Every girl should get married, and every father is doing the right thing by seeing to it that this happens—in letting his daughter go. This conventional wisdom, though, does not describe how Shukichi and Noriko Somiya, in Yasujiro Ozu’s Banshun, feel. Although no spring chicken (she is 27), Noriko has no interest in marriage and […]

Yasujiro Ozu’s first postwar film, Nagaya shinshiroku, is as delightful as his comedy I Was Born, but . . . and twice as profound. Its makeshift family reflects Japan’s shaken institutions, and its setting—the lower-class section of downtown Tokyo—reflects Japan’s postwar economic hardship. What irony that the character who sets the plot into motion, Tashiro, […]

This entry appears in my list of the 100 Greatest Asian Films, which you will find elsewhere on this site. Yasujiro Ozu’s first film in color again mines generational difference and conflict. At a wedding reception, businessman Wataru Hirayama notes the shift from arranged marriages to love matches. He approves, but at the same time […]

One of Yasujiro Ozu’s last silent films is Ukigusa monogatari. “Weeds” refer to an itinerant troupe of stage performers currently lighting in a remote mountain village. The film opens with their “floating” in, and closes with their “floating” out, by train.      The group’s leader is Kihachi Ichikawa. He visits Otsune (Choko Iida, superb), the mother […]