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Reorienting Ozu
ii
Reorienting Ozu
A Master and His Influence

Edited by Jinhee Choi

1
iv

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Names: Choi, Jinhee editor.
Title: Reorienting Ozu : a master and his influence / edited by Jinhee Choi.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2018. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017021094 | ISBN 9780190254971 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780190254988 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190255008 (oxford scholarship online)
Subjects: LCSH: Ozu, Yasujirō, 1903-1963—Criticism and interpretation.
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CONTENTS

List of Figures   vii

List of Contributors   ix

Introduction  1
Jinhee Choi

SECTION I: Branding Ozu   19

1. Watch Again! Look Well! Look!   21
David Bordwell
2. Ozu, the Ineffable   33
Darrell W. Davis
3. Ozu to Asia via Hasumi   45
Aaron Gerow
4. A Dialogue with “Memory” in Hou Hsiao‐hsien’s Café Lumière (2003) 59
Mitsuyo Wada-​Marciano
5. Ozuesque as a Sensibility: Or, on the Notion of Influence   77
Jinhee Choi

SECTION II: Historicizing Ozu   99

6. A New Form of Silent Cinema: Intertitles and Interlocution in Ozu
Yasujiro’s Late Silent Films   101
Michael Raine
7. Ozu and the Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Cinematography in
There Was a Father (1942)   119
Daisuke Miyao
8. Modernity, Shoshimin Films, and the Proletarian-​Film Movement:
Ozu in Dialogue with Vertov   133
Yuki Takinami
9. Laughing in the Shadows of Empire: Humor in Ozu’s Brothers and
Sisters of the Toda Family (1941)   155
Junji Yoshida
vi

SECTION III: Tracing Ozu   175

10. Autumn Afternoons: Negotiating the Ghost of Ozu in Iguchi
Nami’s Dogs and Cats (2004) 177
Adam Bingham
11. Playing the Holes: Notes on the Ozuesque Gag   197
Manuel Garin and Albert Elduque
12. Rhythm, Texture, Moods: Ozu Yasujiro, Claire Denis, and a Vision
of a Postcolonial Aesthetic   215
Kate Taylor-​Jones
13. Wenders Travels with Ozu   233
Mark Betz
14. Look? Optical/​Sound Situations and
Interpretation: Ozu—​(Deleuze)—​Kiarostami   249
David Deamer
15. Sparse or Slow: Ozu and Joanna Hogg   269
William Brown

Bibliography  285
Index (Compiled by Kosuke Fujiki)   299

[ vi ] Contents
FIGURES

1.1 I Was Born, But . . . (Otona no miru ehon—​Umarete wa mita

keredo, Ozu Yasujiro, 1932)   25
1.2 Dim Sum (Wayne Wang, 1985)   25
1.3 An Autumn Afternoon (Sanma no aji, Ozu Yasujiro, 1962)   28
1.4 An Autumn Afternoon  28
1.5 Sumo Do, Sumo Don’t (Shiko funjatta, Suo Masayuki, 1992)   29
1.6 Sumo Do, Sumo Don’t  29
3.1 Late Spring (Banshun, Ozu Yasujiro, 1949)   48
4.1 Métro Lumière (Documentary and interview with Hou Hsiao-​
hsien, included as part of a DVD release of Café Lumière)  62
4.2 Café Lumière (Kohi jiko, Hou Hsiao-​hsien, 2003)   67
4.3 Café Lumière  68
4.4 Café Lumière  70
4.5 Café Lumière  70
4.6 Tokyo Story (Tokyo monogatari, Ozu Yasujiro, 1953)   73
4.7 Café Lumière  73
5.1 Good Morning (Ohayo, Ozu Yasujiro, 1959)   82
5.2 Good Morning  84
5.3 Tokyo Twilight (Tokyo boshoku, Ozu Yasuji, 1957)   87
5.4 Tokyo Twilight  87
5.5 Tokyo Twilight  87
5.6 Tokyo Twilight  88
5.7 Tokyo Twilight  89
6.1 An Inn in Toyko (Tokyo no yado, Ozu Yasujio, 1935)   113
8.1 I Was Born, But . . . (Otona no miru ehon—​Umarete wa mita
keredo, Ozu Yasujiro, 1932)   146
viii

8.2 Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kino ​apparatom, Dziga

Vertov, 1929)   146
8.3 I Was Born, But . . .  147
8.4 Man with a Movie Camera  147
8.5 I Was Born, But . . .  148
8.6 Man with a Movie Camera  148
9.1 What Did the Lady Forget? (Shukujo wa nani o wasureta ka,
Ozu Yasujiro, 1937)   158
9.2 Japan in Time of Crisis (1933)   159
9.3 The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (Todake no kyodai,
Ozu Yasujiro, 1941)   162
9.4 The Toda Family  163
9.5 The Toda Family  164
9.6 The Toda Family  165
9.7 The Toda Family  166
9.8 The Toda Family  167
9.9 The Toda Family  168
10.1 Dogs and Cats (Inuneko, Iguchi Nami, 2004)   190
10.2 Dogs and Cats  190
10.3 Dogs and Cats   190
12.1 A Hen in the Wind (Kaze no naka no mendori, Ozu Yasujiro,
1948)  226
12.2 A Hen in the Wind  226
12.3 A Hen in the Wind  226
12.4 Tokyo Story (Tokyo monogatori, Ozu Yasujiro, 1953)   227

[ viii ] List of Figures

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Mark Betz is Reader in film studies at King’s College London, UK. He is the
author of Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema (2009), as well
as several articles and book chapters on postwar art cinema and film culture,
the reception of foreign films in North America, the history of film studies,
and contemporary manifestations of art film aesthetics with an emphasis on
Asia. His work has been published in Screen, Cinema Journal, The Moving Image,
and Camera Obscura, and in the collections Defining Cult Movies, Inventing Film
Studies, and Global Art Cinema, among others.
Adam Bingham is Lecturer in film and television at Nottingham Trent
University and the author of Japanese Cinema Since Hana-​Bi (2015). He writes
regularly for Cineaste and has contributed to recent books on female filmmak-
ers, neo-​noir in Hong Kong cinema, and on representations of prostitution.
David Bordwell is Jacques Ledoux Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at the
University of Wisconsin-​Madison. He has written several books on film his-
tory and aesthetics, including Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (1988; 1994),
Poetics of Cinema (2007), and Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of
Entertainment (2000; 2nd ed., 2011). With Kristin Thompson he has written
Film Art: An Introduction (2013) and Film History: An Introduction (McGraw-​
Hill, 2009). They write about cinema at www.davidbordwell.net/​blog.
William Brown is Senior Lecturer in film at the University of Roehampton,
London. He is the author of Non-​Cinema: Global Digital Filmmaking and the
Multitude (forthcoming), Supercinema: Film-​ Philosophy for the Digital Age
(2013), and Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New
Europe (with Dina Iordanova and Leshu Torchin, 2010). He also the coedi-
tor of Deleuze and Film (with David Martin-​Jones, 2012). He has published
numerous essays in journals and edited collections, and has directed various
films, including En Attendant Godard (2009), Circle/​Line (2016), Letters to
Ariadne (2016), and The Benefit of Doubt (2017).
x

Jinhee Choi is Reader in film studies at King’s College London, UK. She is
the author of The South Korean Film Renaissance: Local Hitmakers Global
Provocateurs (2010) and has coedited three volumes, Cine-​Ethics: Ethical
Dimensions of Film Theory, Practice and Spectatorship (2014), Horror to the
Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema (2009), and Philosophy of Film
and Motion Pictures (Blackwell Publishing, 2006).
Darrell W. Davis is a recognized expert on East Asian cinema, with books
and articles on Japanese, Taiwanese, Hong Kong, and pan-​Asian film and
media industries. His latest project is an analysis, evaluation, and prognosis
of Chinese connected viewing, conducted with UC Santa Barbara and Warner
Bros. He lives and teaches in Hong Kong.
David Deamer is the author of Deleuze, Japanese Cinema and the Atom
Bomb: The Spectre of Impossibility (2014) and Deleuze’s Cinema Books: Three
Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images (2016); he has also published a few
journal articles and book chapters here and there. Deamer’s interests lie
at the intersection of cinema and culture with history, politics, and the
philosophy of Deleuze and Nietzsche. Deamer is a semi-​ independent
scholar affiliated with the English, Art, and Philosophy departments of
Manchester Metropolitan University, UK; he blogs online at www.david-
deamer.com.
Albert Elduque is postdoctoral researcher in the University of Reading (UK),
where he is part of the project “Towards an Intermedial History of Brazilian
Cinema: Exploring Intermediality as a Historiographic Method” (‘IntermIdia’).
His PhD thesis (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, 2014) dealt with the
notions of hunger, consumption, and vomit in the cinema of the ’60s and
’70s, taking into account European and Brazilian filmmakers such as Pier
Paolo Pasolini, Marco Ferreri, and Glauber Rocha. His main research interests
are Brazilian cinema (particularly its relation with music traditions), Latin
American cinema overall, and the aesthetics of political film. He is the coedi-
tor of the film journal Cinema Comparat/​ive Cinema, published by Universitat
Pompeu Fabra.
Manuel Garin is Senior Lecturer in film studies at Universitat Pompeu Fabra,
Barcelona. He has been a visiting scholar at the Tokyo University of The Arts
and the University of Southern California, where he developed the compara-
tive media project Gameplaygag. Between Silent Film and New Media. He is the
author of El gag visual. De Buster Keaton a Super Mario (2014) and has published
in peer-​reviewed journals such as Feminist Media Studies, International Journal of
Cultural Studies, L’Atalante, and Communication & Society. Trained as a musician,
he holds an MA in Film Scoring from ESMUC Music School.

[x] List of Contributors

Aaron Gerow is Professor in Japanese and East Asian cinema at Yale
University and has published widely on variety of topics in Japanese
cinema and popular culture. His publications include Visions of Japanese
Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895–​1925
(2010), A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan (2008),
and Kitano Takeshi (2007). With Markus Nornes he also wrote Research
Guide to Japanese Film Studies (2009), a revised edition of which recently
appeared in Japanese. He is currently writing about the history of Japanese
film theory.
Daisuke Miyao is Professor and the Hajime Mori Chair in Japanese Language
and Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Miyao is the author
of The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema (2013), Eiga wa neko
dearu: Hajimete no cinema sutadīzu (Cinema is a cat: Introduction to cinema
studies) (2011), and Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom
(2007). He also edited Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema (2014) and coed-
ited Transnational Cinematography Studies (2017) with Lindsay Coleman and
Roberto Schaefer, ASC.
Michael Raine is Assistant Professor of film studies at Western University,
Canada. His most recent publications are an introduction to Matsumoto
Toshio in Cinema Journal 51, no. 4 (2012), “Adaptation as Transcultural
Mimesis,” in The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema (2014), and “From
Hybridity to Dispersion: Film Subtitling as an Adaptive Practice,” in Media
and Translation (2014). He is also coediting a book of essays, The Culture of the
Sound Image in Prewar Japan (forthcoming).
Yuki Takinami is Associate Professor of media studies at Josai International
University. He completed his dissertation, “Reflecting Hollywood: Mobility
and Lightness in the Early Silent Films of Ozu Yasujiro, 1927–​1933,” at the
University of Chicago and published articles in Japanese on silent films
directed by Ozu. He also translated into Japanese essays written by Miriam
Hansen, Katherine Hayles, and others, and published articles on television
and music video.
Kate Taylor- ​Jones is Senior Lecturer in East Asian studies at the
University of Sheffield. She is the coeditor of International Cinema and the
Girl (2015) and has published widely in a variety of fields, including a forth-
coming edited collection entitled Prostitution and Sex Work in Global Visual
Media: New Takes on Fallen Women. Her latest monograph study, Divine
Work: Japanese Colonial Cinema and Its Legacy, has recently been published
with Bloomsbury Press. Kate is editor-​in-​chief of the East Asian Journal of
Popular Culture.

List of Contributors [ xi ]
xii

Mitsuyo Wada-​Marciano is Professor of film studies at Carleton University

(Canada). Her research interests include Japanese cinema and East Asian cin-
ema in global culture. She is the author of Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of
the 1920s and 1930s (2008) and the coeditor of Horror to the Extreme: Changing
Boundaries in Asian Cinema (2009). She recently published Japanese Cinema
in the Digital Age (2012) and edited Viewing “Postwar” in the 1950s Japanese
Cinema (in Japanese, 2012). She is currently finalizing a book manuscript on
the cinema in post-​Fukushima Japan.
Junji Yoshida is an independent scholar of modern Japanese literature and
film. His Ph.D. thesis entitled “Origins of Japanese Film Comedy and Questions
of Colonial Modernity” reconsiders mainstream Japanese film comedies by
Inagaki Hiroshi and Ozu Yasujiro as creative responses to the regime of colo-
nial imagination and the crisis of representation. He is currently preparing a
book manuscript on the complicity of laughter with restructuring of social
relations against tradition.

[ xii ] List of Contributors

Reorienting Ozu
xiv
Introduction
JINHEE CHOI

J apanese director Ozu Yasujiro has become a cultural icon, whose far-​reach-
ing influence is evident both in and beyond the medium of film. Directors
such as Wim Wenders, Claire Denis, and Hou Hsiao-​hsien have paid homage
to Ozu through their work, while Abbas Kiarostami dedicated his film Five
(Panj, 2003) to Ozu. The serialized comic Mystery of Ozu Yasujiro (Ozu Yasujiro
no nazo, 1998–​1999) features an American director named Stan, who tries to
locate the meaning of mu, a kanji character inscribed on Ozu’s gravestone.1
Concierge Renée, one of the two principal characters of the French novel The
Elegance of the Hedgehog (L’élégance du hérrison, Muriel Barbery, 2006), watches
Ozu’s The Munekata Sisters (Munekata kyodai, 1950) during her spare time. To
her great delight, she finds out that a new resident of her building has the
same last name as the great director.2 With an increasing presence as a major
figure in cinema as well as appearing in other cultural milieus, Ozu needs to be
revisited in a broader context—​including moving beyond Japan.
Western scholarship on Ozu has primarily focused on his film style, with
various attempts to identify the origin(s) of his aesthetic—​including to what
extent Ozu’s distinctive and unique film style may reside in his “Japaneseness.”
From culturalists such as Donald Richie and Paul Schrader, to Marxist Noël
Burch, to neoformalists David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, and historians
such as Daisuke Miyao and Mitsuyo Wada-​Marciano, the diverse methodolo-
gies employed in characterizing Ozu’s films not only indicate Ozu’s enigmatic
aesthetic but further, as Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto insightfully points out, reflect
the changing position of Ozu in the establishment and development of film
studies as an academic discipline.3 Ozu still figures in contemporary critical
discourses on directors such as Hou Hsiao-​hsien, Kitano Takeshi, and Kore-​eda
2

Hirokazu and on a global canon of contemporary slow cinema. Why does Ozu
still matter in contemporary global film scenes and scholarship? This volume
aims to consider the formation of Ozu’s aesthetic within the various cultural
and historical contexts and examines Ozu’s influence on both Japanese direc-
tors and those from all around the globe, revisiting the limits and benefits in
considering their relationship under the notion of influence.

THE OZU SYSTEMATICS, THE EVERYDAY, AND NEW

THEORETICAL PARADIGMS

Ozu’s poignant film style is now widely known among film aesthetes and schol-
ars: his oblique, sparse storytelling, the pictorial quality of shots and carefully
arranged props, spatiotemporally ambiguous inserts (pillow shots), his use
of 360-​degree space and low-​height camera, repeated visual motifs (trains,
smokestacks, beer bottles, clothes lines), and tonal stillness/​stasis, to list just
a few. Noël Burch has characterized Ozu’s film style as “systematics”—​“an
association of inter-​related but semi-​autonomous systems,”4 while Bordwell
explores it under the rubric of a “parametric” style that consists of identifia-
ble formal parameters governed by a system of its own logic.5 Japanese film
scholar Hasumi Shigehiko and Japanese New Waver-​turned-​critic Yoshida
Kiju also identify an “Ozuesque” (and “Ozu-​like”) character in the master’s
signature style, despite the contrasting values attributed to it. Ozu’s aes-
thetic, nonetheless, neither emerged nor exists in a vacuum; his aesthetic is
very much embedded in the sociopolitical, cultural, and industrial context of
Japan, interweaving through the various planes of Japanese everyday life.
For many scholars and viewers, everydayness is the principal subject of
Ozu’s work. Yoshida definitively claims,

[Ozu] decided to depict only incidents from everyday life . . . . He was not allured by
the optimistic idea that art is grand and eternal. Limiting his cinematic expression,
Ozu-​san allowed his viewers to use their own imagination limitlessly. Consequently,
his films, apparently plain and simple, become mysterious and constantly invoke new
meanings.6

The everydayness in Ozu’s films also constitutes what Richie calls the “texture
of life.”7 Richie states, “[O]‌ne object of Ozu’s criticism throughout his career,
beginning with such early pictures as The Life of an Office Worker and Tokyo Chorus
(Tokyo no korasu, 1931), has been the texture of Japanese urban life, traditional
in that it has been unthinkingly passed on from generation to generation for
over a century.”8 For Schrader, the relationship between human being and its
“unfeeling environment” is the key to creating a disparity between the two, which
is then to be transcended.9 Seemingly insignificant everyday objects are seen to

[2] Reorienting Ozu

embody subtle nuances for Yoshida and Hasumi. The air pillows in Ozu’s Tokyo
Story (Tokyo monogatari, 1953), according to Yoshida, provide a “gaze” on an
elderly couple; the forgetful husband, Shukichi, who falsely accuses his wife,
Tomi, of being unable to find them in her bag, and the generous wife who fore-
goes sowing tension from the situation. Hasumi notes how a banal object such
as a towel placed around the daughter Michiko’s neck in An Autumn Afternoon
(Sanma no aji, 1962) is there for her to remove it as she silently expresses anger
toward her drunken, guilt-​ridden father—​a father who, having witnessed the
unwelcome prospect of an unmarried daughter at his former teacher’s house,
bluntly brings up the question of his daughter’s marriage.10
The everydayness manifest in Ozu’s films is not merely part of his system-
atic, cyclical vignettes that constitute a core for his aesthetic. His everydayness
is historical as well as aesthetic. It is under the sway of historical conditions,
a space that registers social and familial changes. Whether it is Japanese
modernity, or the disintegration of Japanese traditional family and values, or
the loss of parental authority even in a nuclear family, these conditions are
both resisted and accepted through the changes experienced in everyday life.
Historically inclined scholars of Ozu reveal the complex negotiation taking
place between Japanese modernity and Ozu’s work. The domesticity in Ozu’s
films is not ahistorical. Ozu’s films are gendai ​geki—​drama set in contemporary
Japan. Wada-​Marciano observes that Ozu’s early, lower-​middle-​class salary-
men films (shoshimin geki) such as Tokyo Chorus and I Was Born, But . . . (Otona
no miru ehon—​Umarete wa mita keredo, 1932) cannot properly be examined
without taking into consideration the geopolitics of Tokyo at the time; they
were created in the very context of urban planning and suburbanization of
Tokyo in the 1920s and 1930s, with an increasing awareness of a new sense of
home and family.11 Kristin Thompson challenges the perception of Ozu’s films
as being conservative; the evident “traditional” father in Late Spring (Banshun,
1949) helps his daughter Noriko come to terms with a new sense of marriage
and the family based on happiness, not duty.12 Alastair Phillips also consid-
ers the prominence of female characters in Ozu’s postwar films, especially the
representation of the female protagonist Noriko in the Noriko trilogy, in rela-
tion to the postwar mass female audience, and the stardom of Hara Setsuko in
Japan.13 Changing perceptions of the role of class and gender, in fact, is very
much ingrained in Ozu’s representation of the everyday.
The dense texture of Ozu’s everydayness further provides a useful
framework for a cross-​cultural analysis of domestic space in which objects
are in perfect order. Consider an experimental film directed by Chantal
Akerman: Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (Jeanne Dielman,
23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975), depicting three days of Jeanne’s
everyday life. A widow working as a prostitute, Jeanne brings her customers in
her home. In the film, one can find the protagonist Jeanne’s obsessive compul-
sive ordering of everyday objects comparable to the meticulous placement and

Introduction [3]
4

arrangement of props in Ozu’s films. In the first two days, her daily routines
are established with an immaculate visual ordering of the domestic space. By
the third day, the film slowly sets into a “disaster mode,”14 in which we see
domestic objects begin to be dropped, misplaced, and forgotten, signaling the
deleterious disruption of Jeanne’s daily routines.
The minimal aesthetic, broadly construed, of Ozu, and that of Akerman,
belong to different traditions of filmmaking. If Ozu’s oeuvre constituted a
major strand of home drama in the Japanese film industry during the stu-
dio era, Akerman’s films were influenced by American minimalist artists’ film-
making such as Andy Warhol’s and French leftist filmmaking such as Jean-​Luc
Godard’s.15 Yet the two share a similar aesthetic sensibility—​formal density.
In their films, the human being comprises part of the everyday texture rather
than vice versa. For both filmmakers, their way of constructing “dramatic”
human actions through a rigid play with on-​and off-​screen space could result
in the subversion of a usual hierarchy between character and environment.
Noriko’s unseen wedding in Late Spring, for instance, is less important than
Shukichi’s peeling of an apple in the empty home upon his return from the
wedding. The murder taking place toward the end of Jeanne Dielman can be
read, as Ivone Margulies suggests, as an equivalent to Jeanne’s peeling of
potatoes or preparing veal for a meal, “one more element in the unending ser-
ies of ‘and, and, and.’ ”16 What links Akerman’s film, Jeanne Dielman, to Ozu’s
aesthetic sensibility, despite their unbridgeable formal differences, is the
density of film’s surface texture to the effect that human beings and events
become part of “the transfiguration of the everyday.”17 In Ozu, Gilles Deleuze
claims, “everything is ordinary or banal, even the death and the dead who are
the object of a natural forgetting.”18
The still life and contemplative outlook of Ozu’s films further attract the
attention of the proponents and advocates of “slow” cinema. Compared to con-
temporary filmmakers such as Tsai Ming-​liang, Apichatpong Weerasethakul,
and Béla Tarr, who are often associated with excessively long duration of shot
(and film) and slowly paced narrative, Ozu is not that “slow,” as Jonathan
Rosenbaum observes.19 Nonetheless, one is often tempted to compare
the tone and stillness of Ozu’s films with that of slow cinema and further
intrigued by Studio Shochiku’s invitation of a long-​take director such as Hou
to pay homage to the Japanese master.20 For those who make recourse to
the philosophy of Deleuze and pay a particular attention to the temporality
of slow cinema, Ozu can occupy a special place. According to Deleuze, in the
time-​image, time is not subservient to the construction of the movement-​
image that provides an illusion of the continuity of an action. It becomes the
subject of cinema itself. Deleuze identifies Ozu as “the first to develop pure
optical and sound situations.”21 In the shot of a vase in Ozu’s Late Spring,
inserted between two shots of Noriko with two different facial expressions,
from a smile to sadness, Deleuze finds an instance of direct representation

[4] Reorienting Ozu

of time—​“that which endures.”22 It is the presentation of time as “becoming,
change, passage.”23
Not only Deleuze but also other Japanese scholars and critics such as
Hasumi and Yoshida foster a cross-​cultural study of Ozu that has been desper-
ately needed in the field. While Yoshida’s Ozu’s Anti-​Cinema (Ozu Yasujiro no
han eiga, 1998) was published in English in 2003, Hasumi’s book Director Ozu
Yasujiro (Kantoku Ozu Yasujiro, 1983) has not yet been translated into English,
although it is available in other languages, including French (1998) and Korean
(2000). In Manifesto of Surface Criticism (Hyoso hihyo sengen, 1979), Hasumi is
critical of the cinematic narration system. What Ozu offers us, according to
Hasumi, is to expose such an apparent “systemicity” and reveal its impossi-
bilities.24 Although the focus is different, Yoshida’s approach, Miyao notes,
foregrounds both “the capabilities and limits of motion picture as a medium,”
of which Ozu was acutely aware.25 Two chapters in this volume engage with
these alternative theoretical frameworks. Darrell Davis examines Yoshida’s
theoretical underpinnings and assumptions in comparison with previous
English-​language scholarship on Ozu—​in particular, Schrader and Bordwell—​
and attempts to translate their ideas, opening up a conversation among the
three. Aaron Gerow delineates Hasumi’s scholarship on Ozu as a response to
the Anglophone scholarship on Ozu advanced in the 1970s and 1980s, and
examines the significance of Hasumi’s intervention in both Japanese film the-
ory and culture.
Although Hasumi’s work was contemporaneous with the Western schol-
arship on Ozu advanced in the 1970s and 1980s, the theoretical frameworks
mentioned above were introduced into the English-​language scholarship after
the publication of the last major monograph on Ozu in English—​Bordwell’s
Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (1988). Instead of postulating a binary opposi-
tion between Japanese “indigenous” versus English or French “foreign” schol-
arship, or Japanese-​speaking scholars versus those without a commanding
competence in Japanese, this volume presents them in a manner of conver-
sation. Hasumi was indebted to French philosophy, such as the philosophy of
Deleuze, in the development of his film theory and criticism,26 while Yoshida
shares a methodological inclination with Bordwell and Thompson, in his
emphasis on the “repetition and difference” as the major trait of Ozu’s both
life and aesthetic, who once compared himself to a tofu maker.27 Deleuze fur-
ther provides a theoretical hook for David Deamer, who in this volume offers
a close reading of Kiarostami’s Five, Dedicated to Ozu.

HE KNEW WHAT THEY MEANT; HE KNEW WHY HE WAS DOING

There might be an epistemic risk in lumping together internationally acknowl-

edged directors under the rubric of Ozu. The cultural essentialism still prevails

Introduction [5]
6

when Ozuesque has become an umbrella term to denote any minimalist film
style that generalizes the varying aesthetics of internationally acclaimed East
Asian directors, despite the specificity of the individual directors and their
own cultural orientations. Hou Hsiao-​hsien, for instance, was not famil-
iar with Ozu’s work until the 1990s, despite the fact the critical discourses
paired the two prior to the point of his encounter with Ozu’s films. Kore-​eda
Hirokazu, as mentioned, denies Ozu’s influence on every occasion when asked
who influenced him. Is the notion of “influence” still a viable concept in dis-
cussing Ozu and the subsequent generations of directors in both Japan and
abroad? Is “Ozuesque” purely a construct of critical discourses, projected onto
any “new” terrain of East Asian cinema? This section, in lieu of sketching the
Western key texts on Ozu—​those of Richie, Schrader, Burch, and Bordwell—​
will examine how the notion of influence is construed in their texts. A careful
rereading of the various approaches to Ozu will show that their approaches—​
the humanist, the culturalist, and the neoformalist—​cannot and should not
be as neatly mapped onto the matrix of a methodological framework.28
Humanist critics such as Richie and Schrader, according to Yoshimoto, locate
the particularity of Ozu in his cultural heritage—​Japanese culture, art, and
spirituality.29 Richie’s monograph on Ozu, the first book-​length scholarship on
Ozu in English, was published in 1974, and it provided indispensable insights
into Ozu’s work. Yet his approach to Ozu is considered prominently humanist
as well as culturalist, foregrounding the national character in Ozu’s aesthetic.
Indeed, Richie often finds in the Japanese cultural traditions an indispen-
sible heuristic value in articulating Ozu’s aesthetic sensibility. For instance,
Zen Buddhism and the notion of mono no aware, the connotation of the latter
extending its literal meaning of “pathos of things” to refer to sympathetic sad-
ness, provides Richie with a handy analytic concept to characterize the poign-
ancy and bittersweet sentiment detected across many of Ozu’s films.30
Richie, nonetheless, was fully aware of the tenuous relationship existing
between Japanese culture and Ozu’s films. In Richie’s words,

For him [Ozu] as for all good film directors, the experience of the film was the most
important thing. He himself never spoke of mu, or mono no aware, though he knew
what they meant, and I doubt he would ever have seriously discussed them. Indeed
there is a question (a not very important one, to be sure) whether Ozu “knew” what he
was doing. One possible answer is that the kind of mentality that framed the concept
of mu had much in common with the one that created Late Spring (just as the kind of
mentality that created Kabuki resembles the one that created the sword-​fight film,
which allows innocent critics to speak of the Kabuki’s influence on the Japanese cin-
ema, when in fact, none exists).31

It is interesting to note here that Richie describes as “innocent” those who

find the influence of Kabuki on Japanese period (jidaigeki) films, when “none

[6] Reorienting Ozu

exists.” Many have claimed that Richie in fact fell into a similar kind of pit-
fall in his pigeonholing of the poetics of Late Spring into a “Japanese” men-
tality and sentimentality. Nonetheless, Richie does not offer a reductionist,
essentialist account, as many assume; he sees the Japanese culture such as mu
and mono no aware as providing a causal basis (“he knew what they meant”)
broadly construed, rather than a causal explanation for how Ozu’s distinctive
style came about (“whether he ‘knew’ what he was doing”).
Contemporary Japanese film scholars map Richie’s rather heterogeneous,
if not eclectic, approach to Ozu too neatly onto the humanist tradition rooted
in the reductionist, essentialist assumptions. Despite his “humanist” bent,
Richie’s approach is certainly comparative; Ozu’s sense of irony, he claims,
is comparable to that of Anton Chekhov or Jane Austen in that despite the
estimable detachment manifest in his films, they nevertheless pull the viewer
closer to characters.32 Or the function of Ozu’s low camera position, which
he used persistently from the beginning of his career, is similar to the one
that Gregg Toland employed over a decade later in Citizen Kane (Orson Wells,
1941): “the low angle made it possible to sharply delineate the various sur-
faces of the image and to accentuate the one occupied by the actors.”33 Richie
is amused by the fact that such an aesthetic choice—​adopted by both Ozu and
Toland, although independently—​created a similar difficulty for the studio
heads at Shochiku and RKO: namely, to build ceilings on the sets.
Richie’s analysis of Ozu’s films certainly was guided by his knowledge of
and familiarity with Japanese culture and traditions; however, he repeatedly
grants Ozu his aesthetic peculiarity and sensibility—​that is, his personal
predilection to sustain pictorial balance. In his description of “unaccounta-
ble lapses” in Ozu’s films, Richie states that “in the later films continuity is
continuously broken because Ozu rearranged his props constantly for differ-
ent camera set-​ups. In these cases, however, he knew what he was doing, or
at least why he was doing it (for compositional reasons), and if the effect is
scrambled on the screen, it is at least the way he wanted it.”34 After having
introduced the anecdotes of actors and actresses, including Ryu Chishu, Hara
Setsuko, and Tsukasa Yoko, working on the set under Ozu’s meticulous direc-
tion and control, Richie claims, “the end to which all these pains were taken
was, of course, composition. Ozu had various ways of creating it, but all were
necessarily based on his ideas of balance and geometry.”35
Schrader’s approach to Ozu could be reassessed in a similar way. Schrader’s
work on Ozu operates within the tripartite relationship he sets up in his dis-
cussion of the transcendental style—​individuality (personality), culture (Zen),
and universality (the transcendent). Schrader’s rhetoric is more forceful in his
assertion of the cultural influence of Japan, and Zen in particular, on Ozu’s
work: “Zen is not an organized religion with physical and political concerns
like Shintoism or Christianity, but a way of living which has permeated the
fabric of Japanese culture . . . . Zen is the quintessence of traditional Japanese

Introduction [7]
8

art, an art which Ozu sought to introduce into cinema.”36 Although Richie’s
Ozu was published in 1974 two years after Schrader’s Transcendental Style in
Film (originally published in 1972 [1988]) appeared, Schrader’s transcenden-
tal Ozu resonates with the observations made by Richie. Schrader was very
much in conversation with Richie’s earlier work, The Japanese Film (1959),
coauthored with Joseph L. Anderson and further with Richie’s appreciation
of Ozu, which appeared in the journal Film Quarterly in the 1960s.37 Unlike
Richie, who recognizes the tentative nature of the relationship between the
specificity of Ozu’s films and his cultural heritage, Schrader posits a stronger
relationship between Zen and Ozu:

But taken as a whole Ozu’s techniques are so similar to traditional Zen methods that
the influence is unmistakable, and one must consequently assume that Ozu’s personal-
ity, like that of the traditional artist, is only valuable to the extent that it expresses his
thesis. His personality, like those of his characters, merges with an enveloping sense
of mono no aware, and—​the ultimate achievement of Zen art—​finally becomes undis-
tinguishable from it.38

But to what extent do we need to take Schrader’s rhetoric here at face value,
when Schrader also attributes Ozu’s aesthetic to various sources, including
production circumstances and Ozu’s individuality?

Other precedents can be found for Ozu’s techniques: the rote repetition of movement
was a gag in Japanese silent comedy and became incorporated into Ozu’s technique;
and his stationary camera shots, Ozu once half-​facetiously stated, were due to the fact
that a dolly could not operate at such a low angle. And, of course, his “personality” also
influenced his approach to filmmaking.39

Schrader, like Richie, acknowledges the various origins of Ozu’s aesthetic.

But more importantly, one must also pay attention to a more moderate claim
when reflecting on the cultural aspects of Ozu’s work: “Zen art and culture
is [sic] an accurate metaphor for Ozu’s films.”40 The metaphor is considered
a figurative speech that forges a relationship between two disparate things
for rhetorical effect. Ozu ultimately interests Schrader because of the capacity
of Ozu’s films to achieve transcendental stasis, and because of how his films
could liberate the viewer from everydayness and transcend a fissure existing
between environment and human being. “Zen,” for Schrader, is like mono no
aware for Richie, embodying the heuristic value that would help one to make
sense of some of the “functions” that he believes Ozu’s aesthetic to achieve,
rather than providing a causal explanation.
Ozu’s film style is ideologically significant for Burch, as he sees it as oppos-
ing or contrasting with what he calls “the institutional mode of representation”
(IMR). However, Burch faces a similar kind of criticism leveled against the

[8] Reorienting Ozu

culturalist; Yoshimoto claims that “Burch falls prey to the Orientalist trap.”41
Burch finds a close parallel between Ozu’s aesthetic and Japanese poetry, in
particular that which exists between transitional shots (or a cut-​away within a
scene) and pillow words in Japanese poetry. Burch sees the ambiguity of a pil-
low shot in relation to the shots that precede and/​or follow it, similar to that
of a pillow word, which appears in a poem that modifies the first word of the
next line.42 Burch’s characterization of Ozu’s cinema (or Japanese cinema in
general) is underpinned by his own theoretical agenda to advance a critique of
the IMR and its diegetic effects: that is, how the IMR that has developed along
with the establishment of feature films in the West fosters the viewer’s illu-
sion of and immersion in the diegesis.43 To Burch, Ozu’s systemics, including
his false eyeline match and pillow shot, challenges the “Western” conception
of the fictional world as a self-​enclosed entity, yielding a “decentering” effect.44
Despite Burch’s emphasis on Japanese art (such as poetry) that finds its ways
in Ozu’s work, he also acknowledges the irreducibility of such aesthetics to
either the cultural or the collective, stating, “[T]‌hough it would be absurd to
reduce the pillow shot to any ‘ultimate’ function, the pictorial quality which
it almost inevitably displays may be regarded as the epitome of Ozu’s surface
imagery.”45 Ozu’s pictorial sensibility, in the end, guides his choices in compo-
sition and editing; it is irreducible to either national or cultural origins.
A rereading of these scholars whose works provided salient turning points
in the English-​language scholarship on Ozu, in fact, shows their methodolog-
ical ambivalence in explaining Ozu’s film style: markedly in their struggles to
find an adequate way to offer a view on the relationship between the individ-
ual, the cultural, and the transnational (or the universal). Ozu’s aesthetic is
an outcome of diverse cultural and cinematic sources, influences, and inspira-
tions. From the methodological certainty (“the influence is unmistakable”46)
to heuristics (“metaphor”47), and to analogy (“an unexpected similarity,” “a
parallel”48), the varying degrees of Japanese cultural elements that may have
contributed to the establishment of Ozu’s aesthetic in fact point to the need to
consider both the causal basis (“he knew what they meant”) of, and the causal
explanation (“he knew what he was doing”49) for his film style and sensibility.
It is not my intention to deny that foregrounding the “Japanese” character
in Ozu’s film style carries an epistemic risk of losing both the historical and
aesthetic complexity of Ozu’s work, associating his aesthetic with a handful
of “Japanese” concepts. Nonetheless, instead of generalizing some of these
approaches as the culturalist, orientalist, essentialist, or reductionist, and
neatly summing up the methodological paradigms and “limitations,” what
I hope to have indicated—​by briefly surveying the moments of reservations
in these scholars’ attribution of the cultural influences to Ozu’s world—​is the
conceptual difficulties they encountered in advancing an adequate framework
for explaining the relationship between the individual and the collective (be
it cultural, political, or national). As Schrader puts it, “[E]‌ach artist must use

Introduction [9]
10

the raw materials of his personality and culture . . . but it is not possible to
extrapolate the transcendental style from within a totally Japanese perspec-
tive; one needs several cultural perspectives.”50 Regardless of whether they
were indeed able to encompass “several” perspectives, Richie, Schrader, and
Burch all acknowledge the conceptual risks in reducing Ozu’s style to just cul-
tural and historical factors. A question remains as to how to conceptualize the
notion of influence, either cultural or filmic.
In his critique of the above-​mentioned positions that posit strong affilia-
tions between Ozu’s film style and Japanese culture, David Bordwell points out
that it is hasty for critics and scholars to presuppose the Japanese tradition
as uncontested, as if it maintained its original forms stable and fixed.51 For
instance, in Japan, mono no aware, the idea of which dates back to the Heian
period of the eighth to eleventh centuries, changed its cultural status from the
object of nostalgia toward moral simplicity and purity, to a literary device, and
to an inherent “Japanese” quality, subject to historical conditions.52 In order
to provide a causal explanation for the establishment of Ozu’s aesthetic and
style, Bordwell claims, one should seek “proximate historical practices” within
which Ozu’s own agency could be located. Born in 1903, Ozu experienced the
Meiji (1868–​1912) reformation and ideals to westernize the country in his
formative years. Ozu passionately consumed Western culture, often refrain-
ing from associating his work with Japanese traditional forms. Bordwell notes
that “a causal explanation must specify why Ozu’s work embodies these qual-
ities more than other directors’ work does.”53 Influence, for Bordwell, should
be predicated on the historical conditions and industrial circumstances that
facilitated the source material’s transmission as well as director’s urge to
employ it. For Ozu, who was himself a modern boy (mobo), Hollywood “not
only embodied the modernity of the West but offered an accessible model of
narrative unity.”54
Michael Raine also finds Hollywood cinema as the inspiration for Ozu, who
in fact stood out among his peers for the “intensity of his imitations”55 as
well as for honing in his films the “subtlety” of Hollywood cinema that Ozu
appreciated.56 Ozu’s contemporaneous critics in Japan and the studio blurbs
constantly compared Ozu with foreign as well as Hollywood filmmakers like
Chaplin and Lubitsch. However, Raine proposes considering the Japanese
adoption and appropriation of Hollywood film style and cycles not as imitation,
but as mimesis. The concept of “mimesis,” Raine claims, “acknowledges both
the fluidity it introduces into cultural identity and the multifaceted nature of
‘imitation.’ ”57 The mimetic practice in the local context of early Japanese cin-
ema aims at “recreating Hollywood film in Japan, parodying the absurdities of
American Cinema . . . in the Japanese context, and even learning from the
gap between Japanese and Hollywood cinema.”58 Mimesis, which Aristotle
construes as innate in human nature, certainly involves both representational

[ 10 ] Reorienting Ozu
and heuristic aspects.59 Mimesis can be playful and pleasurable (à la Aristotle)
especially when the spectator recognizes it as such: “identifying this as an
image of such-​and-​such a man, for instance.”60 The appreciation of Ozu’s films
in relation to Hollywood cinema would, then, lie in appreciating both the
adoption and transformation of Hollywood cinema conventions in addition
to the spectator’s recognition of Hollywood references.
Both Bordwell and Raine underscore the industrial context and practices in
which Ozu (and other Japanese filmmakers) worked; any specificity of an indi-
vidual style and affinity between national cinemas should be contextualized
within such practices. It is worth recalling the two attributes of influence—​
similarity and causality—​in locating the various influences on Ozu as well as
his influence on subsequent generations of directors. The relationship of influ-
ence can be construed as follows:

When we say that A has influenced B, we mean that after literary or aesthetic anal-
ysis one can discern a number of significant similarities between the works of A and
B. We may also mean that historical, social, and perhaps psychological analyses of the
data available about A and B reveal similarities, points of contact, between the “lives” or
“minds” of the two writers.61

Without an adequate point of contact, the similarity detected would merely

remain as a marked “affinity” rather than as a sign of influence. The distinc-
tion that Richie casually introduces between “he knew what they meant” and
“he knew what he was doing” nicely contrasts the types of causality that film
scholars attributed and established, either metaphorically or casually. If the
humanist and culturalist tradition (somewhat naively or innocently or inten-
tionally) turned to the “causal (or better cultural) basis” as the point of contact,
the latter sought the “causal explanation,” which can be historically traceable.
When one turns the mirror from cultural and cinematic influences on Ozu
to his influence on subsequent generations of directors, however, similarity
and causality as the two “principles” of influence appear to be insufficient. As
Michael Worton and Judith Still argue, “[T]‌he object of an act of influence by
a powerful figure (say, a father) or by a social structure . . . does not receive
or perceive that pressure as neutral.”62 New Wave directors such as Oshima
Nagisa, Shinoda Masahiro, and Imamura Shohei, for instance, criticized the
commercially oriented filmmaking at Shochiku, challenging the conserva-
tiveness of Ozu’s film style and themes. Imamura, who worked as assistant
director on Ozu’s Early Summer (Bakushu, 1951) claims, “I wouldn’t just say
I haven’t been influenced by Ozu. I would say I didn’t want to be influenced
by him.”63 Kore-​eda Hirokazu, who is often compared to Ozu, also denies
Ozu’s direct influence, seeing himself more aligned with Naruse Mikio or Hou
Hsiao-​hsien in terms of the tone of his films.64 If there is any influence of Ozu

Introduction [ 11 ]
12

on these directors, it would be what Harold Bloom calls an influence as subli-

mation, a “defense against the anxiety of influence.”65
A strong need arises, then, to distinguish between what I would call “forma-
tive” and “constitutive” influence; influence can be exercised as part of initial,
formative forces in positive and/​or negative shaping of a canon, an individual
or group style, and a movement. Influence could further leave its footprints
through thematic and/​or stylistic devices inherited and transformed in films
themselves. The Hollywood slapstick comedy of Harold Lloyd and the sophis-
ticated comedy of Ernst Lubitsch had influences in both senses of the term on
Ozu’s early student comedy. Adam Bingham notes,

Ozu’s earliest extant film, the Harold Lloyd-​esque student comedy Days Of Youth
[1929], was edited almost entirely according to classical continuity conventions (Ozu’s
immense love of American cinema and its influence on his early work have been
noted), most apparently 180-​degree rule shot/​reverse shot cutting and thus “correct”
screen direction, a conventional analytical breakdown of space, and establishing and
re-​establishing shots.66

Ozu’s constitutive influence can be traced in the specific components that are
transmitted to his contemporaries or successors. Bordwell locates Ozu’s influ-
ence in such Shochiku directors as Sasaki Yasushi, Hara Kenkichi, and Shibuya
Minoru: “Hara’s A Happy Family (Kofuku na kazoku, 1940) uses the 360-​degree
space which Ozu pioneered. Sasaki’s Mysterious Man (Shimpi no otoku, 1937)
contains a pensive passage in which two men leave the ‘Arc-​en-​ciel’ bar and
three shots linger on bar signs being switched; the scene reminiscent of The
Only Son (1936).”67 As he discusses in his chapter of this volume, some of the
Ozuesque stylistic devices can be found in films like Suo Masayuki’s Sumo
Do, Sumo Don’t (Shiko funjatta, 1992) in its use of frontal framing and Wayne
Wang’s Dim Sum (1985) and The Joy Luck Club (1993) in its narrative situa-
tions (marrying off children) and the use of domestic objects and lingering
cityscape.
Global film auteurs, who express their admirations for Ozu, could then be
discussed in terms of both formative as well as constitutive influence, and
many chapters in this volume are in fact dedicated to comparing Ozu with
such directors as Hou Hsiao-​hsien, Kore-​eda Hirokazu, Wim Wenders, Iguchi
Nami, Clair Denis, and Joanna Hogg. Certainly, Ozu is not the sole influence
on these directors; in the works of these directors, both cross-​cultural yet
transformative aspects should be foregrounded; it is not the affinity, stylistic
or thematic, that matters, but the transformation of Ozu’s sensibility mani-
fest in these filmmakers’ work.
Reorienting Ozu: A Master and His Influence redirects the scholarship from
Ozu the auteur to Ozuesque—​how his aesthetic sensibilities can be articu-
lated differently in light of the theoretical frameworks that yield the diverging

[ 12 ] Reorienting Ozu
receptions of his films, as well as the historical contexts in which his films
were produced, circulated, and consumed. This volume further traces the
influence of Ozu on the films of directors of successive generations and/​or dif-
fering nationalities. If Ozuesque, as some of the contributors to this volume
delineate and propose, could be characterized not in terms of a fixed set of
tropes and narrative structures manifest throughout Ozu’s oeuvre, but instead
approached historically and relationally, that is, in terms of how it has devel-
oped and been explored within the specific industrial and discursive context,
it could still help us articulate the relationship between Ozu and global film
directors. Ozuseque, construed historically, opens up the possibility of dis-
cussing the nature of influence as operative rather than mimetic. As alluded to
previously, the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-​hsien independently developed
a distinctive style of film staging prior to his encounter with Ozu’s work. Yet,
as he became an internationally renowned director within the global film fes-
tival circuits, his films have increasingly (and explicitly) alluded to Ozu’s films;
Hou was also approached by the Japanese studio Shochiku to direct a film
to celebrate the centennial anniversary of Ozu’s birth—​Café Lumière (2003).
The aesthetic association between Ozu and Hou’s later work should, then, be
traced and situated within this particular global film culture and discourse.
Section I, “Branding Ozu,” presents contemporary theoretical and discur-
sive frameworks that help one re-​examine Ozu’s oeuvre and further explore
the concept of the Ozuesque. This section begins with Bordwell’s comprehen-
sive overview of the legacy of Ozu’s film style and tone and his influence on
such directors as Suo Masayuki, Kore-​eda Hirokazu, and Wayne Wang, as well
as other global directors. Darrell Davis critically assesses one of the prevalent
conceptions of Ozu in the West, especially the presence of Zen Buddhism in his
work, and contrasts such characterization with Japanese scholarship advanced
on Ozu, including that of Hasumi and Yoshida. Elaborating further on Hasumi,
whose scholarship on Ozu has had a significant influence on the filmmaking
and style of contemporary Japanese directors, Aaron Gerow examines the
Japanese discursive formations that contributed to the revival of the interest
of both Japanese filmmakers and audiences in Ozu, and the construction of
Ozu as a transnational figure within Japan. Mitsuyo Wada-​Marciano focuses
her chapter on the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-​hsien’s Café Lumière (2003), a
film dedicated to the celebration of Ozu’s centennial birthday. She makes sense
of, yet challenges, the palpable “Japaneseness” manifested in Hou’s film by
examining the production circumstances and marketing strategies that helped
to create a “systemic sense” in Japanese audiences and critics—​a concept that
Japanese philosopher Ohashi Ryosuke adopts from the Greek philosopher
Aristotle. Jinhee Choi proposes viewing Ozuesque as a sensibility that allows
both constancy and malleability. Employing the notion of sensibility advanced
by art historian Roger Fry, Choi examines how the combination of rigor and
playfulness shapes Ozu’s distinctive aesthetic sensibility.

Introduction [ 13 ]
14

Subsequent sections further help our understanding of Ozu both histor-

ically and transculturally. Section II, “Historicizing Ozu,” expands upon the
existing scholarship on Ozu to examine his films that have not been widely
circulated and discussed. Contributors view Ozu’s work as a result of, and
a response to, technological developments in the Japanese film industry,
censorship, and sociopolitical changes within Japan. Michael Raine offers
a metric analysis of Japanese silent cinema and attributes the function of
more frequent deployment of intertitles in the late-​silent films of Ozu to
his way of replacing, or minimizing the role of, benshi, Japanese voiceover
commentators for silent cinema. Daisuke Miyao challenges the auteuristic
approaches to Ozu’s film style, which has dominated Western scholarship
on Ozu, by underscoring the sensitivity of Ozu’s work to the new technolo-
gies advanced in lighting and cinematography. Yuki Takinami entertains
Ozu’s critique of modern life in his lower-​middle-​class salarymen cycle
(shoshimin eiga) in the 1930s. The term shoshimin is a Japanese translation
of the Marxist term petit bourgeois, but the shoshimin films refer to a cycle
of salarymen films, which often feature a low-​to-​middle-​class office worker
as the protagonist. Comparing Ozu’s salarymen films with Vertov’s modern-
ist film Man with a Movie Camera (1929), this chapter critically assesses the
political dimension of Ozu’s work. The relationship between Ozu’s films and
nationalism will be explored in the next chapter. Junji Yoshida questions a
simplistic trajectory often projected onto Ozu—​from an innovative mod-
ern to a “conservative” Japanese director. Focusing on humor in Ozu’s films,
he instead explores the constant negotiation that took place between Ozu’s
work and censorship.
Section III, “Tracing Ozu,” is dedicated to Ozu’s influence on the directors
of East Asia and beyond. The theme of family, which is the main focus of Ozu’s
home dramas, provides an interesting site to trace the dissolution of family in
Japanese cinema. Adam Bingham’s analysis of Dogs and Cats (2004), which is
the directorial debut of female director Iguchi Nami, demonstrates the shared
style and pacing between the two directors, whose work focuses on the dis-
integration and the absence of stable family structures. Contributors further
assess the cross-​cultural influence of Ozu in world cinema by examining the
work of Jim Jarmusch, Claire Denis, Wim Wenders, Abbas Kiarostami, and
Joanna Hogg. Sight gags, or the way Ozu counterbalances blankness with
playfulness through sight gags, become for Manuel Garin and Albert Elduque
a converging point between Ozu and Western directors such as Jarmusch and
Aki Kaurismäki. Kate Taylor-​Jones draws a parallel between Denis and Ozu in
their postcolonial aesthetic, especially the way their films affectively engage
the spectator with the texture of the films. Mark Betz argues that the father-​
daughter relationship manifested in Ozu’s postwar films had become a formal
inspiration for Wenders’s “road” movies, such as Alice in the Cities (1974) and
Paris, Texas (1984). Kiarostami’s Five, Dedicated to Ozu is analyzed in light of

[ 14 ] Reorienting Ozu
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
without uttering a sound, he fell forward into the bush.
*****
Ducos opened his eyes to the vision of so preternaturally
melancholy a face, that he was shaken with weak laughter over the
whimsicality of his own imagination. But, in a very little, unwont to
dreaming as he was, the realization that he was looking upon no
apparition, but a grotesque of fact, silenced and absorbed him.
Presently he was moved to examine his circumstances. He was
lying on a heap of grass mats in a tiny house built of boards. Above
him was a square of leaf-embroidered sky cut out of a cane roof; to
his left, his eyes, focussing with a queer stiffness, looked through an
open doorway down precipices of swimming cloud. That was
because he lay in an eyrie on the hillside. And then at once, into his
white field of vision, floated the dismal long face, surmounted by an
ancient cocked-hat, slouched and buttonless, and issuing like an
august Aunt Sally’s from the neck of a cloak as black and dropping
as a pall.
The figure crossed the opening outside, and wheeled, with the
wind in its wings. In the act, its eyes, staring and protuberant, fixed
themselves on those of the Frenchman. Immediately, with a little
stately gesture expressive of relief and welcome, it entered the hut.
“By the mercy of God!” exclaimed the stranger in his own tongue.
Then he added in English: “The Inglese recovers to himself?”
Ducos smiled, nodding his head; then answered confidently,
feeling his way: “A little, sir, I tank you. Thees along night. Ah! it
appear all one pain.”
The other nodded solemnly in his turn—
“A long night indeed, in which the sunksink tree very time.”
“Comment!” broke out the aide-de-camp hoarsely, and instantly
realized his mistake.
“Ah! devil take the French!” said he explanatorily. “I been in their
camp so long that to catch their lingo. But I spik l’Espagnol, señor. It
shall be good to us to converse there.”
The other bowed impenetrably. His habit of a profound and
melancholy aloofness might have served for mask to any temper of
mind but that which, in real fact, it environed—a reason, that is to
say, more lost than bedevilled under the long tyranny of oppression.
“I have been ill, I am to understand?” said Ducos, on his guard.
“For three days and nights, señor. My goatherd came to tell me
how a wounded English officer was lying on the hills. Between us we
conveyed you hither.”
“Ah, Dios! I remember. I had endeavoured to carry muskets into
Saragossa by the river. I was hit in the leg; I was captured; I
escaped. For two days I wandered, señor, famished and desperate.
At last in these mountains I fell as by a stroke from heaven.”
“It was the foul blood clot, señor. It balked your circulation. There
was the brazen splinter in the wound, which I removed, and God
restored you. What fangs are theirs, these reptiles! In a few days you
will be well.”
“Thanks to what ministering angel?”
“I am known as Don Manoel di Cangrejo, señor, the most
shattered, as he was once the most prosperous of men. May God
curse the French! May God” (his wild, mournful face twitched with
strong emotion) “reward and bless these brave allies of a people
more wronged than any the world has yet known!”
“Noble Englishman,” said he by and by, “thou hast nothing at
present but to lie here and accept the grateful devotion of a heart to
which none but the inhuman denies humanity.”
Ducos looked his thanks.
“If I might rest here a little,” he said; “if I might be spared——”
The other bowed, with a grave understanding.
“None save ourselves, and the winds and trees, señor. I will nurse
thee as if thou wert mine own child.”
He was as good as his word. Ducos, pluming himself on his
perspicacity, accepting the inevitable with philosophy, lent himself
during the interval, while feigning a prolonged weakness, to
recovery. That was his, to all practical purposes, within a couple of
days, during which time he never set eyes on Anita, but only on
Anita’s master. Don Manoel would often come and sit by his bed of
mats; would even sometimes retail to him, as to a trusted ally, scraps
of local information. Thus was he posted, to his immense
gratification, in the topical after-history of his own exploit at the
gallows.
“It is said,” whispered Cangrejo awfully, “that one of the dead,
resenting so vile a neighbour, impressed a goatherd into his service,
and, being assisted from the beam, walked away. Truly it is an age of
portents.”
On the third morning, coming early with his bowl of goat’s milk and
his offering of fruits, he must apologize, with a sweet and lofty
courtesy, for the necessity he was under of absenting himself all day.
“There is trouble,” he said—“as when is there not? I am called to
secret council, señor. But the boy Ambrosio has my orders to be
ever at hand shouldst thou need him.”
Ducos’s heart leapt. But he was careful to deprecate this generous
attention, and to cry Adios! with the most perfect assumption of
composure.
He was lying on his elbow by and by, eagerly listening, when the
doorway was blocked by a shadow. The next instant Anita had
sprung to and was kneeling beside him.
“Heart of my heart, have I done well? Thou art sound and whole?
O, speak to me, speak to me, that I may hear thy voice and gather
its forgiveness!”
For what? She was sobbing and fondling him in a very lust of
entreaty.
“Thou hast done well,” he said. “So, we were seen indeed, Anita?”
“Yes,” she wept, holding his face to her bosom. “And, O! I agonize
for thee to be up and away, Eugenio, for I fear.”
“Hush! I am strong. Help me to my legs, child. So! Now, come with
me outside, and point out, if thou canst, where lies the Little Hump.”
She was his devoted crutch at once. They stood in the sunlight,
looking down upon the hills which fell from beneath their feet—a
world of tossed and petrified rapids. At their backs, on a shallow
plateau under eaves of rock, Cangrejo’s eyrie clung to the mountain-
side.
“There,” said the goatherd, indicating with her finger, “that mound
above the valley—that little hill, fat-necked like a great mushroom,
which sprouts from its basin among the trees?”
“Wait! mine eyes are dazzled.”
 “Ah, poor sick eyes! Look, then! Dost thou not see the white worm
of the Pampeluna road—below yonder, looping through the bushes?”
“I see it—yes, yes.”
“Now, follow upwards from the big coil, where the pine tree leans
to the south, seeming a ladder between road and mound.”
“Stay—I have it.”
“Behold the Little Hump, the salt mine of St. Ildefonso, and once,
they say, an island in the midst of a lake, which burst its banks and
poured forth and was gone. And now thou knowest, Eugenio?”
He did not answer. He was intently fixing in his memory the
position of the hill. She waited on his mood, not daring to risk his
anger a second time, with a pathetic anxiety. Presently he heaved
out a sigh, and turned on her, smiling.
“It is well,” he said. “Now conduct me to the spot where we met
three days ago.”
It was surprisingly near at hand. A labyrinthine descent—by way of
aloe-horned rocks, with sandy bents and tufts of harsh juniper
between—of a hundred yards or so, and they were on the stony
plateau which he remembered. There, to one side, was the coppice
of chestnuts and locust trees. To the other, the road by which he had
climbed went down with a run—such as he himself was on thorns to
emulate—into the valleys trending to Saragossa. His eyes gleamed.
He seated himself down on a boulder, controlling his impatience only
by a violent effort.
“Anita,” he said, drilling out his speech with slow emphasis, “thou
must leave me here alone awhile. I would think—I would think and
plan, my heart. Go, wait on thy goats above, and I will return to thee
presently.”
She sighed, and crept away obedient. O, forlorn, most forlorn soul
of love, which, counting mistrust treason, knows itself a traitor! Yet
Anita obeyed, and with no thought to eavesdrop, because she was in
love with loyalty.
The moment he was well convinced of her retreat, Ducos got to
his legs with an immense sigh of relief. Love, he thought, could be
presuming, could be obtuse, could be positively a bore. It all turned
upon the context of the moment; and the present was quick with
desires other than for endearments. For it must be related that the
young captain, having manœuvred matters to this accommodating
pass, was designing nothing less than an instant return, on the wings
of transport, to the blockading camp, whence he proposed returning,
with a suitable force and all possible dispatch, to seize and empty of
its varied treasures the salt mine of St. Ildefonso.
“Pouf!” he muttered to himself in a sort of ecstatic aggravation;
“this accursed delay! But the piastres are there still—I have
Cangrejo’s word for it.”
He turned once, before addressing himself to flight, to refocus in
his memory the position of the mound, which still from here was
plainly visible. In the act he pricked his ears, for there was a sound of
footsteps rising up the mountain path. He dodged behind a boulder.
The footsteps came on—approached him—paused—so long that he
was induced at last to peep for the reason. At once his eyes
encountered other eyes awaiting him. He laughed, and left his
refuge. The new-comer was a typical Spanish Romany—slouching,
filthy, with a bandage over one eye.
“God be with thee, Caballero!” said the Frenchman defiantly.
To his astonishment, the other broke into a little scream of
laughter, and flung himself towards him.
“Judge thou, now,” said he, “which is the more wide-awake
adventurer and the better actor!”
“My God!” cried Ducos; “it is de la Platière!”
“Hush!” whispered the mendicant. “Are we private? Ah, bah! Junot
should have sent me in the first instance.”
“I have been hurt, thou rogue. Our duel of wits is yet postponed. In
good time hast thou arrived. This simplifies matters. Thou shalt
return, and I remain. Hist! come away, and I will tell thee all.”
Half an hour later, de la Platière—having already, for his part,
mentally absorbed the details of a certain position—swung rapidly,
with a topical song on his lips, down the path he had ascended
earlier. The sound of his footfalls receded and died out. The hill
regathered itself to silence. Ducos, on terms with destiny and at
peace with all the world, sat for hours in the shadow of the trees.
Perhaps he was not yet Judas enough to return to Anita, awaiting
him in Cangrejo’s eyrie. But at length, towards evening, fearing his
long absence might arouse suspicion or uneasiness, he arose and
climbed the hill. When he reached the cabin, he found it empty and
silent. He loitered about, wondering and watchful. Not a soul came
near him. He dozed; he awoke; he ate a few olives and some bread;
he dozed again. When he opened his eyes for the second time, the
shadows of the peaks were slanting to the east. He got to his feet,
shivering a little. This utter silence and desertion discomforted him.
Where was the girl? God! was it possible after all that she had
betrayed him? He might have questioned his own heart as to that;
only, as luck would have it, it was such a tiresomely deaf organ. So,
let him think. De la Platière, with his men (as calculated), would be
posted in the Pampeluna road, round the spur of the hill below, an
hour after sunset—that was to say, at fifteen minutes to six. No doubt
by then the alarm would have gone abroad. But no great resistance
to a strong force was to be apprehended. In the meantime—well, in
the meantime, until the moment came for him to descend under
cover of dark and assume the leadership, he must possess his soul
in patience.
The sun went down. Night flowing into the valleys seemed to expel
a moan of wind; then all dropped quiet again. Darkness fell swift and
sudden like a curtain, but no Anita appeared, putting it aside, and
Ducos was perplexed. He did not like this bodiless, shadowless
subscription to his scheming. It troubled him to have no one to talk to
—and deceive. He was depressed.
By and by he pulled off, turned inside-out and resumed his scarlet
jacket, which he had taken the provisional precaution to have lined
with a sombre material. As he slipped in his arms, he started and
looked eagerly into the lower vortices of dusk. In the very direction to
which his thoughts were engaged, a little glow-worm light was
burning steadily from the thickets. What did it signify—Spaniards or
French, ambush or investment? Allowing—as between himself on
the height and de la Platière on the road below—for the apparent
discrepancy in the time of sunset, it was yet appreciably before the
appointed hour. Nevertheless, this that he saw made the risk of an
immediate descent necessary.
Bringing all his wits, his resolution, his local knowledge to one
instant focus, he started, going down at once swiftly and with
caution. The hills rose above him like smoke as he dropped; the
black ravines were lifted to his feet. Sometimes for scores of paces
he would lose sight altogether of the eye of light; then, as he turned
some shoulder of rock, it would strike him in the face with its nearer
radiance, so that he had to pause and readjust his vision to the new
perspective. Still, over crabbed ridges and by dip of thorny gulches
he descended steadily, until the mound of the Little Hump, like a
gigantic thatched kraal, loomed oddly upon him through the dark.
And, lo! the beacon that had led him down unerring was a great
lantern hung under the sagging branch of a chestnut tree at the foot
of the mound—a lantern, the lurid nucleus of a little coil of tragedy.
A cluster of rocks neighboured the clearing about the tree. To
these Ducos padded his last paces with a cat-like stealth—
crouching, hardly breathing; and now from that coign of peril he
stared down.
A throng of armed guerrillas, one a little forward of the rest, was
gathered about a couple more of their kidney, who, right under the
lantern, held the goatherd Anita on her knees in a nailing grip. To
one side, very phantoms of desolation, stood Cangrejo and another.
The faces of all, densely shadowed in part by the rims of their
sombreros, looked as if masked; their mouths, corpse-like, showed a
splint of teeth; their ink-black whiskers hummocked on their
shoulders.
So, in the moment of Ducos’s alighting on it, was the group
postured—silent, motionless, as if poised on the turn of some full tide
of passion. And then, in an instant, a voice boomed up to him.
“Confess!” it cried, vibrating: “him thou wert seen with at the
gallows; him whom thou foisted, O! unspeakable, thou devil’s doxy!
on the unsuspecting Cangrejo; him, thy Frankish gallant and spy”
(the voice guttered, and then, rising, leapt to flame)—“what hast thou
done with him? where hidden? Speak quickly and with truth, if, traitor
though thou be, thou wouldst be spared the traitor’s estrapade.”
“Alguazil, I cannot say. Have mercy on me!”
Ducos could hardly recognize the child in those agonized tones.
The inquisitor, with an oath, half wheeled.
“Pignatelli, father of this accursed—if by her duty thou canst
prevail?”
 A figure—agitated, cadaverous, as sublimely dehumanized as
Brutus—stepped from Cangrejo’s side and tossed one gnarled arm
aloft.
“No child of mine, alguazil!” it proclaimed in a shrill, strung cry. “Let
her reap as she hath sown, alguazil!”
Cangrejo leapt, and flung himself upon his knees by the girl.
“Tell Don Manoel, chiquita. God! little boy, that being a girl (ah,
naughty!) is half absolved. Tell him, tell him—ah, there—now, now,
now! He, thy lover, was in the cabin. I left him prostrate, scarce able
to move. When the council comes to seek him, he is gone. Away,
sayst thou? Ah, child, but I must know better! It could not be far. Say
where—give him up—let him show himself only, chiquita, and the
good alguazil will spare thee. Such a traitor, ah, Dios! And yet I have
loved, too.”
He sobbed, and clawed her uncouthly. Ducos, in his eyrie, laughed
to himself, and applauded softly, making little cymbals of his thumb-
nails.
“But he will not move her,” he thought—and, on the thought,
started; for from his high perch his eye had suddenly caught, he was
sure of it, the sleeking of a French bayonet in the road below.
“Master!” cried Anita, in a heart-breaking voice; “he is gone—they
cannot take him. O, don’t let them hurt me!”
The alguazil made a sign. Cangrejo, gobbling and resisting, was
dragged away. There was a little ugly, silent scuffle about the girl;
and, in a moment, the group fell apart to watch her being hauled up
to the branch by her thumbs.
Ducos looked on greedily.
“How long before she sets to screaming?” he thought, “so that I
may escape under cover of it.”
So long, that he grew intolerably restless—wild, furious. He could
have cursed her for her endurance.
But presently it came, moaning up all the scale of suffering. And,
at that, slinking like a rat through its run, he went down swiftly
towards the road—to meet de la Platière and his men already silently
breaking cover from it.
And, on the same instant, the Spaniards saw them.
*****
 “Peste!” whispered de la Platière “We could have them all at one
volley but for that!”
Between the French force, ensconced behind the rocks whither
Ducos had led them, and the Spaniards who, completely taken by
surprise, had clustered foolishly in a body under the lantern, hung
the body of Anita, its torture suspended for the moment because its
poor wits were out.
“How, my friend!” exclaimed Ducos. “But for what?”
“The girl, that is all.”
“She will feel nothing. No doubt she is half dead already. A
moment, and it will be too late.”
“Nevertheless, I will not,” said de la Platière.
Ducos stamped ragingly.
“Give the word to me. She must stand her chance. For the
Emperor!” he choked—then shrieked out, “Fire!”
The explosion crashed among the hills, and echoed off.
A dark mass, which writhed and settled beyond the lantern shine,
seemed to excite a little convulsion of merriment in the swinging
body. That twitched and shook a moment; then relaxed, and hung
motionless.
 THE RAVELLED SLEAVE
Sleep, that knits up the ravelled sleave of care.

I should like to preface my subject with a Caractère, in the style of

La Bruyère, as thus:—
Pamphilus is what the liberal call a reserved man, and the
intolerant a secretive. He certainly has an aggravating way of
appearing to make Asian mysteries of the commonplaces of life. He
traffics in silence as others do in gossip. The “Ha!”, with which he
accepts your statement of fact or conjecture, seems to imply on his
part both a shrewder than ordinary knowledge of your subject, and a
curiosity to study in you the popular view. One feels oddly superficial
in his company, and, resentful of the imposition, blunders into self-
assertive vulgarities which one knows to be misrepresentations of
oneself. Do still waters always run deep? Pamphilus, it would
appear, has founded his conduct on the fallacy, as if he had never
observed the placid waters of the Rhine slipping over their shallow
levels. One finds oneself speculating if, could one but once lay bare,
suddenly, the jealous secrets of Pamphilus’s bosom, one would be
impressed with anything but their unimportance. Yet, strangely,
scepticism and irritation despite, one likes him, and takes pleasure in
his company.
Possibly the fact that he cultivates so few friends makes of his
lonely preferences a flattery. Then, too, loquacity is not invariably a
brimming intellect’s overflow. It is better, on the whole, if one has
very little to say, to keep that little in reserve for a rainy day. Too
many of us, having the conceit of our inheritance, think that we, also,
can feed a multitude on five loaves and a couple of fishes. But we
must adulterate largely to do it.
Pamphilus, again, has the winning, persuasive “presence.” He is
thirty-three, but still in his physical and mental attributes a big-eyed
wondering boy. You can mention to him nothing so ordinary, but his
eager “Yes? Yes?” startles you into trying to improve upon your
subject with a touch of humour, a flower of observation, for his rare
delectation. Is he worth the effort? You don’t know. You don’t know
whether or not he wants you to think so, or is really instinctively
greedy for the psychologic bonne bouche. He is tall, and spare, and
interesting in appearance. In short, he lacks no charm but candour;
and I am not sure but that the lack is not a fifth grace. He is, finally,
“Valentine,” and the subject of this “Morality.”
It may have been a year ago that, coming silently into my rooms
one night, Valentine “jumped” me, to my dignified annoyance. I hate
being so taken off my guard. Generally, I hold it that a man’s
consideration for his fellow-creatures’ nerves is the measure of his
mental endowment. Valentine, however, does not, to do him justice,
make these noiseless entrances to surprise one, so much as to
entertain himself with one’s preoccupations. Mine, as it happened,
was the evening paper.
“Ah!” he exclaimed, breathing the monosyllable suddenly over my
shoulder, like an enlightened ghost. The characteristic note was, I
supposed, in allusion to the paragraph which engaged my attention
at the moment. It was headed “The Brompton Sleeping Girl.”
I started, of course; and, in the instant reaction of nerve, flew to an
extreme of rudeness.
“Yes,” I drawled; “an interesting case, isn’t it? Supposing it had
been a private letter, how long would you have stood before shouting
your presence into my ear like that?”
He laughed as he moved away (he had not shouted at all, by the
by); then, as he sat down opposite me in the shadow, appeared for
the first time to realize my meaning.
“Just long enough to recognize the fact,” he said quietly. “What do
you mean by the question?”
Thus rebounding, my own rudeness struck me ashamed. I had no
real justification for the insult, anyhow that I could call into evidence.
“O, nothing!” I mumbled awkwardly; “except that you made me
almost jump out of my skin.”
It was characteristic of him, and a further puzzle, that in spite of his
self-suggested consciousness of superiority he was easily
depressed by a snub. We sat for a little in a glowering silence, and
perhaps with a mutual sense of injury.
 “Yes, an interesting case,” he said at length with an effort. “A
trance, isn’t it?”
“Something of the sort,” I replied. “I saw the girl yesterday.”
He looked up interested.
“Yes?”
“She is in a private ward of B—— Hospital. I know the house
surgeon. He took me to see her.”
“Well! How does she look?”
“Seen the St. Amaranthe at Tussaud’s—the one whom, as
children, we used to call the Sleeping Beauty? Not unlike her: as
pretty as wax and as stiff: just breathing, with pale cheeks and her
mouth a little open.”
“The fit—I seem to remember—was brought on by some shock,
wasn’t it?”
I growled—
“According to report, concealment of birth. I conclude she was put
to shame by some rogue, and couldn’t face the music. The child was
found, three or four months ago, on a doorstep or somewhere, and
traced to her. When the police entered, I suppose she feared the
worst, and went off. Odd part is, that the infant itself was intact—as
sound as a bell. But all that’s of little interest. It’s the case for me; not
the sentiment.”
“Ah?” said Valentine.
He leaned forward, resting his long arms on his knees and gently
clicking his fingers together. His eyes were full of an eager light.
“Johnny, I wonder if you could get me a sight of her?”
“Why not?” I answered. I felt that I owed him some atonement. “I’ll
ask C—— if you like.”

II

C—— demurred, hummed and hawed, and acquiesced.

“Your friend must keep in the background,” he said. “He’s not a
backstair reporter, I suppose?”
“He’s an independent gentleman, and either a poet or an ass—I
don’t know which.”
 “Same thing,” said this airy Philistine; “but no matter, so long as he
don’t talk.”
“He won’t talk.”
“Very well, bring him up. Fact is, we’re trying an experiment this
afternoon. Aunt’s brought the baby—sort of natural magnetism to
restore the current, cancel the hiatus—see? I’ve not much belief in it
myself.”
I fetched Valentine, and we followed C—— up to the ward. There
were only present there—one, a list-footed nurse; two, a little
shabby-genteel woman, with a false tow-like front over vicious eyes,
who carried a flannelled bundle; and three, the patient herself.
She had not so much as stirred, to all appearance, since I last saw
her. We, Valentine and I, took up our position apart. Some accidental
contact with him made me turn my head. He was quivering like a
high-strung racer for the start. This physical excitability was news to
me. “H’mph!” I thought. “Is there really that in you which you must
keep such a tight rein on?”
The nurse took the infant, and placed it on the sleeping girl’s
breast. It mewed and sprawled, but evoked no response whatever.
“She’d never a drop of the milk of kindness in her,” muttered the
little verjuicy woman.
“Hold your tongue!” said the doctor sharply.
He and the nurse essayed some coaxing. In the midst, I was
petrified by the sight of Valentine going softly up to the bed-head.
“May I whisper a word?” he said. “It may fail or not. But I don’t
think you can object to my trying.”
And actually, before his astonished company could move or collect
its wits, he had bent and spoken something, inaudible, into the
patient’s ear.
Now, I ask you to remember that this girl had been in a cataleptic
sleep for not less than three months, under observation, and with no
chance, so far as I knew, to cozen her attendants; and believe me
then as you can when I tell you that, answering, instantly and
normally, to Valentine’s whisper, she sighed, stretched her arms,
though at first with an air of some lassitude and weakness, and,
opening her eyes, fixed them with a sort of suspended stare upon
the face of her exorcist. Gradually, then, a little pucker deepened
between her brows, and instantly, some shadow of fright or
uneasiness flickering in her dark pupils, she turned her head aside.
Obviously she was distressed by the vision of this strange face
coming between the light and her normal, as it seemed to her,
awaking.
Valentine immediately stood away, and backed to where she could
not see him.
C——, obviously putting great command on himself, since
circumstances made it appear that some damned “natural magic”
had got the better of his natural science, took the situation in hand
professionally, and frowned to the aunt, to whom the baby had been
restored, to show herself. The woman, rallying from the common
stupefaction, gave an acrid sniff and obeyed.
“Well, Nancy!” she said, in a tone between wonder and
remonstrance.
The girl looked round again and up, with a little shock. Immediately
her dilated pupils accepted with frank astonishment this more
familiar apparition.
“Gracious goodness, Aunt Mim!” she whispered; “what have you
got there?”
Then she turned her face on the pillow, with a smile of drowsy
rapture.
“Anyhow, you’ve found your way to Skene at last,” she murmured,
and instantly fell into a natural sleep, from which, it was evident,
there must be no awaking her.
C—— wheeled upon my friend.
“I suppose you won’t part with your secret?” he asked drily.
It was a habit with Valentine, not his least aggravating,
composedly to put by any unwelcome or difficult question addressed
to him as if he did not hear it.
“Skene’s in Kent, isn’t it?” he asked, ostensibly of the aunt, though
he looked at me. I could have snapped at him in pure vindictiveness.
He wasn’t inscrutable, any more than another. What was his
confounded right to pose as a sphinx?
“She fancies she’s there,” he said. “Why?”
I turned dumbly with the question to the little woman creature. I
don’t know if she supposed I was in some sort of official authority to
cross-examine her. She had powder on her face, and a weak glow
mantled through it.
“It was there she met her trouble, sir,” she said, hesitating. “She’d
gone down to the hop-picking last September, and I was to follow.
But circumstances” (she wriggled her shoulders with an
indescribable simper) “was against my joining her.”
“Well,” broke in C——, suddenly and rather sharply, “you must
take the consequences, and, for the present anyhow, the burden of
them off her shoulders.”
“Begging your pardon, sir?” she questioned shrewdly.
“The child,” said the doctor, “the child. Everything, it appears,
relating to it is for the moment obliterated from her mind. She takes
up existence, I think you’ll find, last autumn, at this Skene, with
expecting you. Well, you have come, and returned to London
together. You understand? The time of year is the same. None of all
this has for the moment happened.”
There was an acrid incredulity in his hearer’s face as she listened
to him.
“Do I understand, or don’t I, sir,” she said, “that her shame is to be
my care and consideration? And till when, if you’ll be so good?”
“That I can’t say,” he answered. “Probably the interval, the abyss
in her mind, will bridge itself by slow degrees. Her reason likely
depends upon your not rudely hastening the process. I warn you,
that’s all.”
“And pray,” she said, with ineffable sarcasm, “how is I, as a
respectable woman, to account to her for this that I hold?”
“Put it out to nurse.”
“No, sir, if you’ll allow me. The hussy have done her best to bring
me to ruin already.”
“Say you’ve adopted it.”
She gave a shrill titter.
“Nanny will have lost her wits, hindeed, to believe that.”
“Well, she has in a measure.”
“And the police?” she said. “Aren’t you a little forgetting them, sir?”
“The police,” said C——, “I will answer for. The case isn’t worth
their pursuing, and they will drop it.”
 The baby began to wail; and Aunt Mim, with her lips pursed, to
play the vicious rocking-horse to it.

III

One evening, a week later, Valentine came quietly into my room. I

had not seen him in the interval, and was immediately struck, though
it was semi-dusk, by the expression on his face. It was white and
smiling, and the eyes more brightly inscrutable than ever.
A storm had just crashed across the town, and left everything
dripping in a liquid fog. Looking down, one could see the house-
fronts, submerged in the running pavements, become the very
“baseless fabrics of a vision.” The hansom-drivers, bent over their
glazed roofs, rode each with a shadowy phantom of himself
reversed, like an oilskin Jack of Spades. No pedestrian but, like
Hamlet, had his “fellow in the cellarage” keeping pace with him. The
solid ground seemed melted, and the unsubstantial workings of the
world revealed. To souls hemmed in by bricks, there are more
commonplace, less depressing sights than a wet London viewed
from a third story.
There was a box in my window, with some marguerites in it, the
sickly pledges of a rather jocund spring. Valentine, joining me as I
leaned out, handled a half-broken stem very tenderly.
“It has been beaten down, like poor Nanny, by the storm,” he said.
“We must tie it to a stick.”
I did not answer for a minute. Then very deliberately I drew in my
head and sat down. Again like my shadow, in this city of shadows,
Valentine did the same. For some five minutes we must have
remained opposite one another without speaking. Then sudden and
grim I set my lips, and asked the question he seemed to invite.
“Are you the stick?”
He nodded, with a smile, which I could hardly see now, on his
face.
“You speak figuratively, of course,” I said, “in talking of tying her to
you?”
“No,” he said. “I talk of the real bond.”
 “Of matrimony?”
“Certainly.”
With a naughty word, I jumped to my feet, strode the round of the
room, sat down flop on the table, put my hands in my pockets, tried
to whistle, laughed, and burst out—“I suppose you intend this, in a
manner, for a confidence? I suppose you are taking straight up the
tale of a week ago? Well, I haven’t lost the impression of that
moment, or gone mad in the interval. Do you want me to sympathize
with your insanity, or to argue you out of it—which?”
He did not answer. Indeed, the offensiveness of my tone was not
winning.
“I am perfectly aware,” I went on, “that the melodramatic unities
demand an espousal with the interesting spirit we have called back
to life. They have a way, at the same time, of ignoring Aunt Mims.
You will, I am sure, forgive me if I say that it is the figure of that good
lady which sticks last in my memory.”
Still he did not answer.
“I will put my point,” I continued, growing a little angry—“I will put
my point, as you seem to ask it, with all the delicacy I can. You drew
an analogy between—between some one and that broken cabbage
yonder. The sentiment is unexceptionable; only in France they
consider those things weeds.”
“Do they?” he said coolly. “We don’t.”
“No; because we must justify ourselves for exalting ’em out of their
proper sphere. They’ll not cease to smell rank, though, however you
give ’em the middle place in your greenhouse.”
I struck my knee viciously with my open palm.
“That was in vile bad taste, Val. I beg your pardon for saying it.
But, deuce take it, man! you can’t have come to me, a worldling and
an older one, for sympathy in this midsummer madness?”
I was off the table again, going to and fro and apostrophizing him
at odd turns.
“Let’s drop parables—and answer plainly, if it’s in you. You don’t
exhale sentiment as a rule. Did or did not that touch about ‘poor
Nanny’ imply a hint of some confidence put in me?”
“I’ve always considered you my closest friend.”
 “Flattered, I’m sure; though I didn’t guess it. You put such
conundrums—excuse me—beyond the time of a plain man to guess.
Well, I say, I’m flattered, and I’ll take the full privilege. It’s natural you
should feel an interest in——by the way, I regret to say I only know
her as the Brompton Sleeping Girl.”
“She’s Nanny Nolan.”
“In Miss Nolan, then. A propos, I’ve never yet asked, and mustn’t
know, I suppose, the secret of your ‘open sesame’?”
“No, I can’t tell you.”
“O, it doesn’t matter! Only, as a question of this confiding
friendship——”
“It isn’t my secret alone.”
“Then I’ve no more to say. But I presume she’s the—the flower in
question?”
“O, yes! And I’m the stick.”
He said it with a quiet laugh.
“I shouldn’t have supposed it, on my honour,” I assured him. “You
can have stuck at very little in a week.”
I took a few turns, and faced him, or his motionless shadow, very
solemnly.
“Now,” I demanded, “for the plain speaking. Will you answer me
the truth? I brought away an impression, as I said. It might have
been, after all, an impertinent one. A man’s a man for a’ that—
though I confess I can’t quite apply the moral to a woman. Still, I’ll
ask you frankly: How is she socially?”
“Nothing at all. Her father was a colour-sergeant, a red-headed
Celt from over the border of dreams. He’s gone to join the Duke of
Argyll’s cloud army at Inverary. Her aunt’s an ex-coryphée living on a
mysterious pension.”
“Of course; only rather worse than I supposed.”
“Verender, I must tell you the girl is without reproach. Socially, it is
true, they are in a very limited way. They eke out existence in a
number of small directions, even, as you know, hop-picking.”
“I’ve nothing but respect for Miss Nolan’s virtues. I can even
appreciate the appeal of her prettiness to a susceptible nature, which
I don’t think mine is. Anyhow, I’m no Pharisee to pelt my poor sister
of the gutter because she’s fallen in it. That’s beside the question.
But it isn’t, to ask what in the name of tragedy induces you, with your
wealth, your refinement, your mental and social amiability, to sink all
in this investment of a—of a fancy bespoke—there, I can put it no
differently.”
“Call it my amiability, Verender. She’s like the centurion’s daughter.
There’s something awfully strange, awfully fascinating, after all, in
getting into her confidence—in entering behind that broken seal of
death.”
“You’re not an impressionable Johnny—at least, you shouldn’t be.
You’ve passed the Rubicon. This child with a child—with Aunt Mim,
good Lord! Have you thought of the consequences?”
“Yes; all of them.”
“Of the—pardon me. Do you know who he was?”
“Yes.”
I stared aghast at him—at the deeper blot of gloom from which his
voice proceeded.
“And you aren’t afraid—for her; for yourself?”
“You mean, of her relapsing?” he said clearly. “Not when she
knows the truth—knows what a poor thing he is.”
“Are you sure you know woman? She is apt to have a curious
tenderness for the blackguard who distinguishes her with his most
especial brand of villainy. Then she hasn’t learned it—the truth—
yet?”
“No. Aunt Mim has been loyal.”
“Well, well she may be, so long as you offer yourself the prize to
such a self-denying ordinance. She sees which side her bread’s
buttered, no doubt. And how does she account for the little
stranger?”
“By adoption. It’s an odd thing, Verender—Verender, it’s a very
odd thing, and very pitiful, to see how she—little Nanny—distrusts
the child—looks on it sort of askance—almost hates it, I think. I’ve a
very difficult part to play.”
I groaned.
“Then why play it? What does it all matter to you? You’ve opened
her eyes. Isn’t that enough, without waiting till she’s opened yours?”
“Ah!” he said, obviously not attending to me. “But that isn’t the
whole of my difficulty. The truth is, she appears to shrink from me
too.”
“You’ll forgive me,” I said grimly. “That’s your first comforting
statement.”
“I don’t know how it is,” he continued, in a low voice, self-
pondering; “she’s frightened—distressed, before a shadow she can’t
define. Sometimes and somehow it seems as if she wants to love
me, but can’t—as if she were trying, and vainly, to shape out of a
great gloom the obstacle which separates us. And I want to help her;
and yet I, too, can’t understand. Shall I ever, I wonder?”
I stared at him. “Isn’t it plain enough? But you have love’s eyes, I
suppose.” Then I asked, a little softened, “Does she ever lose
herself, trying to piece that broken time?”
“I don’t know,” he answered. “She speaks so little. She is like a
little shy ghost—half-materialized—fearful between spirit and matter
—very sweet and pathetic.”
With the last word he turned abruptly and strode out of the room. I
was not so much astonished at his curt conclusion, as at a certain
tell-tale cough which accompanied it.
“O, hang the fellow!” I muttered. “If he’s developed tears in his
voice, I give him up.”

IV

One afternoon, accident taking me past the Nolans’ house in the

Fulham Road, I was disturbed to hear Valentine’s voice hailing me
from the parlour window. It was a little cheap tenement, and a
curiously shabby frame to his rather distinguished figure as he stood
up eagerly to stop me.
“Come in,” he said. “I want you.”
I demurred, in an instant and instinctive panic.
“What for? I’m horribly pressed. Won’t it do another time?”
“It won’t,” he answered. “It’s its way. But go on, if your need is
greater than mine.”
“That’s shabby,” I thought; and yielded with the worst grace
possible. He retaliated by meeting me all sweetness at the door, and
conducting me into the parlour.