Michael Mortilla has created original scores for theater, dance, and film, and regularly performs for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, The Silent Society, and the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

(Kimi to wakarete). As we shall see further in a major Mikio Naruse retrospective starting in January, Naruse was sensitized by his nature and early life experience to the circumstances of women in this period of change in Japan. His first feature, about two generations of geisha, “amply displays his quiet passion in full bloom” (Fumiko Tsuneishi). Naruse's keen observation of character and social structure is only underscored by the lyricism that would become his trademark. Kikue (Mitsuko Yoshikawa), although she is already plucking out gray hairs, still supports her son Yoshio as a geisha; Terugiku (Sumiko Mizukubo), an apprentice geisha, falls in love with Yoshio, and attempts to save him from the rough crowd he has taken up with seemingly out of shame for his mother's profession. Terugiku, though herself a victim, is the first of many independent-minded women in Naruse's films. When she moves to a “geisha” house on the outskirts of the city to make a better living, she has no illusions.