Perhaps motivated by white guilt (having only a trace of Asian heritage myself), I’ve always opposed characterizations of Japanese art as subtle, inscrutable, feminine or “Zen” (whatever that means)…and then I encounter an artist who actually is all those things: filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. Ozu is perhaps Kurosawa’s most serious competition for the title of “greatest twentieth century Japanese director,” and his name routinely appears on lists of the greatest directors of all time. But unlike Kurosawa, if “Zen” refers anything more than a conservative monastic tradition imported from China, Ozu is totally Zen. The record suggests that Kurosawa didn’t care for Ozu: he found him boring.

It’s hard to pick one standout in Ozu’s oeuvre; Floating Weeds and Tokyo Story often come up, and his Late Spring (1949) is my own favorite. Late Spring is not be confused with Early Spring, Early Autumn, Early Summer, The End of Summer and An Autumn Afternoon, many of which feature the same actress: the radiant and versatile Setsuko Hara. In Late Spring, she plays Noriko, the unmarried daughter of a well-respected and elderly professor. Her father thinks it’s time she got married. She wants to stay and look after him. Eventually, as the result of some good-natured trickery, she does get married. And she and her father take a last trip together to picturesque Kyouto. That’s it; that’s the whole movie.

Above: Noriko’s father enjoys Noh drama, Noriko is preoccupied

Ozu is known for not moving his camera, and for skipping right over what you would think are important scenes (in Late Spring, Noriko’s marriage is never shown). They have emotional tension, but that tension is never released. Critic Roger Ebert, a man I’ve grown to love, writes in his “Great Movies” collection that the deceptive emotional calm of Late Spring conceals that Noriko’s marriage is forced and unhealthy; I disagree. Ozu’s characters accept the transformations of life. That they are able to do so without disturbing us is part of his mystique. The story of Late Spring is by turns funny, charming, touching, hauntingly sad; but the final impression is only of the strange beauty of life.

Above: Ozu at work

I should repeat that I find this type of artist rare, even in Japan; rather you have Miyazaki’s action-packed romps, Takashi Miike’s stylized ultra-violence, schoolgirls with wardrobe malfunctions, author Yukio Mishima killing himself in public. Ozu reminds me most of novelist Yasunari Kawabata, who said that after the Japanese defeat, he would write “only elegies;” but even in his work I think the undercurrent of grief and anger is stronger, and the effect more disturbing. Ozu is Ozu. His grave marker in Kamakura is inscribed with a single Chinese character: mu, or “nothing.”

Ebert’s essay on Late Spring

Note: Simply in passing, for those of you who have seen the anime Azumanga Daioh: after watching Late Spring I realized that AD’s greatest episode, One Summer Night, is surely a tribute to Ozu.