Mikio Naruse: The Auteur as Salaryman

July 3–December 21, 2025

Mikio Naruse: The Auteur as Salaryman offers a rare opportunity to see many of Naruse’s great films chronicling the lives of ordinary people—from his 1935 international hit Wife! Be Like a Rose! (the first Japanese talkie to screen in the United States) to his magnificent movies of the 1960s.

Read full description

Mikio Naruse: Floating Clouds (1955)
Mikio Naruse: When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960)
Mikio Naruse: A Wife’s Heart (1956)
Mikio Naruse: Lightning (1952)

Upcoming
Films
Upcoming
Events
Selected
Objects
Past
Films
Past
Events

Upcoming Films

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs
Mikio Naruse
Japan, 1960
BAMPFA Collection
Thursday, July 3 7 PM
Essential Mikio Naruse. “An elegant essay in black-and-white CinemaScope and tinkling cocktail jazz, this tale of a bar hostess’s attempt to escape her lot could give heartbreak lessons to [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder and [Douglas] Sirk” (Village Voice).
View Details
Hideko the Bus Conductor
Mikio Naruse
Japan, 1941
Thursday, July 10 7 PM
Hideko Takamine stars as the teenage ticket taker for a bus line that has seen better days in this charming comedy, the first of her seventeen films with Mikio Naruse. Screening with The Whole Family Works, a chronicle of a family’s struggle to make ends meet during the depression and the war with China, the social costs of which are never mentioned but keenly felt.
View Details
Lightning
Mikio Naruse
Japan, 1952
Saturday, July 12 4:30 PM
Adapted from a Fumiko Hayashi novel, and starring Mikio Naruse’s favorite actress, Hideko Takamine, this major work illuminates one of the director’s key themes: entrapment within the family system.
View Details
Floating Clouds
Mikio Naruse
Japan, 1955
Wednesday, July 16 7 PM
This epic story of wartime lovers separated by a wretched peace is a richly evocative portrait of postwar Tokyo and an endlessly fascinating character study. It is revered in Japan as the ultimate masterpiece of Mikio Naruse’s career and a high point for star Hideko Takamine.
View Details
Flowing
Mikio Naruse
Japan, 1956
Saturday, July 19 7 PM
It’s hard to find a more impressive trio of actresses than Hideko Takamine, Kinuyo Tanaka, and Isuzu Yamada. Mikio Naruse’s tale of geishas in decline is “a tangle of subtle relationships. . . . Quietly brilliant filmmaking” (Village Voice).
View Details
A Wife’s Heart
Mikio Naruse
Japan, 1956
Friday, July 25 7 PM
Hideko Takamine plays a young woman working to raise enough money to open her own coffee shop. When her family takes the money to fund her sister’s wedding, she arranges a loan, but her husband is wary of the loan officer (Toshiro Mifune).
View Details
Untamed
Mikio Naruse
Japan, 1957
Thursday, July 31 7 PM
Oshima (Hideko Takamine) experiences a series of failed relationships as she works toward financial independence and self-realization. “Hideko Takamine’s performance . . . is among her most active and energetic and her character is one of the most liberated in [Mikio] Naruse’s oeuvre.”
View Details
Daughters, Wives, and a Mother
Mikio Naruse
Japan, 1960
Friday, August 8 7 PM
Daughters, Wives, and a Mother features a stellar cast in a saga of a comfortable suburban family’s unraveling after the family home is mortgaged.
View Details
A Wanderer’s Notebook
Mikio Naruse
Japan, 1962
Sunday, August 10 4 PM
A revealing biopic, based on the journals of Fumiko Hayashi, the writer Mikio Naruse most frequently adapted, and starring his favorite actress, Hideko Takamine, who gives an “amazingly detailed, unglamorized portrait of the writer . . . imbued with a strong passion for life and writing” (National Film Theatre, London).
View Details
Yearning
Mikio Naruse
Japan, 1964
Friday, August 15 7 PM
A war widow keeps the family store and her heart in check long after she should have remarried. “Whatever else it is—a critique of the economics of the family, among other things—Yearning is also a poem on the beauty of Hideko Takamine” (Boston Phoenix).
View Details
Wife! Be Like a Rose!
Mikio Naruse
Japan, 1935
Sunday, August 17 5 PM
Mikio Naruse’s warm, funny-sad tale of a girl who tries to unite her poetess mother and estranged father “is presented with a simplicity and a seriousness. . . . The result is one of the most moving films I know” (The Nation).
View Details
Three Sisters with Maiden Hearts
Mikio Naruse
Japan, 1935
Saturday, August 23 4:30 PM
Tokyo’s lively Asakusa district comes alive in Mikio Naruse’s wonderful portrait of three modern girls who try to break away into love and marriage. Based on a Yasunari Kawabata novel.
View Details

Past Films

Mikio Naruse: The Auteur as Salaryman

July 3–December 21, 2025

Member-exclusive presale begins Wednesday, May 7 at 11 AM.

Tickets for the general public go on sale Friday, May 9 at 11 AM.

Not yet a member? Join today starting at just $40/year for access to the member presale, half-price film tickets, and more.

“There are no happy endings for Naruse, but there are incredibly enlightened defeats.” —Audie Bock

Mikio Naruse (1905–1969) experienced vast social, political, and technological changes while working to chronicle the daily lives of ordinary people. As scholar Catherine Russell suggested, he was both “auteur” and “salaryman,” finishing ninety-eight films—on time and on budget—in just short of four decades. Money, and the lack thereof, is a central theme of many of Naruse’s films, often a topic of conversation for his protagonists, informing their decisions. Especially empathetic to the plight of women, Naruse excelled at depictions of their struggles, resistance, and endurance, as in his adaptations of the works of popular novelist Fumiko Hayashi, including Repast, Late Chrysanthemums, and her autobiographical A Wanderer’s Notebook.

Working with the great performers of his time, Naruse eliminated surplus dialogue communicating volumes through glances and gestures, his lucid, cinematic style propelling the narrative. Akira Kurosawa described Naruse’s films as being like a deep river, with a quiet surface disguising a raging current underneath. Kurosawa remarked that the flow of Naruse’s shots was so magnificent that the splices seemed almost invisible.

Beginning with a focus on films made with actress Hideko Takamine, who embodies some of the most indelible characters in Naruse’s works—including Keiko in When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, Yukiko in Floating Clouds, Reiko in Yearning, and Oshima in Untamed—this retrospective, which continues through December, offers a rare opportunity to see a broad array of Naruse’s films, from his 1935 international hit Wife! Be Like a Rose! (the first Japanese talkie to screen in the United States) to his magnificent movies of the 1960s.

—Kate MacKay, Associate Film Curator

Less

Film Series Sponsors: Jim and Ruth Reynolds, Robert Riccardi and Deborah Bowman

Mikio Naruse: The Auteur as Salaryman is made possible by the support of The Japan Foundation, New York; and co-organized with The Japan Foundation, New York; The Japan Society; Metrograph; and the Harvard Film Archive.

Thanks to Alexander Fee, Japan Society; Edo Choi, Metrograph; Akinaru Rokkaku, The Japan Foundation, New York; Kenta Tamada, Mika Tomita, Rikako Kosugiyama, National Film Archive Japan; Brian Belovarac, Janus Films; Haden Guest, Harvard Film Archive; Shaun Inouye, The Cinematheque; Shion Komatsu, Toho; and Miki Zeze, Kadokawa.