What is Despair, but Hope Persevering? A review of Tokyo Sonata (2008)
Among many contemporary dramas I saw this year, no single title left me so deep in thoughts for weeks as Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata (2008) did. It is a bitter but a truthful depiction of Japanese middle-class family life.
SPOILER ALERT! STOP READING IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO SEE SPOILERS AHEAD.
Tokyo Sonata sets during the economic downfall of 2008. At that time, major companies in Japan had to make a lot of outsourcing to China and Southeast Asia to cut costs. A white-collar salaryman, Ryuhei Sasaki, who puts life-long loyalty to the company he works at — like most corporate employees at the time, suddenly has to face this particular situation. He is forced to choose either to work in another department at a lower level or leave the company. As a middle-aged Japanese man who has climbed the corporate ladder to the middle-management level, he’d rather leave.
He refuses to tell his wife and kids, so he keeps his daily routine intact: leaves home every morning in suit and tie and returns at sundown. Meandering the streets of Tokyo, he finds others just like him. Some stand in line with the homeless for free meals and many more stand in line at the employment bureau to find work. Later he meets Kurosu, an old friend who has also been unemployed for longer than him, without anyone knowing. Ryuhei learns that Kurosu does deceitful tricks to keep the secret safe. He sets his phone to ring 5 times every hour to make him look busy, he spends his day reading at the local library, and later he invites Ryuhei as a colleague for dinner at his place to avoid suspicion from his family.
Kurosu: When you think about it, we’re like a slowly sinking ship. The lifeboats are long gone, the water’s up to our mouths. We know it’s hopeless, but we’re still looking for an exit. But we don’t have the courage to dive underwater, either.
Megumi, Ryuhei’s wife, is the kind who never complains. She is a diligent and obedient housewife that is always seen inside the house. She wears red in the entire movie, signifying warmth and strength in the big heart that she has and that she is the only one in the family who is capable of loving.
Megumi: How wonderful it would be if my whole life so far turns out to have been a dream and suddenly I wake up and I’m someone else entirely.
The Sasaki family has 2 kids, Takashi and Kenji. Takashi, a teenager with no ambition for the future, suddenly becomes adamant to join the US army as a volunteer to be deployed in the Middle East. This is of course unacceptable to Ryuhei. He kicks Takashi out of the house, but Takashi is still volunteering.
Kenji is the youngest in the house and has an interest in taking a piano lesson after hearing one in session on his way home from school. Ryuhei denies his request, saying that the future of a musician is not promising. Later, Kenji uses his monthly lunch money to take the piano lesson in secret.
The Middle-Class Family in Japan’s Patriarchal Society
Tokyo Sonata centers on a regular, middle-class, nuclear family in Japan with a specific gender role: the patriarch is the sole breadwinner who provides for the family, hence holding the highest authority in the structure. Once that role is disrupted, the structure collapses.
Ryuhei’s dejection slowly seeps into the family. Everyone can feel the coldness, but no one ever dares to ask about the change in the atmosphere. The dinner they have every night becomes an empty formality. This lack of openness, wrapped in suspicion and distrust, is what slowly disintegrates the family.
Ryuhei becomes easily agitated in the moments when he feels that his authority is being looked down. Even for minor problems, Ryuhei uses violence against his sons to hide his insecurities.
Megumi, on the other hand, tries so hard to stick the family together. She gives all her love but receives only alienation in return. And still, she shuns the idea of divorcing her husband in exchange for her own freedom away from this slowly-detaching family.
Although Kurosawa put a closer focus on the psychological impact of the crisis on Sasaki family, he didn’t forget to shine a light on the wider scope. The anxiety felt by Ryuhei and his surroundings reflects a collective, if not national, depression experienced by the country.
Hoping for a Second Chance
Tokyo Sonata delivers a powerful social and psychological message, but for me, the most noteworthy element in this movie lies in the character dynamics.
Every family member faces predicaments on their own, all alone by themselves. No one ever sees each other’s struggle. Instead, it is someone outside the family that brings out each character’s development. Ironically, these aides are broken people in more or less the same situation as the main characters’, who give up at the end. Ryuhei meets Kurosu, who faces the same problem of unemployment and tries so hard to conceal it. Kenji meets his classmate, Taguchi, who runs away from home because no one in the family cares about him. Megumi meets the burglar, who always thinks of himself as a failure and sees no way out of the misery of it. Being held hostage by the burglar, Megumi feels rather liberated — driving a stolen convertible, her dream car, far away from home. All these side characters are like the reflection of the main characters. They are those who have gone to great lengths to keep their hope alight.
Hope is the very thing everyone’s trying to hold onto. In the pivotal moment when the light of hope slowly fades out as the night comes, they are all left physically and mentally drained. Ryuhei is all alone in pain on the side road with dried leaves blowing on him, Kenji is curling up in detention with others around him, while Megumi is lying on the shore, letting the gentle ocean wave caress her. These things that surround them — leaves, people, and the sea — are like their blanket for the cold night, where they can finally feel tranquility that eventually leads to one question, “can I start over?”
Megumi: Do you think I can start all over again? From this moment on, do you think I can start all over again? Is that a land over there? Or boat?
The burglar: I can’t see. I can’t see a thing!
In the morning, everyone wakes up with newfound clarity that they actually have the second chance to start over. On Megumi, we see her head slowly tilt upwards, looking far ahead with a smile as she walks towards the morning sunshine. They walk back home, each looking broken in their own mess, gather around the dining table and have breakfast before facing the new day.
Clair de Lune
The movie concludes with an impeccable coda. Four months forward, Ryuhei is seen occupied in a cleaning job, Takashi sends a letter home and decides to stay in the US for good, and Kenji performs Claude Debussy’s Clair de Lune from the Suite bergamasque at his audition. In that final scene, the camera is fixated on Kenji, just like everyone’s attention is. The intentional long shot invites us to listen mindfully. The deeper I was immersed in the performance, the more I understand why Clair de Lune (meaning “moonlight” in French), is the perfect piece to end the movie with. Not just because the literal moonlight from the previous scene offers resolution, but the piece itself has the capacity to summarize the entire movie.
I would read Clair de Lune in 3 parts. The first 1.5 minutes is a look back on the hardships they are going through, the difficult choices that they have to make, and the mistakes in it.
The second part shows clarity as it builds up to crescendo. It is a hopeful outlook toward the future, the possibility of having a second chance.
In the third part, we are brought back to the present. We forgive and make peace with ourselves. Holding tight to the hopes of a brighter future, we find solace and gratitude. We pat ourselves on the back and we can rest assured that everything will be okay.
Megumi: You are the only person who can be you. That’s all we have to hold onto.
Clair de Lune is a famous piece. It appears numerous times in movies and TV shows, old and new. We hear briefly of it in Atonement (2008), in a 2019 K-drama hit, Crash Landing on You, and in an episode in the last season of Stranger Things when Nancy and Robin visit Pennhurst Mental Hospital to see Victor Creele. This piece was picked by filmmakers mainly to enhance the profundity of a scene, as we see at the end of Ocean’s Eleven (2001). In Tokyo Sonata, this presumption still holds true, and the way I see it, this is the best use case of Clair de Lune in a movie.
Under shomin-geki genre (realist drama about common people), Yasujiro Ozu and Hirokazu Kore-eda are the most prominent names that first pop up to my mind. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who is more well-known in J-horror, has successfully delivered a melancholic yet gripping family drama that is paced with patience and compassion that allows us to be thoroughly immersed in the lives of the characters. Tokyo Sonata is written with a great deal of sincerity and empathy, shot and edited in honesty, and performed brilliantly. It carries a sociocultural relevance that still persists in this modern times, urgently so, as crises are unceasingly lurking in the shadows.
