The Sleeping Beast Within

If Suzuki Seijun had retired from filmmaking in the winter of 1962, he would be remembered – if at all – as an imaginative specialist who stretched the genres he worked in as far as they could go. His early crime films, such as Hachijikan no kyōfu (Eight Hours of Terror, 1957), Ankokugai no bijo (Underworld Beauty, 1958), Jūsangō taihisen yori: Sono gosōsha o nerae (Take Aim at the Police Van, 1960),  and Kemono No Nemuri (The Sleeping Beast Within, 1960) parallel the US B movies made in the late 1940s by Anthony Mann or Richard Fleischer before they graduated to the Hollywood front rank. Suzuki energised his routine scripts with formal play – long mobile takes, audacious camera angles, outré compositions, dramatic lighting, and unexpected editing. By these means the banal became something richer, stranger, and darker.

On paper, The Sleeping Beast Within is a straightforward detective story, complicated by elements of the newspaper exposé, the youth movie, the middle-class shōshimin-eiga (in particular the contemporary films of Ozu Yasujirō), and even the horror genre. Long-serving salaryman Ueke Junpei (Ashida Shinsuke) is sacked by his company and goes missing after a trip to Hong Kong. His distraught daughter Keiko (Yoshiyuki Kazuko) and her pushy reporter friend Kasei Shotaro (Nagato Hiroyuki) investigate. It transpires that Junpei, after a lifelong dedication to respectability and service resulting in emasculation, humiliation, and impoverishment, has opted for a more lucrative and empowering association with organised crime.  

Suzuki’s analysis is conducted entirely through genre – and the reversal of genre.  The detective-journalists expose the father or surrogate father praised at the beginning. It is the adults and not the civic-minded youths who disrupt moral norms.  The salarymen are criminal masterminds, not pitiable losers. The horror is an internal, not external threat. And although Suzuki himself would not be ‘discovered’ by the west for another three decades, he engages with the work of the most internationally celebrated Japanese filmmaker, Kurosawa Akira. The Sleeping Beast Within intriguingly echoes the same year’s Warui Yatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru (The Bad Sleep Well), wherein Mifune Toshiro joins a company to investigate his father’s death; the latter film begins with a group of journalists discussing corporate corruption. The earlier Nora inu (Stray Dog, 1949) likewise used tropes of the American crime genre to explore post-war Japanese society. Suzuki’s Junpei could be Shimura Takashi’s terminally ill bureaucrat in Ikiru (1952) if he turned to crime instead of the public good.    

In The Sleeping Beast Within, the object of investigation is the missing father. The film is structured around Junpei’s absence, and that absence becomes an aporia that haunts it. The story begins in the ship that carries Junpei from Hong Kong to Japan. He talks with the captain but is immediately pushed to the side of, and then disappears from, the frame as the camera focuses on an apparently more significant figure, who breaks into his room and rips open his holdall with a knife. Junpei then becomes the absent subject of speculation by family and friends waiting on the dock.  He is already a ‘vanished man’ before he actually disappears from the film. The character of the ‘vanished man’ would become a trope in Japanese literature and film over subsequent decades – most famously in Imamura Shohei’s 1967 film Ningen jōhatsu (A Man Vanishes) – signifying the alienation felt by many left behind or excluded from the post-war Japanese economic miracle.

Junpei’s disappearance, however, is an object of critique in The Sleeping Beast Within, rather than empathy or sociological enquiry. Junpei the aging, corrupt, but still powerful father is the emblem of an aging, corrupt, but still powerful patriarchy. Junpei explains the “sleeping beast within” of the title as the reserve of anti-social desires that must be suppressed for a conformist and productive society to function.  Junpei as criminal is unleashing the sleeping beast kept caged by his long service as a loyal salaryman. Far from being anti-social, however, the film implies that Junpei and his middle-aged society are synonymous with Society itself, decadent representatives of the previous generation that brought Japan to militarism, fascism, and a ruinous war. A generation whose widespread corruption stifles the growth of their children. The bitter struggle of Keiko and Shotaro thus becomes a classic Oedipal scenario – the Oedipus story, of course, being a proto-detective story about a child seeking the truth about a father.

As suggested above, Suzuki pushed his early films to their generic limits. Ultimately, he could not exceed those limits. For all his invention, the characters, locations, and narrative of The Sleeping Beast Within remain coherent, logical, or explicable from beginning to end. Suzuki would famously claim that he made his first characteristic film with Yajū no seishun (Youth of the Beast), released on 21 April 1963, after nearly a decade filming whatever scripts his studio Nikkatsu threw at him. The Suzuki Seijun aficionado can do one of two things with this claim. She can take Suzuki at his word and dismiss the early films as apprentice or hack work with little personal or artistic distinction.

Or she can scour these early films for traces of the future Suzuki, traces of those heightened moments that break through genre into absurdity or epiphany. There are at least four such moments in The Sleeping Beast Within that elevate it. One is a shot where Keiko is talking to a former colleague of Junpei’s, her profile pointlessly but vividly refracted by the vertical segments of an office windowpane. Another is a sequence worthy of that other genre magician, Jean-Pierre Melville. It begins with Shotaro following a drug dealer down back streets from a distance. In the next shot the prey jumps onto a moving bus in which Shotaro is, impossibly, already standing.

Most breathtaking, however, are two matching scenes of informants talking to one or both of the young protagonists. In each case, the camera abruptly isolates the narrator from their surroundings. Suzuki dramatises their flashback on the screen above them; they talk as if they are benshi, those storytellers who accompanied Japanese films in the silent era. The antiquated device of the split or projected screen was used to illustrate dream sequences or memories in works of the early cinema like Histoire d’un crime (Ferdinand Zecca, 1901). To have such devices in a self-consciously contemporary film as The Sleeping Beast Within is so unexpected that it constitutes a moment of narrative and aesthetic rupture – and rapture. In the pre-1963 films of Suzuki Seijun, such set-pieces are subsumed into the wider formal organisation of genre. Thereafter, they float free as the films’ raison d’être.  

Kemono no nemuri/The Sleeping Beast Within (1960 Japan 87 mins)

Prod: Mizunoe Takiko Dir: Suzuki Seijun Scr: Ikeda Ichirō, based on a story by Kikumura Itaru Phot: Mine Shigeyoshi Prod Des: Nakamura Kimihiko Ed: Suzuki Akira Mus: Kaburagi Hajime

Cast: Nagato Hiroyuki, Yoshiyuki Kazuko, Ashida Shinsuke