Shige vs. Noriko (Isabelle Kirschbaum)

When the parents are staying with Shige, she calls Noriko to ask her to take them somewhere, since she herself can’t take a day off work to spend time with them. Noriko takes a day off and shows the parents around Tokyo, then invites them back to her apartment.

This incident might seem like a clear way to contrast the characters of Shige and Noriko: Shige, the daughter, decides that she is too busy with work to spend any time with her parents, but Noriko, the ex-daughter-in-law, manages to get the day off because she cares about the parents. But I’d like to look at it from a different angle and see if I can understand these two characters in a more complicated way.


While Shige is easy to blame because her treatment of her parents is the most obviously mean out of all the children, her character is in some ways more relatable than any of the others. She doesn’t treat her parents any worse than the others do, but she is more honest about it. When the parents come back from the spa at Atami, she doesn’t try to hide her disappointment, and it even seems like she wants them to know that she’s upset at their coming back so soon. By contrast, Koichi and his wife go to lengths to make their parents comfortable and to reassure them that they are not being a burden, even though they are. Shige is blatant about her irritation. She is busy and poor, and the presence of her parents costs her both time and money. It is understandable that she decides that it’s a bad idea for her to take a day off work, especially since she appears to run the beauty parlor.


Noriko, on the other hand, decides that she can take the day off. At first glance, Noriko’s behavior towards the parents seems refreshingly kind and considerate, especially compared to Shige’s rudeness. But I think there’s something very odd about Noriko and her willingness to drop everything in order to please the parents.


The other children can’t spend time with their parents because they have jobs that play an important role in their lives. Noriko doesn’t seem to feel very strongly about her job, and we never get much information about what she even does. The reason she is so eager to spend time with the parents is because she doesn’t have much of a life herself, so she is not giving up as much as the other children are. She lives by herself in a tiny apartment, where she has lived for at least the past eight years. She keeps a picture of her dead husband on the shelf. Even though they were probably not married for very long and their marriage was probably troubled (based on the little information we have), she refuses to remarry and seems committed to living alone forever. Her life is sad and stagnant. Her kindness comes from a place of extreme loneliness, not because she is a better person than the other children.


Parents would probably be happier to see their children living lives like Shige’s, who is married and running a modest business, than Noriko’s, who is lonely and dwelling on the past even though she is still young. There is more to these two characters than simply the fact that Noriko is kind and considerate and the other children should be more like her. Noriko should not be envied or praised for her virtue. Kindness is of course a good thing, but the reason for her kindness might involve some dark and troubling aspects of her character that we don’t realize exist until we look closer. 

Comments

  1. Krishnan VenkateshNovember 3, 2021 at 10:03 PM

    This is a perceptive and welcome corrective to the more sentimental view. Not only can Noriko afford to take the day off, but her company is large enough to be able to dispense with herfor the day -- whereas both Shige and Koichi cannot absent themselves from their responsibilities, even though both own their businesses and are better off than Noriko. I think Noriko herself sees this clearly -- which is why she knows she can't really judge.

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