Tokyo boshoku
Yasujiro Ozu (1957)
The season is winter and the hour, as the title predicts, often late – the outdoor scenes mostly take place at night. The outwardly dark weather is unusual for Yasujiro Ozu, so are the abortion and suicides strands of this family melodrama, and that may explain the lukewarm reception of Tokyo Twilight on its original release. The usual visual formalities are still in evidence, though, along with examples of the Japanese domestic and social routines that typically feature in Ozu’s cinema. For much of the film, these conventions serve to increase the accumulating tension of the narrative. It’s only in the climax that the melodrama occasionally seems, to western eyes at least, melodrama of a more familiar kind – but even then there are dissonant notes. As Akiko (Ineko Arima) lies in hospital following a suicide attempt, her elder sister Takako (Setsuko Hara) and their father Shukichi (Chishu Ryu) are at her bedside but neither is tearful and Takako seems hardly sympathetic: ‘Pull yourself together!’ she scolds Akiko (that’s what the English subtitle says anyway). The injunction is fruitless: Akiko dies – though not on screen. Her death is reported by Takako to the sisters’ mother Kisako (Isuzu Yamada) and comes as a shock not only to her but to the film’s audience too. Kisako, who walked out on the family years ago and whose unexpected return to Tokyo is an important plot trigger, subsequently sees Takako again, calling at the family home to bring flowers for Akiko’s funeral. Kisako then prepares to leave the city with Sakai (Nobuo Nakamura), her second husband. As their train waits in the station, Kisako watches through the window in the hope that her surviving daughter will reappear at the last minute. Although Sakai assures Kisako this won’t happen, viewers raised on Hollywood product of the 1940s and 1950s will realise that, like Kisako, they’re hoping against hope for a happy ending. Sakai is correct: Takako doesn’t turn up.
The long-past estrangement of Kisako and Shukichi is the seminal event in the story (written by Ozu and Kogo Noda), the start of a pattern of loss and separation that has developed in the years that followed and that continues in the film’s present tense. Kisako’s and Shukichi’s three children were raised by and experienced the love of only one parent. Takako’s and Akiko’s brother subsequently died. Near the start of the film, Takako, who is married with an infant daughter, leaves her husband Yasuo (Kinzo Shin) and, with her child, moves back into Shukichi’s house, where Akiko, who is at secretarial college, also still lives. Shukichi’s sister Shigeko (Haruko Sugimura) is an enthusiastic but ineffectual matchmaker: Akiko already has a boyfriend, Kenji (Masami Taura), a student who hangs out with his friends at a local mahjong parlour. Akiko discovers that she is pregnant. When she goes to the mahjong parlour to look for Kenji, she gets into conversation with the proprietress, who shows a surprising knowledge of Akiko’s family. The proprietress is Kisako. Takako guesses as much when Akiko tells her about the encounter, before going to the mahjong parlour herself to confirm her suspicions. Akiko realises that Kenji doesn’t love her and decides to have an abortion. Although Kisako has begged Takako not to reveal her identity to Akiko, this happens, resulting in a confrontation between the mother and her younger daughter in which Akiko berates Kisako for walking out on the family when she was a toddler. An argument between Akiko and Kenji in a noodle bar swiftly follows. Akiko rushes out of the bar and, at a nearby intersection, into the path of a train, sustaining what prove to be fatal injuries. (Ozu characteristically makes clear that this was a suicide attempt by means less direct than actually showing it.) Akiko’s death in effect halts the succession of break-ups within or involving the members of her family. Takako, anxious to ensure that history doesn’t repeat itself, decides that she and her child will return to Yasuo. She will try again to make the marriage work.
It’s simply but strongly eloquent that Sukichi and Kisako are never on screen together – nor are Takako and Masuo. A good deal of sake is downed in the course of the film: from the opening scene, when Shukichi calls in at a bar on his way home from the bank where he works; through the sequences in at the mahjong parlour and the noodle bar where Akiko and Kenji have their final argument; to the hip flask that Sakai drinks from and offers to his wife as they await the start of their long train journey from Tokyo to Hokkaido. There are fine, persuasive details throughout – perhaps especially in the hospital episode that follows Akiko’s attempted suicide: the persistent sound of a dripping tap; the yawning receptionist; the noodle bar owner (Kamatari Fujiwara), who did the decent thing by coming to the hospital but who takes the opportunity, while he’s there, of talking up his noodles. After seeing Late Spring and An Autumn Afternoon, it’s hard to watch Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara without thinking of their father-daughter partnerships in those other films. Ryu’s emotionally supple acting means that once again he’s the outstanding member of the cast. Hara, as before, supplies a remarkable, melancholy image in individual shots although her movement from one emotion to another is relatively laborious. According to Joan Mellen’s 1976 book The Waves at Genji’s Door – Japan Through Its Cinema, ‘Abortion, for Ozu, is symbolic of a social disease afflicting all of Japan after the war’. The other kinds of family fracture dramatised in Tokyo Twilight may also express his regret at developing modern trends. Yet the film artist in Yasujiro Ozu still trumps the social commentator, even in this melodramatic context. He doesn’t treat any one of his characters dismissively. My resistance to his supposed masterwork Tokyo Story got me off to a very slow start with Ozu but the more films of his that I see, the more I now want to see.
10 November 2017
