The Stranger

A mournful but always restrained film about Japanese life during wartime, Kabei begins at that odd transitional moment in Japanese history where the academics were deeply immersed in reading Nietzsche and Rousseau but still wearing yukata robes and wooden geta sandals. But all the men wore fashionably round spectacles, rode bicycles around town, and tried very hard not to cry when things went badly. And things in Kabei go badly: The titular mother's husband, a professor, is arrested for "thought crimes" against the state and rots in prison. One of his students, Yamazaki, shows up to help take care of Kabei and her girls. Sayuri Yoshinaga plays the wife, Kayo, as a long-suffering everything. She works for money, raises her daughters, begs the authorities, visits her husband (when they'll let her) with Rushmore-like stoicism. Kabei is a paean to Japan's version of the Greatest Generation, to a woman who did her duty to family and country—though, in her case, her duty to country was to quietly fight against its worst impulses. By Brendan Kiley

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