After their indebted father’s suicide, a family of weavers contemplates an uncertain future. Set in the Nishijin district of Kyoto, a centre of textile-making since the 15th century, whose traditions were under threat in a modernising Japan, this subtle drama is another of Yoshimura’s elegant chronicles of female experience in the old capital and another careful analysis of postwar social change. The “Kinema Junpo” reviewer compared the film to Chekhov, evoking The Cherry Orchard, which famously traces the decline of an old family. In fact, Shindo’s screenplay had drawn on a less celebrated 1882 play, Les Corbeaux by French author Henry Becque, about a bitter quarrel over an inheritance. Shindo also incorporated memories of his own childhood experience as the son of a wealthy family that had gone bankrupt. His script is filled with rich and subtle characterisation, while the atmosphere of Nishijin is skilfully captured by Japan’s most respected cinematographer, Kazuo Miyagawa (1908-99). Miyagawa had photographed Rashomon two years earlier and would shoot Ugetsu Monogatari – one of his several collaborations with Mizoguchi – a year later.
Yoshimura gathered a superb ensemble cast, including Mizoguchi’s favourite actress, Kinuyo Tanaka (1909-77), in this elegiac study of traditional crafts in decline in the face of Japan’s modernisation. The “Kinema Junpo” critic praised the vitality of Tanaka’s acting, in a role for which he judged her to be ideally suited, as well as the “glittering” performance of Ichiro Sugai (1907-73). He also celebrated the “remarkable progress” made by star Yumiko Miyagino (19262018), who had made her film debut only two years earlier.

Alexander Jacoby e Johan Nordström