Kikuchi Kan and "Tokyo Koshin-kyoku" : the Effect of a Movie Song on Fiction

Abstract

Kikuchi Kan's story, "Tokyo koshin-kyoku," (Tokyo Marching Song) was serialized in Kingu from June 1928 to October 1929. Before it was finished, Nikkatsu, a large movie production company, turned it into a silent film under the direction of Mizoguchi Kenji, for which a theme song (to be played live during screenings) was produced by Saijo Yaso and Nakayama Shinpei. One study concludes that both the original story and the film were failures. It argues that the director was too faithful to the story, and that the author became too conscious of the effect of the cinematization. However, the novel was never finished, and therefore the end of the film could not have been influenced by the end of the novel. This paper takes a fresh look at the relationship among the three-the film, the novel, and the theme song. Saijo wrote the lyrics without any knowledge of the storyline, and the record of the theme song was sold before the movie was released. The movie, "Tokyo koshin-kyoku," was a "kouta eiga" (a movie forsongs), a silent movie which was presented by a live narrator-singer in a varied, improvisational manner. The latter half of the novel is highly likely to have been written under the influence of the movie and especially the lyrics of the theme song. This representative work of Kikuchi Kan's is thus part of a multilayered synthesis that includes not only novelistic narrative but also the traditional theater and the silent film as presented to the public.