No lover of Japanese cinema can afford to miss this, a beautiful, densely textured work about a demoted insurance company executive who moves into a shabby canal-side inn in Osaka, the “money capital” of Japan, and befriends its female denizens. One might be reminded of Naruse’s frescoes of struggling women in Gosho’s focus on everyday life and his teeming, compassionate group portrait of these hardscrabble ladies – a tippling geisha, a thieving maid, the bullying, penny-pinching innkeeper – whose need for money leads them to desperate acts. But Gosho’s tone and approach are entirely his own, and the way he disguises a complex narrative structure in a seemingly loose accumulation of mood and atmosphere, and employs cinematographer Joji Ohara’s stunning chiaroscuro lighting and precise framing, signals the director’s singular mastery. The dinner sequence that ends the film provides a strong taste of Gosho’s paradoxical tone, what critics have called “laughter through tears.” “An extremely powerful and a very sad film, it is – in its very understatement – one of the very best of the indictments of postwar Japan” (Joseph Anderson and Donald Richie, The Japanese Film). – James Quandt