Tokyo Story (Tôkyô Monogatari)

Released: November 3, 1953

Studio: Shochiku

Genre: foreign/drama

Box Office (numbers in millions):

Domestic: 0.04 Worldwide: 32.0 (Japanese rentals)

Adjusted for Inflation:

Domestic: -- Worldwide: 125.76

Directing: Yasujirô Ozu

Screenwriting: Kogo Noda, Yasujirô Ozu

Starring: Chishû Ryû, Chieko Higashiyama, Setsuko Hara

Review:

“Over and over in his astonishing career, Japanese legend Yasujirō Ozu proved his miraculous facility for a piercingly precise, intimate humanism that unfurls in every direction into an epic thematic landscape.” ^VY Tokyo Story was his most widely distributed and best-known work. ^T95

It served as the finale in the Noriko trilogy, which included the films Late Spring and Early Summer. Tokyo Story “takes the director’s deceptively quiet domestic focus to its most transcendent height.” ^VY It “is a very characteristic study of the emotional strains within a middle class Japanese family that has come to Tokyo from the country and dispersed itself.” ^T95

The movie explores “the gulf between parents and children.” ^T98 The “family grandparents arrive in Tokyo to visit their various offspring” ^T95 and are “treated with different flavors of neglect and disrespect by their grown-up children.” ^VY “Only their daughter-in-law, widowed in the war, is pleased to see them.” ^T95

Ozu’s vision…is emotionally overwhelming; and arguably profound for any engaged viewer.” ^T95 It is “unmatched in Western popular cinema.” ^T95 With the help of “a superlative cast led by Chishū Ryū and Chieko Higashiyama as the elderly parents, [Ozu] fashions simply the greatest and most devastating film about the generation gap ever made.” ^VY