Director Mikio Naruse, A Name Finally in Lights

Though Naruse's 1935 "Wife! Be Like a Rose!" was the first Japanese feature to get (albeit brief) U.S. distribution, he has been a non-factor ever since -- despite enthusiastic acclaim from cultural leading lights Susan Sontag, Phillip Lopate and Donald Richie. In Japan he's warmly appreciated, judging by the crowds that thronged Tokyo's National Film Center to see his films and honor the centennial of his birth last year. But with some arcane exceptions -- French critics have loved him for years -- Naruse has never enjoyed the worldwide reputations of his countrymen Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi.

At first glance, it's easy to understand why distributors -- Japanese and American -- would balk at the task of selling Naruse to U.S. art house patrons, let alone mainstream moviegoers. His shomin-geki (or "home films"), set in the working and lower-middle classes of Japan, are hardly uplifting.

The main characters, frequently women, are often divorced, single or widowed. They have no money, so they're forced to take up unseemly jobs. And no matter how hard they work to better their lives, patriarchal society continues to regard them with disdain and abuse them. The men in their lives are feckless husbands, undependable sugar daddies, unreasonable boyfriends, tyrannical fathers or testy brothers. If they do have family (which Naruse considered a terrible misfortune), those relatives wrangle, scheme and, in some cases, even resort to fisticuffs.

"From the youngest age," Naruse (pronounced Naru-SAY) once said, "I have thought that the world we live in betrays us. This thought remains with me."

The doom and gloom of his films, as well as Naruse's trademark moroseness, did not endear him to his superiors at Toho, the highly bureaucratic studio for whom he made most of his films, says Richie, a film historian and author of many books on Japanese filmmakers. Consequently, Toho refused to submit his films to the prestigious European festivals such as Cannes and Venice -- which provided cultural gateways to the West for Japanese directors.

"The West got our Japanese pantheon there, via the film festivals," says Richie. "Kurosawa's 'Rashomon' won prizes at European festivals [in 1951]. The following year, his 'Ugetsu' was at various festivals. But Naruse's company never sent films to the festivals. His reputation was never lost in Japan. The Japanese know perfectly well who Naruse is. But he was not introduced to America till very, very late."

A closer look at Naruse's films on display -- bookended by 1931's silent, whimsical short, "Little Man, Do Your Best," and his last film, the 1967's "Scattered Clouds" -- reveals that there's more to his movies than just despair. These women are plucky fighters, stubbornly committed to the task of trying their damnedest anyway. Few filmmakers of either gender have created such unsentimentally heroic women.

"Naruse heroines," wrote Audie Bock in her landmark 1978 book "Japanese Film Directors," "retain the dignity of evaluating their acts to the end, and the persistence of their search for happiness, despite accumulating evidence of its nonexistence, becomes the terrifying statement of all of Naruse's work."

Wrote film critic Lopate: "Naruse's forlorn flavor of existence can become addictive. In order to acquire the taste, however, the viewer may need to surrender his or her speeding mental processes to a far less hurried, subtler movement. The effort pays off: If Naruse's films are invariably about disappointment, he himself does not disappoint -- no more than does Chekhov, an artist he greatly resembles in stimulating our appetite for larger and more bitter doses of truth."

The frustrations of Naruse's fictional women, in many ways, echoed his own. Growing up in an impoverished home in Tokyo -- he was the third child of a struggling embroiderer -- Naruse was constantly held back from the things he wanted. Among them: a complete education (he was forced to work at 15) and a director's position. After getting a job as a prop man at Shochiku, his first studio, it would take him 10 years to become a director at Toho. During this protracted apprenticeship, Naruse watched in exasperation as other aspiring filmmakers, who could write as well as direct, rapidly climbed the ladder ahead of him.

When he did start writing scripts and became a director, the soft-spoken Naruse did not take full advantage of his newfound authority. He was not built for assertiveness in the front office, so he often agreed to bad projects, which produced an uneven career. But when the right stories did come -- he was particularly fond of the hardscrabble feminist novels of Fumiko Hayashi -- Naruse took to the task with extraordinary zeal.

Why did Naruse, whose nickname around the Toho studios was "Mr. Disconsolate," respond to these stories of luckless, desperate women? The answer seems to lie in his social habits. With few friends of his own, he spent most of his evenings in cheap restaurants and bars, where he befriended the kind of working women who would feature so prominently, and authentically, in his films. (One waitress, upset that Naruse did not love her, even took her own life.) This social habit continued for much of Naruse's life, interrupted for four years by an unhappy marriage to actress Sachiko Chiba, who starred in "Wife! Be Like a Rose!"

Ironically, for all his sensitivity to the plight of women, Naruse was strangely uncommunicative with the women who acted for him. He refused to provide feedback to his actresses -- or any actor, for that matter -- expressing neither satisfaction nor dissatisfaction with their performances. And he instructed them to keep gestures to a minimum, often framing them in constricting close-ups.

Though his methods intimidated his colleagues, including his leading lady Hideko Takamine (who appeared in 12 of his films), they produced his finest and most domestically popular work, particularly in the 1950s. Movies such as "Ginza Cosmetics" (1951), "Mother" (1952), "Lightning" (1952), "Wife" (1953), "Older Brother, Younger Sister" (1953) and 1955's "Floating Clouds" -- all of them among the Washington offerings -- cemented Naruse's authority as chronicler of the workaday world and, frankly, of the poor and miserable. Though Ozu and Mizoguchi made powerful films about family and women, they aimed for a transcendentalism that Naruse eschewed. He preferred to view life at its closest quarters, without sentimentality or false endings.

The 1950s weren't Naruse's only good years, insists film historian James Quandt, who organized the traveling retrospective in partnership with the Japan Foundation (which provided the new, restored 35mm prints). The series also shows Naruse's work from the 1940s, when the Japanese government forced filmmakers to extol its wartime "national policy" (Naruse managed to get by the censors with lip service to these requirements); his early sound films of the 1930s, such as "Wife! Be Like a Rose!" and 1935's "Three Sisters With Maiden Hearts"; the aforementioned 1950s films (when he placed many times in the Kinema Jumpo "Best Ten," an annual poll of Japan's top critics, which was the country's closest equivalent to the Academy Awards); and finally, the CinemaScope films he made from the late 1950s into the 1960s.

The CinemaScope films, says Quandt, include one of his favorites.

"It's a true buried treasure called 'The Approach of Autumn' [1960], which showed that, late in his career, Naruse could feel his way into the world of children with the same kind of empathy and insight he had shown in his portraits of marriages and trapped women."

Quandt insists, though, the viewer could watch any film in the series to get a sense of his talents. And Naruse, who died in 1969 and whose remains are in a Buddhist temple in Seijo, Tokyo, not far from the Toho studios, would meekly but demonstrably agree.

To access the schedule of films and get program notes, visit these three Web sites: http://www.asia.si.edu/naruse, http://www.afi.com/silver/new and http://www.nga.gov/programs/filmjapanese.shtm.