A Wanderer's Notebook

A Wanderer's Notebook (放浪記, Hōrōki), also titled Her Lonely Lane, is a 1962 Japanese drama film directed by Mikio Naruse starring Hideko Takamine. It is based on the autobiographical book Diary of a Vagabond by Fumiko Hayashi and its stage adaptation by Kazuo Kikuta.

Plot

Fumiko Hayashi is a young woman who cannot find a decent job and has been dumped by her boyfriend; she writes on the side. Fumiko's friends tell her that her writing about her life in poverty is excellent and impressive, but no publishing company will buy her autobiographic novel. She continues working as a bar girl and a factory worker and gets together with another aspiring writer, Fukuchi, who has also been struggling to sell his work. Despite the fact that she does all she can for him and cares for him while he suffers from tuberculosis, he abuses her verbally and eventually physically. She walks out of him, returns, and then walks out again. Yasuoka, a warm-hearted and hard-working man, helps Fumiko in every way possible and asks for her hand, but she rejects his proposal—to Fumiko, Yasuoka is more of a friend than a lover. After these struggles, the film ends with her literary success.

Cast

• Hideko Takamine as Fumiko Hayashi
• Akira Takarada as Fukuchi
• Daisuke Katō as Yasuoka
• Tatsuo Endō as Chief editor
• Kinuyo Tanaka as Kishi, Fumiko's mother

Legacy

A Wanderer's Notebook was screened at the Museum of Modern Art in 1985 and at the Harvard Film Archive in 2005 as part of their retrospectives on Mikio Naruse.