Hymn to a Tired Man uses a flashback narrative to reflect on war and its aftermath. A mild-mannered office worker is driven to recall his past when his son falls in love with the daughter of the commanding officer under whom he served during World War II. Memories of abusive discipline resurface throwing the former soldier’s relatively quiet postwar life into turmoil. Kobayashi offers an unsparing indictment of the lack of accountability for the scars of battle.
Director: Masaki Kobayashi. AKA 日本の青春
Writers: Shûsaku Endô (novel), Sakae Hirosawa.
Stars: Michiyo Aratama, Toshio Kurosawa, Tomoko Naraoka, Kei Satô, Wakako Sakai, Makoto Fujita.
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Download in MP4 (Upscale w/Eng. hardsubs)
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Note: The quality for this one isn’t very good but it’s perfectly watchable, it has some strange effects in several points where the film loses quality (for example 1:33:00) I think this was due to the de-interlacing process that was applied to make the rip (source file), the source file rip was encoded from a 15+ years old DVDr which itself was created from a Japanese TV recording, I think this film has never been released on DVD but I could be wrong, if anyone out there has a better copy please contact me so we can upgrade this one. English subtitles by scannon @KG, while the translation was very good but the timings weren’t as good with most lines appearing too early on the screen before dialogue, I have corrected this for the most part. I upscaled this one mostly to give the subtitles better readability as otherwise they’d look very blurry because of the low resolution of the rip used.
This is the missing Endo adaptation in my viewing history. Thank you very much for this, Jon.
I’ve been waiting for years to see this. (There was a snippet of it in a documentary about the composer Toru Takemitsu.)
The film digs deep into the unresolved traumas of WWII underlying the boom years of Japan’s economic miracle. It makes it plain that soulless salaryman life has its origins in military authoritarianism.
Not Kobiyashi’s top film, but well worth watching — thanks for making it available!
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