A Hen in the Wind

With its screenplay completed in 1947, The Moon Has Risen (realized by Tanaka in 1955) was meant to be Ozu’s second film after WWII, but due to a number of production issues—not least the inability to film its story in war-ravaged Tokyo—the project was scrapped for A Hen in the Wind, a more immediate comment on the conditions of Japan’s reconstruction period. This rare melodramatic turn from the director follows a mother (Tanaka) who, while waiting for her husband (Shūji Sano) to return from war, resorts to prostitution to pay her sick child’s medical bills. The director’s delicate humanism is no less apparent in this genre, but perhaps the driving force of the film’s deep emotional impact is Tanaka, whose elegant and staggeringly honest performance gives clear expression to the domestic troubles faced by Japan’s family unit in the postwar era.