By Imogen Sara Smith on October 31, In the West, Japanese cinema is best known for period epics, serene family dramas, and popular genres revolving around samurai, yakuza, and ghosts. While some of these movies are explicit in their outrage at social injustice,, others are radical in their commitment to honoring the ordinary. There are three titles in the lineup by director Mikio Naruse, who combines a meticulous texture of everyday life with a refusal of conventional dramatic plots.
Naruse quietly observes the quotidian battles of working women to hold things together without husbands, marking both the constant indignities women are subjected to, and the way they are worn down by them yet continue to endure. Kinuyo Tanaka appears in all three films, playing a head bar hostess in Ginza Cosmetics , the owner of a laundry in the tender family portrait Mother , and a maid in a struggling geisha house in the elegiac Flowing In Ginza Cosmetics , she spends her days doing housework and her nights politely listening to the caterwauling of drunks.
Her face reveals all the dispiriting effort of the dutiful, brightly appeasing smiles it usually wears, as she chases deadbeats and fends off the pawing and propositions of businessmen, while the son for whose sake she is doing all this runs unsupervised in the bustling streets.
The need for money is a constant refrain, present in every scene like the dripping of a leaky tap. Life for almost everyone is reduced to a petty struggle for cash, so when Tanaka meets a young man who recites poetry and shows her the constellations—instead of the neon bar signs of the Ginza—she is momentarily exhilarated by the glimpse of something more. After starring in films by Naruse, Ozu, and Mizoguchi, Tanaka became a director herself, an audacious step for a woman at the time.
Five years after the war, he is barely employed, living with his go-getter brother, and paralyzed by passivity, haunting train stations and crowded street corners in hopes of finding a woman he loved and lost. One day he runs into a friend who offers him a job, helping out with a business writing letters in English for women contacting their American boyfriends.
