Evening Stream

Evening Stream (1960) is an interesting late career film from master director Mikio Naruse. The fact that Naruse was credited with co-directing the film with Yuzo Kawashima (who I best know as Shohei Imamura's mentor) is striking enough, but ti was one of four films directed by Naruse in 1960 which included his most well known film in the west, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs. It seems that they wanted a younger director's touch on the film to appeal to younger "Sun tribe" audiences. And Kawashima was best known for his 1957 comedy A Suntribe Myth from the Bakumatsu Era. So he may have been responsible for the young geisha scenes with several younger actors. It was aid that Naruse directed most of the scenes in the geisha house and those with the older generation- which includes Takashi Shimamura as the father of a non-geisha. The complex story is centered on a lively geisha inn and a restaurant, and the story gradually focuses in on an uncomfortable love triangle: the manager of the restaurant (Isuzu Yamada) and her daughter Miyako (Yoko Tsukasa) are in love with the same man, the brooding restaurant cook Ita (Tatsuya Mihashi). There are some melodramatic sub plots throughout, in one Ichihana (Michiko Kusabe) is in the process of getting a divorce and starting a relationship with a kimono dealer named Takiguchi (Akira Takarada bestknown for his role in Godzilla) ends very swiftly and violently. The film essentially is recording the changing of the water trade society and the decline of the insitutiions in Ginza at the beginning of a new era which will see influences from outside Japanese society as it opens up economically to world as symbolized by the u@coming 1964 Olympics.