In Daughters, Wives, and a Mother, someone can’t bring home a shortcake without its price becoming a topic of conversation. Nothing (especially Hara’s widow) enters this house without a price tag. Daughters, Wives, and a Mother is another film in which Naruse compares the ideal of life—what the characters suppose themselves to be living—with its reality. The birthday party for the mother, her children and grandchildren gathered round lovingly, is the image of the ideal. It’s followed by two events that shatter the illusion: first the screening of a disturbing home movie (with sped-up footage of a daughter doing the laundry), then a family business meeting at which a son-in-law reveals the financial calamity that will turn the family members against one another. Again and again in Naruse’s films, the internal coherence of the family is an illusion that’s exposed the moment a crisis loosens the bonds among the family members (instead of doing what people like to believe a crisis does, bringing them together).

Naruse’s staging of scenes portrays the home as internally divided. In Yearning, the heroine and her much younger brother-in-law, after he confesses his love for her, face each other across the division between two rooms. In A Woman’s Sorrows, a shoji partition separates Hiroko, relegated to helping her husband’s youngest brother with his homework, from the other adults of the house, as they play mah jong. The rigidly compartmentalized mise-en-scène of A Wife’s Heart expresses the heroine’s isolation in the house of her husband’s family. In Three Sisters with Maiden Hearts, one sister’s disapproval of their strict mother is underlined by their positions in space: the sister stands on the threshold between two rooms, while the mother sits on the floor.

The ending of The Whole Family Works is very striking: the sons do spontaneous somersaults in their room upstairs; cut to the parents, who, puzzled by the noise, look up at the ceiling; The End. What a strange way to end a film: the parents isolated in their world, the sons in theirs. The sons in motion, the parents still. The scene seems almost anarchistically to extol the sheer energy of youth—but it’s an energy contained, pent up, without outlet.

The question of belonging to a space, of occupying it appropriately or of entering it as a stranger, is foregrounded in Wife, when the heroine’s female friend comes and takes over the house. Her bustling presence highlights the ways in which the house is not really lived in by the couple who occupy it. In Husband and Wife, domestic space is a space of potential or actual intrusions (the roommate pauses at the top of the stairs and coughs before descending to join the couple). Naruse conveys the poverty of the family in Mother by showing that the house is too large, underdecorated, with empty shelves and much bare wall space. The house is made even emptier by the departure, late in the film, of the youngest daughter, after which the mother and the older daughter, in the same medium shot, repair to separate rooms. In Older Brother, Younger Sister, the ground floor of the family home is a vast space offering neither solace nor protection to the family members, who occupy it like travelers at a rest stop; an emblematic shot shows the angry brother in the foreground, with the pregnant and unmarried sister and the resigned, fatalistic mother isolated in separate areas of the background.

Instead of the explorations of theatrical space proposed by such masters of Hollywood melodrama as Ray, Minnelli, and Sirk, Naruse deals in a progressive overcoming of the limits of three-dimensional space. Though based on a stage play and betraying its origin in its rather setbound narrative, The Road I Travel with You (36) nevertheless offers interior scenes in which the characters’ shifting relationships are plotted in relation to a freely shifting camera. Withholding the regular reassurance of a proscenium-and-master-shot view of space, Naruse brings us into a whirlwind or a dance.

Naruse’s Thirties films exhibit an experimental style of camera movement. Volleys of repetitive dollies-into-close-up mark dramatic climaxes in Apart from You and Every Night Dreams; mannered forward and backward tracking shots highlight the end of Wife, Be Like a Rose. In the postwar films, there is a paring down of style: camera movement becomes relatively rare (although there are postwar films, like Okuni and Gohei, in which the evocative use of smoothly flowing tracking shots is an important formal element). Still, the fluidity of time that characterizes Naruse’s unpredictable narratives is matched by their spatial mobility, which is substantial for a director who was supposed to have disliked going on location. Many Naruse films involve journeys away from the home or other familiar surroundings, forcing characters, at least for a while, to redefine themselves and test their strength—for example, Morning’s Tree-lined Street, A Woman’s Sorrows, The Way of Drama (44), Repast, Husband and Wife, Anzukko, and When a Woman Ascends the Stairs.