Older Brother, Younger Sister

Older Brother, Younger Sister (あにいもうと, Ani imōto) is a 1953 Japanese drama film directed by Mikio Naruse. The film is based on the short story Ani imōto by Saisei Murō.^[1][2]

Older Brother, Younger Sister
Japanese film poster
Japanese name
Kanji	あにいもうと
Directed by	Mikio Naruse
Written by	Yōko Mizuki Saisei Murō (short story)
Produced by	Nobuo Miura
Starring	Machiko Kyō Masayuki Mori Yoshiko Kuga
Cinematography	Shigeyoshi Mine
Edited by	Toyo Suzuki
Music by	Ichirō Saitō
Production company	Daiei Film
Distributed by	Daiei Film
Release date	19 August 1953 (1953-08-19) (Japan)[1][2]
Running time	87 minutes[1][2]
Country	Japan
Language	Japanese

Plot

Mon, the elder daughter of a rural family, returns home from Tokyo pregnant after an affair with college student Kobata. Her parents fear a scandal that might threaten the marriage prospects of the younger sister San. Also, Mon, as the film suggests, supports San's education by prostitution, as the father's business had to close down and the mother hardly manages to finance the family by running a small store. The ill-tempered eldest brother Inokichi decides to take on the role of a disciplinarian, first beating up Kobata when he visits the family to apologise, and later Mon. Still, Mon forgives him and returns to the capital.

Cast

• Machiko Kyō as Mon
• Masayuki Mori as Inokichi
• Yoshiko Kuga as San
• Eiji Funakoshi as Kobata
• Kumeko Urabe as Riki, the mother
• Reizaburō Yamamoto as Akaza, the father

Reception

Six years after the film's premiere, film historian Donald Richie objected that by "attempting to move from realism to naturalism, Naruse is occasionally at fault in manipulating his characters a bit too obviously".^[3] In 2008, film scholar Alexander Jacoby called Older Brother, Younger Sister an "uncharacteristically brutal film in which the emotional tensions […] explode into physical violence".^[4] Keith Uhlich of Slant Magazine gave the film 3.5 of 4 stars for showing Naruse's "considerable skill at portraying household dynamics".^[5]

Literary source

First published in 1934, Saisei Murō's short story Ani imōto had won the Bungei Konwakai Award. It had been adapted for the screen the first time in 1936 by Sotoji Kimura^[6] and again in 1976 by Tadashi Imai. The story has been translated into English by Edward Seidensticker and is available in the anthology Modern Japanese Stories.

Legacy

Older Brother, Younger Sister was screened at the Museum of Modern Art in 1985^[7] as part of its retrospective on Mikio Naruse, and at the Cinémathèque Française in 2016 and 2017.^[8]