Naruse’s first film after his move to P.C.L., and his first talkie, this stylish melodrama was adapted from Sisters of Asakusa, a story by Yasunari Kawabata, who would win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968. Naruse recounted the travails of three sisters in the shady Asakusa district of Tokyo through a complex flashback structure. Kawabata apparently credited Naruse’s script with curing what he perceived as the weaknesses of his original treatment, while Naruse, by contrast, regretted having complicated the simplicity of the story.

Naruse used sound creatively, making atmospheric use of sound effects, employing the then-novel technique of voiceover, and interspersing the dialogue scenes with scenes shot silent and played with only musical accompaniment. Catherine Russell notes that “Naruse’s decoupage in Otome gokoro sannin shimai remains as flamboyant as it was in his silent films. The pacing is very quick, and the scenes are often broken into a fragmented assemblage of close-ups and medium shots.” The film was shot partly on location in Asakusa, and preserves the sights and sounds of pre-war Tokyo. The opening scene contains valuable footage of the famous Senso-ji Temple, the original buildings of which were destroyed by firebombing in March 1945.

Typical of its studio, the film displays a marked Western influence. Naruse acknowledged taking inspiration from The Power and the Glory (William K. Howard, 1933), which pioneered the use of flashback and voiceover in Hollywood, while one character sings a song from the successful German musical Congress Dances (Der Kongreß tanzt, 1931). About three minutes’ worth of footage was trimmed by the censors for alluding to prostitution, an example of the moralistic interference that was commonplace in Japanese cinema during the 1930s.

At the time of its release, “Kinema Junpo” published a discussion between four critics, who concluded that Otome gokoro sannin shimai was the best Japanese talkie they had seen to date; it is a mark of the excellence of Japanese film in 1935 that it ultimately did not even rank in the magazine’s Best Ten for that year!

Alexander Jacoby e Johan Nordström