A Darker Tokyo:
Ozu's Tokyo Twilight

September 10, 2007

At the heart of Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Twilight is the story of Akiko. We follow her as she searches for her boyfriend.. and then we learn that the urgency of the search is caused by her pregnancy. The boyfriend Kenji turns out to be a coward.. but the film does not care about that youthful relationship. The deeper story turns out to be the place of Akiko's mother.. or rather, the absence of her mother. The mother turns up in Tokyo.. having long ago abandoned the father to pursue an affair begun during wartime. The two sisters, Akiko and Takako, have thus grown up with only their father.. and Tokyo Twilight is a meditation on the consequences of that disruption of the family..

Consider the following exchange between Takako (the older sister, Setsuko Hara) and her father. The elder sister has left her husband and brought her baby daughter with her. The father tries to mediate:

sister: Wasn't it awkward?

father: what?

sister: meeting with him..

father: of course not.

sister: but...

father: He's changed. He wasn't like that before. He used to be more cheerful. I was thinking on the train home that I owe you an apology.

sister: For what? Not at all.

father: I should have let you marry Sato. You seemed to like him.

sister: It doesn't matter now, Father.

father: I pressed you into marrying Numata.

sister: I'll check the bath.

The younger daughter is the one who has the gravest problems, but even Takako, as we see from her forced smile in the picture, has regrets. She was pressured into marrying a man who turned out to be a selfish drunkard. The lack of a mother is not mentioned in this brief dialogue, but in Ozu's very next film, Equinox Flower, he will highlight a mother's positive role in convincing the stubborn father to allow his daughter to marry for love. The mediating force of a mother is lacking.. and the results are evident in the lives of both daughters.

In the discussions about the younger daughter Akiko the theme of the absent mother becomes more pronounced:

father: She's impossible. How could she ever turn out this way? What a disappointment.

sister: Akiko's lonely. I'm sure of it. Father, please be more gentle with her. She grew up without knowing a mother's love. That's why she's lonely.

father: I tried hard to keep her from feeling that way.

sister: But without a mother...

father: I've always tried to dote on her... I made a mistake somewhere. Bringing up a child... isn't easy.

sister: Father, please go to bed.

Young Akiko is in way over her head. She is pregnant and then gets an abortion when she despairs of her boyfriend helping her. On the heals of that drama she discovers that her mother is still alive. In her despair she is struck by a train.. and although an explanation is given, I think we are meant to understand that this was a suicide attempt. Lying in the hospital she murmurs to her father and sister:

Something went wrong that is beyond the immediate issue of a love relationship that went too far. The problem is way back there.. at the start when Akiko lost the love of her mother. Ozu pushes us to imagine what could have happened had a mother been present. The situation is tough.. but not unsolvable.

The mother is ends up bearing the strongest condemnation. Upon the death of Akiko, the elder daughter Tamako visits her mother with a chilly message:

This condemnation seems to reflect not just the anger of a character.. but also that of Ozu. Tokyo Twilight keeps coming around to the absence of a mother as the cause for later pain. The mother is a nice woman; she's no spiteful person. It is obvious that she has her own needs and desires. But Ozu is not willing to let her off the hook for abandoning her family.

At the close of the film the audience waits for some kind of reconciliation. The mother delivers flowers to Takako and then slowly walks away.. we wonder: will Takako follow and forgive? As the mother gets aboard the train to leave Tokyo for good, she continuously looks out the window in the hope of seeing her remaining daughter. There will be no reconciliation.. at least where we most expect it. Ozu instead allows us to see Takako's change of heart with respect to her husband:

This is the reason I cannot get enough of Ozu these days. I know it seems like a simple message: family is important. But Ozu so patiently examines every angle of the family.. freedom and duty, old and young, mothers and fathers, tradition and novelty, work and private life. With unusual fairness Ozu thinks through the demands of every party in the family.. and in this case he comes down hard on the mother who made unredeemable choices long ago.