The Whole Family Works

Director: Mikio Naruse

1939 / 65min / 35mm

Adapted by Naruse from a novel by Sunao Tokunaga, formerly of Japan’s proletarian literature movement—a fact seemingly ignored by national policy censors in 1939—this bleak drama about the impoverished Ishimura clan, a family of 11 crammed into the close quarters of their dim, dilapidated house, whose eldest son Kichi longs to quit his dead-end job for college, would remain one of Naruse’s “all-time favorites,” perhaps for its echoes of his own youthful experience. Rich with evocative imagery and incident—a young man dozing on his break and dreaming of the horrors of real combat as kids around him play war games; a boy treating his brothers to tempura noodles from his meager savings—Naruse’s wartime masterpiece is a model of poetic economy, shading its home-front message of filial piety with a tragically ironic sense of generational waste.