Scene at the Sea / Ano natsu, ichiban shizukana umi (1991)

A young deaf-mute man decides he wants to be a surfer and is followed on his quest by his deaf-mute girlfriend. Nothing could be more likely to become a tear-filled journey, probably to ultimate success and love. But from the very first shot of two young men blankly staring straight ahead into the camera, it …

The Bride Talks in Her Sleep / Hanayome no negoto (1933)

Like The Neighbor's Wife and Mine, Gosho's Bride Talks in Her Sleep is designed to show off the new sound technology that Shochiku was slowly introducing as their studio standard. It is also a light-hearted look at student and salaryman life in the early thirties, very much the same feel as Ozu's silent student comedies …

Funeral / Ososhiki (1984)

Wabisaki and his wife Chizuko are actors who make most of their living from TV commercials. One day Chizuko gets a phone call from her mother that her father has died, and the mother wants her and her husband to organize the funeral. Thus begins Juzo Itami’s quietly charming first movie The Funeral, as pure …

Crazy Family / Gyakufunsha kazoku (1984)

In Family Game, Yoshimitsu Morita took a scalpel to the modern Japanese middle-class family; in Crazy Family, Sogo Ishii takes a sledgehammer to the same subject, but expands his target to the whole of contemporary Japanese society. We meet the Kobayashi family on that magical day known to so many American families in the fifties …

Woman in the Mist / Oboroyo no onna (1936)

Just before he came down with TB before the war, Gosho began a turn away from his popular shomin-geki with three more melodramatic movies. Woman in the Mist is the most frustrating of these three movies, even though it seems the most complete, for it takes us into the confusing world of the Japanese mistress. …

General Bow-Wow / Enoken no wanwan taisho (1940)

Japanese film comedies are rare outside of Japan, so when YouTube throws up something like General Bow-Wow, we can hardly skip the chance to take a look. In the world of film comedy, there are two broad categories -- the comedy built around a story and the comedy built around the comedian, who plays the …

Kinuyo’s First Love / Kinuyo no hatsukoi (1940)

I wish I had found Kinuyo’s First Love two years ago when I was writing primarily about movies made in the thirties, for it provides so much cultural information that would have been helpful as I wrote about other movies. It also provides a bittersweet story told without melodramatics of the type that came to …

I Am a Cat / Wagahai wa neko de aru (1975)

I Am a Cat isn’t really about a cat, but rather about the family the cat wanders into. Until the rather surprising ending, we do not hear the cat’s thoughts or see activities through the cat’s eyes (though the traditional Japanese penchant for low camera angles would have been quite useful). Instead, we get a …

Take Care, Red Riding Hood / Akazukinchan kiotsukete (1970)

Kauro is a high school graduate trying to decide what to do with his life. He has a childhood sweetheart that he keeps breaking up with and then getting back together. It is assumed that he will go on to Tokyo University like his two brothers and become a lawyer, which he sees as a …

It’s Tough Being a Man* / Tora-san – Our Lovable Tramp / Otoko wa tsurai yo (1969)

Most Americans who become interested in Japanese movies are first attracted to the exoticism of the jidai-geki or the energy and violence of the yakuza movies, so it is easy to forget that there was a large world of movies about modern life being made at the same time. The shomin-geki did not die in …