Ozu's The Only Son

The Only Son (1936) was Yasujirō Ozu’s first feature with synchronized dialogue. The musical score is by Senji Itō (who also wrote the music for Ozu’s Late Spring and Early Summer). The film is about the relationship between a widowed mother and her only child. He goes to Tokyo and loses touch with his mother for some years. Then – prefiguring Ozu’s later masterpiece, Tokyo Story (1953) – she pays him a visit.

One of the lighter scenes of The Only Son takes place in a cinema. As a treat, the son has taken his mother to see her first talking picture. It is an odd choice: Unfinished Symphony, a kitschy Anglo-German biopic about Franz Schubert, complete with strikingly Aryan heroine (the singer Marta Eggerth). The son is embarrassed as his poor mother keeps drifting off to sleep.

But these were troubled and violent times and Ozu’s focus in this film is on personal relationships in the context of grinding poverty. In an iconic scene, the son expresses regrets, telling his mother that he wishes he had stayed with her in rural Shinshū as she herself had wished instead of seeking to further his education in Tokyo, essentially at the expense of his mother’s (always tenuous) financial security and her comfort in old age.

The soul-crushing monotony of the provincial silk mill and the flat, ugly landscape of a poor sector of Tokyo, with tall chimneys belching smoke nearby, represent Ozu’s version of William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills.” But, unlike Blake – whose head was full of Christian myths and radical politics – Ozu is more interested in depicting the pathos and tragedy of life than in elaborating apocalyptic visions. Or, for that matter, in making strong political statements or agitating for some imagined social, political or economic remedy.

Culture – and, by extension, politics – is important and can modulate our personal realities but the pathos and tragedy of life is inescapable precisely because it is tied not just to culture but also to the biological cycle of life, aging and death. The quote (from the short story writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa) which Ozu chose to serve as the epigraph for The Only Son underscores this point: “Life’s tragedy begins with the bond between parent and child.”

This is an extract from a piece which appeared in August at The Electric Agora.