The Neighbor's Wife and Mine

The comedic story depicts a playwright attempting to write a play by a strict deadline and getting distracted by his family and a noisy next-door jazz band.

The film opens with Shibano, a playwright for a Tokyo theater, squabbling with a painter over his work depicting a local house, newly up for rent. The two stumble into the street only to be interrupted when Shibano accidentally falls into the women's section of a nearby bathhouse. The woman who appears to scold them ends up dissolving the situation, and Shibano finally states his desire to move into the house pictured previously.

Soon, Shibano and his family have moved in, but he is late on his deadline for a new script and the family is running low on money. His first attempts do not go well, with distractions from his children and his wife, as well as his own procrastination. The neighbors are also distracting, as they host the rehearsals of a jazz band. When Shibano goes next door to ask them to quiet down, he is invited by the wife of the household to stay and watch the rehearsal. She turns out to be the same woman who previously intervened in Shibano's fight in Tokyo. As the group practices and treats Shibano to drink, he listens to the song lyrics and becomes infected with the new jazz fever of the period. The song about the "Age of Speed" inspires him to go home and finish his script. The movie ends with a more modernized family reflecting on their differences from the local farmers.

• Atsushi Watanabe as Shibano Shinnsaku, the playwright
• Kinuyo Tanaka as Shibano's wife
• Satoko Date as Yamakawa Takiko, the neighbor's wife
• Mitsuko Ichimura as the playwright's daughter
• Shinichi Himori
• Yukiko Inoue
• Tokuji Kobayashi
• Takeshi Sakamoto

The Neighbor's Wife and Mine won the 1932 Kinema Junpo Award for Best Film.[4]

• The Neighbor's Wife and Mine at the Japanese Movie Database (in Japanese)
• The Neighbor's Wife and Mine at IMDb