THE JAPANESE REMARRIAGE MARKET: BUYERS SHOULD BEWARE

MONTREAL WORLD FILM FESTIVAL, August 30, 2016 – “Black Widow Business”, a film by 76-year old Japanese director Yasuo Tsuruhashi, is the story of two deadly scam artists who are in the business of stealing the life savings of elderly men lured into marriage.

Toru Kashiwagi, played by the actor Etsushi Toyokawa, runs a corrupt “marriage agency” that caters to widowers looking to remarry. Toru’s 50/50 partner in the schemes is Sayoko Takeuchi, played by the actress Shinobu Otake, a 60-ish widow who charms the older men with her compliant attitude and musings about looking at the stars in the sky. According to the film’s production notes, there are more than 4,000 marriage agencies in Japan that are used by more than 600,000 people each year, and fraud is on the rise.


   Shinobu Otake at the Imperial Theater in Montreal

At the start of the film, Sayoko’s latest prey is 80-year old Kozo Nakase, a former professor, who has two grown daughters, Komomi and Naoko. Kozo falls for Sayoko and marries her, but then Sayoko plots to kill Kozo by tampering with his medication. Kozo eventually dies, and at the funeral Sayoko informs Kozo’s daughters that she will be inheriting all of his large estate.

This outrages Komomi and she contacts a college classmate who is a lawyer. They hire a private investigator and begin to learn the awful truth about Sayoko – the many men she has married have gone missing.

From here, the film unfortunately becomes slapstick and falls apart. The private investigator tries to blackmail Toru, who then manipulates Sayoko’s hyper son into killing the investigator, who botches the assassination attempt and accidentally “kills” Sayoko in a fight. Toru and the son stuff what they think is the dead Sayoko in a suitcase but as they try to load the luggage into a car are tripped up by a police patrol.

In the end, however, no police action is taken and Toru and Sayoko continue to go about their heinous business.

For their parts, stars Shinobu Otake and Etsushi Toyokawa are well cast and convincing in their roles. But they can’t overcome the faults in the plot. A more convincing, and satisfying, ending would have been to have the scheme exposed when the police came on the scene and the two perpetrators brought to justice.