Notes toward a reading of Tokyo Twilight (Tokyo boshoku).

Wood, Robert Paul

On February 27th I was at last able to see Ozu's Tokyo Twilight for the first time. I am writing this on the 29th, to be in time for this issue's deadline: something I almost never do, especially for films of obviously high value, preferring to allow for time, reflection, discussion and (when possible) repeated viewings to deepen perception and correct misreadings. In this case there is little time and no chance of a repeated viewing: the film's solitary screening was part of the travelling Ozu retrospective, just drawing to its close at the Toronto Cinematheque. I have long thought of the film as 'the one nobody wants to talk about': it has received nothing like the attention of certain films that preceded it (e.g. Late Spring, Tokyo Story) or the late colour films that followed it. And I was intrigued by the idea of an Ozu film that dealt with issues such as premarital sex, abortion and suicide.

Its juxtaposition with Equinox Flower (made one year later, 1958) is startling: not only Ozu's last film in black-and-white next to his first in colour, but also his bleakest (it reminded Richard Lippe of Ingmar Bergman) next to one of his mellowest and most life-affirming. The opposition is not only general (subject-matter, characterization ...) but signalled in tiny details. Two motifs (authorial signatures)--trains, and laundry hung up to dry--occur through most of Ozu's work, the former in (I think) every film from Story of Floating Weeds on, the latter in many of the silent films as well. The trains represent the possibility of movement and change, arrival and departure, the laundry notions of cleansing and starting afresh. Tokyo Twilight is among the very rare Ozu films in which laundry does not appear; in Equinox Flower the image is reserved for the triumphant ending, with brilliantly coloured laundry on lines, celebrating the triumph of the conspiracy of women over the patriarch. Trains, on the other hand, are insisted upon throughout Tokyo Twilight, but always with overtones of melancholy or tragedy (Akiko's suicide, departure of the mother). The juxtaposition of the two films confirms once again one of Ozu's most important characteristics as artist and human being: his remarkable openness to the complexities, contradictions and potentialities of human life--the more remarkable, perhaps, for an artist who is widely known for the apparently limited range of his subject-matter (though the retrospective has shown this to apply only to the 'late', postwar period, and even there is more apparent than real).

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Writing, then, in haste, I want to examine briefly a number of aspects of the film, and it seems convenient and in the interests of clarity to number them. They are not in any order of importance but they are at least partly sequential.

1. The Ozu 'System'. So much has been written about Ozu's highly idiosyncratic stylistics that it might appear redundant to raise the matter yet again. I shall, however, take for granted that readers are fully aware of their nature. (I prefer the word 'system' here to 'style': both terms, if they have any authenticity, derive directly from the artist and 'express' him or her, but 'style' often has overtones of something deliberately cultivated and applied externally, whereas a 'system', going beyond 'style' to include subject matter, is, essentially, the 'person'--one might say, the diagram of the person). The aspect of Ozu's system that needs to be stressed here is its openness, its non-judgemental quality--more specifically, his refusal to use cinematic means to tell his audience how they should judge the characters: camera angle (high, low, tilt shots), lighting (bright, dark ...), camera distance. All his characters are filmed, essentially, in the same way, and the lighting is that of the specific environment. We are left to judge them from what they say, what they do, their expressions, their behaviour, their motivation, their positions, the effects of their behaviour. Few filmmakers have given their audience such freedom. This seems especially important in Tokyo Twilight because its sympathies are so unconventional. Here, all the characters are flawed, imperfect, in one way or another, but the two (it seems to me) for whom we are encouraged to feel the most sympathy and compassion are, precisely, the most transgressive: the delinquent mother, the delinquent younger daughter: the two who break the rules, causing the pain of others and, ultimately, their own. Neither is condemned for this.

2. The Environment. I have never been to Japan, but have come to realize the immense importance of location in Ozu's films. It's obvious enough in those that clearly differentiate between different locales (Tokyo, Kyoto, for example, in Late Spring and The Makioka Sisters), but there is clearly significance in the use even of subsections of Tokyo. The Tokyo of Tokyo Twilight is clearly signified by the smog masks certain of the characters wear when they go out into the city: a locus of contamination. At the same time a distinction seems to be made: those who put on their masks and those who don't (Takako/Setsuko Hara does; Akiko/Ineko Arima, her younger sister, doesn't): those who do, perhaps, are those who feel they can rise above ordinary human problems, remaining 'clean'.

Otherwise, the environment is characterized predominantly by somewhat sleazy bars, gambling places, piped music, dark or dingy streets.

3. The Characters. Without accusing Ozu of a simplistic determinism (you live in one place, you're good, another, you're bad), one can see a very close connection between the environment of Tokyo Twilight and its characters' lives and decisions. No one in the film is 'pure', all are, one might say, in different ways contaminated, like the city. What is especially remarkable here (given their appearances in other Ozu films) is the use made of Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara. The former (almost seeming, at times, the director's alter ego or spokesman, though not quite in the direct way in which Max von Sydow seemed it in certain Bergman films--The Seventh Seal most obviously) is here drained, withdrawn, reduced to ineffectuality, vaguely aware of the dramas going on around him but too hurt to take a positive role. Even more startling is the use of Hara, the radiant, energetic young woman of what I have elsewhere called the 'Noriko' trilogy. Here she becomes the film's least sympathetic character (though none of the characters is entirely beyond Ozu's wise and cautious sympathy). Her role as a wife and mother, escaping an apparently abusive relationship with her husband, seems yet another nail in the coffin of the hoary old cliche of Hara as 'the eternal virgin'. She has clearly been deeply hurt--perhaps permanently affected--by her mother's desertion, and has assumed (as a result) a moralistic stance that is as alienating as her father's withdrawal. Akiko tries to talk to her (as she also tries to talk to their father), but it is impossible, the moral barricade is impregnable. The film makes it clear that Akiko's suicide might (would?) have been prevented if she had felt able to talk to either sister or father. Both are therefore implicated in the film's catastrophe, Akiko's desolate and desperate suicide.

The film's sense of alternative (but very tentative) possibilities seems centred in the notion of possible forgiveness and reconciliation, which Takako/Hara repudiates. The climactic sequence in which the mother, refused recognition, departs on the train while constantly looking out of the window in the hope that her daughter may be coming to say goodbye, is quite heartbreaking (she has been, and continues to be, drinking to drown the pain). It also seriously qualifies Takako's decision to return to her husband for her child's sake (a child in whom we have seen her take remarkably little interest, even its grandfather, in one of Sugiyama/Ryu's mellower moments, seen briefly playing with it). The husband, after all, from what we have gathered of the relationship, has been abusive, so the woman's return has overtones of masochism, or, at best, a kind of stoical resignation, which scarcely bodes well for the future.

4. These late Ozu films are detailed and highly intelligent critical studies in cultural change which ultimately defy the application of such terms as 'progressive', 'regressive', 'conservative', etc.... 'Change' is not necessarily for the better (though our current culture is constantly telling us that of course it is ('the latest', the 'with it')--an obvious ploy of corporate capitalism, which depends upon the mystification for selling its products. If we gain new freedoms, we should also beware of casually casting off the past without asking ourselves what in it--what standards of seriousness, what beliefs, what aspects of our lives--might be worth preserving. I find all these thoughts in Ozu, incomparably expressed.