Catherine Russell, The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity,

Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2008

Reviewed by Freda Freiberg

At long last, Naruse Mikio’s cinema has received serious attention in the first book-length study of his work in the English language. Western scholars of Japanese cinema have neglected Naruse, favouring the more attention-grabbing classic maestros – Kurosawa Akira, Mizoguchi Kenji and Ozu Yasujiro – who have all been discussed extensively and long accepted into the pantheon of great film directors. Like Mizoguchi, Naruse was a great director of star actresses and women’s films; like Ozu, he was trained at Shochiku’s Kamata studios and was a reliable company employee; like Kurosawa, he served a long apprenticeship – in fact, the young Kurosawa worked as Naruse’s assistant director in his early years at Toho.

In Japan, a Naruse film received the Best Film award twice in the annual Kinema Jumpo critics’poll, for Tsuma yo bara no yo ni (Wife be like a rose) in 1935; and for Ukigumo (Floating Clouds) in 1956. In the West, we have known his work largely through the efforts of Audie Bock, who curated the first Naruse retrospectives in Europe and North America in the 1980s, after according him an honoured place in her 1978 survey of leading Japanese film directors. The retrospective reached Australia, so we here were also able to “discover” Naruse. Despite the excitement generated by this discovery, Naruse has not (until now) received the attention he deserves and has generally been underrated. Part of the problem has been the subtlety of his style and stance in comparison with those of the other acclaimed masters; he neither lectures us nor draws attention to himself. Overlooking the comic elements, some critics have found him dour and pessimistic; on the whole, women viewers respond to him more enthusiastically than male ones, because he represents women’s experience so honestly and sympathetically. In his films, women are not male fantasies, as they so often are in the films of male directors.

Like Bock, Russell has long been a fan of Naruse. She has previously praised his adaptations of Hayashi Fumiko stories and provided appreciative commentaries for DVD releases of his films. For this book, she has conducted comprehensive research on all the extant Naruse films, and their critical reception in Japan and abroad, as well as on the academic literature on modernism in Japanese studies and film studies. Although she does not read or speak Japanese, she has employed Japanese translators and researchers productively. She covers the different periods of Naruse’s working life (prewar, wartime, Occupation and postwar) with historical specificity, identifying the specific pressures (industrial, political and social) he worked under at specific times. She gives accounts of the content and formal construction of 67 films, an astounding feat in itself. But she also relates them to an overall argument about his films. Drawing on a term coined by Miriam Hansen in regard to classical Hollywood cinema, she argues that, although Naruse’s cinema does not critique modernity, as the product of popular culture it articulates something close to “vernacular modernism”, reflecting the contradictory experience of modernity in the everyday life of ordinary people, especially that of women.