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.

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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; around March of 1974 it also played alongside another Yosuke Natsuki feature called Awesome Guys [Sugoii yatsura].

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".