Zatoichi and the Chest of Gold (Kazuo Ikehiro, 1964)

Zatoichi and the Chest of Gold (Kazuo Ikehiro, 1964)

Cast: Shintaro Katsu, Shogo Shimada, Machiko Hasegawa, Tomisaburo Wakayama, Tatsuya Ishiguro, Matasaburo Niwa, Hikosaburo Kataoka, Mikiko Tsubouchi. Screenplay: Shozaburo Asai, Akikazu Ota, based on a story by Kan Shimozawa. Art direction: Yoshinobu Nishioka. Cinematography: Kazuo Miyagawa. Film editing: Takashi Taniguchi. Music: Ichiro Saito.

Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse, 1955)

Hideko Takamine in Floating Clouds

Yukiko Koda: Hideko Takamine
Kengo Tomioka: Masayuki Mori
Sei Mukai: Mariko Okada
Sugio Iba: Isao Yamagata
Kuniko Tomioka: Chieko Nakakita
Seikichi Mukai: Daisuke Kato

Director: Mikio Naruse
Screenplay: Yoko Mizuki
Based on a novel by Fumiko Hayashi
Cinematography: Masao Tamai
Production design: Satoru Chuko
Film editing: Eiji Ooi
Music: Ichiro Saito

Mikio Naruse's Floating Clouds brings to mind some of Ernest Hemingway's stories about war-damaged lovers trying to make the best of a doomed relationship. Yukiko is a young woman returning to Tokyo after working in Japanese-occupied French Indochina as a secretary. There she had an affair with the bitter, cynical Kengo, an employee of the Japanese forest service who is married to the sickly Kuniko. Trying to make it on her own in postwar Japan, Yukiko finds that her secretarial skills are in little demand because she doesn't know English, a necessity under the American occupation. Desperate, she picks up an American soldier and becomes his mistress. Meanwhile, she also seeks out Kengo, and finds him trying to make a go of it in the lumber business, still married to Kuniko but unwilling to divorce her and marry Yukiko. So over the course of the film, these two deeply wounded people meet and part repeatedly, not only lacerating themselves but also hurting others with words and deeds. At the end, they have seemingly found a way to live together, partly by retreating from the world onto a remote Japanese island, but even that rapprochement is ill-fated. Naruse's film is an absorbing downer, gaining much of its energy from our suspense about what the protagonists will do to each other next, as well as a showcase for Hideko Takamine's marvelous performance. There are those who think it a masterpiece. 

Wife (Mikio Naruse, 1953)

Yatsuko Tan'ami and Ken Uehara in Wife

Mihoko Nakagawa: Mieko Takamine
Toichi Nakagawa: Ken Uehara
Fusako Sawara: Yatsuko Tan'ami
Tadashi Tanimura: Rentaro Mikuni
Yoshimi Niemura: Michiyo Aratama
Setsuko Sakarai: Sanae Takasugi
Eiko Matsuyama: Chieko Nakakita
Hirohiso Matsuyama: Hajime Izu
Taeko Niemura: Yoshiko Tsubouchi

Director: Mikio Naruse
Screenplay: Toshiro Ide
Based on a novel by Fumiko Hayashi
Cinematography: Masao Tamai
Production design: Satoru Chuko
Music: Ichiro Saito

I was well into Mikio Naruse's Wife when I had a sudden feeling of déjà vu: I felt like I had seen this film before. It struck me when Nakagawa goes to a cafe with Sawara, a typist who works in his office, and she identifies the music playing in the background as a violin concerto by Édouard Lalo. I thought I had seen the cafe setting before: It's distinctively divided into two levels, with some ornamental ironwork separating the upper from the lower level where Nakagawa and Sawara are sitting. Later in the film, when Tanimura, the painter and art student who rents a room from the Nakagawas, appears, and still later when Nakagawa's wife, Mihoko, rents another room to a young woman who's the mistress of an older man, I knew I'd seen Wife before. At my age, any memory lapse like this can be disturbing, but I also thought it told me something about the kind of film Wife is. For the main story of the film, about the stagnant marriage of Toichi and Mihoko Nakagawa, is so low-key that it's hard to latch onto anything specific about it. We've seen troubled marriages and illicit affairs before, but the Nakagawas hold their emotions in such tight check that they never explode into memorable scenes. The parts of Wife that the memory holds onto are the unique ones -- a classical melody, a distinctive set (as contrasted with the Nakagawas' typically boxlike home), or colorful characters. Even the title, Wife, has a generic quality to it -- like some of Yasujiro Ozu's titles, it doesn't give the mind much to hold onto. This is not meant to be a knock on Naruse's film, however. The pain experienced by Mihoko when she learns of her husband's affair, and that felt by Toichi and Sawara when they're forced to part, is very real and quite delicately observed. And there's something particularly devastating about the lack of resolution at the film's end, when, having achieved a kind of stalemate, the Nakagawas return to routine. He goes off to work and she stays home, both condemned to trying to work things out. In a way, I'm glad I had forgotten that I'd seen Wife before: It gave me a chance to rediscover a work whose subtlety and finesse outweigh its lack of flashy memory hooks.

Yearning (Mikio Naruse, 1964)

Yuzo Kayama and Hideko Takamine in Yearning

Reiko Morita: Hideko Takamine
Koji Morita: Yuzo Kayama
Hisako Morizono: Mitsuko Kusabue
Takako Morita: Yumi Shirakawa
Ruriko: Mie Hama
Shizu Morita: Aiko Mimasu

Director: Mikio Naruse
Screenplay: Zenzo Matsuyama
Based on a story by Mikio Naruse
Cinematography: Jun Yasumoto
Music: Ichiro Saito

Mikio Naruse's Yearning could almost have been a Douglas Sirk romantic melodrama, with Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson in the roles played by Hideko Takamine and Yuzo Kayama, except that Hollywood would never have allowed the Japanese film's bleak downer ending. (Sirk argued for an ending to the 1955 All That Heaven Allows in which Hudson's character died, but was overruled by producer Ross Hunter.) Like Sirk, Naruse takes the woman's side and uses the film for sharp commentary on the changing role of women. Reiko Morita's husband died in the war, after a brief marriage, but she stayed on to help the Morita family rebuild its business after the war ended, and in the subsequent years has run the family grocery and liquor store with great skill. But now a new threat has emerged to their business: the supermarket, which can afford to cut prices below what the Morita's store is able to charge. Reiko runs the store almost single-handedly, with no help from her brother-in-law, Koji, a college-educated layabout. And then her sister-in-law, Hisako, acting on a suggestion from her husband, proposes that the family convert the store into a supermarket because of its prime location. Koji, as the surviving male in the family, would become president -- if he can clean up his act. The problem with the plan is that there's no room in the scheme for Reiko, who is not actually a member of the family, even though she has kept it going for years. Meanwhile, Koji also discloses to Reiko that he's in love with her, which causes problems because she's his brother's widow as well as because she's 11 years older than he is -- the kinship and the age gap being huge challenges to tradition. When the situation reaches a crisis point, Reiko decides to go home to her own family, which lives far away. Koji follows her onto the train and in a long ride they try to work things out. Naruse and his lead actors give this concluding section a great poignancy, though it ends abruptly and painfully, leaving the audience to work out the consequences of the ending for themselves.

The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (Yasujiro Ozu, 1952)

Koji Tsuruta and Shin Saburi in The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice

Mokichi Satake: Shin Saburi
Taeko Satake: Michiyo Kogure
Noboru Okada: Koji Tsuruta
Setsuko Yamauchi: Keiko Tsushima
Aya Amamiya: Chikage Awashima
Sadao Hirayama: Chishu Ryu
Chizu Yamauchi: Kuniko Miyake
Naosuke Yamauchi: Eijiro Yanagi
Toichiro Amamiya: Hisao Toake

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Music: Ichiro Saito

Yasujiro Ozu's The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice begins like a 1950s American TV sitcom in which Lucy and Ethel try to pull a fast one over Ricky. In this case, Lucy is Taeko Satake, who wants to get away for a day with Ethel, or Aya Amamiya, at a resort spa without letting Ricky, or Mokichi Satake, know what she's up to. So Taeko decides to tell Mokichi that her niece has fallen ill at a class reunion and she needs to go tend to her. But just as she's about to depart, the niece, Setsuko, drops by the Satake home, so Taeko has to swiftly come up with a Plan B. What we are in for, obviously, is a comedy of marital errors. The Satakes have no children and their marriage has grown stale, which provides an object lesson for Setsuko, whose parents are pressuring her into an arranged marriage and have set up a meeting with the potential groom. Seeing that not only do Taeko and Mokichi have no passion in their lives but Aya is also insouciant about the extramarital affairs of her husband, Toichiro, Setsuko is determined not to fall into their trap. Where Ozu excels is in the presentation of the texture of his characters' lives -- Taeko with her gossipy friends, Mokichi with his daily office grind followed by visits to bars and pachinko parlors, sometimes with his young friend Noboru, whom Mokichi is helping get a start in life after Noboru graduates from college. (There's a wonderful little moment when a slightly inebriated Noboru sings "Gaudeamus Igitur.") At one pachinko parlor, Mokichi discovers that the owner is an old army buddy, Sadao, played by Ozu regular Chishu Ryu, whose chief role in the film is to provide a note of nostalgia for the more adventurous days during the war. Escaping from the meeting with her prospective groom, Setsuko joins Mokichi at the parlor, where she also meets Noboru, and we see a potential relationship spark between the two young people. But when Taeko learns that Mokichi has met with Setsuko when she should have been at the matchmaking session, she's furious and refuses to speak to her husband. Eventually, the crisis is resolved in a lovely scene in which Taeko and Mokichi begin to resolve their marital problems while raiding the larder after the maid has gone to bed, though the film ends with Setsuko and Noboru having what looks like their first fight. Ozu's bittersweet little comedy is sometimes dismissed as a minor work by a master director, but the mastery is very much in evidence.

Record of a Tenement Gentleman (Yasujiro Ozu, 1947)

Hohi Aoki and Choko Iida in Record of a Tenement Gentleman

Otane: Choko Iida
The Boy: Hohi Aoki
Tashiro: Chishu Ryu
Tamekichi: Reikichi Kawamura
Kawayoshi: Takeshi Sakamoto
Kikuko: Mitsuko Yoshikawa
The Father: Eitaro Ozawa

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Tadao Ikeda, Yasujro Ozu
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Music: Ichiro Saito

There are Web pages devoted to the "funny titles" that other countries give American films. The Japanese title for Leaving Las Vegas (Mike Figgis, 1995) allegedly translates as I'm Drunk and You're a Prostitute, and Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999) becomes The Hole of Malkovich. But presumably other countries have similar sites devoted to silly Anglicizations of their film titles, too. Certainly the Japanese have every reason to wonder how the translators came up with an off-the-mark title like Record of a Tenement Gentleman for Yasujiro Ozu's film. The setting is not what we call a tenement: a multistory apartment building in a slum. It takes place instead in a row of small houses in an impoverished suburb of Tokyo, where people eke out a living as artisans or peddlers. And the protagonist of the film is not a gentleman but a middle-aged widow named Otane, who agrees to take in for a night a small boy who has followed one of her neighbors home. The boy was separated from his father, a carpenter, when the two of them went into the city in search of work after the apartment building in which they lived burned down. He made his way back to where they used to live, which is where he began to tag along with Tashiro, a fortune-teller by trade. Tashiro shares a home with Tamekichi, a tinker, who refuses to take the boy in, so they persuade Otane to shelter the boy for a night. Things do not go well: The boy wets the bed, and Otane, already grumbling at having been pressured to take him in, becomes even more grouchy at the "stupid" child. She takes the boy to the place where he once lived, but the neighbors there say that the father hasn't yet returned. Otane even tries to abandon the boy, running away from him when they start back, but he's too quick for her. Of course, anyone who's ever seen a movie knows where this is going: After he wets the bed again, the boy runs away, afraid of Otane's anger, but she realizes how much she has come to enjoy his presence and her heart softens when he returns home. She begins to indulge the boy with new clothes and even has their photograph taken together. And then, of course, just as Otane has decided that motherhood suits her, the father arrives, having tracked the boy down. That Ozu manages never to descend into mawkishness with this familiar premise is remarkable, but also a great tribute to his actors, especially Choko Iida as Otane, who makes the transformation from grumpiness to affection entirely credible. The film is also a tribute to the stubborn endurance of the Japanese working classes in the difficult environment of the immediate post-war period. 

Mother (Mikio Naruse, 1952)

Kyoko Kagawa in Mother

Masako Fukuhara: Kinuyo Tanaka
Toshiko Fukuhara: Kyoko Kagawa
Shinjiro: Eiji Okada
Ryousuke Fukuhara: Masao Mishima
Susumo Fukuhara: Akihiko Katayama
Hisako Fukuhara: Keiko Enami
Uncle Kimura: Daisuke Kato
Tetsuo: Takashi Ito
Aunt Noriko: Chieko Nakakita

Director: Mikio Naruse
Screenplay: Yoko Mizuki
Cinematography: Hiroshi Suzuki
Music: Ichiro Saito

Mutatis mutandis, Mikio Naruse's Mother could almost have been a 1950s Hollywood family drama starring Irene Dunne or Myrna Loy in the title role: a woman struggling to help her family survive difficult times. Of course, the necessary change would be that of setting: Mother is very much a portrait of lower middle class Japan in the immediate postwar years. Masako Fukuhara is not just trying to feed her family but also struggling with the effects of the war, including disease -- the death of her only son from tuberculosis -- and crippling loss -- she and her husband, Ryosuke, take in her sister Noriko's little boy, Tetsuo, after Noriko returns from Manchuria, where her husband was killed. Masako's struggle gets worse after Ryosuke works himself to death reestablishing the family's laundry business. Fortunately, there is Uncle Kimura, who had been a prisoner of war in Russia, to help out in the laundry, but Masako still has to raise her teenage daughter, Toshiko, as well as her younger daughter, Hisako, called Chako. What links Mother to the Hollywood films is some sentimental melodrama, a characteristic not usually ascribed to Naruse's work, and some rather conventional comic relief, such as the scene in which Toshiko's boyfriend, Shinjiro, sees her dressed as a bride and thinks she's marrying someone else, when in fact she's modeling for Noriko, who is trying to make it as a hair stylist. Fortunately, Naruse knows how to work against sentimentality and convention with some distancing tricks. In mid-film we are suddenly presented with a title card that says "The End" in Japanese -- a moment that actually made me reach for the remote control to see if the screening service had somehow skipped to the end. It turns out to be the end title for a movie that Toshiko and her friends have gone to see -- a weepie that has left them in the tears guaranteed by its advertising. It also helps that Mother has the extraordinary Kinuyo Tanaka and Kyoko Kagawa playing mother and daughter -- a relationship they would repeat in Kenji Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff (1954). It's also fun to see Eiji Okada as Shinjiro, one of his early performances, before he achieved international fame in Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959) and Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964).

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Late Chrysanthemums (Mikio Naruse, 1954)

Haruko Sugimura in Late Chrysanthemums

Kin: Haruko Sugimura
Tomi: Yuko Mochizuki
Tamae: Chikako Hosokawa
Nobu: Sadako Sawamura
Kiyoshi: Hiroshi Koizuma
Sachkiko: Ineko Arima
Tabe: Ken Uehara
Seki: Bontaro Miake

Director: Mikio Naruse
Screenplay: Sumie Tanaka, Toshiro Ide
Based on stories by Fumiko Hayashi
Cinematography: Masao Tamai
Music: Ichiro Saito

In 1993, writer-director Nora Ephron satirized a prevailing male attitude toward "women's pictures" in Sleepless in Seattle. When the character played by Rita Wilson tears up while recounting the plot of An Affair to Remember (Leo McCarey 1957), Tom Hanks's character dismisses the film as "a chick's movie," and he and Victor Garber's character mock her by bursting into tears while recalling the thoroughly macho ending of The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich, 1957). Although Ephron's film had the downside of reinvigorating the old put-down phrase "chick flick," it also sent video sales and rentals of An Affair to Remember through the roof. The male-female audience split, and the willingness of filmmakers to cash in on it, dates from the days when there were movie theaters within walking distance of almost every neighborhood, and women who worked at home could take a break to watch a movie while the kids were in school. So the "matinee weepie" became a standard product of Hollywood studios, usually focusing on the problems women had with their families and their husbands -- or their lack of families and husbands. In Japan, however, women's problems were compounded by history and rapid social change: The institutions women had learned to adapt to before and during the war were being revolutionized. The constitution drafted during the occupation of Japan in 1946 went perhaps even further to establish the political and social equality of women with men than was common in the United States. The Japanese version of a "woman's picture," Mikio Naruse's Late Chrysanthemums, demonstrates both how liberating and how traumatizing this newfound equality could be for older women by focusing on four former geisha, now in late middle age, past the time when the one skill they had been trained in, pleasing men, could support them. One of the women, Nobu, has found stability by running a small restaurant. Another, Kin, had socked away the money she had earned and, never married, now lends money and invests in real estate. But Tomi and Tamae, each of whom now has a grown child but no husband, have had harder times. They share a house, but Tomi is addicted to gambling and Tamae is in poor health, which keeps her from earning what she could as a housekeeper in a hotel. Tomi is also upset that her daughter, Sachiko, who dresses in modern Western clothes, is marrying an older man, while Tamae frets first about the fact that her son, Kiyoshi, has a mistress and later that he has decided to move to Hokkaido. There's no real plot to Late Chrysanthemums, but instead a concentrated focus on characters and their reactions to a changing world. Kin, for example, is drawn back into the wartime past by the return of two men: Seki, with whom she was once so in love that they attempted a double suicide, and Tabe, an ex-soldier who was her patron. She spurns Seki, now a derelict ex-con, but eagerly receives the handsome Tabe, only to be disillusioned when it turns out that he only wants to borrow money and gets sloppily drunk. Haruko Sugimura, who was usually cast in rather vinegary roles, like a Japanese Agnes Moorehead, gives a performance of depth and understanding as Kin, but all of the film's performances are richly accomplished.

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Sound of the Mountain (Mikio Naruse, 1954)

So Yamamura and Setsuko Hara in Sound of the Mountain

Shingo Ogata: So Yamamura
Kikuko: Setsuko Hara
Shuichi: Ken Uehara
Yasako: Teruka Nagaoka
Fusako: Chieko Nakakita
Kinuko: Rieko Sumi
Hideko Tanizaki: Yoko Sugi

Director: Mikio Naruse
Screenplay: Yoko Mizuki
Based on a novel by Yasunari Kawabata
Cinematography: Masao Tamai
Music: Ichiro Saito

Watched on Turner Classic Movies

I find that numerous critics have observed something I sensed while watching Mikio Naruse's Sound of the Mountain: that it feels like a kind of sequel to, or even reaction against, such films by Yasujiro Ozu as Late Spring (1949) and An Autumn Afternoon (1963) that center on the arrangement of the marriage of a young woman. In both of the Ozu films I mention, the marriage is so much the event toward which the plot moves that we never even see the potential bridegroom -- as if just being married were the point. I know that's doing a disservice to the great artistry of Ozu, whose interest is always on relationships and not outcomes, and that Ozu was working in the long tradition of romance and comedy, in which marriage is what the plot is there to move toward, but I have to feel that Naruse is making a direct riposte to that tradition. Why else cast Setsuko Hara, the "Noriko" of three of Ozu's films -- Late Spring, Early Summer (1951), Tokyo Story (1953) -- that center on unmarried or widowed women? In Sound of the Mountain, Hara is Kikuko, an unhappily married woman, whose husband, Shuichi, has taken a mistress and frequently comes home drunk -- or not at all. The couple lives with his parents, to whom she devotes herself almost to the point of servitude. And when their daughter, Fusako, arrives with her small children, having separated from her own husband, Kikuko's household duties increase. Fortunately, she has a sympathetic confidant in her father-in-law, Shingo, who is clearly more than a little in love with Kikuko, and tries to sort things out for her, even to the point of confronting his son's mistress to try to break up that relationship. But things are not so easily resolved in this state of extramarital affairs. Kikuko takes a quietly devastating revenge on her husband by having an abortion -- something that Shuichi's mistress, who is also carrying his child, refuses to do. This is a film of great sadness, a mood that Ichiro Saito's film score does much to emphasize without ever turning lugubrious.