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Tokyo, choked with charred and bloated corpses. We have a strong vested interest in their serenity. Statement of the obvious, the obvious that no one ever seems to get round to mentioning: there is more than one sort of war damage, and more than one way of portraying it. Ozu is routinely enshrined as a timeless master of transcendent subtlety, as if you could be subtle in the abstract without having a subject to be subtle about (‘life’ doesn’t count!). We accept the idea of his sublime indirectness, as long as he’s not saying anything. There couldn’t be a more patronising way of acknowledging greatness. If we like to see his films as being about everything in general, nothing in particular, then that expresses a preference, and it’s not difficult to work out why we value this interpretation so highly. We’re grateful for some Zen vagueness. We don’t really want to know what’s behind Noriko’s smile. In the process we happily go along with the obvious untruth that great art is immortal. Of course art is mortal, just as mortal as the people who make it, but in a different way. In the long run it’s the museum curator, defending treasures from handling, who is the real vandal. Works of art have more to fear from the embalming process than from straightforward rust or rot. The question of whether sexual trauma is part of the intended subject matter of Late Spring isn’t 238
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something that can be settled as a matter of fact. It’s a speculation that may or may not be the case – though academic’s-daughter-mysteriously-damagedby-forced-labour isn’t something you’d make up on a whim at a script conference, particularly if no one else in the film you were making has any wartime experiences attached to them. So try looking at the logic of it from the other angle. Reverse the argument. If Yasujiro Ozu did decide to make a film about a sexually traumatised woman and the effects of her experiences on her family life in postwar ­Japan, within the limits of what the censors and his audience could accept, what would it look like? Wouldn’t it look like Late Spring? Very much like Late Spring.

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Tokyo, choked with charred and bloated corpses. We have a strong vested interest in their serenity.

Statement of the obvious, the obvious that no one ever seems to get round to mentioning: there is more than one sort of war damage, and more than one way of portraying it.

Ozu is routinely enshrined as a timeless master of transcendent subtlety, as if you could be subtle in the abstract without having a subject to be subtle about (‘life’ doesn’t count!). We accept the idea of his sublime indirectness, as long as he’s not saying anything. There couldn’t be a more patronising way of acknowledging greatness.

If we like to see his films as being about everything in general, nothing in particular, then that expresses a preference, and it’s not difficult to work out why we value this interpretation so highly. We’re grateful for some Zen vagueness. We don’t really want to know what’s behind Noriko’s smile.

In the process we happily go along with the obvious untruth that great art is immortal. Of course art is mortal, just as mortal as the people who make it, but in a different way. In the long run it’s the museum curator, defending treasures from handling, who is the real vandal. Works of art have more to fear from the embalming process than from straightforward rust or rot.

The question of whether sexual trauma is part of the intended subject matter of Late Spring isn’t

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