One Wonderful Sunday / Subarashiki nichiyobi (1947)

When Criterion released One Wonderful Sunday, it was something of a surprise for admirers of Kurosawa. The story of a young couple’s Sunday in 1947 Tokyo that is anything but wonderful, it is not at all what people expected from the writer/director of Seven Samurai or The Bad Sleep Well. Many commenters have seen it as Kurosawa’s only shomin-geki, but it is a long way from the carefully observed and gently illustrated pre-war films about the middle-class world growing up around the salarymen. Instead, it gives us one of our best available views of Occupied Japan during the very worst years before the reconstruction of the economy had taken hold. In that sense, we can see it as  part of an unintentional trilogy with Mizoguchi’s Women of the Night and Shimizu’s Children of the Beehive that show how people on the bottom rungs tried to find a respectable way to cope during Japan’s darkest hours.

Much of One Wonderful Sunday is visually studio-bound, but whenever we step outside we find a city still in ruins. Masako and Yuso are engaged and meet on Sundays to spend some time together. Pooling their resources, they can only manage 35 yen. He is so depressed and poor he even tries to smoke discarded cigarette butts because he can’t afford any of his own. She, however, is always positive and hopeful, sometimes past the point of believability and together they try to entertain themselves with almost no money.

Baseball in the streets

We see the inevitable children’s baseball game, which he is temporarily drawn into, with pauses for both a truck and an oxcart. They go to the zoo, where a sudden downpour drives them out. They go to look at model homes for new developments

In the model home

and eye the sample they can’t possibly afford with great longing while another couple makes fun of its shabbiness and small space. They hear of an available room, only to discover that they can’t afford it even though it is a tiny cell with no light or amenities. They share their lunch with a feral young boy.

The young boy on his own

He visits an old army buddy who has a night club in search of a better job, only to be mistaken for a beggar and shunted off out of sight of the gaudy new black-market rich customers.

Contrasts of the new society

They spot a concert playing the same music as their first date and try to buy the cheapest possible tickets, only to see them all snapped up by scalpers ahead of them in line. The last of their money goes on coffee and pastries that turn out to be inedible, while they plan for the little cafe they will start someday.

In their imaginary cafe

They are left with nothing but their imaginations as they try to recreate Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony in an abandoned amphitheatre in another rain. Wherever they go, they find prosperity only for the cheats and ruins for the honest and respectable.

The imaginary cafe and the  Tinkerbell final scene remind us of course of Frank Capra’s Depression films and they do go on long after the point is made. But up till that point, it is as direct and straight-forward as any of the Italian neo-realists who were dealing with much the same situations at the same time.

While watching, I could not but think about my own parents, newly married and looking for steady work and a place to live in a community that had not yet caught up to the need for housing or employment caused by the return of the soldiers. I remember as a small child in the 1950s accompanying them on Sunday excursions to look at model homes which, even with my Dad’s now steady job, they could never afford. But at least in America after the war, the economic structure was in place and the better life ahead was something more than just a hope and a prayer.

Compared to Mizoguchi’s women or Shimazu’s children, the young couple are still quite fortunate — they have jobs, however miserable and low-paying, and they “have each other,” as the cliché goes.

One cultural surprise, given the date, is that they are actually “dating.” They were apparently dating before he was drafted and sent overseas, since they try to recreate a first date that can only have come in better times, and there is no mention anywhere of her parents having arranged a marriage for her.  The man does seem to be entirely her choice. They are a “modern couple” with pre-war lower middle-class backgrounds trying to cope with a world of poverty they were not really prepared to cope with. This modernity is even illustrated with a kiss, the earliest I have come across in my viewings. We don’t actually see the lips touch, just a lean together with one head blocking the camera, but there is no doubt that is what we’re intended to understand that they are doing. In Japanese movies before this date, and for many years later, couples do not kiss and even a hug is rare. I don’t think this is a matter of censorship, because there is almost no reticence about sexual relations such as is found in American movies made under the Code (where kissing was allowed but only standing up) or in modern Bollywood movies (where no kissing is allowed at all). Rather, it seems to be something fundamental in Japanese cultural tradition.* But no matter how modern their actions may appear, she still takes on the traditional woman’s role of maintaining the stability and spirit of her man.

Fascinating as it may be as a social document, One Wonderful Sunday is also interesting for its portrayal of the ups and downs of the couple’s relationship, compressed into a single day. It’s not what most people expect from Kurosawa, but it is more than just a curiosity.

• I remember a lovely scene in another movie of about the same time in which a young man is leaving for the war and saying goodbye to his intended. Her face is desperate for a kiss, maybe a hug or even just the touch of his hand to remember him by. He pauses, feeling the same urge, but then stops himself and formally bows to her and leaves. I think this is in Morning for the Osone Family, but I saw it at least five years ago when my note-taking was not so detailed and will need to rewatch it to be sure.