The 1964 Japanese movie Manji is being screened this month by Dublin Film Qlub

Dublin Film Qlub are screening Manji Yasuzo Masumura (1964), the film adaptation of the 1930 novel, Quicksand by Junichirō Tanizaki.

Dublin Film Qlub detail how the film does away with the literary device in Quicksand where the author is being recounted the story in an interview setting, instead setting the action in the world of lesbian lovers as a “queer spectacle” that they encourage viewers to “surrender” to.

Don’t worry if your Japanese isn’t up to scratch, while the trailer below doesn’t have English subtitles, the film itself will.

Hysteria & Deception

“The pioneering lesbian novel Quicksand was published in Japan in serialised form in 1928-30, but it has some of the feel of a 1970s Latin-American soap opera,” Dublin Film Qlub said.

“The key note is Hysteria, the refrain is Deception. In the novel, everyone is deciving everyone else, in increasingly unlikely plot turns, as the characters get deeper and deeper into the quicksand of infatuation.

The shadow of Dorian Gray looms large in this season of the Film Qlub, and we find it here too… The beautiful and psychotically-manipulative young Mitsuko pulls easy targets towards her, and as the weight increases, so do the chances that they’ll all sink together.

Lesbian Love

“The novel seems partly inspired by another Irish classic, Le Fanu’s vampire-tale Carmilla, with a narrator whose intentions remain obscure.

“In Quicksand, the story is told by the cheerful widow Sonoko directly to the author, Tanizaki himself, in a recorded conversation. This is an old literary device, which Tanizaki exploits really well, giving minute physical descriptions of letters, contracts, evidence he has gathered. This kind of detail would not make sense in a film, and plays no part in the 1966 adaptation (they’ve been five adaptations to date).

“The film simply presents lesbian love as a kind of paroxysm, as a series of incontrolable and violent seizures. The book is a meditation on the power of lies, proposing that love is madness and life is fiction.

“The adaptation is a David-Lynch-esque queer spectacle, a film made to astonish. Surrender to it.”

Manji is screening on Saturday 18 February at 2:30pm in The New Theatre in Temple Bar, Dublin 2. Dublin Film Qlub membership is €8 for the day and there will be free tea, coffee and biscuits available.