Naruse ranked

Fumiko struggles to get her literary work published, spending years working in poverty while being abused by her boyfriend all the while hoping to break free from the cycle.

Otsuta is running the geisha house Tsuta in Tokyo. Her business is heavily in debt. Her daughter Katsuyo doesn't see any future in her mothers trade in the late days of Geisha. But Otsuta will not give up. This film portraits the day time life of geisha when not entertaining customers.

A middle-aged bar hostess, constantly in debt, is faced with numerous social constraints and challenges posed to her by her family, customers and friends.

Two friends meet in a bar. Later that night, one friend's flirtatious wife is reportedly in an accident. The other friend doesn't feel well. What's come over him?

A tragic social drama set in post war Japan about a lonely woman trying to find purpose and stability in a devastated Tokyo.

A man falls in love with the widow of a man he killed in a car accident. Eventually she falls in love with him in return.

What is the life of a Geisha like once her beauty has faded and she has retired? Kin has saved her money, and has become a wealthy money-lender, spending her days cold-heartedly collecting debts. Even her best friends, Tomi, Nobu, and Tamae, who were her fellow Geisha, are now indebted to her. For all of them, the glamor of their young lives has passed; Tomi and Tamae have children, but their children have disappointed them. Kin has two former lovers who still pursue her; one she wants to see, and the other she doesn't. But even the one she remembers fondly, when he shows up, proves to be a disappointment.

The real mother of the two children of a respectable university professor is not his wife, but his mistress, the hostess of a Ginza bar the family frequents.

Drama about the lives of the five daughters and daughter-in-law of a store owner.

After a bombing raid destroys the family store and her husband, Reiko rebuilds and runs the shop out of love stopped short by destruction.

Keiko Yukawa is a former prostitute and the newest inmate at White Lily, a female rehabilitation facility.

When she reaches adulthood, a precocious young woman sets out to find her biological father, who, as her mother tells her, abandoned them for another woman.

Michiyo lives in a small home in Osaka and is not happy with her marriage; all she does is cook and clean for her husband.

A young woman tries to raise money to open her own coffee shop.She arranges a loan when her rigid family won't help and then her husband becomes jealous of the loan officer.

A child is killed in a hit and run. The mother plots her revenge by posing as a maid in the house of the murderer.

A war widow with a young boy manages a farm with her bossy mother-in-law. When a reporter comes to interview her, the two begin an affair. He turns out to be married and won't leave his wife. Her older brother tries to marry off his children and hang on to/ extend his farm through an advantageous marriage in the face of threatened land confiscation and the desire of his children to get comfortable urban jobs instead of the backbreaking work in the paddy fields under parental control.

A married couple looking for an apartment move in with the husband's co-worker, a widower. The husband becomes jealous of the widower and his wife.

Kogure is the widow of an assassinated samurai and Otani was that man's pupil. They have been sent out to seek revenge on the murderer, Kogure's first suitor, but their long and arduous journey has so far been fruitless.

Tokyo. Mihoko and Toichi Nakagawa's ten year marriage is crumbling out of inertia. Each knows the other isn't happy, they themselves aren't happy, but they don't talk about their problems with each other, each festering in their unhappiness largely so that they will not show especially to their three boarders their problems. Mihiko in particular, old fashioned in her outlook, does not see divorce as an option, that move which would be a stigma she could not tolerate. Both are seemingly oblivious to the fact that others around them are facing similar if not worse situations, and that they themselves are largely the cause of their unhappiness. Things for their marriage get worse when Toichi starts to fall for his work colleague, widowed Fusako Sagara, who returns his affections.

An ingratiating bride develops warm ties to her father-in-law while her cold husband blithely slights her for another woman.

A woman remember's her own marriage when dealing with the love life of her son.

Poor, pathetic mother Ose has four children, three daughters and a son, by four different men.

Okoma, a young lady working as a conductor with a bus company in Kofu Yamanashi, has an idea for her bus that could avert the dwindling number of passengers.

In Older Brother, Younger Sister, director Mikio Naruse's adaptation of an oft-filmed popular novel by Saisei Murô, the eldest daughter (Machiko Kyô) of a rural family comes home pregnant, testing some already tenuous family bonds. Naruse shows his considerable skill at portraying household dynamics, filming Kyô in relaxed and/or reclining positions (indicative of her character's exhaustively maintained independence) that are then intruded upon by her ill-tempered older brother (Masayuki Mori), whose initially comic, brute-force presence grows increasingly menacing and treacherous as the film progresses.

The story of a family in Tokyo who live under the same roof in a large house and include the widowed sixty-year-old mother, older son and his wife, the youngest daughter and the older daughter who, while being married, is experiencing domestic problems and has moved back in. The latter woman's husband soon dies however making the move permanent. With life insurance money flowing in she not only can afford to pay rent, but also loan some cash to her brother who unbeknownst to his mother has taken on a loan from the bank with the house as collateral. The loan was needed as his wife's aunt's factory needs an infusion of funds.