Tokyo Story

May I start by not comparing this film to a Japanese Haiku, the art of sushi, the stillness of cherry blossom… Yes, Yasujiro Ozu’s masterpiece IS Japan. It is everything that is graceful and measured, visually delicious, reserved yet with a torrent of energy running beneath the surface… But it is also more- for we have in Tokyo Story a film that transcends the cultural references so often commented upon in Ozu’s technique. Produced in 1953, this film is still considered to be one of cinema’s all-time greats. It meditates upon those questions of time and self that haunt and puzzle us to this day.

What comes through- often as a whisper- in every scene is Ozu himself. He becomes more than a director but also a teacher, a guru, a friend, guiding us through reflections and tableaux of ourselves, never judging. I can only echo Roger Ebert who says of the film: ‘It ennobles the cinema. It says, yes, a movie can help us make small steps against our imperfections’.

On the surface, it is the simplest story ever told: an elderly couple makes their first visit to Tokyo, to see their grown-up children. The children are busy with their adult, modern lives and the two elderly people upset this routine, forcing the important questions of family relationships, love and how you live life. Ozu shows us, at the same time, the bonds that hold the family together but also the necessary paths the children have carved out for themselves. The youngest daughter Kyoko (Kyoko Kawaga) still lives at home with her parents. Throughout the film she is the one still innocently holding on to the ‘ideal’ of the family. Kyoko is one of the many unmarried children in Ozu’s films who live with their parents, just as Ozu never married and lived with his mother until she died. (A complete aside but I love that he named his character after the young actress. Again you feel the largesse and benevolence of this director who raises the very smallest detail up to a higher level, giving everyone and everything their equal space in the scheme of his world, even offscreen).

Then there is the youngest son Keizo (Shiro Osaka) who works in Osaka, midway to Tokyo (as the children get older they move physically and emotionally further away). And finally, Tokyo, where the eldest son Koichi (So Yamamura) is a doctor in a suburban clinic – not right in the thick of things as his parents had imagined. He is married to Fumiko (Kuniko Miyake), and they have two sons. The elder daughter Shige (Haruko Sugimura) is also married and runs a beauty salon. The last character in the family drama is Noriko (Japan’s great star Setsuko Hara), who is not a blood relation but their daughter by marriage. Her husband was killed years ago in World War II but she has never remarried and lives alone in Tokyo.

The film observes a few days in the lives of these characters: the parents’ visit and the necessary arrangements the younger generations must make to accommodate them offering a snapshot into the realities of all their existences and the wider tribulations of human existence itself. In scenes of often heartbreaking simplicity, Ozu shows us that fine line between selfishness and compassion, the frenetic rush of modern existence alongside the ability to take time and appreciate the lives of those closest to you.

The incredible art of Ozu’s films lies in the way in which he weaves this meditative quality into the camerawork and structure of the film itself. His visual strategy does precisely what many of his characters seem incapable of- patiently observing the moment and allowing the camera to dwell for longer on each shot, each subtle movement. The camera almost never moves. The movement comes from the people within it, who are given ample space for the viewer to take in the full weight of their existence. Often he will show the empty space of a room before a character enters and will linger for a while after they have gone. The effect is one of supra-reality. Not only are we made to feel the full reality of his characters but also the energy that they impart to the spaces around them. There are no fast cutaways or overlapping dialogues – each element- including the silence in-between- is given complete and utter attention. He allows the beauty and mystery of the world to reveal itself at its’ own pace.

One very characteristic element of Ozu’s technique is the ‘pillow shot’: like the pillow words in Japanese poetry, these separate scenes with evocative images, such as the smoke rising from a train, a boat slowly passing in the distance, a quiet street or grassy hill. They represent, for me, the images we forever carry with us in our minds- that have remained so ingrained by the power of the emotion they come to represent (the distant hill in Ancora, the arranha-ceus, Albertina’s sewing machine – these are all images of a very personal emotional typology but they have the same effect of slowing you down to appreciate the life behind them).

They also make you realize the transience of this life, which is ultimately the theme this film comes to rest on. Everyone is finally brought together again when Nori tragically dies. The journey is this time for the children, leaving Tokyo and ‘themselves’ to gather in mourning and appreciate another’s life. The regret to not have done more, not have spent more time with her, been kinder to her is felt by all the family. Shukishi’s final contained outpouring of grief had me in incontrollable tears: “Oh, she was a headstrong woman … but if I knew things would come to this, I’d have been kinder to her…Living alone like this, the days will get very long.“

Ozu never once judges however. Even the most selfless of his characters, Noriko, refuses to be viewed as such or to pass judgement on the others, explaining that: ‘Everyone has to look after their own life first’. It is the bitter-sweet truth of existence – whilst life must go on, lives of others slip away, often without us being able to be as present to them as we could wish.

Ozu’s films offer an answer to this- rooted in the very substance of all the presents he takes in. We are able, for two hours, to look inwards for the people that make us.

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