Metrograph

Offered Fumiko Hayashi’s final novel, unfinished upon her sudden death the same year, Naruse undertook his first of six adaptations of the revered feminist author’s work, producing one of his great melodramas, a major critical and commercial success that ushered in his most fertile period. Working for the first time with recurring screenwriter Sumie Tanaka (Late Chrysanthemums, Flowing), herself an outspoken feminist playwright, Naruse crafts an achingly exact portrait of a fraying Osaka housewife (Ozu muse Setsuko Hara) trapped in a marriage to a stunted and oblivious salaryman (Ken Uehara in the first of several such roles for Naruse). Hara delivers one of her finest performances, complicating the smiling sorrow of her Ozu characters with a uniquely Narusean sense of restrained resentment, teetering on neurotic frustration.

Introduction by Akinaru Rokkaku, Program Director of the Japan Foundation, New York on June 14