A Most Humanly Hobo

My Hobo is a Japanese comedy in the Italian manner. The fine Japanese hand of Director Zenzo Matsuyama has blended the smiles-and-tears vagabondage of La Strada with the bumbling malfeasance of Big Deal on Madonna Street into a Campari and sake cocktail that may be bitter at first sip but is warm on the aftertaste.

Junpei is a hobo full of heart and uncommon ingenuity. He wears a remarkable garment fitted out with pockets for everything: tools, utensils, pots, food packets, soy sauce and a jar of Ajinomoto brand monosodium glutamate. And taped over his liver, like a mustard plaster, is a wad of 80,000 yen. Junpei prefers to live by his wits instead of his money, and hits the road to put the touch on all who cross his zigzag path. On his travels he encounters Komako, a female swindler with a grisly gimmick: she begs by posing as a Hiroshima maiden, although her scars are really from a childhood encounter with a fireplace. "My white corpuscles decrease daily--sometimes I swoon from anemia," she says with a pitiful passion. But she has to use sweet-potato moonshine, rather than a sob story, to pry loose Junpei's bankroll. Then she absconds, but only after he has fallen in love with her.

One day, while loitering around a railroad station, he is adopted by two abandoned children. He snarls like a bee-stung samurai, he sulks like a spoiled geisha, but the kids tag along. And so Junpei has two kids, a sweetheart on the lam, and no yen except to do right by the youngsters and to get Komako (and his money) back.

My Hobo is filmed in carefully composed color, and although often selfconsciously sentimental it gives a candid look at contemporary Japan while commenting on two of its prime problems: the increase in materialism and selfishness as prosperity makes its mark, and the fear of another nuclear war. Little of the tea-ceremony tranquillity of picture-book Japan comes before the camera's eye, but one scene evokes the flavor of tradition. Junpei makes a pilgrimage to a Buddhist shrine where a procession of monks, carrying enormous torches, winds below a pounding waterfall. Kneeling, he makes his confession: "O Lord Avatar Buddha, what is my part in this life? Am I of use to others? I am lazy, costly, helpless and lewd. But I am a most humanly man."

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