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There's something audacious about how unremarkable the story is in 1939's The Whole Family Works (はたらく一家). Directed by Mikio Naruse, who by this time had only a few sound films under his belt, it shows his improved proficiency with the medium while still not being like the nuanced, dark melodramas he directed in the 50s and 60s. Nonetheless, in focusing on the unremarkable events in the lives of a ordinary family in financial trouble, it subtly highlights problems in the Japanese economy at a time when most filmmakers in Japan were making propaganda films for the war effort.



As the title suggests, the whole family works. Well, really just the father, Ishimura (Musei Tokugawa), and the four eldest sons, the other kids are still too young and Mrs. Ishimura (Noriko Honma) works hard at the domestic duties of a housewife who doesn't have a lot of cash to work with. Ishimura and four of his sons all work in dead end, menial jobs.



The eldest son, though, Kiichi (Akira Ubukata), has a little ambition and this serves as the point of tension for the whole film--he wants to take off five years to go to school in the hopes of getting a better job so he can provide for the family. This may seem a trivial problem for a movie but Naruse makes it clear how delicate the situation really is for the people involved, spending a lot of time focusing on Ishimura mulling over the issue. Even with five people in the family working, they're already barely getting by and the loss of just one source of income for five years could be devastating.



One might expect a scene where Kiichi does something drastic or embarrassing but in the climax of the film he just gets drunk, something his father doesn't even mind. In conversation with another man, Ishimura says he's much more worried about Kiichi getting a girlfriend so the young woman who tends the local bar, Mitsuko (Sumie Tsubaki), seems to him a much bigger danger than the alcohol she serves. The last thing he needs is an addition to the family, a source of stress that adds some subtly melancholy tension to seemingly innocent and friendly conversations between Mitsuko and the sons.



Only just over an hour long, nothing terribly dramatic happens in the film but with Naruse's storytelling instincts its a nice little snapshot of the tensions experienced by a family in a precarious situation.

A principle difficulty faced by the aspiring artist or writer is the thorny issue of what constitutes legitimacy in a field where success and failure are attained in a seemingly endless variety of ways. Any course seems to be expensive and have at best a 10% chance of paying off. Add to that the normal difficulties faced by a woman in early to mid 20th century Japan and you can see why the story of author and poet Fumiko Hayashi is so remarkable. Her autobiography was adapted by Mikio Naruse in 1962, a good film called A Wanderer's Notebook (放浪記), with an extraordinary performance from Hideko Takamine as Hayashi.



The first scene of the film is a keen thesis statement for the rest--as a child, Hayashi accompanies her mother (Kinuyo Tanaka) to the police station where her father is being questioned. A street musician, he's accused of panhandling. The cops demand that he sing to prove he's really a musician but the man's so nervous he can't sing well. They conclude he was only pulling a scam--he's fined. The incident reminded me of the story from Alfred Hitchcock's childhood where his father sent him to a police station to be locked in a cell for being "naughty." Much as that incident seems to have inspired Hitchcock to make film after film about people wrongly accused of crimes, the incident from Hayashi's youth makes her keenly aware of the precariousness of an artistic career throughout her life.



In one sense, it makes her a fighter, constantly writing and submitting work to publishers, and in another sense, it gives her crippling low self-esteem. When the cops mistake her for a prostitute and thief later in the film, despite a friend's insistence that she's a writer, she puts up only a half-hearted defence and allows them to take her to the station without complaint.



She takes jobs in factories and bars to support herself and her lovers. She tries to get a job as a secretary but immediately leaves when it's clear her prospective boss expects her to have sex with him for the job. Working as a bar hostess, which in Japan entailed fawning over and chatting with men, she can play along but is less willing to put up with bullshit. In one extraordinary scene she fires off a rapid series of insults at a group of unruly drunks.



It works all the better because of Takamine's performance. I've seen her in a lot of movies but never like this. I suppose it's because she's affecting some of the real Hayashi's dialect and mannerisms--she's a little hunched and has a rolling gait, almost a swagger. She comes off as a tough dame which makes her moments of vulnerability all the more effective--and Takamine seems aware that she needs only subtle changes to achieve a great effect. In one of my favourite scenes, she comes home to find her lover with his mistress who claims to be his wife. She sits down as though nothing's odd and casually explains that she's his wife too--a slightly trembling lip and a few furtive looks are the small, devastating indications of what's happening under her tough exterior.



When her book is published late in the film, people comment on the number of men in her life. As she explains to her mother, she hates men but also can't help loving them. Her roommate early on, played by Daisuke Kato, is a widower who falls head over heels for her and is eager to lend her money whenever she asks. But when she tells him she's not attracted to him, he's disappointed but never pressures her--not for the rest of their lives. His presence in a late scene makes her unwillingness to give money to a writer's charity--"You have to work, it's the only way"--a little more complicated. But Kato's character is an exception among the other men in her life who often seem great at first but end up either casting her aside or abusing her.



Naruse adapted several of Hayashi's books to film so it's natural he would eventually adapt her autobiography. It doesn't have some of the bigger emotional moments and scope of the much better regarded Ukigumo (also starring Takamine) but A Wanderer's Notebook is pretty good.

The danger in diagnosing the problems in any relationship is that there are inevitably so many unseen complicating factors. But in the films of Mikio Naruse, you can be sure money is a big part of it, as it is in his 1956 film A Wife's Heart (妻の心). The tale of a woman who finds herself suddenly dissatisfied in a previously contented marriage, it could be called a retread of Naruse's better, and better known, film Meshi. But a Wife's Heart is a little more complicated and a little gentler. Filled with good performances, it's another showcase for Naruse's talent for subtly sewing drama and relationships through editing and composition.



Hideko Takamine plays Kiyoko, a young woman whose husband, Shinji (Keiju Kobayashi), inherited a convenience store from his mother (Eiko Miyoshi) and the three of them now live in a nice house behind the store. Shinji inherited the property despite being the younger brother of Zenichi (Minoru Chiaki) who left home to work for a company. But when Zenichi's wife and child come to stay for a visit, Kiyoko and Shinji are surprised when Zenichi joins them and the whole family ends up staying indefinitely.



Kiyoko and Shinji are in the early stages of opening a cafe. Kiyoko goes to a good friend whose brother Kiyoko arranges to meet with, a bank manager named Kenkichi played by none other than Toshiro Mifune.



I think this is the first time I've seen Mifune in a Naruse movie and he sure sticks out. I suddenly found myself noticing how extraordinarily deep his voice his, how physically large he is, things I just take for granted when I see him in Kurosawa films. His part isn't so big in this movie but it's crucial. He happily loans Kiyoko money for the cafe and daily starts to get his lunch at the cafe where Kiyoko's learning to cook and wait tables. Meanwhile, Zenichi is suddenly asking for a loan from Shinji to start his own cafe on the other side of town and their mother is pressuring Shinji to grant it. With all the stress he's under, Shinji starts to spend more and more time drinking with a couple geisha.



It's subtly indicated that Kiyoko has a better head for finances than her husband--he has a tendency to go to her advice and both use rhetorical gymnastics to get around acknowledging the fact that the wife is telling the husband what to do with the money. Rather than anyone ever directly stating it, it's clear Kiyoko is drawn to the bigger than life, happy and confident bank manager over her insecure and malleable husband. Like Meshi, it's clear that the wife's strength is more responsible for holding up the family than the husband's.



Aside from one scene involving a suicide, the film isn't as dark as Meshi, or most of Naruse's films. A Wife's Heart is less about the feeling that an unstoppable doom is descending and more about the mysteries of paths not taken and the effects of unexpected complications. It's exciting seeing Mifune and Takamine together, I would have liked to have seen them paired in more movies.

"Your family is complicated," says a journalist named Okawa to a young woman named Yae. It's an understatement in 1958's Sardine Clouds (鰯雲). Her family is complicated because of a series of remarriages and for the increased pressure it puts on rural farmers whose children are attracted by city universities and city jobs. One of Mikio Naruse's few colour films, it uses a beautiful, subdued, and simple palette. It tells a story, as usual for Naruse, fraught with anxieties about money and uses Tae's complicated family as an eloquent case study of a people shifting from the ancient customs of an agricultural society to the seductive, uncertain future of city employment.



Yae (Chikage Awashima) lives with her young son and her mother-in-law on a farm. She's forced to do most of the work but finds time to write a newspaper serial about the changing dynamics of rural family life. As she explains to Okawa (Isao Kimura), although her mother-in-law receives money from a daughter who lives away from home, she refuses to spend any of this money, treating Yae as a workhorse. Before Yae had a child, it seemed as though she wouldn't be accepted by the family at all.



Meanwhile, Yae's brother, Wasuke (Ganjiro Nakamura), lives with his third wife, three sons, and several daughters. Wasuke has several fields, one of which is used by his second wife and her husband. They have a rebellious young daughter, Hamako (Kumi Mizuno), who wishes to go study at the university, like Wasuke's second son, Shinji (Hiroshi Tachikawa). We meet Shinji begging his father for money to go study at the university--later, after he's gotten a job, it's Wasuke who asks him for money to pay for the marriage festivities of his eldest son, Hatsuji (Keiju Kobayashi) to a young woman found by Okawa. Shinji, seemingly seeing himself as a patriarch already, coolly refuses to indulge in his father's old fashioned idea of putting on a grand ceremony. As Yae explains later, the tradition with such ceremonies was based on the idea that the wife was coming to the new family as a new daughter, now marriage was a custom between just two people.



The film is an ensemble piece but unlike most of Naruse's films, which centre on a female protagonist, Wasuke takes centre stage. We see his frustration and despair as everything he believes, and every measure of his self-respect, is gradually eroded by his children. And it's all done without malice as each child is simply trying to assert his or her independence with what seems clearly to be the best means of survival.



The last portion of the film does go back to Yae a lot more as she's forced to deal with her affair with Okawa. Both Awashima and Nakamura give very good performances.

It's hard to see precisely where the battle lines are drawn in the conflict between the head and the heart in Mikio Naruse's 1956 film Sudden Rain (驟雨). Setsuko Hara and Shuji Sano star as a young married couple whose unexamined issues are exacerbated by a sudden series of financial woes, portrayed with Naruse's characteristic delicate, inexorable cruelty. This beautiful picture addresses the emerging influence of feminist social change, ably touches on fundamental human anxieties, and has the wisdom to avoid tidy resolution.



Everything seems fine as the film begins--Fumiko (Hara) and Ryotaro (Sano) have a small, obviously inexpensive home and have typical arguments in the morning about whether they should go out more and about Fumiko cutting recipes out of the newspaper they can't afford for her to make. Kyoko Kagawa plays Fumiko's sister, Ayako, and she pays the couple a visit. She's distraught over her husband's behaviour and she needs Fumiko to confide in.



Fumiko is amused by the complaints that seem like high crimes to Ayako. Her husband yawned at a dinner with guests, he flirted with a waitress right in front of her--Fumiko explains that this is simply what men are like and that being married means becoming acquainted with the faults of one's spouse. When Ryotaro comes home, though, helpfully trying to explain the situation that may have caused Ayako's husband to stay out all night, Fumiko gradually becomes angry herself at her husband's dismissive attitude regarding the faults of another man.



There is a literal sudden rain shortly after but the film's title seems more to refer to three problems that strain Fumiko and Ryotaro's already strained finances--a thief picks Fumiko's pocket at the market, stealing her wallet; Ryotaro's boss announces the company he works for is going under; and a stray dog the couple had been feeding has been stealing and destroying property throughout the neighbourhood. People have begun to demand restitution from Fumiko and Ryotaro.



In a more predictable film, the dog would eventually bring Fumiko her lost wallet or something but Naruse never gives his characters that kind of easy out. The dog is an especially effective part of the film. Even as their problems mount, the couple still can't resist feeding the dog and its hard not to see his innocent but destructive hunger as reflecting the same impulse that keeps the couple together despite their problems.



Fumiko calls Ryotaro old fashioned and feudal, not just because he won't let her work to bring in extra money but also because he presumes that he can go back to his home village at any time and earn a living as a farmer. He threatens to do that several times, each time saying how Fumiko would need to stay in the city because country life wouldn't suit her, a slightly cowardly way of floating the idea of separation. Two opportunities present themselves for Fumiko to get work--first as an errand woman for a newspaper, then as a waitress in a restaurant Ryotaro's co-workers propose opening. The argument between the couple over the issue is particularly insightful for the ways arguments tend to go over such ideological issues--Ryotaro says he doesn't want to be supported by a woman and seems to see any kind of work as degrading for her while Fumiko seems insulted by the very idea that one of them is supporting the other by bringing in money, seeing it instead as a matter of maintaining their existence. The disagreement between the two is exacerbated by each being offended by the other's conceptual presumptions.



But no ideas either one has seems to influence their behaviour, illustrated neatly by a really funny final scene which at the same time does nothing to dispel any of the sources of anxiety.