Tag: Ken Uehara

Undercurrent (夜の河, Kozaburo Yoshimura, 1956)

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Is it possible to be both married and personally and artistically fulfilled? Marriage hangs over Kiwa (Fujiko Yamamoto) like a looming cage in Kozaburo Yoshimura’s sensuous melodrama Undercurrent (夜の河, Yoru no Kawa, AKA Night River). Scripted not by his regular writer Kaneto Shindo but frequent Mikio Naruse collaborator Sumie Tanaka adapting a novel by Hisao Sawano, the film finds its heroine caught between tradition and modernity while struggling to maintain her position as an independent woman and rightful heir to her father’s kimono dyeing business.

Everyone also keeps telling her that kimono itself is dying out, a relic of a bygone past now that everyone wears Western dress. Even Kiwa’s younger sister Miyoko (Michiko Ono) dresses exclusively in Western fashions and moves to Tokyo on her marriage. An ancient capital, Kyoto is the centre of historical elegance and the last bastion of these “outdated ideals”, yet several shops in their area have closed recently and people do things differently now. A wealthy woman comes to the shop with some fabric directly, cutting out the middlemen and haggling for a discount while cheerfully asking for her cab fare to be covered when Kiwa refuses the job. The young man they’ve taken in as an apprentice, Toshio, leaves to work in an electric factory complaining that “master” and “apprentice” are outdated concepts and that it’s against the Labour Law to force him to work overtime. Kiwa’s father Yujiro (Eijiro Tono), meanwhile, thinks this is just an expression of Toshio’s lack of commitment and that it’s only right that an apprentice should be applying himself to learning his craft every waking moment of the day. 

He was after all once an apprentice himself, but is both proud that his daughter has surpassed him in skill and guilty, fearful that Kiwa has sacrificed her own life and happiness to devote herself to kimono dyeing which is why she has never married. On one level, he’s happy if she’s happy and willing to leave marriage up to her, but also wary of the social censure of the neighbours including his kimono dyeing mentor who gives him a telling-off for his failure as a father to find a match for his daughter. When rumours arise that Kiwa has entered an affair with a married professor, the lady who helped Yujiro get started in business more or less tells him he should get her married to keep her in line. If hadn’t been for the war, she says, Kiwa would have been safely married off long ago and would probably have a gaggle of children to look after which would obviously prevent her from pursuing her art as a kimono dyer though the lady herself has obviously gone on working. 

Kiwa is drawn Takemura (Ken Uehara ) firstly because he’s wearing a tie that features one of her signature dyes which implies some kind of affinity between them. That the fact that he was touring a Nara temple alone with his daughter may have suggested he was a widower, though in truth Kiwa always knew he was married and that may have been a key part of what attracted her to him. She is after all, as Yujiro’s mentor said, a woman and experiences romantic desire even if the mentor is wrong to say that Kiwa sublimates her loneliness through art when in reality the reverse is true. After meeting Takemura even Yujiro remarks that she seems more like a woman, implying that her industry and forthrightness lend her a masculine quality as does her determination to get on in business. She first strikes up a business relationship with the sleazy Omiya (Eitaro Ozawa) whose wife is always watching him like a hawk though she manages to rebuff his attentions while establishing herself as business woman and in demand kimono designer. In pursuit of Takemura she is the one bringing him gifts and inviting him out for walks while Takemura remains somewhat conflicted and pulled along her wake.

Yet for all that, none of her family members really question the fact that she’s been carrying on with a married man and rather seem slightly relieved that she’s discovered an interest in romance or perhaps just anything outside of kimono dyeing. Even Takemura’s daughter suspects they’re romantically involved and doesn’t seem to mind. Yujiro remarks on Kiwa suddenly using the colour red which she never previously liked and it does seem to echo her reawakening passion. Takemura is also researching red fruit flies, which is less romantic, but also hints his barely suppressed longing. The film seems to align him with yellow flowers and Kiwa with pink. When they’re caught in a rainstorm and refuge in an inn owned by Kiwa’s childhood friend, the entire room in bathed in the glow of the Daimonji fire festival as their passions finally, and perhaps unwisely, overtake them as Takemura announces he’s thinking of moving far away perhaps to avoid this forbidden romance or otherwise for the health of his ailing wife who has been a Kyoto hospital for the last two years.

It’s finding out about Mrs Takemura’s likely terminal illness that seems to implode Kiwa’s romantic fantasy. After they’d made love for the first time, she had told Takemura that if she became pregnant she’d raise the child alone without intruding on his family life, which is to say she wasn’t really envisaging one with him. Her horror is on one level framed as guilt, that she now sees she’s committed an act of betrayal and resents Takemura when he tells her “it won’t be much longer” as if he were counting down the days until his wife passed away. Or worse, that he or others suspected that Kiwa willed her dead. But in reality the reverse is true. Mrs Takemura’s death is an existential threat to Kiwa’s independence. She doesn’t want to get married, even if loves Takemura, because if she did she wouldn’t be able to maintain her independence or career as a kimono dyer. She really does mean it when she says that likes it best when it’s just she and her father in their “cramped” old-fashioned dyeing shop without even an apprentice. 

A tortured art student who seems to pine for her tells her as much, disappointed in her for her relationship with Takemura not out of moral censure but because he fears she’s betraying her art. Okamoto is much younger than her and she’s not interested in him romantically even if he’s painting slightly lewd interpretations of his mental image of her. At one point he appears with a bandage around his neck that implies he may have tried to take his own life and eventually announces he’s leaving Kyoto because he can’t secure his identity there. Ironically he’s happy that Kiwa and Takemura are now free to love each other when the opposite is now true. Now that he’s no longer a married man, Kiwa can no longer love him and is denied the possibility of having both romantic and artistic fulfilment. She is perhaps free in another way, backed by a deep red cloth hanging up to dry as she watches the May Day parade pass by with all of its waving red flags having embarked on a life that is defiantly of her choosing and fulfilled by the passion of art.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Husband and Wife (夫婦, Mikio Naruse, 1953)

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Kikuko (Yoko Sugi) climbs the stairs to the roof of a department store and pauses at the top looking down on her friends below, but they appear to be looking down on her. They’re disappointed. She looks so “provincial”, even though she has no children and therefore more time to spend on herself. They’re envious of her “freedom” to return home late while they have to get back to their husbands or in-laws, but Kikuno isn’t really free at all while trapped in a stifling marriage to the incredibly dull and petulant Isaku (Ken Uehara). 

One of a series of films about marriage and originally envisaged as a sequel to Repast until Setsuko Hara fell ill, Husband and Wife (夫婦, Fufu) paints a rather bleak picture of married life even by Naruse’s standards. The couple are quite literally but also spiritually “homeless” in that they cannot find a home to share, while the absence of a domestic space to call their own prevents them from solidifying their marriage. They’re pushed out of Kikuko’s parents’ home because her brother’s getting married and they need the space, but Isaku drags his feet over finding somewhere else and leaves much of the legwork to Kikuko alone. The main problem seems to be that Isaku can’t afford anything decent, which places a strain on his male pride, but in a repeated motif, rather than confront the situation, he ignores it completely and then crassly presses his recently widowed colleague to let them rent a room in his now much emptier house. 

It’s a mystery why Isaku has so many financial problems when he and Takemura (Rentaro Mikuni) work for the same company, save that Isaku had evidently spent some time working in the provinces, and his colleague had already bought a home with no apparent money worries, but it further sets the two men apart and fuels Isaku’s sense of inadequacy. Having returned from a leave of absence following his wife’s death, Takemura is grief-stricken and apparently uxorious. He complains that he’ll never find another woman like his late wife, all while Isaku won’t shut up about the house and others relentlessly encourage him to remarry. Nevertheless, after the couple move in with him, a natural connection arises between Kikuko and Takemura who is Isaku’s total opposite, both in his treatment of Kikuko and general personality. Where Isaku is sullen and resentful, Takemura is cheerful despite his grief and generous of spirit. Kikuko effectively becomes a wife to both men, taking care of each of them by cooking and cleaning, but while Takemura goes out of his way to thank her, all Isaku does is run her down and humiliate her in front of company.

Then again, having fallen in love with Kikuko precisely because she is a “proper wife,” Takemura then runs his own late wife down by complaining that she wasn’t very pretty and couldn’t cook. The only thing she had going for her was her health, and then she died. He says got a bum deal, and that Kikuko has shown him a different side of womanhood. When two colleagues come to the house and compliment Kikuko’s cooking but are surprised when she eats nothing herself (because they have no money), Isaku responds to their assertion that it’s difficult to be a housewife by replying that men work hard all day while women “only” have to look after the house. For her part, Kikuko says that she was happier when she was working. Men can fall in love several times, but once a woman’s married her romantic life is over. As her friend tells her, men soon get bored of their wives and hers has already taken a mistress at work. 

At several points and with the women in earshot, the men warn each other about the pitfalls of marriage. Irritated that Kikuko has returned to their home on New Year’s Eve after becoming fed up with Isaku, her father advises her brother that women show their true faces after six or seven years and it’s going to horrify him. Isaku tells him not to be too nice or obedient during the early days because his wife will get used to it, while Kikuko counters that men are overgrown children and as long as you make sure to cradle them like babies everything will be fine. Neither of them seem to have a very positive idea of what marriage should be and frame it almost in terms of a war in which they are continually at odds with each other. Isaku describes a husband and wife as a pair of scissors, intending it as a positive metaphor about how one half can’t cut alone, before reframing it as two knives coming together. He becomes unpleasant and chauvinistic, blaming Kikuko for everything by complaining that it’s her fault that he wears a torn up old coat that causes him some embarrassment in front of his boss and a tactless geisha, while criticising her for not having the bath ready when he comes home tired from working all day. Kikuko points out that men seem to assume they’re the only ones who get tired while her loved up brother swears he’ll be different and even if they’re in the honeymoon phase, they do seem much happier and more suited than the already resentful Kikuko and Isaku.

It’s the sister-in-law who throws them a lifeline by introducing them to a relative looking to rent a vacant room, allowing them a means to save their marriage by leaving Takemura’s house. Increasingly resentful of the growing attachment between Kikuko and Takemura, Isaku starts avoiding coming home and hanging out with a young woman at the office with, at least, the danger of a burgeoning affair for which he’s taken to task by Takemura. As Takemura says, it’s not much of a marriage if Isaku can’t trust his wife while Kikuko is eventually so sick of the cold shoulder and constant denigration that she considers leaving him. The new apartment finally gives them a domestic space they can call their own, but it comes with the caveat. The landlady doesn’t allow children because the tenant next door is an ikebana teacher who demands peace and quiet, but Kikuko is in fact already pregnant which might present another means of saving their marriage by becoming a family but Isaku immediately rejects it. He complains he doesn’t have any more money to move again and tells Kikuko to get an abortion, strong-arming her when she refuses. Kikuko can’t go through with it and the nicest thing Isaku says to her in the entire picture is that they can go home, he’s giving in and will raise the child even if it’s difficult. But even this bittersweet moment seems more like condemning them to marriage rather than repairing their relationship with Isaku only grudgingly accepting, most likely because he realises that his marriage is dead anyway if he forces Kikuko to give up their child against her wishes. Despite the changing season, the air between them remains frosty, and marriage is exposed for the prison that it is trapping each of them in loneliness and resentment rather than bringing them together in joy as they prepare to become a family rather than just husband and wife.

Husband and Wife  screened at Japan Society New York as part of Mikio Naruse: The World Betrays Us – Part I.

A Brother and His Younger Sister (兄とその妹, Yasujiro Shimazu, 1939)

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A young man’s love of go ends up getting him into hot water at work in Yasujiro Shimazu’s surprisingly progressive shomingeki, A Brother and his Younger Sister (兄とその妹, Ani to Sono Imoto). It seems office politics might not have changed all that much in the last 80 years even if many other things have, but conversely the film seems to have more to say about the changing nature of gender roles and attitudes towards women in a time in which it was becoming possible for a woman to live a fully independent life. 

This window wouldn’t last very long and the situation largely reversed itself even amid the supposed equality enshrined in the post-war constitution, but Fumiko (Michiko Kuwano) at least has a well paying job as a secretary at a large company and consequently little desire to marry even at the comparatively late age of 24. Her earning capacity is later put forward as a reason that there “aren’t many opportunities” for marriage as men apparently feel threatened and embarrassed especially if their salary is lower than hers. It’s not exactly that she’s against marriage, but as she can support herself and is otherwise happy living with her brother Keisuke (Shin Saburi) and his wife Akiko (Kuniko Miyake). She doesn’t see the need to rush into such an important decision. Though she might change her mind if the right person came along, for the moment she just isn’t interested. Then again, Akiko’s sucking of her finger when she’s ironically cut by a thorn on a bouquet of roses from an unwanted admirer might suggest another reason marriage is not on her radar.

Her suitor, Michio (Ken Uehara), despite his handsomeness is a little creepy in his courtship and cannot seem to take a hint that Fumiko isn’t interested in him. A friend of her boss, he has a habit of dropping into the office for no real reason and attempts to ask her out when the boss isn’t there. She lies and tells him she’s married already (to a penniless painter!) but after the boss reveals the truth it doesn’t seem to occur to Michio that if she made up a story like that it’s because she doesn’t want to go out with him. We’re told that Michio studied at Oxford and is attracted to Fumiko because he’s impressed by her language skills, but he’s also some kind of stockbroker which quickly paints him as no good seeing as the film seems to have a minor message about how dabbling in stocks and shares is little better than gambling and definitely dangerous.

One of Keisuke’s colleagues has been given a warning because there’s a rumour that he’s into shares while another has apparently been demoted because it came to light that he had a fondness for horse racing. More than a moral judgement, it seems the reason is that these sorts of hobbies may eventually lead someone towards embezzling from the company to cover their debts. Keisuke’s supervisor is also worried that his 18-year-old son is refusing to go to university and apparently wants to join some kind of “investment society” which admittedly does not sound like a good idea so he wants Keisuke to talk him out of it. The big boss, meanwhile, who is also Michio’s uncle, turns out to be into shares himself which makes him a very compromised authority figure. 

Keisuke is not into shares, but he is very into the game of go which causes him to stay out until late at night playing with his bosses. He does this because he genuinely likes playing, but Fumiko worries that his colleagues will come to resent him assuming that he does so to curry favour. Apparently, something similar happened at his previous job which is why he ended up quitting abruptly. As he was quite lucky to get this one despite how impressed everyone seems by his capabilities, it would be better if that didn’t happen again. Nevertheless, the perspicacious Fumiko turns out to be right as as his co-worker Yukito (Reikichi Kawamura) becomes increasingly jealous of his success fearing that he will leapfrog him to take the shortly to open up supervisor position which he believes to be his simply because he’s been there longer (which is generally how things work at Japanese companies). Consequently, starts a series of rumours that Keisuke is a snitch who got the horse racing guy demoted and is only in his position thanks to schmoozing with the bosses.

This obviously leaves him with a huge dilemma when his boss asks him to put in a good word for Michio with Fumiko whom he is pretty sure won’t be interested. To his credit, Keisuke maintains that it’s up to her and his career is nowhere near as important as her happiness though he is also aware it’s going to be embarrassing for him when she says no. Fumiko knows this too, and it’s clear that she also feels incredibly awkward when he puts it to her but only asks for a few minutes to think before offering her primary justification for refusing which would be that she fears Keisuke’s colleagues will resent him even more if they come to the conclusion that he sold his own sister in the hope of career advancement. This does in fact turn out to be the case as Yukito has already started a rumour about a dynastic marriage that turns the rest of Keisuke’s colleagues against him especially as he’s given the promotion immediately before he was going to tell the boss Fumiko isn’t interested. 

Confronted by the horse racing guy, Keisuke ends up quitting again after getting into a physical confrontation with a seemingly remorseful Yukito who probably didn’t mean for it to go that far. Keisuke quits because he won’t have people think he was gossiping behind their backs and is offended by this attack on his integrity, but his decision is also a rebuke against this infinitely corrupt employment regime in which hypocritical bosses hand out jobs to their favourites and maybe do expect that Keisuke will persuade his sister to sacrifice herself for his career. She meanwhile is portrayed as an independent woman, but ironically rejects the marriage to save her brother’s reputation though perhaps equally she feared her “no” would not be enough on its own. Then again, she had apparently turned down several suitors already and no one really expected her to say yes this time unless she’d suddenly begun to feel anxious about her age and declining prospects. 

Nevertheless, it’s refreshing that the film does not force Fumiko into accepting marriage as so many others would and in fact legitimises her opposition to it and right to live as an independent woman for as long as she chooses. Keisuke is also in some ways rewarded for quitting his job at the corrupt company in immediately getting another one from a former co-worker who’s since started his own business and wants to expand to Manchuria. But this final scene almost seems tacked on for the censor’s benefit. It is perhaps a little unusual for 1939 that the film has so far made no mention of Japan’s imperial ambitions nor made any kind of patriotic appeal. It’s even been quite pro-internationalist in the talk of people speaking English and engaging in European trade (even if the currency trading Michio’s doing is definitely framed as bad). Fumiko spots a little patch of grass clinging onto the plane as they take off for Manchuria with Keisuke remarking that he hopes this little piece of Japan will take root on the continent. On one level, it suggests that contemporary Japan was too corrupt for an “honest” man like Keisuke to prosper while Manchuria will offer greater freedom for himself and the independent modern girl Fumiko (who declares she won’t marry until Keisuke’s successful), but it’s also of course an unpalatable advocation for the ongoing imperialist expansion which seems so out of keeping with everything that’s gone before. Even so, the message is clear that it’s Keisuke and Fumiko who are in the right and should be allowed to live just as they are in a society free of judgement and hypocrisy.

Sound in the Mist (霧の音, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1956)

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In the opening scenes of Hiroshi Shimizu’s Sound in the Mist (霧の音, Kiri no Oto), a young woman tells another that “as women, we need to create our own happiness,” though as it turns out it’s something that neither of them are really able to do. A classic melodrama, the film once again hints at Shimizu’s mistrust of romance and the frustrating inability of men and women to communicate or embrace their love for one another even when the seeming barriers preventing it have been removed.

To that extent, it’s interesting that the chief disagreement between unhappily married botanist Kazuhiko (Ken Uehara) and his wife Katsuyo is over her feminist politics and desire to devote herself to women’s emancipation under the new post-war constitution. The main bone of contention is that she wants to sell a mountain owned by Kazuhiko’s family to fund her political career though as he later says this mountain is his life. In any case he lets her sell it, believing there’s no point putting up a fight. He puts up even less of one in his relationship with Tsuruko (Michiyo Kogure), his assistant who is hopelessly in love with him yet after his wife’s angry visit decides to absent herself feeling as if she’s in the way.

It was her friend Ayako, a Tokyo dancer, who told her that women need to make their own happiness but in the end she couldn’t do it either. She was similarly involved with a weak-willed married man who continued to vacillate over leaving his wife offering the justification that he didn’t want to mess things up for his children. Eventually the pair find escape through double suicide which only emphasises the futility of their romantic connection. Tsuruko similarly makes several comments about the idea of death and dying, stating that if she were to die she’d want to go to a particular spot in the mountain which seems like heaven to her.

Though Katsuyo describes it as a “filthy” place the cabin does indeed become a kind of haven, a bubble of apparently chaste love and longing inhabited only by Kazuhiko and Tsuruko as the voiceover says hiding out from post-war chaos. Tsuruko seems to be the kind of woman Kazuhiko regards as the ideal wife in that she cares for him and supports his work even if he tells Katsuyo he just needed someone to run errands and do the grocery shopping so Tsuruko is there as his maid. Both are at pains to emphasise that no physical relationship exists between them but are otherwise prevented from acting on the their love because of Kazuhiko’s marriage along the existence of his daughter, Yuko (Keiko Fujita), who may be adversely affected by her parents’ decision to divorce in an age when such things were less common.

Kazuhiko continues to return to the mountain cabin which has since become an inn at regular intervals to see the Harvest Moon, as does Tsuruko though she also carries a degree of shame that makes her fear re-encountering Kazuhiko having become a geisha apparently solely to ensure her proximity to the mountain. Once again filming with the gentle lateral motion familiar from his later films, Shimizu focuses on the landscape and suggests that these lovers are only free to love in the natural world unconstrained by the petty concerns of civilisation which prevent them from embracing their desires. The sound in the mist is perhaps that of Kazuhiko’s latent romanticism and the implication that to him it may be better to suffer for love than to accept it. The same may be true for Tsuruko who is equally powerless if filled with regret that in the end she gave up so easily rather than fight for the love of her life.

On the other hand, the cabin seems to have given rise to a love match between Kazuhiko’s daughter Yuko and her husband who vow to continue the tradition of coming to the inn on the occasion of the Harvest Moon which marks both their wedding anniversary and the time they met. Yuko’s melancholy expression on coming to an understanding of her father’s “special memories” suggests a gentle sympathy but also that this younger generation is freer to love though no less romantic.The poignant closing scenes in which Kazuhiko wanders into the mist are nevertheless filled with irresolution, regret, and a longing that express only a deep sadness for the misconnections and misunderstandings of a less open past.

Sound in the Mist screens at Japan Society New York on May 23/30 as part of Hiroshi Shimizu Part 2: The Postwar and Independent Years.

365 Nights (三百六十五夜, Kon Ichikawa, 1948)

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For his second film at Shintoho, Kon Ichikawa had wanted to adapt a story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa that later inspired Rashomon, but was handed a standard melodrama to direct first. Ichikawa apparently did not think much of the novel the film was to be based on nor the script by Kennosuke Tateoka which he subsequently brushed up with the help of his new wife Natto Wada, and it’s not difficult to see why he might have felt he had an uphill battle. Melodrama is after all a genre that is founded on coincidence, though 365 Nights (三百六十五夜, Sambyaku-rokujugo ya) quickly strains credulity with the sheer number of unlikely events and surprise reappearances along with its rather strange take on the contemporary post-war society which is undoubtedly influenced by the demands of the Occupation censorship regime. 

Indeed, the setting itself seems reminiscent of 1930s cinema following the dashing hero Koroku, played by the equally dashing Ken Uehara, an architect who has walked away from his privileged upbringing as the son of a successful construction magnate. His problem is that he’s being aggressively courted by the haughty Ranko (Hideko Takamine), also the daughter of a successful but shady businessman, who to modern eyes is basically stalking him. Grinning with an evil glint in her eye, she tells her minion Tsugawa (Yuji Hori) that she’ll have seduced Koroku within 365 days which by melodrama standards seems to give her quite a lot of leeway.

Clueing us up to her villainy, Ranko is always seen wearing incredibly stylish Western outfits but otherwise behaves in a transgressively masculine fashion ordering her male employees about while set on the sexual conquest of Koroku who despises her for everything she is. It’s difficult not to see an inherent criticism of the new post-war woman and an anxiety regarding the power that comes with wealth being wielded by someone who is not a man. The contrast between Ranko and traditional femininity is rammed home by the fact that Teruko (Hisako Yamane), the daughter of the landlady in the house where Koroku finds new lodging after moving home to escape Ranko, is always dressed in kimono and otherwise naive and innocent. 

This positions Ranko, and her minion Tsugawa who is also in love with her, as the villains who are rebelling against the kind of earnestness expressed by Koroku and Teruko. From more humble origins, Tsugawa is deeply resentful of Kokoku’s class privilege and feels that he looks down on him which is one reason he seeks revenge by destroying his life along with his sexual jealously that Ranko pays him no attention yet is fixated on Kokoku perhaps precisely because he is entirely uninterested in her though it remains mystery why you’d want to be married to someone who strongly dislikes you. 

Yet for all his own earnestness, Koroku is almost betrayed by the capitalist father of whom he also seems to disapprove when he asks him to consent to an arranged marriage with Ranko to save his business. Meanwhile, it also transpires that Teruko’s father has been absent from her life because he two has a criminal past further tainting the legacy each of them bear. Ichikawa stages each evolution of their relationship at the same, noirish street corner that seems to exist as a kind of border between the illicit underworld that seeps out from Tsugawa’s bar into the post-war society, and the geniality represented by Teruko’s otherwise nice, middle-class home. 

It’s the this transgressive quality, of being caught between these two worlds, that starts to eat away at Koroku leaving him a broken and shabby man little better than a tramp. In a break with melodrama norms, though he is aware that he has led Teruko into Tsugawa’s trap he comes to believe that she has betrayed him while she clings fiercely to her love and in the end attempts to sacrifice it basically giving Koroku to Ranko whom she believes can better care for him in his now corrupted state. Though events become grim with a wedding that is staged like a funeral and takes place at a death bed, there is also the sense that something must come right that seems a little incongruous and perhaps a concession to the censors board as may be the coda implying that Ranko, despite having undergone a kind of redemption, will also have to pay for all her dodgy dealings. Though clearly hampered by the material, Ichikawa crafts some stunning images such as the final scene at Tsugawa’s bar along with a surprisingly energetic action sequence during which Koroku fights off burglars at Teruko’s home and wins her heart with his manliness. In any case despite the hints at redemption the implication remains that this is a world dark at its core in which not even the earnest can escape its creeping corruption. 

Nightshade Flower (夜来香, Kon Ichikawa, 1951)

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A couple who met briefly in Manchuria are reunited in Kobe five years later but find their joy short-lived amid the vagaries of the post-war society in Kon Ichikawa’s tragic romance, Nightshade Flower (夜来香, Ieraishan). The film takes its name from a song “夜来香” known as “Ieraishan” in Japanese, a transliteration of the Mandarin pronunciation (yèláixiāng) in katakana, which was released in a Chinese-language version in Shanghai in 1944 performed by Manchurian Japanese actress Yoshiko Yamaguchi (山口淑子) who also went by the names Ri Koran/Li Hsiang-lan (李香蘭) and later Shirley Yamaguchi at various times in her career. A song of lost love, it seems to echo a sense of despair among the wartime generation who cannot reconcile their pasts with the post-war present. 

Akiko (Asami Kuji), a sex worker, first meets Seki (Ken Uehara), an army doctor, when he pulls her out of the way of an oncoming vehicle in a crowded market place in Northern China in June, 1944. As she is dressed in cheongsam and angrily shouts at him in Mandarin, he assumes her to be Chinese and carries on along his way while she remains ambivalent about the encounter especially as the sleeve of her dress has been torn. In any case, it’s clear that the situation has become precarious and most of the Japanese population are preparing for evacuation. The owner of the brothel where Akiko and her friend Gin (Harue Tone) are employed has hopes of carrying on her business further behind the lines where army bases are still in operation though the pair would prefer to head home as soon as possible, jumping off the repatriation truck organised for them by the madam with the intention of returning to the city and boarding the next one bound straight for the mainland. 

But Gin falls off a cliff and injures her leg, leaving Akiko to go in search of a doctor incongruously rocking up at Seki’s medical clinic. Though she is originally unwilling to have him treat Gin, she soon comes around and the pair begin seeing each other with Akiko pledging to stay behind after putting Gin on a truck. Nevertheless the pair are separated during an air raid with Akiko believing that Seki has been killed in a direct hit to the shrine they were sheltering in when he left their foxhole to check on a crying baby. Five years later, Seki has returned to Kobe to look for Akiko but has had no luck while staying with the family of one of his men, Toshio (Yuji Kawakita), who has fallen into post-war despair and given up his promising future in medicine to peddle black market drugs with shady fixer Kameyama (Reikichi Kawamura). 

The crisis comes when Seki realises he is losing his sight, apparently a delayed reaction to the head injury he sustained in Manchuria which was not fully treated due to the war’s end. Though he reunites with Akiko, he believes that he can no longer have a future with her because of his impending blindness and in fact that his life is now over. Akiko meanwhile has also fallen into despair. Believing Seki was dead she gave up on the idea of finding him and has returned to sex work, she and Gin working in a small backstreet bar and living in adjacent rooms of a rundown tenement block. Seki had always known that she was a sex worker, but she believes he may now reject her because she has failed to live up to the promise she made him of living a more “honest” life ironically because without him she had no reason to do so. 

Meanwhile, Seki is intent of saving Toshio whom he had first met as a naive private openly crying over the death of his mother having picked up a venereal disease after losing his virginity to a sex worker in an attempt to overcome his grief. Toshio is an embodiment of the despair felt by young men who went to war as innocent teenagers and are filled with disillusionment and confusion. Though Toshio is luckier than most who struggle to find work in the difficult post-war economy, he came from a middle-class medical family and if he finishes his training of which he only has a year left he would inherit his father’s clinic, he no longer sees a future for himself and actively rejects his privilege as an act of self-harm by taking up with Kameyama and becoming involved with crime. He resents his father for remarrying soon after his mother died, taking the family maid as his second wife, and is reluctant to marry their nurse, Chiyo (Chiaki Tsukioka), who is also Kameyama’s younger sister, as everyone expects him to despite otherwise carrying on an affair with her which later results in a pregnancy. He says that he wants to earn his own living and be his own man but claims he cannot see the bright future Seki speaks of for him and continues along a dark path of crime and vice. 

The constant rumblings of the train along with its flickering light strongly foreshadow the tragic denouement but also hint at the automatic motion of society that damns the trio and frustrates their attempts to move on from the war and find happiness in its aftermath. Even so, to modern eyes the motif of Seki’s literal blindness which robs him of the ability to perceive a happy future with Akiko cannot but seem a little ableist even as Akiko points out that many men lost their sight in the war but are living good lives with wives and children and that she does not see his disability as a barrier to their ability to make new lives for themselves in the post-war society much as he doesn’t regard her past in sex work as a reason to reject her.

Even so, Seki is dragged into the post-war morass after becoming involved with Kameyama in a futile attempt to save Toshio only to discover that Kameyama has betrayed them by getting them both to work on the same job as a payment for a debt taken out by Seki on Toshio’s behalf to free him from his life of crime. Ichikawa embraces a sense of melodrama with frequent closeups and an underlying theatricality, but also captures something of post-war confusion in the noirish fog that surrounds Akiko as she considers one last job to pay for probably useless medical treatment to save Seki’s sight. The cruelty of the ending is in its way too difficult to bear but perhaps apt for the view from 1951 in which the possibility of escaping the legacy of wartime corruption lies only in painful memories. 

Late Chrysanthemums (晩菊, Mikio Naruse, 1954)

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The post-war economy was difficult for most, though by the mid-1950s the situation was perhaps improving. The four former geishas at the centre of Naruse’s Late Chrysanthemums (晩菊, Bangiku) , adapted once again from a series of stories by Fumiko Hayashi, are all in their way attempting to find a way through to the modern society but are nevertheless stuck in the past, unable to move forward as women more or less left behind by a changing idea of “modernity” which no longer has a place for them. 

The most successful of the women, Kin (Haruko Sugimura), has become a ruthless moneylender engaging in real estate speculation. As the film opens she’s waiting for the arrival of a business associate for a meeting about a house she’s trying to flip, clear that they’ll need to kick out the desperate widow who is currently living there. Kin has lent money to her old “friends” with whom she spent her youth as a geisha before the war. Otamae (Chikako Hosokawa) and Otomi (Yuko Mochizuki) are widows with unfilial children, Otamae now working as a maid in a love hotel while her son Kiyoshi (Hiroshi Koizumi) struggles to find a job, and Otomi a washerwoman selling blackmarket cigarettes as a sideline while her daughter Sachiko (Ineko Arima) is a forthright modern woman who refuses to enable her mother’s irresponsible vices. Nobu (Sadako Sawamura), meanwhile, married late to a man from outside of Japan and has opened a small bar where she hopes to start a family, brushing off Kin’s insensitive insistence that she is already too old to bear a child. 

Kin has prospered and become wealthy, but she’s done so largely at the sacrifice of maternity. She disparages the other women, telling them she’s grateful not to have had children because not even they can be depended upon, but is also embittered that she’s missed out on life and love, substituting material wealth for emotional fulfilment. Otomi and Otamae have problems with their children and regrets about their lives, but they both resent Kin for her heartless rationality. Kin is in a sense supporting them with her money, even if she wants it back with interest, and continues to see herself as doing a favour for women she considers friends, hurt that they often run or hide when they see her coming but insisting that she is only trying to survive while implying that the other women have failed to achieve the self-sufficiency she has achieved because they’ve lived irresponsibly by placing their trust in men and frittering their money away on the temporary pleasures of drink and gambling. 

Otomi’s thoroughly modern daughter Sachiko thinks something much the same. When Otomi approaches her for a loan, she says no, fearing that her mother has another lover she will end up subsidising or that she will spend it all on drink and pachinko. Sachiko does, however, offer to buy her mother dinner which at least ensures she will get a good meal. Sachiko’s shock news is that she plans to marry an older man, though he seems not to be particularly wealthy seeing as she later sarcastically asks Kin to buy her a house because they’ll be living with other tenants in a small flat. Otomi objects, not only because Sachiko hasn’t mentioned any of this to her before, but because she thinks Sachiko is being overly practical and gives her some surprisingly transgressive advice to the effect that she should have her fun with various men while she’s young so she’ll be able to figure out which is the best to spend a life with. Sachiko quite reasonably asks how that worked out for her, to which Otomi obviously has no answer and leaves the restaurant feeling dejected enough to ask Kin for the money she was after instead. 

Otamae’s problem is of the opposite order. Her son Kiyoshi cheerfully rolls home in the morning after staying out all night and tells her he’s become a kind of gigalo, dating a slightly older woman who is technically the kept mistress of another man. The situation is ironic in the extreme, but despite her own past as a geisha, Otamae doesn’t like it that her son is engaging in a compensated relationship, while he suggests that perhaps she messed him up by making him refer to her as his sister in public. Eventually Kiyoshi is offered a job in a mine in Hokkaido, salmoning the post-war migratory movement and leaving his mother (as well as the mistress) behind to fuel the economic recovery from the provinces. 

Otomi and Otamae have only each other to rely on, men and children have all proved undependable. Kin, the most fiercely independent, is literally haunted by the spectre of failed romance. Nobu, snaps that Kin made her money by swindling her clients, which might be why she takes the side of Seki (Bontaro Miake), a man who tried to commit double suicide with Kin but survived and was ruined. Kin sees it differently. Seki tried to kill her when she refused to die with him, so understandably she is not keen to reconnect. Nobu advises him to visit her and ask for money as “compensation”, which whichever way you look at it is crass and troubling, that Kin is expected to compensate a man for his ruined prospects caused by his obsessive romantic violence towards her which she claims has put her off men for life. Nevertheless, she continues to meditate on the memory of Tabe (Ken Uehara) whom she loved when he was a student, even visiting him in his Hiroshima barracks after he was drafted. She is thrilled to receive a letter from her first love, but declares herself disappointed minutes after he arrives for a visit. Tabe is just another failed salaryman who thinks women like her have it easy and harps on about how looking at his “old” wife makes him nostalgic for the women he loved in his youth. Like everyone else, he’s after her money. Kin burns the photo of him in uniform and gives up any lingering dream she might have had of romantic fulfilment. 

The women find themselves trapped by conflicting visions of “modernity” which are wildly different from those of their youth. They miss their “carefree” lives as geishas, now perhaps somewhat romanticised, along with the misplaced idealism of their time of Manchuria, while lamenting that as single older women they cannot be anything other than dependent. Only Kin is able to achieve self-sufficiency, but does so effectively as the film suggests at the cost of her “femininity”, becoming hard and cold, ruthlessly practical but not perhaps uncaring even as she continues to subsidise the only “friends” she has perhaps in the knowledge that they fiercely resent her. Yet their lives continue. Nobu runs her bar, Otomi and Otamae send their children off with grudging respect while vowing to follow their examples, and Kin, after a moment of crisis, ventures off towards new prospects. For good or ill they shift towards the modern world, more understanding of its rhythms and their place within it than before, but perhaps no more secure.

Sound of the Mountain (山の音, Mikio Naruse, 1954)

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“All I can do for you now is set you free”, a failed father laments. Mikio Naruse is renowned as a pessimist according to whom we are always betrayed by the world in which we live, yet bleak as it sometimes is 1954’s Sound of the Mountain (山の音, Yama no Oto) offers us what in Narusean terms at least might be considered a happy ending. Adapting a novel by Yasunari Kawabata, Naruse and his screenwriter Yoko Mizuki stop their story a little before the original’s conclusion offering an “open prospect” in which the chastened patriarch is forced into retreat, setting the young ones free while reflecting on paternal failures both national and personal. 

Now in late middle age, CEO Shingo (So Yamamura) is beginning to notice things he perhaps hadn’t before or had merely brushed aside such as the various ways the women around him continue to suffer because of inherently unfair patriarchal social codes. He dotes on his cheerful daughter-in-law Kikuko (Setsuko Hara) but is also aware his son/employee Shuichi (Ken Uehara) is having an affair. Confronted, Shuichi pledges to end the relationship but asks his father if he has honestly remained faithful all his life. Shingo doesn’t exactly deny anything, but remarks that it justifies nothing and his son ought to know better. 

According to Shingo, a man’s success is affirmed if he lives out his life unharmed but one’s success as a parent depends solely on that of the marriages of one’s children and on that front at least Shingo appears to be a failure. Shuichi offers barbed comments about his wife that sound like jokes but clearly aren’t, responding to query as to why they have no children with an excuse that his wife is a child herself, Kikuko’s face contorting momentarily in pain and shame at her husband’s cutting remark yet the only sign of childishness that we see in her is oft remarked cheerfulness. The Ogata household is currently down a maid and it’s Kikuko who’s been picking up the slack as perhaps a daughter-in-law is expected to do, taking care of the household and ensuring her in-laws are well cared for. Ironically enough, the Ogatas love her like a daughter, in part because of her ability to conform to what is expected of a wife despite their son’s indifference, though Shingo is perhaps learning to see past Kikuko’s placid expression, so like the impassive noh mask passed to him by a deceased friend, in the brief flickers of her discomfort. The old couple discuss a double suicide of a couple their age who have decided to leave quietly of their own volition with bleak humour, a look of such total and abject despair passing over Kikuko’s face as she replies to Shingo’s question if she too would write a note if she planned to die with her husband that she might leave one for him. 

The ill-defined relationship between Kikuko and her father-in-law is in essence paternal but profoundly felt, founded on a shared sense of connection and a deep respect. It stands in contrast, however, to that with his own daughter, Fusako (Chieko Nakakita), who returns home to her parents having discovered that her husband is also having an affair. In a sense, this reaction is a facet of post-war freedom, Shingo’s wife Yasuko (Teruko Nagaoka) may suspect her husband had other women but would have pretended not to and in any case would never leave an otherwise successful marriage over such a “trivial” matter. Fusako, meanwhile, has the freedom to demand better and to leave if she doesn’t get it but continues to hesitate blaming her father’s indifference towards her for her husband’s lack of respect something which she believes also fed into his poor choice of match. 

Cheerful, stoical Kikuko meanwhile finds herself caught between tradition and modernity unhappy in her marriage but uncertain if she has the right to escape it. Despite his parents’ niceness, Shuichi has grown into a cruel and selfish man, running down his wife and neglecting his work to romance his father’s secretary, who is not the mistress (not that she wouldn’t like to be), and apparently a violent drunk who routinely beats his girlfriend, a war widow and independent woman who sees nothing wrong in dating a married man because his wife is only waiting for one certain to return. Mirroring Kikuko, Kinuko (Rieko Sumi) is also pregnant but transgressively plans to have the child and raise it alone (supported by her friend and roommate). Telling no one, Kikuko learns that she is expecting but unilaterally opts for an abortion telling her husband that she cannot in good conscience give birth to his child knowing the kind of man he is. Confronting Shuichi, Shingo describes it as a kind of suicide and he is at least right in that she kills the image of herself as the good wife but does so by choosing her own integrity, seizing her agency in rejecting a dissatisfying present to seek a happier future. 

By contrast, we get the impression that Fusako, who has two children already, will likely return to her husband. Shuichi has the talk with his brother-in-law his mother hoped he would, but bonds with him in male solidarity, excusing his affair while advancing that Fusako doesn’t understand that he is merely working hard for their family laying bare a fundamental disconnect in the thinking of men and women further borne out by Yasuko’s assertion that men and women deal with sorrow differently. It’s this series of disconnects, between men and women, parents and children, that Shingo is beginning to bridge only to be confronted with his own patriarchal failures. While he and his wife are seemingly happy enough, he brushing off her self-deprecating remark that he was “unlucky” in marrying her only because her prettier sister died, his children’s marriages have each failed. His failure stands in for that of his generation, realising that he all he can do for them now is set them free. Meeting Kikuko in a park with wide open vistas, oddly like the final meeting of doomed lovers aware they must now part, Shingo vows retreat, planning to retire and move to the country with his wife as if liberating the youth of Japan from the oppressive social codes of the past in ceding the “open prospects” of the post-war society to his surrogate daughter in order that she might at least seize her freedom to chase her own happiness. 

Untamed (あらくれ, Mikio Naruse, 1957)

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“Don’t let guys control you. You have to make them men” the heroine of Mikio Naruse’s Taisho-era drama Untamed (あらくれ, Arakure, AKA Untamed Woman) advises a former rival, yet largely fails to do so herself in the fiercely patriarchal post-Meiji society. Based on a serialised novel by Shusei Tokuda published in 1915 but set in late Meiji rather than early Taisho, Naruse’s adaptation essentially drops a contemporary post-war woman into a by then almost unrecognisable Japan, but finds her hamstrung firstly by feckless and entitled men and then by complicit women who themselves cannot accept her transgressive femininity. 

As the film opens, a teenage Shima (Hideko Takamine) has just married wealthy grocery store owner Tsuru (Ken Uehara) but the marriage is already a failure. Though Shima is compared favourably with Tsuru’s previous wife who was apparently in poor health, presumably suffering with TB which required a sojourn by the sea, it soon becomes clear that Tsuru is as trapped by the archaic patriarchal social system as she is. He was apparently in love with a woman from a higher social class he was too afraid to pursue and despite still seeing her also has a mistress near their factory in Hokkaido whom he often visits under the guise of a business trip. Yet when Shima tells him she thinks she may be pregnant, he is unimpressed, immediately questioning the paternity of the child while harping on about her having been married before which it seems is not quite true. Perhaps the reason that she has ended up a second wife despite her youth and beauty, Shima ran out on a marriage to a childhood friend arranged for her by her adoptive parents the night before the wedding not realising they had already registered the union without her knowledge or consent. 

This transgressive act at once signals Shima’s total disregard for conventionality and insistence on her own autonomy, yet it is also indicative of the fact she married Tsuru in search of a better life, knowing that to marry her adoptive parents’ choice meant only a life of servitude on the family farm. She is not always a terribly likeable figure, coldly explaining that she didn’t mind being fostered out because the adoptive family were wealthier and could give her a better life than she had with her birth parents. Yet it’s this sense of familial dislocation and the liminal status it gives her that allow her to take agency over her life in the way other women might not, unwilling to lose the familial security Shima may not feel she ever had. Tsuru is also an adopted son, but the price for disobedience for him may be even higher and indeed as we later hear his inability to sort out his love life eventually sees him out on his ear. His pettiness in refusing to accept the child is his leads to an argument which causes Shima to slip on the stairs and miscarry, the implication being that she may not be able to bear more children leaving her unlikely to remarry and thereby spurring her desire for a tempered independence. 

The fall is the last straw. Tsuru divorces Shima citing her inability to play the role of the proper wife while her birth family, from whom she is emotionally estranged, refuse to take her back as do the adoptive parents because of the embarrassment she caused them with the marriage stunt. She is often described as “like a man”, unable to win as Tsuru at once insists she wear the frumpy kimonos left behind by his previous wife who was a decade older, complains she wears too much makeup, and tells her to loosen her kimono belt to de-emphasises her figure, while criticising her for being unfeminine in her refusal to simply put up with his bad behaviour as is expected for a wife in this era. Shima fulfils all her wifely duties and as we see is in fact running his business as the women of the family are often seen to do while their husbands spend the money they earn for them on other women whether drinking with geishas or supporting mistresses in second homes. When her husband hits her, she fights back rather than shrinking away chastened as intended. 

Yet she cannot overcome the sense that a man is necessary for her success which cannot be accomplished alone. Cast out from her family, her brother installs her in the mountains to work in a geisha house if only as kitchen staff but soon does a flit to reunite with his married lover who has left her husband for him. While there she falls for the quiet and sensitive inn owner Hamaya (Masayuki Mori), also an adopted heir, whose wife is again ill with TB. Hamaya may be treating his wife a little better than Tsuru did his, but quite clearly assumes she’ll die in starting an affair with Shima who is then sent away to an even more remote inn to avoid a potential scandal. As Tsuru did with the woman he apparently loved, Shima continues to see Hamaya until he too succumbs to TB as an ideal of an impossible love while simultaneously accepting that he failed her in being too weak and cowardly to fight for their romance, outright refusing to become his mistress. 

This may be one reason she is determined never again to be an employee but to own her own store which is why she ends up marrying tailor Onoda (Daisuke Kato) who introduces her to textiles and seamstressing at which she quickly proves adept having mastered the modern sewing machine. She marries Onoda in believing him “reliable”, but soon comes to regard him as lazy and feckless. The first shop fails because he can’t keep up with her. The male employees are always taking breaks to drink tea and play shogi, Onoda complaining that he’s tired while she does all his work for him and the housework too. Yet he also criticises her for a lack of femininity, snapping back that it must be her time of the month when she berates him in front of their employees while later after they’ve become successful complaining it’s “embarrassing” that his workhorse wife doesn’t know the things a sophisticated society woman would such as ikebana while flirting with the teacher he’s hired ostensibility to teach her. He even forces her to wear a frumpy and already somewhat dated classically Edwardian dress with a fancy bonnet which more resembles something a country girl might wear to church than the latest in Western fashions in an attempt to advertise their tailoring which seems primed to backfire. 

That she learns to ride a bicycle in this rather ridiculous outfit is again a symbol of her desire to seize and manipulate modernity even giving rise to a piece of innuendo from her much younger assistant Kimura (Tatsuya Nakadai) as to the pounding she’s been getting from the saddle. Kimura seems to think the problem with the business is that Onoda’s patterns are outdated, offering her a new modernity while she prepares to cut Onoda out on catching him with his mistress taking their best employee with her to ruin his business and start another of her own. Though once again she cannot leave alone only with a man the ending is perhaps more hopeful than might be expected from a Naruse film allowing Shima to commit herself fully to the sense of industry she embodies always ready to start again, work harder, and achieve her desires unwilling to be bound by conventional ideas of femininity or to simply put up with useless men who refuse to accept her for all she is. Yet she largely fails to make men of them, each of her various suitors failing to live up to her, ruined by an oppressive social system that encourages them to exploit female labour while taking it for granted in their intense sense of patriarchal entitlement. 

Repast (めし, Mikio Naruse, 1951)

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“Must every woman grow old and die feeling empty?” asks the unhappy heroine of Naruse’s 1951 melodrama Repast (めし, Meshi) only to conclude that yes, she must, but that this in fact constitutes “happiness” as a woman. The first of Naruse’s Fumiko Hayashi adaptations Repast arrived in the year of the author’s death and is inspired by a short story left unfinished at the time of her passing. Screenwriter Sumie Tanaka was apparently convinced that the film should end with a divorce, as Sound of the Mountain would two years later, and consequently left the project after the studio mandated a more “sympathetic” ending. Superficially happy as it might seem, however, the conclusion is as bleak as one might expect from Naruse in which the heroine simply accepts that she must recalibrate her idea of happiness to that which is available to her and learn to find fulfilment in shared endeavour with her husband. 

As she explains in her opening voiceover, Michiyo (Setsuko Hara) married her husband Hatsunosuke (Ken Uehara) five years ago in Tokyo against her family’s wishes and has been living on the outskirts of Osaka for the past three. Marital bliss has quite clearly worn off. As we see from the repeated morning scenes of the local community sending their sons off to school and husbands to the office, every day is the same and all Michiyo ever seems to do is cook and clean. The only words Hatsunosuke says to her are “I’m hungry”, and the only source of solace in her life is her cat, Yuri. Yet even this constant state of unhappy frustration is disrupted by the unexpected arrival of Hatsunosuke’s spoilt and immature niece Satoko (Yukiko Shimazaki) who has apparently run away from home in rebellion against an arranged marriage. 

There is obviously a blood relation between Hatsunosuke and Satoko, but Michiyo’s jealously is not exactly unreasonable given the young woman’s childish flirtation with her uncle, perhaps an adolescent extension of her propensity to pout and preen to get her own way. Aside from all that, finances weigh heavily on Michiyo’s mind. Other than her drudgery, the constant source of friction in the relationship is Hatsunosuke’s low salary and lack of career success. Satoko’s family are a little wealthier and having been brought up in relative comfort she has little idea of the real world and is often tactless, remarking on Hatsunosuke’s worn out tie much to Michiyo’s chagrin. Hatsunosuke is happy enough to have her, but Michiyo is wondering if there’s enough rice in the jar to see them through and Satoko never stops to consider that they’re feeding her for free even falling asleep when Michiyo enjoys her one and only day off reuniting with old friends rather than preparing dinner as she’d been asked. Perhaps aware of the disruptive effect of her presence, Satoko pours salt on the wound by constantly asking her uncle if Michiyo doesn’t like her or is angry, further placing a wedge between husband and wife. 

For all that, however, Hatsunosuke would not be accounted a “bad” husband for the time save perhaps for his lack of career success. He is not cruel or violent, merely insensitive and distant, taking his wife for granted and unable to see that she is deeply unhappy while otherwise internalising a sense of guilt and failure in his inability to adequately provide for her. She meanwhile sometimes takes her dissatisfaction out on him in barbed comments about his low salary, her barely hidden contempt never far from the surface. Yet as her mother later points out in encouraging her go back to him he is “reliable, discreet, and honest”, qualities borne out by his later refusal to go along with a dodgy scheme organised by the old elite along with his nervous rebuttal of the attentions of the “mistress” from across the way. 

At heart a conservative woman, Michiyo too looks down on Ms Kanazawa (Kumeko Otowa) for her taboo status as the illicit lover of a wealthy man which is only in a sense her way of seizing her future as an independent woman running her own bar. Satoko, a woman of the modern era, sees less of a problem with it and is far less judgemental, though her own attempts are destined to end in failure thanks to her inability to work out that her present lifestyle is far above her current reach. Retreating to her Tokyo home, Michiyo looks for other options, admiring the apparently happier relationship between her younger sister and brother-in-law who now run the family shop. She asks a sympathetic cousin, Kazuo (Hiroshi Nihonyanagi) who provides an alternate love interest, to help her find work but encounters the brutalising line outside the local employment office and then an old friend now a war widow desperate for employment because her benefits are about to run out and she has a young son to support. Later she spots the same woman handing out flyers, suddenly realising the fallacy of her fantasy of starting again as an independent woman. She pens a letter to her husband admitting that she’s realised how vulnerable she is without his protection, but remains undecided enough to avoid sending it. 

Hearing that Satoko, still childish but perhaps not quite as naive as she assumed her to be, has been laying her claws into Kazuo the final nail seems to have been struck. Michiyo knows she will return to Osaka, but does so not because she has rekindled her love for her husband but because she has accepted there are no better options. Hatsunosuke is dull, but he is in a sense reliable, and honest to the extent that he may be about to be rewarded for his moral unshakability. He cares enough about her to show up in Tokyo hoping, but not insisting, she will return with him which is perhaps as close to a declaration of love that one could hope for. On reflection she decides that a woman’s happiness is found in sharing the journey with her husband, accepting that she must subsume her own desires into his and cannot hope to expect emotional fulfilment other than that found in his satisfaction. Even for a Naruse film, and one as peppered with moments of slapstick humour as this one is, it’s an extraordinarily bleak conclusion subtly hinting at the iniquities of life in a patriarchal society in which the best a woman can hope for is a life of unrewarded drudgery.