As A Wife, As A Woman

Mikio Naruse's As A Wife, As A Woman (1961) comes across as a sequel to A Woman Ascends the Stairs, even though it takes places in a totally different narrative. This film is notable for being in color. Once again we have Hideko Takamine as Miho, a single woman running a Ginza hostess bar for her married lover Keijiro Konno (Masayauki Mori), a university professor who owns the bar. Konno's rival is Minami who is played by Tatsuya Nakadai who like Mori was also in A Woman... She wants to break it off with Konno since he is ashamed to be seen with her and has never spent one night with her in the 11 years they have been seeing each other. She feels that she deserves some compensation for her investment, however the bar is registered in Konno's wife Ayako's (Chikage Awashima) name. Ayako drives a hard bargain and low balls Miho who then exposes the fact that the two Konno children are actually hers fathered by Konno as urged on by her ex-geisha grandmother. The children are disgusted by the adults and the film ends with the Konnos divorcing and Miho opening a roadside food stall. As Catherine Russell points out in The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: "As a Wife, As A Women poses some serious questions about women's work and social responsibility, and the gender inequalities of a family system that more or less condones extramarital affairs for men." The politics are progressive, but perhaps at the cost of artistry in the film.