Joyû to shijin

In this nice family comedy about a Japanese couple in the 1930s with wife as actor (joyu) and husband as poet/writer (shijin), Naruse has created a parody of the dilemma of a modern couple - wife being the breadwinner and husband, writing novel for small money (only good enough to buy cakes).

Could the man still hold the honour and be the real "master" of the house? Naruse portrayed this change in the traditional values in modern Japan in a comical way where play intermingled with real life. The solution: just follow the man and if husband is happy, wife is happy too. As the saying goes: An angel with only one wing could not fly. But could such happy ending only happen in play / movie and not in real life? A rare piece of Naruse romance which are more often portrayed as a sophisticated tragedy rather than a light-hearted comedy.

When actress Sachiko Chiba and her husband, poet Hiroshi Uruki, move into a gossipy street, they are a happy couple. True, she is the breadwinner of the household and his literary efforts pay almost nothing, but they don't care. However, when she asks him to help her learn her lines in a new play in which she plays the wife in a similar couple who have a fight, she confesses she doesn't understand the character.... but understanding is coming her way very soon.

Mikio Naruse is best remembered for directing tragedies of women's problems, but like any good director, he could turn his hand to comedy, and he understood that people taking themselves too seriously is the source of a lot of unnecessary sadness. This being an early sound film for him, he gets playful with the noises of voices and the street, in a way that later sound films abandoned.