Tokyo Sonata

It was September 2008 that I first went to Japan, mainly Tokyo; eight years ago to this month. This is around the same sort of time that Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 'Tokyo Sonata' was released. Eight years on, my love-affair with Japanese culture, particularly its cinema, still holds strong, but can the same still be said for the film which I first saw in January 2009.

For me, a real test of any piece of art is: in ten years time will you still be watching/listening/reading/however you choose to consume it? While not quite a decade, I have recently re-watched 'Tokyo Sonata', a film I have now watched a number of times. While it is quite simple in its premise, and possibly in its conclusions also, it is a film that I always find more to appreciate with each viewing.

Around the time of the global 'credit crunch', salaryman Sasaki finds his department being outsourced to China as part of a cost-saving measure. Unable to find any other skill he can offer the company, he is left middle-aged and unemployed, but too proud to reveal his new status to his wife and family. He, therefore, spends his days queuing for free meals, at job agencies and finding ways to pass the time in his suit with briefcase to complete the facade of 9-5 mundanity to his wife.

But he is not the only member of the family keeping secrets: Wife Megumi takes secret driving lessons to attain her license; eldest son Takashi wants to join the US foreign volunteer army; and youngest son Kenji uses his lunch money to fund after school piano lessons. While portraying a perfectly ordinary family unit, the four lack basic communication and any real knowledge of each other's lives.

For a film with Tokyo in the title, this isn't perhaps specific to Japan's capital itself in terms of the modern problems faced. Referencing the global financial crisis of the last decade and war in the Middle East were problems for every country, and so nothing unique to Japan. What does make it Tokyoite though is its use of shots of some of the less obvious parts of Tokyo, focusing on the more mundane and ordinary parts of the metropolis, a far cry from the typical shots foreign-made films will use to portray Tokyo.

Filming much of the piece in more gloomy twilight also adds to this sense of the ordinary, but also the changing of state in the lives of the main characters, as they take a turn for the worse, reminiscent of Kore-eda Hirokazu's 'Maborosi'. While in parts clunky in how they get there, the father, mother and youngest son all find themselves hitting low points: waking in a gutter, an abandoned beach hut and prison cell respectively, as the most ordinary of families finds itself quickly dysfunctional from their own lack of communication.

Kurosawa is perhaps known more for horror, suspense and mystery than Ozu-esque family structures, but here combining the use of twilight with the film's soundtrack create a haunting image of Tokyo, different from most, showing the city in a different light.

While nothing distinctively groundbreaking in terms of moral message, warning of the dangers of modern isolation and its affect of traditional family structures, it is still a message that holds relevant today, despite its distinctively Naughties setting.

While not perfect, there are some brilliant scenes, notably the revelation of Kenji's piano lessons resulting in a trip to A+E and the film's conclusion where, for once, the family listen to each other. While fairly run-of-the-mill in conclusion, the blank-faced audience left watching them is less so, in anticipation of what is to come.