First Love of Okon (1958)

directed by Kunio Watanabe

Japan

85 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I planned on reviewing this as a Pride Month thing, because those movies where Hibari Misora plays a man are, to me, as a trans person and a jidaigeki nerd, honestly exhilarating to watch. Gender euphoria, etc etc. But Misora in drag receives only a very limited amount of screen time in First Love of Okon despite the poster prominently featuring her in a chonmage, which is kind of funny to me; Toei knew what we all wanted to see. I'll still review this anyway, but it'll be a short one.

Misora plays Okon, a kitsune (fox spirit) who lives in the mountains with others of her kind. When humans trap a young kitsune with the intent to cook him up and eat him, Okon transforms into a human man to rescue him. Afterwards, she gets trapped herself, but is saved by a woodcutter named Onokichi. The two of them become friends and eventually fall in love, but the story is bittersweet and wrought with obstacles, as there's a deputy who wants Okon for his concubine and also wants Onokichi's forest for the money.

This is a musical. If you're familiar with the Russian Fantastika genre, this will seem very familiar; while a bit less gaudy, the setpieces are similarly fairytale-like, especially during the more elaborate song and dance sequences. Misora is enchanting to watch as always, and this is definitely her movie, but another reason why you should watch it is for Jun Tazaki, prolific portrayer of extremely stoic, stiff-upper-lipped military generals, playing the goofball deputy. He sings too, and generally runs around being the butt of many jokes, along with his retinue, who all also sing.

Although Misora's male role in this film is restricted to basically only one scene, Okon and two of her kitsune sisters also transform into the deputy and two of his men at least once. The fluid way that this film depicts gender is really interesting: how casual it is for Okon and the other kitsune women to become men, just like they shapeshift into other things. It is all a fantasy, but fantasy was the lens through which these stories could be told in mainstream cinema at the time. I guarantee you there were people watching Misora perform as a man and either realizing things about themselves or feeling like the things about themselves they already knew were maybe not so rare and unusual after all.

I unfortunately had to watch this as a garbage-quality, poorly-cropped VHS rip, but even still, the magic is there. I'm surprised I don't hear about this and others of its ilk talked about more as queer cinema. Women playing male roles (and men playing female roles) in traditional Japanese theater is of course not inherently a queer thing and I'm not trying to map my own Western values onto that concept, but it's also true that there are trans people everywhere who can and assuredly have seen themselves reflected in that.