in March which would push the official release date back a few months, but I'm not certain about any of that (which is why I've put a load-bearing question mark next to the release date).

Yoshio Shirasaka adapted the film to the screen from two works written by Junji Ishigaki titled Ten Ways to Make Your Wife Die Early and Ten Ways to Make Your Husband Die Early, serialized in Weekly Asahi. Ishigaki seems to have primarily been a medical writer, and his other works have titles such as Introduction to Sexual Medicine, The Ethics of Nursing, 365 Days of Health, and - most relevant to our current examination - How to Make Your Husband Last a Long Time and How to Make Your Husband Strong and Long-Lasting. The overwhelming majority of Ishigaki's work is concerned with subjects like healthy diet, raising children, sexual hygiene, and family planning, so given that context, I'm not sure what to make of this movie. Possibly he published his Weekly Asahi articles as a joke?

In any case, we do have a picture of Hirata's character, Yokoyama, and, uh, well.

Computer... [sighs] enhance.

A slightly different version of the same poster with a less cropped picture of Yokoyama is out there as well:

This poster has been folded in half but we don't care about the other half.

And we've also got another picture of him from a lobby card that looks slightly better, although I have to say I think this is his worst on-screen facial hair so far:

Bad fake beard aside (which is nothing new; see Fantasy Paradise and Crazy Big Explosion... hey, those are both Crazy Cats movies, maybe Watanabe Pro had it out for him), it's very interesting to see how in the 1970s, as the film industry was imploding and Toho's system of exclusive contracts was falling apart, Hirata started to be cast in comedic roles, something that would never have happened 10-15 years earlier in his career. It's nice to see him get away from being typecast as scientists/villains, although those kinds of roles would still continue to be associated with him for the rest of his life and beyond.

There are a few other lobby cards for sale online as well as some stills which are catalogued as being held in the Toei Eigamura Library. I sent in an inquiry asking if these could be viewed digitally but they cannot. In any case it's possible these stills are just the same lobby cards that are already available online.

Despite being shelved initially and then relegated to the second half of a double-bill three years later, somebody evidently kept prints around, because I've found reports of a few theatrical screenings: One in 2006, an unconfirmed one in 2010 (can't confirm locations of these two), and in the early 2000s Laputa Asagaya showed it as part of a festival celebrating the work of Yoshio Shirasaka, who wrote the film. Laputa must have really been digging around for the deep cuts, because compared to some of Shirasaka's other work - Giants and Toys, The Beast Must Die, Blind Beast, Kon Ichikawa's Olympics movie, etc - this is the smallest of small potatoes. A Filmarks reviewer writing in January of 2025 says they saw the film at Toho Cinemas Shibuya, but I'm not sure if that means it screened in 2025 or if, as mentioned above, the reviewer saw it some other time and just decided to write about it in 2025. If it did screen last year, that would be lovely as it would confirm that prints are extant and good enough to be viewed.

This still showing the film's production crew confirms that shooting was wrapped in spring of 1971 (we can just barely make out "1971" on the sign being held up by the guy with the glasses who kind of looks like Shin Kishida.)

Mentions of the film on social media, more than anything else, proved to be instrumental in getting a feel for how people remember this movie today and learning about its screening history. Despite its obscurity, it seems like a lot of people were engaging with the movie specifically when Laputa showed it as part of their Shirasaka festival. Twitter user @kasamatu_kun says "[...]I, too, am a devotee who rushed to see 'How to Make Your Wife Die Early' at Laputa Asagaya Late two decades ago, lured by the appearance of Miyoko Akaza." @rikako_ki, on the other hand, describes it as "an incredibly boring movie[...]the epitome of a B-movie," but a movie doesn't necessarily have to be good for us to want to see it.

The weirdest reference I've managed to find online is from a Filmarks review that namedrops it in reference to an American beach party movie from the 1960s called Ghost in the Invisible Bikini. User KyoSiroの感想・評価 says: "Susan Hart is absolutely adorable and full of playful mischief in her role as the ghost watching over the proceedings. Her entrance scene utilizes a composite visual effect - superimposing blue-tinted film footage - reminiscent of Director Susumu Kodama's 'How to Make Your Wife Die Early'." Considering how obscure and little-known this movie is, that's a pretty random comparison to throw out there. Also, I really can't imagine why a movie like this would use composite filming.

Well, anyway, I hope this post was informative, because now I'm probably on a watchlist for Googling "how to make your wife die early".

俺の選んだ女 / Ore no eranda onna / The Woman I Chose [1976]

Release date: Unreleased; some sources claim a release date of December 11, 1976

Director: Susumu Kodama

Studio: Toho

Cast: Raita Ryu, Chieko Matsubara, Chieko Naniwa, Daisuke Katō, Keiji Yanoma, Kunihisa Mizutani, Kon Ōmura, Seiji Miyaguchi, Bontaro Miake, Masao Shimizu, Sadako Sawamura, Akihiko Hirata, Chikako Natsumi et al.

Availability: None.

____

I've been writing about films from the '50s and '60s a lot lately, so for our this and our next post, we're going to take a look at some from the 1970s. I know most of what I talk about here is obscure, but this one takes the cake: It was never released at all!

By 1976, Toho's system of exclusive contracts for actors and staff had been dead for about five years. That doesn't mean, however, that The Woman I Chose is full of B-listers; obviously, we can see that there are some decently famous names in the cast: Hirata's Taiyo ni Hoero! co-star Raita Ryu and the very prolific former Nikkatsu actress Chieko Matsubara - who is still working at 81 years old - headline, with a few other distinguished folks like Seiji Miyaguchi (Seven Samurai) and Daisuke Katō (Yojimbo) backing them up. It's also worth noting that this is one of Kunihisa Mizutani's few roles before he retired from acting to take care of his family's camera business. (Mizutani of course played foil to Hirata's Mr. K in Warrior of Love Rainbowman.)

Ryu was already a regular on Taiyo ni Hoero! at this point, and audiences for this film (had they ever existed) would have been familiar with him from the show. In fact, the tagline on the above poster pretty unambiguously makes reference to Ryu's character on Taiyo ni Hoero!, whose nickname is "Gori" (gorilla):

Whose wonderful girlfriend is that?

She belongs to me - a guy like a gorilla!

A human-hearted comedy that paints a picture of tearful love through laughter! 

Toho had planned to release - and, from what I understand, made the film for the sole purpose of releasing - The Woman I Chose on a double bill with Mother of the Cliff, but the then-popular Inugami Family was chosen instead, which seems to have sentenced our movie to obscurity forevermore. Another point that makes this film's relegation to the dustbin all the more regrettable is that Kyu Sakamoto, though not being credited, makes a special appearance. This movie is included in his filmography on his official website, and some promo stills of him do exist, but even his fame couldn't get this movie out there - perhaps another indication of just how bad the film industry was circa 1976.

Susumu Kodama, the director of this film, was much more prolific in television, having worked on the very popular What is Youth? back in the 1960s, which kicked off Toho's series of Youth [Seishun] school dramas. We can see some more of the influence television had been having on the film industry in the fact that The Woman I Chose is officially listed by Toho as having been produced by their television department despite having been planned as a theatrical release, with sales handled by the film department. This is the second of two theatrical films Kodama directed that were unreleased, and next time, we'll be taking a look at the second one, which, despite being shelved, did eventually make it to theaters.

Hirata is credited as playing a character named "Kuroda", but since this character is not mentioned in the film's synopsis (published in Kinema Junpo's late February 1977 edition), we can know nothing about him whatsoever. His role is likely quite small, as he doesn't appear on any posters, and although there are a fair number of promotional stills out there, none of those feature him, either. Since Ryu's character works in advertising and the plot does seem to heavily involve some miscellaneous business drama, I'm going to guess he plays somebody's boss, but that's pure speculation. 

Does Toho still have this movie? That's what I'd like to know. After 50 years, if it's never been digitized or taken out of storage, I highly doubt the print is in decent condition, and considering the ups and downs Toho has been through, it's very probable that nobody currently working at the company knows where the movie physically is. Even I'm having trouble drumming up any optimism about this one ever resurfacing. But hopefully, my writing about this film in English for the first time can bring it out of total obscurity by at least some small degree.

Koto no Tsume, Revisited (or: Koto no Two-me)

This is just a quick post to make mention of something I'm extraordinarily excited about. Recently, I was contacted by someone who had read my post about Koto no Tsume (which we're henceforth going to call Last Days of the Samurai) and asked me if I was interested in subtitling the movie, since they actually had a copy of it. That's the kind of thing you don't have to ask me twice!

You can now, for the first time in close to 70 years, watch this movie with English subtitles here. Massive thanks to kagetsuhisoka for proofreading and re-timing the entire thing after Aegisub let me down.

Now that I've actually watched the movie, I can say more about it. Last Days of the Samurai is a very emotionally fraught film, but in terms of its visuals, it's quite the bare-bones affair: there are maybe two or three sets (which could very well have been re-used from another production), the whole thing takes place over the span of about two days, and it has a relatively small cast, out of which surprisingly few people have speaking parts. Hirata's character Ushioda only has a couple of lines; his role is basically to be salty about the whole affair and then eventually die off-screen, and yes, as seen above, when we first see him he is shaving Yu Fujiki's face, which is, uh, interesting? Again, not as fun as his role in Inagaki's Chushingura, but I do always enjoy these roles where he gets to be angsty as I think he plays that particular emotion very well.

I find it kind of unusual that Ushioda isn't referred to by name in the film - as in, there's no point where anybody directly addresses him using his name (his name is mentioned, but only when he's off-screen). The same goes for most of the miscellaneous ronin. Looking at the Toho News sheet I included in my last post, it seems like the actors did have their characters' names written under their pictures in promotional materials, but aside from that, you wouldn't be able to tell who the less-prominently-featured members of the cast were meant to be playing.

As for the rest of the cast, this film feels mostly like a vehicle for its three leads (Ganjiro Nakamura, Chikage Ogi and Koshiro Matsumoto), and they really hit it out of the park. There's not much of a script to work with, here, and the storyline is well-trodden territory, but Ogi and Nakamura as the star-crossed lovers especially give a very evocative performance, and Matsumoto pulls off his role with exactly the strong sense of dignity that was no doubt intended. (We may recall Senjaku Nakamura getting all his teeth pulled out in Yagyu Secret Scrolls.) 

Takanori Ushioda's terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day.

Anyway, if all of that sounds like something you'd be interested in, you can now judge the film for yourself. It's a pleasure to know that this is out there in a format more accessible to English-speakers, so I hope you'll give it a look-see. The link, again, is here, the movie is available as both an mp4 with burned-in subtitles and as a higher-quality mkv.