Naruse Mikio

By: Arsaib

Naurse’s importance is without doubt the equal of Ozu’s and Mizoguchi’s. — Cahiers du cinéma

Formalist critical approaches cannot fully account for the emotional effects of his cinema. — Catherine Russell

“Naruse’s films celebrate, without extravagance, the lives of ordinary people struggling for something better than the hand fate has dealt them. Performed with quiet certainty by superb actors, shot and edited with a sure and relentless hand, they raise the ordinary and even the sordid to a quality near sublime” (Audie Bock).

“If women and their problems predominate in Naruse’s films, as in Mizoguchi’s, the unique mixture of anguish and calm that characterizes the work of the less famous (but no less great) director arises from the fact that his female figures are always doubled. For every Naruse heroine there is another woman, her rival or mirror image, whom she finds waiting when she turns a new corner, who legitimately possesses the man to whom the heroine has at best a moral or sentimental claim, or who stands as a living reproach to the heroine” (Chris Fujiwara).

“Naruse’s editing method consists of building one very brief shot on top of another, but when you look at them all spliced together in the final film, they give the impression of a single long take. The flow is so magnificent that the splices are invisible. This flow of short shots looks calm and ordinary at first glance then reveals itself to be like a deep river with a quiet surface disguising a fast-raging current underneath. This sureness of his hand in this was without comparison” (Kurosawa Akira).

“Naruse, a master of depicting unspoken emotions, was notorious for eliminating dialogue from the scripts that were prepared for him. The restrained acting style and relative lack of action mean that the emotional weight and drama of the films is accomplished mainly through editing. By exploiting the possibilities of 360-degree space and mismatched eye lines, a wide range of effects could be created. That the editing itself remained somewhat invisible accounts for the realist style that made his filmmaking not “Japanese” enough for Western critics looking for an aesthetic signature they could associate with the director’s cultural heritage" (Catherine Russell).

“Naruse’s cinema echoes with sums and salaries, tots and computations; all is commodity, and landlords, merchants, beggars and usurers are forever arriving to collect. Even in the comparatively well-off world of some of his late domestic dramas, money concerns frequently impinge. It sometimes seems that it is this materialism – in several senses of the word – a kind of grubby acknowledgement of the fact of money’s importance that has stanched admiration for Naruse among those who prefer their Japanese cinema cosmic, sublime, transcendental, serene, refined. Naruse’s aging, obsolete geishas, trapped, grasping housewives, and struggling widows are blunt in their appraisal of their chances in a precarious world in which, Naruse famously said, ‘if they move even a little, they quickly hit the wall.’ The endings of Naruse’s films often find his characters returning to routine after crisis – that is, to another round of everyday unhappiness” (James Quandt).

“It is instructive that the first major Naruse retrospective in the West was organized by Audie Bock, an American woman. The American male critics have always treated him as second-rate. They were entranced by the boyish playfulness of Ozu and the macho histrionics of Kurosawa. They could locate Zen Buddhist aesthetics in late Ozu and Mizoguchi, Zen and samurai ethics in Kurosawa. In search of spiritual elevation or showy displays of stylishness, they found Naruse too bleak in philosophy, too austere in style” (Freda Freiberg).

“Although a central director of the Classic period, there is something very modern about Naruse’s characters and stories. This is perhaps one of the reasons for the recent interest in his films. Watching a Naruse film is not about examining “how they used to do films”. It is about getting involved in stories that still strike a chord with us" (Eija Niskanen).

From the youngest age, I have thought that the world we live in betrays us; this thought still remains with me — Naruse

Naruse Mikio (20 August 1905 – 2 July 1969) is one of the least known of Japan’s early master directors, both in the West and in Japan, yet he created some of the most moving, darkly beautiful works in Japanese cinema. Like Mizoguchi Kenji, Naruse showed an uncanny understanding for the psychology of women. Like Ozu Yasujiro, he preferred subtle shifts of character over broad strokes of plot. Unlike either of these early greats, however, Naruse’s vision of humanity was much darker and more clinical.

Born in Tokyo, in 1905, Naruse was the youngest of three sons of a desperately poor embroiderer. Although he excelled in elementary school, his family could not afford to further his education. He was instead enrolled in a two-year technical school. There, he spent virtually all of his free time reading borrowed books from the library. Soon after he graduated in 1920, his father died. At age 15, Naruse had no choice but to work. He found employment at the newly founded Shochiku company as a prop man. During this same time, Mizoguchi and Ozu rose, within three years, from lowly apprentices to directors. Excessively modest and painfully shy, Naruse rose through the studio’s ranks more slowly. After eight years as an assistant director to Gosho Heinosuke and Ikeda Yoshinobu , he finally got the chance to direct. But soon thereafter, Naruse moved to P.C.L studio which later merged into Toho. (Note: Of Naruse’s 24 silent films, 19 have been lost, and of the 65 sound films, 2 have been lost, and one is available only in incomplete form.)

His films are populated with proud, willful women who find themselves searching for dignity in desperate circumstances, only to find false promises and continuing degradation. Naruse’s characters are stubborn, experienced, and self-aware. They are women who knowingly enter doomed relationships, as in Floating Clouds; barmaids who struggle to support their children, as in Ginza Cosmetics; or aged geishas who try to resist a decline into prostitution, as in Flowing. Yet they continue to struggle and endure in spite of their bleak prospects. Naruse shoots his actors close-up in confined spaces. His claustrophobic aesthetic seems to deny the possibility, not just of transcendence, but even of communication or happiness. Naruse films rely on subtle changes of expression to create brilliantly nuanced studies of these remarkable and desperate women.

Naruse, like other Japanese directors, worked with a consistent crew of scriptwriters, technicians, and actors, who may have evolved and changed over the decades, but who nevertheless helped to create a certain style associated with the director’s name. Among Naruse’s most important collaborators were two women screenwriters: Mizuki Yoko (who worked on 7 films from 1952 to 1957) and Tanaka Sumie (who worked on six films between 1951 and 1962). (Note: Naruse based 6 of his films on the works by the great Hayashi Fumiko: Repast, Lightning, Wife, Late Chrysanthemums, Floating Clouds, and A Wanderer’s Notebook.) The other notable screenwriter, Ide Toshiro, worked on 12 films, from 1951to 1966. As for cinematographers, Suzuki Hiroshi shot 13 films from 1935 to 1952, and Tamai Masao shot 16 films from 1949 to 1960. Composer Saito Ichiro worked on all the 1950s and early 1960s films. Art director Chuko Satoshi worked with Naruse on 25 films, from 1939 to 1967. As early as 1934, actresses felt privileged to work with him, and he continued to earn their respect until his very last film. Takamine Hideko did 17 films with Naruse. Hara Setsuko, Sugimura Haruko, Yamada Isuzu, Tanaka Kinuyo, Tsukasa Yoko, Sugi Yoko, Okada Mariko, Irie Takako, and Awashima Chikage were also frequently cast in his films.

References/Reading

Wikipedia / All Movie Guide
Audie Bock, Japanese Film Directors, Kodansha International, Tokyo, San Francisco & New York, 1978
Audie Bock, Naruse Mikio: Un maitre du cinema japonais, Locarno, Edition du Festival international du film de Locarno, 1983
Catherine Russell, The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity, 2008, Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Chris Fujiwara, Naruse Mikio: The Other Women and the View from the Outside." Film Comment, Sep-Oct 2005
Hasumi Shigehiko, “The International reputation of Naruse: In the Face of Misfortune, in the Age of Discovery.” HKIFF, 1987
Kano Ayako, Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender and Nationalism. New York: Pelgrave, 2001
Miguel Marias, “Naruse’s Serene Splendor.” Edited by Hasumi Shigehiko and Yamane Sadao. San Sebastian Film Festival, 1998
Jean Narboni, Naruse Mikio: Les temps incertains, Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2006
Okamoto Kihachi, “What the Master Naruse Mikio Taught Me: Spirit and Technique.” Chicago: The Film Center, 1984
Andre Scala, “Naruse and some Dutch Painters.” Cahiers du cinéma, 1993
Edward Yang, “Generosity: The invisible Invisible.” Edited by Hasumi Shigehiko and Yamane Sadao. San Sebastian Film Festival, 1998

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Top 30

in alphabetical order

ANZUKKO (ANZUKKO, 1958)

DAUGHTERS, WIVES, AND A MOTHER (MUSUMA, TSUMA, HAHA, 1960)

A splendid cast which features not only stellar Naruse regulars (Hara Setsuko, Takamine Hideko, Uehara Ken, Mori Masayuki) but also the redoubtable Nakadai Tatsuya, graces this drama, shot in Scope and color, which is appropriate for a work of such narrative complexity. The Sakanishi family live in comfort in the suburbs of Tokyo; the eldest son takes care of the sixty-year-old matriarch, while his two sisters and wife fill out the domestic spectrum suggested by the film’s title. A loan secured from mortgaging the family home leads to a chain of disasters and recriminations, leaving the Sakanishis in disarray and their aging mother feeling that she must admit herself to a nursing home for the children’s sake. One of Susan Sontag’s favorite Naruse films.

FLOATING CLOUDS (UKIGUMO, 1955)

This is it: for many critics, film historians, and Narusians, the ultimate masterpiece of the director’s career. Especially revered in Japan – even Ozu noted his admiration for it in his diary – Floating Clouds opens in the bombed-out ruins of Tokyo as Yukiko (Takamine Hideko, more luminous than ever) searches for her old lover Tomioka, with whom she worked in Southeast Asian during the war. They renew their affair, though he tells Yukiko he cannot leave his ailing wife. She sacrifices her health and happiness pursuing him while he, a typically weak Naruse male, vacillates, their turbulent relationship reaching its conclusion on the island of Yakushima, amid dense rain forests. As Miguel Marias has pointed out, the two central characters are adrift and in constant motion, but Naruse shoots their strolls and movements with traveling shots so imperceptible that all seems fixed, immobile.

FLOWING (NAGARERU, 1956)

Naruse gathered an ensemble of great veteran actresses for the superb Flowing; it’s hard to imagine a trio more impressive than Takamine Hideko, Tanaka Kinuyo, and Yamada Isuzu. Tanaka plays Rika, a maid hired by the proud mistress of a failing geisha house. The maid quickly comes to realize that the mistress is deep in debt and that her desperate attempts to save her establishment are in vain. The maid’s clear-eyed comprehension of her employer’s dilemma, as traditional geisha establishments were closing or becoming bordellos to survive in rapidly changing Tokyo, constrasts with the blind naïveté of the samisen-playing mistress (Yamada) and her emotionally deprived daughter (Takamine). Phillip Lopate ranks this “delicate, absorbing chamber drama” as one of Naruse’s three greatest masterpieces.

MOTHER (OKAASAN, 1952)

The great Tanaka Kinuyo is formidable in this beloved classic, often cited as Japan’s most important contribution to postwar neorealism. (Venerable film historian Sato Tadao brackets it with Mizoguchi’s The Life of Oharu and Kurosawa’s Ikiru as the beginning of “the second golden age of Japanese cinema.”) Tanaka plays the enterprising matriarch of the Fukahara family, struggling to survive amid the poverty and devastation following the war. The film begins in chirpy, almost comic mode, as the elder daughter of the family introduces us to the Fukaharas and their neighborhood, but inexorably, inevitably, Naruse’s tragic sense takes hold. The parents’ dream to reopen their once prosperous laundry comes true, but is accompanied by death, loss, untenable sacrifice. (These are mostly, as so often in Naruse, confined to ellipses, and the effect is doubly powerful.) The pragmatic mother is finally faced with a choice between keeping her (diminished, fragmented) family intact or ensuring that one of her children has opportunities. Naruse transforms the mawkish genre of “mother” movies (known as haha-mono) so popular in Japan into something astringent and complex, dense with social observation; the film’s poignancy is hard-earned and authentic. Momentarily moved to show an instance of true, unfettered happiness, Naruse resorts to an uncharacteristic flashback as mother and father reminisce about good times long gone. “One of Naruse’s best films” (Donald Richie and Joseph L. Anderson).

NIGHTLY DREAMS (YOGOTO NO YUME, 1933)

Few recent discoveries have created as much excitement as this, which has been called Naruse’s most visually audacious work. “An outstanding work of film art” (William M. Drew), Nightly Dreams was an early statement of Naruse’s cardinal theme of a woman trapped and betrayed by weak or corrupt men. Using the finest writers, technicians, and actors offered by the Shochiku studio, Naruse developed this dire story form the experiences of a geisha who lived nearby. A young woman, abandoned by her husband, works as a hostess in a Tokyo harbor bar to support her small son. Her husband suddenly reappears but cannot find employment, and when their boy is injured by a car, the reassembled family once again fragments, this time more tragically. A virtuoso display of camera movement, unusual angles, deep field composition, and startling montage, Nightly Dreams also features an early instance of an actress (Kurishima Sumiko) prodded to greatness by Naruse’s directing. The supporting performances, including that of Ozu regular Saito Tatsuo, are also very fine.

OLDER BROTHER, YOUNGER SISTER (ANI IMOTO, 1953)

SOUND OF THE MOUNTAIN (YAMA NO OTO, 1954)

“This is one of my all time favorites, “ commented Naruse, “I love this picture.” So do many critics: Sound of the Mountain is frequently ranked at the top of Naruse’s pantheon by Japanese and European commentators. Hara Setsuko, so sublime in Ozu’s films, brings serene intensity and “incredible sensuality” (Cahiers du cinéma) to her role as the wife of a businessman who is indifferent to her desperate loneliness in this adaptation of a work by Nobel prize-winning author Kawabata Yasunari. Returning to their home in Kamakura from drunken forays after work in Tokyo, the sodden, insolent husband remains unaware that his wife is considering aborting their baby, so abject is her sense of their future together. Among the film’s triumphs is the portrait of the husband’s father, a wise, emphatic man, played by the great Yamamura So, who shares his daughter-in-law’s distress; his walk with Hara in a park of bare limbed trees at the end of the film is classic Naruse in its sense of bereft resignation. Full of marvelous details and set pieces, including a storm that causes a blackout. “I would put Sound of the Mountain on equal footing with the best of Mizoguchi, Ozu, Ford, McCarey, Chaplin, Rossellini, Dreyer, Renoir or Hitchcock; that is to say, among the greatest films ever made” (Miguel Marias).

THREE SISTERS WITH MAIDEN HEARTS (OTOME-GOKORO SANNIN SHIMAI, 1935)

THE WHOLE FAMILY WORKS (HATARAKU IKKA, 1939)

WIFE! BE LIKE A ROSE! (TSUMA YO BARA NO YO NI, 1935)

YEARNING (MIDARERU, 1964)

“As a love story it climbs to sublime heights” (Miguel Marias). Yearning stars Takamine Hideko as a headstrong war widow who has supported her family with the dwindling earnings of a small store that is losing out to proliferating supermarkets. Her brother-in-law returns from Tokyo, promising to help out, but soon resumes his life of booze and women, while his sisters try to marry the widow off and when unsuccessful, conspire to sell the store out from under her. (The selfishness of such characters in Naruse never ceases to amaze.) As he did in Summer Clouds, Naruse entwines a fated love story between a desperate war widow and a philandering man with a portrait of Japan’s changing economy and mores. Taiwanese master Edward Yang, a great admirer of Naruse and of Yearning, has written very eloquently about how the calm discretion of the film’s closing sequence summarizes Naruse’s world view and manifests what Yang rightly calls his generosity.

*Excerpts by James Quandt