Some say Otsuta needs a man. What they really mean is that Otsuta needs
money.
Money, and how to get it, is the ongoing concern in Flowing, Mikio Naruse’s tale of down-and-out geishas in mid-century Tokyo. Otsuta’s geisha
dwelling, Tsuta House, is deep in debt, and it’s her fault: the result of her
love-affair with a man who took more than he gave. But Tsuta House still
survives, and that, too, is thanks to Otsuta (Isuzu Yamada), whose fame,
beauty, and mastery of traditional geisha arts continue to draw customers to
her business.
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.
