The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Yasujirō Ozu · a film · 1953 · 136 minutes · scored on the Japanese release, with the desk’s own English renderings
Mode
Family drama of ordinary people, the Shochiku home drama carried to its fullest; a journey story with every climax placed off screen
Mythos
The aged parents who go to their children and are not wanted; three hosts, two of the blood who fail and one by marriage who passes; the death of the mother and the father left alone
Phase
One summer, from a morning’s packing in Onomichi to a train leaving it: out to Tokyo and Atami, back by way of Osaka, a death, a funeral and the morning after
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, Academy ratio, mono sound, 136 minutes, in Japanese; the parents in the speech of Onomichi, the children in the speech of Tokyo; a camera set near the height of a person seated on tatami, which almost never moves
Register
From Shige’s cakes and two drunk fathers delivered by a policeman to a widow weeping over pocket money; held level throughout, the music warmer than the images
Scale
Two parents, five children, one summer
Governing Proposition
An old couple travel from Onomichi to Tokyo to see their grown children, are passed from house to house and sent to a hot spring, and go home; the mother dies, and the one who was kind to them was the widow of their dead son. The wager of the film is that an even form, with every great event placed off screen, can show that children put their own lives first as the ordinary order and not as a wickedness, that the parents know it and judge in their turn, and that the kind one is kind without feeling good.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins in Onomichi, a harbour town on the Inland Sea, on a summer morning: boats on the water, a stone lantern, schoolchildren, a passing train. In a house above the harbour an old couple, Shūkichi and Tomi Hirayama, are packing for Tokyo. A neighbour greets them through the window. The air cushion is missing; each is sure the other packed it, and Kyōko, their youngest daughter, a schoolteacher who lives with them, finds it before she leaves for school. A marriage of forty-odd years is given in one object, and the film’s method in one scene: nothing is heightened, and everything is placed.
The design is a journey out and back, and the journey itself is never shown. In Tokyo the parents are passed between the houses of a son and a daughter, sent to a hot spring, and separated for a night; they come back by way of Osaka; the mother falls ill and dies; the children come for the funeral and leave; there is a morning after. Five children: Kōichi, a doctor in Tokyo; Shige, a hairdresser there; Shōji, dead in the war eight years; Keizō, with the railway in Osaka; and Kyōko at home. And one more who is not of the blood, Noriko, Shōji’s widow, who works in an office in Tokyo. The great events of the film happen between its scenes: the journey out, the collapse on the train, the moment of death.
Yasujirō Ozu directed it from a screenplay he wrote with Kōgo Noda, and Takeshi Yamamoto produced it for Shochiku at its Ōfuna studio. It was released in Japan on 3 November 1953, when Ozu was forty-nine: black and white, in the Academy ratio, with mono sound, 136 minutes. Yūharu Atsuta photographed it, Tatsuo Hamada was its art director, Yoshiyasu Hamamura cut it, and Kojun Saitō wrote the score. Chishū Ryū, also forty-nine, plays the old man; Chieko Higashiyama plays Tomi; Setsuko Hara plays Noriko, her third Noriko for Ozu, after Late Spring (1949) and Early Summer (1951); Haruko Sugimura plays Shige. The camera is set low, near the height of a person seated on tatami, and almost never moves. The parents speak the dialect of Onomichi; their children speak the standard Japanese of Tokyo.
Movement II
Kōichi’s house and surgery stand at the city’s edge, among washing on lines and smokestacks. His wife Fumiko moves their elder boy Minoru’s desk to make room for the grandparents, and he sulks. Shige arrives, Noriko comes from work, and the parents arrive. On Sunday Kōichi’s outing to show them Tokyo is cancelled by a call to a sick child, and Minoru throws a tantrum. Tomi walks with the younger boy, Isamu, on the grass embankment, and wonders aloud what he will become and whether she will be there to see it. The child ignores her. The children’s children already have no room, and the question she asks the smaller one is the film’s.
At Shige’s beauty parlour the parents are in the way, among the dryers and mirrors. Shige’s husband Kurazō brings home expensive cakes; she scolds him for the expense and eats them with him. She telephones Noriko at her office and asks her to take the parents out. Noriko takes a day’s leave and shows them the city from a tour bus and from a department-store roof, and then takes them to her apartment, a small rented room, where she borrows sake from a neighbour and serves them under Shōji’s photograph. They talk of him, dead eight years. The daughter has sent the parents on to the daughter-in-law, and the widow is the one with time.
The comedy is Sugimura’s. Shige is brisk, practical and mean about money, and she is never a villain; the camera gives her the same frontal attention it gives her mother. Kōichi is not unkind either. He is a doctor, and he is called away. The method is to show each household at its own work, the surgery, the salon, the office, and to let the parents’ moves follow their children’s hours. Then Kōichi and Shige agree, at her suggestion, to share the cost of sending the parents to the hot spring at Atami. It is a gift, and it is a way of being rid of them, and the film shoots it as both.
Movement III
Atami: the sea wall, the breakwater, the inn. At night there is mahjong, a drunken party, a woman singing into the small hours, and the corridor outside the room, and the parents cannot sleep. Next morning they sit side by side on the sea wall, their backs to the camera and the sea in front of them, and Tomi is dizzy as she rises. They decide to go back. They have seen Tokyo and they have seen Atami, and they will go home. The hot spring is where they learn what they have been paid for, and the film tells them with a song through a wall.
They return to Shige early. She has a hairdressers’ meeting at the house that night and nowhere to put them, and they go out. At Ueno the two sit on the grass above the city with their bundle and work out where each will sleep: Tomi at Noriko’s, Shūkichi with his old friend Hattori. They remark that Tokyo is so large that if they lost each other they might never meet again. Hattori has no room either, and Shūkichi, Hattori and their old friend Numata drink in a bar. Numata laments a son who is only a minor section chief and had lied to him about his rank. Shūkichi admits that he had expected more of Kōichi than a neighbourhood practice, and says that children do not come up to their parents’ hopes, but that his are better than most.
Tomi sleeps in her dead son’s wife’s room. Noriko rubs her shoulders. Tomi urges her to remarry and not to feel bound to them; Noriko presses pocket money on her, and Tomi weeps. A policeman delivers Shūkichi and Numata, drunk, to Shige’s salon, and Shige, disgusted, recalls that his drinking made her mother’s life hard. The night the parents have no bed in Tokyo is divided between a widow’s room and a floor. The father’s disappointment in his son is spoken in a bar and nowhere else, so that what he says of his children later is said by a man who has judged them. And the mother is given money by the one child who owes her nothing. Everything the film will say has been shown by the time the two of them are put on the train.
Movement IV
At Tokyo Station the children see them off. Tomi is taken ill on the train, and they break the journey at Osaka with Keizō, who works for the railway. In his room, with the fan, the two agree that the children have changed, but that they are fortunate compared with most. The man who judged his son in the bar forgives him here, from knowledge rather than innocence. Then a telegram reaches Tokyo: the mother is critical. Shige packs mourning clothes in case. Kōichi, Shige and Noriko travel; Keizō is away on business and arrives late. Tomi lies unconscious with the family seated around her, and Kōichi says that she will not last the night.
She dies before morning. At dawn Shūkichi stands alone in the temple grounds above the harbour, and Noriko comes to fetch him. He says: “Kyō mo atsū naru zo.”
“It’ll be hot again today.” The camera does not rise to the dawn, and the music does not swell. The funeral is held in the temple, with the chanting and the wooden fish. Keizō leaves during the sutra and tells Noriko, on the steps above the sea, that a man wants to be a good son when his parents are already gone. The proverb is the nearest the film comes to a moral, and it is given to the son who came too late.
At the meal after the funeral Shige asks for her mother’s kimono and sash as keepsakes. Kōichi, Shige and Keizō leave by the night train. The house is stripped the day the mother is buried, and the children are gone the same night, and none of it is shot as an outrage. It is shot from the floor, at the same distance as everything else. Left in Onomichi are the father, the youngest daughter, and the widow, who stays.
Movement V
Next morning Kyōko, furious at her brothers and sister, talks with Noriko before school, and Noriko defends them: everyone comes to put their own life first, and she too, though she does not want to, will go the same way. Kyōko: “Iya nē, yo no naka tte.”
“Isn’t it hateful, the way the world is.” Noriko: “Sō… iya na koto bakkari.”
“Yes… nothing but hateful things.” The commonplace is spoken by the kindest person in the film so that the film can go under it. In her classroom Kyōko watches the clock, and a train passes.
Noriko goes to Shūkichi before she leaves, and he thanks her for what she did for them. She answers: “Iie, watashi, zurui n desu.”
“No. I am selfish.” She does not think of Shōji every day; she feels she is waiting for something. He tells her that this honesty is itself the goodness, and gives her Tomi’s watch. Hara’s smile, held through the whole film, breaks here. The one person who was good to the parents is the one who tells them she is not, and the father accepts the confession as he accepted everything else, seated, at the height of the floor.
Noriko on the train, the watch in her hands. The neighbour at the window again; Shūkichi alone with the fan; the harbour, and the boats on the Inland Sea. The film reached London in 1958 and the United States in 1972; its reach since has run through art cinema, from Wim Wenders and Hou Hsiao-hsien to Hirokazu Kore-eda, and it was restored and remade in 2013. The literature is still at odds over whether it is religious stillness, a formal system or a record of 1953. What it shows is not in dispute. The children put their own lives first, and that is the ordinary order; the parents know it and judge in their turn; the kind one is kind without feeling good; and the heat comes again the next day.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged mainly on structure, with a verbal part in the repeated lines and the few speeches that state the film. Run the subtractive test scene by scene and the film resists it. The Atami night is the hinge, where the parents learn they have been paid to go away; without it the night at Ueno has no cause. Noriko’s day is the measure the children are weighed by. The bar is where Shūkichi’s disappointment in his son is spoken, so that his forgiveness is of a man he has judged. Osaka breaks the journey and places the third son. The great events are already removed: the journey out, the collapse, the death. What is charged: the cakes and the hairdressers’ meeting do one job twice, and Hattori’s wife is half a scene of furniture.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds: grown children put their own lives first, and this is the ordinary order rather than wickedness, which the parents know and do not condemn. Noriko says it to Kyōko, and adds that she will go the same way. Kyōko: “Iya nē, yo no naka tte” — “Isn’t it hateful, the way the world is.” Two truths lie under it. Disappointment runs both ways: in the bar Shūkichi admits he had hoped for more of Kōichi, and in Osaka the two agree they are luckier than most. And the kind one is not kind from goodness: “Iie, watashi, zurui n desu” — “No. I am selfish.” Held below the top because the postwar city that has taken the children is shown and not itself opened.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The elevation is quiet and infrequent, and it is real: Tomi on the embankment, bending to a grandchild who ignores her, asking what he will become and whether she will see it; two backs on the Atami sea wall; the two on the grass at Ueno with their bundle, above a city with no room for them; Tomi weeping over the pocket money in her dead son’s wife’s room; the dawn above the harbour after the death; Keizō on the temple steps with the sea below; the watch in Noriko’s hands on the train. Height is reached by withholding: the camera does not rise to the dawn and the music does not swell. Frequency holds the axis down. For long stretches the film is level by design: salon business, a doctor’s house, a tour bus.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The myth is built, from the oldest matter: the aged parents who go to their children and are not wanted, the kind stranger, the death of the mother, the father left alone. Its forms are Lear’s and the folk tale’s, and the structure bears load: the journey out and back; three hosts, two of the blood who fail and one by marriage who passes; the exile to the hot spring; the night without a bed; the death; the stripping of the house, when Shige takes the kimono and sash. The particular stays particular: an air cushion, cakes, a moved desk, a telegram. Held below the top because the method keeps the archetype at the depth of the ordinary and never lets it surface as symbol: the structure is felt rather than seen, and it is one myth, not many.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is double: the Shochiku home drama, the shomin-geki, and Ozu’s own form, settled over twenty years from I Was Born, But… (1932) to Early Summer (1951). Against narrative cinema at large it is a deep departure: a camera that neither moves nor rises, cuts across the line of action, speakers facing almost into the lens, transitions by still shots, every climax off screen. Against Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), said to be the story’s model, the melodrama is drained out and the parents’ own faults are kept in. Held at the gate because the turn was made before this film. By 1953 the grammar was Ozu’s proven path, and the swerve here is of subject more than of form: an old couple as leads, a death at the centre, a widow as the measure.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that this is ordinary and bearable, which only an even form can carry. The ellipses are the content: the parents are left out of their children’s days as the great events are left out of the film, and the viewer learns to live with what is not shown as the parents do. The low, still camera makes the viewer a guest on the floor, not an observer above it. The frontal address makes the viewer the one spoken to, which Noriko’s confession needs. The trains and smoke between scenes set the family in a time that moves whether or not anyone is kind. Make it a melodrama and the knowledge becomes pathos; raise the camera and the parents become small. The one cost is the score, a container rather than an instrument.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Seventy-three years of return are evidence. The literature is large and still at odds: Donald Richie’s Ozu and Paul Schrader’s Transcendental Style in Film in the 1970s, Noël Burch, Hasumi Shigehiko and David Bordwell’s Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema after them, and a handbook on this film alone. The readings are incompatible: religious stillness, a formal system indifferent to meaning, a social record of 1953. It yields on return in both ways. A first viewing sees the children’s unkindness; later ones see Shige’s comedy, the parents’ own failings, the drinking and the father’s judgment of his son, and Noriko’s confession as the real subject. Formally, the cutting across the whole space of a room and the rhymes between shots can be studied without end. Held below the top by span: seventy years against the centuries behind the literary bench.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Released in 1953, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the fullest statement of a grammar that reorganised what narrative cinema could do without, which is movement, climax, villainy and plot. Part of that force belongs to Ozu’s earlier films, and it is discounted. The reach was delayed, then wide, and within art cinema rather than popular film: the film reached London in 1958 and the United States in 1972, and inside Japan the New Wave of the 1960s defined itself against Ozu. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Wim Wenders’ Tokyo-Ga (1985), Hou Hsiao-hsien and the Taiwanese cinema of the 1980s, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Still Walking (2008), built on this film’s shape, Abbas Kiarostami’s Five Dedicated to Ozu, Yōji Yamada’s remake Tokyo Family (2013), and the slow cinema of the last three decades.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Survival is demonstrated across seventy-three years: continuous exhibition, the restoration of 2013, a remake, and a standing in the Sight and Sound critics’ polls that has risen rather than fallen, third in 2012, fourth in 2022, and first in the directors’ poll of 2012. The surface fixed to its moment is part of the subject: the postwar city, the war dead, the tour bus and the beauty parlour are 1953, and the film is about what 1953 did to a family, so they age as history, not as fashion. The condition it treats has not changed. The cost is physical: the image as it survives is softer and grainier than other Shochiku films of its year. That is a loss to the fabric, and it takes little of what makes the work. With its form whole and its presence unbroken, the evidence would have carried it level with the works of its decade that have lasted best on other desks, Waiting for Godot, its exact contemporary, among them, and the medium’s span holds it at 8.8. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it. Seventy-three years is a shorter and narrower demonstration than the oldest works on the bench have made: the Parthenon, its form still legible after nearly twenty-five centuries, has come through changes of language, faith and state, and a film has so far come through only its own decades and the changes of its own medium.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium bears weight throughout. The low camera and its compositions: doorways, corridors and rooms in depth, figures placed in the same spot of the frame from shot to shot. The cutting, frontal shot answered by frontal shot, with still lifes between scenes that keep time moving. Yūharu Atsuta’s photography of interiors by day and the harbour at dawn. The script’s repetitions and its two registers of speech, Onomichi against Tokyo. The performances: Chishū Ryū’s stillness and old man’s gait at forty-nine, Chieko Higashiyama’s slowness, Haruko Sugimura’s briskness, which is the film’s comedy, and Setsuko Hara’s smile, held until the last scene breaks it. The sound: trains, boats, singing through the inn’s walls. The costs: Kojun Saitō’s score is conventional, and sentimental where the images are not; Ryū’s age-acting shows once or twice.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the Atami night, mahjong tiles and a drunken song through the wall, and the dawn above the harbour after the death. One law governs both: everyone is living their own life, time passes at one speed for all of them, and the camera watches each from one height and one distance. Shige’s meanness and Noriko’s kindness are shot identically; no one is lit as a villain or a saint. The comedy of the cakes, the desk and two drunk fathers delivered by a policeman obeys the same even physics as the grief, and the range between them is wide for so quiet a film. The one strain is the score, warmer than the images, which tells the viewer what to feel where the camera will not. It is small, and it is the only break in the law.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The orders held in one structure: the family at the centre, three generations and five children; consciousness, in Noriko’s confession and the parents’ reckoning in Osaka; labour, since each child is placed by work, surgery, salon, railway, office and school, and the parents’ moves follow their children’s hours; time and the generations, in the watch, the clock and the trains; death and its rites, in the funeral and the temple above the harbour; history, in Shōji dead eight years and a capital filling from the provinces; town against city, two orders of life. Each is reached through the family and none is listed. What is held weakly keeps the axis lowest: history and the sacred are glimpsed, not entered; the state is absent except as the war that took Shōji; nature is a frame of boats and heat.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 9.4 and The Made at 9.3, then The Unconcealment, The Bottomless Well and The Inner Law at 9.1. A form whose ellipses and floor-level view are the knowledge itself, a command of composition, cutting and performance that carries a film with no climax on screen, a disclosure that is stated and then gone under, seventy-three years of incompatible readings, and one even physics from the mahjong tiles to the dawn.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.0 — the family, labour, time, death and the town against the city are held in one structure; history and the sacred are glimpsed, the state is absent but for the war, and nature is a frame of boats and heat. Next above it, The Swerve at 8.5: a grammar that departs far from narrative cinema but was Ozu’s proven path before this film, so that the turn here is of subject more than of form. Then The Sublime at 8.6, held down by frequency in a film that is level by design.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.4, The Made at 9.3, The Inner Law at 9.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Unconcealment at 9.1, Pressure on Tradition at 8.9, and The Archetypal Deep and The Imperishable at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Swerve meets it exactly, at 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.5, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, 8.9 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Tōkyō monogatari (東京物語) as released in Japan by Shochiku on 3 November 1953, 136 minutes, from the harbour at morning to the harbour at the close: directed by Yasujirō Ozu from a screenplay by Kōgo Noda and Ozu, photographed by Yūharu Atsuta, with music by Kojun Saitō. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the Japanese film. The English renderings are the desk’s own, used for sense, a reader’s aid rather than the object; no subtitled version is judged, and nothing here is charged to one. The difference between the parents’ Onomichi speech and the children’s Tokyo speech is heard in outline and is part of the film’s argument; its finer registers are beyond this reading and are neither credited nor charged. Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow enters only where the inherited tradition is described, Ozu’s other films only under the swerve and the pressure on tradition, and the remake of 2013 only as evidence of reach. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, four lines in all, in romanised Japanese above the English, and is otherwise paraphrased without quotation marks. No timing within the film is given. Facts that could not be verified, among them the length of any scene, the number of shots in which the camera moves, the fate of the original negative, the circumstances of the film’s delayed export and the characters’ ages, are not given.