"Why is it that the best Japanese films about children are so sorrowful? It may be...that for a child to forgive a parent's transgressions is one of the most beautiful expressions of the Buddhist spirit of compassion." (Tadao Sato) Set in 1956 in Osaka, Muddy River views, through the eyes of a child, the demoralization that lingers years after the war. Nobuo is the only light in the life of parents who run a modest riverside eatery. In the father we see Harp of Burma's legacy: the returned soldier for whom family life is set against an unfathomable darkness; of whom grief has made a perpetual wanderer. Nobuo befriends two children whose unspoken secret is that their mother is a prostitute working out of their dilapidated houseboat. The simple humanity of Nobuo's parents towards the outcast children is striking. Perhaps, if all is fluid like the rocking river, there is no line between their "darkness" and that of the prostitute-mother. It's Renoiresque, on the surface, but this film's creaturely closeness echoes, in the everyday, the world of Bodhi-Dharma. In both films, the encounter with the suffering of animals moves a child closer to knowledge of the human condition.