Born in Tokyo, his family's poverty prevented him from going to university; instead, he became a propman at Shochiku. But where most of his colleagues like Mizoguchi, Ozu, Shimizu and Gosho, in one or two years became directors in their own right, Naruse had to slave for ten years before he was allowed to make his first film. He didn't hit it off with Shochiku's director Kido, and in 1934 moved to rival P.C.L., which soon became Toho. Here he was recognized as a major filmmaker and Naruse even attained some international acclaim when one of his first sound films, Wife, Be Like a Rose! (1935), was shown abroad in the United States.
Naruse remained the rest of his life at Toho, where he was appreciated for the fact that he always turned out high-quality films efficiently and economically (within budget and time - important at Toho which was run like an American studio). After the war, he remained a major force in Japanese cinema with such noted films as Mother (1952), Floating Clouds (1955), Flowing (1956) and When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960). In his 37 years as a director (between 1930 and 1967) he produced 89 films.
Naruse, who seems to have been a silent an unsociable man, has been called the "materialist par excellence. [...] His characters battle to satisfy basic physical, social and economic needs. [...] His central characters are single women coping with the problems of making a living, supporting a sick parent or child, finding companionship and sexual partners, seeking ways of reducing their burdens and improving the quality of their lives." (Freda Freiberg in Senses of Cinema)
Characteristic for Naruse are the following elements:
1. Struggle with the world
Naruse's genre is the shoshimin-eiga, the realistic film about the lower middle classes, within which his specialties are the precise delineation of social milieus and of material hardship. His characters are engaged in a constant struggle, a struggle that the frequent open endings of his films indicate is one that will continue. His characters will fight on. Naruse's subtle and profound realist dramas are distinguished by careful observation and superb acting. They are energized by the force with which his characters struggle with the world, leading to an underpinning with a steady onward flow, which is very inspiring.
2. Women's films
Films about struggling women. Naruse shows compassion for the plight of Japanese women in an essentially male-dominated world. The women in his films are full-blooded heroines who do not indulge in self-pity but face the world with gritty resolve (especially when played by Naruse’s frequent collaborator Takamine Hideko). Though they may be handicapped by circumstances beyond their control, they confront life squarely with courageous determination and without delusion.
3. "Enlightened defeats"
There are no easy victories in Naruse's films, his work doesn't fit in the Hollywood-type "feel good" mode. The endings of Naruse's films often affirm the impossibility of escape: the discontented wife returning to an unhappy marriage in Repast (1951); the aging 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), etc. Audie Bock, an authority on Japanese film, sums up Naruse'’s oeuvre as follows: "There are no happy endings for Naruse but there are incredibly enlightened defeats."’
4. "Invisible" cinematic technique
Naruse's auteurist films lack the strong formal distinctiveness that characterizes Ozu, Mizoguchi or Kurosawa, but all the same, Naruse's use of cinematic techniques is very sophisticated. Virtually every shot stands out for its carefully composed artistry. The director also utilizes montage effectively. Naruse's films are characterized by the simplicity of the screenplay, with all superfluous dialogue stripped away; unobstructive camera work and an inconspicuous studio set. Naruse’s style has been called “invisible,” one that is in the first place put in the service of the story, of the characters and the emotions in any given scene. The unifying features of his mature films are thematic rather than stylistic. His austere method is concentrated on the everyday drama of ordinary Japanese in their struggle with life’'s tribulations, with a maximum of psychological nuances in every glance, gesture and movement.
We can divide Naruse's career as follows:
1. Silent Films at Shochiku (1930-34)
At Shochiku Naruse made 24 films, of which 5 have been preserved. The content is based on a combination of Japanese shinpa melodrama and Hollywood; the style is Modernist, with some excesses. These are typical early "city films," featuring young modern men and women, and a dynamic style of shooting and editing. Every Night Dreams, discussed below, is a good example, but other interesting films are Apart from You (geisha milieu) and Street without End (about a waitress in a Ginza cafe, with great shots of the 1930s Ginza).
2. P.C.L./Toho (1935-39)
Naruse made 10 films during his three years at P.C.L., all in the style of vernacular Modernism. This became the first period of personal and artistic success for him. The most famous of these films is Wife! Be like a Rose! which was also shown in New York under the title Kimiko.
3. 1940s (War and aftermath)
Naruse's production during and just after the war was less successful and rather uneven. During the war years, Naruse made 13 films at Toho. Like films by other directors at this time, these are mostly atypical costume dramas as well as films set in the ideologically "safe" world of traditional art. The most interesting film from the war years is the comedy Hideko the Bus Conductor with a very young Takamine Hideko. In the Occupation period Naruse made the usual pro-democracy films (10 in total). None of these films is very good, also because Naruse was not able to work with top actresses.
4. Women Films of the Fifties & Sixties (1951-1967)
Naruse came back in full force in 1951 with Meshi based on a Hayashi Fumiko story and Ginza Gessho. He could now work with top actresses as Tanaka Kinuyo, Hara Setsuko and Takamine Hideko. He based six successful films on the popular novels of Hayashi Fumiko and worked with excellent screenplay writers as Mizuki Yoko. Naruse now produced a consistent body of great films, although he was never granted the auteurist position that Ozu and Kurosawa occupied - at Toho, he remained a company man and also had to do some projects that were not ideally suited to him.
The fifties and sixties are sometimes divided as follows:
1950-56: Ginza Cosmetics marked the start of the top period of Naruse’s work, and is followed by such masterworks as Repast, Lightning, Older Brother - Younger Sister, Sound of the Mountain, Late Chrysanthemums, and Floating Clouds.
1956-67: Although there is some falling-off in the quality of the work in this last period, it still includes superb films like When a Woman Ascends the Stairs and Midaregumo.
The best films by Naruse (I make a rather large selection because Naruse is unjustly still relatively unknown):
1. Every Night Dreams (Yogoto no yume, 1933)
Yogoto no Yume ("Every Night Dreams") is a melodrama about the poor, visually influenced by Von Sternberg's 1928 The Docks of New York. In a Japanese harbor town (Yokohama?), a young woman (famous silent star Kurishima Sumiko), abandoned by her husband (Saito Tatsuo, the father in Ozu's I Was Born, But...) and seeking to support her little boy, works as a hostess in a bar patronized by sailors. She seems on the verge of being forced into prostitution. Then the husband suddenly returns to resume living with her, but is unable to find a job. He spends his days playing with their boy. When the boy is hit by a car and wounded, the desperate father becomes a robber (there was no general health insurance yet). Pursued by the police, he finally drowns himself in the harbor. When his wife learns of his fate, she is overwhelmed by grief but urges her son to be strong in adversity as the film ends. The focus on losers (those who are too weak to even try and those who give up) and battlers (those who at least put up a fight or keep struggling) would be typical for all Naruse's films. Yogoto no Yume placed third among the year's outstanding productions cited by the prestigious Japanese film magazine, Kinema Jumpo, behind Ozu's Dekigokoro (Passing Fancy) and Mizoguchi's Taki no Shiraito (The Water Magician) and just ahead of another Naruse film, Kimi to Wakarete (Apart From You). Like in all his silent films, every scene has been carefully composed in a typical Modernist style.
2. Wife! Be Like a Rose! (Tsuma yo, bara no yo ni, 1935)
When Naruse moved to P.C.L., he immediately made five films in 1935, of which one, Wife! Be Like a Rose! won the Kinema Junpo Best Film award. It is a fine comedy, with a lighter touch than is usual for Naruse. The speed is also brisk. The film's lively formal invention is always at the service of the relationships between the characters and their emotions. A bright and modern office girl (Kimiko, played by Chiba Sachiko, usually dressed in a suit), who lives with her mother, a tanka poet who is obsessed with literary creation, laments that her father for the last fifteen years has been staying in the countryside with his disreputable mistress, a former geisha. Kimiko is hoping to marry her boyfriend and her father must at least show his face to her in-laws! She travels to Nagano Prefecture intending to track down her errant father and ask him to come back home. But she discovers that he has found a happier relationship with another woman and their two children, and finally comes to accept that situation. She also sees the disinterested love of the mistress for her father. In fact, the daughter discovers the mistress to be good and the official wife to be the worse of the two. Although the father comes to town to prepare for her wedding, he soon returns permanently to the other family, for that is where he now belongs (and it is clear he has nothing in common anymore with his poet-wife). We find a mature acceptance of life as it is in this Japanese film, rather than a forced moralistic ending in Hollywood-style. Much like Renoir's films from the same period, Naruse displays a great openness to unorthodox models of social relationships and a skeptical attitude to the conventional nuclear family. Wife! Be Like a Rose! became the first Japanese talkie to be shown abroad, in New York, but it had a rather mixed reception, as it probably was too modern and foreign for its viewers.
3. Hideko, the Bus Conductor (Hideko no shasho-san, 1941)
At the beginning of the war, Naruse makes Hideko no Shasho-san ("Hideko, The Bus Conductor"), based on a short story by Ibuse Masuji, and starring the young Takamine Hideko. Hideko works as conductor for a company in the countryside (Yamanashi), where the number of passengers is dwindling. To save the company, she asks a visiting author to write commentaries on local sites so that she can recite these to the passengers during the trip through the countryside. Not only a wonderfully peaceful and pleasant film, but also a remarkable story about a vivacious young woman coming out as a professional. She is a typical Naruse heroine in that she fights back and puts up a struggle, here to keep the bus company afloat so that she doesn't loose her job. And, as in some films from the 1930s, for example Arigato-san by Shimizu Hiroshi, there are great location shots through the windows of the bus.
4. Ginza Cosmetics (Ginza Gesho, 1951)
Ginza Gesho ("Ginza Cosmetics") depicts a few days in the life of a Ginza bar hostess, and is a sort of precursor to Naruse's later When A Woman Ascends the Stairs. Tanaka Kinuyo plays the bar hostess, an unmarried woman (or widow) with a young son, and it is interesting to see her playing against type: she is a somewhat rough-and-ready, hard-drinking and chain-smoking hostess. The film also brings on one of Naruse's trapped characters, as the hostess is unable to escape from her hard life by catching a suitable husband. Ironically, when she is together with a suitable man and trying to show herself from her best side (no smoking!), her son disappears and she leaves to search for him, entrusting her would-be partner to her younger sister. Sister and partner hit it off so well, that then and there they decide to marry - and Tanaka Kinuyo accepts this with resignation.
5. Repast (Meshi, 1951)
Repast is a nuanced psychological masterpiece on the home life of a childless couple, a low-salaried clerk (Uehara Ken) and his wife (Hara Setsuko) living in Osaka. The wife begins to realize that all those years of marriage have given her no feeling of self-realization and she starts weighing her options - which are however rather meager. The situation is brought to a head by the arrival of a niece, a young woman, with whom her husband starts flirting. The wife returns to her family in Tokyo, seeking a job, but in the end resigns herself to going back to her husband. Naruse portrays life in post-war Japan in an almost documentary fashion, particularly in his location sequences. This is the first of six films that Naruse in the coming decade will base on the novels of Hayashi Fumiko. He even made a film about her life, Horoki (A Wanderer’s Notebook, 1962). This film was Naruse's return to critical esteem sixteen years after Wife! Be like a Rose!.
6. Mother (Okasan, 1952)
Okasan ("Mother") by Naruse Mikio was one of the most successful of postwar shoshimin-eiga. A daughter witnesses her widowed mother (with three children), a tenacious, aging woman, struggling to keep the dry-cleaning business left by her husband going and avoid poverty. Melodramas about maternal love and sacrifice, so-called "haha-mono," were popular since the early fifties (Daiei made scores of sodden sentimental ones with actress Mimasu Aiko, "the mother of Japan" - these films about mothers suffering for the sake of their offspring apparently took their cue from Henry King's Stella Dallas, but it is also an age-old Japanese theme). Naruse's film is an ironical variation on the "mother" theme. There is a voice-over from the daughter who talks in a funny and loving way about her mother, but who in reality manipulates her. Casual viewers may miss this, and it is not put into words in the film, but after the death of the husband the mother is helped in her laundry by an uncle. There is a suggestion that she would not be averse to him staying and marrying her and this feeling seems to be reciprocal. But by her attitude the daughter makes clear she is against her mother remarrying, and the mother therefore consciously lets the chance slip by. This is selfishness of the daughter, for the mother has a hard time alone; and the daughter has already a boyfriend so will soon leave the house. Another interesting point is that the death of the older brother and the father are both almost elided, in contrast to other "mother" films where they would be milked for sentimental effect.
7. Inazuma (Lightning, 1952)
Based on a novel by Hayashi Fumiko and featuring the director's frequent muse, Takamine Hideko. In contrast to the previous film, this is a story about a weak-willed mother with four children by different fathers - a rather dysfunctional family, at least as the three eldest children are concerned. The youngest, unmarried daughter tries to break away from the sordidness around her, but in the end cannot help being kind to her pathetic mother. In Naruse's films the inner conflicts of the characters are subtly indicated by the absence of prolonged eye contact or by glances filled with a hidden flash of disgust.
After the well-known novel by Kawabata Yasunari, one of the writer's masterworks. The heroine of this film (Hara Setsuko), a young bride, finds relief from marital distress when her husband slights her for another woman, in the friendship with her father-in-law (Yamamura So). The husband is again played by Uehara Ken, as in Meshi, now an active philanderer. The youthful enthusiasms of the wife are crushed by the unfeeling husband and only the aging father-in-law is moved by her sadness. Mizuki Yoko, who was responsible for the scripts of other masterworks by Naruse, has shifted the emphasis of Kawabata’s novel away from its male point of view and focus on the psychology of the elderly father-in-law, to the feelings of the daughter-in-law. This daughter-in-law is increasingly (silently) angered by her husband's bad behavior (he has a child by his mistress), so much that when she notices she is pregnant, she has an abortion without consulting anybody in the family. In the end she leaves her husband; the final scene is set in Shinjuku Gyoen Park, where she has a farewell meeting with her father-in-law.
9. Last Chrysanthemum (Bangiku, 1954)
A film about the loneliness and disillusion of three aging geisha, struggling to retain their dignity in a cold and unfeeling world, a subject Naruse had already touched on in Apart from You (1933). Naruse again demonstrates his deep understanding of female psychology in these sharp portraits of women who are experienced, proud and disillusioned. Forced into retirement by age and financially struggling in their meager second careers, these proud but flawed women persevere through economic hardship, alienation from their adult children, and personal heartbreak. Permeated with a general feeling of regret and sadness. Based on three short stories by Hayashi Fumiko.
10. Floating Clouds (Ukigumo, 1955)
Naruse's most popular but also somewhat melodramatic film. Set in a post-war devastated Tokyo and a society that is in dissolution, the film shows us the tenacity of an ill-fated woman, Yukiko (Takamine Hideko), in love with a worthless married man, Tomioka (Mori Masayuki), she met in S.E. Asia during the war. After the war, Tomioka returns to his wife and family; when Yukiko follows him, he appears a completely changed man. The novel is set in the poverty and degradation of bombed-out Tokyo, where everybody suffers the pangs of hunger. Yukiko accepts every sort of humiliation at Tomioka's hands - even when he takes up with another mistress, or leaves her simply behind when he has a job transfer. To survive, she has to turn to prostitution - at all stages of her life she is manipulated be men. She keeps following her lover, all the way to the remote island of Yakushima (the edge of postwar Japan), where she finally dies. In the chilling last scene, Tomioka carefully puts lipstick on her dead lips. Based on a novel by Hayashi Fumiko. Kinema Junpo Award for Best Film of the Year.
11. Flowing (Nagareru, 1956)
A film about the decline of a geisha house on the Sumida River, based on the expert novel by Koda Aya. The events are seen through the eyes of the middle-aged maid Rika (Tanaka Kinuyo) who begins to work there at the start of the film. We witness the slow dissolution of a once viable way of life in a time of economic hardship, and also the decline in status of the geisha after the war. The long-established geisha house run by the proud Otsuta (Yamada Isuzu) is heavily in debt, and the mistress desperately tries to save her business. In that, she is assisted by her practical daughter Katsuyo (who is not a geisha and wants a regular job; played by Takamine Hideko), but the forces opposing her are very strong. There are various subplots, but the structure of the film is unified through the use of the architecture of the house. The title "Flowing" points literally at the Sumida River flowing at the back of the establishment, but also at the uprootedness of the characters - and perhaps also to "the flow" of money that is so important in the film, as survival depends on it.
12. When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Onna ga kaidan wo agaru toki, 1960)
A film set in the milieu of bars and hostesses, and the men who visit such bars. Keiko (Takamine Hideko) is a beautiful hostess who manages a bar in Tokyo's Ginza district as the "mama-san" although she does not own it. In her behavior, she is demure and conservative, seldom showing her feelings; she is always impeccably dressed in kimono. She is in her thirties (she is a widow) and it is therefore time to settle down, by either acquiring an establishment of her own, or by leaving the water trade through a second marriage. Her present bar is on the second floor, and every evening she has to climb the stairs. She hates the look of those steep stairs, and the grind work that awaits her at the top of them, but once she is inside her bar, she shows an impenetrable smiling face - a professional accessory - and can take everything that comes her way. She also keeps her style and her independence. In her own words: "Around midnight, Tokyo's 16,000 bar women go home. The best go home by car. Second-rate ones by streetcar. The worst go home with their customers." But as the films shows: this type of work is hard and it is difficult to find security. Every man in her life deserts or disappoints her, but in the evening, resigned but tenacious, she again climbs the stairs to her bar to spend another night serving selfish and exploitative customers.
13. Scattered Clouds (Mideragumo, 1967)
The last film (the English title is often changed into "Two in the Shadow") by Naruse, made two years before his death. Tsukasa Yoko plays a widow (Yumiko) who falls in love with the driver, Shiro (Kayama Yuzo), who accidentally killed her husband in an accident. She gives a beautifully restrained performance which indeed symbolizes the end of an era. The sedate pace and slow-burning kind of passions in the film have evoked comparisons with Douglas Sirk and Wong Kar-wai. But it is not surprising that it takes a long time for Yumiko's feelings to change towards the man who after all was responsible for her husband's death. Shiro, a professional driver, has been cleared of wrongdoing, but does feel guilty for what has happened, particularly when Yumiko is disinherited by her husband's family. A delicately understated and poetic film.