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Cinema Ozu (24): Kihachi's Farewell at An Inn in Tokyo

Feature #32:
An Inn in Tokyo / Tokyo no yado
(1935)
Status: 80 minutes out of ten reels available on DVD in Asia
Script: fully preserved
Prints: partial negative and prints survive
Region1 DVD: none as of this writing

Ozu's single surviving feature (out of two) from 1935 is Kihachi's swan song. In it, he has grown quite a bit in selflessness and maturity. This time around, he has two sons. One is played by "Tokkan Kozo" once again, but is not named Tomibo. There's less screwing around and more drifting in desperate seek of work.

Father and sons

The narrative somewhat mirrors parts of Passing Fancy, with Kihachi meeting an attractive young woman (Otaka, played by Yoshiko Okada) and re-connecting with an old ladyfriend (a third instance of "Otsune", played by Choko Iida once more). This time, the young lady has a toddler daughter, and is similarly in dire need of work, shelter, food, and income. Kihachi and the boys meet Otaka walking through a field. The children play for a bit, and they part ways.

Kihachi and single mom Otaka watching their respective kids play

Kihachi and sons eating after losing the bundle of their few material possessions.

One night, Kihachi and sons choose food over shelter, and it begins to rain. By chance, Kihachi runs into Otsune, who offers them a roof and sustenance until Kihachi can get them back on their feet. Kihachi once again harbors an infatuation with the young woman, but here, it comes off as less creepy and selfish. He seems more concerned with providing a mother for his boys and comes off as genuinely sympathetic for the single mother with a young daughter. As Kihachi cranks up his courting engine, the mother and daughter disappear due to the little girl getting dysentery.

Kihachi resumes binge drinking his sorrows away, and finds Otaka has become a sake bar hostess (and implied prostitute) to pay for the girl's treatment. He makes a valiant (though questionable) sacrifice of himself by stealing the money needed, which Otsune would have undoubtedly loaned had she known the circumstances. Kihachi walks off into the night. In the context of the film, he's going to give himself up to the police, but in cinematic history, he's fading into the mist forever.

The boys. "Tokkan Kozo" (l.) sure is growing up a lot.

Even considering the shortsighted, foolish decision that Kihachi makes, Inn in Tokyo transforms him from a selfish, petty cretin into a noble savage just as he is retired. Sakamoto will go on to perform in more Ozu films over the next couple of decades, but predominantly in supporting and bit parts. An "Appendix" piece on Sakamoto is in the offing this week, so watch for that.

Children make the most of what they have to play with and fixate on. In this movie, they fixate on a hat.

The themes of despair and the struggle to survive among the poor working classes becomes yet more pronounced in this film and peaks in the next two Ozu features. The mid-30's were a time of great economic hardship in Japan, and the unemployment rate had been steadily climbing for years. As discussed in my entry on Until the Day We Meet Again, Japan had been getting more and more serious about full-on war with China in a non-rhetorical way since 1931. It's my assertion that the economic downturn that followed The Manchurian Incident was a contributing factor to the further escalation of war with China, since the age-old solution for economic woes had always been starting a new war.

Chishu Ryu's quick cameo as a policeman

There are these massive, empty spindles that litter the landscape of this film (seen in the first couple of images embedded in this article). They're the type used for giant masses of rolled cabling. The rapid modernization of Japan has produced this inorganic industrial waste that is as prevalent here as buildings and actual functional structures in previous films. Ozu could never be accused of self-imposed tactics of overt imagery, and I would caution against assuming that Inn in Tokyo is some sort of subtle "statement". If anything, it stands out compared to other films of the era in terms of realistic "this is how people are living", but there is no blunt sociopolitical "message movie" disguised here. The desolate "industrial desert" (as Bordwell puts it) is a powerful precursor to The Only Son.

Next up for Choko Iida: one of the most selfless, tragic mothers in cinema

To me, this final appearance of Kihachi seems to characterize the quiet extinction of the "old style" scrappy laborer type that happened in the run-up to WWII. Unlike Chaplin's Little Tramp, the character Kihachi would never speak (though Sakamoto would in many Ozu pictures).

Farewell, Kihachi.

Hope for a Region1 DVD: This is the only surviving "Kihachi Trilogy" movie that is not on DVD in the USA. Even though there were four Kihachi movies, An Innocent Maid is generally ignored for reasons aside from being considered lost. As one of the most fully-formed of his silent films, I hope to see it available as the crowning piece in something like a "More Silent Ozu" or "Pre-War Ozu" Eclipse set. It isn't nearly as big of a landmark as The Only Son or There Was a Father, so I don't think it really requires much, if any, supplemental material outside a short essay for context and a music score (which is present on the Asian import DVD).

We've finally reached the last Ozu film that is considered completely lost, and it's a real tragedy: College is a Nice Place is his final silent film, and it co-stars Chishu Ryu in his first major role. We will then quickly jump into half of today's big-deal Ozu release (and the reason this entire series began), The Only Son. Today is an all-Ozu day for me, so stick around.

Cinema Ozu is a limited-run series of articles about the career and impact of Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. My primary intent is to chronicle my own journey through his films, a fair number of which I have seen, but even more of which I have not. The most essential research tools I have used are David Bordwell's book Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema and definitive Ozu fansite "Ozu-san".

The series is also timed to celebrate the July 2010 U.S. release of The Only Son and There Was a Father as a DVD double-set by The Criterion Collection. You can find all entries in Cinema Ozu here. New to the series? It's best to start from the beginning.