Review of Apart From You / 君と別れて, directed by Mikio Naruse

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I feel like a lot of my blog introductions, especially when it comes to movies, have been lamenting on the fact I don’t have a ton of time lately. I used to work as a film critic (which, in fact, was so incredibly underpaid that I now make more off of this blog’s display ads than I ever did publishing anywhere else), and then when I was in graduate school I was writing a lot about film, so I used to watch so many movies.

But now I work an 8-5, come home, and then doom scroll my evenings away instead of watching the movies I used to love so dearly. And recently I realized I want to stop doing that, so I’ve set limits on my phone and am fully prepared to sit back and watch more movies and read more books in order to feed my brain.

And that’s how I ended up purchasing a Criterion subscription. I always wanted to go back onto the Criterion Collection and their streaming platform, but I could never justify the price. Now with my job and the fact I’m running this blog on the side, I feel like I can actually sit down and afford these things.

That said, I’ve been on a Japanese film kick and Criterion has a lot of Japanese movies that have been restored with good subtitles. That’s how I ended up watching Apart From You, which is actually a silent movie from the 1930s.

Let’s get into the review! Lots to cover with this movie.

An aging geisha grapples with a new beauty at the workplace, as well as her teenage son’s disobedience.

As I wrote before, this movie was released in the 1930s and is a silent movie, so there’s quite an interesting perspective and dynamic going on in the background. This is right at the middle of Japan’s imperial conquests and desire to become a more “modern” country, and we’re at the eve of the Pacific Theater in World War II.

I mention this as someone who did my graduate work on Korea during this time and the role of women in literature. Kisaengs in Korea, which are similar to geisha in some sense, were considered to be in the lower rungs of society despite being prolific in the arts and incredibly talented.

Our main character in this movie is a geisha. Her name is Kikue, and although she actually isn’t that old, she’s being passed over in favor of much younger women that are considered more attractive in the eyes of society. A good chunk of the movie is about her struggle with her age.

Her son, Yoshio, who is a teenager and looking for trouble, is also deeply ashamed of his mother’s work. He skips school constantly, which she finds out about soon, and ends up getting into trouble with other young men and boys.

One of Kikue’s fellow geisha, Terugiku, ends up inviting Yoshio to her parents’ home. Something ends up going down between them romantically, but Yoshio witnesses something big when he’s over there. Terugiku doesn’t want her sister to work as a geisha like she did, but her father wants to send her to the geisha house anyways to make money.

Not long after, his mother tried to imply that she wants to kill herself because of the current circumstances, which ultimately pushes Yoshio back into school and throwing himself into his studies. That leads to friction between him and the guys he was hanging out with before, who come after him with a knife.

He survives that encounter with only some superficial wounds, but Terugiku, who was there as well, was slit by the knife. She has to recover from this experience, but when she does, she leaves town for a job that will make more money. Turns out she really wants to prevent her sister from becoming a geisha and living that life, which is quite admirable on her end, leaving Yoshio and Kikue behind to find their own paths.

Overall Thoughts

I had never seen a Japanese silent movie before, only American and Korean ones, so this was an interesting perspective to consider. I didn’t know much about the geisha, as my grad studies focused largely on the kisaengs in their local context (and, well, how the Japanese put out postcards on them for sex tourism), so this was really interesting to watch and learn more about that stigma.

That said, this was pretty solid for a silent movie. It’s definitely one though you have to come in with a vetted interest, as it can be a little slow and melodramatic in the early 1900s Asian sense. I could see how this was a uniquely Japanese story not only from the plot, but its framing as well.

Watch this one if you’re interested in its subject matter. I think if I ever return to academic work I’m going to keep this film at the back of my mind, as it’s an important one for the decade.

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