This sparkling comic drama is the most famous of Naruse’s 1930s films, and became one of the very small number of pre-war Japanese films to have secured a commercial release abroad; it played in New York in 1937 under the title of Kimiko, to lukewarm reviews. In Japan, by contrast, it was hailed by the critics, among whom Matsuo Kishi, in “Kinema Junpo”, saluted it as “one of the greatest achievements not only of P.C.L., but also of the Japanese cinema as a whole”. It topped the magazine’s Best Ten critics’ poll for that year.

The film was adapted from the first episode of Futarizuma (Two Wives), a three-part shinpa (melodramatic drama with a contemporary setting) play by Minoru Nakano (1901-73). It is a bittersweet account of the efforts of a young female office worker to reunite her lonely mother with the father who has left home and gone to live with another woman in the countryside. The contrast between Tokyo and rural Nagano Prefecture, and between the lifestyles of the different generations, is brought across vividly. Writing a couple of years after the film’s release, Kyoichi Otsuka praised “a formal beauty achieved through the pleasant harmony of sound and scene”, and noted that the film brought freshness to shinpa conventions by “touching on the true nature of the human heart”. It was, he concluded, “a triumph for Mikio Naruse and a triumph for the talkie”.

With her cheerful, vivacious star persona, Sachiko Chiba (1911-93), who plays heroine Kimiko, was P.C.L.’s first big star. Having made an impression with her debut in Sakebu Ajia (Asia Cries Out, Tomu Uchida, 1933), for which P.C.L. recorded the sound, she had been headhunted by the company, and starred in P.C.L.’s first feature (Japan’s first musical), Ongaku kigeki: Horoyoi jinsei (Tipsy Life, Kimura Sotoji, 1933). She was to appear in several other Naruse films, including Uwasa no musume later the same year. In 1937, she married Naruse, though the couple were to divorce only three years later.

Alexander Jacoby e Johan Nordström