Co-organized with Japan Society and Japan Foundation, New York, Metrograph is pleased to commemorate this master of Japanese cinema’s golden age with Mikio Naruse: The World Betrays Us, a two-part 30-film retrospective—presented entirely on rare film prints imported from archives and collections in Japan—on the 120th anniversary of his birth. The series runs from May 9 – 31 at Japan Society, continuing at Metrograph from June 5 – June 29.
Metrograph’s program will begin with When a Woman Ascends the Stairs followed by a post-screening reception hosted by Japan Foundation, New York at the theater. Tickets for the series will go on sale Wednesday, April 30, with a limited number available for the opening night event.
Over a career spanning four decades from 1930 to 1967, Mikio Naruse bore witness to the making of modern Japan, before and after World War II, in films that primarily examine the cruel condition of women cast adrift in a society in constant, convulsive upheaval. Chiefly a director of melodramas for famed studio Toho, often in the shoshimin (common people) genre, Naruse was a revered women’s director, guiding the era’s most iconic actresses, including Setsuko Hara, Kinuyo Tanaka, and, above all, the indefatigable Hideko Takamine, to many of their greatest performances.
Formerly demoted by Japanese and Western critics alike in favor of his friend Yasujirō Ozu, a conspicuously idiomatic stylist, the notoriously taciturn Naruse left behind a quieter, more unassuming body of work that today reveals itself as an equally essential contribution to modern cinema, inspiring filmmakers from Ann Hui and Hou Hsiao-hsien to Park Chan-wook and Ryusuke Hamaguchi. Marked by the understated fluency of its formal rigor, the drab realism of its settings, and its themes of personal dreams extinguished by economic deprivation, gender inequality, and the failure of traditional kinship structures, Naruse’s thoroughly disillusioned cinema only grows more ripe for reconsideration as our postwar global consensus barrels toward collapse. “From the earliest age I have thought that the world we live in betrays us,” the director said, “this thought remains with me.”
Titles include Daughters, Wives, and a Mother, Floating Clouds, Flowing, Late Chrysanthemums, Morning’s Tree-Lined Street, Mother, Repast, Scattered Clouds, Sound of the Mountain, The Stranger Within a Woman, Summer Clouds, Sudden Rain, Traveling Actors, Tsuruhachi and Tsurujiro, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, and The Whole Family Works.
Mikio Naruse: The World Betrays Us Part II runs from June 5 to June 29, with select encore screenings to follow.
Film Line-up: Metrograph
MORNING’S TREE-LINED STREET
1936, 71 min, 35mm
Naruse harbored a special affection for this rural farce starring the great comic actor Kamatari Fujiwara, familiar to American audiences as the cravenly cynical peasant Manzo in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. As written by Naruse himself, Hyoroku (Fujiwara), a lowly member of a backwoods kabuki troupe, brings buffoonish pomposity to his role as the front legs of the act’s puppet horse. When a drunken patron falls on the horse’s head, the company replaces it with the real McCoy, unceremoniously demoting Hyoroku and his sidekick Senpei to stable boys. Tinged with nostalgia for a pre-modern popular art and vanishing provincial folkways, Naruse’s film conjures a timeless aura as if to ward off the distant reality of war.
TSURUHACHI AND TSURUJIRO
1938, 89 min, 35mm
After the 1937 kokutai decree established a cultural regime of militarist ultranationalism, the Japanese film industry decreased production of the shoshimin-eiga (common people dramas) in which Naruse had hitherto specialized in favor of films valorizing traditional Japanese arts. The liveliest and most moving of the films Naruse dutifully turned out in the geido genre, expressing the “way of the artist,” this backstage tragicomedy of the late Meiji period concerns a temperamental shinnai tandem – male singer Tsurujiro (Kazuo Hasegawa) and female shamisen player Tsuruhachi (the great Isuzu Yamada) – whose uncanny musical chemistry is matched only by their romantic combustibility. With its rarefied fine arts setting, Naruse’s film is a singularly lyrical articulation of his core theme, the unequal relationship between a man and a woman.
THE WHOLE FAMILY WORKS
1939, 65 min, 35mm
Adapted by Naruse from a novel by Sunao Tokunaga, formerly of Japan’s proletarian literature movement – a fact seemingly ignored by national policy censors in 1939 – this bleak drama about the impoverished Ishimura clan, a family of 11 crammed into the close quarters of their dim, dilapidated house, whose eldest son Kichi longs to quit his dead-end job for college, would remain one of Naruse’s “all-time favorites,” perhaps for its echoes of his own youthful experience. Rich with evocative imagery and incident – a young man dozing on his break and dreaming of the horrors of real combat as kids around him play war games; a boy treating his brothers to tempura noodles from his meager savings – Naruse’s wartime masterpiece is a model of poetic economy, shading its home-front message of filial piety with a tragically ironic sense of generational waste.
TRAVELING ACTORS
1940, 71 min, 35mm
Naruse harbored a special affection for this rural farce starring the great comic actor Kamatari Fujiwara, familiar to American audiences as the cravenly cynical peasant Manzo in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. As written by Naruse himself, Hyoroku (Fujiwara), a lowly member of a backwoods kabuki troupe, brings buffoonish pomposity to his role as the front legs of the act’s puppet horse. When a drunken patron falls on the horse’s head, the company replaces it with the real McCoy, unceremoniously demoting Hyoroku and his sidekick Senpei to stable boys. Tinged with nostalgia for a pre-modern popular art and vanishing provincial folkways, Naruse’s film conjures a timeless aura as if to ward off the distant reality of war.
REPAST
1951, 97 min, 35mm
Offered Fumiko Hayashi’s final novel, unfinished upon her sudden death the same year, Naruse undertook his first of six adaptations of the revered feminist author’s work, producing one of his great melodramas, a major critical and commercial success that ushered in his most fertile period. Working for the first time with recurring screenwriter Sumie Tanaka (Late Chrysanthemums, Flowing), herself an outspoken feminist playwright, Naruse crafts an achingly exact portrait of a fraying Osaka housewife (Ozu muse Setsuko Hara) trapped in a marriage to a stunted and oblivious salaryman (Ken Uehara in the first of several such roles for Naruse). Hara delivers one of her finest performances, complicating the smiling sorrow of her Ozu characters with a uniquely Narusean sense of restrained resentment, teetering on neurotic frustration.
MOTHER
1952, 98 min, 35mm
Based on a children’s essay adapted by famed Japanese screenwriter Yoko Mizuki (Sound of the Mountain, Floating Clouds, Kwaidan) in her first work for Naruse, Mother stars the legendary actress-director Kinuyo Tanaka as a beleaguered working class matron, whose self-sacrificing efforts to maintain her family during Tokyo’s postwar reconstruction make her a paragon of maternal virtue in the eyes of her teenage daughter Toshiko (Kyoko Kagawa). Like Huw Morgan in Ford’s How Green Was My Valley, Toshiko idealizes her mother and the value system she embodies, a naive perspective that pleasantly lifts what in fact unfurls as a bitterly sad, episodic tale of slow-burn economic immiseration. Anticipating the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien in its ironically sentimental vision of Confucian dissolution, Naruse’s film is a melodramatic tearjerker for the ages.
LATE CHRYSANTHEMUMS
1954, 101 min, 35mm
Compositing three Fumiko Hayashi short stories, Naruse weaves a cyclical narrative that traces the social web of wily, hard-hearted Kin (Haruko Sugimura), a retired geisha turned moneylender and real estate speculator in shitamachi Tokyo, who makes collection visits to her former, now dependent geisha sisters and encounters two old and tarnished lovers. The thespian Sugimura, a grande dame of the Japanese stage too often confined to colorful character parts on- screen (such as the eldest daughter in Ozu’s Tokyo Story), gives a marvelously inflected performance whose shell of calloused cynicism guards a raw core of wounded feminine vanity. Almost experimental in its reduction of plot to the minutest of interactions, Late Chrysanthemums is a complete Naruse original, offering a fine-grained character study of a resilient woman and her cohort, who confront their obsolete position in postwar Japan.
SOUND OF THE MOUNTAIN
1954, 95 min, 35mm
Naruse himself instigated this adaptation of Yasunari Kawabata’s classic novel and the resulting film, one of his greatest, was a personal favorite. Set in Kawabata’s own stately upper middle class neighborhood of Kamakura, the story opens as the loveless marriage of Kikuko (Setsuko Hara) and Shuichi (Ken Uehara), who live with Shuichi’s parents, approaches a point of crisis. Harboring a mysteriously profound affection for Kikuko, Shuichi’s distinguished father Shingo (So Yamamura) looks on in impotent disbelief. As things deteriorate between man and wife, the mutual connection between father and daughter-in-law only deepens until one of them must make a fateful decision. Both surpassingly wonderful, Yamamura and Hara command every moment of Naruse’s exquisite romantic melodrama.
FLOATING CLOUDS
1955, 123 min, 35mm
With his penultimate Fumiko Hayashi adaptation, Naruse sought to compose a “summary of everything Hayashi meant to me,” and fittingly this modernist masterpiece stands out among his films for the epochal sweep and heightened register of its story of a time-spanning tragic passion. It’s 1946. Repatriated to Japan, Yukiko (Hideko Takamine) seeks out her former lover Tomioka (Masayuki Mori) amid the rubble of Tokyo, expecting to resume the romance they began as colonial functionaries in occupied Indochina, only to find a spiritually defeated man too cowardly either to leave his wife or remain faithful to her. As the years pass, Yukiko follows Tomioka from one ruined or remote region of postwar Japan to another, the two drifting in and out of each other’s lives, seemingly suspended in time and bound only by a shared sense of desperation. In a genuinely iconic performance, perhaps the greatest of her roles for Naruse, Takamine is heartbreaking as a woman who refuses to give up her love even if all that remains of it is a memory.
FLOWING
1956, 116 min, 35mm
Naruse’s most complex film assembles an historic ensemble of iconic Japanese actresses to depict the postwar decline of Tsuta House, a once esteemed geisha establishment in Tokyo’s old pleasure quarters. Unfolding under the watchful eyes of Tsuta’s faithful new maid Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka), the intricate drama centers on proud madam Otsuta (Isuzu Yamada) and her ambivalent daughter Katsuyo (Hideko Takamine), whose dubious accounting is catching up with them as the house’s business recedes and its stable of geisha, including the aging Someka (Haruko Sugimura) and the sassy, “new-style” Nanako (Mariko Okada), grows discontent. A rare Japanese film to treat the archaic geisha world with authenticity and restraint rather than prurience and histrionics, Flowing is an understated masterwork of perfectly balanced narrative proportions and finely etched behavioral details, calmly gathering force toward its devastating conclusion.
SUDDEN RAIN
1956, 91 min, 35mm
The fifth entry in Naruse’s informal cycle of marriage films (Repast, Husband and Wife, Wife, Sound of the Mountain) finds Setsuko Hara once again cast in the unenviable role of a put-upon housewife, whose bored salaryman husband (Shuji Sano) only pipes up to ask what’s for dinner or to complain about her cutting recipes from his newspaper. Here, Naruse widens his typically domestic perspective to include the social tapestry of the suburban Tokyo neighborhood around the couple’s home, filling out the film’s picture of the pressures of middle class life with enviable neighbors, a meddling community board, and even an unseen local pickpocket. A darkly delightful comedy in which Naruse pushes his sharp observation of the petty irritants and banal routines of marital life to nearly farcical extremes, Sudden Rain comprises one of the director’s most purely enjoyable films.
SUMMER CLOUDS
1958, 129 min, 35mm
For his first film in both color and widescreen, Naruse shifted his typically urban focus to the verdant and expansive rice fields of Atsugi, near Yokohama, and the farmers who cultivate them. Here, the strong-willed war widow Yae (a stirring Chikage Awashima) stands astride the forces of progressive land reform, represented by the alluringly handsome city journalist Okawa (Isao Kimura), and those of entrenched family patronage, embodied by her bitterly obstinate older brother Wasuke (Ganjiro Nakamura). Nakamura’s fully inhabited performance as a man who refuses to change with the times imbues Naruse’s pastoral melodrama with an elegiac soul.
WHEN A WOMAN ASCENDS THE STAIRS
1960, 111 min, 35mm
The nocturnal rhythms and rituals of the neon-lit Ginza come incandescently alive in Naruse’s late-career masterpiece, at once a magisterial recapitulation of, and thrilling variation on, his recurring theme of female integrity within an increasingly materialist world. Shot in pristine black-and-white Tohoscope by Naruse’s stalwart cinematographer Masao Tamai, the film fittingly renders a world of deceptive appearances and seductive surfaces. Navigating this world is Hideko Takamine’s Keiko, a widowed bar hostess who, night after night, climbs the stairs to one bar then another, as she flits through a revolving Rolodex of suitors from Tokyo’s corporate world. Brilliantly played by Takamine, rivaling her performance in Floating Clouds, Keiko personifies the Naruse heroine as she crosses the threshold between the chilly postwar ’50s and the cool postmodern ’60s.
THE STRANGER WITHIN A WOMAN
1966, 102 min, 35mm
In the penultimate year of his career, Naruse made a pair of audacious forays into noir, the first of which is this macabre chiller starring the hangdog actor Keiju Kobayashi as a man racked with guilt over the murder of his lover, and the mask-like Michiyo Aratama as his wife in whom he confides, leading her to fear for his sanity. Adapted from Edward Atiyah’s The Thin Line, which would also serve as the basis for Claude Chabrol’s later Just Before Nightfall, this exceptional Naruse film yet concerns itself with the performative contest between a man and a woman, while conjuring a spectacularly sustained mood of dry-mouthed horror with its gaunt black-and-white cinematography courtesy of Yasumichi Fukuzawa (Dodes’kaden) and its lushly dissonant score by Hikaru Hayashi (Death by Hanging).
DAUGHTERS, WIVES, AND A MOTHER
1960, 123 min, 35mm
A prestige talent showcase for Toho, led by the venerable Aiko Mimasu alongside Setsuko Hara and Hideko Takamine, and supported by a dozen further major and minor stars of the era, Naruse’s full color melodrama is a feat of directorial command, never once buckling under its own widescreen weight. Concerning the ill fortunes of a widowed mother (Mimasu) and her five adult children as they endure a string of destabilizing personal and financial shocks, this melancholy picture of a Japanese family’s gradual disintegration evokes Naruse’s friend and critical rival Ozu with its succession of domestic rearrangements and tests of filial responsibility. Small wonder that Ozu favorite Chishu Ryu makes an eleventh hour cameo.
SCATTERED CLOUDS
1960, 123 min, 35mm
Naruse’s final film is also justly one of his most beautiful. Shot in austere color Tohoscope and endowed with a gorgeously romantic score by Toru Takemitu, this sublime melodrama stars the elegant Yoko Tsukasa as Yumiko, a genteel woman who is greeted early on with the news of her husband’s death in a freak car accident. Her old life destroyed, she finds her way to the remote northern city of Aomori, where, by a mixture of coincidence and intertwined fate, she reconnects with the young man behind the wheel (Yuzo Kayama), gradually falling in love with him. Like all Naruse’s doomed lovers, Yumiko knows that hers is a passion that she can neither deny nor accept. Enacting a tragedy of suspension, Scattered Clouds closes Naruse’s career on her ellipsis of yearning.
Screening Schedule: Metrograph
** additional weekday showtimes to be announced**
THURSDAY, JUNE 5
7:00 PM When a Woman Ascends the Stairs
SATURDAY, JUNE 7
3:15 PM The Whole Family Works
Reception
4:50 PM Floating Clouds
7:30 PM Sound of the Mountain
SUNDAY, JUNE 8
12:00 PM When a Woman Ascends the Stairs – Introduction by writer Phillip Lopate
4:45 PM The Whole Family Works
SATURDAY, JUNE 14
12:10 PM Sound of the Mountain
2:15 PM Sudden Rain
4:15 PM Repast – Introduction by Akinaru Rokkaku,
Program Director of the Japan Foundation, New York
SUNDAY, JUNE 15
7:50 PM The Stranger Within a Woman
FRIDAY, JUNE 20
6:00 PM Tsuruhachi and Tsurujiro
8:00 PM Traveling Actors
SATURDAY, JUNE 21
12:30 PM Morning’s Tree-Lined Street
SUNDAY, JUNE 22
2:15 PM Late Chrysanthemums
4:30 PM Flowing
SATURDAY, JUNE 28
5:00 PM Mother
5:10 PM Summer Clouds
SUNDAY, JUNE 29
2:00 PM Daughters, Wives, and a Mother
4:35 PM Scattered Clouds
Tickets for Mikio Naruse: The World Betrays Us – Part I at Japan Society can be purchased at https://japansociety.org/film/mikio-naruse-the-world-betrays-us/
Tickets for Part II at Metrograph are on sale now at https://metrograph.com/category/mikio-naruse/
