Considering Tokyo Sonata’s focus is on a seemingly typical and mundane nuclear family, it would be an understatement to say that Kiyoshi’s Kurosawa’s most recent film is a departure from his modus operandi. Being aware—more than anyone—of his repertoire of J-horror, Kurosawa openly acknowledges his shift in genre, storytelling, style and ambiance: I am hoping that Tokyo Sonata will be received by the audience as a film unlike any of my previous works.

Though, if there is any semblance of Kurosawa’s touch of horror, it is that Tokyo Sonata is a quiet, but rolling brew of emotional, political, socioeconomic and cultural issues quietly rumbling beneath the floorboards of a middle-class suburban home; you can’t see it, but you know it’s there, lurking in the characters’ minds and possessing them. Though a J-horror flick and a family drama are worlds apart, Kurosawa manages to use his flair for terror by eliciting the troublesome fears that loom over everyday lives. Beyond the creative urge to broaden his breadth of work and artistic depth, what truly drives Kurosawa’s endeavors in Tokyo Sonata is that as an aging Japanese citizen who has seen the nation as it was and as it is, he is compelled to ask all the right questions about how it will be.

The basic premise of the film follows a salaryman, Ryuhei Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa), who goes to great lengths to conceal the fact that he has been unceremoniously fired from his administrative job. His wife, Megumi Sasaki (Kyoko Koizumi), is a typical housewife who cooks, cleans and takes care of the monthly kozukai (essentially, the household finances). Their eldest son, Takashi Sasaki (Yu Koyanagi), is a typical Japanese part-timer: he hands out tissue packets to pedestrians at night. The youngest son, Kenji (Kai Inowaki), is in his last year of grade school. Throughout the film, we find that it is not only Ryuhei who has a secret that reverberates throughout the Sasaki household: Megumi’s hesokuri (pin money) becomes the unlikely key to the emotional arch of Tokyo Sonata, Takashi’s idealism embodies the political commentary of the film, and Kenji’s rebellion represents the film’s plea for art and individuality. And, of course, the friction between Ryuhei’s public and private lives elucidates the socioeconomic and cultural ramifications within Japan.

Despite seeing other salarymen loiter about in areas designated to the homeless and unemployed, Kurosawa leaves the fronts and facades intact between Ryuhei and these men. Like the mere extras in the film—and the countless people they represent in Japan’s cold and distanced economic infrastructure—the audience itself knows who these nameless suit clad men are and what their problems are; via Ryuhei’s own plight. Ryuhei reunites with an old classmate (Kurosu, played by the wonderful Kanji Tsuda), but instead of giving them what one would expect to be cathartic commiseration, Tokyo Sonata suggests that perhaps there truly is nothing worse than having your public bubble burst right in front of your face, for it also hacks away at your private sphere.

Juxtaposing sobering images of lines and queuing, Kurosawa underscores the fact that the morning power walk to work can very easily turn into the condemned shuffle at the unemployment agency to the demoralized trudge to nowhere. A man can represent the steady flow within the veins and heart of the Japanese economy, then wake up to find himself precisely excised as a troublesome blockage.

The willing apathy of the characters of Tokyo Sonata clearly represent Kurosawa’s commentary on his own countrymen’s willingness to seal off their peripheral visions. Though many make the fallacious argument that conformity and acquiescence (in exchange for stability and security) are inherent to Japanese culture itself, these “traits” are in reality largely a product of the psychology of post-war Japan. Kurosawa’s depiction of Japan’s “psychosis” illuminates the fact that all of these lives are historically contingent: what happens in America, in Iran and in the Japanese economy directly affects everyday families and individuals, the very people who feel as if they are disconnected from the world that shapes their lives.

Though Kurosawa paints a rather pallid and condemning portrait of Japan, it is not without a silver lining or spark of hope. Like Megumi points out in the opening scene of the film, a storm is to come. Though its aftermath leaves things disarrayed—in most cases, permanently—it passes all the same.

Both of the Sasaki sons, most notably Kenji, openly question the realms they live in—the worlds they did not choose to occupy—and while there is no blatant or saccharine happy ending for either Takashi or Kenji, Kurosawa makes it abundantly clear that these boys represent the saving grace of Japan’s future: a vision that is inextricably bound to artistry, intellectual provocation, political query, individual expression and above all else, dialogue.

Is this Japan’s version of American Beauty? Not so much. Rather than portraying the answer to, “Can I start over?” as something achingly beautiful, yet inevitably tragic, Tokyo Sonata makes no illusions about what starting over may or may not mean or entail. Beneath the quiet humor and slightly outlandish climaxes, Tokyo Sonata is spun from realism, unalike American Beauty’s postmodern fable of suburbia. Kurosawa’s film drives home the notion that resetting one’s perspective is a radical restart in and of itself.
 
 
 
 
Directed by Kiyoshu Kurosawa

Writers/screenwriters
Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Max Mannix
Sachiko Tanaka
 
 
 
 
2008 Cannes Film Festival
Un Certain Regard Jury Prize - Kiyoshi Kurosawa

2008 Hochi Film Awards
Best Actress - Kyoko Koizumi

2009 Kinema Junpo Awards
Best Actress - Kyoko Koizumi

2008 Mar del Plata Film Festival
Best Director - Kiyoshi Kurosawa

2009 Yokohama Film Festival
Best Cinematographer - Akiko Ashizawa
 
 
 
 
US Release Schedule