The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice
Ochazuke no aji
Yasujiro Ozu (1952)
Tokyo housewife Taeko Satake (Michiyo Kogure) calls on her friend Aya (Chikage Awashima), who runs a shop in the city centre. Aya proposes they take a short break at Shuzenji, an out-of-town health spa. Taeko is keen to go but needs a pretext for absence from home to give her husband, Mokichi. At Aya’s suggestion, she tells him her niece Setsuko has been taken ill with stomach pains while staying at the spa. No sooner has Mokichi (Shin Saburi) agreed to the trip than Setsuko (Keiko Tsushima) turns up at the Satakes’ home, a picture of health. Taeko then substitutes a different invalid, her friend Takako, and heads for Shuzenji – along with Aya, Setsuko and Takako (Yoko Osakura). As the sake flows, Taeko jokes to the others that Mokichi – ‘Mr Bonehead’ – didn’t get wise to her deception. When she takes a call from him at the spa, she’s keen to end the conversation as quickly as possible. Having put the phone down, she instantly picks it up again to order more sake, only to find that the previous call hasn’t disconnected and Mokichi is still on the line.
These opening scenes of The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice are puzzling or dismaying, depending on what you take from them. Yasujiro Ozu cuts straight from Taeko deciding on the substitute appendicitis victim to the train carrying her and the others to the spa: we don’t, in other words, witness Mokichi’s swallowing his wife’s second lie. Swallow is and isn’t the operative word here. The morning after the sake party, the women throw food to koi in a pool by their room. Amused by a fish slower on the uptake than the others, Taeko derisively compares it to Mr Bonehead though the dimwit carp doesn’t even get to ingest. Ozu and his co-writer Kogo Noda strongly imply that Taeko’s husband believes the Takako story but that’s hard for the viewer to swallow when Mokichi has only just been fed the Setsuko fib. More credible is that the mild-mannered husband realises his wife’s lying but doesn’t let on. In which case, is it also possible that Taeko knows he knows – that her derision is a response not to her husband’s gullibility but to his apathy or cravenness?
The Satakes are from different backgrounds. Taeko, a Tokyo native, is more sophisticated than her husband, who comes from Nagano and a humbler background. He’s progressed to a management job in an engineering firm but his wife finds him boring. Shin Saburi, the standout in a strong cast, is the perfect embodiment of reliable solidity and its shadow side of implacable dullness. (The several shots of Mokichi poring over his work are especially expressive.) The couple came together through arranged marriage: Ozu uses Setsuko’s determined opposition to the arranged marriage she‘s now under family pressure to enter into both to highlight generational difference and to expose the extent of Taeko’s regret and disaffection.
Setsuko’s intended is glimpsed only briefly, seated beside Taeko at a kabuki performance from which Setsuko absents herself. This prim, drippy suitor is a comedy character in a film that’s often (and often more subtly) amusing but the principals’ feelings and exchanges are no laughing matter. Setsuko’s resistance to a ‘feudalistic’ system that prevents a woman’s choosing the man she’s to spend her life with, is stiffened by the impact of hearing Taeko make fun of her husband in the presence of others. When Taeko insists that Mokichi reprimand Setsuko for skiving off the kabuki date, he does so reluctantly and half-heartedly. Any schadenfreude Taeko might have got from seeing her niece on the receiving end of conventional expectations around arranged marriage quickly evaporates. Urged by his wife to scold Setsuko more vigorously, Mochiki replies – in the niece’s presence – that it’s pointless to push her into a union she doesn’t want. He says this would ‘only create another couple like us’. His habitual placidity makes Mochiki’s remark all the more devastating.
In order for Setsuko to serve as a means of reinforcing the divide between her stern aunt and stolid uncle, it’s clearly necessary for them to take the lead in laying down the law to the young woman (who’s in her early twenties). This is slightly awkward since both Setsuko’s parents are around, albeit her mother is a minor character and her father, Taeko’s brother, is never seen. (Taeko claims Setsuko is wilful because her parents spoil her although there’s not much evidence of that.) For the most part, though, the narrative is cleverly constructed. During the first hour, Taeko and Mokichi share the screen in only one scene yet we always sense, through their moods and words in other sequences, that these are the main characters, and that their unhappy, childless marriage is the film’s chief concern. At the same time, the scenes they don’t share develop the supporting characters and help to build another of Ozu’s illuminating portraits of Japanese domestic and social life in the early post-war years.
Green Tea over Rice was released in Japan just a few months after the end of the American occupation, whose influence is regularly in evidence. The commercial aircraft in the film carry the Pan American Airways logo. Mokichi’s younger acquaintance Noboru Okada (Koji Tsuruta), known as Non-chan, when he applies for entry to Mokichi’s company, takes an exam in which it’s ‘no surprise’ that the ‘Dulles theory of public finance’ is a main component. In the Satakes’ kitchen, there’s a drum of Wesson’s cooking oil. Setsuko’s determined modernity includes a different occidental outlook. In the opening scene, she and Taeko are in a taxi heading into town, where Setsuko will see a film starring Jean Marais. Her mother (Kuniko Miyake) expresses concern that her daughter is reading books in translation.
Setsuko is also the only female playing in the pachinko parlour where she insists on accompanying Mochiki and Non-chan when she should have been watching kabuki with her suitor. Gambling and sports are a leitmotif, so too various kinds of song. While pachinko, a baseball game and cycle races appear as enjoyable diversions, Ozu shows them as distractions in more ways than one. As illustrations of escapist needs, marital snags, or a combination of the two, they strike harsh or melancholy notes. This is clearly announced in the name of the pachinko parlour – ‘The Bittersweet School of Life’ (which might serve as an alternative title to the film – a good job Ozu went for a less explicit one). From their seats in the baseball stadium, Taeko, Aya and Takako spot Aya’s husband (Hisao Toake) sitting down nearby with a much younger female companion (Matsuko Shige), whom Aya has never seen before. An announcement over the public address system then asks Taeko to return home immediately. The request has been placed by Setsuko, who has learned about her parents’ intentions for an arranged marriage, urgently needs Taeko to bend an ear and is startled by her lack of sympathy.
People bet on the outcome of the cycle races, just as they hope to win money at pachinko. Non-chan introduces Mikichi to both and they make two visits to the pachinko parlour. The older man’s second visit is thoroughly uncomfortable, thanks to his anxiety about Setsuko’s presence there. The first visit is jollier: Michiki, who fought in World War II, is surprised to discover that the man who runs the place is Sadao Hirayama (Chishu Ryu), a member of the army unit Michiki headed. The delighted Sadao insists that Michiki and Non-chan have a drink with him but he’s less cheerful about his present line of work. When Michiki says he must be doing well financially, Sadao voices doubts that the current pachinko craze will last. For all his genuine, genial pleasure at seeing his old squad leader again, he sees his peacetime circumstances as sadly reduced. (Chishu Ryu, in this relatively small part, brings the character vividly to life.)
Nostalgic for their army days, Sadao sings a song that commemorates corps d’esprit while acknowledging the pain of losing a fellow soldier in action. Taeko and her companions, on their visit to the Shuzenji spa, sing a more broadly nostalgic love song (‘When the violets were blooming’) together but the legacy of war, in combination with the passage of time, also percolates the first conversation between Michiki and Non-chan in a Tokyo bar: Michiki recalls his high-school friendship with Non-chan’s elder brother, who was killed in action. Here too, there’s singing although the song choice isn’t so easy to understand. Non-chan launches into ‘La donna è mobile’ from Rigoletto – or, at least, into the Verdi tune: he sings in Japanese and the lyrics aren’t subtitled.
The drama is consistently gripping but the early deceit(s) shaped my reactions to much of what followed. If you don’t believe Mokichi believes the Takako lie, you’re liable to see the Satakes’ marriage, from an early stage, as steeped in cynical dissimulation. That means things can get hardly worse – although they do in terms of conspicuous fractures in the relationship. After falling out over Setsuko’s behaviour, Taeko – according to what she tells Aya – refuses to speak to Mokichi for days on end. She breaks her silence to deplore his table manners, as he pours soup over rice before ‘wolfing it down’. She asks if he’s in the habit of doing this in her absence – a question she directs to the couple’s diligent, likeable housemaid Fumi (Yoko Kosono), who’s deeply embarrassed to witness her master’s dressing-down. Later, in private, Mokichi tells Taeko he won’t eat this way again but also reminds her that it’s how he was brought up, and that he likes things ‘cosy and down-to-earth’, with ‘no ceremony or affectation’. He mentions other preferences that he knows his wife detests: third-class rail travel, which Mochiki finds more relaxing; a brand of cigarettes that aren’t only cheaper but taste better. Taeko says she’s heard enough and leaves the room. The following morning, shortly after Mokichi has left for work, she takes herself off to Kobe for a few days, leaving her husband a note that she needs to ‘clear my head’.
Taeko’s attitude towards her marital problems also causes a rift between her and Aya. At the start of the film, it’s Aya who first complains about husbands, though she does so good-humouredly, even before she proposes that Taeko invent a reason to go to Shuzenji. At the spa, Taeko mocks her dull husband; at the baseball match, Aya is made a fool of in public, albeit unwittingly, by her philandering husband. Aya loses patience when Taeko complains that Mokichi deceived her by concealing that Setsuko had gone to him after abandoning her kabuki date. Aya reminds Taeko that she’s been selfish and used to getting her own way since they were schoolgirls together; she tells her friend she should be grateful to be married to someone as dependable as Mokichi. In the same conversation, Aya voices what may be the most disillusioned point of view expressed at any point of the film. She tells Taeko it’s a sign of a healthy marriage that she and Mokichi still take the trouble to lie to each other. When a relationship has really broken down, says Aya, the people in it don’t bother to do that.
On the same morning that Taeko departs for Kobe, where she’ll stay with a friend, Mokichi’s boss asks him to go on a business trip to Uruguay the next day. As soon as he gets back from the office, Mokichi sends a telegram to his wife, asking her to return home urgently. He receives no reply and flies to Montevideo the following morning. Mokichi is seen off at the airport by a crowd of people, including nearly every significant character in the film. Taeko is highly conspicuous by her absence. Aya and Takako, who are present, take a very dim view of it. As the plane takes off, Sadao says, ‘That’s my squad leader gone now’, as if he’ll never see Mokichi again. This departure scene baffled me: I could only suppose the mass turnout at the airport was a joke a Japanese viewer would understand.
Later that day, Taeko comes home and finds out about her husband’s foreign trip. Aya and Setsuko are waiting there to tell her off for ignoring Mokichi’s telegram and one that Setsuko sent subsequently. Taeko spends the rest of the day alone in her room, deep in thought. A technical problem forces Mokichi’s plane to head back to Tokyo; his flight is rescheduled for the following morning and he returns home late in the evening. With Fumi and their other maid having gone to bed, the Satakes, most unusually, prepare food themselves. No less unusually, Taeko’s manner towards her husband is now gentle and friendly – once or twice, she even touches him affectionately, as he does her. Mokichi is hungry but wants just rice and green tea. As he and Taeko enjoy their food, he reiterates the simple tastes that, in their previous scene together, so infuriated his wife. She now accepts them, and apologises for the way she’s been behaving. A smiling Mokichi compares marriage to the pleasures of the well-matched ingredients of the meal they’re eating.
On the surface, all seems to end well. Taeko reconciles with Aya, Takako and Setsuko – who now seems free to choose her life partner. (Ozu’s lack of explanation of how this cultural shift has been achieved calls to mind lines in Philip Larkin’s ‘Annus mirabilis’ – ‘Then all at once the quarrel sank:/Everyone felt the same’.) It’s been clear for some time that Setsuko and the cheerful, self-confident Non-chan enjoy each other’s company. The closing scene of The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice shows them going out together – and squabbling, as if to confirm they’re becoming an authentic couple. In early scenes, each of Setsuko and Non-chan is told, by Aya and Mokichi respectively, that they’re at the best age, in the springtime of their lives. The last sequence works as a witty, light-hearted affirmation of this but its lack of weight also amounts to an ironic postscript to what’s gone before.
The film’s penultimate scene is as open to interpretation as its beginning. It consists largely of Taeko’s account to Aya of the revival of her marriage. Taeko’s falsehoods get the story underway: how truthful is she in what she finally tells Aya? We know that she and Mokichi reconciled over the green tea and rice supper. We have to decide whether to believe Taeko’s claim that Mokichi described that night as the happiest of his life. Without acknowledging it’s something Aya has already told her, Taeko informs her friend that what counts most in a marriage is having a reliable husband. It’s hard to credit that this bitterly disappointed, often dislikeable woman has had an epiphany that will sustain her in the longer term. Mokichi is now in Montevideo (it’s not clear for how long): is their new honeymoon period helped by his absence making Taeko’s heart grow fonder? Is she genuinely contrite, as she told Mokichi she was, or has she decided to make the best of a bad job? (Not that those two things are mutually exclusive …) She also tells Aya that Mokichi says he knew, when Taeko went to the spa, she was making up the sick friend story. He’s advised her to lie more convincingly in future.
The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice, which comes immediately before Tokyo Story in Ozu’s filmography, is not among his best-known works but I found it more complex and compelling than any other film of his that I’ve so far seen. (That includes Tokyo Story, though I’m keen now to give that supposed masterpiece another go now.) As I was writing this note, I kept going back to individual sequences to check things. After a while, I decided to watch the whole film again before trying to write more. Ozu must have one of the most distinctive visual styles in cinema history. This film, photographed in black and white by Yuuharu Atsuta, has an abundance of the director’s trademark static shots of unpeopled rooms to end scenes; but there are also powerful kinetic images, most remarkably when Taeko is making her supposed escape to Kobe but her train is moving through a landscape that seems like an unending metal cage. The Japanese characters in the opening credits (which, as usual in Ozu, appear against a burlap-like background) are, to these western eyes anyway, remarkably orderly; they might seem to herald a drama whose themes will be similarly cut and dried. Any such impression foreshadows, rather, the importance of deceptiveness in what’s to come in this richly ambiguous film.
21 July 2020