Apart from You (Shochiku, 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, October 11) Turner Classic Movies followed up the American-produced but Japanese-cast 1914 film The Oath of the Sword with a 1933 film made in Japan: Apart from You, a.k.a. Kimi to Wakarete (Google Translate gives that in Japanese characters as 君 と 分かれて and offers the translation, I Parted Ways with You). The writer/director was Mikio Naruse, who made 28 silent films (of which only five survive) before Japanese cinema definitively converted to sound in 1935, well behind the rest of the world. Naruse is described thusly by imdb.com: “Considered a major figure of Japan's ‘golden age of cinema,’ Mikio Naruse was a filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer who directed 89 films in the period 1930 to 1967. Although Naruse's work is lesser known in the twenty-first century than those of his contemporaries Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Yasujirō Ozu, his films remain unique in the way they give a central place to female characters.” Kurosawa named Naguse as a major influence on him even though virtually all of Naguse’s films were set in contemporary rather than historical Japan. (Kurosawa was reportedly upset at the way audiences, especially in the West, typecast him as “the samurai director” even though about half of his films took place in the Japan of his own time.) Apart from You is the sort of film I definitely wanted to like, but except for scattered scenes, it didn’t reach me on an emotional level. The central character is Kikue (Mitsuko Yoshikawa), an aging geisha who’s worried about two things. First, she’s getting too old and unattractive for the geisha gig; second, her teenage son Yoshio (Akio Isono) has fallen in with a group of hoodlums who’ve inducted him into their gang. Yoshio also has an age-peer girlfriend, Terugiku (Sumiko Mizukubo), who got inducted into geisha-dom by her father (Reikichi Kawamura) and now wants to keep dad from selling her younger sister Mitsuko (Yōko Fujita) to a geisha house as well.

There’s quite a lot of confusion in the West over just what a geisha is and whether it involves prostitution. The geisha evolved from an earlier tradition of Japanese courtesans, essentially long-term mistresses of rich men who had sex with them and bore them children but also had important non-sexual functions in the household. The geisha page on Wikipedia explains that by the early 19th century, the height of the geisha, there were essentially three classes: the ones who just entertained and conversed with their clients, including singing, playing music, and serving them tea and sake in ritualized ways; the ones who did those things and also provided sex; and the lowest-status ones who just took money for sex and were essentially prostitutes passing themselves off as geishas. (I also learned from this source that prostitution was legal in Japan until it was outlawed in 1956, 23 years after this film was made.) Among the good aspects of Apart from You are the stunning cinematography of Suketarō Inokai; he and Naruse achieve a cold, hard look in strong black-and-white that makes the film look like Japanese etchings. There’s also a fascinating scene that shows us how Kikue is losing it as a geisha: instead of her serving him sake and playing the samisen, the traditional plucked-string instrument that the geisha used to accompany their singing, he’s serving her sake and playing the samisen while she gets drunk. Ultimately he warns her that due to business reverses (this was 1933, after all, in the middle of the worldwide depression) he won’t be able to see her as often and will have to cut back from once a week to once a month. Naturally Kikue interprets this as a kiss-off and is sure he’s found a younger, hotter geisha more willing to “put out” for him.

Earlier there’s been a scene in which Kikue and Terugiku are entertaining at a party with men who want the women to get on their backs and ride them like horses. This has a bit of “whatever turns you on” about it, at least to me, and it also makes a Western filmgoer even more confused than ever about the difference between being a geisha and being a prostitute. (I remember reading years ago a memoir by a woman who as a teenager had worked as a professional S/M dominatrix and had been told that as long as her practices didn’t involve actual sexual contact, she was in the clear legally. She could whip her clients, insult and humiliate them however they pleased, but if they started to jack themselves off while she was with them she had to warn them that legally that was “sex” and could get them both busted.) The film reaches its climax (so to speak) when Yoshio decides he wants out of his teenage gang after his mother either attempts or threatens suicide, and tells that to the other members. They respond by beating him. They threaten him with a knife, and his girlfriend Terugiku attempts to intervene and takes the blade herself. Yoshio nurses her back to health, but she leaves on a train for another city to protect her sister Misako from being sold into geisha service by their father. I might have liked Apart from You better if I hadn’t seen it the night after Charles and I watched Federico Fellini’s masterpiece Nights of Cabiria (1957), which is also about an aging sex worker anxious to get out of “the life.” There are obvious differences, including that Cabiria is an out-front prostitute and she isn’t raising a son as a single parent, but for much of this movie I kept wishing that Kikue would have shown some of Cabiria’s infectious spunk and charm instead of just moping around and accepting her victimhood. (At the same time I couldn’t help but wish Cabiria had shown some of Kikue’s awareness of the true asshole nature of men instead of the naïveté that allowed Cabiria to let herself be ripped off by male so-called “lovers” at both ends of her film.) Apart from You lasts only an hour (surprisingly short for a 1933 feature; even the cheapest U.S. indies and “B”’s ran about 70 minutes), but even at that short a length I found it disappointing and almost insufferably boring, aside from a few clever and genuinely moving scenes.