Why Is Mikio Naruse So Little Studied? The Craftsman Who Made 87 Films and Never Showed His Storyboards

SCENE 5 is Mikio Naruse.

In SCENE 4, I named “being able to keep watching to the end” as one of the conditions of a good film. Seen in that light, the director with the most to teach us is Naruse.

Because his contemporaries included towering masters such as Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Yasujiro Ozu, Naruse has drawn little attention, but when it comes to the craftsman, Naruse is the one. After joining Shochiku’s Kamata studio in 1920, he worked his way up from the props department to assistant director and then to director, and by the time he died at sixty-three he had made no fewer than 87 films. That number is in a class of its own. The famous Kurosawa made 30, which shows just how prolific Naruse was.

He was, moreover, a late bloomer. Yet his work has hardly been given its due, and it has scarcely been studied at all. Why should that be? The reason lies in his own way of making films.

Because filmmaking means directing a large crew, preparation determines the quality of the work. In the crucial stage of preparation known as pre-production, the screenplay is refined, and the director draws up a storyboard to share his visual image with the staff.

Storyboards are usually drawn, and those of Kurosawa, who had originally wanted to be a painter, are so artistic that they have been shown in exhibitions of their own, yet Naruse, remarkably, never let anyone see his storyboards or his shooting plans, the most important documents of all.

So although Naruse made as many as 87 films, almost no records of his work survive, and for lack of material he has never become a subject of study.

Naruse was not lazy, though. In a sense, he was a genius, for he could compose the whole image of each film he made, perfectly, inside his own head. Usually, however vivid the images in a director’s mind, a film involves so many craftspeople that, unless those images are shared as storyboards and plans, no coherent work can emerge. Naruse needed none of these conventions. He worked backward from the finished image in his head to set the number of shooting days, the schedule, and the division of the budget, delivered every film within budget and on time, and always wrapped the day’s shooting, which began in the morning, before five in the afternoon.

Film production in those days was far worse than any of today’s exploitative companies. Going several nights without sleep was normal, and working conditions were brutal in the extreme. Deadlines slipped as a matter of course, and many productions collapsed partway through. In the middle of all this, only one man went on making films, calmly and steadily, and that man was Naruse.

Naruse’s unit, known as the Naruse-gumi, kept to its deadlines, kept to its budgets, and kept to its working hours, and above all it was led by a director in whose head the whole design was already complete. The studio valued it above every other unit, and to the craftspeople on set, many of them rough characters, Naruse was a master who left them nothing to say.

Taciturn, never saying a word more than was needed, and yet an overwhelming presence. That was Naruse, and that is his greatest appeal. People who love his films tend to have something of the craftsman in them, and they are able to find art in his flawless design.

As a way into Naruse’s work, then, I recommend A Wanderer’s Notebook (1962). It brings to the screen Fumiko Hayashi’s autobiographical debut work, designed to perfection in Naruse’s head, and its cast, led by Hideko Takamine and Kinuyo Tanaka, makes for a superb ensemble.

His other films have their quirks and take some getting used to, so I recommend starting with A Wanderer’s Notebook (1962), When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960), in which Hideko Takamine plays a bar madam in Ginza, and The Stranger Within a Woman (1966), built around the murder of a friend’s wife.

Once you have grown used to Naruse’s style through these, moving on to the vast body of his other work will come easily. You will feel how the Japanese cinema of the past was held up by the quiet heat of its craftspeople.