General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

A Hen in the Wind (風の中の牝雞)

A Hen in the Wind (風の中の牝雞, Kaze no naka no mendori) is a 1948 Japanese black-and-white drama directed by Yasujiro Ozu, produced by Shochiku at its Ofuna studio, and released in Japan on September 17, 1948¹. It was Ozu's second film after his return from military service, following Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947)¹. The film follows Tokiko, a mother who sells herself once to pay her sick son's hospital bills, and her husband Shuichi, a repatriated soldier who learns of it on his return from war². It is the most melodramatic and socially direct film in Ozu's postwar career, and the director himself came to regard it as a failure³^•⁴.

Key fact	Detail
Release	September 17, 1948, distributed by Shochiku¹
Director and script	Directed by Yasujiro Ozu; screenplay by Ozu and Ryosuke Saito⁵
Running time and format	83 minutes (some prints listed at 84), monochrome, standard 1.37:1, 35mm sound film¹^•⁵
Principal cast	Kinuyo Tanaka as Tokiko, Shuji Sano as Shuichi Amamiya, Chieko Murata as Akiko Ida, with Chishu Ryu and Takeshi Sakamoto¹
Contemporary standing	7th place in Kinema Junpo's 1948 top ten Japanese films; Mainichi Film Concours awards for actress performance and art direction⁶^•⁷
Later recognition	A Hen in the Wind did not rank 15th in the British Film Institute's 2012 critics' poll of the greatest films ever made; that position belonged to Late Spring⁸^•¹⁶
Restoration	Restored by Shochiku; world premiere of the restoration in the Venice Classics section of the 2022 Venice International Film Festival⁹

Spoilers

Plot

Tokiko (Kinuyo Tanaka) lives in rented rooms with her small son Hiroshi, waiting for her husband Shuichi (Shuji Sano), who has not yet been demobilized. She pawns kimono, one or two at a time, through her neighbor Orie (Chieko Murata)². When Hiroshi suddenly develops a fever, he is diagnosed with acute catarrhal enteritis and saved by injections, but Tokiko is left with hospital bills she cannot pay². After hesitating, she spends one night with a stranger at a house in Tsukishima².

Hiroshi recovers and leaves the hospital, but her friend Akiko learns what Tokiko has done and reproaches her for not asking for help². Soon afterward Shuichi returns home. He asks how the hospital bills were paid, and pressed by his suspicion, Tokiko confesses everything². The film then follows the couple's conflict: Shuichi cannot contain his anger and jealousy, and in one scene he throws Tokiko down a staircase, injuring her, before finally deciding to forgive her⁴^•¹⁰. The reconciliation is reached quietly, by the bank of a river¹¹.

Production and context

Ozu returned to Japan in 1946 from a prisoner-of-war camp in Singapore and resumed work at the Shochiku Ofuna studio, beginning his postwar career with Record of a Tenement Gentleman in 1947³. A Hen in the Wind followed in 1948 and depicts the harsh reality of defeated Japan: a family in poverty in burned-out Tokyo, with postwar inflation making ordinary life precarious³^•⁸.

The BFI program notes for a 2022 retrospective record that the script was derived from a story by the novelist Shiga Naoya¹². A different project, The Moon Has Risen, had been planned as Ozu's second postwar film with its screenplay completed in 1947, but production problems, including the inability to film its story in war-ravaged Tokyo, led to it being scrapped in favor of A Hen in the Wind, a more immediate comment on the conditions of Japan's reconstruction¹³.

The film is grouped by Shochiku's own database with a series of "war and chastity" pictures such as Yukigusa and Love Letter, yet its direction remains characteristically meticulous². It was made while the American occupation authorities were attempting to change Japanese attitudes toward the role of women, a context in which MoMA's program note places it alongside Kenji Mizoguchi's Women of the Night (1948)¹¹.

Style

The film departs from the style Ozu is known for. The scene in which Tokiko falls down the stairs during a quarrel with her husband uses overhead shots, a marked anomaly in a body of work defined by low camera positions¹. Domestic violence, a hospital stay, and raw emotional confrontation appear on screen, elements rarely seen in Ozu's films⁸. The BFI notes also observe a new crispness of photographic definition compared with Ozu's previous talkies, allowing finer nuances of gesture and framing in the confrontation scene¹².

Reception and Ozu's verdict

Contemporary reception was mixed. Kinema Junpo placed the film 7th in its 1948 top ten, and Tanaka received the Mainichi Film Concours actress performance award, but the film was not a commercial or critical success by the standards of Ozu's other work⁶^•¹⁴. Near the end of his life Ozu wrote of it: "Well, everyone has his failures. There are all kinds of failures, however, and some of my failures I like. This film is a bad failure."⁴

The failure had consequences for his method. The screenwriter Kogo Noda delivered a harsh opinion of the film, and Ozu accepted it; from then on he wrote every scenario jointly with Noda, beginning with Late Spring in 1949³. In this sense the film marks the turning point at which Ozu abandoned treating war frontally and moved into the serene late style of Late Spring, Tokyo Story, and An Autumn Afternoon³^•¹⁰.

Later criticism has been more generous. The Japanese critic Tadao Sato argued that the film asks what Japan lost in losing the war, and answered that Tokiko's prostitution symbolizes a loss of the national purity central to wartime definitions of the Japanese spirit, while Shuichi's violence embodies the brutality of the war years¹². The filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa has called it Ozu's most problematic work, made immediately before Late Spring, one that pushes the question of how ordinary people overcome the war to its limit¹⁰. In the British Film Institute's 2012 critics' poll of the greatest films of all time, Late Spring ranked 15th, one of two Ozu films on the list alongside Tokyo Story in 3rd place⁸^•¹⁶.

Restoration and revival

Shochiku restored the film digitally, and the restoration had its world premiere in the Venice Classics section of the 2022 Venice International Film Festival⁹^•⁷. A 4K restoration has since circulated at festivals and repertory screenings, including a Japan premiere at the 36th Tokyo International Film Festival⁷. Before this revival the film had been little circulated and rarely shown, particularly in the English-speaking world¹²^•¹⁵.

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1940s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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