Tokyo Story

The experience of watching Tokyo Story for the first time was almost hypnotic. Pulled into the rhythm of this film – a rhythm that is stretched and teased out – I found myself acutely conscious of the form and movement of almost every small detail that presented itself to the camera. This hyper-awareness was shrouded in languor. I was both spectator of, and participant within, an intricate and meditative aesthetic.

My interaction with film was shaped by its pace. Ozu moves slowly, with delicate and measured steps that tread quietly along the boundary between action and stillness. Having recently sat through Masaki Kobayashi’s The Human Condition, which is almost ten hours long and progresses through a similarly languid rhythm, I was quite prepared for the pace of this film and did not find it tedious. In The Human Condition the camera holds still on a shot even after the action or event has passed. Ozu’s camera operates in the same way, holding on a scene long after it has served its narrative purpose.

This lingering camera makes its presence known most explicitly in the interior domestic scenes. Even after a room has been emptied of its inhabitants, the camera remains attentive. These moments – the vacant room moments – are pauses between narrative events. Here the distinction between movement and stillness is almost imperceptible as time is stretched apart and opened up. These rooms are not inert domestic spaces, but expansive and generative spaces. What they generate is a ritual of waiting – waiting for the cut, the next scene, the return of a figure, anything.

These spaces are about immanence and the in-between. For me, they are inscribed with as much, if not more, significance as the narrative. Where they are laden with metaphoric substance – that immanence – the film’s narrative progresses through what seems like a sequence of non-events. The elderly woman’s death, the film’s most crucial narrative development, passes by so quietly that I almost missed it.

The event of the woman’s death seems almost inconsequential. The unoccupied spaces speak of, and to, death in a way that the woman’s funeral and the reaction of her children do not. Immediately after the funeral her children make demands over which of her belongings they want and then quickly leave to return to the city. Where they do not give her death space, the unoccupied spaces do. The spaces forecast her death: if they are waiting for anything they must be waiting for death. Her death is the ‘immanence’ that those in-between spaces announce.

There are two characters that grieve the woman’s death, her husband and her daughter-in-law. As they grieve they become absorbed into these ‘immanent’ spaces. The daughter-in-law weeps silently in a train carriage, which is an interior space that epitomizes the condition of the in-between, and the husband sits cross-legged in a room in his house, facing away from the screen. In this instance it is as if he has dissolved into the space around him and become submerged in that ritual of waiting. This was, for me, the most heartbreaking moment in the film.