Cinema Talk

The runaway success of Kurosawa’s High and Low in 1964 must have been enough to convince Toho that neo-noir was a viable route for their filmmakers. Two of Naruse’s last three films could be organized by the genre, even if they do manage to downplay the more thrilling elements that made Kurosawa’s film such a smash. The first of these two is A Stranger Within a Woman. Noir seems especially uncharacteristic for Naruse, but this wasn’t his first attempt at such a film, 1950 saw the release of both The Angry Street and White Beast, two films which are definitely noir-tinged. Those two films came before Naruse cultivated his mature 1950s style, the one that informed his legacy. They contain a pulpy energy, where as A Stranger Within a Woman is an airtight thriller, it seems to approach plot points with melancholy, as opposed to excitement.

Sugimoto runs into his long time friend, Toshiro, as the two are walking home from work. They decide to have a drink together, and then split. Arriving home, Toshiro is greeted by his wife, Masako. He tells her that he’s expecting a call from Sugimoto. The call never comes. The following day’s newspaper explains why: following a drink with Toshiro, Sugimoto returned to his home to find his wife, Sayuri, dead by way of strangulation. Soon after, Toshiro confesses to Masako that he was having an affair with Sayuri before her death. Later, he confesses that he was the one responsible for her death and that he intends to turn himself in.

Although Naruse provides us a great deal of information through flashback, his concern here is not for the mystery to unravel slowly. In fact, we have no reason to think that Toshiro isn’t the culprit immediately and when he confesses to infidelity thirty minutes in, most would be confident in his guilt. The flashbacks show that Naruse, although working with the mold of a thriller, was not concerned with “who did it?” or “why” either. These sequences are narrated to us with observations, ones that go attack Sayuri’s character. The first flashback, initiated by the musings of Toshiro’s mother, is a passive critique of Sayuri’s flirty nature. The flashback’s most crucial detail does not uncover itself as a clue, but rather suggests the inevitability of her death.

It would be a mistake to credit Sayuri as the film’s main character here, but she is the most interesting. She’s on screen for less than a minute, but the film is built on conversations around her. When Toshiro’s younger coworkers at a printing press discuss her death the first question asked is “was she good looking?” Even Sayuri’s husband, Sugimoto seems rather unmoved by her death, and he immediately rationalizes her demise as inevitable because of her “many male friends.” Here, I could suggest that Sayuri was functionally dead before she was even killed. Certainly, her death is not given any value beyond her relationship to men. Conversations frame her only as a bourgeois “slut” whose sexually transgressive nature ruined an otherwise humble man like Sugimoto. This is often how the femme fatale operates, but Naruse never gives her time to properly seduce us, suggesting that any attempt to defend Toshiro is ridiculous. Then again, Toshiro doesn’t feel like he’s been wronged like an American film noir protagonist would, he basically embraces the punishment he feels he deserves. In Naruse’s world, the hormone-driven chaos that makes noir exciting is flattened, reduced to something banal.

Although the film opens in Akasuka, an ideal urban setting for a noir, most of it takes place in the suburban comfort of Kamakura. Kozaburo Yoshimura’s Temptation also shows us Kamakura, but it seems that much has changed in a short eighteen years. Yoshimura’s Kamakura is represented by a beach house, one where the interiors seem to exist in a liminal space between what we conceive as indoors and outdoors. Naruse’s Kamakura should be more familiar to American audiences, we seldom go outside (it is almost always raining in the film) and so we’re left to consider a Westernized suburban home. Suburbs existed in Japan before Levittown and America’s process of suburbanization. The hybrid nature of the house represents a post-occupation structure, it is the sort of thing that Isoya Yoshida would have fought violently against in the 30s. Whether he liked it or not, gender played a huge role in Yoshida’s vision of architecture, and he spoke of “purity” both in structures and in women. The film concludes with Masako poisoning Toshiro before he can turn himself in. As she explains via voiceover, “As he tries to go out the front door with his head held high, I’ll have to sneak him out the back.” The front lawn of the American suburban house is the masculine space. The back, the garden, is feminine. Masako, just like her house, has forsaken Yoshida’s idea of “purity” in Japan. Her and the house have transitioned in American suburbia, American patriarchy, both of which maintain a similar control over her body. The revolutionary moment is not that she kills her husband and gets away with it. After all, she does so to main the respectability of the family. Instead, it comes from the realization that all the “modernity” and “progress” that American imperialism (or in this specific case, occupation) advertises to women has changed very little. Basically, the patriarchy upgraded the master’s house, but Masako must still live in it.

It makes sense that Naruse’s first feature filmed in color and in Tohoscope would take place away from the city center. It wasn’t the first time he went “rural” so to speak (nor would it be his last) but the new technology offered his technique something that didn’t immediately click with the aesthetic of his “city films.” This seems like a preposterous statement to make when one considers the Tohoscope beauty of When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, which finds the filmmaker back in the urban realm. Here, though, the technology seems especially compatible with the way he opens up space. Of course, Summer Clouds is still about the city, but its conversation on “the city” uses the vocabulary of rural peasants.

Yae is a single mother who, when not attending to her family’s rice field, works as a freelance journalist for nearby Yokohama. Her connection to the world of journalism is Ogawa, a younger man with whom she enjoys a sly, sexual relationship. Yae is realistic, she wants something more with Ogawa, who is married, but realizes that they aren’t going to run away together anytime soon. In the midst of this, a family drama is brewing between Yae’s brother, Wasuke and his three sons. He criticizes them for their interest in escaping the rural life for one in the city, be it in Yokohama or in Tokyo. He tries to solve these complications by marrying off his sons, but things don’t go so smoothly.

The relationship between the rural and urban is a discursive thread running throughout Naruse’s work, but it is seldom as pointed and obvious as it is made here. Ogawa’s two youngest sons, Jun and Shinji, want to separate themselves from the traditions of farm life and relocate to the city. The concept of “tradition” is a dangerous one, especially in the loose, reductive, and Orientalist way western critics carelessly yield it around Japanese films. Both Naruse and Ozu have had the term applied to their work. It’s not an incorrect application, but the inability to expound on the idea of tradition is one that flattens and simplifies their work. The descriptions of tradition are so often viewed with an understood distant, both temporally and geographically. The patriarchy present in 1950s Japan is, at least according to western critics (everyone from Donald Richie to Noel Burch) is nowhere close to the western world in the present day. I’m not suggesting the situations depicted in a film like Summer Clouds could easily be transplanted to North America or the United Kingdom without any editing, that is just as simplistic. Instead, I am suggesting that evoking “traditions” in describing a film such as this is an Othering practice.

The traditions that Wasuke holds close to him are so difficult to break because they can be held up by logic. It doesn’t make sense, economically speaking, for his sons to transition into city folk or for relatives who are women to attend school. He repeatedly refers to a hope that his family remains a peasant family, and that his sons do not become employees. Peasant can evoke, to many, an image of the rural poor one that doesn’t match with the family depicted here. There are classes of peasantry, and the milieu here is that of the “middle peasant” (a term I encountered through Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, but has origins in the writings of Lenin and Mao) or the peasant with a comfortable amount of space and agrarian equipment. Wasuke could let go to this status, but it would lead to the end of the family’s middle peasant lifestyle.

The work of the peasant seems to slip through the ideas of labor and value expressed through capitalism. Marx’s lumpen-proletariat (or those too disadvantaged to gain class consciousness) can be imagined as peasants, because they are, by definition, not directly exposed to capitalism’s exploitation and abusiveness. Yet, Naruse’s camera manages to render both capitalist labor and peasant labor as similarly harmful. Wasuke holds to traditions, which pressures some in his family to stay in this system. Naruse films the few scenes of labor as mechanical, not literally (though, Yae does use a mechanical plowing tool at some point, a sign of her modernity) but in how the bodies  themselves respond in machine-like unison. By extension, Wasuke’s rationale for holding on to traditions are formed by the logic and reasoning of capitalism, even as the labor itself works outside of it.

While Naruse was able to provide a fruitable and intriguing conversation on labor, the appeal of Summer Clouds is in the character of Yae, who is portrayed by Chikage Awashima. She takes charge in every situation, be it in her sexual relationship with Ogawa or her dealings with Wasuke’s stubborn old-fashionedness. In one of Naruse’s most subtly sensual scenes, Yae closes two sets of doors. Ogawa opens one, but Yae quickly shuts it. The image fades, and it’s the morning after. Though she dreams of a life with Ogawa and even vocalizes such desires, she’s still pragmatic. The films ends with her plowing the rice fields. Her frustration is palpable, but she does not call on us to pity her, instead her laboring suggests she’ll survive. She deserves a man who is devoted to her entirely.

Despite some critical success, Mikio Naruse was in a tough position by 1933. His peers admired his work but his studio boss, Shiro Kido, was unimpressed. We now know that the friction between these two lead to Naruse’s transfer to PCL, which later become Toho. However, in 1933, the pressure was on for him to deliver a film that doesn’t immediately echo Yasujiro Ozu’s work. Kido would remain skeptical of him, but it is hard to watch a film like Apart From You, and think that it owes any particular debt to Ozu. They do overlap in that they capture the reconfiguration of rural spaces, which would be transformed to suburbs. Ozu (literally) moved up within Tokyo to more middle class families. Naruse moved outward to the margins that so many of his characters had already called home.

Kikue is an aging geisha struggling to keep her most devoted client interested. Her son, Yoshio, contributes to this frustration by his truancy at school. He’s fallen into a young gang, and when asked about his disobedience, he lashes out at Kikue and says that he’s embarrassed by her profession. Kikue’s best friend, Terukiku, is also a geisha and around the same age as Yoshio. She tries to convince him that his mother is indeed very devoted to him, and that his agitation with her is misplaced. Terukiku invites Yoshio to join her on a visit to her hometown, which appears idyllic, but is revealed to be a site of abuse and anger. Seeing the familial discord has an impact on Yoshio, but he’s not quite prepared to straighten up immediately on the trip back.

My earlier review of this film, published in 2008, is pretty generic. I don’t want to turn this into a complete overview of my writing at the time, but while it is not a particularly offensive piece, it is not a very interesting one either. Apart From You is at its heart, a melodramatic film. One that seems to be missing the necessary dramatic syntax to make such a film work. It’s only an hour long, and so there’s little time to capture the anxiety rising up on Kikue, Terukiku, and Yoshio. While I still love this film, it might be for completely new reasons now. Perhaps it is an unintentional side effect, but Naruse’s camera does capture the liminal part of Tokyo’s transition. Other filmmakers situated their “urban dramas” in sexier, more fully developed spaces. But, in fitting with the economic plight of his characters, Naruse captures a neighborhood that still has rural residue. The trip to Terukiku’s home town sets up a narrative contrast, between the city and country, but Naruse’s camera suggests that describe the spaces in such a binary is incorrect.

Terukiku’s hometown remains unnamed, but we do now that she and Yoshio are able to easily access it via railroad. One might deduce that it is a present-day suburb, transitioning from its rural past, not unlike the suburb occupied by the family in I Was Born But… There is plenty of visual evidence to describe the space as “less sophisticated” but Suketaro Inokai’s camera captures a richness in the street life. Less developed and less commercial than the Tokyo the film opens with, but not reduced to the condescendingly rural. The two primary spaces of the film can’t be positioned as a binary, which works with Naruse’s handling of the characters. The plot could be described as trite, but the dramatization of their emotions is complicated. In fact, words seem especially inefficient to describe the film’s finale.

Terukiku and Yoshio return to Tokyo, where Kikue contemplates suicide. In one particularly impressive sequence, Kikue’s violent confrontation with her patron is paired next to a more jovial encounter between younger geishas with younger patrons. Kikue is, in the end, saved but violence is unrelenting here. Yoshio’s attempt to quit his gang leads to ridicule, which then ends with Terukiku being injured. The film’s conclusion is unclear, but we know that Terukiku, because of her selfish father’s economic wants, must leave Tokyo for a profession even less desirable than that of a geisha. Sex, of course, is not explicit in a film from 1933 Japan, but Terukiku is presumably shipped off to a brothel. I would suggest that Naruse’s entire career shows compassion to sex workers, as opposed to the anxiety evident in other such films. Terukiku and Yoshio’s farewells to each other are bittersweet but she’s already told us that “she’ll keep fighting.” The film ends with her departing, potentially, for a life of more abuse. Visually, we understand that hope is still there. For others, this would be the conclusion to the tragedy, but Naruse is more pragmatic. Terukiku leaves the frame, but her agency feels firmly intact.