Mikio Naruse

This film is about the story of the relationship between a daughter-in-law (Setsuko Hara) and the father (So Yamamura) of her neglectful and selfish husband (Ken Uehara). As the father becomes more and more aware of the unhappiness of Hara, he takes ever more unconventional steps to try to rescue his son's marriage. Though the issues of infidelity, abortion and divorce swirl through this film, the tone is remarkably low-key and unmelodramatic (IMDB Comments)

Otsuta is running the geisha house Tsuta in Tokyo. Her business is heavily in debt. Her daughter Katsuyo doesn't see any future in her mothers trade in the late days of Geisha. But Otsuta will not give up. This film portraits the day time life of geisha when not entertaining customers. (imdb)

Michiyo moved to Osaka two years ago, when her husband Hatsunosuke who works at a stock brokerage was transfered from Tokyo. She wash, cook and clean 365 days a year. All the dreams and hopes she had when they got married five years ago seems to be gone. From here on we follow the everyday life of Mr. and Mrs. Okamoto. (imdb)

This is the story of Mama, a.k.a. Keiko, a middle-aged geisha who must choose to either get married or buy a bar of her own. Her family hounds her for money, her customers for her attention, and she is continually in debt. The life of a geisha is examined as well as the way in which the system traps and sometimes kills those in it. (imdb)

Hard luck Yukiko (Takamine Hideko) remembers the days of wine and romance back in Indochina but Kengo (Mori Masayuki) isn't having any of it. The war is over, the survivors are back in Japan and Yukiko wants to rekindle the old flame. (IMDB Comments)

What is the life of a Geisha like once her beauty has faded and she has retired? Kin has saved her money, and has become a wealthy money-lender, spending her days cold-heartedly collecting debts. Even her best friends, Tomi, Nobu, and Tamae, who were her fellow Geisha, are now indebted to her. Kin has two former lovers who still pursue her; one she wants to see, and the other she doesn't. But even the one she remembers fondly, when he shows up, proves to be a disappointment. (imdb)

A father with a steady home life that includes a wife and two children, is shocked to find that his friend's wife has been killed. It becomes apparent that the father was busy having an affair with his friend's wife right up until her death. While everyone is initially stumped to who the killer could be, it is slowly revealed that the aforementioned affair included kinky sex which may have led to the woman's death. (CinemaTalk)

Sanae Sakanishi, widowed at the film's outset is left a substantial inheritance that soon becomes the instigator of much familial discord. (Slant)

A 19 year old girl loses her husband in war. Bombing destroys his family's shop and the widow stays to rebuild it as the rest of the family flee and runs it for 18 years out of love for her dead husband and his mother. After 18 years when a new supermarket threatens to put them out of business, the sisters conspire to turn the shop into a supermarket and get rid of their brother's widow. (imdb)

A war widow with a young boy manages a farm with her bossy mother-in-law. When a reporter comes to interview her, the two begin an affair. He turns out to be married and won't leave his wife. Her older brother tries to marry off his children and hang on to/ extend his farm through an advantageous marriage in the face of threatened land confiscation and the desire of his children to get comfortable urban jobs instead of the backbreaking work in the paddy fields under parental control. (imdb)

The effervescent and charming Chiba Sachiko (Naruse's wife at the time) plays Kimiko, the bold daughter who travels to the countryside to find her estranged father to seek his consent for her forthcoming marriage. When Kimiko discovers that her father has taken up with a young geisha and is just as difficult as ever, her journey forces her to reconsider her ideas about familial ties. The film was Naruse's biggest success to date and one of his warmest films...

The life history of a woman who faced disillusion from her husband and disappointment from her son, but lives to welcome her grandson. (bfi.org.uk)

Scattered Clouds, director Mikio Naruse's final film, plays like the melancholy last dance of an extended evening of revelry now teetering on the fine line separating drunkenness and sobriety. It's the cinematic equivalent of a hangover, though the heady haze the film conveys is part of its charm and very much in tune with its deeply saturated color photography, which constantly threatens to spill over its borders and run together in a kind of chaotic emotional release. (KG)

Keijiro and Ayako Kono (Masayuki Mori and Chikage Awashima) seem like a picture-book upper middle-class family. He is a respected professor and the couple has two amiable children (a high school-aged girl and middle school-aged boy). But the Kono's domestic siutuation is more complicated than it seems on the surface. The children are actually the illegitimate children of Kono's long-time mistress, Miho. To compensate for giving up the children, the Konos subsidize a bar which Miho operates. (imdb)

Kiyoko is 23 and works as a tour guide. She lives with her mother and has two sisters and a brother, all from different fathers. Despite and because of various forms of pressure, the problems she sees and experiences around her make her suspicious of men and marriage, and very ambivalent about her relations to her own family.

A Wanderer's Notebook, also known as Her Lonely Lane, is director Mikio Naruse's hollow biopic of authoress Fumiko Hayashi, whose work the director often adapted for the screen. (Slant Magazine)

On her way to meet her boyfriend, Sugiko is hit by a car and hospitalized. When she doesn't arrive at the meeting place, her boyfriend believes she has betrayed him, and he returns to his hometown. Yamauchi, the man who was driving the car that hit her, proposes to her. Sugiko marries Yamauchi, but is bored with his family's lifestyle. She leaves him and goes back to work as a waitress. (imdb)

The greatest shock of Sudden Rain comes when Ryotaro Namiki (Shuji Sano) declares to his wife Fumiko (Setsuko Hara) that she has no dreams. For those familiar with Hara's typically incandescent screen presence this is less of an insult than pure blasphemy, though it's all to director Mikio Naruse's subversive point. (Slant Magazine)

A bar hostess approaching middle age has a young child to support and an ex-husband who frequently needs money. She believes in marriage but is cynical about men. She seeks a rich patron for the faltering bar she works in but must then contend with unwelcome sexual advances. Meanwhile, she must manage her active young boy. When an attractive and kind young man enters the picture, introduced by a flirty friend, she thinks she may have found her way out of Ginza bar life. However, it is not to be. (imdb)

Study of the relationship between children of the Ainu tribe in Hokkaido and their pure Japanese neighbours and schoolmates. (bfi.org.uk)

Three Sisters with Maiden Hearts, writer-director Mikio Naruse's first sound film, tells the story of three very different siblings forced to work as samisen street musicians to make ends meet. (Slant Magazine)

A teenaged girl witnesses her widowed mother's attempt to sustain her family. (imdb)

In this film, Sumiko Kurishima plays a woman whose husband had deserted her, following the birth of her child. For lack of any better option, she has been forced to support her son and herself as working as a hostess at a waterfront bar. When her ne'er-do-well husband (Tatsuo Saito) returns, her first impulse is to reject him, but her neighbors prevail on her to give him a second chance... (imdb)

In Older Brother, Younger Sister, director Mikio Naruse's adaptation of an oft-filmed popular novel by Saisei Murô, the eldest daughter (Machiko Kyô) of a rural family comes home pregnant, testing some already tenuous family bonds. (Slant Magazine)

A 1960s co-production between Japanese directors Yuzo Kawashima and Mikio Naruse

The context here is tightly drawn in scope around a couple and their colleagues and friends, and the intended theme of marital discord is consistent and pervasive. The plot weaves around within these constraints, bringing out the various aspects of the eternal battle of the sexes. (imdb)

The competing husband and wife voiceovers that open the 1953 Mikio Naruse melodrama Wife set up a character dialectic that never comes to fruition and though the title suggests the resulting imbalance may be intentional, the film still plays out as a deeply flawed examination of marital discord. (Slant Magazine)

As the teenage bus conductress O-Koma, Takamine might best be described as beatification personified, and it is her continuously cheerful demeanor that effectively masks the film's underlying current of satirical bitterness. (Slant Magazine)

This film from the great Naruse has her stretching her acting muscles, playing Oshima, a woman who goes through situations in which men treat her wrong. Somehow, in a sometimes fun way, she emerges intact and stronger. (imdb)

A self-absorbed young actor humiliates an elderly Noh performer, who then commits suicide. His act of cruelty compels his father to disown him, leading the once promising actor to a life on the streets. But his desire to win back the respect of his father and the affection of the dead actor's daughter pushes him toward a more noble existence. Naruse employed a delicately structured mise-en-scene in this family melodrama, which evokes the work of Josef von Sternberg.

Okuni (played by Michiyo Kogure) is the wife of a samurai, who was murdered (in an underhanded fashion) by a former suitor, Tomonojo (So Yamamura). So she and one of the retainers of her husband, Gohei (Tomoemon Otani, a famed kabuki artist, during a brief stint in the movies) go seeking the murderer, planning to seek revenge. However, the two have no real clue as to where to seek Tomonojo and their quest seems endless. (imdb)

The Whole Family Works, Mikio Naruse's adaptation of a Sunao Tokunga novel, feels more of a piece with the writer/director's quietly observant and psychologically charged later work. (Slant)

In the furious The Girl in the Rumor, as tight, absorbing, and intricate a 55-minute film as any ever made, a confrontation between two sisters is staged and cut as a series of complementary, mirroring, responsive movements in and out of frame, resulting in a dizzying pattern in which the two sisters ceaselessly replace each other. (Chris Fujiwara)

This early-ish Naruse is best remembered for having two giants of 50s Japanese cinema in its crew - Akira Kurosawa and Ishiro Honda. Somewhat ironically, very little has been written about the film itself. It's a fascinating nonlinear study of a marriage, only one year old, beginning to crumble. Kusaku is married to Fukiko but is in love with Yayoi. A nice little film (runs under an hour) that features some flashes of the future Naruse.

Kiyoko, along with her husband Shinji (Keiju Kobayashi), wants to open a coffee shop and so goes to Kenkichi to ask for a loan. (Slant)

The main focus is on the 5 member band of a small circus as it runs into problems while touring rural Japan. It also pays lots of attention to the two daughters of the aging and irascible ringmaster-circus owner. The high points are the sound (and score) and cinematography featuring a lot of vertiginous panning (appropriate - as high wire trapeze artists are also an important element in the film). A fascinating side-light on 30s Japan. (imdb comments)

This film depicts a troupe of wandering kabuki players traveling through rural Japan. (imdb)

In Ryokichi Urshiyama (Isao Kimura), a struggling writer who, over the course of the film, sinks into a vicious cycle of despair and drunkenness, Naruse creates a vividly unsympathetic on-screen surrogate. (Slant)

This film is based on a real Meiji era performer -- and tells of Tochuken's partnership with his wife (played by Chikako Hosokawa) who played shamisen for his songs/recitations), his affair with a geisha (Sachiko Chiba), the deterioration of his partnership and marriage and the angry death of his wife (in a hospital -- due to lung disease) followed by his rather sententious poeticizing over her remains. (Roslindale Monogatari)

This is ostensibly a sex-education film -- with hardly any education! -- but it's incredibly beautiful. The spring and early summer scenery in Nagano (probably) echo the budding sexuality of the film's young characters. A good dose of German romantic poetry also adds to the barely sublimated sexual atmospherics. The film isn't perfect; the cast is obviously inexperienced and the film hypocritically avoids a frank discussion of sex.... (imdb comment)

This 2-part film romance (clocking in at just a bit under three hours) was based on a story by noted author Kikuchi Kan (who also founded Japan's one of Japan's most prestigious literary prizes, named after fellow author Akutagawa). It is a surprising blend of real and unreal. Everyone in the film seems to come from marvelously rich families -- and lives in very large houses and apartments. And yet the human interactions are generally realistically (and credibly) depicted. (imdb comment)

This is once again, in terms of plot, a bit of a shocker. Soon after we meet Kuniko (a young widow, played by Hideko Takamine) and her much-beloved young only son, the boy is run over by Kinuko (played by Yoko Tsukasa the rich spoiled wife of an automobile executive). Kinuko, it turns out, was distracted at the time of the accident because her companion in the car, a hunkish younger man who is her lover, had just told her of his plan to soon begin a far-away job. (imdb comment)

This 2-part film romance (clocking in at just a bit under three hours) was based on a story by noted author Kikuchi Kan (who also founded Japan's one of Japan's most prestigious literary prizes, named after fellow author Akutagawa). It is a surprising blend of real and unreal. Everyone in the film seems to come from marvelously rich families -- and lives in very large houses and apartments. And yet the human interactions are generally realistically (and credibly) depicted. (imdb)

This skeptical attitude to the conventional nuclear family was extended into open hostility in A Woman's Sorrows, where the repressive nature of traditional family structures is laid bare... (sensesofcinema)

As the titular, exceedingly popular performing duo (respectively a samisen player and a Shinnai singer) they enact a tragicomic tale of unrequited love that--save for a deeply affecting, pathos-ridden final scene--is far removed from director Mikio Naruse's usual cinema obsessions. (slantmagazine)

This early Naruse silent is a stock drama about a mother sacrificing her happiness to ensure her child's.

This tells the story of an aging geisha (Mitsuko Yoshikawa) who struggles to support her senior high school-aged son (?). He, however, is so embarrassed by his mother that he has begun cutting school -- and associating with a bad crowd. A young (late teen-aged?) colleague of his mother (Sumiko Mizukubo) also worries about the son, and urges him to not disappoint his mother. In order to show him how lucky he is, she takes him to visit her dysfunctional family. (imdb comment)

Another period piece, with legendary characters and vaguely martial overtones. The script has some wit, and the screenwriter makes a small effort to give the characters dimension, but there's really not much that Naruse can do with this material, other that create beautiful deep-space compositions for the exterior shots. (Dan Sallitt)

Ryuji Nagami's script mandates a fairly straightforward comedy of nonconformism and antisocial behavior, and also tends to lean too hard on its comic contrivances. Most of the film is low-key and digressive, and Naruse does some nice, relaxed character work with the supporting players, a few of whom are suspended between comic relief and villainy.... (Dan Sallitt)

The material is certainly dark enough for Naruse: the otherwise promising young man Asaji (Heihachirô Ôkawa) and his younger brother Yuji (Hideo Saeki) face blighted lives because of society's disapproval of their illegitmacy and déclassé family. (Dan Sallitt)

Mieko Takamine is a former ballet star and current ballet teacher married to So Yamamura. The couple have a teen-aged son and daughter. Takamine's affections seem to be engaged by an old friend (Kan Nihonyanagi). Okada is now an advanced ballet student -- but is distracted by her mother's romance (which she is not entirely unsympathetic to) and the illness of her old teacher. (Michael Kerpan)

Set in the Osaka theater world, the story is dominated by a self-righteous troupe leader (Roppa Furukawa) who bravely risks his popularity by selecting only plays that support the Japanese military cause, and who decides to break up the love affair between his star actor (Kazuo Hasegawa) and a shamisen player (Isuzu Yamada) in order to purify the actor's commitment to his craft. (Dan Sallitt)

The language of modernity in Sincerity consists of a discourse of class and cosmopolitanism that contradicts the quiet harmony of village life. (KG)

The film contrasts a day-in-the-life of a working class insurance salesman (Isamu Yamaguchi) with that of his temperamental young son Susumu.

Naruse's second "political" film, Both You and I (Ore mo omae mo, 1946), is a revisiting of the salaryman genre of Flunky, Work Hard but this time the two salarymen, after being thoroughly humiliated and exploited by their boss, finally confront him and accuse him of wartime profiteering. They threaten to "stick together" and "fight for our rights" in the face of a threatened, but unspecified, reorganization of the company. (KG)

A child, living with relatives after his mother left him, experiences a series difficulties.

Sudo and Mori are two university students who make money by picking up rich girls in dance clubs and conning them into giving them cash. Mori is the brains of the operation, and Sudo is the suave dancer who picks up the girls. Over the course of the film, Sudo becomes involved with three different girls and is drawn into the gangster milieu, which he seems unable to resist even though he is responsible for his mother, grandmother, and sister, Masako. (Catherine Russell)

A Fond Face from the Past is also set in a rural community, specifically a village outside Kameoka, near Kyoto. In some ways this short, thirty-six-minute film is Naruse's most moving negotiation of the militarist restrictions of the time, perhaps because it is also his most direct engagement with the culture of war. When a newsreel comes to Kameoka featuring a local man named Yoichi, it causes some excitement in the community and, of course, in Yoichi's own family.... (KG)

Made as World War II wore on, This Happy Life is pure wartime propaganda, but of an unusual sort. There's little, if any, militarist feeling expressed - although the most sympathetic character preaches the joys of German cuisine. Rather, the film's mission is to instruct the home front, in great detail, on how to make do with the odd scraps of food and supplies available, and to demonstrate in various ways that people can be happy no matter what straitened circumstances they find themselves in (KG)

To apply this model of kitsch to a Japanese film from 1946 is to suggest that A Descendant of Urashima Taro constitutes a kind of phantasmagoria of the lost opportunities of a revolutionary democracy based in the collective aspiration for national renewal. As a studio product made under fairly strict terms of censorship, it is a film that does not take itself entirely seriously. (Catherine Russell)

Based on an original story by Ishizaka Yojiro, the film has a reflexive element by which it comments on its own process of taking the materials of everyday life and transforming them into narrative. This realist conceit is enhanced by the rural setting, which is photographed with some care, including the mountainous landscapes and the farmhouse interiors. (Catherine Russell)

White Beast is indicative of the new influences of the Hollywood psychological thriller on Naruse. (worldscinema.com)

As suggested by the title, this film takes up the theme of the city, beginning with a series of traveling shots from Chiyo's point o view on a bus leaving the countryside and entering the metropolitan cityscape. After some fruitless job hunting in downtown Tokyo, Chiyo accepts a job as a bar hostess in Shiba ward. Well away from glamorous Asakusa and Ginza, this is a neighborhood bar where the women are dirt poor, each having only one kimono to their name.... (KG)

Mother Never Dies offers a neat ideological harmonization of family, capitalism, and country in which the patriarchy is consolidated around the national spirit through the memory of a self-sacrificing mother. (Catherine Russell)

Hideko Takamine is the widow of the oldest son of an extended family -- and runs the family's grocery. The upcoming threat of super-marketization is mentioned in passing -- but not followed through here. Much of the machinations here involve a marriage proposal for one of the younger daughters. (imdb)

Kuniko Miyake (a perennial supporting actress in Ozu) inherits the reins of a cosmetics company after her husband dies. She and her younger sisters (Setsuko Wakayama and Yoko Katsuragi) initially live together. The two younger sisters are both smitten by Koji Tsuruta, but settle for less rewarding spouses. The older sister also remarries. All three then proceed to disentangle themselves from their improvident matches. (kerpan)

Naruse's reliance on actors is underlined by the roles of Takamine Hideko and Uehara Ken in a short film that Naruse made in 1955 as part of a Toho omnibus called The Kiss (Kuchizuke). The other two shorts in the complication are by Suzuko Hideo and Kakehi Masanori. Naruse's half-hour segment is called "Women's Ways," and it is interesting to see how he turns his marriage theme into a light comedy within which Takamine manages to add a level of melancholy through her performance. (Catherine Russell)

It is a twenty-five-minute episode of a four-part omnibus feature that was intended to showcase the postwar revival of Toho studio. (KG)

Omnibus of love stories from 1947 directed by famous directors, featuring big stars. (The Movie Database)