Happiness isn't something you wait around for

After watching Seven Samurai and spending a lot of time last week reading commentary on Akira Kurosawa, I got an itch to watch some films by Yasujiro Ozu, who seems to be characterized by some as the more “authentically Japanese” of the two directors. But what does this even mean? This week, after watching Ozu’s Late Spring (1949), I feel like I gained some insight into this question.

Let’s begin with an excerpt from Roger Ebert’s review of the film.

So much happens out of sight in the film, implied but not shown. Noriko smiles but is not happy. Her father passively accepts what he hates is happening. The aunt is complacent, implacable, maddening. She gets her way. It is universally believed, just as in a Jane Austen novel, that a woman of a certain age is in want of a husband. “Late Spring” is a film about two people who desperately do not believe this, and about how they are undone by their tact, their concern for each other, and their need to make others comfortable by seeming to agree with them.

Ebert is correct that much is implied in the film. Regarding the question of “authenticity”, this does read as very Japanese (or East Asian) to me, as there definitely is a culture of indirect, subtle, non-explicit communication, especially around feelings. Even the final twist in the plot (spoiler alert) is based around indirect communication, which from a modern progressive perspective we might even describe as manipulation. This is easily contrasted with the performances in Seven Samurai, where most emotions are clearly displayed or indicated, even in the case of the socially forbidden romance between the young samurai Okamoto and the villager Shino.

But my read on the film’s main takeaways was the exact opposite as Ebert’s. Much like traditional Japanese (and more generally Confucian) culture, the story revolves around the sacrifice of self for fulfillment of duty, whether it is one’s duty in one’s family or one’s duty in one’s society. The film does not necessarily present this as positive or negative; to my eye, it presents it simply as a matter of fact of Japanese society, or of life itself.

Noriko’s character is in fact not progressive, nor is she being beaten into submission by Japanese culture. She seems not so much hindered by traditionalism as an active participant in it. After all, she refers to her father’s widower friend Onodera’s remarriage as “filthy”, and similarly displays great discomfort with the idea of her father Somiya, also a widower, getting remarried. 

Noriko does, however, engage in flirtation with Somiya’s engaged colleague Hattori, spending so much time with him that observers are surprised to find out that Noriko is not actually Hattori’s fiancée. But when Hattori asks Noriko out on a date, she declines despite her true underlying desires, because she does not feel that it would be proper to go out with an engaged man.

Later, Noriko’s eventual agreement to marry Satake happens in parallel with her concession that Onodera’s remarriage is not actually “filthy”. In this light, her decision to marry should be viewed, seemingly paradoxically, not as a conservative decision, but a progressive one. Indeed, perhaps it is the staying in the comfort of the home forever, to never grow up, that would be conservative in this context. To push Noriko out of the nest is, despite the evident ambivalence that she and her father are feeling, the right thing to do in the grand scheme of things.

Ebert again:

“Will you marry?” Noriko asks him. “Um,” he says, with the slightest nod. She asks him three or four different ways. “Um.” Finally, “that woman we saw today?” “Um.” He defends arranged marriages: “Your mother wasn’t happy at first. I found her weeping in the kitchen many times.” Not the best argument for a father trying to convince his daughter to marry.

I also read this scene oppositely to Ebert. The father’s speech was for me the most powerful and profound scene in the film. He speaks of the sacrifice one must make in marriage, that one may be unhappy for one, two, five, even ten years. But:

Happiness isn't something you wait around for. It’s something you create yourself. Happiness lies in the forging of a new life shared together.

One does not have to view this in the bleak way that Ebert does. All relationships have troubles, and while a western notion of romantic love does certainly help, it is not the only facet of a successful marriage. Devotion and the willingness to put the work in can be worth just as much as romantic love. Immediately before Somiya gives this speech, he visibly holds a copy of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra in his hand. Perhaps Ozu intends to reference Nietzsche’s ideas about the overcoming of oneself to create something new — couldn’t that be a marriage?

The final shot of the movie shows Somiya, now having married off his daughter, slumped over in a chair, sadly peeling an apple by himself. We cut to shots of waves at a beach, and the film ends. We have a sense of the Japanese concept of mono no aware, the pathos of the inevitability of loss. Like the waves crash in a predictable, never-ending pattern, so too do the patterns of life itself. The children must eventually leave, and the parents must be alone once again. It is a difficult experience to go through but one must face it as an unavoidable, natural way of life, just as Nietzsche puts it in his concept of eternal recurrence.

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but love it.

Ozu does not provide any hint whatsoever as to whether Noriko will be happy in her marriage. But in the end, no one can really know or predict whether they will be happy in the long term, whether it is in a love marriage, an arranged marriage, or a life of being single. Either way, one must face the future with equal parts courage, joy, and acceptance.