Tokyo Sonata (2008)

Though it was widely seen and written about on its initial release, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata is so full of forgotten detail that it is more than worth a second or a third look. While it is the story of a salaryman who loses his job and almost loses his family, it is far more than that.

Perhaps most important is to remember that the events depicted have happened before 2008 and its world-wide economic collapse, the context in which foreigners first saw it on its initial release. Just as Japan’s student protests had preceded those in the west, its economic bubble (ironically also related to real estate) had also burst much earlier. In a sense, then, Tokyo Sonata is a revisit to the Japan of Ah, Spring or Currency and the Blonde, which had also dealt with salarymen who a decade earlier lost what they thought was a job guaranteed for a lifetime. The company for which Sasaki had worked had weathered that first crisis, but now something new has happened. The company has been bought by a Chinese company and is moving its headquarters to Dalian, now ironically reversing Japan’s earlier colonization of the Chinese city, just as China was now replacing Japan as the leading Asian economy. Sasaki is an adminstrator who now has no office to go to and nothing to administer.

Stunned, he soon discovers that he is far from alone. While he had been safely in his office, Tokyo’s streets were filling up with the unemployed and many of them, like him, wear suits and ties. When he goes to the employment office, the lines outside the door run down the stairs for several stories, the library is full of men in suits pretending to look busy, and the lines at the soup kitchen are long.

Though we see no homeless camps or people begging on the streets, he spends much of his day in an abandoned construction site, where people sometimes congregate for hours waiting for the soup kitchen to arrive. When he goes for job interviews, he has no specific new skill to offer them – he administers and manages, which requires other people to be managed and orders from above to be administered. One interviewer grows so frustrated that Sasake is asked to sing some karaoke.

Yet at home he pretends that everything is fine. He puts on his coat and tie, picks up his briefcase, and leaves every morning as if heading for the office, joining the crowd of other commuters headnig for the station. He returns every evening as if he was on his regular schedule, He still can give his wife the household money, but during the day spent in central Tokyo he has nothing to do. When he is not standing in line, he waits around for the food kitchen that feeds lunch to the homeless. He runs into an old high school friend Kurosu, who at first seems to be constantly on the phone to his office but is also unemployed and also hasn’t told his wife. After bringing Sasaki home for dinner to pretend he is an underling from the same office, Kurosu kills his wife and himself. Eventually, Sasaki does find a job, as a janitor at a shopping mall, which does have similar hours so he can continue to pretend to be going to the office, and where many of his compatriots will also be changing out of suits as they wordlessly don their uniforms. The job is even more humiliating than normal cleaning work because the janitors must change into their coveralls in front of public lockers. Each janitor works alone, so we see none of the joking collegiality we would associate with such jobs in the west; each man is living a secret life and keeps it that way.

However, the movie is far from the merely historical and sociological document of the times that it first seemed to be, for it is really about Sasaki’s family, which initially seems perfectly normal, even ideal. They have their own house, and Megumi the mother is a typical housewife, cleaning, cooking, taking care of the family which includes Tasaki the eldest son of 17 and Kenji a sixth-grader. But something is not right.

Kurosawa has placed them in a setting that always separates them, the camera always observing through shelves or stair rails or from the other room. Since it is a Kiyoshi Kurosawa movie (which meant nothing to me when I first saw it), there is the expectation that all these visual divisions are going to lead to a horror story of some kind, but it is a far different horror than Kurosawa has been associated with before or since.

Sasaki’s family has fallen apart well before Sasaki loses his job, but he has not noticed. Everyone else we see is in either a broken family or one that is about to break. Kenji wants to play the piano, but Sasaki refuses to pay for lessons for him. Since he can’t admit that he can’t afford them because he has lost his job, he falls back on “Because I said so.” Kenji then skips school and uses his lunch money for the lessons anyway, practicing in quiet in his room on an electric keyboard he found in the trash. When his teacher tells the family that she thinks he has real talent and should go to music school, this leads to one of the most surprisingly shocking scenes you’ll ever come across.

Tasaki has not gone to university. He has a job, but it is a nothing job passing out advertising leaflets. Like many an American teenager who is still living at home, he comes and goes with little explanation and when he is home spends most of his time in his room. He ultimately decides that Japan has nothing to offer him and joins the US Army. This is during the Iraq War, when the US was offering citizenship to foreign nationals who enlisted, though it is a surprise to see that some Japanese had taken up the offer. When The Surge comes in 2007, he is sent to Iraq. Though Megumi thinks she has seen his ghost, he is not killed yet never returns home.*

Megumi too is discontented, though as the traditional wife she never expresses it openly. In secret, she has gotten a driver’s license, though the family has no car. Making a window-shopping trip, the car salesman automatically tries to sell her an SUV-like “family car,” but she is drawn to the convertible. On her way to the train station afterward, she sees Sasaki at the soup kitchen and waits at home for him to tell her why he is there, but he never volunteers the information and she never openly asks. With one son gone, she wants someone, anyone, to help her find a new life. When a burglar breaks in, he takes her hostage and she gets to drive his stolen convertible.

She stops at the mall to go to the toilet, comes face to face with Sasaki, and then returns to the car, driving away with the burglar to the seaside. After lying down in the surf, she returns to the shack they found, only to waken at dawn and see car tracks leading straight into the ocean.

Beyond the economic problems, Tokyo Sonata is also looking at the breakdown of “authority.” When Kenji is wrongly punished at school, he blurts out that he saw the teacher reading a porn manga on the train. The class uses that to give the teacher a nickname that destroys his classroom authority – he will never again be respected as their sensei. When Megami asks Sasake to relent about the piano lessons, he openly tells her he can’t change his mind, for to do so would destroy his authority in the family. Tasaki’s friend wants an earthquake that would destroy all the men that had gotten Japan into this mess. And it is a breakdown that appears to be caused not so much by the secrets themselves but by a deeply ingrained hypocrisy, where everyone lives a life of secrets that they can not share with others, even those they love, and a political/social hypocrisy that constantly papers over the cracks and pretends that nothing is wrong. Though we never see such an obvious visual metaphor, everything is like one of those paper screens in historical movies with panels patched over in different papers to disguise previous damage and poverty.

It seems important to note that this is a Tokyo sonata, not a Japanese sonata. Except for Megumi’s night excursion to the beach, we never leave the city (and the ocean is never very far away in Tokyo), and the ills we see, both economic and personal, are closely related to metropolitan life. Perhaps more accurately, it is about suburban life, where the husband is away all day and the wife is alone inside the house behind the little wall, apparently without contact with the neighboring wives who are equally alone, cleaning and waiting for someone to return only so she can feed them.

Tokyo Sonata is the first Kurosawa movie in a decade that is not a horror movie, and also the first movie in the same decade not to use Koji Yakusho as his leading man. Teruyuki Kagawa’s permanent hang-dog look makes him seem like a man born to be stepped on, so we are more surprised when he tries to be authoritarian than when he seems lost without his job. Yakusho does make an appearance as the burglar, both his character and his personal presence rather imbalancing what has otherwise been a carefully detailed and quiet movie and suggesting a last-minute addition to the screenplay when Yakusho suddenly had a break in his busy schedule. Kyoko Koizumi turns in another subtle and powerful performance as Megumi, reminiscent of Hideko Takamine at her best, and young Kai Inowaki in his first appearance of a continuing career is absolutely natural as Kenji.

Sasaki is eventually hit by a car, left by the roadside among the trash, in one of the few obvious metaphors. Nevertheless, he survives this and makes it home. In a quiet morning breakfast, the three remaining members of the family may be thought to be starting over, but still no one chooses to explain where they have been during the previous night. Though no “happy ending” has ever been more beautifully and tastefully presented as when Kenji plays Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” for his audition, the scene still has the sense of being added on to try to resolve an otherwise bleak movie that had no plausible dramatic resolution.

With that caveat, it is a fascinating movie, utterly engrossing. It is also the last movie Kurosawa would make for another decade that was not in the horror, sci-fi, or the supernatural genre, though some of those only used the genre to make more personal explorations of isolation and loss.

* Takashi is not part of the small “humanitarian” unit that Japan itself sent; he enlists directly in the US forces. Though Iraq is not specified, the TV news reports saying only “The Middle East,” the first “surge” using that term was in Iraq in 2007. There is of course the possibility that Takashi was sent to Afghanistan, especially since he sends a letter to his mother saying he has chosen to stay with the people he has come to like and help them fight the US. It is also striking that his “ghost” doesn’t talk about his personal danger but about the many people he has killed.