Directed by Mikio Naruse • 1953 • Japan
Starring Mieko Takamine, Ken Uehara, Rentaro Mikuni

One of six films that director Mikio Naruse adapted from the novels of Fumiko Hayashi, WIFE is an incisive, unsparing portrait of a decade-old marriage in the process of disintegrating. Opening and closing with the same sequence of the husband (Ken Uehara) silently leaving for work, the real focus of the story—as so often in Naruse’s films—is the wife (Mieko Takamine), who resorts to desperate measures to try and hold her marriage together, even after learning of his infidelity. What plays out is a remarkably clear-eyed domestic tragedy that manages to also convey the greater social stresses of life in postwar Japan.