Agreeing to Disagree about Naruse

It's unfortunate the way the mind works sometimes. While reading the obituaries and tributes to Donald Richie following his passing, I was reminded about a commentary I had intended to write about his 2004/2006 commentary for Criterion's edition of Mikio Naruse's When a Woman Ascends the Stairs. Given that I largely enjoyed and agreed with his commentary, I hope it doesn't seem too soon to discuss where my opinions differed.

Some context before we begin

When we meet Keiko (Hideko Takamine) at the beginning of the story, she is the top hostess at her club, but getting older--with younger, seemingly more successful girls either marrying or obtaining their own bars by becoming mistresses of wealthy patrons. We must watch for a while before we discover that Keiko is a widow, and a somewhat reluctant participant in the hostess world. She enjoys the money and the independence that it buys, but her loyalty to her husband's memory prevents her from pursuing any of the paths the other women choose. This loyalty earns the unrequited love of hostess club lifer Kenichi Komatsu (Tatsuya Nakadai), who admires her refusal to sleep with a customer, but can't stop himself from availing himself of the girls he manages. It seems like everywhere Keiko turns, people are telling her it is decision time. She is at the height of her powers as a woman, but if she does not decide on becoming a wife or a mistress soon, she will miss her chance to maximize her return. Keiko takes the advice to heart and begins to seriously consider proposals from potential suitors of all kinds.

It's not giving away too much to say that every attempt to change her situation leads to the realization that all men are unreliable, and neither option--marriage nor mistresshood--is acceptable. However, to say as Richie does that she "fail[s] to achieve any of them" is to miss the point of the film. The movie was only ostensibly about the false dichotomy that was presented. It was really about the making of a mama-san--how a woman must kill a type of feeling in herself to survive as a hardened businessperson long after her beauty has been replaced by a look of power.

Now on to the commentary

I've listed the approximate time markers of each Richie comment under discussion as a sort of bibliography should you wish to refute or confirm any of my points.

0:04:00 Richie shares his thesis about the core theme of the movie at the outset: "These two ambitions [marriage or owning your own bar] animate the film [. . .] She [Keiko Yashiro] will be given the choices as it were, and will ultimately fail to achieve any of them." As if to confirm this isn't a throwaway line, he underscores the point that her only options are marriage or a patron (i.e. become a mistress in exchange for an investment in her own bar) at the 16 minute mark. While I can't deny that the movie sets up this limited choice at the outset, Naruse will show by the end of the movie that we often have more choices than those forced upon us, but that they are more difficult to find precisely because they are unstated.

0:22:00 A key character is introduced at this point of the movie, Keiko's employer, the elderly mama-san. This scene is crucial because in it Keiko sees the mirror image of her future self, a hardened businesswoman who is savvy enough to keep a double set of books and who has secured herself financial independence despite lacking the apparent currency of Ginza--youthful good looks. This is not to say that "mama" wasn't once a looker. In fact, in both the geisha and the hostess club tradition, the shrewdest and most successful of the floating world's women navigated the transition to mama-san and found a way to survive by employing the latest wave of young women making a career of satisfying male fantasy. On the surface, the cold, calculating, tax evading mama-san looks like an unsavoury character and a role model of nothing more than soulless, exploitative, greed. Yet by the time the movie finishes and one has watched how the men in Keiko's life attempt to use her to satisfy an image they have constructed of her, it is easier to gain a newfound respect for mama's power and hope that Keiko can achieve the same thing for herself. (Alert viewers will notice that Keiko's colleagues and customers refer to her as "mama" throughout the movie, but this describes her role as a quasi-manager of the club and not the proprietor, that is, the true "mama.")

I once worked for a woman like mama when I was in Japan. Don't worry, it was nothing sordid--unless you consider teaching English conversation perverse. My mama (let's call her M-san) was a widow with two children she raised by herself thanks to her ownership of a handful of language schools. Based on the respect (fear?) she inspired in her Japanese staff, I suspected she ruled her staff with an iron fist, but she covered it with a velvet glove when dealing with her Western teachers, so I got along with her well. Whether it was my work ethic or the laugh we shared about Westerners with little knowledge of Japanese history (she related a great story about a teacher who asked her if samurai still lived in Japan), she never gave me the sense that she was unhappy with my contribution. Our mutual respect aside, I often wondered why she was so hard on her Japanese employees who seemed to be doing a good job from what I could see.

Over time, I came to more fully understand just how much men dominated the country economically. Once I appreciated the limited options for women to achieve economic independence in Japan, I attained a newfound respect for M-san, and realized she might have been forced to adopt such a tough persona to succeed as a single mother in Japan. A long aside I know, but perhaps necessary to provide some context about the mama-san type that Richie barely addresses in his commentary.

1:41:00 Jumping ahead to last act of the movie, we hear Richie expound on this theme of failure again: "All of her options have now been run through and she has what? Failed, is that the word? Failed in all of them? We are to feel for her, and yet at the same time, this being Naruse, I do think we are meant to admire her."

The timing of Richie repeating his impressions of Keiko as an admirable failure is curious given that a crucial scene between Keiko and Kenichi (Nakadai) is about to play out which begins to disprove his thesis.

1:43:00 Kenichi discovers that Keiko has finally broken her personal vow not to have sexual relations with a customer after five years in the business. He criticizes her for giving in and betraying the memory of her dead husband. Keiko tellingly replies that 'she wasn't that good'--in other words, she is just as human as he is, with her own failings and desires. At the height of the argument, Kenichi tries to hurt her with what he thinks will be the ultimate criticism--that she has become a pro. Rather than be stunned into silence by this revelation, she retorts that it was Kenichi himself who had always coached her to be a pro, and now she has finally done it. Upon hearing this, Kenichi reveals his own rescue fantasy and asks to marry her. When Keiko refuses because she feels no strong emotion for him one way or another, it is becoming more clear that she is developing the emotional armour necessary to ensure that she is never taken advantage of by a man again.

1:46:00 Curiously, Richie does acknowledge that at the end of the movie "she wants to be alone and everything she does from now on is going to ensure that she is alone, including the final scene where she puts on the mask indefinitely and becomes the hostess. She becomes what she said she disliked most. At the same time that she does this it is not a tragedy. She has instead accepted and has begun to eat what life has left on her plate. She is again doing the right thing."

While admitting that her situation is not a tragedy, he will not go so far as to describe it as a success either. Based on his comments during the final scene itself, there is no reason to believe that he ever saw Keiko as more than an admirable failure. To accept Richie's thesis though, it seems to me that one must also subscribe to the notion that a woman can only be happy if she is with a man. It is a difficult point to argue, and a number of single women would surely dismiss the premise out of hand. It is also worth noting that there is no evidence to suggest that Naruse was making the same claim himself.

1:48:00 One of the best scenes in the movie is also one that I think Richie misreads completely. The scene takes place at a train station platform where Keiko goes to see off the banker who led her on, used her, and spurned her. He is already seated in the train car with his wife and family. Full of smiles and kind words, Keiko proceeds to slowly roast him and expose the affair right in front of his wife, and he can't do a single thing about it because she commands the social situation so perfectly. While he squirms, Keiko returns stock certificates to his wife with which he had attempted to buy off any guilt he might have felt about sleeping with her before revealing he was moving to Osaka. His wife does not seem to clue in to the full extent of the affair, blandly commenting to her husband about Keiko's good looks, but there is no doubt by the look on his face and his silence that he is feeling humiliated.

Curiously, Richie praises Keiko for being polite and "doing absolutely the right thing" by so kindly seeing them off. He even goes so far to say that Naruse is "not pushing any buttons with these particular scenes." How he misses Keiko's subtle and exacting revenge is beyond me, but I would be bold enough to claim that 9 out of 10 people watching this scene would take my characterization of the scene over Richie's.

1:50:00 Having so badly misinterpreted the previous scene, perhaps it is no surprise to hear Richie say at the end of the movie, "But there is no closure. It's simply the repetition of what went on before and her feelings have not changed. If anything they have gotten more bitter and yet we are to admire the way that she accommodates herself to the things that are impossible to avoid." To this he adds that she should be celebrated for making the best of a bad situation, or "doing the right thing"--a point he had also made earlier (1:24:00) when he stated that doing the right thing is the main theme of the picture.

As he says this, Keiko is telling us in voiceover that "I must be strong despite the winds gusting around me." While this comment does suggest that she has learned to make the best of a bad situation, the reason why is more important. She has not learned to survive as a failure at both finding a husband or a patron, but as a successful mama-san in her own right, putting on the happy face of a caring, attentive matron, while cooly protecting her own interests beneath a surface no one will be allowed to see. Indeed, what we have just witnessed for the better part of two hours is the making of a mama-san.

Other quibbles

0:47:00 Somehow, Richie tries to compare When a Woman Ascends the Stairs with the picaresque novel Moll Flanders because "All of [Keiko's] choices prove to be wrong ones." If the results of a character's choices were enough to qualify a story as picaresque, then Richie might have a case. I think he really stretches the definition of picaresque here considering that there is nothing roguish or comical in her personality.

1:29:00 Here, Richie describes a scene of boys circling two adult characters on their bikes as an example of "magic realism" when there is nothing magic realist about it. Having read Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende and their examples of magic realism where characters inhabiting otherwise realistic worlds blandly accept fantastical incidents, it is difficult to agree with Richie's observation here. Anyone who has ever witnessed bored children engage in repetitive play while waiting for adults to finish a conversation would surely drop the "magic" from the description.

1:32:00 I also found Richie's take on mono no aware to be debatable. It starts out reasonably enough when Richie says it ". . . connotes a kind of contented resignation, and sort of an observation of the way things are and sort of, kind of a willingness to go along with them. It advocates experiencing the basic nature of existence--savouring the comforts of being in harmony with the cycles of the universe, an acceptance of adversity, and an appreciation of the inevitable."

Where his definition goes off the rails is when he tries to summarize by saying, "But the idea of accepting what's on your plate and eating it is mono no aware. Not going to the beauty parlor when you've got, you know, another wrinkle. Nodding, saying OK, I'm with it, this is exactly what's supposed to happen, therefore it is good. That's mono no aware." If the riotous laughter of my wife was any indicator, Richie missed the boat on this one. Where he goes wrong, I think, is in conflating mono no aware with stoic resignation about our fate when it is more about an aesthetic experience which could be described as finding beauty in the pathos of transient experiences.

1:35.00 Richie's definition gets even worse, believe it or not, when he says "getting drunk and romping in bed includes mono no aware." Compare this with Roger Ebert's definition from the Floating Weeds commentary, where he described it as an appreciation of "bittersweet nostalgia, or a kind of sadness in the middle of joy" and the sense that "this is a good moment, but it will pass."

Although a full exploration of mono no aware is well beyond the scope of this blog post, I would recommend Todd Shimoda's novel Oh: A mystery of mono no aware (see my quasi-review for more information) for a more nuanced exploration of the concept.

Not to discount the rest of the commentary

Richie's encyclopedic knowledge of the Japanese film industry shines through in other parts of the commentary when he discusses behind the scenes contributors, long time associations between various players in the industry, and most importantly, the difficulty actors had working under Naruse due to his reticence on the set. There is also a good discussion of the sets themselves and Naruse's preference for sets over location shooting. Film fans will also appreciate the extensive biographical information provided about the film's star, Hideko Takamine.

Richie also does a good job explaining the cultural milieu in which the hostess bar exists and usefully compares it to the world of the geisha. The discussion is enhanced by his observation that this film is set far enough after the war that class differences and widening income gaps are also loosening social ties amongst Japanese who had adopted a "we're all in this together" attitude in the early days of reconstruction. For any viewer who has never been to Japan, this is an important context to appreciate before watching the film a second time.

Time well spent

If I seemed unduly hard on Richie at any time in this post, allow me to reiterate the high regard in which I hold him as a film critic (more evidence available here). Although I felt my disagreements with this one commentary a little too strongly to let them pass without sharing, they were offered in the spirit of healthy debate. In fact, if anyone wishes to challenge a point, I would be more than willing to continue a respectful discussion in the comments section. Regardless of how you feel about this post, the most important point to stress is that Naruse's original film is well worth seeking out for its story, the acting, the composition of the scenes, and its cool jazz soundtrack. Whether you listen to the commentary or not, the movie will reward repeated viewings many times over.

Travis Belrose is the author of The Samurai Poet, a work of historical fiction set in 17th century Japan. Learn more here.