KYOKO KAGAWA RARITIES: LITTLE PEACH / ANZUKKO (1958)
Directed by Mikio Naruse
109 minutes
This summer Anthology, Asia Society, and The Japan Foundation, New York, join forces for a celebration of the career of actress Kyoko Kagawa, who for the past 75 years has been one of the shining lights of Japanese cinema, delivering indelible performances in films by Mikio Naruse, Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Kozaburo Yoshimura, Akira Kurosawa, Ishiro Honda, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and many others. The five-film series, "Kyoko Kagawa Rarities", begins with an opening night screening at Anthology, before continuing uptown at Asia Society for the following three days. The opening night event features an exceedingly rare screening of Mikio Naruse's LITTLE PEACH, described by Chris Fujiwara as both "a masterpiece of Naruse's elliptical and unemphatic fifties style" and "one of the harshest of Naruse's female melodramas." Known for her iconic roles as the little sister or the enduring daughter, Kagawa here lends her tenderness to the beleaguered adult role of wife to a would-be novelist in perpetual collapse. Echoing SOUND OF THE MOUNTAIN in the many walks and talks with the great Sō Yamamura as paternal figure, with its buoyant bike rides and painful vision of marriage as social fate, the film also gestures at a spiritual afterlife for Ozu's LATE SPRING. Following this opening night event, "Kyoko Kagawa Rarities" continues at Asia Society through Sunday, August 16, with screenings of FAREWELL TO THE HIGHLAND STATION (Nobuo Nakagawa, 1951), TOKYO RENDEZVOUS (Chihiro Ikeda, 2008), FIVE SISTERS (Seiji Hisamatsu, 1954), and SHOZO, A CAT AND TWO WOMEN (Shiro Toyoda, 1956), featuring imported archival prints and newly translated subtitles. "Kyōko Kagawa Rarities" is programmed by Joseph Eusebio and Akinaru Rokkaku and is a co-presentation of Asia Society, Anthology Film Archives, and The Japan Foundation, New York. For more info about the Asia Society screenings visit: https://asiasociety.org/new-york/kyoko-kagawa-rarities Special thanks to Hiroyuki Kojima (Japan Foundation, New York), Inney Prakash (Asia Society), and Shion Komatsu (Toho).