Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story

Throughout this course, our attention has been consistently drawn to the way in which cinematic modernism often seems intent upon drawing our attention away from the obvious grandeur and immediacy of the macrocosmic (e.g.: the city; conventional overarching plots, etc) and refocusing it on the subtleties of the microcosmic (e.g.: the depth of meaning in the everyday details we usually miss or dismiss; the unique attributes of film, the many layers of detail within a single shot and the cinema’s ability to interrogate and augment perception, etc). Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story is no different.

As with my Wise Blood experience, Tokyo Story affected me emotionally rather than on just a purely intellectual level like with most of the texts, largely, I think, because the cinematic space depicted in it is so absorbingly ethereal and almost uncanny. Narrative and temporal ellipses’ abound, such as when we only realise that the arduous, day-long trip from Onomichi to Tokyo discussed in the opening sequence has already taken place well into the next scene when Fumiko mentions to her son that his grandparents are moments away. Similarly, we are not told character names or how they are related with the other character until after having already met them, illustrating Ozu’s unwavering preference to show rather than tell. Domestic interiors are at once claustrophobic (as made clear by the boy humorously complaining about having no room to study and the difficulties encountered in making physical and, indeed, psychological space for the grandparents) and surprisingly transitory (the camera observes Fumiko weaving in and out of the rooms of her house to complete a seemingly impossible full-circle, alluding to the presence of sliding walls). The scene where Tomi is watching her grandson play outside becomes an internal monologue or narration of a psychological or imagined space that she subtly directs to camera. While we are shown very little of Tokyo itself (which is somewhat ironic given the film’s title) and the little we do see is vague and difficult to place (just as Noriko finds it difficult to point out the location of her house from the department store lookout), the city looms large as an isolating, all-pervasive, high expectation-dashing force, particularly for the grandparents, as captured by the following heart-breaking exchange between Tomi and Sukichi as they prepare to separate for the first time in the film thus far:

Sukichi: Tokyo is such a big place…
Tomi: Yes, if you get lost here, I would have to spend the rest of mylife looking for you.
(a rare long-shot is then used, heightening the unfamiliarity of their surrounds)

As clichéd as it may sound, watching Tokyo Story is like watching an intricate origami sculpture being assembled: a single, ridiculously small piece of paper that is seemingly insignificant in itself and easily discarded (or one episode out of an infinite number of interchangeable everyday occurrences, such as the before, during and after of rural-dwelling grandparents visiting their children and grandchildren in Tokyo) is, through experienced, careful and deliberate manipulation (or a disciplined palette of camera techniques parred back to only the most essential compositional elements), momentarily transformed into an object (or film) of revelatory beauty made all the more profound by its humble beginnings, skill execution and in-built transitoriness (just as the sculpture will eventually unfold or decay, so too will the film come to an end, yet both, as Bergson would argue, will live on in our cinematic memory-banks).