Inazuma

Inazuma stars the wonderful Hideko Takamine, which was one of the regulars of the films of Michio Naruse (at least during the 1950s). The movie, set in postwar Japan in a lower middle class milieu, is a bit hard to understand at first, with all the messy family relations for the audience to sort out, but is basically about the Takamine character's decision to leave her extended family and start a life of her own (her mother has four different children from different fathers: "you breed like a cat", Takamine would later reproach her mother, in one of the movie's funnier lines). The movie ends up in a relatively upbeat note. And why in so many Japanese movies from the 1950s the only job apparently available to young women consist on being tourist guides?