Mikio Naruse Movies

An ingratiating bride develops warm ties to her father-in-law while her cold husband blithely slights her for another woman.

With delicate, unobtrusive strokes, Naruse evokes both the humor and bitterness of his characters’ dilemmas, in this bleak, compelling poignant...

A luckless geisha struggles to make a living for herself and her young son.

A war widow with a young boy manages a farm with her bossy mother-in-law. When a reporter comes to interview her, the two begin an affair. He turns...

The main focus is on the 5 member band of a small circus as it runs into problems while touring rural Japan. It also pays lots of attention to the...

Slice of life film centered on a couple of years in the life of a rural high school girl.

A story of two sisters, the older being more traditional, the younger a "moga" ("modern girl"). Their widowed father runs the family sake shop, but...

The story of Kiyoko, a young woman who has successfully managed to make a break with her dysfunctional family who have been trying to arrange a...

Considered one of the finest late Naruses and a model of film biography, A Wanderer’s Notebook features remarkable performances by Hideko...

This film is based on a real Meiji era performer -- and tells of Tochuken's partnership with his wife (played by Chikako Hosokawa) who played...

A small community in wartime Japan learn how to make do with less.

A teenaged girl witnesses her widowed mother's attempt to sustain her family.

A melodramatic love story, a would-be apprenticeship between the titular bad girl and the optimistic scholar returning from the big city. It is...

Michiyo lives in the small place Osaka and is not happy with her marriage; all she does is cook and clean for her husband.

The Angry Street includes a great deal of location shooting in the rebuilt city, including downtown streets, residential neighborhoods, the campus of...

Anzukko (Little Peach) is the daughter of a successful writer. She turns down each one of her suitors, until she marries a beginning writer named...

Okoma, a witty young woman working as a conductor in an old, rickety bus in Kōfu, Yamanashi (rural Japan), has a creative idea that could avert...

Kiyoko (Takamine Hideko) and her husband want to open a coffee shop. She becomes increasingly close to the bank clerk (Mifune Toshiro) she's asked...

Part 2 of a 2-part romance (first part - Kafuku zempen) based on a story by noted author Kikuchi Kan. In the second half, we discover that Toyomi is...

Tashiro coincidentally meets his best friend Sugimoto in a bar very close to the apartment in which Sugimoto’s wayward wife is found dead....