So short is the life of a flower Yet so many hardships it suffers
Ever since Chicago Film Society screened When A Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960), I’ve been down a Mikio Naruse funnel. That movie was relentlessly brutal but seductive at the same time. I’ve watched a bunch of others and the man is a connoisseur of human suffering. Every way one person can torment another is explored in delicious detail with multiple variants and permutations. I just can’t get enough!
Wikipedia says Naruse made shōshimin-eiga (“common people drama”). I guess that’s fair as far as it goes. There aren’t any kings or fairies or anyone very unusual in the movies I’ve seen so far. It’s kitchen-sink stuff which is catnip for me. Yet he makes the everyday trials of his little people excruciatingly sensuous somehow.
In Woman Ascends, a saintly bar hostess is put through a Job-worthy series of setbacks yet she just keeps smiling and plugging along. Like many of Naruse’s heroines, she’s resigned to her fate and sees no real way out. When these women permit themselves a moment of hope or dream the world slams the door twice as hard in their faces.
In Sound of the Mountain (1954), a young woman is trapped in a loveless marriage to a philandering shit, her only solace the relationship with her father-in-law. She wants children badly but has an abortion knowing that giving birth will bind her for good to a man she’s grown to despise but the love of the older man has arguably enslaved her even more than her husband’s neglect. There are layers and layers of complications throughout these films that never permit any of the characters an easy out.
In Scattered Clouds (1967), Naruse’s last, a pregnant newlywed on the verge of traveling abroad for her husband’s promotion, instead spends the ensuing decade mourning his death in a traffic accident, living on money from the man who ran him over, and eventually falling for that man. Everything and everyone in this story is cursed or doomed and in others’ hands this would be a ludicrous soap-opera but Naruse manages to wring tragic emotion out of it somehow.
Perhaps the bleakest in his pantheon of misery is Floating Clouds (1955), in which yet another young woman indentures herself to an older man. They meet in Indonesia and have an affair during the war, but when they come back to Japan to a ruined country, she obsesses over him though he clearly doesn’t want her anymore. Naruse keeps twisting the knife as she prostitutes herself just to remain near him, even paying for his wife’s funeral and paying for a lawyer for a jealous husband who kills the young wife the man had a fling with. When he gets a job in a remote mountain region she robs a grifter who’d raped her in her youth so she can make the journey with her beloved, only to die when they reach their destination.
I plan to keep watching more. I don’t know exactly why these movies work so well for me. Maybe it’s best I don’t know.
Just can’t look away.
According to WordPress, this is my 600th newsletter. There were many more going back the six or seven years prior to 2015, sent out whenever the mood struck me, before I signed up for Tinyletter but this is as far back as my archive goes. I want to thank everyone who’s stuck it out any fraction of these last ten years. In honor of this milestone, here is Newsletter #1:
Hello,
So, I’ve caved in and signed up for this newsletter service. The main reason, of course, is convenience and ease of use. The programmers that design these things are miles ahead of anything I could ever even begin to learn so why fool myself, right? You have to pick your battles so sometimes it’s best to leave some of the minutiae to the professionals. I can’t imagine that there will be any substantive difference from my regular newsletter aside from your being able to unsubscribe easily and the formatting being better. But if you for some reason have a strong opinion on this please don’t hesitate to let me know.
