Mikio Naruse was known during his lifetime as a great director of women. “To act in his films was really an honor for actresses,” said Yoko Tsukasa, who appeared in several Naruse films, most notably his last, Scattered Clouds, in 1967. “He understood perfectly the psychology of women.” If women and their problems predominate in Naruse’s films, as in Mizoguchi’s, the unique mixture of anguish and calm that characterizes the work of the less famous (but no less great) director arises from the fact that his female figures are always doubled. For every Naruse heroine there is another woman, her rival or mirror image, whom she finds waiting when she turns a new corner, who legitimately possesses the man to whom the heroine has at best a moral or sentimental claim, or who stands as a living reproach to the heroine.

The jolting Hit and Run (66) is built on a pattern formed by two women: a widow whose son is killed in the title accident and the guilty party, a car manufacturer’s unfaithful wife. In an emblematic close-up, the eyes of the latter’s young son shift from one woman to the other, as though he had intuited the plot’s pivotal secret, the equivalence between the women. Later in the film, the widow imagines herself being embraced passionately by the other woman’s husband.

One version of the Narusean other woman is the Other Mother—the mother whom the daughter has never known. In The Girl in the Rumor (35), a young woman refuses to accept the truth when she’s finally told that her father’s mistress is really her mother. In As a Wife, As a Woman (aka The Other Woman, 61), it’s the same situation again: the children of a distinguished professor find that the woman they have come to regard as their racy and slightly disreputable Ginza aunt is really their mother. A different surprise awaits the newly widowed Mitsuko, one of the three half-sisters in Lightning (52): still carrying around her husband’s ashes, she’s suddenly confronted with his mistress, who requests financial support for herself and the baby he has fathered by her.

Naruse pushes the other-woman theme to an extreme of clarity and tension in films that reverse cinematic clichés about “strong, independent women.” In the superb Untamed (57), the ever-dissatisfied Oshima, at two stages of her random course from man to man, finds herself confronted with the same rival, the opportunistic Oyu. Oshima triumphs over Oyu by beating her up—in an aggravated (and by no means rare) breach of the decorum that reigns uneasily over the Naruse universe. In A Wanderer’s Notebook (aka Her Lonely Lane, 62), based on the journals of writer Fumiko Hayashi, the heroine for a while becomes reconciled with her romantic rival, with whom she teams up to form a literary magazine. But the two split up again, as if in acknowledgment of the law that makes Naruse’s women oppose each other.

In Repast (51), the first, and one of the best, of six Naruse films based on Hayashi’s works, housewife Michiyo is eclipsed and reduced to resentful silence by the flirting of her niece, Satoko, with Michiyo’s husband and with Michiyo’s potential lover, a handsome male cousin. Satoko represents, by implication, a freedom of sexual behavior that the older woman has denied herself. Near the end of the film, Michiyo’s triumph over Satoko—which marks the renewal of her ability to reconcile herself to the perpetual disappointments of her married life—is signaled by her suddenly seeing the humor in the girl’s modern affectations and laughing at her.

Michiyo’s laughter expresses something characteristic about Naruse’s extraordinary films. If, despite the loss and sadness in them, the worldview they imply isn’t tragic, it’s because Naruse puts so much weight on the ability of his heroines to change their minds about their problems—a gift celebrated at the tears-turning-to-laughter end of Lightning, another Hayashi adaptation. A certain increased distance is always available to Naruse’s women. Reflecting this possibility, most of the director’s films contain moments when he suddenly withdraws his camera from a scene, putting it outside a window to peer in at the characters. As a Wife, As a Woman boasts lovely shots that look in from outside at the home the heroine shares with her grandmother and at the traditional restaurant where the film’s two central Other Women confront each other. In Apart from You (33), the beautiful scene of a couple’s train ride into the country is intercut between interior shots of the couple and exterior shots in which we see them from outside, through the window.

Naruse’s customary move of cutting to an exterior view of an interior scene is never more effective than in Untamed: the master of the house comes upon a maid in a bathroom and, overcome by passion, seizes her. At this point, Naruse cuts to a shot from outside the house. The couple’s shadows grapple in a square of light in the background. A clump of snow falling from the roof obscures our view; then, a momentary truce having been called at the same moment, the woman backs slowly into the visible section of the hallway and runs her hand over her hair. Fade-out. During the climactic philosophical discussion between mother and daughter in Lightning, Naruse cuts repeatedly to a view of the characters from outside the daughter’s apartment, visualizing the potential for the daughter, at least (who sits closer to the window and occasionally looks outside), to free herself from the misery and the constraint that have characterized her life.

Naruse’s own impoverished beginnings no doubt helped predispose him to be sensitive to the struggles of the poor. He was born in 1905 to an impecunious embroiderer and his wife, who both died while he was young. Naruse started his film career in 1920 as a prop assistant at Shochiku. With the support of Heinosuke Gosho, Naruse started directing for the company in 1930. At the house studio of Ozu (his elder by only two years), Naruse failed to find his own path and felt, he said later, “compelled to take up anything even if it was not very pleasing to me, or even if I was weak at it.” With his 1935 switch to P.C.L. (which soon became Toho), Naruse discovered sound and won commercial and critical success. His Wife, Be Like a Rose (35) won Japanese film magazine Kinema Jumpo’s top annual prize and was distributed in the West. This film and several others from the same period established Naruse as a leading director of shomingeki, or dramas of the common people, a genre with which Naruse would remain associated throughout his career.

In the Fifties, usually considered Naruse’s peak period, a series of hits consolidated his position as one of Toho’s top directors. His ability to craft popular films without going over budget or schedule was especially prized by his bosses, who seem to have rewarded him with some degree of autonomy (his regular editor, Ume Takeda, recalled that “as a general rule, Naruse did the editing as he intended and the studio didn’t touch it”). Yet, in the twilight of his career in the Sixties, Naruse was heard to lament, “We can no longer trust the studio.”

In all its periods, Naruse’s is a strikingly modern cinema. A summary comparison among the three best-known Japanese directors of their generation might go like this: if Mizoguchi’s long-take traveling shots show time in perpetual flow, and if Ozu’s reverse-shot patterns freeze the timeless within time, Naruse’s varied and distinctive rhythms, created by the careful counterposing of look with look and movement with movement,highlight the cruel exhilaration of being jostled in the present moment. Structuring his films as unpredictable journeys, Naruse employs a subtlety of composition that makes the graphics of the camera angle itself visible as a form of movement—movement of the eye in a certain direction—and not just “point of view” or “perspective.” Though ’scope enhances this awareness with its elongation of space (Naruse mastered ’scope from his first use of the format, in 1958’s Summer Clouds, and thereafter shot almost exclusively in that process), the effect doesn’t depend on a widescreen aspect ratio, since it’s apparent as early as The Girl in the Rumor (35), with its vigorous orchestration of various characters’ movements through streets. In the supreme triumph of ’scope filmmaking that is When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (60), Naruse draws a stirring sense of implacable modernity from sets and locations, like the industrial area where the heroine, a Ginza bar hostess, meets one of her Other Women—the wife of a man who has deceitfully proposed to her. But the corrosiveness of the modern pervades Naruse’s work at least since such Thirties masterworks as Three Sisters with Maiden Hearts (35), with its documentary-like opening montage of city streets.