A Japanese Tragedy

It begins in a whirlwind of documentary footage about current Japan, about corruption and strife. We see flashbacks to Japan, just coming out of the War, dealing with poverty and hunger and teachers explaining that they were telling their students lies, passing on the lies they had been told and believed. Newspaper stories are shown. Among the headlines is one about a mother of two who committed suicide by jumping in front of a train.

Yûko Mochizuki is a serving woman at a resort in the Izu Peninsula. Her son and daughter visit her. The son wants her to sign documents so he can be adopted by a wealthy doctor; he is a top student, but he has no money, and so cannot afford to practice medicine. Her daughter, unknown to her, is being courted by her English teacher, a married man whose wife despises him, and whose daughter has been trained to hate him.

Ozu and Naruse wrote and directed serious movies about families struggling to survive and adapt in a changing Japan. Their families care about each other. Kinoshita, in this movie, says those are lies. Miss Mochizuki's family has fallen apart in a Japan where no one cares about anyone else. She is a kind, moral, silly woman, who gives good advice and is lied to at best, or knocked to the ground for it. Her daughter was raped by her cousin; now she hates all men and trusts no one. Her son has become an almost emotionless intellectual drudge, who shrugs his shoulders when told of some one making a stupid choice; they're adults, he says. They have to make their own decisions. He's going to survive in this new world.

Kinoshita's work after his wartime propaganda, is usually ameliorated by his dark sense of humor. There is no humor here. Instead, he has absorbed the techniques of both Italian Neo-Realism for his visual effects, and Film Noir's flashback structure to show character's motivation. It's a fine, angry, hateful story of people adrift in an uncaring world.