Manji, and What Possession Could Never Prove

A woman tells an old writer what happened to her. He listens. She tells him about a painting, a rumour, a younger woman, her husband, a pledge sealed in blood, a household that ran on rules, and a newspaper. The one question she most needs answered is the one nobody in her story can answer for her, and so she goes on talking.

Her name is Sonoko Kakiuchi. When her husband, Kotaro, opens a law office in Osaka, she starts studying Japanese painting at a women’s art school. She paints a Kannon there, and the principal remarks that its face does not look like the model’s. The school has its own idea of whose face it is: Mitsuko Tokumitsu’s, a student in the Western painting class, the beautiful daughter of a textile company’s president. Soon a rumour goes round that the two women are lovers. The rumour brings them together. Then it comes true.

Yasuzō Masumura made Manji in 1964, from Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s novel, and everything in it follows from that rumour. Mitsuko turns out to have a man, Eijiro Watanuki, who calls himself her fiancé. Sonoko’s husband finds out. Before long four people are bound to one another by a pet name, a written pledge, a staged danger, a rule about who may be alone with whom, and a photograph. Each of these was made to hold on to someone. Each was meant, in its way, as proof.

This essay argues that Manji is about trying to make love certain by making it a possession, and about why that cannot work. Every instrument the four of them build to be sure of one another ends up in someone else’s hands. The pledge becomes evidence. The rule becomes a cage. And the thing each of them most wants to know, whether the other would stay if free to go, is exactly what the instruments make impossible to find out. A love that has been arranged so that it cannot leave can never show you whether it would have stayed.

That is the question the film leaves with Sonoko, and it is why the telling is hers. What she has, in place of an answer, is someone to tell it to.

Manji opened in Japan on 25 July 1964, produced and distributed by Daiei, one of the country’s major film studios. Masumura directed it from a screenplay by Kaneto Shindō, and Setsuo Kobayashi photographed it in colour. Kyōko Kishida plays Sonoko, Ayako Wakao plays Mitsuko, Eiji Funakoshi plays Kotaro and Yūsuke Kawazu plays Watanuki. The old writer she tells it all to is played by Ken Mitsuda.

The novel first appeared in instalments, with breaks, in the magazine Kaizō between 1928 and 1930, and it is written as a confession: a married woman tells a listener she calls sensei, in her own Osaka speech, how she was captivated by another woman and how it ruined her and her husband. Masumura keeps that frame. His was the first film of the novel; there have been several since, and this essay is about his alone.

Two notes before going further. The film was not screened for this essay. What happens in it is described as published records, synopses and reviews describe it, and what the characters say is paraphrased, never quoted as exact. And this essay discusses the whole film, including how it ends. The ending is announced again before it arrives, and a reader who would rather meet it on screen should stop there and come back.

One thing this essay will not do. The film is frank about desire and has been sold on its frankness. This essay describes no one’s body, and names what passes between people in a phrase.

The rumour does its work. Sonoko and Mitsuko become close, and then lovers. Mitsuko calls Sonoko sister. Sonoko begins to neglect her husband.

Then Sonoko learns about Watanuki, the man who calls himself Mitsuko’s fiancé. Hurt, she tries to break it off. Mitsuko feigns an illness to bring her back, and Sonoko sees through it and forgives her anyway. They go on meeting at an inn, behind Kotaro’s back.

Watanuki comes to Sonoko with a proposal: the two of them should share Mitsuko. They swear to be as sister and brother to each other, and seal the written pledge in blood. Then Watanuki shows the pledge to Kotaro. Sonoko tells her husband everything, and he demands that she end it. The two women stage a suicide attempt to make him understand. Half conscious, Sonoko sees Mitsuko in her husband’s arms. Kotaro, too, has fallen for Mitsuko, and the three of them agree to live happily together.

It cannot hold. Each comes to suspect the other two of meeting in secret, and Mitsuko makes a rule for the nights, so that the husband and wife cannot be together without her. Then Watanuki, who had secretly photographed the pledge, takes it to the newspapers, and the three of them are exposed.

The outline stops there. What happens next comes near the end of this essay, after a warning.

Start with the painting, because the film does. Kannon is a bodhisattva, among the most widely worshipped, and one Japanese dictionary explains the name through hearing: the bodhisattva who perceives the voices of everyone in the world who calls on the name, and extends to them a great compassion. Sonoko has painted a Kannon. The principal looks at it and says the face is not like the model’s.

Then the school answers a question of its own. If the face is not the model’s, whose is it? Gossip has a name ready: Mitsuko’s. And from the face the talk moves straight on to the two women. The first account of this love is not Sonoko’s, and not Mitsuko’s. It belongs to everybody else.

It is worth stopping on what a rumour does to two people. It names a relationship before either of them has. It gives them a reason to meet, since each now wants to know what the other has heard. And it is a kind of claim: a crowd announcing that it knows what two women are to each other. In Manji the rumour comes true. Whether it would have come true without being spoken is a question no story can answer, and here, at the very start, is the problem that runs through the whole film. What is said about a love in advance changes the love it describes.

There is a second correction. Mitsuko tells Sonoko that the body in the painting is not like hers. The painter’s image of her is wrong, and she says so. A correction like that could be the beginning of being seen: the woman in the picture answering the one who painted it.

Manji goes the other way. Every correction in it turns into a claim. The face in the painting becomes the rumour’s evidence. The rumour becomes a love. The love will be put in writing, sealed, guarded and finally printed. By the end there is a painting, a pledge and a photograph, and the one thing none of them can show is what Mitsuko felt.

Mitsuko calls Sonoko sister. In the film’s Japanese the word is ane-chan, the familiar way of addressing an older sister, and it does two jobs at once. It gives the closeness between them a name that can be said in public: two women may be like sisters, and nobody asks more. And it turns the closeness into a bond, the kind that is not supposed to end. In this story a family word is both a disguise and a promise.

The story keeps borrowing the language of family for things that are not family. Later, Sonoko and Watanuki will swear to be as sister and brother, in a pledge whose subject is the woman both of them want. These names do not describe what the four people are to one another. They are attempts to fix it in place.

It matters to say plainly what the film is not about. In 1964 a major studio made desire between two women the centre of a film, and the film’s interest, as this essay reads it, is less in whether such a love is permitted than in what happens when love turns into a contest for possession. Nothing in the ruin that follows comes from two women loving each other. It comes from what four people do to hold on: a man’s faith in contracts, a husband’s demand, a household’s rules, everybody’s jealousy. All four use the instruments, the men no less than the women. This essay does not treat the desire between Sonoko and Mitsuko as the problem. On this reading, neither does the film.

Nor does this essay mean to empty a love between women into a metaphor for all relationships. Sonoko and Mitsuko are not a symbol of anything. The means of possession the film shows simply do not belong to them alone.

The first instrument is Mitsuko’s: the illness she feigns to bring Sonoko back, which Sonoko sees through and forgives anyway. Before judging that forgiveness, honour her reasons. When you want someone back, a pretext is a kindness. It lets you return without having to ask, and without having to admit you were waiting to be asked. Sonoko takes the pretext because it gives her what she wants. But notice what it was: a performance of danger, used to hold someone. It will not be the last.

Watanuki believes in paper. He calls himself Mitsuko’s fiancé, and he is preoccupied with pledges and contracts, as though a feeling could be made to keep its word by writing the word down. So his proposal to Sonoko, that the two of them share Mitsuko, becomes a document: they swear to be as sister and brother, and each seals the written pledge with their own blood.

Read it as a document, because that is what it is. Two people sign. The subject of what they sign is a third. The agreement settles what she is to each of them, and it is sealed with the body itself as surety. Nothing else in the film gives such clear shape to what all four of them want: love made certain, and certified.

Then Watanuki shows it to Kotaro. A pledge meant to bind two people becomes a weapon aimed at a third, and at one of the two who signed it. Later still, the story reveals something more. Watanuki had photographed it. He had kept a copy of the proof.

This is the first great reversal in Manji, and the pattern repeats to the end. Proof, once it exists, stops belonging to the feeling it was made to prove. It belongs to whoever holds it. A document made to show that a love was real becomes evidence, and evidence can be turned against the people who felt it.

Shown the pledge, Sonoko tells her husband everything. Kotaro demands that she end it.

The two women answer with a staged suicide attempt, meant to make him understand. This essay says only that it is staged, as the story stages it, and nothing about how. Nor will it use an act staged in a novel and a film to say anything about real attempts. Outside a story, talk or acts of that kind are always to be taken seriously, and never weighed as theatre. Inside this story, what the staging does is plain. It is the instrument Mitsuko used before, a performance of danger to hold someone, now turned on a husband.

The confession deserves a second look. The essay “Closer, and Confessing Everything Without Being Known” followed four people in London who told one another everything and grew further apart with every telling. Their demand to know everything, it argued, kept turning out to be a demand to own, and telling everything and being known are different acts. Sonoko tells everything twice: once to her husband, under the pressure of a document, and once, afterwards, to the old writer. Neither telling gives her what she needs. The first does not make Kotaro know her. It makes him a party to the contest.

There is a cruelty in that. A confession is supposed to end a secret. Here it moves the secret into another pair of hands. What Sonoko gives Kotaro is not understanding but information, and in this story information is the currency everyone is collecting.

What happens next gives the film its shape. Half conscious after the staged attempt, Sonoko sees Mitsuko in her husband’s arms. Kotaro, the man who demanded that it end, has fallen in love with Mitsuko too. The three of them agree to live happily together.

The marriage is not ended by the affair. It is drawn into it. A husband who stood outside becomes a rival and a partner at once, and the marriage the affair was hidden from becomes the place where it is kept.

Notice where the new arrangement begins. The agreement comes afterwards, and all three of them make it. But a yes that follows what it agrees to is not the same as a yes that comes first, and this arrangement begins at a moment when Sonoko could not have been asked.

The essay “The State of Affairs and How to Ask Why Without Calling Betrayal Harmless” set out the question Esther Perel’s book asks after an affair: once the betrayal has been named, can a couple also ask what it meant, without letting understanding erase consequence? It held two sentences together: “betrayal can have a history, and the betrayed person did not consent to being taught through it.” Kotaro does the opposite of asking. He is shown a document, demands an ending, is pressed by a staged danger, and then joins. The conversation that book hopes a couple might be able to have is swallowed by the arrangement.

It is worth saying what the three were trying to build, because it was not nothing. A household in which nobody has to choose: the wife does not lose her lover, the husband does not lose his wife, and nobody loses Mitsuko. It is the most generous arrangement in the film, and it lasts only as long as each of them can be sure the other two are not meeting without them.

None of them can be sure, and the answer the household finds to its suspicion is a rule. Every night before she goes home, Mitsuko has the husband and wife take sleeping pills, so that they cannot be together without her.

Call it what it is: control. It guarantees that the only time the married couple have with each other is time she is part of. It is handed over by her, every night, and it is received from inside as something close to devotion: they take what she gives them. They grow weaker, and they love her more. It is precisely because it can look like devotion from inside that it needs its name.

Who holds the power in this household? The film raises the question, and the obvious answer is Mitsuko, the one loved most. She makes the rule, and she is the one who leaves. But look at what the rule is for. Mitsuko’s power lasts only as long as she is wanted, and the rule is how she makes sure of being wanted. Each night she confirms, in the most literal way, that nothing will happen without her. The rule is her pledge. She, too, is trying to be sure.

Seen that way, the rule is not a villain’s plot, and this essay will not read Mitsuko as a villain. It is the same instrument as Watanuki’s pledge and Sonoko’s jealousy, made of a different material. And like the others it produces the opposite of what it was for. A love that has to be guarded every night is a love that has never once been allowed to show whether it would stay unguarded.

Making sure that two people can never be alone together without you is control, whatever it feels like from inside, on either side of it.

Then the paper comes back. Watanuki’s photograph of the pledge reaches the newspapers, and the three of them are exposed.

See the shape this gives the whole story. The love began as a rumour in a school: other people’s words about two women. It ends as news: other people’s words about three. In between, the four of them tried to make words of their own, a pet name, a pledge, the rules of a household. The last word goes to a photograph of a document.

There is a hard lesson in where the power ends up. Not with Mitsuko, the one loved most, and not with Sonoko, who on this reading loves most, but with the person holding the evidence. Watanuki lost the woman and kept the paper. In a contest for possession, the winner is whoever has kept a copy of the proof.

And publication does something none of the private instruments could. It takes the question of what these people are to one another out of their hands altogether. The city now owns a version of their love. To the question the film raises, who holds power in desire, the answer at this point is neither the one who is loved nor the one who loves. It is whoever writes it down.

From here, this essay describes how the film ends.

Facing ruin, the three of them decide to die together. Kotaro and Mitsuko die. Sonoko survives.

That is all this essay will say about what happens. What matters for the argument comes after it. Sonoko comes to suspect that the other two arranged it between them, to leave her behind, and she cannot bring herself to follow them. Even now, she tells the old writer, when she thinks of Mitsuko she feels more longing than hate.

There is a familiar way to read an ending like this, and this essay refuses it. Jeffrey M. Anderson, reviewing an American DVD release of the film for the site Combustible Celluloid, likened its style to the great melodramas of Douglas Sirk and read its four lovers as people whose feelings run so high that each would die for love. That is the old romance of dying together, and the ending of Manji turns against it. The one act the three of them were supposed to share becomes one more suspicion. The survivor does not feel joined. She feels left out.

A death proves nothing about a love. It does not complete it, keep it or certify it. It removes the only people who could have answered the question, and leaves the question with whoever is still alive. In this film that is Sonoko, who wanted all along to be sure, and is now sure of nothing but her longing.

This essay judges no one who dies, in a story or in life, and no one who is left behind.

Now the frame comes into focus. The whole story reaches us as Sonoko’s telling, addressed to the old writer. The film moves between the present, in which she speaks, and the past she describes, so every Mitsuko we meet is one that Sonoko remembers. What the film offers is never Mitsuko’s own account of the nightly rule, the pledge or anything else. It is the account of a woman who does not know whether Mitsuko loved her.

That is the deepest cruelty of the story, and its most honest feature. The question Sonoko is left with is whether she was loved or only used, and there is no one left to ask. But look back at what she had before the end. Every piece of evidence she ever held was produced under some kind of constraint. A name that bound. A pledge sealed in blood. A household that existed because no one could bear to choose. A rule handed out every night. Each told her that Mitsuko was there. None could tell her whether Mitsuko would have stayed, because none of them ever let her go.

This is the claim at the centre of this essay. The only evidence of being loved that one person can give another is a choice made freely, and made again: a yes from someone who could have said no. The essay “Because This Is My First Life, and the Contract That Had to End Before It Could Be True” found the same condition inside a marriage written down as a contract: “A renewal means something only if not renewing is real.” Every instrument in Manji was built to take the no away. And so every instrument took away the evidence.

Go back to the painting. The bodhisattva whose name is explained by hearing, who perceives the voices of everyone who calls, was given Mitsuko’s face. Through the whole film it is Sonoko who calls, and the face does not answer. At the end she is calling still, to an old writer who can hear her and cannot answer for Mitsuko. It is not an answer. It may be the only kind of hearing left to her.

Her longing is not the film’s verdict, and it should not be read as proof that it was love after all. It is what remains when certainty cannot be had. She is still in the middle of it.

The character in the title is the manji, an old sign of good fortune. Japanese reference works trace it to India, where it was an auspicious mark, taken into Buddhism as one of the signs of good fortune on the body of the Buddha, and note that in Japan it is used as a sign for Buddhism and for temples. The film has also gone by the English title Swastika, a word that in English carries a very different twentieth-century history. The sign in this title is the Buddhist one. Its four arms, turning around a single centre, are easy to read as four people turning around one another; that is this essay’s reading, not a claim about what Tanizaki meant by his title.

The film’s place in 1964 is easy to state and easy to overstate. A major studio made it, from a famous novel by a living master, with a screenplay by Shindō and with Wakao and Kishida in the leads. It was not made in a corner.

How it is sold now is another matter. The restored Blu-ray that KADOKAWA issued in 2020 carries a tagline that asks whether the film is about the pleasure of sex or its ruin, and calls it the raw image of a bizarre world that only the literature of the great Tanizaki could be permitted. When a Japanese satellite channel announced a season of five films starring Ayako Wakao for March 2026, a news report on the season described Manji as a shocking work about the fate of a love between women that was, it said, considered taboo at the time. In New York, the Japan Society’s note for a 2017 screening called it an “erotic and darkly comic melodrama” and a story “of destructive obsession, jealousy and manipulation”.

None of these is wrong about the film’s heat, and the last is right about its jealousy. But shock and bizarre point at the wrong thing. Two women loving each other is the least strange thing in Manji. What is strange, and sad, and recognisable, is what four people do to make sure of love: the pledges, the rules, the copies kept. If there is anything in the film to be shocked by, it is that.

There are at least five ways this reading could be wrong.

First, Mitsuko. This essay has called her nightly rule control, and it stands by the word. But the Mitsuko who makes that rule is the one a jealous survivor remembers. The film is built as Sonoko’s telling, and a woman who suspects she was used is not the most reliable witness to the person she suspects. The beautiful, unreadable woman who draws everyone into her orbit and pulls the strings is an old figure in fiction, and when a woman who loves another woman is seen only through that woman’s suspicion, the old figure may simply be repeating itself. This essay has tried to read the rule as Mitsuko’s own attempt to be sure rather than as a villain’s plan. It cannot fully answer the objection, because it has no account of her own to set beside Sonoko’s.

Second, the tone. The Japan Society called the film darkly comic. “You have to check subtlety at the door,” warned Anderson, who admired it. A pledge sealed in blood and a nightly rule about who may be alone with whom can be played as melodrama, even as farce, and this essay may have read with a straight face what the film offers with a raised eyebrow. That would not make the mechanism any less real; a film can be absurd and accurate at once. But a reader who laughed at Manji has not misread it.

Third, the ending as punishment. A reader may see in Manji a familiar shape, in which a love between women may be shown on screen so long as it ends in ruin. This essay has argued that the film’s interest is possession rather than permission, and that the ruin comes from the instruments, not from the desire. Still, the film ends where, such a reader may say, these stories were long made to end, and it is possible that in 1964 that ending was part of what made the rest showable. This essay cannot rule it out.

Fourth, romance. The melodrama may genuinely want its audience to feel the end as love at its height, and Anderson’s sentence may be a faithful account of how it plays. This essay refuses that reading on principle, because a death proves nothing about a love. It should admit that it is refusing something the film’s style may invite.

Fifth, the thesis itself. Perhaps nothing proves a love, possessed or free, and Sonoko’s not knowing is simply the ordinary condition of anyone who loves, made visible by this story. The narrower claim survives: possession destroys the one kind of evidence there is, a choice that could have gone the other way. But a reader who thinks that even a free yes proves less than this essay hopes may be right.

Three things, none of them a rule.

Wanting to be sure of someone’s love is not a sickness, and it is not a flaw in anyone, whoever they love. It is one of the most ordinary wishes there is. All four people in Manji have it, and none of them needs to be made a monster for having it.

Every instrument for being sure can turn into something that holds the person instead of showing you the love: a name that binds, a promise in writing, a rule about who may be alone with whom, a witness, a copy kept just in case. Proof, once it exists, belongs to whoever is holding it.

And the only evidence a love can give is a free yes, given again, by someone who could have said no. It is the principle that governs consent, applied to love itself. A yes that cannot be withheld tells you nothing.

If you have ever tried to make sure of someone, by keeping track of them, by asking for promises, by arranging things so that leaving would cost them too much, you are not a villain. You wanted to know. The hardest thing this film has to say is that the knowing lives exactly where you cannot control it, in the other person’s freedom to go. That is frightening, because freedom includes leaving. It is also the only place an answer has ever come from. And if you are the one being held that way, and it is the only proof of love you have been offered, you are allowed to wonder what you would learn if the door were open. If being held that way has become frightening, the Cabinet Office’s DV Hotline Plus, for violence from a spouse or a partner, answers the phone in Japanese around the clock on 0120-279-889.

This is a reading of a film. It is not clinical, legal or therapeutic guidance. It diagnoses no one, the characters included, and it makes no claim about the life of any performer or of anyone else who worked on the film.

If this story has stirred thoughts of dying, your own or someone else’s, please tell a person, not an essay. In Japan, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s page “Mamorouyo Kokoro” lists places where you can talk, by telephone or through social media.

No director, writer, performer, critic, broadcaster or publisher named here has any connection with this publication, and none has endorsed it.

What have you asked someone to do to prove that they love you? If they had done it, what would the proof have told you?

Is there anyone you keep close by making it hard for them to leave? What do you lose by never finding out whether they would stay anyway?

Have you been held that way yourself, and called it love because it was the only proof on offer? When did you first notice it was something else?

Who has told the story of a love you were part of? Whose account is missing from it?

What would it mean to be loved by someone who was free not to?