Director Mikio Naruse: An overlooked master

You probably haven't heard of Mikio Naruse (1905-1969) After all, the Japanese film-maker did his very best to keep a low profile. Since his death there have been periodic attempts to thrust this most reticent of figures into the limelight, and every decade or so his films are revived and Western critics proclaim him the equal of his better-known contemporaries, such as Yasujiro Ozu (who also served his apprenticeship at the Shochiku film company in the 1920s) Akira Kurosawa (once Naruse's assistant) or Kenji Mizoguchi (who also made films about doomed geishas).

Despite their efforts, Naruse remains an almost obscure figure. He was an astonishingly prolific director, having made 89 films, but only three are available on DVD in the UK.

Naruse was mild-mannered and extraordinarily shy. Few of his closest collaborators knew him well. "Even during the shooting of a picture, he would never say if anything was good or bad, interesting or trite," remembered his muse, the actress Hideko Takamine, who appeared in many of his greatest movies. "He was a completely unresponsive director. I appeared in about 20 of his films, and yet there was never an instance in which he gave me any acting instructions."

Naruse's movies invariably fell into the Shomin-geki genre: they were about the "common people" – the sinking lower middle-classes. His films lacked the exoticism that Western audiences savoured.

Unlike the other big-name Japanese directors of his era, Naruse's work wasn't "discovered" at a glamorous festival like Venice or Cannes. Nor did he inspire Hollywood remakes. Some sneered that Naruse made "women's pictures" with soap operatic plots.

On one level, Naruse was meek and conformist, working as a director-for-hire in the Japanese studio system for almost half a century. He rarely refused any project offered to him. At the same time, he was stubborn and uncompromising. You can't help but wonder how such a shy and reclusive film-maker was able to make such probing films about the lives of women.

"It's a good question. He didn't seem to be very friendly with women by any means," says the academic Catherine Russell, author of the forthcoming book The Cinema of Naruse – Women and Modernity. She suggests that in making so many movies aimed at women audiences, Naruse learned how to tailor his work. Even if he was famously non-communicative, he also had a knack of finding the best actresses and working with them again and again.

He rarely gave interviews, and most of the information about him comes from colleagues. We know that he was born in Tokyo in 1905, the youngest of three children of an embroiderer, and that he started his career as a prop man at the Tokyo Kamata Studios.

He eventually married the actress Sachiko Chiba, star of his film Wife! Be Like A Rose! in 1937. That marriage ended in 1942. The conventional account of his career suggests that he started with great flamboyance in the 1930s but then – after his marriage – lost his way. He did not flourish in the war years, although he somehow managed to keep on working. Little is known about his second wife. Only in the early 1950s did he find his touch again.

Russell disputes the idea that he went into a 15-year-slump. "In fact, during that so-called slump, the whole industry was in a slump," she says.

In the latter part of his career, Naruse made several adaptations of novels by Fumiko Hayashi, a writer who specialised in stories of the downtrodden. The quote from Hayashi that Naruse includes at the beginning of his 1951 film Repast sums up his preoccupations perfectly. "I am moved by the sadness to be found in the simple lives of people..."

The film is about Michiyo (Setsuko Hara), a housewife whose salaryman husband ignores her. She is living unhappily in Osaka, and is slowly being worn down by domestic drudgery. Matters come to a head when her pretty niece comes to stay and the husband begins to flirt with her. Naruse shows brilliantly how the husband and wife cling to respectability by a thread.

Naruse's work pays close attention to the subject of money, and he deals openly with sexuality. A certain fatalism runs through one of his best-known films, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960). This is about Keiko (Hideko Takamine), a Tokyo hostess. Again, Naruse is brutally honest about her plight. She is a widow beginning to lose her looks. She has dependents, including a feckless brother and his young son, who needs an operation.

Every decision carries a financial consequence. Keiko is obliged to live luxuriously and to invest in expensive kimonos. If she sleeps with a customer, she risks losing her good name. She projects ease and grace but the audience knows how tormented she really is – they also know how much rent she has to pay and the cost of her nephew's operation.

This may make the film sound depressing. Naruse's world view was certainly on the pessimistic side. "From the youngest age, I have thought that the world we live in betrays us; this thought still remains with me," the director once remarked. Nonetheless, the mood is much more uplifting than a summary of the plot might suggest. Somehow, the women manage to keep on going. But their problems aren't so much solved as deferred.

Naruse's films work through the accumulation of tiny details. Kurosawa, who called him "the hardest director to work under," spoke of the way he built one brief shot on top of another. "When you look at them all spliced together in the final film, they give the impression of a single long take. The flow of short shots that looks calm and ordinary at first glance then reveals itself like a deep river with a quiet surface disguising a fast-raging current underneath."

What was also remarkable about Naruse was his consistency. Russell describes him as "a salaryman" of the film industry. He was so proficient that Ozu suggested he made films as if he was "making tofu". This, Russell suggests, was the highest compliment: "It meant that film-making was like a craft and that he was able to make something perfectly, over and over again. Naruse was a studio guy working in an industry and producing a product that was consistently good."

The Mikio Naruse season runs at BFI Southbank, London, (020-7928 3232) from 1 to 31 July; a Naruse box set is available on DVD from Eureka in its Masters of Cinema series