Takako Irie loses his job, and he, his wife and son movie to a poor neighborhood. While he resolutely works his way back into respectability, his wife grows ill; to avoid being a burden, she kills herself, leaving a note urging her widower and child to make the youngster into a great man, a good Japanese man. As Irie doggedly advances, he grows more humble; the son, however, forgets the message, even as he remembers his mother's love,and grows a sense of entitlement.
Takako Irie gives a stellar performance here, increasingly burdened under old-man prostheses, and makes Mikio Naruse's sentimental movie work. However, examining it almost eighty years later, we can see the wartime propaganda, as when unprovoked Chinese forces fire on a Japanese unit, and the the nation takes up arms in an expression of the best of the Japanese character. Was this drawn from Sensuke Kawauchi's novel, or was it something added for the zeitgeist... or at the censors' insistence?
