Tokyo Story and the Transcendental Element in Ozu’s Humble Style

by Evrim Kaya /

Yasujiro Ozu is the one of the most widely known Japanese film directors and yet the essential elements in his films create maybe the most local style in the eastern cinema. This is the key to the fundamental tension present in Ozu’s complete corpus: He tells his unimposing stories on middle class Japanese characters with a technique adapted from the traditional Japanese culture: Zen, tea-ceremony, kabuki are most important influences construing the elements of his film language. However, through the most Japanese elements, Ozu’s films are stories about the universal human condition and maybe they even transcend it. My aim in this assignment is to take a closer look to the narrative and structure of an “Ozuan” cinema through his most well known movie “Tokyo Story”. This inquiry shall bring us first of all to answer the question “what is it that makes the movie so touching and remarkable for the non-Japanese, in particular western viewer despite its non-dramatic narrative and sharply eastern style?”

The process that the western spectator is going through when faced with Ozu’s taciturn character is what Paul Schrader calls “extracting the universal from the particular”. According to Schrader, Ozu’s films are made according to a “transcendental” style which exceeds the experience, transcending the immanent by definition. For Schrader it is the art form most near to the religion, based on a necessary structured, ritual-like constituted out of repetitions and harmony to express “the Transcendent in the human mirror”. What he sees as the conditions for the transcendental style in Ozu, I mark it as the source of the seemingly contradiction in Ozu’s cinema in general and Tokyo Story in Particular: creating a distance to the peculiarity of the characters and the undermining of the insistence on the reality of the representations with a cinema of mise-en-scène (with limited field of vision and a certain amount of primitiveness) arise from the adaptation of the Japanese understanding of art and therefore they are supposed to be the foreign elements to a the western eye. But these are the very elements that support a general inquiry of the universal human soul as such.

Tokyo story flows from the same source with most of Ozu’s movies. It is based on the story of a Japanese family of après-guerre generation in the rapid process of modernization. The process is painful since it must deal with the difficulty of cultural change but beyond that it is the modernization of a generation that has experienced the painful, destructive face of the world war two. Modernization in the sense of an adaptation to the western civilization is challenged by the ugly side of the west, the creator of the atomic bomb. The main tension is between the individualist west and the traditional Japanese family. The western materialism is for Ozu always a threat to the Japanese family grounded on the tacit communication of the members.

The movie runs in a simple narrative with a moderate climate and no surprises ever. This is mocked by Bordwell as:

It is as if stylistic organization becomes prominent only if the themes are so banal as to leave criticism little to interpret. (p.282)

An elderly couple visits their grown-up children in Tokyo. Too busy to entertain them, the children pack them off to a noisy resort of spa. Returning to Tokyo, the old woman visits the widow of another son, who treats her better, while the old man gets drunk with some old companions. They seem to realize they are a burden, and simply try to smooth things over as best they can. By now the children have, albeit guiltily, given up on them; even when their mother is taken ill and dies, they rush back to Tokyo after attending the funeral. A simple proverb expresses their failure: “Be kind to your parents while they are alive. Filial piety cannot reach beyond the grave.” The last sequence is of the old man alone in his seaside home, followed by an outside shot of the rooftops of the town and a boat passing by on the water. Life goes on.

What creates the movie is beyond the plot: the combination of the stylistic features peculiar to Ozu with the touching details spread to the whole story. The first apparent characteristic of the film is its taciturn development. The destroyed ties between the parents and the children do not cause this silence, since the traditional Japanese family is itself foreign to verbal communication. So the non-verbal development of the narrative is the first sign of the dominance of traditional culture over Ozu’s style. This has the result that the not self-expressive characters become anonymous as “any family”, as the example of the universal family.

The second point is Ozu’s usual technical choice: the camera is located as an invisible Japanese guest sitting on the traditional tatami, three feet above the ground. But as pointed out in Bordwell’s article, Ozu maintains this choice even for outdoor shootings. So the camera cannot be truly identified with this invisible witness. This serves for a limited field of vision in total accordance with the two dimensional painting tradition of the east. In the entire movie there is one single, imperceptible movement of the camera: no pan, no zoom, no dolly. Between the indoor settings with little exception the only place where the narrative develops, there is a pause with an outdoor shooting of a landscape or an irrelevant work of architecture. For the use of this trademark of Ozu, I agree with Schrader’s view: they serve as mu – the concept of negation and void in the painting and gardening. Traditionally this void is not to underline the motive (action in this case) but the action underlies the mu. This is the transcendence in Ozu’s films: his aim is to deliver the spectator to the spiritual silence he can arrive at only by transcending the little human actions. And in order to draw attention to the non-communicable essence of life, Ozu chooses minor events in the plot. There is no drama, but bitterness and this bitterness is created by irony: as in the example of the mother staying overnight in the house of her widowed daughter-in-law, saying: “What a treat to sleep in my dead son’s bed.” Irony is the key to the transcendence.

The minority of events support the main link that connects Tokyo Story to the culture of Zen. In tokyo syory, every action takes place very slowly creating absolute no sense of a development in the spectator; it is only simple steps of the daily life following each other. Ozu even diminishes the dramatic effect of happenings like death shifting the climax of the movie to a very uneventful point in the story: The widowed daughter-law bursts into tears because of an ethical conflict in her heart, which the viewer is not much informed from except the point that she is disappointed from the common despair, absurdity and cruelness of life. Zen as a religious-philosophical activity is based on these unimportant commonplace activities. Like Schrader point out, it makes no distinction between the fine and manual arts, in fact Ozu is usually seen (and wanted himself to be seen) as a craftsman rather than artist. Every shot he uses in the movie seems to be a variant of another or even a repetition some shot from a previous movie, however for Ozu this is the source of authenticity. His style as a director seems to be only as a means for Zen to be at work and the humble style of the movie no matter how exactly defined and worked on draws no attention to any specialized human presence: not to the peculiar characters and not to Ozu himself, but only to the people of the universe.

Schrader uses the dichotomy between “primitive” and “classical” as the keyword towards an interpretation of his art; the basic dichotomy manifests itself in sub-dichotomies: irrationalism vs. rationalism, repetition vs. variation, sacred vs. profane, two-dimensional vs. three-dimensional, tradition vs. experiment and anonymity vs. individualization. This primitiveness doesn’t refer to an ancient phenomenon, although it has roots in the far history of humanity this is not an attitude left behind but on the contrary, it is a key to understand the situation of the man in the devastating nineteenth century. What Ozu is trying to establish in the hard-flowing time of Tokyo’s everyday life is the human transcendence resisting the affects of temporality. We can read this in the eyes of the old couple: filled with wisdom, irony, melancholy, tranquility and disappointment but hope and acceptance at the same time.

The rejection of the temporality can be detected from the fact that there is no past and no history efficient in the narrative. Everything happens and passes simply by; if it would be a play of Shakespeare we would have to face at least the ghost of the son who died in the war. But we don’t. Instead there is the general bitterness caused by the war. Again this is probably related to the transcendental elements based on the Zen culture, and again this is what makes the story for the spectator any story as such.

Tokyo Story is an example perfectly characterizing Ozu’s world, but there is more. It also characterizes our world and the international reputation of the film is more than normal, as expected as any climax in one of his plots.

References:

Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Wisconsin: Routledge. 1986.

Paul Schrader. Transcendental style in film : Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1972.