You think you know Setsuko Hara.
I discovered the Japanese actress the same way, I bet, that a lot of you did: through the works of her friend, and favourite director, Yasujiro Ozu. Ozu’s ‘Noriko Trilogy’—so-called because all three films starred Hara as a woman named Noriko—are considered among his best work. Given Ozu’s stature, that makes them three of the best films ever made.
Hara worked for other directors, of course, but I’d never seen an example. And until I did, I didn’t realize how wholly the actress and the Noriko character were merged in my mind. It wasn’t simply Noriko who possessed that infinite patience, that commitment to self-sacrifice, that smile of steel—those were, for me, Hara’s traits too. And that made Repast, a major work by director Mikio Naruse, starring Hara, revelatory for me in a way that it might not be for everybody. Here, for the first time, I saw Hara look… grumpy. That was big.
A relative of mine, who would never claim to be a literary scholar, on the subject of Jane Austen, once offered me this: ‘for someone who never married and had no kids, that woman sure understood how families work.’
She meant power games, and the pressures family members place upon one another, and the conflicts between different generations, and even between different families. And she was right: Austen had rare insight into those things. But it was also interesting, to me, that she saw the single, childless Austen as an outsider looking in; as though, without those additional life experiences, one could not normally be expected to understand how families really worked.
Austen was close to her family for the entirety of her short life. Yasujiro Ozu was close to his, too. He died at 60, in 1963, having predeceased his mother, with whom he lived, by only a couple of years. He, too, left behind no spouse, and no offspring. But the director did leave behind a body of work profound in its examination of the family dynamic—the comforts, cruelties, and most importantly, inevitabilities of a life lived with others.
Among Ozu’s acknowledged masterpieces (a canon that also includes Late Spring (1949); Tokyo Story (1953); and Floating Weeds (1959)) it is Early Summer that focuses most fixedly on family structures. The household in Early Summer is a relatively happy, stable, and normal one, composed of two elderly parents, their unmarried daughter, their married son and his wife, and two young grandsons. And several pet birds. The family members get along, mostly; everyone is healthy, and money is good.
