, also titled ''Love Betrayed'', is a 1973 Japanese

drama film In film and television, drama is a category or genre of narrative fiction (or semi-fiction) intended to be more serious than humorous in tone. Drama of this kind is usually qualified with additional terms that specify its particular super-g ...

written and directed by

Kaneto Shindō was a Japanese film director, screenwriter, film producer, and writer, who directed 48 films and wrote scripts for 238. His best known films as a director include ''Children of Hiroshima'', ''The Naked Island'', '' Onibaba'', ''Kuroneko'' and ' ...

. It is based on the 1914 novel ''

Kokoro is a novel by the Japanese author Natsume Sōseki. It was first published in 1914 in serial form in the Japanese newspaper ''Asahi Shimbun''. The title translated literally means "heart". The word contains shades of meaning—notions of the he ...

'' by

Natsume Sōseki , born , was a Japanese novelist. He is best known around the world for his novels ''Kokoro'', '' Botchan'', ''I Am a Cat'', '' Kusamakura'' and his unfinished work '' Light and Darkness''. He was also a scholar of British literature and writer ...

Cast

* Noboru Matsuhashi as K * Kazunaga Tsuji as S * Nobuko Otowa as Mrs. M. * Anri as I-ko *

Taiji Tonoyama was a Japanese character actor who made many appearances in films and on television from 1939 to 1989. He was a close friend of Kaneto Shindo and one of his regular cast members. He was also an essayist. In 1950 he helped form the film company Ki ...

as Father of S * Yasuo Arakawa as Boy * Sotomi Kotake as Girl

Literary source

Sōseki's novel has been adapted for film and television numerous times, the first time for cinema by

Kon Ichikawa was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. His work displays a vast range in genre and style, from the anti-war films '' The Burmese Harp'' (1956) and '' Fires on the Plain'' (1959), to the documentary ''Tokyo Olympiad'' (1965), which won t ...

in 1955 as '' The Heart''. For his version, writer/director Shindō moved the story's

Meiji era The is an era of Japanese history that extended from October 23, 1868 to July 30, 1912. The Meiji era was the first half of the Empire of Japan, when the Japanese people moved from being an isolated feudal society at risk of colonization b ...

setting to the 1970s and put his focus only on the novel's third and final part, "Sensei to isho" ("Sensei's testament").

Reception

While

Louis Frédéric Louis-Frédéric Nussbaum, also known as Louis Frédéric or Louis-Frédéric (1923–1996), was a French scholar, art historian, writer and editor. He was a specialist in the cultures of Asia, especially India and Japan. Early life Louis-Fré ...

ranked ''The Heart'' among Shindō's important films, Max Tessier criticised Shindō's "leaden directing" and "heavy-handed psychology".

References

External links

* 1973 films 1973 drama films Japanese drama films Films directed by Kaneto Shindo Films based on Japanese novels 1970s Japanese films {{Japan-film-stub