Tokyo Sonata is a horror film of sorts, but one without the ghosts and serial killers that have populated Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s earlier work. There aren’t even any killer trees, as in Charisma, or poisonous jellyfish, as in Bright Future. Kurosawa’s films have always offered social commentary, but on their own eccentric terms. Cure responded obliquely to the Aum Shrinyiko subway gas attacks, while Pulse confronted a generation of lonely, Internet-obsessed otaku. Even Kurosawa films with no genre elements, like Bright Future and License To Live, have been pretty off-kilter. Tokyo Sonata’s first two-thirds are startlingly straightforward, commenting directly on Japan’s recession. After the disappointing Retribution, which recycled images and plotlines from Cure and Pulse, Tokyo Sonata marks a real comeback for Kurosawa - his best film since Pulse, made eight years ago - and a new direction.
Businessman Ryuhei Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa) gets fired in the first few minutes of Tokyo Sonata. He’s a victim of downsizing: his firm has sent his job to China. He doesn’t tell his wife or two sons about this. Instead, he pretends to continue going to work. Everyday, he puts on a suit and tie and goes out to get free food from an open-air soup kitchen. He goes to a temp agency, but he finds only menial work available there. Meanwhile, his wife Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi) stays at home and looks after Takashi (Yu Koyanagi), a college student with little direction in life, and Kenji (Kai Inowaki), a 6th-grader who loves playing piano. Ryuhei eventually takes a job as a shopping mall janitor, but he keeps this from his family, although Megumi sees him in line at the soup kitchen one day and learns his secret. Kenji has some secrets of his own: he uses his lunch money to pay for private piano lessons, since Ryuhei disapproves of this interest.
In interviews, Kurosawa stresses that the apocalyptic endings found in many of his films aren’t intended to be completely negative or hopeless. For him, there’s creative potential in the act of destruction. Without the safety nets of genre or metaphor, Tokyo Sonata examines what it’s like to live through a social collapse. In it, the old, patriarchal values of family life have disintegrated, but nothing has yet arrived to replace them. Ryuhei obviously feels shame about his unemployment, but he’s incapable of expressing it in words. (Kagawa’s tightly clenched jaw does much of his acting.) He can’t communicate with his children. When Takashi wants to join the U.S. Army, Ruyhei’s offended by his son’s statement that he’s doing so to protect his family, but Ryuhei has no real protection to offer.
In school, Tokyo Sonata shows the same breakdown of authority. Kenji gets in trouble for possessing a comic book in the classroom. His anger at being punished for it is justifiable, since half the class had passed it around and he didn’t own it, but he responds by claiming that he saw his teacher reading pornographic comics on the subway. From there, the teacher’s power over his students is completely ruined; in a later scene, they throw confetti around and write “Ero-Bayashi,” mocking his name, on the blackboard. There’s a hint of conservative nostalgia here, but Tokyo Sonata is more concerned with finding solutions to present-day Japanese dilemmas.
For its first eighty minutes, Tokyo Sonata is Kurosawa’s first foray into humanist social realism. One can recognize the same worldview present in all his films, but it’s never been expressed so directly before. His earlier work is much colder. Then, Tokyo Sonata goes off the rails, as the Sasaki family becomes separated and spin off in their own directions. Kurosawa proves himself a master of switching tones, balancing tension and humor ably. He also turns the focus away from Ryuhei to Megumi, showing that a housewife’s life is no easier than that of a laid-off salaryman.
In Kurosawa’s earlier work, nuclear families are relatively rare. Instead, he focused on isolated loners, usually played by Koji Yakusho. (Yakusho pops up here in a small but crucial role.) At times, Tokyo Sonata presents a savage vision of family life as a charade that’s long since stopped meaning anything to its participants. Still, Ryuhei proves shockingly capable of violence to defend his nonexistent authority. In the end, Kurosawa has the courage to imagine a path out of chaos. For the first time, he shows the other side of apocalypse.
Also, he finally seems to have something in common with earlier Japanese directors like Mikio Naruse and Yasujiro Ozu. (Cure and Charisma were unrecognizable as products of the same culture as Ozu’s Tokyo Story.) Ozu chronicled the changes in Japanese family life from the ‘30s through the early ‘60s; here, Kurosawa does much the same for present-day Japan, finding hope without compromising the force of his critique.
For more Tokyo Sonata, see our interview with Kurosawa from the 2008 Toronto Film Festival.
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