Tree Without Leaves / Deciduous Trees / Rakuyoju (1986)

An old man walks through the snow and hears his mother calling him in to supper on a summer night, beginning a long journey into his childhood memories. Since the old man is a screenwriter now trying to write his first “novel,” we can assume this is an autobiographical film by Kaneto Shindo about his own childhood, which along the way not only idolizes his mother but also reflects the enormous physical and cultural changes he has lived through.

Set in a village near Hiroshima, we immediately sense impending doom, but the time is much earlier, probably around 1920, and the family’s doom comes from the strange, all but silent, father. For young Haru, however, the initial memories are of a prosperous family full of love. His two older sisters tease him about being “mother’s hanger-on,” as the subtitles have it. Born when his mother was already 41, he is her pet. The other children do not seem to be particularly jealous of this. Though we do eventually get told that he was eleven when she died, several years are covered. Enough time is depicted that the eldest son does his military service, becomes a policeman, and gets married, while the younger sister grows from Haru’s playmate to old enough to leave home to become a nurse. Time jumps around in Haru’s memories, so we can’t be sure of his exact age at any given moment. He still sleeps with his mother, makes her tell him bedtime stories, and often suckles at her breast; in one surprising bath scene, shown twice, she dries him off and gently kisses his penis.

It is an idyllic world for Haru, even when things begin to fall apart. Father has guaranteed another man’s loan and refuses to sell even one field of his “ancestral land” to pay off the debt, so interest payments eventually result in the loss of all the land and even the family’s house. The elder daughter in effect insists on selling herself to help with the family debts, but it is to a man whom we never see who appears to marry her and take her to America. As a child, Haru does not really understand what has happened or why, but as an old man he wonders if his father was obstinate or just stupid. Whatever the reasons, Father is no tyrant; basically, he just sits and smokes while mother and the children do the work, but no one complains because that is the way of life.

It is not a life of constant toil, however. Haru plays with his younger sister in the twilight or in the nearby stream, the family (except Father) make regular trips over the mountain to the beach, there are numerous festivals, New Year visits from traveling entertainers, and young men on bicycles visiting after the harvest to shyly eye the eldest daughter while the family listens to the phonograph, or trips alone with Mom on Sundays to visit the brother in his barracks.

Before the land begins to be sold off, there is plenty of food in many varieties. Mother never seems to tire, despite her comparatively advanced age. This is no Naked Island, nor even Shindo’s earlier Mother.

The house is so large, and Father so insistent about his “ancestral lands” that we wonder about some Samurai ancestry. However, Mother tells Haru that his great-grandfather was a carpenter who built the house by himself. He also taught judo and, because he knew the acupressure points of a body, actually became rich as a doctor using traditional Chinese methods.

When the house is finally sold, Mother, Father, and Haru move into their former storage building, where Father immediately sits on the first tatami mat laid down and begins to smoke.

Rather surprisingly, the house itself is torn down by the buyers, the lumber and roof tiles taken away to be used elsewhere.

The elderly Haru, though always seen in kimono, lives in a modern world (even with female joggers) and has to go to a mountain cabin to find the solitude to remember and to write. A woman (Meiko Kaji, now nearly forty) hikes out to visit him one day in the summer.

She brings some delicacies from Tokyo (including a Newton’s cradle), reads his memoir, and stays overnight. He explains to her why he thinks it is so important as the last of the family to save the memory of his mother before he himself dies. We never find out if she is a daughter, a younger mistress, or even his wife, for she hikes out the next day and is not seen again.

Shindo began his directing career with Nobuko Otowa playing the perfect wife, so it is no surprise that she is now cast as the perfect mother. Shot in a pristine b&w, with music by Hikaru Hayashi built around two traditional Japanese songs, the movie is elegaic without wandering over into the sentimental, nostalgic but with a strong foundation of reality.  It is clearly a very personal project for Shindo, yet its detailed evocation of a lost world makes it a universal look at memory and childhood, as well as one of the most convincing post-war reproductions of an old Japan now gone.