It's the story of the early life of Fumiko Hayashi: her penniless upbringing, her desperate poverty in her young adulthood, her awful choice in men, and ultimately the beginning of her success as a writer.
Mikio Naruse's sixth and final movie based on Miss Hayashi's works -- including the revered MESHED and my personal favorite, INAZUMA -- is a story of tragedy from the beginning to the end. The choice to play the writer, Hideko Takamine, seems an odd choice, but she makes herself unattractive and utterly believable. Likewise, Kinuyo Tanaka seems older and more futile than in anything I've ever seen her in.
It's clearly an important movie, released to celebrate Toho's thirtieth anniversary as a production company. He directs it as one of those endless tales of Tokyo poverty that he and other socially conscious directors supervised in the 1930s, combined with the story of a woman mistreated by Japan's misogynistic society that Naruse so often offered.
I found it a tough watch; not only is it difficult to see a movie about a poet in another language -- although the rhythms of the translation in the version I watched were excellent -- but the unending misery, accurate to Miss Hayashi's life and written story though it may be, was hard to watch befalling my favorite Japanese actress. Don't mistake me: it's a great movie. But it's not one I'm likely to visit again soon.
