Lost In Translation

Husband And Wife

Husband And Wife (1953) directed by Mikio Naruse is a part of his "marriage trilogy" with Meishi and Wife. Ken Uehara stars in all of them and is very adept at depicting the bored middle-class husband moping around reading newspapers and acting disrespectful of long-suffering women in them. The wife of Uehara (Nakahara) this film was Yoko Sugi (Kikuko), who is said to have filled in for an ill Setsuko Hara. They are having trouble finding a place to live after marriage and decide to stay with a widower colleague of Nakahara, Takemura (Rentaro Mikuni). In this set up, Takemura falls for Kikuko as Nakahara takes out office girls fro drinks and movies. Near the end of the film, the couple moves into a new apartment with the condition that no children are allowed and then is revealed that Kikuko is pregnant. Nakahara suggest it might be best if they "get rid of it." Money problems are often major concerns for characters in Naruse films and this is no exception they will not have enough money to move again in six months. This one ends on an unambiguously hopeful note-a rarity for Naruse.

Anzukko

Anzukko (1958) is a surprisingly weak late period film from Mikio Naruse, who did most of his best work in the late 50s and 60s. This one is essentially an "unhappy marriage" film. Kyoko Kgawa stars as the daughter of a celebrated writer, So Yamura, who marries a local boy, Isao Kimura, who also has literary ambitions. The first third of the film features impressive outdoor on locations scenes. But the rest of the film is set indoors as the husband fails in his writing and turns to the bottle for solace. And periodically the daughter returns home to escape her husbands outbursts and her father is understanding but will not allow her to return permanently and gives the "that's life" excuse for her misery. As the film ends it is clear that she will have to suffer the poverty of an unsuccessful husband who wants literary success or nothing at all. It's a bleak ending rather than the usual ambiguous ending-here it seems that there is no hope for the future.

The Way Of Drama

The Way Of Drama (1944) is a poorly regarded wartime propaganda film from master director Mikio Naruse. That being said, there are some notable aspects to the film, for starters, it stars three well-known actors from the er:a Kazuo Hasegawa and two Kurosawa regulars, Isuzu Yamada and Takeshi Shimura. I mainly know Hasegawa from Kon Ichikawa's An Actor's Revenge (1963), so it's disconcerting to see him as  a young man. The setting is Dontoburi in Osaka at the turn of the century, so it is abstractly a propaganda piece extolling filial piety to elders and humility and self-sacrifice. Looking beyond the wartime preachiness and melodrama are some impressive visuals such as classic framing and interesting camera angles that almost make up for the subpar story line.

The Angry Street

The Angry Street is one of four films Mikio Naruse directed in 1950. The screen play was written by Motosada Nishiki, who also worked on Naruse’s subsequent 1950 films, White Beast and The Battle of the Roses. This film is seen as a flawed genre film-it's Naruse's version of a film noir about two college students, Sudo (Yasumi Hara) and Mori (Jukichi Uno), who work together seducing wealthy young women and scamming them for money to pay for college. Mori comes up with the plans and the dashing Sudo executes the scams. As the film progresses Mori has a change of heart inspired by a meeting with Sudo's younger sister Masako (Setsuko Walkayama) and tries unsuccessfully to get Sudo stop his petty life of crime. Along the way he is played by an older women, Tagami (Yuriko Hamada) who dabbles in the black market. Naruse uses mostly location Tokyo scenes of street life and the neon signs of the nightlife that are fascinating. Furthermore as pointed out by Catherine Russell in her book, The Cinema of Naruse Mikio:

Naruse represents life in the metropolis not only through location shooting, but also through a detailed depiction of the material culture of everyday life in the city. Specifically, several scenes actually open with close-ups of objects from which the camera either tracks back or cuts abruptly away. Functioning almost like inverted establishing shots, these "still-life" images set the scene from the inside out.

Thus, the distinctive Naruse touch that is brought out in the genre film is fascinating to me, since this such a departure from Naruse's bread-and-butter women and family dramas that built his reputation. These flawed films like this and White Beast stand out for me because they are departures in genre and tone from how I usually think about Naruse.

White Beast

White Beast is one of four films made by Mikio Naruse in 1950 (the others were Professor Ishinaka, The Angry Street, and Battle of the Roses). It prefigures the female exploitation prison films of the 60s and 70s, and was not well-received by Japanese critics. However, it is a serious problem film that addresses many topics that are still avoided today. Most of the women at eh White Lilly Institution are former prostitutes who are being rehabilitated (an approved genre by the occupying censors). The "White Beast" that is tamed by the institution in this film is Mitsuko Miura (Yukawa) a proud and defiant woman who is not happy to be incarcerated-but she is told White Lilly or serious prison. Although there are plenty of melodramatic elements such as catfights, hysterical tantrums, film noir lighting, and dramatic music there is a clear indebtedness to American film. However, Naruse highlights social hypocrisy when a prison official comes to lecture the women about their greed. Yukawa challenges him by asking who the customers were-you and your sons... There is also the issue of syphilis which is addressed-another subject polite society would rather not discuss. Some characters are cured, but one woman has an advanced state and dies in a grotesque fashion-penniless and alone after having served as a comfort woman. Such treatment calls to mind Kurosawa's The Quiet Duel, made the year before that also deals with syphilis. This is not a major Naruse production, but it shows flashes of his greatness in editing sequences such as the one in which a tapping foot transitions to a woman using her foot to power a sewing machine. There is some impressive cinematography from Masao Tamai, who would be behind the camera in some of Naruse's most popular films of the 50s.

This Happy Life

I must have overlooked this wartime propagandist film, This Happy Life (1944), from the Japanese master director Mikio Naruse when I was trying to see all of his available films a few years back. However, this is not one of his best efforts, minor Naruse that is essentially wartime propaganda on how to live simply without luxury during the shortages caused by the war. A family moves into town and sells the idea of doing more with less. That being said there are some impressive cinematic touches such as classic framing and on location cinematography as well as some interesting surrealistic superimpositions and advanced camera techniques.  and other . As Catherine Russell points out in her  book on Naruse, The Cinema of Naruse Mikio, "Although the didacticism of This Happy Life is not his usual style, the dispersal of activity over a collection of characters, and the ongoing issues of economic survival are familiar tropes."

Setagaya: Enkoji-Mikio Naruse / Kinuta Koen / Yoga

I found out that the grave of one of the Japanese masters of cinema, Mikio Naruse, was located in a suburb of Tokyo in Setagaya ward at Enkoji Temple, which seems to be a popular temple name: a more famous one is located in Kyoto along with two others in the Tokyo area. It was a nice sunny winter day so I decided to check the Yoga station area out.

The Naruse family grave identified by the kanji (Chinese characters)-it is an unusual family name.

On way there and back I walked near or through Kinuta Park, which is apparently famous for cherry blossoms in the spring.

It also houses the Setagaya Art Museum, which I walked around but decided that I wasn't interested enough to check out the exhibitions showing at the time. However, there were some interesting sculptures outside.

On the walk back to the station I accessed it via a lovely little street called Yoga Promenade that had some stately houses along the well-maintained and decorated road.

I used Yoga Station on the Den-entoshi line for access to Enkoji. As you can see the station entrance is very modern and futuristic looking.

Untamed

I finally tracked down Mikio Naruse's 1957 Taisho era (1912-1926) film Untamed (1957) starring Naruse's frequent muse Hideko Takamine. It is Takamine's ferocious performance as the fiercely independent and industrious Oshima that would place this in the top five of Naruse's films and certainly one of Takamine's finest performances. According to Catherine Russell in her book The Cinema of Naruse Mikio, the film is based on a novel serialized by Tokuda Shusei in 1915 that was adapted by Naruse and screenwriter Yoko Mizutani to incorporate some more contemporary aspects of modern women in the 50s while transporting the heroine back in time to the unpredictability of the Taisho era. Russell reports that Naruse was creating a character that was still present in contemporary Japan-one that was the embodiment of the entrepreneurial spirit and has no place in the traditional order of society. Furthermore, Naruse says that Oshima was the opposite of Yukiko in Floating Clouds-who was dependnent on men and put up with bad behavior and the indiscreet affairs of her lover. She is the opposite in a big way. She disapproves with her adoptive family's first marriage match and escapes to her sister's on the day of her wedding. Her first marriage to the philandering Tsuru (Ken Uehara) ends after a physical fight when she falls down stairs and has a miscarriage. After that she is sent to a inn in the mountains to work off her brother's debts, she soon becomes involved with the married owner of the inn, Hayama (Masayuki Mori), and when found out she is banished to another more remote onsen. Later her father arrives to drag her back to Tokyo because he believes that she has become a prostitute. While back in Tokyo she takes up the tailor trade and quickly hitches her future up with a seemingly compliant tailor Onoda (Daisku Sato), who is less industrious and reliable than she had originally thought. The have frequent fisticuffs and at one point turns a hose on him when he was being lazy in the shop. Later she fights her husband's lover and then leaves him taking the head shop assistant (Tatusya Nakadai who would later star with Takamine again in A Woman Ascend the Stairs in 1960). So Oshima is as far from Yukiko as can be. The period details of the film as well as the location settings are part of the artistry of the film when western fashions and innovations (bicycles and telephones) came into prominence. A rare non Fumiko Hayashi adapted film about a strong -willed and modern woman taking charge of her own survival-one of Naruse better films overall, full of the cinematic craftsmanship that Naruse had been known for.

The Approach of Autumn

The Approach of Autumn (1960) is notable for a couple of reasons: for one it is the first film produced solely by director Mikio Naruse and in that it focuses on two child protagonists. Hideo (Kenzaburo Osawa), a boy displaced to Tokyo from Nagano with his mother (Nobuko Otowa) after his father's untimely death. In Tokyo he meets Junko, the only child of a single mother (the mistress of a rich Osaka businessman-the ubiquitous Daisuke Kato reprising a similar role from A Woman Ascends the Stairs). They are united by their resentments of their parents. Hideo's mother runs off with a client from the inn that she worked at, leaving the boy behind with the working class uncle and aunt where he has to contribute to the family business. His surrogate brother, Shotaro (Yousuke Natsuki) is the only one who looks out for him taking him for rides in delivery truck and motorcycle. As Catherine Russell points out in her book, The Cinema of Naruse Mikio, the drama of the film is the drama of grwoing up in a world that is totally alien to Hideo not only in geography, but also in new moral codes and social behaviors. There are several scenes that allow the viewer to explore the outdoor condition of Tokyo in Naruse's magnificent Scope cinema as it is being remade from a wasteland into the modern city it will become in the 60s before the Olympics. Junko takes Hideo to the a department store rooftop in which Tokyo Bay can be seen. Later they take a taxi to the reclaimed area that will become Shiodome in the future full of skyscrapers a s Junko has predicted. She disappears from his life abruptly near the end of the film when he tries to give her a beetle for a school project that he found in the crate of apples from his grandmother in Nagano. Again Russell sums up things nicely: "In Naruse's Tokyo of 1960, the city is a force that dismantles and disperses the Japanese family."

Battle Of Roses

It would seem that by general consensus, Battle of Roses aka Barra Kasen (1950) is considered one of Mikio Naruse's weakest films, along with White Beast. There is a lot of melodrama involved in this intricately plotted story of three sisters who are daughters of a parents who owned a cosmetics company. Catherine Russell, in her book The Cinema of Naruse Mikio, notes that the many short scenes detract from the scene-setting atmospheric effects that punctuate Naruse's cinema. She also sees the film as working as a cautionary tale about giving women new privileges and powers, since there are instances of premarital sex, kept men, blackmail, and younger lovers. The youngest and most innocent sister's husband tries to kill her, takes a lover, and finally is transferred to Hokkaido.  So even the just are punished. It acts as a sort of exploitation film as Russell notes, which draws on the sensationalism of the "liberated" woman. I didn't think it was all that bad, but when held up against his best Yearning, Floating Clouds, and the like-it pales in comparison. But it was a fun film none-the-less. In particular, I liked how Naruse captured postwar Tokyo with riverside inns, rooftop cafes, the neon lights of Ginza, and the like.