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Mikio Naruse by Alexander Jacoby Alexander Jacoby, 24, is a British-born, Tokyo-based film critic whose particular interests include Japanese cinema and silent film. His writing has appeared in various publications, both on and offline. |
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| The films of Mikio Naruse have never been entirely unknown
in the West. Predating the wider discovery of Japanese cinema in America
and Europe by some fifteen years, his prizewinning Wife, Be Like a Rose
(1935) was given a commercial release in New York, albeit to lukewarm reviews.
(1) His Mother (1952) was distributed in France
in the 1950s; a substantial retrospective toured Western cinémathèques
in the 1980s; and a handful of his films are in distribution, and available
on video, in France and the US. Yet despite this, and the fact that Naruse
is not infrequently cited as the third great master of the classical Japanese
cinema, his work remains far less familiar in the West than that of the
canonical greats, Ozu and Mizoguchi, or of the more popular if less distinguished
Kurosawa. As with Ozu and Mizoguchi, differences exist as to the value of
Naruse's work from different periods: the traditional, liberal humanist
line, as exemplified by the criticism of Donald Richie, tends to exalt the
postwar work, while the formalist perspective of Noel Burch finds the director's
most original and subversive achievement in the prewar period (or, more
precisely, in one film of that period, Wife, Be Like a Rose). Both
approaches have been vitiated by the vagaries of film preservation and availability;
at the time that Richie's early books on the Japanese cinema were written,
Naruse's prewar work was almost wholly inaccessible, while even Burch, in
the 1970s, was forced to rely on a much narrower sample of the prewar films
than are now available. The period divisions have some justice as regards
Naruse's style, which gravitates from the lively, if sometimes affected,
experimentation and flamboyance of the 1930s films to the more subdued and
disciplined, if less inventive, methods of his postwar work. His themes,
however, remain consistent throughout his career, and this essay seeks to
discuss the oeuvre and its concerns as a whole, while acknowledging
its development over time. Neither in his early experimental period nor in the mature postwar films did Naruse achieve a mastery of a specific visual style to merit comparison with the work of Mizoguchi or Ozu. Nevertheless, he commands respect as the architect of subtle and profound realist dramas, distinguished by careful observation and superb acting. His genre is the shomin-geki—the film about the lower middle classes—within which his specialities are the precise delineation of social milieux, of material hardship and practical responsibilities, and “the compassionate portrayal of courageous women faced with great adversity.” (2) While nothing in Naruse's oeuvre matches the radical feminism of My Love Has Been Burning (1949), his heroines are generally more independent and practical, less prone to romantic self-oppression, than Mizoguchi's suffering women. Yet independence and practicality are virtues of limited significance in Naruse's treacherous and unhappy world, which tends to crush its inhabitants regardless. His characters lack the hope and good humour of Ozu's in the face of disappointment, and, unlike Mizoguchi's protagonists, they are usually denied the luxury of death. The title of one early film, Street Without End (1934), is paradigmatic, and the tragic catharsis of Floating Clouds (1955) or Yearning (1964) is exceptional. More often, Naruse's endings affirm the impossibility of escape: the discontented wife returning to an unhappy marriage in Repast (1951); the ageing bar hostess climbing to work once more in When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960); the young geisha at her sewing machine in Flowing (1956). “If they move even a little,” Naruse famously remarked of his characters, “they quickly hit the wall. From the youngest age, I have thought that the world we live in betrays us; this thought still remains with me.” (3) It's impossible not to see such pessimism as founded in the sadness of Naruse's own life: the early deaths of his parents, his poverty and loneliness, and the ten years he laboured as prop man and assistant while denied promotion by Shochiku's formidable head of production, Shiro Kido.
On the other hand, the biographical interpretation of Naruse's art has its mythic elements, myths perpetuated by the limited distribution of the films outside Japan and a consequent reliance on second-hand accounts. It is still confidently asserted, mainly because Naruse himself said so, that his career between 1935 and 1951 entered a prolonged slump during which “he was simply incapable of turning out a really good film.” (4) The blame is usually ascribed to the slow breakup of his marriage to Sachiko Chiba, the actress who had starred in Wife, Be Like a Rose. The chronological realities—that the marriage did not even take place until 1937—are brushed aside, just as are the aesthetic ones—that, at least during the late 1930s, Naruse produced a number of distinguished and fascinating films whose perennial inaccessibility until recently prevented anyone from challenging their critical underestimation. Recent screenings in Japan and Europe of such hitherto unknown films as Avalanche (1937) and A Woman's Sorrows (1937), coupled with revivals of Wife, Be Like a Rose and The Whole Family Works (1939), have revealed the consistent quality and complexity of Naruse's work in this period: an intriguing blend of melodrama with realism; a novelistic ability to balance and develop a set of distinct but overlapping narratives, and to create large numbers of plausible, three-dimensional characters; an imaginative willingness to experiment with diverse cinematic styles and their expressive potential. (5) The complicated flashback structure of Avalanche rejects a chronological organisation to contrast more directly the birth and disintegration of a marriage. Wife, Be Like a Rose is a bittersweet comedy, unique in Naruse's output for its delicate affections and tentative optimism, whose lively formal invention is, contrary to Noel Burch's arguments, always at the service of the relationships between characters and their emotions. (6) Much like Renoir's films from the same period, it reveals an intriguing openness to unorthodox models of social relationships—the heroine, leaving home to track down her errant father and restore him to her disconsolate mother, discovers that he has found a happier relationship with another woman, and finally comes to accept that situation. This sceptical attitude to the conventional nuclear family was extended into open hostility in A Woman's Sorrows and The Whole Family Works, where the repressive nature of traditional family structures is laid bare. In the latter film, most daringly, the repression operating within the family is associated with the militaristic ideals dominant in Japan at that time; the attack on such sacred cows as filial duty and loyalty to the group is doubly remarkable given its historical context. At the same time, Naruse, like Mizoguchi, made several intriguing films in a genre to which his contribution has hitherto been overlooked: the backstage melodrama. As Japan's military government tightened its grip, the genre became an oasis for left-leaning directors seeking to escape from the requirements of national policy. The theatrical milieu and (more often than not) a Meiji-period setting allowed progressive concerns to be advanced under the cover of generic traditions and historical distance; thus, the overt feminism of Mizoguchi's masterpieces, Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (1939) and The Straits of Love and Hate (1937), went unchallenged, because unnoticed, by the authorities of the time. Naruse's work in the genre, while admittedly not comparable for its quality with Mizoguchi's, is at its best similarly subversive, and indeed less ambiguous in its politics. While Story of the Late Chrysanthemums does make available a conservative reading—that the heroine's sacrifice is justified by her lover's aesthetic triumph—Travelling Actors (1940) makes clear its scepticism as regards the militaristic ideology. The context is a once-in-a-lifetime performance in a rural backwater by the distinguished kabuki troupe of Kikugoro VI, but the film's heroes are a pair of Shakespearean clowns who form the pantomime horse in a less exalted local company of players. The gentle comedy is undercut by at least one openly subversive moment as the heroes watch two conscripts going off to war and wonder apprehensively if they'll be next. As late as 1944, the theatrical company in The Way of Drama resist demands from the authorities to stage patriotic dramas, and secure success by continuing to act traditional plays. Nor are these films conventional in style; Travelling Actors displays a lively interest in the creative potential of montage, which is indeed still detectable towards the end of the war in the admittedly mediocre fantasy, This Happy Life (1944).
It is, of course, debateable to what extent these features are attributable to Naruse's own authorial intervention, rather than being inherent in the scripts he worked from and the source material he adapted. The Naruse of the postwar era is by no means a negligible visual artist, and Akira Kurosawa, who had assisted him before the war on Avalanche, rightly admired his skill in editing together a sequence of brief, ostensibly unremarkable shots to create the effect of “the flow of a deep river, with a calm surface hiding a rushing, turbulent current below.” (9) Yet the measured rhythms of his editing, and the expressive use of interior space, tend simply to illustrate the content of the script, rather than creating meaning in the manner of Mizoguchi's stylistics. While one would therefore tend to ascribe a greater degree of the creative input to the screenwriter rather than the director, the paradox is that a specifically Narusean worldview is more consistently visible in the later works, scripted by a variety of screenwriters, than in his prewar films, scripted largely by himself. Still, while the precise extent and form of Naruse's intervention in his material remains unclear, it is necessary to acknowledge the importance of his collaborators—perhaps the most important of whom was already dead. The unyielding concentration on the petty frustrations of life which typifies his later films derived in part from the books of the late Fumiko Hayashi, a novelist whose despairing outlook matched his own. After Repast—an adaptation of her last, unfinished novel, made in the year of her death—he would adapt all her novels for the screen, and chronicle her sad life story in Her Lonely Lane (1962). The first of his Hayashi adaptations coincided with Naruse's return to critical favour in Japan, and his versions of her work exemplify the three main strands of inspiration in his later years: the film about unrequited passion (Floating Clouds), the film about unhappy families and marriages that have gone stale (Repast, Wife [1953], Lightning [1952]), and the film about the struggle against material poverty and social oppression (Late Chrysanthemums [1954]). The unifying features of Naruse's late films are, then, thematic rather than stylistic, and it follows that he perceived the cinema as a dramatic rather than a pictorial art form. Shortly before his death, he planned “a film to be shot with only white curtain backdrops, no real sets, no exteriors, all concentration on the nuances of human movement expressing feeling carved down to the quick.” (10) Naruse's other crucial collaborators were the great actresses who conveyed those nuances of movement and feeling—above all Hideko Takamine, who, from 1941's Hideko the Bus Conductress, was to work with him in twenty-odd films. Though Naruse worked with virtually all of Japan's leading actresses, including Kinuyo Tanaka, Setsuko Hara, Kyoko Kagawa and Chikage Awashima, it was Takamine whose star persona—as “the Japanese woman who is not necessarily beautiful in her suffering, but persevering, dedicated and intelligent” (11)—proved ideal to incarnate his unhappy yet resourceful heroines. Or rather, had the potential to do so, for a comparison of Takamine's output before and during the main period of her collaborations with Naruse indicates that her persona developed considerably under his direction. Her work for Shiro Toyoda in Wild Geese (1953) or Keisuke Kinoshita in Twenty-Four Eyes (1954), though magnificent, was in a vein of more conventionally passive, suffering femininity; while otherwise she essayed a rather zany humour in films such as Carmen Comes Home (Kinoshita, 1951). In a sense, Naruse combined the two models, crafting a multi-layered persona which concealed sensitivity behind a brash exterior—the blend of toughness and vulnerability was instrumental in making many of his rather coldly observed films humanely moving.
For the postwar Naruse, then, the release of emotion has tragic consequences; it's as if the trials his heroines face can be endured only through the refusal to feel. Hence the scarcity of true tragic endings in his art—more often, his characters find no solution but to go on living, though without hope. The fruitless expenditure of energy which concludes several of Naruse's 1950s films seems a substitute for emotional catharsis: thus, the nearly estranged couple throwing a balloon back and forth at the end of Sudden Rain (1956); the ageing geishas in Late Chrysanthemums dancing a comic number patterned on Marilyn Monroe; and, in Summer Clouds, Chikage Awashima's trapped heroine laboriously ploughing the fields. This forlorn, purposeless physical activity provides an outlet for the frustrations of Naruse's characters, but constitutes an artificial conclusion, expressing their problems without resolving them: the despair is bleaker because it has no melodramatic finality. The desolation that marks Naruse's later work is, in the final analysis, limiting; in Donald Richie's words, “He lacks that hope which is the highest wisdom.” (12) Nor, it must be added, does he possess that mastery of cinematic style for which Ozu and Mizoguchi rank among the great artists of their chosen medium. Yet there is a style which consists in detail of characterisation and elegance of structure, just as there is a wisdom which consists in the strength of purpose and clarity of vision required to portray the sorrows and disappointments of life without sentimentality, complacency or compensation –to portray, in Audie Bock's words, the “wound called life for which there is no salve.” (13) I have tried to show that this is not the whole of Naruse's art, but it is, perhaps, at the heart of his most mature and perfect films. Richie, and his colleague Joseph Anderson, had the first word, and, since their summation could not easily be bettered, it is appropriate for them to have the last: “It is the honesty with which Naruse treats his theme that commands our respect; it is his faithfulness to this theme which creates his style; and it is our suspicion that, painful though it be, he is telling the truth, that creates his greatness.” (14) © Alexander Jacoby, April 2003 Endnotes:
Filmography Mr
and Mrs Swordplay (Chambera
Fufu) (1930) 
Bibliography Surprisingly
little has been written on Naruse in English, and no book solely devoted
to the director exists. The following sources contain a substantial amount
of useful information:
Articles in Senses of Cinema Unsentimental
Journey: A Glimpse into the Cinema of Mikio Naruse by
Acquarello
Web Resources Mikio
Naruse
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