Heinosuke Gosho

was a Japanese film director and screenwriter who directed Japan's first successful sound film, The Neighbor's Wife and Mine, in 1931. His films are mostly associated with the shōshimin-eiga (lit. "common people drama") genre. Among his most noted works are Where Chimneys Are Seen, An Inn at Osaka, Takekurabe and Yellow Crow. Life Gosho was born on January 24, 1902, in Kanda, Tokyo, to merchant Heisuke Gosho and his father's geisha mistress. At the age of five, after Heisuke's eldest son died, Gosho left his mother to be the successor to his father's wholesale business. He studied business at Keio University, graduating in 1923. Through his father's close relation to film director Yasujirō Shimazu, Gosho was able to join the Shochiku film studios and worked as assistant director to Shimazu. In 1925, Gosho debuted as a director with the film Nantō no haru. His films of the 1920s are nowadays regarded as lost. Gosho's first notable success, and Japan's first feature length sound film, was the 1931 comedy The Neighbor's Wife and Mine about a writer distracted by a noisy next-door jazz band. Naming Ernst Lubitsch's The Marriage Circle and Charles Chaplin's A Woman of Paris as the greatest foreign influences, Gosho's work oscillated between comedy and drama, sometimes mixing the two, which earned his films the reputation of making the viewer "laugh and cry at the same time". Other Gosho trademarks were his fast editing style and his repeated relying on literary sources, such as the works of Yūzō Yamamoto and Ichiyō Higuchi. Together with Shirō Toyoda, Gosho was one of the first directors to adapt the works of the junbungaku ("pure literature") movement for the screen, which opposed "popular" literature in favour of "serious" literature and a more complex handling of its subjects. A prominent example is The Dancing Girl of Izu (1933), a successful adaptation of Yasunari Kawabata's story of the same name, about the unfulfilled love between a student and a young country woman. Of his 36 1930s films, only slightly more than a half-dozen are extant.