A compelling romantic melodrama, Ukigumo was acclaimed both by the director’s colleagues in the film industry (Yasujiro Ozu hailed it as a masterpiece) and by the Japanese critical establishment, who voted it into first place in that year’s Best Ten critics’ poll for Japan’s leading film magazine, “Kinema Junpo”. In Japan, it is still generally regarded as, in the words of Naruse scholar Masumi Tanaka, “the pinnacle of his creative achievement”. The film was one of six that Naruse adapted from writings by the distinguished female author Fumiko Hayashi (1903-1951), and one of 17 in which he directed the great actress Hideko Takamine (1924-2010), whose sensitive yet determined screen persona ideally personified his unhappy yet resourceful heroines. Ukigumo is a perfect synthesis of Hayashi’s literary sensitivity and Naruse’s visual restraint, with Takamine serving as the essential bridge between these two artistic visions. The genius of Naruse lies in his ability to capture the fleeting emotions that cross Takamine’s face – those momentary hesitations, flashes of hope quickly extinguished, and the quiet determination that marks her character’s journey through postwar disillusionment. The film’s drama has long been interpreted as a microcosm of Japan’s wartime and postwar experience. Naruse and Takamine transform what could be a simple story of unrequited love into a profound meditation on the displacement experienced by an entire generation who had lost not only a war but their place in a rapidly changing social order. In Takamine’s nuanced performance, we witness the disillusionment of postwar Japan not as abstract concept but as lived emotional reality.

Johan Nordström