Mikio Naruse
Mikio Naruse (August 20, 1905 – July 2, 1969) was a Japanese filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer who directed some 89 films spanning the period 1930 (towards the end of the silent period in Japan) to 1967. Naruse is known for imbuing his films with a bleak and pessimistic... Read full bio →
Midareru
After a bombing raid destroys the family store and her husband, Reiko rebuilds and runs the shop out of love stopped short by destruction.
Anzukko
Anzukko (Little Peach) is the daughter of a successful writer. She turns down each one of her suitors, until she marries a beginning writer named Ryokichi. Their life quickly sinks into despair.
Haru no mezame
Slice of life film centered on a couple of years in the life of a rural high school girl.
Hideko no shashô-san
Okoma, a witty young woman working as a conductor in an old, rickety bus in Kōfu, Yamanashi (rural Japan), has a creative idea that could avert the dwindling number of passengers when her job and the bus company itself are at stake.
Tsuma yo bara no yô ni
Kimiko, a Tokyo white-collar working girl, lives with her serious, intellectual, haiku-writing mother. Kimiko seeks to marry her boyfriend but needs her absent father to act as the go-between and negotiate the marriage. Kimiko travels and finds her father living with a second family.
Yogoto no yume
In the formally ravishing Every-Night Dreams, set in the dockside neighborhoods of Tokyo, a single mother works tirelessly as a Ginza bar hostess to ensure a better life for her young son—until her long-lost husband returns.
Kimi to wakarete
An aging geisha, whose angry teenage son is ashamed of her profession, works alongside a young geisha, resentful of her family for forcing her into a life of ignominy.
Nasanunaka
In No Blood Relation, a gripping early example of Mikio Naruse’s cinematic boldness, featuring a screenplay by Ozu’s famed collaborator Kogo Noda, an actress returns to Tokyo after a successful stint in Hollywood to reclaim—with the help of her gangster brother—the daughter she abandoned years before.
Koshiben ganbare
A short concerning an impoverished insurance salesman and his scrappy son, whose fisticuffs with the other boys of their village put his father’s livelihood in jeopardy.