Mikio Naruse’s final film, Scattered Clouds (1967), follows Yumiko (Yoko Tsukasa), a woman whose life is upended when her husband dies in a sudden car accident caused by Shiro (Yuzo Kayama), a driver for hire. Despite being found not guilty in court, Shiro is consumed by guilt and offers his financial penance to Yumiko. She initially refuses. Legally disowned by her husband’s family and consequently stripped of his meager pension, she reluctantly returns to her rural hometown by Lake Towada, where her sister, also a widow, runs a hotel. Through sheer coincidence, Shiro’s work transfers him to the same area. Their paths cross once again, and a tense connection fraught with grief and unspoken attraction begins to blossom. Shiro and Yumiko’s fates are intertwined, yet reconciliation is impossible.
There is an abiding tension between personal grief and external expectations throughout Naruse’s oeuvre. Yumiko longs to mourn her husband in solitude, but her in-laws, sister, and even Shiro impose their own demands upon her: pushing her toward a second marriage, relocation, and financial pragmatism. Her desires clash with the demands of those around her to just move on from her husband’s sudden death. Despite Yumiko’s best efforts, her lack of agency and financial independence forces her to accept money she doesn’t want and leave Tokyo for the countryside. While starkly exposing the financial fragility of widowed women in 1960s Japan, Naruse captures the agony of being surrounded yet profoundly alone, where every well-meaning intervention only deepens an individual’s estrangement from their own feelings.
Naruse portrays the emotional and societal pressures faced by his characters with bluntness as they stubbornly move through life while privately struggling to process their tragedies. His restrained dialogue and prolonged glances convey more than words: Yumiko and Shiro’s interactions are charged with unspoken grief, shame, and longing. They both avoid facing the reality of their experiences by using alcohol, denial, and forced new beginnings to distract themselves, putting the ways people navigate the difficulties of life without truly confronting them on unfettered display. Shot on lush Tohoscope, the Lake Towada landscape contrasts with the film’s bleak themes of financial instability, widowhood, and the quiet agony of repressed emotions. Ultimately, Scattered Clouds is a poignant exploration of guilt, loss, the complexity of love, and the cruel irony of fate, underscored by Naruse’s signature restraint and empathy for the frailty inherent to the human condition.
Scattered Clouds screens this afternoon, June 29, and on July 3, at Metrograph on 35mm as part of the series “Mikio Naruse: The World Betrays Us.”
