Naruse likes unexpected bursts of voiceover narration and the surprise of introducing a flashback in a narrative that until then has been strictly present tense. In the last section of Late Chrysanthemums (54), an adaptation of several Hayashi stories, unexpected voiceover narration by an ex-geisha makes explicit the lack of feeling remaining between her and her former lover, even though outwardly the scene looks like meetings they had in their youth. The single flashback to happier days in Mother (52) is the more poignant for being so sharp and short. In Scattered Clouds, sudden flashbacks to the widowed heroine’s married life portray her lost happiness with a characteristic Narusean blend of curtness and lyricism. Three Sisters with Maiden Hearts even has a flashback within a flashback, though that is perhaps less startling than the fantasy within a fantasy in Morning’s Tree-lined Street (36). In As a Wife, as a Woman and Floating Clouds (55)—another Hayashi adaptation and probably the best known of the director’s 89 films—the Narusean flashback is a sudden opening up of unexpected passageways and escape routes in time. Past and present are continuous in Naruse. In Floating Clouds, a kiss begun in flashback is completed in the present. In As a Wife, as a Woman, two children run out of a room in flashback, then, in response to the call of their supposed mother, return (after a straight cut) through the same doorway, years later. In Stranger within a Woman (66), which shares the same basic story with Chabrol’s Just Before Nightfall, the hero relives his obsessive relationship with his slain mistress through quick straight-cut flashbacks.

In Floating Clouds, the heroine observes wryly to her lover during one of their many walks together (which Naruse contrives to present as one infinite walk): “We’re not getting anywhere, are we?” Over the many years spanned by the film’s narrative, various obstacles, including several Other Women, always keep the heroine from pairing off with her chosen man, the married seducer whom she follows on a downward spiral of misadventures to sickness and death. The condition of their relationship is its instability. Throughout Naruse’s career he remained faithful to the theme of the impossible relationship. In Okuni and Gohei (52), the netting around the noble Okuni’s sickbed, dividing her from her devoted servant, is the visual reminder of the ban on the love that develops between them as they travel together. The singer-hero of Tsuruhachi and Tsurujiro (38), willfully and in apparent consciousness of what he is doing, ruins the relationship on which both his personal happiness and his professional success depend, opting for solitude and failure.

Some Narusean relationships are impossible because of the punishing role of the ideal in his characters’ lives. In Wife (53), based on a Hayashi novel, a widow sacrifices her potential happiness with her married lover because she recognizes the superiority of the claims of the man’s wife. Fulfilling her preordained role as the hero’s feminine ideal, the widow finally makes herself unattainable. The heroines of Yearning (64) and Scattered Clouds follow her in this choice, convinced that fate has cast them in roles that bar them from happiness. In When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, Naruse again describes the predicament of a woman who’s believed to be too good for the world: most of the characters idealize the heroine, in part because of the legend that she placed a letter and a photograph with her husband’s ashes, symbolically burying herself with him.

The role of the widow in Naruse’s cinema might be described as highlighting the fact that in Naruse’s world, the man is necessarily dead, that is, unable to fulfill the ideal of masculinity. If the man happens to be biologically living, the woman’s role becomes that of protecting him from becoming aware that his life is a failure, that he is already dead. The characters played by Kinuyo Tanaka in Ginza Cosmetics (51) and Mother fulfill this function, as do the hero’s second wife in Wife, Be Like a Rose, wives of failed writers in The Actress and the Poet (35) and Anzukko (58), and Fumiko with her tubercular husband in A Wanderer’s Notebook. The heroine’s brother in Lightning, a wounded war veteran, is a frail zombie, still bearing in his body the bullets that could at any moment actualize a death that he has merely delayed (when his brother-in-law gets into a fight with the baker who has cuckolded him, the brother shrinks away in terror). Only his mother’s pampering sustains for him the illusion of a kind of dreamlike existence, a perpetual childhood.

In A Woman’s Sorrows (37), one of the best of several excellent films Naruse made during his career’s supposed 16-year slump between Wife, Be Like a Rose and Repast, Naruse’s art is one of portraying conflicts that, for almost the whole of the film, have not yet erupted and become irreversible, of showing the small discouragements and unpleasantnesses of family life. There are no villains: if the heroine, Hiroko, becomes exploited by her husband’s rich family, her condition appears as the almost inevitable result of her fidelity to an outmoded way of life. (Throughout this film, the heroine is in constant motion in response to the successive demands of the other members of the household. It’s the opposite of Naruse’s The Whole Family Works [39]: here, nobody in the whole family works except the heeroine.) The Sound of the Mountain (54) is also about a loyal wife who sticks with an impossible situation until its impossibility becomes too obvious to all concerned. Setsuko Hara, best known in the West for her roles in Ozu’s films, plays both this woman and the central character of Daughters, Wives, and a Mother (60), who also makes personal sacrifices to live up to an unwritten code of How People Should Behave, a code that’s calmly violated and ignored by all the relatives who exploit her. But the opposite course, putting personal desires above family expectations, doesn’t lead to happiness either, as the heroine of Summer Clouds finds when she makes her single, doomed bid to escape her condition as a war widow in a rural land-owning family by having an affair with a married journalist from Tokyo.