A Film Canon

A much more understated engagement with Japan's 1956 Anti-Prostitution Bill than Street Of Shame, Flowing takes place in a geisha brokering-house, rather than a brothel. By replacing the act of consummation with anticipation and preparation, Naruse creates a stronger identification of geisha and prostitute, part of a more pervasive nostalgia for traditional Japanese aesthetics ("Our costumes, our hairstyles, our artistry...all these special things about a geisha are disappearing.") At the same time, the focus on brokerage brings business into the foreground, such that the ultimate collision is between geisha and commerce, rather than prostitute and commerce, as occurs in Mizoguchi's version. The virtual absence of men also allows the dynamics between the geishas - who are a much more symbiotic, integrated group than in Street Of Shame - to become a cipher for post-war anxieties about the demise of the traditional family. Virtually every exchange turns on a thwarted parental, filial or romantic impulse - or, alternatively, clarifies geishas as figures who have to be mother, sister and lover to their clients, preventing them fulfilling those roles satisfactorily in their personal lives - culminating with the stark opposition between the serene, Ozu-like maid (a conspicuously peripheral character, somehow exempt from the rules of the house), and the dismal prospects facing one of the youngest characters: "It feels like I'm only a half-geisha. I don't know what I am... and marriage is just a dream."