When a Woman Ascends the Stairs
1.
Absence of evidence doesn’t necessarily establish evidence of absence. Or: plenty of things exist that we don’t know about. No conclusions can be drawn from ignorance.
The film director Mikio Naruse is almost entirely unknown in Europe and the English-speaking world. Although a famous and influential director in his native Japan, his films haven’t been widely distributed and are mostly unavailable. In the 56 years since his death, there have been two USA retrospectives in which some of his many films were screened – one was at the Museum of Modern Art; the other was hosted by the Harvard Film Archive. In this country, only one of his almost 90 feature films can be seen on DVD, the Criterion When a Woman Ascends the Stairs. David Thomson admitted that Naruse was terra incognito – “here there be dragons,” he wrote in his famous New Biographical Dictionary of Films. (In a later edition, Thomson acknowledged that he had seen only one of Naruse’s pictures Floating Clouds, observing that it was an extraordinarily accomplished and intelligent story about thwarted love that made most Hollywood and European treatments of that topic seem juvenile and, even, irresponsible. Thomson went on to say that he doubted that any of his readers would be able to see that picture – and, in fact, his doubt has proven to be a realistic assessment of the situation; I certainly haven’t been able to get my hands on the movie.)
There is always an impulse to simplify. When I was young, Japanese cinema consisted of a handful of pictures by Akira Kurosawa, two or three movies by Mizoguchi, and Ozu’s Tokyo Story. Of course, Japan has an immense, thriving film industry and has produced hundreds of interesting films in all genres including many classics about which we have little or no information. A similar situation used to prevail with respect to Indian cinema – there was Satjayit Ray and no one else at all. Critics regarded movies in India according to a bizarre mind-set – Ray was the only director worth following; seemingly, he had emerged from nothing, established no school, had no influence, no serious competitors, and was the only filmmaker of any merit on the entire subcontinent. People actually believed this to be true for decades. But, Ray is only one of many important filmmakers in India – there were great directors before him, great contemporaries, and great directors after him as well. (India is a particularly complicated case because the country is a Babel of languages – Bollywood makes movies in Hindi; this was Ray’s language. But the largest market share in the Indian film industry is devoted to Telugu-speaking films and the world’s largest studio, Ramoji and Hyderabad primarily produces pictures in that language. There are regional film industries making movies in Malayalam, Tamil, Kanada, Marathi, Bengali, Punjabi, and Gujarti. Anyone characterizing Indian cinema, accordingly, as primarily Hindi under the influence of Ray, who was well-known in Europe and America, is grossly misrepresenting the actual state of affairs.)
In Japan, the three most important directors emerging from the silent era are said to be Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Naruse. (Kurosawa, who was heavily influenced by John Ford, is renowned in the West, but considered to be less significant than these other film directors in his home country.) All three men are products of the pre- and post-war Japanese studio system. In Japan, directors were considered specialists in certain genres and their work was ordinarily limited to the films within their specialty. Directors typically worked with the same screenwriters (in Naruse’s case, the scenarist, Ryuzu Kikushima) and used a repertory company of actors who cycle through a number of pictures by the director – for instance, Hideko Takemine, who appears in 17 of Naruse’s movies in the fifties and sixties). Ozu specialized in bitter-sweet, low-key family dramas with comedy elements; Mizoguchi was regarded as a “woman’s director” and made melodramas (as well as period pictures) featuring traduced, betrayed, and suffering women. Naruse began with slapstick silent comedy, later working as a director of women’s pictures set in contemporary times, more or less consistently focusing on working heroines and the socio-economic conditions that affect their well-being. Unlike Mizoguchi, Naruse is said to entirely eschew melodrama: his pictures are said to embody “naturalistic pessimism” and feature female protagonists described as “persevering, dedicated, and intelligent.” Critics claim that his films demonstrate “despair” that is “bleaker” than that existing in the more melodramatic films of directors like Mizoguchi – the films “are bleaker because (they) have no melodramatic finality.”
2.
Mikio Naruse was born in old Tokyo City, an enclave in the larger urban area, in 1905. His parents died when he was young and he was raised by a brother. Unlike most of the other famous directors in Japanese cinema, Naruse came from a working class background. There was no money for any education after he was fifteen and, at that time, went to work to support himself. As a teenager, he began working at the Shochiku Studios where he labored for ten years as a grip, lighting assistant, and prop man. Taciturn and very unassuming, Naruse was ignored until a friend suggested him for directing a silent slapstick-style comedy – this was in 1930. This was the beginning of Naruse’s career as a director – he ultimately made 89 pictures. After a couple of years, Naruse specialized in the so-called shoshimin-eiga (“common-people films”) genre and, by and large, was confined to those types of movies for the rest of his professional life. He learned to make pictures of this kind very efficiently and was able to work with relatively low budgets.
Naruse became famous to a comedy-drama Wife be like a Rose, a 1935 picture that returned huge profits to Shochiku Studios – the picture won a Kinema Junpo award, the equivalent of the Oscar, and was extremely influential and much imitated. Naruse, who is not a reliable historian, claims that he suffered the cinematic equivalent of “writer’s block” between 1935 and 1951 and was completely unable to make any decent pictures during that eleven year period. Naruse attributed this failing to personal turmoil – he had married the star of Wife Be Like a Rose and suffered serious marital discord during his “lost” decade. (I suspect that Naruse was involved in several war-time propaganda movies and his assertion that he made nothing of any value during the war years was defensive. In fact, critics who have seen some of his pictures made in the late forties regard those movies as highly accomplished.) Between 1951 and 1960, the release date of When a Woman Ascends a Stair, Naruse made a series of pictures regarded as classics in Japan. After 1960, his health declined and he died (a victim of colon cancer) when he was 63 in 1969.
Naruse didn’t develop a characteristic camera-style (unlike Ozu and Mizoguchi); he is not an auteur. In his films, Naruse avoids flourishes that might distract the audience from the performances and the narrative. He is supremely intelligent and the intricacy and depth of his narratives have been compared with the realism identified with writers like Henry James.
Naruse was disliked by most actors with whom he worked. He never gave any notes and provided no direction at all to his performers. He told them where to stand and established eye-lines but, beyond that instruction, he was silent. Naruse is said to have spoken in a very soft voice; people who worked for him say that he was silent, enigmatic, and never explained what he wanted in terms of the performance. He was a perfectionist and would do many takes to get a scene exactly right. The reason actors both disliked and feared him was that he coupled a highly disciplined and precise approach to filmmaking with a refusal to explain in any way the effect that he was seeking – he did twenty or more takes without ever telling anyone why he rejected earlier versions of the shot. Naruse seems to have regarded his actors as props – he was like Hitchcock in that he told them where to stand and cued them to speak but didn’t make any effort to explain what he was trying to accomplish. Hideko Takemine, who admired Naruse for his artistry, called him a “mean old man.”
Naruse had a curious way of filming a scene. He used only one camera and made every shot necessary for the sequence seriatim, that is, in order but without the other images necessary to complete the scene. For instance, in a dialogue sequence (Naruse’s films are almost entirely dialogue), he would position the camera and set up lighting and, then, film each line spoken by the actor in the order in which it was required on screen but without any interpolation of speeches (or reaction shots) by the other party or parties to the conversation. In effect, he would film one side of the conversation in a continuous series of shots, all made in order, and, then, film the other side of the conversation with a new camera set up and lighting. In this way, Naruse could use only one camera, could control the shot with the utmost precision, and, then, splice the dialogue together in the editing suite. (This technique which is highly efficient but exceptionally demanding on the actors who must present their lines without dialogue by the other interlocutor(s) in the scene is called nakanuki – that is “cutting out the middle.”) Hideko Takamine recalls that once a lighting technician drew an eye on the set to establish an eyeline – that is, to cue her as to where she was supposed to look at the imaginary interlocutor in the scene. Naruse was angry about this, erased the eye from the set, and threw the lighting technician off the shoot. Needless to say, it takes enormous concentration and focus to make a movie in this way – Naruse had to maintain the order of shots in his head without letting the scene play out naturally; that is, he had to analyze the shot in terms of camera set ups and, then, make the scene in this highly unnatural if, extremely, efficient manner. Akira Kurosawa, who has been called the “world’s greatest film editor”, has said that he regards Naruse’s skill in the cutting room as preeminent; Kurosawa noted that some Japanese reviewers criticized Naruse as making films “with no ups or downs” claiming that the “tone is too flat” but that by dint of his editing Naruse’s style “is like a great river with a calm surface and a raging current in its depths.”
Naruse was cold and seemingly indifferent to the people with whom he worked. He never discussed personal issues on the set and didn’t seem to have any interest in what his actors did when they weren’t on the job. His diagnosis of cancer seemingly thawed him a little. Hideko Takemine recalled that the only real conversations that she ever had with Naruse (with whom she had worked for almost thirty years) were during the weeks in which he was dying. Then, he opened up a little to her and spoke volubly about his upbringing and memories.
In his last year, Naruse told Hideko Takemine (whom he called Hide-chan) about what he thought was important in cinema: “I would like to make a film shot with only a white curtain backdrop, no real sets, no exteriors, all concentration on the nuances of human behavior, expressing feeling carved down to the quick.” A few months after this conversation, Takemine saw Naruse for the last time. He was debilitated and dying, confined to a wheelchair. Takemine encouraged Naruse by saying that she believed he would rally and they would be able to make another movie together again. Naruse expressed skepticism about this prospect. As Takemine left the room and began opening the door to the outside, Naruse called out to her: Hide-chan. When she returned to him, Naruse said that he would return to making films if they could shoot “that”. Takemine knew that he was referring to the film shot against a bare white backdrop without sets or exteriors, showing only human feelings and gestures “carved down the quick.” The actress said that Naruse’s return to this subject was unnerving to her. He died a few weeks later, never expressing any pain, making no complaints, perishing as silently as he had lived.
3.
Naruse summarized his views as to the misfortunes that his female characters experience in his films: “If they move even a little bit, they quickly hit the wall. From my earliest years, I have thought that the world betray us – this thought stills remains with me.
4.
The stream of consciousness narrative (voice-over by the protagonist) tells us that there were 70 hostess bars on the Ginza in 1960. (Ginza is an entertainment district in old Edo, a separate city center that is now part of Tokyo.) At that time, the Ginza was a center of the so-called Mizu-shobei or “water-trade”. Mizu-shobei refers generally to entertainers who are not paid a fixed salary but receive compensation as honorariums from patrons – workers of this kind range from actors and actresses, people in show business, geishas, bar girls and, even, prostitutes. (The name for this sort of enterprise comes from the phrase shobu wa mizumono da – that is, “it’s all a matter of chance” or “depends upon the water”; so-called “muddy” Mizu-shobei is an euphemism for outright prostitution – this name derives from the hot springs where prostitutes plied their trade.) Mama, Naruse’s protagonist, works in the “water-trade” at a “hostess bar” – “The Carton Bar.” As long as we are considering this watery subject, it is worth noting that the lifestyle of bar girls in the Ginza (and their more elite sisters, the Geisha) is part of the ukiyo - e (that is, “the floating world”, a name for the Japanese demi-monde in its urban entertainment districts). The denizens of the ukiyo-e are famously portrayed in souvenir Japanese woodcuts by such artists as Hiroshige and Hokusai.
Japanese society in the fifties (and to some extent today) is regarded as a “homo-social” culture. Business and social ties are forged between men who interact in stylized ways at drinking parties. The all-male “stag” drinking party is a mainstay of Japanese corporate culture. Men get together to drink and become inebriated. During these sessions, business alliances are forged. Drinking parties are financed by the corporations for which these so-called “salary men” are employed. In other words, drinks and female companionship are purchased on company credit, generally on expense accounts. In 1960, it was thought to be uncivilized to make patrons pay for drinks and girls at the point of sale. Therefore, the bars and their hostesses kept tabs as to what was owed and, then, on a monthly basis invoiced the companies by whom the men were employed. Enterprises that didn’t promptly pay might receive visits from polite collection agents first, then, muscle, and, if necessary, yakuza (gangsters).
(This is not too different from the way business was done in Europe and the United States in the fifties and early sixties. When I was in Hamburg, I toured the harbor entertainment districts with an elderly man that I had met on the train from Frankfurt. The old man had been employed in the shipping industry for many years and he showed us places where there had once been expensive restaurants where he took business prospects, many of them from India and southeast Asia. He boasted that he had an unlimited expense account for wining and dining these customers. On our tour, we ran into a couple of old bar maids that the elderly man knew from his glory days. Obviously, he had a close relationship with these women and stood in the alley with them for a while (I was drinking a beer) smoking cigarettes.)
The role of the bar hostess was to flirt with the customers and compliment them. The women were thought to be the necessary lubrication required to get productive business done. Bar hostesses were not prostitutes but, of course, might be sexually available depending on circumstances. In the Ginza pecking order, bar girls occupied a position in the “water-trade” between prostitutes and geishas. Geishas were highly accomplished entertainers, trained to sing and play stringed instruments; they could dance, recite poetry, and had a vast repertory of off-color jokes and childish party games and their services were extremely expensive. Geishas looked down their middle-class competition, the Ginza bar girls. Of course, the bar girls disdained the prostitutes. In most cases, the women in the Ginza survived on the basis of sexual relationships with selected patrons with whom they maintained long-term contact. (Married women understood that their husbands’ business success was tied to their social contacts and relationships fostered in the “water-trade” – as a consequence, most married women didn’t disapprove of the bar hostesses with whom their spouses consorted, regarding these women as “professionals” who could be trusted to maintain appropriate detachment from their customers. This sort of understanding is evident in the scene in which Keiko returns Fujisaki’s money and bids him farewell at the train station.)
The Ginza still exists, centered around the famous Wako Department Store. It is now an upscale neighborhood characterized by expensive wine bars, coffee places, and cabarets embedded among elite boutiques and shopping areas. The hostess bars that once lined its streets are extinct; they have gone the way of the dinosaurs. Geishas still exist but are primarily patronized by tourists.
5.
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs depicts thewalls closing in around its protagonist, Keiko (called “Mama”), a thirty-year old widow working in the Mizu-shobei business. (As the business’ “mama-san” or manager, Keiko doesn’t own the Carton Bar but is responsible for its day-to-day operation.) In a circumstantial manner, without a whiff of melodrama, Naruse shows how Keiko’s options are eliminated one-by-one, confining her, at last, to a single dimension or latitude of movement – she must “ascend the stairs” to the bar where she works as a hostess with no hope for a better life. Hopes are illusory. Keiko’s free will turns out to be a fiction.
At the film’s outset, Keiko has three avenues for escape. She can open her own bar with the help of the bouncer and enforcer, Komatsu, who secretly loves her. She can marry one of her customers and retire from the water-business. Or, she can acquire a wealthy patron, willing to support her as his mistress. Keiko’s self-esteem is based on her intelligence, grit, and the image that she preserves of herself as faithful to her dead husband to the bitter end – she has vowed that she will never marry or love another to honor the dead man. Her choices are also limited, as is the case with many women, by the obligations she has assumed for others – she must provide for her mother, has to hire a lawyer for her dead-beat brother, and, finally, pays for surgery for her nephew’s polio. From the film’s opening scenes, Keiko is not a free agent – she is encumbered by too many costly obligations including the emotional debt to her dead husband.
As the film progresses, Keiko’s opportunities are exhausted. She doesn’t have enough money to become the proprietor of her own bar and has to abandon that ambition. (This is probably fortunate; the film shows an apparently successful competitor who does open her own business but ends up committing suicide because of unpaid debts – specifically charges for five elaborate kimonos that she has purchased for her girls.) The chubby and gregarious Sekine offers to marry her and, after agonizing over what will be a marriage of convenience for her (she doesn’t love the unsightly Sekine), she accepts. But this escape route is closed when Keiko learns that Sekine is already married and, apparently, a pathological liar. Keiko loves one of her patrons, the wealthy and successful businessman, Fujisaki. He implies that Keiko can become his mistress. (We know that Fujisaki has money – in one scene, he enters the Carton Bar with a sulky geisha, obviously an expensive “bought and paid for” companion.) Keiko seems on the verge of completing the transaction with Fujisaki when he tells her in a post-coital conversation that he has been assigned to Osaka and will be leaving Tokyo. He pays her but Keiko’s pride prevents her from accepting his money and she returns it to him at the train station when he is departing. Throughout the film, Komatsu, Keiko’s bouncer and bill collector, has been in love with his boss. But he is disgusted when Keiko gets drunk and throws herself at Fujisaki. So Komatsu, who has worked for Keiko for a number of years, says he can no longer work for her and quits his job. Keiko’s self-image as a virtuous and chaste widow has been shattered – after all, she is willing to marry Sekine and sleep with Fujisaki. Only one dimension is available to her – she ascends the stairs to the Carton Bar where she will presumably be trapped until too old to entertain the drunken men who spend their time pawing her in the bar. Her clock is ticking and, by the end of the film, the end seems to be in sight.
6.
The work with which we are familiar that is most similar to When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth (as well as the Terence Davies’ film based on that novel). Like Keiko, the protagonist of The House of Mirth, Lily Bart, is running out of options. Without any money to her name, Lily is approaching 30 – she must secure her position in society by either making a good marriage or resigning herself to becoming a courtesan, the mistress of a wealthy man. Lily Bart, like Keiko, is admired by a young man who is without substantial wealth and must work for a living – that is, she has her own Komatsu whom she rejects until it is too late. Lily hesitates with respect to her suitors, deferring her decision as to marriage for too long. In the end, her suitors abandon her and marry other women. Too late, Lily realizes that her only option is to become the mistress of a wealthy Jewish businessman. But she rejects his advances and, later, he closes this door on her – he hoped to use Lily, who begins the story well-connected, to buy his way into polite society. But his own success paves the way for alliances that will make a way for him among the elites in New York and he no longer needs Lily to gain access to the fashionable old money families with whom he has been doing business. In the end, Lily is penniless and commits suicide (or dies by accidental overdose). This is a melodramatic climax to Wharton’s novel – Lily’s dead body is discovered by the man who has loved her in vain through throughout the book. As we have seen, Naruse rejects melodrama; Keiko can’t escape the rigors of her life by dying. (Correlations to Wharton’s House of Mirth abound in When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, although I think it is highly unlikely that Naruse knew anything at all about Wharton’s “gilded age” novel; similarities arise from the compromised position of the single female protagonist in mid-century Japan and early 20th century New York – it’s interesting to observe that Lily goes into debt over lavish spending on her wardrobe, the “uniform” required by her social status; Yuri, Keiko’s competitor, commits suicide over debts arising from purchase of her wardrobe required for the “water trade” in her bar. In both cases, there is an intimation that the suicides are inadvertent, the result of accidental overdose.)
7.
In House of Mirth, Lily Bart temporizes and delays, rejecting each suitor in the hope that she can make a better match. Lily’s fatal flaw is that she is too intelligent and proud to compromise – she understands her own value, grasps the exact parameters of her situation, and, then, isn’t willing to engage in a transaction that she finds demeaning to her. Lily’s problem is that she is too intelligent to let herself be defined by her social status and erotic options. But the world defines her precisely in those terms.
Similarly, Keiko is highly intelligent and, understands with precision, the choices with which she is presented. She’s too smart to let herself be defined by the constrained options with which she is presented. The result is that she deliberates too long to be successful – before she can take action, her choices have been eliminated.
I have identified Keiko’s failing as too much intelligence, combined with a high self-esteem resulting from her self-serving assumption of the role of the virtuous, chaste widow – when, in fact, she is neither conventionally virtuous nor chaste. Clearly, Naruse, the Toho studio salary-man, single and probably an alcoholic, limited to working in a single narrow genre, identifies with the plight of his heroine. He has no options either. As we watch When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, we are struck, I think, by the film’s lucid discipline – it’s too intelligent and controlled to be interesting. Critics like Pauline Kael have educated us to understand the movies as tawdry, lurid, even trashy. But there’s nothing about Naruse that is even remotely tawdry, he eschews drama, avoids lurid imagery, and provides no cheap or trashy thrills. The film is less a movie than a serene and pessimistic argument. There are some directors who are simply too intelligent and too rigorous to produce films that appeal to those instincts for spectacle and garish emotion that underlie most movie-going. (I am thinking here of Roberto Rossellini and the great French director Bertrand Tavernier, both filmmakers also characterized by their penetrating intelligence). Is When a Woman Ascends the Stairs simply too smart for us?
8.
My brother, Christopher, managed luxury hotels. For many years, he was the General Manager of an Embassy Suites at Burlingame, a few miles south of San Francisco. Many Japanese business travelers stayed at his hotel and he, often, hosted expense account parties for them in his bar on the site. Of course, my brother had no access to geishas and didn’t employ bar girls as hostesses. So the poor Japanese salary-men had no one to tease or play silly games with – simply put, there was no one to pour their sake for them, one of the charming tasks of a bar hostess in Japan. Without female companionship, the businessmen got morbidly drunk, became maudlin, and engaged in weird competitive drinking. One of the things that they particularly enjoyed was competitive flatulence, that is, farting contests. During one of these games, the Japanese boss said to Christopher in English: “Talk about the divine wind!” “Divine wind” in Japanese is Kamikaze.
9.
In an essay on Naruse in Senses of Cinema, an Australian on-line film journal: “It is the honesty with which Naruse treats his theme that commands our respect; it is the faithfulness to this theme which creates his style, and, it is our suspicion that painful though it be, he is telling the truth – this makes him great.”
10.
In 2007, Criterion issued a disk of When a Woman Ascends the Stairs. Donald Ritchie, America’s foremost expert on Japanese film, provided commentary on the disk. Ritchie believed that the time had come for Naruse’s recognition as a master filmmaker in the West. The great Japanese directors Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi became famous in the fifties and sixties; the French discovered Mizoguchi first and Kurosawa became renowned for films like The Seven Samurai and Rashomon in America in the late fifties and early sixties. Yasujiro Ozu, a more ascetic director, was discovered in the seventies – I recall attending a lecture by David Bordwell about Ozu’s film-style (University of Wisconsin at Madison) around 1980. On the disk commentary, Ritchie asserts that recent retrospectives of Naruse’s work would surely influence film students in America and Europe to take interest in the director’s movies. Ritchie was wrong. In 2025, American viewers can see only one Naruse film on DVD – that is, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs.