A comedy about two salarymen who routinely degrade themselves for their boss.

スト解決後最初の東宝第一プロ作品で、四つの物語を別々のスタッフが製作した「四つの恋の物語」の第2話。 美津子は、二度目の旦那と別れて、ダンサーだった頃に知り合った有田と同棲していた。しかし、有田が絹子という新聞売りの娘と知り合って以来、自己を反省し真剣に働きたいと考えるようになったのを知った美津子は、わざと愛想づかしを言って自ら彼のもとを去って行く。

The Angry Street includes a great deal of location shooting in the rebuilt city, including downtown streets, residential neighborhoods, the campus of the University of Tokyo, and the high life of jazzy dance halls. Sudo (Hara Yasumi) and Mori (Uno Jukichi) are two university students who make money by picking up rich girls in dance clubs and conning them into giving them cash. Mori is the brains of the operation, and Sudo is the suave dancer who picks up the girls. Over the course of the film, Sudo becomes involved with three different girls and is drawn into the gangster milieu, which he seems unable to resist even though he is responsible for his mother, grandmother, and sister, Masako (Wakayama Setsuko). In this world of bad boys and girls, Masako is the pillar of strength and moral virtue who finally enables Mori to straighten out.

A Fond Face from the Past is also set in a rural community, specifically a village outside Kameoka, near Kyoto. In some ways this short, thirty-six-minute film is Naruse's most moving negotiation of the militarist restrictions of the time, perhaps because it is also his most direct engagement with the culture of war. When a newsreel comes to Kameoka featuring a local man named Yoichi, it causes some excitement in the community and, of course, in Yoichi's own family. First of all his mother makes the newsreel (Nippon News, no. 14), which begins with the same marching music that opens his own film, followed by a curious baby judging context in Los Angeles featuring two hundred Japanese babies. Released in January 1941, almost a year before the pacific war begins, this “found footage” is indicative of Japanese imperialist ambitions beyond Asia long before Pearl Harbor.

Slice of life film centered on a couple of years in the life of a rural high school girl.

The third film that Naruse made in 1950, White Beast (Shiroi yaji, 1950), was described by Kinema Junpo critic Tsumura Hideo three years later as "so indescribably miserable as to haunt me even today." Tsumura represents the bulk of Japanese critics of the time, who felt that Naruse experienced a terrible slump throughout the 1940s and this film seemed to be the "bottom of the ocean." The critical establishment was clearly not prepared to accept a woman's prison film featuring former prostitutes recovering from venereal diseases, unwanted pregnancies, and estranged lovers. With its catfights, hysterical tantrums, film noir lighting, and dramatic music, White Beast is indicative of the new influences of the Hollywood psychological thriller on Naruse. Caged (John Cromwell, 1950) initiated a cycle of women's prison movies in the United States that may or may not have been shown in Japan, but the stylistics of White Beast draw on the same paranoid woman's films and film noir conventions that preceded the American cycle.

A small community in wartime Japan learn how to make do with less.

This film depicts a troupe of wandering kabuki players traveling through rural Japan.

A woman and her daughter are in love with the same man, a chef at the restaurant that the mother manages. He is slightly crippled from frostbite in his years in Siberian labor camps and considers himself “already dead.”

Kyoko, the daughter of a successful novelist, marries an aspiring writer. However, her husband’s difficulties with his writing and his resentment over her father cause deep strains in the marriage.

1931 film by Mikio Naruse

In Depression-era Tokyo, the life of a single mother and her young son are disrupted by the return of her ex-husband, who fathered the child and walked out on her years earlier.

1933 film by Mikio Naruse

A story of two sisters, the older being more traditional, the younger a "moga" ("modern girl"). Their widowed father runs the family sake shop, but is running into financial trouble, causing him to tamper with his stock; Meanwhile, his long-time mistress yearns for something more serious. Amidst this, the older sister is introduced to a well-off suitor: A university boy, much more intrigued by the less traditional little sister. A doddering grandfather, an officious uncle and busybody neighbors also don't make the lives of the hardworking members of the family any easier.

Three sisters earn money for their bossy mother by being samisen street musicians. This means mainly playing a banjo type instrument for tips in bars...

Otherwise promising young man Asaji and his younger brother Yuji face blighted lives due of society's disapproval of their illegitmacy and déclassé family.

This film is based on a real Meiji era performer -- and tells of Tochuken's partnership with his wife (played by Chikako Hosokawa) who played shamisen for his songs/recitations), his affair with a geisha (Sachiko Chiba), and the deterioration of his partnership and marriage.

After some fruitless career hunting in downtown Tokyo, Chiyo accepts a job as a bar hostess in Shiba ward. Well away from glamorous Asakusa and Ginza, this is a neighbourhood tavern where the women are dirt poor, each having only one kimono to their name...

The study of a one-year marriage that begins to crumble. A married man is torn between the love of his wife, and the attraction to a cousin of his wife.

Mr. Tsurujiro is a Japanese folk singer assisted by Ms. Tsuruhachi on the shamisen. The pair is popular, but he often nitpicks her music and so they split. She marries a benefactor, but after a joint show, feels music is above marriage.