A Woman of Paris
After graduating from Keio University, Tōkyō, Gosho joined the Shochiku film studios and worked as assistant director to Yasujirō Shimazu before debuting as director in 1925. 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.