Kinuyo Tanaka, in a characteristically beautiful performance, plays a newly widowed mother of three trying to make a go of the family dry-cleaning business. Her story is told through the eyes of the elder daughter, played by the bright and sensitive teenage actress Kyoko Kagawa. A perennial favorite in Japan, Mother is somewhat atypical of Naruse's films of the period in its unabashed sentimentality. But as Audie Bock notes, “Although the story elements are the stuff of a standard ‘mother piece' tear-jerker, Naruse and his adept scenarist Mizuki have fashioned them into something that is much more mood and slice-of-life, lacking a climax and a definitive ending like all Naruse's best work.” Mother was the first postwar Japanese film to be shown in Europe; there, with its portrayal of street and family life from the refreshing point of view of a youngster, it was inevitably compared with the Italian neorealist films that had recently emerged.