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Paper short abstract:

A close analysis of Naruse Mikio’s silent film Nasanu naka (1932) delves into the director’s visionary play with narrative and film-stylistic conventions regarding sexuality, family and female agency as he situates an outdated melodrama within the spectacle of modern urban life.

Paper long abstract:

When Naruse Mikio made Nasanu naka (No Blood Relation) as a silent film at Shōchiku in 1932, the material was already seen as old-fashioned and related to the worn mode of shinpa-style cinematic melodrama. Yet the Kinema Junpō critic at the time admitted that he cried watching it while hailing its ‘fresh’ qualities.

Naruse’s version features a woman, Tamae (Okada Yoshiko), who leaves Japan to pursue a film career in Hollywood and returns to claim her daughter, whom she had left with her husband. The child, however, has formed a strong emotional bond with the father’s new wife, Masako (Tsukuba Yukiko), which Tamae proves unable to sever, prompting her to return to America alone. I argue that while Naruse builds on melodramatic shinpa dynamics as structural ‘bookends’, the film, on both narrative and stylistic levels, plays out a more nuanced version of the classic clash between the traditional Japanese and the Western-influenced female characters, family values and female sacrifice.

The urban environment, steeped in body-focused modern consumerism (with costumes provided by Mitsukoshi), serves as a backdrop for Tamae’s world of female agency, sexuality and the foreign(ised) other. The usual Modern Girl-trope, however, is undermined by her role as a mother keen to win back the love of her daughter. In another unusual twist, the stepmother is here portrayed as the kimono-clad purer model of selfless motherly love, untainted by sexuality and childbearing, who makes a simple home in the suburbs. Stylistically, the emotional climax of relinquishing the child to the stepmother occurs off-screen, granting Tamae a sense of autonomy uninhabited by the camera. As she decides to leave the child not through the acceptance of insurmountable fate common in shinpa, but by recognition of the consequences of her earlier socially-sanctioned life choices, she is still offered a clear path towards opportunity that shinpa heroines are often denied. Moreover, through the frequent use of rapid track-ins to characters’ faces (cf. Russell 2008), Naruse exaggerates the close-up as silent cinema’s and shinpa’s classic access-point to a character’s emotional interiority in order to situate the film firmly in the transition to sound film.