Wife! Be Like a Rose!
About Wife! Be Like a Rose!
Kimiko (Sachiko Chiba), a modern Tokyo office worker, lives with her mother Etsuko, who writes haiku and still grieves for Shunsaku, the husband who left fifteen years earlier for the former geisha Oyuki. Kimiko wants to marry Seiji (Heihachirō Ōkawa), and his father wants to meet her father first. She goes to the country to bring Shunsaku (Sadao Maruyama) home. He is content with Oyuki (Yuriko Hanabusa) and their two children. The money orders that arrive in Tokyo with no letter are sent by Oyuki, not by him. Oyuki is keeping his failing business going.
Cast & crew
More about Wife! Be Like a Rose!
Mikio Naruse directed and wrote the screenplay from Minoru Nakano's play Futari tsuma (Two Wives). Hiroshi Suzuki photographed it. Noboru Itō wrote the music. Kōichi Iwashita edited. Kazuo Kubo designed the sets. P.C.L. released it in Japan on 1 September 1935. The Japanese title is 妻よ薔薇のやうに. It was also released as Kimiko. The Japanese Film Database records a U.S. theatrical release under that title in 1937, called the first Japanese feature shown that way in America.
Themes
In film history
Under the title Kimiko it was the first Japanese feature given a theatrical release in the United States, in 1937.
Making
Naruse shot Kimiko's visit as a correction of the story she has been told in Tokyo: the country household is not the one her mother describes.
Reviews
Kinema Junpō's critics placed it first among Japanese films of 1935.
Look
Hiroshi Suzuki photographed it. One long take looks into the house through a wisteria trellis.
Music
Noboru Itō wrote the music.
Preservation
A print of about 74 minutes survives.
Notes
- Kinema Junpō's critics voted it the best Japanese film of 1935.
- Kimiko does housework in a shirt and tie. The Japanese Film Database singles out that costume.
- Toshiko Itō and Setsuko Horikoshi are also in the cast.
- P.C.L. later became part of Toho. The 1935 credit is P.C.L., not Toho.
- Nakano's play, not a Naruse original, is the source.
Awards
- Kinema Junpō Best Japanese Film of 1935
Scenes
- Kimiko arrives expecting a calculating ex-geisha and finds Oyuki keeping the household and the remittances.
- Shunsaku will not come back to the Tokyo wife who has been writing poems about him for fifteen years.
Influenced by
- Futari tsuma by Minoru Nakano