Mikio Naruse

Andrew Chan

Two uncompromisingly bleak films examine the unresolvable nature of domestic life and familial relationships.

Hideko Takamine as Kiyoko (center left), Osamu Maruyama as Kasuke (center right), Mitsuko Miura as Mitsuko (far right), and cast in Lightning. Courtesy Japan Society. © Kadokawa Corp.

“Mikio Naruse: The World Betrays Us—Part 1,” Japan Society, 333 East Forty-Seventh Street, New York City, through May 31, 2025

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In two of Mikio Naruse’s greatest postwar melodramas, Lightning (1952) and Yearning (1964), home is hell. The insular domestic settings of these films, with their stuffy, often windowless rooms and total lack of private space, breed not just discord but an ethic of brute survivalism. Siblings squabble over financial decisions, spouses become heartless traitors or obstacles to maneuver around, and elders stand watch in a state of convenient helplessness, all while myriad adverse influences leak in from the outside world.

A veteran of the Japanese studio system who began working in the silent era, Naruse has sometimes been referred to as a “poor man’s Ozu,” a phrase originated by critic Sato Tadao. Both directors, in fact, often competed on the same terrain: the shoshimin-eiga, a genre of realist cinema concerned with the daily struggles of ordinary people. But since the 1980s, Naruse—who died in 1969 and whose legacy initially suffered from limited distribution outside Japan—has been the subject of several major retrospectives in the West, and each new occasion to assess his formidable oeuvre has boosted his reputation and made it harder to cast him in the shadow of his more famous compatriot.

Kumeko Urabe as Osei and Hideko Takamine as Kiyoko in Lightning. Courtesy Japan Society.

One clear point of distinction is worldview: though the two men favored the aesthetics of restraint and understatement, Ozu was never as misanthropic as the Naruse of Lightning and Yearning, both of which will be screening later this month in a program devoted to the latter director at Japan Society. (The retrospective continues in June at Metrograph.) Naruse was also more willing to place a fair share of the blame for life’s disappointments on deficiencies of character and failures of nerve, even as he examined the societal forces that dictate people’s destinies.

Hideko Takamine as Kiyoko in Lightning. Courtesy Japan Society. © Kadokawa Corp.

Lightning—an adaptation of a novel by pioneering feminist author Fumiko Hayashi, whose writing Naruse repeatedly drew from—is one of cinema’s most claustrophobic accounts of family dysfunction. Ironically, it begins in motion on the streets of downtown Tokyo, as the protagonist, Kiyoko (Hideko Takamine), works her day job as a bus-tour guide, cheerily extolling the sights to her passengers. The rest of the film undermines this vision of cosmopolitan leisure and mobility. Taking place in the cramped quarters where the lives of Kiyoko, her mother, and her three siblings converge, Lightning regards family as a kind of eternal cage.

Hideko Takamine as Kiyoko, Mitsuko Miura as Mitsuko, and Chieko Nakakita as Ritsu in Lightning. Courtesy Japan Society. © Kadokawa Corp.

The children were all fathered by different men, and alongside the alcoholic war veteran Kasuke (Osamu Maruyama), the adulterous Nuiko (Chieko Murata), and the submissive Mitsuko (Mitsuko Miura), Kiyoko is the only one with a level head and moral compass. Part of what keeps her grounded is her disavowal of romance and commitment to personal dignity; she professes to hate men and sees no point in replicating the mistakes of her family members by rushing into marriage. Naruse honors Kiyoko’s feelings by holding them at a respectful distance. Had he wanted to reach for the feverish registers of tragedy, the director could have exploited any number of the film’s unsavory scenarios: the sudden death of Mitsuko’s husband exposes his affair with an impoverished woman, who later tries to extort Mitsuko for money; a scoundrel whom Nuiko has introduced to Kiyoko as a potential husband makes an unwelcome sexual advance. But these incidents are treated with scarcely more emphasis than Naruse gives to the household’s cat or a clothesline viewed from a window. And because he maintains a breezily anecdotal style, never allowing conflicts to fully combust, the film implies a truth even grimmer than its individual plotlines: that any awful thing can be assimilated into a person’s mundane reality and distort their sense of the world.

Still from Lightning. Courtesy Japan Society.

Made during the second and most widely celebrated of Naruse’s golden ages (the first, stretching from the mid-1930s to the beginning of World War II, is best represented in the retrospective by the exuberantly playful early sound film Wife! Be Like a Rose!, from 1935), Lightning is an uncompromisingly bleak work from a director who always viewed himself as a studio employee whose primary responsibility was to turn a profit. Though the movie was well received upon its release, it’s hard to imagine a mass audience embracing such an unforgiving view of life. Even the quasi-cathartic ending—in which Kiyoko and her self-absorbed, angst-ridden mother quarrel and then abruptly reconcile as a storm brews outside—suggests wounds that can only be soothed, never healed.

Hideko Takamine as Reiko in Yearning. Courtesy Japan Society. © Toho Co., Ltd.

Viewed alongside Lightning, Yearning shows the different effects and shades of meaning Naruse could draw out of a similarly morose tale of working-class strife. Comparing the two films also illuminates the dramatic range of Takamine, one of Naruse’s most important collaborators. Whereas in Lightning the actress drifts subtly between youthful effervescence and all-consuming resentment, in Yearning she has the rigidity of a woman whose existence revolves around a code she has never dared to question: loyalty to her late husband, who died in combat eighteen years ago and to whom she was married for only six months. This steadfastness has, cruelly, made Reiko the object of contempt for her ungrateful female in-laws, who acknowledge that she single-handedly rebuilt the family’s small grocery business after the war but see her as an impediment in their mercenary plan to turn the shop into a supermarket. Their hope is to remove Reiko from a well-earned executive position without seeming responsible for doing so.

More than her mother-in-law, who is easily cowed by her two conniving daughters, Reiko is a vestige of prewar culture, constitutionally unable to get with the times. (In this way, she is like the film itself, an old-fashioned melodrama released in a year defined by more audacious fare, such as Hiroshi Teshigahara’s erotic art-house hit Woman in the Dunes.) Naruse envelops her story in signs of modern decadence, including a grotesque eating contest in which shady men goad young women into gorging on boiled eggs. The greatest provocation to Reiko’s psyche, though, is the love that comes her way from a distinctly inappropriate source: her handsome layabout brother-in-law, Koji (Yuzo Kayama), who is eleven years her junior.

One would be hard-pressed to call Naruse a romantic. His films tend to depict relationships as sites of transaction, abuse, and betrayal. And in real life, he was so prickly and impersonable that even Takamine—who worked with him seventeen times—found it impossible to get near him. But the final twenty-odd minutes of Yearning reveal an understanding of love as deep and resonant as that of any of the director’s contemporaries. Over the course of a long train ride to Reiko’s rural hometown, she and Koji share a gentle flirtation that becomes more apparent as the distance between them shrinks. Naruse leaves room for us to feel both the surprise of this decisive emotional shift and its inevitability. Even as we sense the attraction between them, Koji continues to call Reiko “sister,” an increasingly awkward address that nonetheless elucidates the ties between romantic and familial love.

While Ozu’s most beloved work fixates on what is insoluble and elemental in family bonds, Lightning and Yearning instruct us that there is no form of love that can be taken as a given. In their climactic sequences, both films stage confrontations between characters who have lived under the same roof for decades but have never truly known one another. Compassion flashes between them, and yet something remains unresolved, forever unstable. In Naruse’s world, whatever hope exists lies in the fact that such moments of understanding, no matter how transient, are possible at all.

Andrew Chan is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of Why Mariah Carey Matters, published by University of Texas Press.