Onna no za

Onna no za, which can be translated as A Woman's Place, is a 1962 Japanese family drama directed by Mikio Naruse from a script by Tochirô Ide and Zenzô Matsuyama.

An old shopkeeper from Tokyo lives with his second wife and three unmarried daughters, in addition to his widowed daughter-in-law and a grandson, still gravitating around the family, two more married daughters and a son and even a stepson, who appears to launch even greater instability in the family.

Such a large family brings inevitable problems, including rivalries, envy, succession and financial disputes, infidelities, competitions, etc. The old couple, who hoped, with so many children, to have a peaceful life in their old age, find themselves confronted with an intricate web of interests, which progressively distances them from their selfish children.

An interesting reflection on family life, which is also a picturesque portrait of Japanese society, in the early 1960s, reminiscent of, and certainly influenced by, the work of Ozu, who so well portrayed the same society in previous decades.

A Woman's Place is about a large family: an elderly couple who run a small market and their six adult children, all of whom except for one are women. The parents look on in bemused consternation as their offspring stumble through life. Three of the children are unmarried and are looking to change that with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The three oldest offspring are married but the stresses of employment and philandering don't make for the strongest case for matrimony. And then there is Yoshiko (played by Hideko Takamine) who was married to a son who has died before the movie begins. The parents treat her like another daughter while many of the other family members take her for granted and treat her almost like a servant. Add to this a number of other in-laws, grandchildren and other relatives and you have a pretty large cast of characters to keep track of.

The movie is fairly plotless, as most of the movie is taken up with just keeping track of the characters as they go about their lives. The tone is lighter than most of the other Naruse movies I have seen but it doesn't stay that way as an element of sadness takes hold by the end. Overall, this almost feels more like an Ozu movie than a Naruse one, but that is not a complaint. It is a melding of the best of both directors.

I didn't get the appeal of this movie. I'd mostly call it a slice of life and not a particularly interesting one. To a westerner, it's certainly interesting to see a Japanese family from 1960 and to a modern person it's interesting to hear about divorce leading to zero contact if you don't get custody (note: that's was still common up to 2022 in Japan, not sure it was uncommon in other parts of the world in 1960 though)

In any case. A big family, Mom, Dad, 4 daughters, 1 daughter in law, 1 grandson, 1 son, and 1 from a previous marriage, all go through different issues. One is super independent and never had a relationship but finally falls for someone. Another has to choose between 2 suiters. One is struggling with a ramen shop. Another is out of a job, not sure what to do and hoping the family will help.

The ending and what each of them do is not really resolved ... the end

There's no words of wisdom, no real messages except maybe life is messy and people do the best they can.

So, I didn't hate it and as someone that speaks Japanese and lived in Japan for 15 years I found parts of it interesting but overall I didn't get why it's rated 7.6. It seemed kind of forgettable.

If you want old Japanese movies that will stay with you see Ikiru, Woman in the Dunes, Tokyo Story. That last one, Tokyo Story, is similar to this one, just a family. But, at least the message will never leave you unlike here where there is no message.

It's a little family shop in a changing Tokyo. The parents are too old to run it, so it falls on their unmarried daughter and widowed daughter-in-law. They have given up some land so a daughter and her husband can build an apartment building; another daughter returns from Kyushu with her husband and seem to move in permanently; a lost son turns up; a grandson despairs of passing his high school entrance exam; and there's talk that the land will be expropriated to build a highway.

Mikio Naruse's movie -- with Hideko Takamine as the widowed daughter-in-law -- starts out with an Ozu-like story, that soon bursts its bounds. The subplots are too numerous, the characters too selfish and poor, and the outside world keeps intruding with customers coming by and the telephone ringing, for Ozu's calm world, where all problems are soluble and all endings are happy. I watched for for more than half its length before I could figure out what was going on, what the story was about, even with Miss Takamine in the top-billed role. She seems, for the first half, to have no real issues beyond gently urging her son to study hard, and helping her mother-in-law do the housework. By the ending, all that had changed.

Naruse's works that seem to comment on Ozu always seem to be asking questions beyond watching the gentle prodding of a daughter to get married. They ask why families work, and how they work, and are they worth making work. Despite the gentle ending, this is among his most pessimistic works.