The Realistic Melodrama Of Mikio Naruse

Being one of the four most famous directors in Japan, in comparison to the studies of Yasujiro Ozu, Akira Kurozawa and Kenji Mizoguchi, the achievements of studies concerning Mikio Naruse were quite weak worldwide. What Naruse produced were melodramas, which were basically the same as the works of Ozu. The lack of strong personal visual aesthetic style made him somehow overlooked by western critics. In recent years, as some of the major works of Naruse were released in the form of DVD and a vast amount of them were shown on the cabel channel of NHK network, intuitive study materials began to be enriched. Even though Naruse began to draw attentions by some of the Japanese films reseachers in China, the studies of his works are not yet perfect and theren't no full-length monographs published in Chinese language. The only monographs of Naruse that were translated into Chinese were The Cinema of Naruse Mikio:Women and Japanese Modernity, written by Canadian researcher Catherine Russell.Naruse had been focused on making melodramas since the world of cinema was still silent, and most of them were featured females as main characters. Naruse was active during the time of 1920s to 1960s, and those few decades were the time when Japan faced a long period of social instability. He placed those female characters into the presents of the social conditions, showing their resistance, helplessness and dilemma. Those films has gone beyond melodrama, a genre which fits in classical narratologies, and also with a touch of realism and modernism.This article corporate Japanese cultural study with melodrama theory and director research, has made a key research on female subjectivity. Using feminism theory as a tool of study, with modernistic way of thinking, analyzing how characters were built with subjectivities, explored the historical and cultural factors by Japanese cultural study, melodrama theory, and historical study of realism cinema trend occurred in other countries. Finally analyzing aesthetic means of how he created his works which end up with the conclusion of the realism melodrama of Mikio Naruse.