Ryunosuke Shimizu

明治十二三年頃、横浜での物語。ある露路の長屋に栗崎菊栄という裁縫の師匠がやもめ暮らしをしていた。隣には月琴の流しをしているお絹という美しい娘が母と二人暮らし。お絹は稼業に似ずしおらしい素直な娘である。彼女は貿易商阿島家の駆者をしている江口信吉という将来弁護士を志す青年と愛し合う仲であった。阿島は信吉を見込んで跡取りに迎える…。

A lowly drunken samurai finds an abandoned baby in the woods and takes it home. A gift from a fox. But there's something special about the boy.

Mizoguchi’s 30th film is the earliest surviving example of his work, and his only film of the 1920s to survive complete. Song of Home finds the director already concerning himself with the collision of traditional and modern values. The film is structured around the contrast of two country-bred boys: a coach driver who has never left his home, and a student who returns from Tokyo with city-slicker affectations and Western jazz records. Produced by the Ministry of Education, the film has a simplistic lesson-plan at its heart, but what lingers in the mind after viewing are its more ineffable qualities: The dulcet, lyric, evocation of a disappeared rural past.