In the opening scenes of Mikio Naruse’s Repast (original Japanese title: Meshi, 1951), a neglected housewife wonders where her dreams have gone. Is this all there is for her? The film proceeds to analyze Japanese society as it grapples with changing gender norms and expectations after its defeat in the Second World War. The film pulsates with the desires of a woman searching for meaning in a world where she is afforded little ability to forge her own identity.
Michiyo (Setsuko Hara) lives in the outskirts of Osaka with her husband Hatsunosuke (Ken Uehara). Her family did not approve of the marriage, and she has found the provincial backwaters of Osaka to pose far fewer opportunities for her than her hometown of bustling Tokyo. Naruse films the neighborhood as claustrophobic; everyone appears to live on top of each other, inserting themselves into the private gossip and goings-on of their neighbors. Michiyo’s husband seems to have little interest in much of anything: his early appearances in the film announce his return from the office with a bored and yawning exhortation for Michiyo to make him food. Although the film is translated as Repast (the Japanese word meshi can mean either a meal or a specific kind of rice dish), it does not culminate in a grand feast, like Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast (1987), rather it points to the centrality of food to these characters and the dreariness that Michiyo faces having to prepare her husband’s meals.
When Michiyo’s niece Satoko (Yukiko Shimazaki) arrives, Michiyo finds her marriage coming under threat as Satoko flirts shamelessly with her husband. Satoko giggles at Hatsunosuke’s every joke and walks arm in arm with him to the glaring disapproval of their neighbors. This convinces Michiyo of the futility of her living arrangement. She flees to Tokyo after encountering a man of her past who is passing through Osaka before returning to the capital. But in Tokyo the romanticized way that she viewed her hometown does not correspond with what she now experiences. The effects of the war are clearly seen as hastily rebuilt buildings and rubble from the 1945 fire bombings line the streets. Was her life in Osaka truly the stultifying existence of which she was previously convinced? The film’s ending explores the choices that Michiyo faces as she contemplates her future.
The film was a comeback of sorts for Naruse. His films during and immediately succeeding the war had not been met with effusive praise from critics or with strong box-office receipts. Repast, however, was met with both critical and commercial acclaim. This film, along with those of Yasujirō Ozu and Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952), heralded the post-war success of the shoshimin-eiga genre or petit-bourgeois melodramas (often called shomin-geki [common people drama] in the West) focused on the struggles of the working and middle-class citizens. Famed Japanese studio Toho, which produced Repast, was investing in both prestige dramas and movies aimed at broad audiences during this period, including Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and the first iteration of the Godzilla franchise, both of which almost bankrupted the company due to their high production costs in 1954.
Toho invested mightily in these films by luring talented writers, directors and actors to work on its domestic dramas for the international festival circuit in its infancy in the 1950s. Future Japanese Nobel laureate for literature Yasunari Kawabata served as scenario supervisor on the film. Repast was based on an unfinished story by the feminist author Fumiko Hayashi, who died shortly before the film was released. Naruse would spend much of the 1950s directing other adaptations of Hayashi’s writings, including the notable films Wife (1953), Late Chrysanthemums (1954) and Floating Clouds (1955), becoming some of the most respected works of his career. Some scholars claim that the ending of Repast has tamed (and perhaps, betrayed) Hayashi’s more overtly feminist tone in her fiction, but to see a Japanese film from this period that so effectively portrays the ennui and despair of married housewives is striking even today.
