Sotoji Kimura is one of the unsung minor masters of Japanese cinema during the 1930s. While he was available for humorous works such as Tipsy Life, his tone was usually more sombre and often politically charged, as befits a filmmaker whose background lay in the leftist Prokino movement. This film is his version of a short story by Saisei Muroo which had won the Literary Confab Club Award after its publication in 1934. The story is a product of the author’s middle period, in which, as Ivan Morris writes, “passions once under control now explode, and the manner becomes scandalously realistic”. Kimura’s film faithfully reproduces the working-class milieu of the story, with some striking Soviet-style imagery of workers by the river in the opening shots, and compellingly captures the dramatic intensity of the relationship between brother and sister and the familiar antagonism between the country and the city. Muroo’s story was to be filmed twice more, by Mikio Naruse in 1953 and by Tadashi Imai in 1976.

Alexander Jacoby, Johan Nordström