A Film Canon

With Road To Eternity, Kobayashi's Human Condition trilogy turns from the political to the libidinal economy of war, as Kaji's (Tatsuya Nakadai) movement from labor supervisor to soldier produces a comprehensive denunciation of the Japanese military ethos ("Our real enemy...is the army"), and a delineation of it's peculiar delay and intensification of pleasure. Not only is the prostitution of No Greater Love subsumed into the barracks, which sings whoring songs to relax, and punishes 'cowards' by making them play the role of streetwalkers, but the narrative opens with the drastic consequences of a cigarette enjoyed outside army supervision - the first in a wave of violent slaps that come to form the most basic unit of military pleasure, enrhythmning the narrative, and gradually seguing into perverse, semi-sexual tortures as the shame of imminent defeat escalates. As a result, Kaji's most threatening, heterodox act is the evening that he spends alone with his wife (Michiyo Aratama), who comes to visit him at barracks, their sequestration in a storeroom completely disassociating love from domestic economy, and opening up the liberating romanticism glimpsed in the earlier film. Concomitantly, that film's lunar wastes are replaced by a more viscous widescreen landscape, as the Manchurian border, and the political possibilities that it represents, constantly coalesces and dissipates around the protagonists, seething into their rage, and precluding any conventional, geographical front.