FLOATING CLOUDS (Mikio Naruse, 1955)

Ukigumo, the perfect title of this absorbing, deeply affecting film, comes from the 1951 novel, by Fumiko Hayashi, on which it is based. (I’m presuming that the English translation is accurate.) Recurrent shots of the two principal characters aimlessly walking give form to the drifting, uncertain nature of postwar Japanese lives following defeat and during the U.S. occupation. (Listen for “Jingle Bells.”) The term “floating clouds” is also an apt formulation of the film’s melancholy, the woman’s moody flashbacking memories, her eventual death and the possibility that the man will continue to be haunted by her memory.
      Yukiko Koda is the woman; Kengo Tomioka (Masayuki Mori—brilliant; best actor, Kinema Junpo Award), who is married, the man. They meet during the war and have their brief affair, which means everything to Yukiko and little or nothing to Kengo. We thus come to observe the formation of Yukiko’s disappointment and disillusionment; she descends into prostitution—a “floating” downwards. Meanwhile, Kengo’s wife is critically ill and his career slips. Japan, as he once knew it, is no longer there for him, either.
     Critics describe the Yukiko-Kengo relationship as being out-of-sync, their needs never quite coinciding in time. The film’s fragmented time-scheme reflects this as well as the discontinuity of the relationship as Yukiko experiences it. In another sense, though, the couple “match up” seamlessly; for self-pitying, paranoid Yukiko so loves Kengo precisely because of the unavailability of his feelings for her, while he comes to appreciate her love for him, when she dies, precisely because of her unavailability to him. Therein lies a stunning metaphor for a Japan “unavailable”—lost—to its people.
     Best film, best director: Mainichi Film Concours, Kinema Junpo and Blue Ribbon Awards—and subsequently voted Japan’s third greatest film of all time.

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FLOWING (Mikio Naruse, 1956)

Isuzu Yamada gives the performance of a lifetime as Otsuta (best actress, Kinema Junpo, Blue Ribbon, Mainichi Film Concours Awards), who runs a financially struggling, heavily in-debt geisha house in Tokyo, as the custom fades into history, in Mikio Naruse’s Nagareru, based on Aya Koda’s novel. Yamada is highly particular, delicately nuanced, complex, forceful, sad and moving as Otsuta perseveres, becoming a figure of dramatic irony, like Garbo’s searing Grusinskaya in Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932), insofar as we know her fate when she does not.
     Nearly as wonderful as Yamada, Kinuyo Tanaka, indeed a greater actress, plays Rika, who, mourning the loss of spouse and child, and fleeing the provincial strictures of her in-laws, becomes Otsuta’s loyal maid. As such she is called Oharu—for us, Tanaka’s greatest role (The Life of Oharu, Kenji Mizoguchi, 1952): beyond a postmodernist flourish, a distancing device by which Mika becomes the observant, caring outsider who flows in and (as Katsuyo anticipates) will flow out of Tsuta House, an embodiment of Japanese continuity.
     Indeed, Naruse begins and ends this beautiful film with shots of a flowing river, boats upon it, in long-shot, moving. Inside this narrative frame there’s little movement, however; rather, static shots from a variety of camera positions accumulate into the suggestion of characters in a boxed-in domain, insulated from the tide of time working against them. Movement comes in dance: Otsuta’s little granddaughter, practicing so that one day she can be a geisha; drunk, having just been jilted by her lover, a geisha brandishing bravado. And movement comes hauntingly: Tsuta House’s former pet cat, on its own, walking a ledge at night.
     Hideko Takamine plays Katsuyo, Otsuto’s elder daughter, who practices using a sewing machine. One day she will have to support her mother and herself.

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A WANDERER’S NOTEBOOK (Mikio Naruse, 1962)

Fumiko Hayashi wrote fiction that Mikio Naruse converted into notable films, among them Repast (1951), Late Chrysanthemums (1954) and Floating Clouds (1955). Hayashi was in her late forties when she died in 1951. Hourou-ki, sometimes called Her Lonely Lane in English, sometimes A Wanderer’s Notebook or Vagrant’s Diary, came from Hayashi’s 1927 autobiographical Hōrōki. It chronicles a desperately poor life, afflicted with chronic bad matches and marriages, that ultimately reaches a level of literary popularity and financial success, by which time, however, Hayashi is an embittered cynic. Hideko Takamine plays Hayashi. One has to admire the extent to which the former child star is willing to detail such an unpleasant character (twice Hayashi loses a job because she is drunk at work), but one doesn’t necessarily believe that Hayashi is capable of writing anything, no matter how many shots show her hunched over a table busily writing to the light of a single hanging bulb. To be honest, I find it hard to believe that Takamine is capable of even reading a book.
     Still, Naruse’s film is an estimable achievement, not least so for its compelling portrait of a struggling community of poets and fiction writers in Tokyo slums. Indeed, the widescreen, black-and-white film is emotionally gorgeous at first, steeped in dark gray nostalgia deepened by Takamine’s accomplished voiceover and the memorable main theme of Yuji Koseki’s score. The film’s first movement reminded me of George Cukor’s Little Women (1933).
     But the thing goes on for more than 140 minutes, and as it insists on Hayashi’s pathetic, unhappy life it peters out. Hayashi is scarcely made more sympathetic by the periodic punctuation of male abuse.
     Naruse, shrewd, attends to both the social context and Hayashi’s self-destructive attitude. These concerns, though, never quite come together.

LIGHTNING (Mikio Naruse, 1952)

The lovely breeziness of Mikio Naruse’s Inazuma (best film, best director, Blue Ribbon Awards) telegraphs the laughter of its eventual mother-daughter reconciliation and expresses optimism for daughter Kiyoko’s future; but at the same time the film, from a novel by Fumiko Hayashi, takes up Japanese cinema’s principal postwar theme: the breakdown of the Japanese family. Indeed, the cohesiveness of family is rendered insupportable in the example that Osei, Kiyoko’s mother, provides; each of her four offspring claims a different father, and the resident male, her one son, is a traumatized, wounded war veteran in clinging need of his mother’s care. Naruse’s light comedy has dark underpinnings.
     Played by round-faced former child star Hideko Takamine, Kiyoko is the protagonist, a bus tour guide: a flip, independent girl who takes full advantage of the dissolution of Japanese patriarchy. The film opens with Kiyoko at work as the view through the moving bus’s front window expresses the new freedom and range of possibilities at her disposal. Kiyoko moves out of her mother’s home once its financial stress has been shored up by a serendipitous death and legacy. In her final confrontation with her mother, the hilarious punctuation of lightning bolts again suggests that even the cosmos is on her side.
     In its own way, Naruse’s film evokes life’s transience as much as Ozu’s films do, but without Ozuvian gravity as ironical counterpoint. What you see in Inazuma is what there is. One is touched along the way by what touches Kiyoko: the sight of her handsome neighbor hanging up the wash that he has laundered so that his sister can concentrate on practicing at the piano: another example of the current better days in Japan for gender fairness—a social victory eked out of the tragedy of national defeat.

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MOTHER (Mikio Naruse, 1952)

Kinuyo Tanaka claims her warmest, most universal role, as Masako Fukuhara, the hardworking middle-aged matriarch of Mikio Naruse’s moving family chronicle Okaasan, written by Yôko Mizuki. Her extended family, which includes a young nephew as her widowed sister tries to find her financial footing in postwar Japan, seems in perpetual flux: Masako’s older son, Susumu, and demoralized husband, Ryosuke, both die (offscreen, thereby shortcircuiting sentimentality); her younger daughter, Chako, moves in with relations, who lost their son in the war, to fill in their loneliness and ease her now widowed mother’s financial strain. Toshiko, Chako’s older sister, is terribly upset, but her mother, philosophical, attributes her own remarkable fortitude to the fact that she also was moved into another home as a child by her parents.
     1950; the Fukuharas live just outside Tokyo, in a working-class district. Susumu, whose loneliness and despondency over his impending youthful end causes him to return home after fleeing the sanatorium, contracted tuberculosis in the upholstery shop where he worked: a symbolical imprint of the U.S. occupation. (Setting the action two years back makes this unmistakable.) The Fukuharas finally have their confiscated land returned to them, enabling them to restart the family laundry; Ryosuke dies shortly after. With assistance from a repatriated prisoner of the Russians, Masako perseveres. Exit “Mr. P.O.W.”; enter a new member of her extended family: Masako’s 16-year-old apprentice, who, homesick, is shown at the last writing his own mother a letter. Life devastates and goes on.
     One of the most poignant passages shows the family in a rare recreational mode at an amusement park. The occasion: Chako’s imminent departure. In another episode, Toshiko’s modeling of a traditional wedding dress, mistakenly interpreted, temporarily dashes her boyfriend’s hopes.
     Ozu and De Sica have influenced Naruse’s wonderful piece of neorealism.

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