Tokyo Story (1953)
Is Tokyo Story Yasujirô Ozu’s greatest film? I couldn’t tell you. When dealing with a master like Ozu it’s splitting hairs to assign varying degrees of greatness to his individual films, and, quite frankly, such laurels mean nothing — especially when considering Ozu’s films are so completely committed to avoiding the grandiosity such ready-made labels imply. Three reasons explain why Tokyo Story is generally regarded as Ozu’s finest work are: it’s by far the film of his that’s been most widely seen in the West; its first distribution in the U.S. coincided with the landmark publication in 1972 of Paul Schrader’s Transcendental Style in Film, which considered Ozu alongside other such luminaries as Carl Theodor Dreyer and Robert Bresson as an exemplar of spiritual film making; and it’s seen as the most complete summation of its director’s art.
Ozu, often called “the most Japanese of Japanese filmmakers,” made films about everyday life. It’s almost difficult to talk about “everyday life” now when it comes to film because the term has been co-opted by those with political and stylistic imperatives. To document “everyday life” for the neorealists meant to document financial struggle, which, in the hands of some of its latter-day followers, has resulted in a depiction of life filtered through miserabilism. For the adherents of direct cinema, the camera itself was meant to disappear, which more often than not meant lackadaisical camera setups and shoddy compositions, justified by the idea of spontaneity.
Ozu had no such imperatives. His characters are usually middle-class folks not overly concerned with money, and not subject to but actively a part of daily rituals that some may find mundane but are truly the stuff of life: having a cordial, if superficial, conversation with a neighbor; preparing the morning breakfast; folding laundry; rearranging furniture to make room for company; packing for a trip. Tokyo Story’s plot couldn’t be simpler: An elderly couple, Shukichi and Tomi, travel from their country home to visit their children and grandchildren in Tokyo. There they find that their children have their own busy lives in which they don’t quite fit anymore, and when they leave, Tomi, the grandmother, takes ill and dies. For the sake of drama, Ozu’s films do often hinge around a key life event — usually a marriage or a death. But it’s the ordinary moments in between that matter most, the kind of moments left out of most conventional screenplays. Take this bit of dialogue from Tokyo Story: Tomi asks her husband, Shukichi (Chushu Ryu), “I wonder what part of Tokyo we’re in?” When he says, “A suburb, I think,” she replies, “You must be right. It was such a long ride from the station.” That’s exactly the kind of mundane banter anyone from any part of the globe could expect hearing their grandparents engage in.
Ozu’s appreciation of subtle shades of character means that what isn’t said can be more important than what is. When Tomi says, “When each of my boys was born, I prayed that he wouldn’t become a drinker,” it implies that her husband had in fact a drinking problem, something you wouldn’t expect from the ever-so-slightly-stiff Shukichi. Ozu expresses great distinctions in character through the most subtle of differences; Shukichi’s daughter Shige very practically packs a funeral kimono when visiting her ailing mother near the end of the film, while his daughter-in-law Noriko comes completely unprepared. It reveals a lot about the different attitudes of the characters, without elevating one over the other.
Behind the simplicity of the writing is a simplicity in staging and composition that the unschooled eye might see as artless. Ozu usually places his camera no higher than the eye-level of a person sitting on a tatami mat and, almost never moving the frame, records the carefully planned movements and gestures of his actors. Notice how in the film Shukichi usually sits at a right angle to the camera, right side facing us, with Tomi to his left and ever so slightly behind him. But when things don’t go quite as well for them on their trip as they’d hoped, Shukichi and Tomi end up sitting directly parallel to one another, as if comforting each other. Likewise, when their children send them away to a raucous health-spa, Ozu first indicates that Shukichi and Tomi are out of their element by a medium shot of their sandals lined up outside their door.
By having established the rhythms of Shukichi and Tomi’s life together with such precision, Ozu’s presentation of the old woman’s death, because it’s not conventionally melodramatic or histrionic, is all the more deeply felt. When the film ends where it began, with Shukichi sitting on his tatami mat, fanning himself because of the sticky summer heat, this time alone, it’s a different presentation of eternity than, say, Dreyer’s Ordet. Where Dreyer used resurrection as a metaphor to underline the miracle of life itself, Ozu establishes the miracle of human life by the absence of one life. Though Tomi is gone there will still be the putt-putt of a boat engine in the harbor, the far-off whistle of a train, the endless droning screech of cicadas. And the knowledge that Shukichi and Tomi’s children will replace them and one day suffer their fate too. Such is life.
In this exquisite merging of specific and universal, infinite and infinitesimal, Tokyo Story perhaps most clearly illuminates that Ozu is not the most Japanese of filmmakers, but the most human.
Tokyo Story (Tôkyô monogatari) is generally regarded as one of the greatest films ever made. It regularly appears at the top of most credible film polls and there are an endless number of film critics and filmmakers who speak of it in complete awe and admiration. While director Yasujiro Ozu was not known outside of Japan until much later than other important Japanese directors such as The Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai, 1954) director Akira Kurosawa, he is now regarded as one of the world’s foremost filmmakers.
Ozu directed his first film in 1927 and was a prolific director in Japan until he was conscripted in 1937. Ozu did make a couple of films during the war years but he would not start filmmaking regularly again until the late 1940s. However, the films that he then went on to direct, which include Tokyo Story in 1953, are the films that developed his distinctive style and are his most acclaimed. Some of these films include Late Spring (Banshun, 1949), Early Summer (Bakushu, 1951), Floating Weeds (Ukigusa, 1959) and An Autumn Afternoon (Sanma no aji, 1962). Ozu’s films from this era tended to be concerned with issues of family, marriage and domestic life. They are distinctively different from the grand narratives of Kurosawa’s films and they also have little resemblance to the Hollywood melodramas that explored similar issues with an excess of emotion and style. Instead Ozu’s stories are simple and calm affairs that are tinged with nostalgia. Zen-like and sad, Ozu’s films offer the audience an opportunity to reflect and contemplate their own life and how it mirrors that of the characters on the screen.
The dominant theme of Tokyo Story is the generational conflict between parents and their children. It depicts the visit of an elderly couple who come to Tokyo where they wish to spend time with their adult children, and their families, and the widowed spouse of another son who was killed in the war. Despite best intentions the children find that their parents’ visit is a burden to their busy lives, something that the parents then feel bad about. Tokyo Story is the perfect example of Ozu’s gentle approach to storytelling. It is an open narrative, in that there is no great all encompassing resolution, and none of the characters are delineated as being ‘good’ or ‘bad’, with the possible exception of their widowed daughter-in-law Noriko (played by regular Ozu actor Setsuko Hara) who is one of the most heartbreakingly kind and generous characters to ever appear on screen.
Ozu’s desire to ensure that the audience focus on the small nuances of character interaction is apparent by examining what is left out of the film. Despite its importance to the film, the city of Tokyo is barely depicted. There are the occasional establishing shots of industry to distinguish it from the rural setting where the film begins and ends but otherwise the only time the audience really gets to see the city is at the same time as the elderly couple during their brief bus tour. In terms of plot development, major turning points that a more narrative driven film would have included, are left out. The audience never sees any of the train journeys that the parents take and key events towards the end of the film all occur off-screen. Instead Ozu focuses on how the characters respond and interact with each other rather than the actual dramatic moments.
The meditative quality of Tokyo Story is further enhanced by Ozu’s approach to film style. Conversations in films are typically shot in the shot-reverse-shot pattern where the camera is placed over the shoulder of the character that is speaking. This gives the impression of a naturally flowing conversation that the audience witness from a detached position. Ozu, on the other hand, places his camera right between the two people conversing and films each person directly so that the audience feel that they are standing in the middle of the conversation and are being addressed directly by the characters. Furthermore, Ozu films from a far lower height than audiences are accustomed to. This technique has been described as the tatami shot as the camera is placed as if it were a person kneeling on a tatami mat. This technique increases the sensation of the audience being within the space of the film and therefore makes them far more receptive to the characters.
Perhaps Ozu’s most innovative approach to filmmaking in the period when he made Tokyo Story was to strip away all stylistic devices associated with camera movement and editing. Ozu’s camera is static — once a shot begins the camera does not move except on very rare occasions, such as the slow, steady and unobtrusive tracking shot in Tokyo Story that goes along a fence to reveal the parents waiting outside for Noriko to come home. Ozu also discarded editing techniques such as dissolves, fades and wipes to instead have simple direct cuts. Transitions between scenes were created through a series of insert shots. This pared down approach to filmmaking further heightens the reflective quality of Ozu’s films and brought the humanity of the characters further into the foreground.
Tokyo Story is a masterpiece that leaves the viewer in a serene state of thoughtfulness long after the film has finished. It is a distinctly Japanese film, depicting the sad inevitability that children develop a degree of selfishness in order to become independent from their parents. Tokyo Story may be a slice-of-life type of film but it also conjures up some of the big questions in life such as how we deal with grief, death, aging and change.
