“Life is a journey”, declares one of the heroines of this early Naruse sound film, but Naruse’s films, as Catherine Russell writes, “are journeys without final destinations”. With its provincial setting, artistic milieu and itinerant theme, this comedy about performing artists might evoke the contemporary work of Shochiku-based Hiroshi Shimizu. But it is also characteristic of P.C.L. as a studio, with its stress on music as illustrative of the potential of sound film, and of Naruse’s work in the first decade of sound with its repeated focus on performing artists, a theme to recur in Tochuken Kumoemon (1936), Tsuruhachi Tsurujiro (1938), Uta andon (The Song Lantern, 1943) and Shibaido (The Way of Drama, 1944). The film was loosely based on a novel entitled Kanashiki Jinta (Sad Jinta) by comedian Roppa Furukawa. “Kinema Junpo” was critical of the film, judging it inferior to Wife! Be Like a Rose!, and finding that it lacked the lyricism typifying Naruse’s best work. Nevertheless, in so far as we can trace, this film has never previously been screened outside Japan, and its European premiere at Bologna is a unique opportunity for admirers of this respected director to see how Naruse’s thematic concerns took shape in the first years of sound.