Early Summer
Bakushū
Yasujiro Ozu (1951)
The opening shot of Early Summer shows a dog on an otherwise deserted beach, running about as it pleases. The next shots are of a bird in a cage, a screen image almost guaranteed to symbolise the constrained circumstances of a human character. (That ‘almost’ is a nod to Joey, Hattie Jacques’s budgie in Carry On at Your Convenience (1971).) Yasujiro Ozu’s canary, no exception to this movie convention, is part of an aviary belonging to Shukichi (Ichiro Sugai), a senior member of the Mamiya family, the household at the centre of Ozu’s story. The household also includes Shukichi’s wife Shige (Chieko Higashiyama); their hospital doctor son Koichi (Chishu Ryu), his wife Fumiko (Kuniko Miyake) and their two boys, Minoru (Zen Murase) and Isamu (Isamu Shirosawa); and Koichi’s sister, Noriko (Setsuko Hara). She is the caged bird. Her family – or, at least, the social norms and expectations which they recognise and insist upon – are the cage.
Noriko is twenty-eight years old. This is mentioned repeatedly – part of a mantra that also states it’s high time she married. An elderly uncle (Kokuten Kodo), on a visit to the family, asks to be reminded of Noriko’s age: the old man, who is going deaf, can hardly believe his ears at the answer. Noriko takes this and subsequent, ostensibly light-hearted, queries about her spinsterhood in smiley good part yet you sense her underlying discomfort with the subject: she knows her relatives’ light-heartedness is a front, too. Although she has a good secretarial job, there’s something of the overgrown schoolgirl about Noriko. Both qualities – the discomfort and the girlishness – register differently in the interesting scene where she and a trio of girlfriends, who were all classmates at school, go to a restaurant after attending the wedding of another school contemporary. Two of the other three are married; Aya (Chikage Awashima), who is Noriko’s closest friend, is not. The joshing about marital status across the restaurant table – the single women seated opposite the married ones – is decidedly two-way.
Early Summer explores what are core themes in Ozu’s cinema (at any rate in his later sound films: I’ve not seen any of his more numerous silent pictures) but getting Noriko married off becomes so dominant in the narrative that, by around halfway through, the action seems to be verging on the farcical. Then Noriko herself makes the decision to marry – not the supposedly suitable (unseen) suitor proposed by her blithely chauvinist office boss (Shuji Sano) and favoured by her parents and brother but Kenkichi (Hiroshi Nihonyonagi), a widowed father who is Koichi’s junior colleague at the hospital. What’s most remarkable about Early Summer is that, once Noriko has made her crucial commitment, the story evolves into something nearly tragic. Her decision causes much tension and upset between her and her nearest and dearest. Koichi, in particular, deplores his younger sister’s haste and choice of husband: she could have done better for herself – and for her family’s reputation. Even Kenkichi, albeit rather a glum fellow, doesn’t look or sound thrilled by the prospect of his second marriage. The film’s shift of tone and increasing emotional depth culminate in a sequence in which Noriko breaks down, sobbing in private but profusely.
Noriko agrees to marry Kenkichi in response not to a proposal from him but to an impulsive plea from his mother, Tami (Haruko Sugimura). Her son is being posted for several years – it seems on Koichi’s recommendation – to a place called Akita, in northerly Honshu. Akita is described by one character as ‘the back of beyond’ – so in-the-sticks that, in an unusually humorous exchange between them, Aya imitates the natives’ rural accent and Noriko, giggling, joins in. Her decision to move there is no laughing matter, though. Asked by Tami if she could see her way to being Kenkichi’s wife, setting up home in Akita with him, his daughter and with Tami herself, Noriko simply says yes. At first, you wonder if this is an extraordinary instance of Noriko’s characteristic politeness – of instant acquiescence entailing lifelong obligation. Of course, there’s more to it than that. The heroine’s assent is a reaction to pressure to marry from within her own family. It also derives from not unusual circumstances for a woman of her generation in the early post-war years. In the films he made during those years, Ozu repeatedly illustrates American influence on, or presence in, contemporary US-occupied Japan. He does so in Early Summer through a device that combines the chief factors in Noriko’s decision to marry Kenkichi. The film opens with a tinkling instrumental of ‘Home! Sweet Home!’ (aka ‘There’s No Place Like Home’) on the soundtrack. The music, reprised at the other end of the film, has both sentimental and ironic force; it hints too at the impact of the recent war.
The Mamiyas’ younger son is still officially missing in action (the family more or less accepts that he’s dead); and although Noriko has known Kenkichi since they were children, it seems she may have been closer to his brother, who was killed fighting for his country. Before his mother pops the question to her, Kenkichi arranges to have tea with Noriko and brings along an ear of wheat. He explains that this is a gift from his brother, who had asked Kenkichi to deliver it to Noriko in the event that he didn’t return from the War in the Pacific. The film’s Japanese title is more specific than its English one: bakushū translates literally as ‘barley harvest time’. Barley isn’t wheat, Kenkichi isn’t his late brother, and Noriko isn’t the wife that Kenkichi loved and lost. Ozu builds a sense of people making the best of what’s available. A sense of – to put it in granary language that seems apt – half a loaf. Early Summer‘s closing shot is of a ripening field of barley.
The cast includes perhaps the two most famous members of Ozu’s de facto repertory company. In the films of his that immortalised her, Setsuko Hara always plays an unmarried character called Noriko (the films are often referred to as ‘the Noriko trilogy’). In Late Spring (1949), Noriko is a loving, dutiful daughter, reluctant to leave home and her widowed father. In Tokyo Story (1953), she is a widow. In both Late Spring and Early Summer, Noriko does eventually marry but off-screen. (In the penultimate sequence of Early Summer, her parents – staying at the home of the uncle whose earlier visit to them started the matrimonial ball rolling – watch a bridal procession on a country road but the bride is not their daughter.) It’s striking that Setsuko Hara never married in real life: nicknamed ‘the Eternal Virgin’ in Japan, she lived in determined, Garbo-like anonymity for many years after her retirement from cinema in 1963 (the year of Ozu’s death). Like Hara, Chishu Ryu is a strong screen presence; unlike her, he was cast by Ozu in roles that vary widely in terms of the character’s personality and age. Ryu was forty-seven when he played Hara’s brother in Early Summer – two years after playing her father in Late Spring. Another two years on, Ryu was an elderly paterfamilias in Tokyo Story, where Chieko Higashiyama played his wife: she’s his mother in Early Summer. A naturally sympathetic performer, Chishu Ryu is interpreting an increasingly unsympathetic character in this film. Koichi is capable in his job and as a husband and father (and he knows it). Ryu has such keen animation on screen that when he shuts down, to register Koichi’s angry dismay at Noriko’s choice of husband, the switch has startling impact.
Pace the canaries (who appear more than once in the course of the film’s 125 minutes), Early Summer develops into a study not just of confinement but of dispersal and mutability too. Ozu includes several shots of Tokyo’s tall office buildings, so dominant that they seem to leave little space in which to walk in the streets below; like the birdcages, these work places stress confinement. Yet Noriko leaves her office job; and she and Kenkichi’s family leave Tokyo. The large distance between pre-war and post-war life is powerfully clear (without being over-explicit). Noriko’s parents eventually resign themselves to her marriage, consoled by the thought that her absence in Akita, although it will feel lengthy, is temporary. As is everything – that final barley crop included. Shortly before Noriko’s departure, the three generations of the Mamiya family pose for a professional photographer. Their group portrait feels like the family’s only way of arresting change and the passage of time.
10 September 2023