ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests ways in which the notion of cinema as vernacular modernism could be useful to the project of writing transnational film history. To begin with, though, I would like to evoke three sets of examples from Japanese and Chinese films of the 1930s. The first revolves around the figure of the prostitute who is also a mother. In Shimizu Hiroshi’s sound film Forget Love for Now (Koi mo wasurete, Shochiku, July 1937), released the same month Japan turned to open warfare against China, a young woman (Kuwano Michiko) works as a taxi dancer in a Yokohama harbor bar to pay for her son’s education. The film resolves the contradiction of motherhood and prostitution by sacrificing the son, having him die from pneumonia after fighting a mob of boys over his mother’s reputation. A similar configuration of prostitution and motherhood can be found in a silent Shochiku production directed by Naruse Mikio, Every Night Dreams (Yogoto no yume, 1933). Likewise set in the Yokohama harbor area, this film casts Kurishima Sumiko as a bar hostess struggling to rear her son and not to descend into the lower depths of the sex trade; the son is almost killed, in a car accident, but the sacrifice is displaced onto the unemployed husband
(Saito Tatsuo), who drowns himself after a failed attempt at burglary to pay for his son’s medical bills.1
