Though Naruse’s is largely an urban cinema, a lyrical, pastoral strain can be detected in much of his work. In Morning’s Tree-lined Street, soft lighting and focus diffuse light in a forest into soft globules of gray and white. The sequence in The Song Lantern (43) in which the hero and heroine practice a traditional Noh dance in a forest is both a visual highpoint of the film and a standout in Naruse’s career for its lyrical crane shots. Emphasizing the layers of time and space that the girl must pass through to reach the forest, Naruse identifies this location as a place apart, a sacred space. The lyrical sense of landscape tends to disappear from Naruse’s later work. In Whistling in Kotan (59), little emphasis is put on the scenic attractions of the Hokkaido region where the story of race prejudice takes place; the visuals are keyed to the drama, which is intimate and small-scale. Still, the father’s garden in Anzukko indicates a role for order and beauty in the universe, and the scenes along the water in Scattered Clouds punctuate that film’s bleakness with stabs of lyricism.

The horizontality of the street attracts Naruse, but he is also a very “vertical” director, who draws many of his most striking effects from the top-bottom arrangement of space. In Three Sisters with Maiden Hearts, the middle sister, Some, and the younger sister, Chieko, are constantly involved in up-down patterns: Chieko enters a room, looks down at the seated Some, and sits down, whereupon Some gets up, goes to her, and sits down again. Then Chieko gets up and walks to a window. Some gets up, follows her to the window, and sits. (All through Naruse’s career, we find him, as in this sequence, cutting on frames into which characters rise or sink.) In The Girl in the Rumor, the older sister, riding on a ferry, looks up and sees her younger sister on a bridge. Returning home, the older sister comes upon the younger sister lying on the floor. In The Sound of the Mountain, the viewer’s eye is drawn, with the eyes of the characters, repeatedly upward (toward a roof barraged by heavy rain) and eventually outward (toward a park’s “vista”). Several Naruse films feature scenes on rooftops, as if the characters felt drawn to seek the widest possible view, the greatest distance (the ending of A Woman’s Sorrows and the beginning of Husband and Wife are examples).

Naruse always articulates his characters’ doublings through careful visual patterns. In the furious The Girl in the Rumor, as tight, absorbing, and intricate a 55-minute film as any ever made, a confrontation between two sisters is staged and cut as a series of complementary, mirroring, responsive movements in and out of frame, resulting in a dizzying pattern in which the two sisters ceaselessly replace each other. Much of the visual shock of the film comes from the intercutting of shots in which one or the other sister is alone in the frame with shots showing one in the foreground and the other in the background (alternately in/out of focus). The visual equation shifts and surprises.

In Apart from You, a curtain is drawn across the screen from left to right; Naruse then cuts to a shot in which a window slides open from right to left. Later in the film, a door closes in the foreground in a leftward movement that obliterates the figure of a geisha; after the cut, the geisha’s kimono crosses the foreground from left to right, obscuring the figure of an older geisha lying in bed. In the final train station scene of Three Sisters with Maiden Hearts, the electric shot changes convey the terrifying sweep of temporal progression in a way that already hints at the strangely detached purposefulness of When a Woman Ascends the Stairs.

Throughout his career, Naruse liked two-shots in which one person is in the foreground, the other in the background. The husband and the wife are filmed this way repeatedly throughout Every Night Dreams. The regular alternation of such shots creates a strong emotional cohesion, which pays off in the scene that follows the robbery the husband commits to pay for their son’s medical treatment. Contrary to the usual pattern, husband and wife now both face in the same direction, and both descend to floor in unison. In all his films, Naruse’s editing patterns emphasize criss-crossing diagonal movements, looks exchanged and averted, and the turning of faces toward and away from each other. A recurrent gambit has one person walk away from another, whereupon the other person advances to a new place to look at the first person from the side.

Naruse underlines the surprise of his shot changes by having people walk from behind the camera diagonally into depopulated visual fields. In the moment before the figure enters the shot, we’re often bewildered as to where we are and what relation this space bears to the last space we saw. The art of connecting “full” and “empty” spaces reaches unexpected heights of complexity and elaboration in the last half hour of Kumoemon Tochuken (36), one of a cycle of Naruse films about performing artists. (Noël Burch, who dislikes the film, simply calls it “slightly over-edited.”) But this art is already very advanced in Every Night Dreams, which has a stunning montage in which the heroine is shot from various angles as she walks around a room and bitterly denounces her husband: in each new shot, she walks into an empty frame into close-up. The apartment scene between the hero and his boss’s daughter early in Scattered Clouds is a remarkable example of Naruse using the same cutting and staging patterns in ’scope that he uses in standard format: cutting on movement, unexpected introduction of new angles, cutting to an external view of the scene from outside a window.

Naruse’s last films reveal increased severity and a certain impatience —not that there’s anything slapdash in their orchestration of detail, but the reserve with which Naruse has always viewed his characters hardens into a grim skepticism. His implacable awareness of how life hurries people through time and space has passed through anguish and become pure and desolate. The climax of Naruse’s career in this sense may be the supremely uncomfortable scene in Scattered Clouds of the central couple’s cab waiting at a train crossing. Here, with minimal prompting from the plot, Naruse makes us aware of a destined unhappiness linked both to the cosmos and to the film’s visual patterns.

But already we have got this feeling from the heartbreaking last sections of Mother, which Naruse called his “happiest” film. So pervasive in this film have been the abrupt departures of people and slow fade-outs on others left alone—which together imply that any look at a loved person could be the last look—that as soon as Naruse shows the mother seeing her oldest daughter dressed as a bride (for a hairdressing competition), we know that the mother will not live to see the daughter married in reality. Yet Naruse, having already surprised us by placing the end title in the middle of the film (in a movie-theater sequence), surprises us again by ending Mother before the mother dies. This could be the most subversive stroke in Naruse’s work, suggesting that since all endings are unhappy, one that is non-unhappy is simply premature.

Chris Fujiwara is the author of Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall (Johns Hopkins University Press) and the forthcoming Otto Preminger (Faber & Faber).

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(NOTE: The author wishes to acknowledge the generosity of Sachiko Watanabe, Reiko Murakami, Miguel Marías, Michael Kerpan, and Kent Jones in providing materials for preparing this article.)

© 2005 by Chris Fujiwara