Wife! Be Like a Rose!, 1935

In Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano cites the contradictory delineation between urban and provincial life in Mikio Naruse’s Wife! Be Like a Rose! as an example of interwar Japan’s amorphously defined domestic and social spaces that arose from society’s ambivalence towards the rapid pace of modernization in the aftermath […]

Every Night’s Dreams, 1933

Mikio Naruse’s elegantly distilled early silent film Every Night’s Dreams provides an archetype for the filmmaker’s recurring themes: pragmatic, determined women who tenaciously hold onto their failing relationships, weak men who lead a life of increasing dependence on the women they mistreat, life stations that grow baser as characters paradoxically strive to improve their situation. […]