Okasan opens to the voice of a reflective young woman named Toshiko (Kyôko Kagawa) who amusedly comments on her assiduous and determined mother Masako’s (Kinuyo Tanaka) idiosyncratic preference for short brooms as she observes her mother meticulously sweeping the floors of their modest family home. In a poor, working class Tokyo suburb in 1950, the […]
Tag: Mikio Naruse
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. […]