Tokyo Story

Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story is stately; it was made in 1953, but feels much older. I think this has less to do with the cultural divide than it does the gulf between the ages. Though the movie is considered one of the greatest works of world cinema, and carries you along with a strange, becalming, old-world serenity, it seems to raise issues that it refuses to confront. This can partly be explained as reflective of the way the family it depicts interacts, but that isn’t quite satisfactory; the film is about moving on, but it moves on too easily, with so much left up in the air. It’s too tidy to be ambiguity; it must be underdevelopment. All the conflicts seem benign, as if elucidation was not required. The elderly father is disappointed in his son, a neighborhood doctor. Why? He should be doing better things than helping the sick? Their relationship goes completely undefined. Unlike a recent family-reunion movie, A Christmas Tale, the filial dynamics here haven’t the weight of history; except in the case of one daughter—a bitchy beautician who looks like Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People—it’s hard to imagine what life was like when the kids were growing up and living under the same roof in provincial Onomichi. We can’t really determine why the old couple’s daughter-in-law, whose husband has died (in World War II?), is so selflessly kind to them. Is it because she’s still carrying their son’s torch? Is it some guilt that’s been carried over? Perhaps it’s her kinship with the old man: They both have strange, impersonal smiles—like flight attendants’. Some sort of emotions are being repressed, but which? The revelation that Father was a souse, and may become one again soon, makes his placidity seem a touch sinister. Father calls Mother headstrong, but she isn’t really. They only fight once, in the very beginning—and, in retrospect, that seems a false start. But Chieko Higashiyama, who plays Mother, is a true focal point. She’s the movie’s soul. Unlike everyone else, she seems acutely aware of the undercurrents that the others are sitting cross-legged on top of. She looks as though she’s spent her life waiting for these feelings to be uncovered, but she ends up dying in vain; her passing is made to symbolize the end of an era.

That era, of course, is prewar Japan. The elderly couple are like fish out of water in their nation’s capital. It’s a metropolis to them, though—to modern viewers, aware of how cosmopolitan Tokyo has since become—it seems like a second-class city in the Rust Belt. Ozu’s style is partly to blame. He focuses on straight lines and right angles; all of his static camerawork is intricately worked out—in a way, masterful. But, except for a few shots of traditional architecture at the end, the cramped Tokyo interiors don’t look much different from the Onomichi homestead. And even when things are “lively,” his pace remains the same; it’s vibrance as seen from an objective point of view, one which never differs, and is at cross-purposes with the movie’s insistence that things change. Universal as the theme is, I don’t respond so well to the caveat that things invariably change for the worse. There’s a touch of quietism in how Ozu appears to see things: Children grow apart from their parents, but children also become worse people, necessarily selfish, and the process is inevitable. Even the daughter-in-law admits that she’ll be subject to it—despite herself. Mother is an externalization of Ozu’s style; that’s why she’s the one to die.

Still, Tokyo Story must be judged as a product of its time. It seems to be a Japanese equivalent of Dickensian England—at the end of an era in which members of a family live out their lives in an ancestral home, and yet before the advent of true mass communication. One gets the impression that the old couple hardly sees their children, and do not talk to them frequently. For emergencies, they still send telegrams; the house in Onomichi probably doesn’t have a telephone. No wonder their visit to the city seems so momentous. If nothing else, the bucolic gotham of this film lends perspective to Kurosawa’s High and Low of ten years later. Though I thought that movie was a bit too procedural, and that it wore its themes on its sleeves, the gap between it and Tokyo Story says a lot about Japanese growth and urbanity in the middle of the twentieth century. No wonder that the nightlife scrutinized by the Kurosawa film looked like a wild Westernization. And it isn’t very hard to grasp Tokyo Story’s enduring appeal. It makes the increasing complexity of the world feel simpler. It looks at the future with eyes from the past, and its staunch, ascetic serenity reminds one that some values will never change.