Rakugo Nagaya wa Hana Zakari Pamphlet: Promo Images and a Lot of Text

My most recent Buyee order just came in, so I can now share high-quality scans of this pamphlet, which features some of the only images from the film that I'm aware of. Pictures first:

The "hype text" on the middle two pages reads (next to the photo of Mokuichi and the women): "Did it fall from the sky? Did it rise from the ground? [this is an idiom meaning roughly "something incredible has cropped up that has never been seen before"] A gale of laughter erupts in the tenement house! Absolutely the best, most outrageous and extravagant comedy! Laugh out loud! Everyone will laugh!" (next to the photo of Enoken and Asami Kuji) "A fire-lover, elopement, rubberneckers, Enoken giving it his all, and the greatest comedians of Japanese cinema appear in this unprecedented, extravagant comedic masterpiece!" Yowza.

Here are clearer images of the promo photos by themselves for your delectation - again, this movie is almost entirely lost, we have maybe a dozen pictures from it.

Ehehehehehe.

I'll put the synopsis under a jump cut, since it's going to run pretty long, but I want to keep one thing up here in the main post: the back of the pamphlet has a section titled kaisetsu (explanation/commentary), which is a short introduction to sell you on the film. Synopses are easy enough to find (relatively speaking), but this is unique to this pamphlet. It reads:

Kenichi Enomoto, who reigned as the king of comedy in both film and theater and was extremely popular, fell ill with a strange, rare unknown disease, and suffered a painful illness for about a year, but he has recently made a full recovery and this is his first appearance in a film. The film is written by Tsuruo Ando and the screenplay is by the sharp Toshiro Ide, who put together [several rakugo stories]. To celebrate Enoken's full recovery, this is a luxurious blockbuster that features all the comedic heroes of the Japanese film and theater world, and the director Nobuo Aoyagi has made full use of his unprecedentedly large cast in all its forms.

The story is a compilation of the rakugo stories "Nedoko", "Kaji musuko", "Dekikogoro", "Umaya kaji", "Niramugaeshi", "Shingan", and "Tarachine", all compiled into one story. The cast includes a gorgeous and diverse variety of actors such as Kenichi Enomoto, Roppa Furukawa, Kingoro Yanagiya, Shizuko Kasagi, Tony Tani, Aiko Mimasu, Akihiko Hirata, Mayuri Mokusho, Hisaya Morishige, Yuriko Hamada, Yunosuke Ito, Atsushi Watanabe, Koreyoshi Nakamura, Kanta Kisaragi, Norihei Miki, and Asami Kuji. It was produced by Ichiro Sato and Yoshie Kishii, who worked on "Botchan" and "Onna gokoro wa hitosuji ni", and this is Toho's first luxurious comedy masterpiece of the year.

Rakugo Nagaya wa Hana Zakari Addendum: Ōwarai Daifukucho Edition [大笑い大福帳]

Translating that script left me wanting to do further research on the shortened re-release version of the film. I'm not that curious about why they cut Akihiko Hirata's role (they cut a lot of people's roles, not just him), but I wanted to know more about the shortened version and what of the original film did survive the editing process. Here's what I was able to find out.

When the film was re-released, the title was changed to Ōwarai Daifukucho, or Big Laughs Daifukucho. (A daifukucho was a type of account book used in the Edo period, when the film is set.) With only four confirmed screenings in the past ~25 years, it's barely less obscure than the film proper, but it does at least exist.

Thankfully, people who have seen this edited version of the film shared their thoughts about it on the internet. Through this, we can glean that the 38-minute version is comprised of two skits from the full film: "Mind's Eye", the skit featuring Hisaya Morishige as Mokuichi the anma, and "Tarachine", the skit where Kenichi Enomoto's character is set up with Asami Kuji's character through a matchmaking arrangement. Intriguingly, even though it isn't seen, events from the segment that featured Hirata's character are mentioned in the shortened film.

When I originally wrote up this post, I had a very difficult time figuring out one glaring piece of information: why this movie was recut and when. However, in the course of my research into something entirely unrelated, I may have finally come to the bottom of both of those questions. According to the official blog for the town of Musashi-Kosugi, flyers for a 1958 Tanabata festival were recovered that included a list of films being shown at the Yurakuza theater, one of which was Ōwarai Daifukucho. However, I also came across an auction listing for an Ōwarai Daifukucho poster where the release date was listed as 1956. So unless the listing is incorrect, I'd say 1956 is most likely when this recut version was created.

Let's take a look at those more recent screenings.

Laputa Asagaya

Occurring in June 2016, this appears to be the most recent screening. It was held as part of a showcase of screenwriter Toshiro Ide's work, focusing mostly on women's films. The showcase ran from June through to August and a great deal of films were shown. Owarai Daifukucho was screened from June 26th to July 2nd.

Satellite Theater

Satellite Theater (Eisei Gekijo, or Eigeki) is a Japan-only digital television channel that broadcasts kabuki and other stage plays, Korean dramas and K-pop, Chinese dramas, music, older films, and other such things. The channel apparently broadcast Ōwarai Daifukucho in May of 2016, and I found a blog post where someone complains about the way Satellite Theater presented the film as if it were the full version when it wasn't.

Jimbocho Theater

On June 12, 2010, as part of the "Comedy Movie Paradise" film festival, Ōwarai Daifukucho was shown at the Jimbocho Theater. The theme of the day was rakugo movies, and the slate of films was even titled after our movie: "Rakugo Movies in Full Bloom". Since the edited version is so short, it was screened alongside another, unrelated film. This particular screening is interesting because the person who was responsible for getting Ōwarai Daifukucho was film writer and music producer Toshiaki Satō, who asked Toho directly if they had a print of Rakugo Nagaya wa Hana Zakari. They apparently did not, so he was given the short version instead, and his excitement about seeing the film is palpable in the blog post he wrote. He also mentions having a script in that post. I can’t help but wonder: is that script my script? I have no way of knowing, but for some reason I have a feeling that it very well might be.

The post says that Satō watched the film together with someone else, and it was then screened digitally at the Jimbocho. I don't know who currently holds the print (presumably Toho) or who has the digitized version, but it's good that there is a digitized version, given that the print is most likely severely degraded by now.

Unknown 2000 screening

I'm gonna be honest here. I said in my original post that I found a screening that took place in 2000. I remember it, I remember looking at a webpage with information about it, I confirmed that it happened in 2000. What I did not do was save this page in any capacity and now I have no idea where the hell it is. I don't want to edit that part out of the post because I'm sure I did see it, but also, with no way to verify it, I feel bad leaving it in. Great job, me.

With that I think I've covered everything I can about the state that Rakugo Nagaya wa Hana Zakari currently exists (or doesn't exist) in. Yippee, a whole four(?) screenings.

Rakugo nagaya wa hana zakari [落語長屋は花ざかり]: Original Script

That's right. I said "original script".

I translated the whole thing. If you'd like, you can also look at it for yourself; I've put it on archive.org here. Sorry for the bad photos, but putting this in a scanner would have destroyed it. I'm going to go ahead and create a specific tag for this film as well since I'll be writing about it so much.

So.

While I was doing research for my post about this movie, I found a kosho.org listing simply titled "Rakugo nagaya wa hana zakari script". The description said "stains, tears, scratches". There were no photos. No further details. No page count or dimensions were given. The price it was listed for was suspiciously cheap.

"Count me in," I said.

After reading the script, I think I can infer a few things about it. The first is that this is an early draft. That's fairly obvious just from looking at the pages where the cast is listed - there are actors written there who weren't in the final film, roles that didn't make it, and blank spaces where there should be names. There's also a blank page where the rest of the crew's names should be. I haven't (and probably won't) see the finished film, so I can't say this with full confidence, but I'm inclined to think that this may even be the first draft. We can be certain, though, that whoever owned this definitely knew Akihiko Hirata was going to be in the film at the point when they were writing stuff in it, since his name is written with the rest of the cast.

There is absolutely no way to tell who this belonged to. I'm almost certain it was someone on the production crew rather than the cast, since the notes made in the script seem to pertain to cutting/editing scenes. However, I don't know how many people in the crew would or could have the authority to do things like cross out entire scenes and change the layout of the set. That blank page where there should have been more crew listed is interesting in this regard. It could mean absolutely nothing, but it could also mean that the rest of the crew hadn't been assembled yet, so the script would have been owned by one of the few crew members whose names were written in the script: Ichiro Sato, Yoshie Kishii, Tsuruo Ando, Toshiro Ide, or Nobuo Aoyagi. You can find a fuller list of the credited production crew here, although as always be aware of mistranslated names if you're using an auto-translator.

Utter guesswork there, though. Anybody could have had it. It could have been someone in the cast as well, but I’m trying not to think too hard about that.

Just... honestly, my god. Holding this in my hands. This was bouncing around Toho even if it wasn't on set during filming. I just want to emphasize that the experience of reading this script and "watching" a film that doesn't seem to exist anymore in its full extent was, honestly, very affecting. You want to see something incredible?

Like, incredible incredible?

To talk about the actual process of translating it: I put several weeks of my life into this project and I don't think I fully knew what I was getting into. As you can see in the photo above, the handwriting was extremely difficult for me to decipher as someone who doesn't natively write kanji. Further complications arose the further I went into it: it became evident that the entire film assumes familiarity on the viewer's part with a plethora of specific aspects of Japanese culture and history from the Edo period, including plays, people, places, customs, and language. The script is also so old that it frequently uses obsolete kanji.

That all being said, on the whole I am fairly confident about this translation, because the bulk of it was done literally word-by-word, copy-pasting kanji into online dictionaries and using websites like HiNative and Kotobank to gain context for phrases and idioms I was uncertain of. I did lean on machine translation, but I don't want to say that that's all this is, because the percentage of it that I figured out through looking up individual words in a dictionary (or being able to read it myself, although that accounts for very little) far outweighs what I got from DeepL and the like. I've tried to be honest in places where I just can't figure something out, and I've added a frankly somewhat frightening amount of footnotes to make it easier to understand, so hopefully reading it is not as hard on you as translating it was on me.

If you read this far, thanks! I included a chart mapping out all of the relationships between the characters in the PDF of my translation, but I'll post it here too just for funsies. Note that this only applies to the script - many of these characters aren't present in the final film.

Here are my links once more for good measure: translation here, full script here.

落語長屋は花ざかり / Rakugo nagaya wa hana zakari / A Long, Comic Story of Houses In Their Prime (1954)

Release date: March 17, 1954

Director: Nobuo Aoyagi

Studio: Toho

Cast: Kenichi Enomoto, Roppa Furukawa, Kingoro Yanagiya, Aiko Mimasu, Hisaya Morishige, Asami Kuji, Akihiko Hirata, Yūnosuke Itō et al

Availability: No home media or streaming release. Four confirmed theater screenings of the shortened re-release version between 2000 and 2016; the full film is most probably lost.

----

[Note: In the time since writing this post, I've obtained and translated an early draft script of this film. You can see the script and my translation here. I've edited this post to include the new information I've gathered from reading the script.]

So this post turned out to be longer and more involved than I initially planned for it to be. It's one of many things I've written about on here that I've done so much research into, I almost feel like I've seen it, even though I haven't. I won't be covering the plot, but if you're looking for that sort of thing, there is a page where someone has written it out in detail, although they're referencing a shortened re-release of the film and not the 91-minute original.

This is the first in a trilogy of films which adapted classic rakugo stories and fleshed them out into one semi-connected narrative. As rakugo is performed by a single storyteller acting out various parts, the idea here was to adapt those stories into scenarios where each part was played by a separate actor, instead of having one person act them all out. Other changes were made to the stories, but as I understand, some variation is natural in rakugo, especially depending on the geographic location where the performance is taking place.

The rakugo stories included in Nagaya wa Hana Zakari (or, at least, the early draft script for it) are:

• Nedoko ("Bed"/"Bedroom")
• Kaji musuko ("Fire son")
• Dekikogoro ("Impulse"/"On a whim")
• Umaya kaji ("Stable fire")
• Niramugaeshi ("Glaring back")
• Shingan ("Mind's eye)
• Tarachine ("Mother", "Father", or "Parent" in general)

While you can't watch the film itself, you can check out "Rakugo Mambo" and "Chinchirorin" on YouTube. They are both absolute bops. I like to listen to them while I'm working night shift.

I don't know that audiences would have been going to see this because they were interested in it as a film - they would see it for Enoken, Roppa Furukawa, and the soundtrack composed by Toriro Miki. None of these names are that well-known outside of Japan unless you're interested in a very specific time period of Japanese pop culture history, so I'll give some brief context.

Kenichi "Enoken" Enomoto was a comedian who got his start as an assistant in Asakusa Opera plays during the late 1910s and eventually moved from stage comedy to film with PCL, the precursor to Toho. I find the late 1940s and early 1950s to be a fascinating era in Japanese cinema because it is filled with actors like Enoken, who had been acting since before Japan had a motion picture industry to speak of, alongside a generation or two of younger actors for whom film was the only way they had ever experienced acting. (Even so, it was common for actors at this time to perform in small-time stage plays - such as Toho New Face festivals and the like - before they made their debut in front of the camera.) You went to see movies for Enoken: a good deal of his films have "エノケンの" ("Enoken's") preceding the title.

Yes this is the picture of Enoken we're going with. (Enoken doing the kissing, promoter and yakuza Kazuo Taoka being kissed)

Enoken was massively famous throughout much of his life but suffered the loss of a son and some health problems that left him despondent and hospitalized. However, Harold Lloyd would visit him and encourage him to work with some of his disabilities - including a prosthetic leg - and he would return to acting, mostly in television, incorporating his prosthetic leg into his comedy routine. He ultimately died of liver failure at age 70.

Furukawa, also an editor and essayist, came from former nobility, and seemed to be headed towards a career in writing until a turn to stage acting in his early 30s. He started a production company that mostly put out acharaka ("nonsense" comedy plays) which were apparently not that great. Furukawa joined Takarazuka within a few years of its founding and then joined PCL. With PCL he had a comedy troupe that attained a high degree of popularity and put on a multitude of variety plays and musicals with large attendance. He was at the height of his fame just before the war, and while he was patriotic, he also seemed to find certain nationalistic wartime trends ridiculous - he was asked to change his name so that it would be written in kanji (he spelled "Roppa" in katakana) and was quite angry about it. After the war his fame waned; although there was a brief revival in the mid-1950s (and he would dub a small role in the Japanese version of Dumbo), his health issues, including diabetes and tuberculosis, led to him dying early at 57.

ca. 1935, from left: manzai comedian Entatsu Yokoyama, manzai writer Minoru Akita, and Roppa

Toriro Miki was multi-talented: he wrote lyrics, composed music, directed for the stage, and wrote for television and film. Here he is being given a whole roasted chicken by a fan.

That's about how I'd look if somebody gave me a whole roasted chicken. That's also about how I'd look if I gave somebody a whole roasted chicken.

Miki was a scholar at first and then, after being drafted, began composing music while in the military. After the war he decided to pursue music full-time. Miki was associated with jōdan ongaku, which directly translates to "joke music". As I understand it, this is jazzy music that is performed with a light, joking attitude; Hajime Hana and Crazy Cats as well as Frankie Sakai and City Slickers are two very popular bands who performed in this style. Miki worked extensively in commercial jingles and TV themes, and is the only one of these three who seems to have lived a long and possibly not depressing life. He died at age 80 while his four-part memoir was being published.

So, where does A Long, Comic Story fit in the timeline of these three entertainers? After having explored their respective back catalogues, this movie is barely a blip in the shadow of their much more famous works. Enoken and Miki were doing pretty well at this point, and Furukawa was on the decline, but, more importantly for our purposes, the cast also includes a young up-and-comer who had only been acting for about a year and was, before the end of 1954, going to play a pivotal role in arguably the most famous movie to ever come out of Japan.

sixth from far right on the row of portraits and also the still on the far left

This isn't Akihiko Hirata's best-known movie (it's not really anybody's best-known movie), but I think everything he was in before Godzilla is interesting just by virtue of it being before Godzilla. A Long, Comic Story was released about a month after his very strong performance in Farewell Rabaul, which got him noticed by Ishirō Honda and eventually cast in Godzilla, and he had also had his first (and only) leading role in film the year before - in a film that at least one critic basically described as a dumpster fire. (I disagree, but what do I know.)

From what I can gather, the full movie may actually not exist anymore. In 2010 a film and culture writer reached out to Toho directly about screening the film at Jimbocho Theater as part of a festival, and was given the 38-minute re-release version. Helpfully, the person who obtained the 38-minute version wrote a blog post about it which specifies that Hirata's role was cut entirely from the shortened version. Given that the only screenings I can confirm - which go as far back as the year 2000 - also use the shortened version, I think it's pretty safe to say that's all that remains of this movie, which would make the posters and the pamphlet the only pictorial evidence we have of Hirata's role. I think you can probably understand why getting the script felt so special.

In the film, Hirata plays Sonosuke, the firebug son of a landlord/gidayu enthusiast who eventually gets disowned and kicked out for skipping out on his father's gidayu performance to go watch a big fire with his girlfriend (eventually wife). Reading the script made me sorely upset that the parts of the film that include him were cut - if the final film resembled the script in any way, this was a rare comedic role for him. Sonosuke almost seems like he was written to be a teenager rather than an adult, but the script as well as the source material it was adapted from do specify that he is an adult.

I guess I'll just end this post by encouraging you to please read the script. Again, this movie is a footnote, but it's precisely because it's so obscure that I was able to do something like this; deteriorating Kurosawa scripts that are selling for upwards of $500 are just not in my wheelhouse. And, honestly, it's a really good and funny movie. If you're familiar with the actors, it is very easy to recreate a version of the film in your head, even if none of us will ever see it for real.