This Happy Life

This Happy Life is about a small community, centered around a main street where all the characters have small shops. Each is identified with a profession, including bookselling, clock repair, tobacconist, and barber. Introduced by a patriotic poem recited in voice-over, a new family arrives in the community and teaches the town how to derive small pleasures from everyday life. In a regime of scarcity, their lives are enriched by making toys out of leaves, crafts out of household junk, and gourmet food from table scraps. Soma (Yanagiya Kingoro) and his two daughters have a kind of magical capacity to endow everyday life with spirituality, although the Germanic menu they serve to guests is a good clue as to the sources of their inspiration. Especially after 1941 and the advent of the Pacific War, the Japanese industry was greatly inspired—if not aesthetically influenced—by the Nazis’ use of popular culture for propaganda purposes.

When Soma’s youngest daughter visits a sick child, she encourages him to see raindrops dancing, and sure enough, , the children—and the viewer—see a choreographed fairy dance emerge from the puddles outside the window. This film is like a musical in its attempts to give a utopian character to desperate living conditions. The elder daughter sings as she does housework, finding an intriguing rhythm in the barrel maker’s hammering. The family hosts a theatrical evening in which the children perform traditional songs and dances, including a sword routine by a young boy. Explicit and direct references are made to the war in this film, as one woman’s husband is at the front, and one of the young boys is preparing to go. Soma is benevolent and mysterious but nevertheless paternalistic. His authority is unquestioned despite the townspeople’s initial bewilderment, and the film is ultimately a didactic lesson in how to make the most of very little. Despite this propaganda aspect, it is indicative of Naruse’s overall strategy during these years to concentrate on the detail of everyday life, rather than the “monumental” aspects of an imperialist culture. The antimaterialist thrust of kokutai policy fed into his expertise in the “home drama” aesthetics of simplicity. 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. Embedded within this narrative is a small triumph for a young woman whose mother has allowed her to work at a local cooperative before she gets married. Every little miracle in the town is attributed to Soma and his family, and even if this accomplishment is likely intended to promote female labor in munitions factories, it is significantly pitched as a victory over an “old-fashioned” mother. —Catherine Russell