Between Men and Women
Hannah Bonner on Mikio Naruse’s Floating Clouds

Floating Clouds screens May 9 as the opening night of the Mikio Naruse retrospective, The World Betrays Us, presented at Japan Society through May 31, and Metrograph from June 5–29.

A man and a woman huddle together. The woman pulls away and stares off into the distance, a slant of light illuminating her face. “I remember many things,” she begins. As she chronicles memories from their romance, the man remains shrouded in darkness, his head bowed in concentration—or in shame. Upon mention of his wife, the mise-en-scène becomes freighted with meaning: the woman’s plaid scarf echoes the barred windows in the background, a gleaming sake carafe cleaves the unbreachable space between them. As the man says, “You must forget the past,” he rises to switch on the overhead light, breaking the spell. “For us, the past is the only reality,” the woman counters, clinging to that dim memory. “Without it, where would we be?”

In this scene from Mikio Naruse’s Floating Clouds (1955), an adaptation of feminist writer Fumiko Hayashi’s final, eponymous novel, postwar Tokyo is the backdrop for the doomed relationship of typist Yukiko (Hideko Takamine) and Tomioka, a married Forestry Ministry officer (Masayuki Mori). Though Yukiko and Tomioka initially meet in Indochina while working on a forestry project of the Japanese wartime government, the film largely follows the aftermath of their affair. Upon returning to Tokyo, Tomioka refuses to leave his sickly wife or his second mistress, Osei, for Yukiko. Ever loyal, Yukiko continues to hold out hope, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Tomioka will have a change of heart and leave both women for her.

On May 9, as part of a comprehensive Naruse retrospective programmed by Edo Choi and Alexander Fee, Floating Clouds will screen on 35mm at the Japan Society on its 70th anniversary. One of Naruse’s most well-known films, Floating Clouds is an engrossing, devastating introduction to Naruse’s mid-career work. Lauded for his shōshimin-eiga (common people’s drama), Naruse was a key figure of the Japanese golden age, but frequently listed, according to film scholar Catherine Russell in The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity, “as the ‘number four’ auteur, following Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and Ozu in international—and Japanese—recognition.” To wit, the Japanese film critic Sato Tadao dubbed Naruse a “poor man’s Ozu.”

Some of this critical oversight (or derision) may stem from Naruse’s commitment to the Toho production company where he made more than half of his films, including Floating Clouds. As “a company man,” Russell writes, he became “notorious for bringing films in on time, on or under budget.” Such an austere attitude allowed for a prolific output, even if Naruse himself was “not always pleased with his results.” Pleased or not, Naruse directed 89 films between 1930 and 1967 in contrast to Kurosawa, who directed just 30 feature films over six decades. Naruse was a master of melodrama, particularly attuned to the lives of women in states of emotional, economic, or societal upheaval. He recurrently returned to Hayashi’s writing, ultimately adapting her work six times. Her stories of working-class women appealed to Naruse’s similar preoccupations with the everyman. From Floating Clouds to Late Chrysanthemums (1954) to When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960), Naruse’s most emotionally potent films often depict working women grappling with love, loneliness, and loss.

Floating Clouds opens with archival footage of repatriates returning to Tokyo in the early winter of 1946. Interspersing this fictional film with documentary footage infuses it with material and emotional realism, though Naruse will quickly abandon that style for a three-point lighting system that favors and highlights Hideko Takamine’s radiant face. The archival footage (a record of the past) also introduces central themes of the film: waiting and time. Desire is an often atemporal state of being. As Roland Barthes writes in A Lover’s Discourse, “Am I in love?—yes, since I am waiting.” In the 1950s, mainstream narratives of affairs typically feature the woman waiting, at the mercy of the man’s whims and wayward attentions, forever perched at the precipice of hope or despair. Naruse captures the quotidian quality of a woman’s loneliness in the mise-en-scene, much in the spirit of “A Tomb for Anatole” when Stéphane Mallarmé’s writes,

true mourning in
the apartment
—not cemetery—
furniture

Seated under her leaking corrugated tin roof, Yukiko watches drops of water hit the tabletop, their percussive rhythm mimicking the ticking of a clock. The minutes pass languidly, uninterrupted. In the next scene, she walks aimlessly through the city streets before a white Western soldier approaches her, a transactional (and transient) companionship to quell her loneliness and, perhaps, offer a temporary economic reprieve. Earlier, when asked if Tomioka deceived her, Yukiko replies, “Not exactly. Things aren’t the same since the war ended.” How can one disentangle the affairs of the heart, Naruse seems to ask, from the affairs of money, war, and politics? For much of history, love and capital for women have been inextricably linked.

Writing about Naruse’s proclivity for centering female characters within (and beyond) his six adaptations of Hayashi’s work, Russell states, “[Naruse] produced a remarkable body of films dedicated to women’s passions, disappointments, routines, and living conditions, but he made remarkably few comments about his interest in women characters or women’s culture.” While Russell notes Naruse’s reticence to comment on the gendered dynamics of his work, there is little doubt that he demonstrates an affinity, however understated, for his actresses. Under soft lighting, amidst her drab surroundings, Hideko Takamine shines. As she and Tomioka open a bottle of shochu, Naruse keeps Yukiko centered in the foreground while Tomioka faces her in profile at the periphery of the frame. Naruse invites us to sympathize squarely (narratively and formally) with her.

Later, when Yukiko confronts Tomioka about her unexpected pregnancy, the depth of focus in the frame showcases their conflicted responses. Yukiko, downcast and resigned, states she’ll take care of the baby herself. Tomioka brightens, almost imperceptibly. Despite Tomioka’s temporary resolve to be a father, Yukiko remains in the foreground, favored by the light. As they discuss keeping the baby and Tomioka’s wife, Naruse employs a shot-reverse shot structure that keeps the couple from cohabitating the frame. The editing symbolizes all the ways they will continue to be apart. “Don’t talk as if I were a naive girl,” Yukiko says wearily as they walk home. “I’ll get by.” The solution? An abortion, since Yukiko is already well aware that Tomioka will never fiscally, nor emotionally, care for her.

At the beginning of Hayashi’s novel, when Yukiko first gets off the train at Saginomiya, she’s had “nothing to eat or drink on the train. Her body feels as if it were floating.” Though the phrase “floating clouds” initially might evoke a lush, pastoral scene, “floating” in Hayashi’s world connotes scarcity and hunger. These women psychically and physically must settle for scraps. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that Hayashi once penned the poem:

Hana no inochi wa mijikakute
Nigashiki koto nomi ookariki

The life of a flower is short
Only bitter things are many

Yukiko has also tasted life’s bitter fruit. Proximity to Tomioka cannot sweeten its nectar, only lead to further temptation and disappointment in an iterative loop without end. Ichirō Saitō’s score amplifies this recursive movement, swelling every time Yukiko weeps or suffers rejection, as if a constant sonic reminder that all hope is lost.

Though Yukiko initially believes that their idyllic time in Indochina is the only reality they share, Tomioka himself states, “Our love died when the war ended.” Nonetheless, Yukiko trails after Tomioka despite repeated rejections, unable to fully grasp his apathy. He moves through her life like vapor, unwilling (or unable) to be held, just as shadows of dusk light permeate multiple scenes. The darkness of evening cannot help but evoke the U.S. air raids on Japan, reminding the viewer of another kind of ash. Though Floating Clouds is a story of what tragically transpires between men and women, it is also about what is feasible when a society is pushed to the brink of collapse. Even when infrastructures are rebuilt, love is not necessarily guaranteed such revivification.

As Yukiko suffers in sickness toward the end, Naruse films her again in close-up, soft lighting permeating her pained face. This shot both further isolates Yukiko from the other characters, while also focusing attention on her. Returning to Russell’s observations, the close-up magnifies the emotionalism and narrative possibilities of Hayashi’s female characters who are overlooked by society, though not by Naruse’s camera. Ultimately, Yukiko cannot receive the attention she wants from the man she loves. “The life of a flower” may be short, but we are fortunate to bear witness to that brief, extraordinary blossom.