Mikio Naruse

Because his style was similar to that of Yasujiro Ozu, who was already active at Shochiku, he moved to PCL (currently Toho) in 1933, where he appeared in the talkie works "My Wife, Like a Rose" and "Tsuruhachi Tsurujiro." It got attention. There were times when he was unable to make as many films as he wanted due to wartime film regulations and post-war Toho disputes, but in 1951 he revived his career with Meshi. Since then, he has released masterpieces one after another, including "Okaasan," "Lightning," "The Couple," "Wife," "Anii Mouto," "Sounds of the Mountain," and "Bangiku." The pinnacle of his work, "Floating Clouds," is Kenji Mizoguchi's "Wife." Even director Ozu was impressed, calling it a masterpiece of Japanese cinema, on par with "The Sisters of Gion." He depicted ordinary people in everyday life with an everyday realism that was not influenced by lyricism, and he consistently sought out women as his subjects.

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10 minutes 18fps, 35mm, silent, black and white. The film records the members of Studio F enjoying a cherry blossom viewing party, with the smiling faces of Gosho, Naruse Mikio, Fujimoto Masumi, Chiba Sachiko, Shinobu Setsuko, Kobayashi Jyukuji, and Kawakita Sotaro. The original is 8mm. Around 1935.

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War widow Reiko rebuilds and runs the grocery shop in the house of her husband's family. Many years later, their business is threatened by a newly built supermarket and Reiko's in-laws plan to convert their small shop into a supermarket, to her detriment.

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Based on the life and career of novelist Fumiko Hayashi, she bitterly struggles for literary recognition in the first half of the 20th-century – her affairs with feckless men, the jobs she took to survive (peddler, waitress, bar maid), and her arduous, often humiliating attempts to get published in a male-dominated culture.

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A single mother from the country raising a 6th grade boy comes to Tokyo, leaves the boy to live with his uncle's family, runs a struggling grocery store, and works a local inn. The boy befriends a girl, the daughter of the innkeeper.

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A woman and her daughter are in love with the same man, a chef at the restaurant that the mother manages. He is slightly crippled from frostbite in his years in Siberian labor camps and considers himself 'already dead'.

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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 Ryokichi. Their life quickly sinks into despair.

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Portmanteau film about young lovers.

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Keiko Yukawa is a former prostitute and the newest inmate at White Lily, a female rehabilitation facility.

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University students Sudo and Mori make money by picking up rich girls in dance clubs and conning them into giving them cash. Mori is the brains of the operation, and Sudo is the suave dancer who picks up the girls. Sudo becomes gradually involved with three different girls and is drawn into the gangster milieu, which he seems unable to resist even though he is responsible for his mother, grandmother, and sister Masako. In this world of bad boys and girls, Masako is the pillar of strength and moral virtue who finally enables Mori to straighten out.

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

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

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A comedy about two salarymen who routinely degrade themselves for their boss.

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

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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 the dwindling number of passengers when her job and the bus company itself are at stake.

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A Fond Face from the Past is also set in a rural community, specifically a village outside Kameoka, near Kyoto. In some ways this short, thirty-six-minute film is Naruse's most moving negotiation of the militarist restrictions of the time, perhaps because it is also his most direct engagement with the culture of war. When a newsreel comes to Kameoka featuring a local man named Yoichi, it causes some excitement in the community and, of course, in Yoichi's own family. First of all his mother makes the newsreel (Nippon News, no. 14), which begins with the same marching music that opens his own film, followed by a curious baby judging context in Los Angeles featuring two hundred Japanese babies. Released in January 1941, almost a year before the pacific war begins, this “found footage” is indicative of Japanese imperialist ambitions beyond Asia long before Pearl Harbor.

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This film depicts a troupe of wandering kabuki players traveling through rural Japan.

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9th directorial work by Yamamoto Satsuo.

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Two young girls, Nobiko and Tomiko, go to the same school. The less fortunate girl Nobiko is one of the top students, while the rich girl Tomiko is not. At one time Tomiko's father was quite fond of Nobuko's mother.

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A large family scrapes by on the meager salaries of the father and three eldest sons, who left school in order to work and support the family. The fourth eldest is soon to graduate and follow in their footsteps, though he'd rather continue schooling. The eldest finally decides to break free and set out on his own against his parents' wishes, with the support and sympathy of his siblings.

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Mr. Tsurujiro is a Japanese folk singer assisted by Ms. Tsuruhachi on the shamisen. The pair is popular, but he often nitpicks her music and so they split. She marries a benefactor, but after a joint show, feels music is above marriage.

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The study of a one-year marriage that begins to crumble. A married man is torn between the love of his wife, and the attraction to a cousin of his wife.

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Young Hiroko’s conservative principles place her at odds with most modern women, as she has already submitted to her mother’s choice of man for any marriage prospect. Wed into an affluent family that practically treats her as a housemaid, locked away like a 'doll' by her estimation, Hiroko’s own submission to traditional thinking brings contradictions to light.

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After some fruitless career hunting in downtown Tokyo, Chiyo accepts a job as a bar hostess in Shiba ward. Well away from glamorous Asakusa and Ginza, this is a neighbourhood tavern where the women are dirt poor, each having only one kimono to their name...

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Otherwise promising young man Asaji and his younger brother Yuji face blighted lives due of society's disapproval of their illegitmacy and déclassé family.

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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 shamisen for his songs/recitations), his affair with a geisha (Sachiko Chiba), and the deterioration of his partnership and marriage.

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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 is running into financial trouble, causing him to tamper with his stock; Meanwhile, his long-time mistress yearns for something more serious. Amidst this, the older sister is introduced to a well-off suitor: A university boy, much more intrigued by the less traditional little sister. A doddering grandfather, an officious uncle and busybody neighbors also don't make the lives of the hardworking members of the family any easier.

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Kimiko, a Tokyo white-collar working girl, lives with her serious, intellectual, haiku-writing mother. Kimiko seeks to marry her boyfriend but needs her absent father to act as the go-between and negotiate the marriage. Kimiko travels and finds her father living with a second family.

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Three sisters earn money for their bossy mother by being samisen street musicians. This means mainly playing a banjo type instrument for tips in bars...

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In Depression-era Tokyo, the life of a single mother and her young son are disrupted by the return of her ex-husband, who fathered the child and walked out on her years earlier.

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An aging geisha, whose angry teenage son is ashamed of her profession, works alongside a young geisha, resentful of her family for forcing her into a life of ignominy.

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An actress returns to Tokyo after a successful stint in Hollywood to reclaim—with the help of her gangster brother—the daughter she abandoned years before.

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Kato's splendid mustache is an obstacle when it comes to finding a job. However, he gets a job as a security guard at a construction site. The president of the construction company tries to grow a mustache like Kato's and, failing, orders Kato to shave off his. Considered a lost film.

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A short concerning an impoverished insurance salesman and his scrappy son, whose fisticuffs with the other boys of their village put his father’s livelihood in jeopardy.

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Directed by Mikio Naruse. It is presumed to be lost.

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