When a Woman Ascends the Stairs

Keiko Yashiro is a widow in her early thirties who works as a hostess in a bar in Tokyo's Ginza district, where colleagues fondly call her Mama. She supports her mother and her brother, and though men court her regularly, she refuses to become involved with wealthy patrons. Aware that her youth is slipping away, she faces a difficult choice: marry and depend on a husband, or borrow money and open a bar of her own. Both paths ask her to give up either her independence or her principles.

Mikio Naruse directed this 1960 drama, which followed Ginza Cosmetics (1951) and Brother and Sister (1953) in his filmography. Ryūzō Kikushima wrote and produced it, and Hideko Takamine plays Keiko, with Masayuki Mori, Reiko Dan, Tatsuya Nakadai, Daisuke Katō and Ganjirō Nakamura II among the cast.

On IMDb the film holds 8 out of 10 from around 5,300 votes, and on TMDB it also stands at 8 out of 10, from a much smaller base of 131 votes. A critics' rating of 8.4 out of 10 from 16 reviews places it close to those audience scores, indicating broad agreement on its quality.