Sound of the Mountain

"Sound of the Mountain" (Yama no Oto, 1954) is a Japanese drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Mikio Naruse and adapted from Yasunari Kawabata's novel of the same name.

Ogata, a Tokyo businessman nearing old age, shares his suburban house with his son and daughter-in-law Kikuko, played by Setsuko Hara. The son is pursuing another woman, openly. Kikuko knows and says nothing — the expectations of a postwar Japanese household give her no ground to object. Ogata sees all of it. The quiet closeness he develops toward his daughter-in-law — unspoken, unresolved — is where the film actually lives.

Naruse is the least celebrated of Japan's postwar masters, which is genuinely undeserved. Where Kurosawa was operatic, Naruse was precise. Kawabata, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, wrote the source novel. Stream "Sound of the Mountain" online on iFILM.