Kyôko Kishida is known abroad for one part, the widow in the pit in Woman in the Dunes, and it deserves the attention. She plays a woman who has stopped arguing with her circumstances, and that is more unsettling than any struggle.
Fi1m perspective
The first time we see Kyôko Kishida properly in Woman in the Dunes (1964), she is asleep, and a film of sand so fine has settled on her that she looks like a statue nobody has dusted. It is a fair introduction. Hiroshi Teshigahara's film keeps an insect collector (Eiji Okada) at the bottom of a pit for most of its 147 minutes, and Kishida is the widow who lives there and shovels sand all night while men above haul it up in baskets. Okada does the talking. Kishida laughs at his plans without unkindness and talks about the sand the way farmers talk about weather, and the longer she does it the less certain we are that he is the sane one.
We expected the film's horror to come from the pit. It came from her calm. She never raises her voice about the sand; she treats it as something you live with, like rain, and we found that acceptance more frightening than anything the villagers do from the rim. Okada is quick and vain and we found him tiresome for a while. Kishida is quieter and better, and she lets him be tiresome without competing, which is a generosity not every lead performer manages.
She came to film from the stage. She joined the Bungakuza company in 1950 and made her name in the theatre in Yukio Mishima's 1960 production of Salome, the same year Kon Ichikawa gave her a first proper screen part in Her Brother. Supporting roles followed for Masaki Kobayashi in The Human Condition III: A Soldier's Prayer (1961) and for Yasujirō Ozu, as Madame Kaoru in his last film, An Autumn Afternoon (1962). Then 1964 brought two leads at once: the pit for Teshigahara, and the bored housewife Sonoko in Yasuzō Masumura's Manji, an erotic melodrama about a relationship between two women of a kind Japanese cinema had rarely put on screen.
The directors who kept her were the ones with a taste for the strange. Ichikawa cast her twelve times. Teshigahara used her again as the nurse in The Face of Another (1966), another Kōbō Abe script, and once more, after a long gap, in Rikyu (1989). Her later years went largely into television and voice work, including Moomin, and almost none of that has travelled, which is why for most readers here she remains one part in one film.
Start with the pit. Most of what came after is harder to find, and that is our loss rather than her fault.
Biography
Kyōko Kishida (29 April 1930 – 17 December 2006) was a Japanese actress and voice actress. Born in Suginami, Tokyo, she was the daughter of playwright Kunio Kishida. She joined the Bungaku-za theatre company in 1950 and made her stage breakthrough in Yukio Mishima's production of Salome in 1960.
Kishida's film roles include Madame Kaoru in Yasujirō Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon (1962) and the lead in Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes (1964). Other credits encompass The Face of Another (1966), Manji (1964) and The Human Condition III: A Soldier's Prayer (1961). She appeared in four NHK Taiga drama series and provided the voice of Moomin in the 1960s anime series, as well as narration for other animated works.
She was married to actor Noboru Nakaya from 1954 until their divorce in 1978. Kishida continued working in film and television until shortly before her death from respiratory failure caused by a brain tumour.
