The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity (review)

Naruse Mikio (1905–1969) learned and practiced filmmaking in the mid-twentieth century, a time when Japan experienced the massive upheavals of war and occupation as well as societal and ideological change. Fascist, democratic, and citizens' rights movements took place in the context of a burgeoning consumer culture and mass media that drew attention to the search for identity and how to represent and conceptualize oneself in the modern milieu. In her groundbreaking study of Naruse Mikio's cinema, Catherine Russell analyzes the construction and representation of Japanese women on screen, as well as the overall project of modernity operating on and around Japanese women in real life. Japanese women emerge as disappointed in the broken social promises of the Meiji Restoration and Occupation democracy, but also as hopeful and something more: strong, energetic, forward-looking, and makers of their own destiny. A non-Japanese speaker, Russell brings an external viewpoint to the study of Japanese cinema and succeeds in vividly transporting us not only into the historical period during which Naruse worked, but also into the worldview of Japanese women, so brilliantly and restrainedly expressed by a series of strong actresses like Hara Setsuko, Tsukasa Yōko, and Takamine Hideko.

In this study, Russell analyzes all sixty-seven of the extant Naruse films, aiming to highlight his aesthetic values without resorting to a hierarchical ranking of the films. Her description of the films as "fragments of one much longer film" (p. xii) is borne out through detailed plot synopses with a focus on repeated narrative events, showing the cohesiveness of Naruse's vision. Describing her work as an auteur study, Russell compares Naruse to other directors of his generation—Kurosawa Akira, Mizoguchi Kenji, and Ozu Yasujirō—but admits she "cannot really testify to the distinctiveness of Naruse's cinema" in terms of industry or studio norms. Rather, her main aim is to show how his work "participates in and contributes to Japanese modernity as a cultural movement" (p. xiii). Russell succeeds in this by detailing Naruse's attention to materiality and showing how his films may be read as "ethnographies" or "anthropological studies" of everyday life in the modern Japanese city. She demonstrates how the films use key narrative events such as traffic accidents—variously involving trains, cars, and bicycles—as, essentially, examples of the modern effects of urban living; she also shows how Naruse's construction of female subjectivity through costume and appearance sets fashion trends and kitsch against traditional kimono and more enduring styles. Russell uses to great effect Miriam Hansen's idea of "vernacular modernism," where film is seen as a modern democratizing influence on a global urban culture, and frequently references Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, and Naoki Sakai in exploring the relationship between subjectivity, mass culture, and cinema as a "mode of experience."

Throughout the book, Russell interrogates the definition of "modernity" in the Japanese case, basing it firmly in mass culture and the historical moment. This focus succeeds in avoiding the essentialization typical of "national cinema" approaches. So many critics of Japanese film have focused on national traits or representations of Japanese identity through the invocation of tradition, that it is a relief to see a work dealing in concrete and observable historical and cultural specifics. This specificity also allows an examination of weaker films as well as works acclaimed as masterpieces, while the chronological structure enables us to trace the developmental changes in female subjectivity across time. In its broad range and specific readings, Russell's work follows Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto's study of Kurosawa, although she makes sure to contrast her own interpretations with Yoshimoto's in regard to melodrama and national allegory.¹ Unlike Yoshimoto, Russell does not theorize about the binary hierarchies of fidelity discourse that plague adaptation studies; instead she analyzes Naruse's adaptations of novels by Hayashi Fumiko, Kōda Aya, and Kawabata Yasunari on their own merits. By evaluating these films primarily as films, Russell has actualized...