A Woman's Place

Mikio Naruse's 1962 film A Woman's Place / The Wiser Age feels like homage to Yasujiro's Ozu's Tokyo Story. Surprisingly, this film has been dismissed by the likes of Audie Bock who said that it and two other films from this era are "mediocre" and "negligible" that they have been omitted from film reference books. I beg to differ, it is still a fascinating family drama representative of the changing society seen in the early 60s in postwar Japan. It is the story of a large multi-generational family that comes together when the family patriarch, Kinjiro Ishikawa (Chishu Ryu playing a similar role to the iconic one from Tokyo Story), falls ill. The saintly widowed daughter-in-law, Yoshiko (Noriko played by Setsuko Hara in Ozu's film), this time around is played by Naruse regular Hideko Takamine, who has a son, Ken (Kenzaburo Osawa), that she is relying onto to support her after graduating from high school and college. Ken, however, is struggling under the pressure and is not performing well at school. The matriarch of the family Aki is played by Haruko Sugimura-who also was in Tokyo Story, playing the cold-hearted daughter Shige. They have five other daughters and another son aside from the Yoshiko's deceased husband-who is the first son, who is usually the heir to the family's fortune, which is now due to be given to young Ken. One of them, Natsuko (Yoko Tsukasa), is being shopped around for marriage and finally deices to marry an up and coming executive who is being sent to Brazil for 2-3 years, which eases the burden on the family and allows her young sister, Yukiko (Yuriko Hoshi), to pursue a romantic interest with another of her suitors, Aoyama (Yousuke Natsuki) an intellectual working for the meteorological agency and will be transferred to the Mt. Fuji station. The biggest villains in the film are Umeko, an unmarried but successful flower arranging and tea ceremony teacher and her sister Michiko (Keiko Awaji) who arrives from Kyushu with her deadbeat husband Maasaki (Tatsuya Mihashi). Complications arise when Umeko falls for the mother, Aki's son Musumiya (Akira Takarada Godzilla), a conman and hustler, from her first marriage in which she left him behind to marry Ishikawa. The complication is that Musumiya has fallen for Yoshiko and she has learned about his reputation and has asked him to leave and not marry Umeko-Umeko thinks she is meddling because she is jealous. Suddenly Ken is is hit by a train in an apparent suicide and has sent the family dynamics spiraling. The parents will sell their house and move into a smaller house and have invited Yoshiko to join them but suggest the possibility that she may want to re-marry. The rest of the family are already plotting what to do with the family lot-Jiro, now the main heir, wants to move into the house, Michiko wants to open a supermarket and Umeko thinks they should build an apartment-selfish motives among all. Catherine Russell in her book, The Cinema of Naruse Mikio sums up the film nicely: "It isn't clear what Yoshiko's fate will be-whether she will remain with them, remarry, or be cast out. But she does seem to be left with her in-laws as some kind of relic or the past, stuck without a role in the changing world."