The same year as his famous Meshi (Repast), Mikio Naruse made another, not-so-famous film: Maihime, based on the novel by future Nobel Prize-winner Yasunari Kawabata, which Kaneto Shindô adapted. It is the melancholy story of Namiko Yagi, a former ballet dancer who currently runs a ballet school in postwar Tokyo. Although they have two teenaged […]