Tōkyō Monogatari
Yasujirō Ozu (1953)
Tokyo Story has long been a fixture in the top ten of Sight & Sound’s decennial greatest films poll. When I first saw it at BFI – probably around 2005 – I just couldn’t understand why but in those days I’d seen hardly any Japanese cinema and what I had seen I found hard to ‘read’. As noted elsewhere in these reviews, the work of Hirokazu Kore-eda – most memorably Still Walking (2008) but pretty consistently since – has helped me engage with other Yasujirō Ozu films, particularly Late Spring (1949), The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice (1952) and Tokyo Twilight (1957). Returning to Tokyo Story at BFI was something of an acid test. Would I now appreciate what’s widely regarded as the Japanese master’s masterpiece? If the answer has to be a simple yes or no, then it’s a yes. If we’re dealing in multiple choice categories, it’s equivalent to a ‘somewhat agree’. I got a lot more out of Tokyo Story this time but still left NFT3 wondering why it’s considered Ozu’s supreme achievement.
Shūkichi (Chishū Ryū) and Tomi (Chieko Higashiyama), a late-middle-aged, retired couple, live in the provincial city of Onomichi with their schoolteacher daughter, Kyōko (Kyōko Kagawa), the youngest of their five children. The parents go to Tokyo to visit their eldest son, Kōichi (So Yamamura), and elder daughter, Shige (Haruko Sugimura), both married, and their widowed daughter-in-law, Noriko (Setsuko Hara), whose husband Shōji, Shūkichi and Tomi’s middle son, never returned from the Pacific War. Kōichi and Shige both have busy jobs – he’s a doctor with a practice in suburban Tokyo, she runs a (tacky) hairdressing salon – and it’s soon clear their parents are an unhelpful distraction. Noriko, in contrast, takes time off from her office job to take her in-laws sightseeing. Kōichi and Shige pay for their parents to stay at a hot spring spa in Atami, and be out of the way. The spa’s clientele is mostly younger and rowdier and disturbs the senior citizens’ sleep. They return to Tokyo prematurely to find that Shige, who lives over the shop with her husband (Nobuo Nakamura), needs to make other use of the room they’d been occupying – so Toni is sent to stay with Noriko and Shūkichi left to his own devices for the evening. When he goes out, he bumps into old friends from Onomichi and, to Shige’s disgust, comes back to the salon with his two pals, all of them blotto. Lamenting (to each other) how their children have changed, the parents return home, again sooner than planned, intending to stop briefly in Osaka to see their other son, Keizō (Shirō Ōsaka).
Tomi, who first shows signs of being unwell during the Atami excursion and takes a turn for the worse on the journey back to Onomichi, falls critically ill soon after getting home. Kōichi, Shige and Noriko travel to see her; Keizō, away on business, doesn’t make it in time before his mother dies. The visitors, except for Noriko, take their leave immediately after Tomi’s funeral, causing Kyōko to rail against her selfish, callous siblings. Noriko is sympathetic but tells Kyōko that it’s natural for children to grow away from their parents, and that Kyōko will come to understand this, once she has her own life to lead. One day, with Kyōko out at work, Noriko informs Shūkichi that she will be returning to Tokyo later that day. When Shūkichi thanks Noriko for her unfailing kindness, his daughter-in-law protests she’s not kind at all, explaining how guilty she feels for failing to think more often than she does about Shōji. Shūkichi gives Noriko a watch that belonged to Tomi as a memento of his wife. When Noriko cries and admits how lonely she is, Shūkichi urges her, as Tomi also did while staying in Noriko’s apartment, to remarry. In the film’s two brief closing scenes, we see Noriko on the train to Tokyo, contemplating the watch, and Shūkichi starting to resign himself to the loneliness of life without Tomi.
The story, which Ozu wrote with Kogo Noda, sounds straightforward enough but plenty of the film’s admirers perceive in it a work of quite exceptional emotional complexity and depth. For Roger Ebert, it ‘lacks sentimental triggers and contrived emotion; it looks away from moments a lesser movie would have exploited. It doesn’t want to force our emotions, but to share its understanding’; the evidence of how powerfully Tokyo Story succeeds is that Ebert ‘never heard more weeping in an audience than during its showing’. He believed that the film ‘ennobles the cinema. It says, yes, a movie can help us make small steps against our imperfections’. David Thomson has asked, rhetorically, if there’s a more moving family drama in the history of cinema. Susan Sontag claimed to have seen Tokyo Story thirty times. Critical and, to an even more striking extent, ‘auteurial’ consensus about its superiority to other Ozu works is neatly summarised by the latest S&S polls, in 2012. In the critics’ poll, Tokyo Story placed third and Late Spring fifteenth, and were the only Ozu films featured in the top one hundred. In the directors’ poll, Tokyo Story placed first; neither Late Spring nor any other Ozu appeared in the top hundred.
Renewed bemusement at this abated soon after leaving the screening, thanks to reading Asian film expert Tony Rayns’ excellent S&S piece (from 1994) used as the BFI handout. Rayns starts off with a reminder that Ozu himself described Tokyo Story as his ‘most melodramatic movie’ and that the director wasn’t a man given to irony. Rayns thinks Ozu’s remark ‘reflected the film’s uncharacteristic explicitness: this is an almost didactic film about the disintegration of Japanese family values, full of characters and incidents designed to spell out social and psychological points with diagrammatic clarity’. (By way of illustration, Rayns reasonably singles out Haruko Sugimura’s relentless, one-note portrait of Shige – mercenary and heartless from start to finish, except for her brief embarrassment when the police hand over her drunken father and his friends.) Rayns also notes that Tokyo Story was likely developed by Ozu and Kogo Noda with a Hollywood precursor, Leo McCarey’s Depression drama Make Way for Tomorrow (1936), in mind. The idea that Ozu was distressed by Tokyo Story‘s reception in Japan is borne out by the decidedly unsentimental nature of his next film: Early Spring (1956) feels like an austere corrective. Rayns’ reading of Tokyo Story is convincing. Its position in the S&S polls, and the absence from these of other Ozus except for Late Spring, can be ascribed to cinema connoisseurs seeing Tokyo Story as a summation of Ozu’s pessimism and preoccupation with family dynamics and anxieties, despite their being presented in an atypically emphatic way.
It’ll be clear from this note that I’m more intrigued by Tokyo Story’s status in the cinematic canon than awed by the film itself but the following are a few things I particularly liked about it this time around … The several shots of trains on tracks and boats on the water, and the different connotations these develop – the trains expressing the busyness of everyday city life, the boats the passage of time on another, larger scale. The quietness of Kōichi’s wife, Fumiko (Kuniko Miyake), compared with the couple’s sparky, bolshy sons (Zen Murase and Mitsuhiro Mori), who are miffed by Shūkichi and Tomi’s interruptive arrival even before it happens: this feels, in retrospect, almost an anticipation of the next younger generation becoming, in due course, impatient with their parents. Chieko Higashiyama’s corpulence, as well as giving her an unusual look for an Ozu character, helps lend Tomi’s increasing exhaustion a poignant reality. Chishū Ryū’s engaging blend of vitality and largely unspoken regret is eloquent. For this viewer, the most emotionally powerful moment came in a three-word line – ‘This is it …’ – as Shūkichi realises his wife of many years is going to die. Ryū conveys a sense of how often his character has imagined and dreaded what is now coming to pass.
30 November 2021
