Kinuyo and Sumie: When Women Write and Direct

Female authorship is the subject of this chapter, which concentrates on Tanaka’s third film, The Eternal Breasts (Chibusa yo eien nare, 1955). This was her first collaboration with scriptwriter Tanaka Sumie, and the chapter reveals the negotiation between two very different women of the same generation who worked together to articulate female subjectivity. Examining their distinct life experiences and approaches to the depiction of women (and female sexuality in particular) works to position Tanaka in the history of Japanese women’s cinema and melodrama. An exhaustive analysis of screenplays, shooting scripts, interviews, and contemporary reviews renders visible Tanaka’s authorial voice as a woman and her visual translation and intervention in Sumie’s script. The chapter makes a case of Tanaka’s creative directorial worth, while exposing why both the film industry and film studies may have hitherto overlooked her directed works.