• めし (Repast)

5/5/22 (Thurs)

Naruse Mikio’s 1951 film is the first of his six adaptations of novels by Hayashi Fumiko (e.g., Late Chrysanthemums, A Wanderer’s Notebook), an author known for her bleak female-centered works. This novel was actually an unfinished work, but Naruse ably fills in the gaps. The film is said to have launched or revived the shomingeki genre that concentrated on the lives of the common people.

Michiyo (a wonderful Hara Setsuko) is bored with her marriage to Hatsunosuke (Uehara Ken), relegated to never-ending housework in a penny-pinching life with little time for herself. Having moved to Osaka for her husband’s work, she is separated from her Tokyo life. Her neighborhood is frequented by men’s mistresses, shoe thieves and an uppity female restaurant owner – most of the main characters here are female. Her self-pity comes to the fore when her perky young niece (Shimazaki Yukiko) comes to visit from Tokyo. The pretty niece flirts openly with Hatsu and shows no interest in helping out around the house, making Michiyo jealous and resentful on both counts.

Michiyo’s plight is balanced by scenes of Hatsu’s own life of drudgery as a salaried worker. Ambition seems to have been beaten out of him, and his only promotion comes as thanks for his refusal to join a business proposal by a colleague that, as it happens, turns out to have been a dud. That is, he is basically rewarded by his passiveness. He pays little attention to Michiyo’s efforts at home, looking on them as a duty like his work at the office – and assuming that Michiyo looks at it the same way. That is, he blindly does what is expected of him and does not expect more from others. He is not ungrateful of Michiyo, as we find later, but he is not the expressive type, in line with men of that era. He dutifully takes care of his niece as a family member would, showing her around Osaka and drinking with her with no awareness of how that looks to his wife. He’s thick-headed but not necessarily a bad person.

Still, Michiyo is dissatisfied with life and feels she is being used. She takes the niece back to Tokyo as a pretense to leave her husband and find her own way. Receiving no word from her husband, she writes him instead a farewell letter but refrains from sending it. She discovers that she is envied by her single friends for what they perceive as happiness on the basis that she’s married, and is jolted to discover a widowed friend working at a newsstand in desperation to support her child. Michiyo gradually becomes aware that making her own way in the world is not as easy as she has imagined. When her husband shows up in Tokyo and happily greets her, she initially shuns him, only to realize that he is genuinely pleased to see her and doesn’t understand why she is avoiding him. When he tells her that he came to ask her opinion about the better job offer, she seems to have an epiphany. She agrees to return to Osaka with him. On the train, she tears up the letter that she never sent. She offers to tell him what it was she wrote, only to find that he has fallen asleep mid-conversation. Realizing that his life is tiring as well, she pledges in a voiceover to seek happiness within her marriage rather than without.

The film would normally be expected to take Michiyo’s side as the put-upon wife, but the approach is more subtle. Michiyo is irritated by the niece’s cluelessness in hanging around the house doing nothing to contribute. When Michiyo herself returns to her Tokyo home, however, she is chided by her brother-in-law for precisely the same thing, i.e., sitting around while her mother (the always great Sugimura Haruko) does all the cooking and lays out the futons, as if it were Michiyo’s birthright as a daughter to have the mom do everything for her. Yet her mother is hardly bitter, considering it her responsibility. She understands Michiyo’s feelings perhaps better than Michiyo and gently urges the daughter to return to her husband. The Japanese title Meshi, which means rice as well as a meal (i.e., repast), represents an essential household ritual that is mechanically followed but unappreciated, a symbol of Michiyo’s existence.

A very well constructed, beautifully filmed movie. The dialogue is realistic and restrained, often trailing off amid suggestive smiles and averted eyes. (The script was supervised by no less than Nobel laureate Kawabata Yasunori.) Some of the subtitles could have been better; anata (あなた), for instance, a word used by wives to address their husbands, is translated mechanically as “darling”, which hardly seems the right sentiment between Hara and Uehara. The unspoken moments actually speak louder than words, especially as performed by the peerless Hara, whose Mona Lisa smile carries a wealth of emotions. The story is a bit diffuse with a few too many characters, such as the unnecessary appearance of the niece’s father, though nicely played by Yamamura So. But it is a deep and realistic depiction of the common people’s lives, particularly their expectations vs. reality. Highly recommended.