Kyoko Kagawa, Reflecting the Sign of Eternity - An Actress's Journey in Search of the Breath of Her Role (1950s-1960s)

Kyoko Kagawa, Reflecting the Sign of Eternity - An Actress's Journey in Search of the Breath of Her Role (1950s-1960s)

When preparing for her roles, Kyoko Kagawa visited bars in Ginza and school staff rooms to feel the atmosphere of these places on her own skin, and attempted to incorporate it directly into her acting. The buzzing of the bar, the shadows of the lighting, the distance between the customers and the bar, and the inflections of the voices - these details became the raw materials for transforming the fictional characters into "real people. In the school's staff room, I carefully observed the teacher's behavior, interaction with the students, and miscellaneous signs of daily life, and even kept in mind the cold and warmth of the classroom, the scratches on the desks, and the saltiness of the postings on the walls to give a multilayered quality to the character's interior.

These methods were deeply resonant with the realist orientation of postwar Japanese cinema. After the war, audiences began to be more attuned to stories rooted in their own lives than to pretensions, and film also turned toward depicting the smells of everyday life and human breath. The serene time depicted by Ozu and Ozu, the pain of the common people projected by Naruse, and Kinoshita's humanistic drama ...... In the midst of these trends, Kagawa's "feel it with your body" acting preparation became a weapon to impart naturalness and persuasiveness on screen.

Director Kenji Mizoguchi told Kagawa, "You can't think about acting with your head. If you are in the role from the core, you should be able to move naturally. There is an anecdote that Kagawa himself gradually came to realize that "you have to hit the role with your body and feelings. This was strongly reflected in her roles as married women in "Chikamatsu Monogatari" and other films, when she expressed the subtleties of emotional vacillation and silence. Mizoguchi repeatedly told her to "reflect and move" and "react naturally," words that taught Kagawa the fundamentals of acting.

Kagawa also paid attention to the movements of the director and co-stars on set, the temperature of the set, and changes in shadows caused by lighting, and tried to act as if the character belonged there. He tried to convey emotion without dialogue by adjusting his eye line to the moment his co-stars or the set moved, and by subtly changing the sense of distance. In addition, it is documented that Kagawa received support from his uncle, Ichiro Nagashima, which enabled him to move freely throughout the film industry.

Thus, the experience of walking in actual places such as Ginza and schools - which was not mere imitation but a training of sensitivity - brought a realistic breathing quality to Kyoko Kagawa's acting. At the intersection of the changing times and the internal demands of cinema, she succeeded in conveying to the audience the "reality of the actor" by using her own body as a medium for the role.