Sound of the Mountain

For this film in his “marriage cycle,” about disintegrating relationships in a changing world, Mikio Naruse adapted one of Nobel Prize–winning novelist Yasunari Kawabata’s best-known works into a knowing, profoundly moving account of a woman’s loneliness. The ancient seaside town of Kamakura, where the novelist himself lived, here functions as a suburb of Tokyo, with its sleepy streets and stay-at-home wives contrasted against the city’s brisk if tainted lifestyle. The story tells of the deep and complex relationship that develops between Kikuko, a young wife betrayed by her philandering husband, and Shingo, her father-in-law, with whom the couple live.