Koto ["Ancient City"] (Twin Sisters of Kyoto)

• Japan 1963, 106 min.

Director:

• NAKAMURA Noboru

Starring:

• IWASHITA Shima
• MIYAGUCHI Seiji

Notes:

• IWASHITA Shima plays the double role of the twins as like as two peas, growing up in completely different surroundings where one is in luxurious circumstances as a daughter of a kimono material wholesaler and the other is in poverty as a village girl, polishing cedar logs. Her appearance in this film opened up a road to a star. The twin sister's warm feeling for each other developed after their reunion and the wholesaler's relationship with various people such as weavers in the kimono town of Kyoto are depicted with warm touch while a change of the four seasons is beautifully reflected in the background.
  

• The film is based on a present-day story originally published as a newspaper serial by the Nobel Prize winning novelist KAWABATA Yasunari (1899-1972). His power to fuse the distinctions between the human realm and the domain of nature is a distinctive and intoxicating feature of his writings. Equally forceful, however, are the insurmountable distances that KAWABATA places between his characters. Often it seems as if they belong to opposing magnetic fields: however much they may think they want one another, something in their basic natures always drives them apart. Yet this very unattainability (or at times an unconcious desire to be alone) creates that element of unsullied purity which hovers over many of his women characters.