The story of a mother (Kinuyo Tanaka) trying to make a go of the family dry cleaning business following the death of her husband is told through the eyes of her adoring daughter, played by the bright and sensitive teenage actress Kyoko Kagawa. There is a whole genre in Japan devoted to “mother” movies (haha-mono), but Mikio Naruse sidesteps sentimentality; set in the homes and streets of a Tokyo suburb, this is a slice-of-life story. Mother was the first Japanese film to be released in Europe, where it was inevitably compared with the Italian neorealist works that had recently emerged.