Naruse's are quiet tragedies, character studies revealed in gestures, plots unfolding in a glance. Kurosawa once characterized Naruse's style as "like a great river with a calm surface and a raging current in its depths." His characters are those who live on the edge of society's comforts-whether emotional or economic-and so it is not surprising that his subject is women, from the stultifying oppression of the Japanese wife to the tarnished rituals of the anachronistic geisha. One of his subtlest character studies, based on three short stories by Fumiko Hayashi, Naruse's favorite writer, Late Chrysanthemums is a virtually plotless portrait of four former geishas who contemplate their lives and the ongoing instability in their relationships with men. Only in camaraderie with each other do they find refuge from the harsh loneliness of their lives, the pain of which they continue to conceal behind the placid exterior of the professional geisha-the perfect Naruse emotional foil.