A Wanderer’s Notebook (1962)

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A Wanderer’s Notebook (1962) – M. Naruse

I’m a big fan of director Mikio Naruse, who similar to Ozu and Mizoguchi made many silent films before he moved into sound and made his mark chiefly with melodramas focused on the experiences and relationships of women.  A number of his best films were drawn from novels or stories by writer Fumiko Hayashi (1903-1951), such as Meshi (1951), Lightning (1952), Late Chrysanthemums (1954), and especially Floating Clouds (1955).  So, it comes as no surprise that he decided to make this film of her first autobiographical novel, again starring Hideko Takamine, his “go to” actress (see When A Woman Ascends the Stairs, 1960).  Hayashi’s life was not easy – her mother (Kinuyo Tanaka) remarried to a travelling snake oil salesman and they moved around peddling until she graduated from high school and left the family to live in Tokyo.  The film mainly begins at this point and shows a series of unfortunate relationships with men as well as her gradual path to literary success through poetry and stories in magazines.  I suppose it may be a case of method acting but Takamine does not seem her usual charismatic self here – as Hayashi, she’s awkward, even stoop-shouldered, at the start, gradually becoming more relaxed but she’s never a warm, attractive, or even likable character.  Mostly she’s self-absorbed and there are suggestions that her fiction reflects this, with its focus on her subjective experience of poverty and hardship (which may after all be universal; Naruse himself treats the social impact of money as a central theme in his work).  Even at the end, when she’s successful, she’s neither generous nor friendly – possibly a result of her hard knock life.  Although there’s a place for unromantic heroes in films, the dreariness of both events and character somewhat capsizes the film which is not amongst Naruse’s best.  But middling Naruse is still worth seeing.