Why There’s Never Been a Better Time to Celebrate Yasujirō Ozu

Strictly speaking, Yasujirō Ozu is not a household name—at least not on this continent. While he enjoyed some international recognition in the 1950s and 60s, when a few of his works were first shown in the United States, the Japanese director and screenwriter was not a showman. His films were made of quieter stuff than Akira Kurosawa’s, and for an American public just emerging from the thrall of Italian neorealism, they didn’t seem all that cinematic. But the man who counts directors Wim Wenders, Claire Denis, and Paul Schrader among his devoted fans is very much worth celebrating—and if you needed a reason, he would have turned 115 years old today, had he not also died 55 years ago.

At his best, Ozu worked on an intimately human scale; his scripts, cowritten by Kogo Noda, considered family dynamics—often, how parents related to their children (see 1949’s Late Spring; 1951’s Early Summer; 1953’s Tokyo Story, widely considered a masterpiece; 1958’s Equinox Flower; and 1962’s An Autumn Afternoon, among others)—and the uneasy compromise that love and freedom must negotiate with loyalty and security. As his career progressed, what his films lacked in taut suspense and grand revelation, technical flourishes and, until 1958, the use of color film, was more than made up for in pure, powerful feeling. As Roger Ebert wrote in 2005, “[Ozu’s] stylistic development involved the abandonment of one artistic device after another until his films reached a simplicity and serenity that abandoned breadth for bottomless depths.”

Lengthy takes—along with an unorthodox approach to capturing conversations (namely, by having each character look directly at the camera, as if we, the viewers, were the addressee), and a predilection for the strangely low “tatami shot”—vested his work with a touching transparency, if not realism per se. Each shot, structured by a rigorous internal geometry (longtime cinematographer Yûharu Atsuta loved a long, empty hallway), is just a little too perfectly arranged to be real: “Ozu’s films always convey a sense that the inanimate world existed long before mankind did and will be here long after we are extinct,” one critic remarked in 1971.

Narratively, his storytelling fell within the gendai-geki genre of film, television, and theater, mining contemporary Japanese life for its subject matter. (Quite unlike Kurosawa, Ozu eschewed the spectacular, sword-slinging violence of period films, or jidaigeki.) That focus informed one of his most affectingly articulated themes: intergenerational conflict, in many cases between a parent and his or her unmarried daughter. In Ozu’s films from the ’50s, the Western dress code embraced by younger female characters (swishy shifts, collared shirts, pleated skirts) chafes against his stark, colorless lens—a device that’s much better suited to framing their mothers’ fastidiously modest kimonos. (Among men, the war between old and new could play out on a single body: In Late Spring, a middle-aged father played by Chishū Ryū—one of a bevy of actors employed by Ozu over and over—becomes the reluctant modernization of postwar Japanese culture personified, seen removing the suit, tie, and suspenders that he’s worn to work, and slipping into a kimono.)

“Ozu is often considered to be a director of sober restraint; in fact, sober restraint is his main subject, and the subject of his critique,” The New Yorker’s Richard Brody has written, and it’s true. Risks never ventured, conversations never started, and passions never indulged burn angry holes in Ozu’s deeply dignified domestic universe. (Put another way—also by Brody—“Characters’ inability to express their needs, desires, and wishes, because of tight traditions of decorum, give rise to much of the misery he depicts.”)

The director’s own biography lends itself all too well to Freudian analysis: A heavy smoker and drinker throughout his life, he never married, and lived with his mother until her death—just six or so months before his own, on his 60th birthday. (In its way, this made as fitting an end as any; at the conclusion of his films, Ozu nearly always returned to an image or circumstance first encountered at the beginning—the same nosy neighbor in Tokyo Story, for instance. “It would be difficult to find an Ozu film that did not end where it began,” the critic Donald Richie observed.)

Still, he managed to leave an extraordinary body of work behind. Some have glimpsed traces of his lexicon in Wes Anderson’s films. (Think: painstaking compositions, knotty familial relationships, lots of medium close-ups.) Others enjoy the cultural cachet of even knowing his name; the lion’s share of his 35 surviving films are extraordinarily difficult to track down. But one thing we’d all do well to hold dear is the lyricism with which he rendered ordinary lives. Ozu’s protagonists were small and private, selfish and scared. “Someday, I’m sure, foreigners will understand my films,” he once said to his assistant, Yûharu Atsuta. “Then again, no. They will say, like everybody else, that my films aren’t much of anything.” Much of anything, they may not be—but kind of everything? Absolutely.