Ellipsis of character

 We have seen Ozu frequently employ ellipsis (the deliberate omission of a scene or occurrence) in his films. This is a common narrative tool, and often lets the story glide over events that have little or no significance. Ozu, though, uses it differently: many of the scenes he leaves out of his films seem hugely important to their plots - Noriko's wedding, for example, or the other Noriko's wedding, or Tomi's funeral. Besides this narrative ellipsis, though, Ozu's films often have a kind of ellipsis of characters, in which important characters are absent, either through not appearing onscreen or through being dead or missing. 

In Early Summer, for example, Noriko's threatened fiancé Mr Manabe is something of an apocryphal figure, as the audience never sees him. At first, this reflects Noriko's experience, since she does not meet him either; we see the people around Noriko become more and more fixated on this theoretical Manabe, collecting empty information about him - he plays golf, he has such and such a position at so and so a company - while we and Noriko have no idea who he actually is. There is a sense of unreality about Mr Manabe created by this almost-presence. What is more strange is that, at the end of the film, Noriko does see Mr Manabe. She is visiting Aya when she gets a chance to spy on him; although she is reluctant, Aya insists until Noriko agrees. The rest of that scene, in which Noriko glimpses the reality of the man she rejected, is not in the film; for the audience, Manabe remains invisible, absent, unreal, some force or figure acting on Noriko's life without being in it - much like another character in the film conspicuous for his absence: Shoji, Noriko's older brother and Yabe's friend, who was killed in the war. In their conversation before Yabe's farewell party, Noriko and Yabe discuss their memories of Shoji; Yabe gives Noriko a stalk of wheat Shoji sent him during his military service. Whatever the precise nature of the relationship between Noriko and Yabe is, it is in part built on their shared memory of and love for Shoji. He is less present than Manabe, being dead, but also more real, as what little we know of him is learned not from offhand proposals-by-proxy, but from the reminiscences of people close to him.

Like Manabe in Early Summer, Satake, the mooted fiancé of Late Spring's Noriko, does not appear - even though in this case Noriko not only sees him, but meets and marries him. Our image of Satake, though, is shaped more by Noriko's descriptions of him than by the gossip of people who have never met him; because she has a chance to get to know him somewhat, he is a more real presence than Manabe. We do not have to content ourselves with the empty knowledge that Satake graduated from Tokyo University, because we see Noriko and Aya joking about whether he looks like Gary Cooper or like the electrician (who, admittedly, looks a lot like Gary Cooper). Still, it is odd that Satake does not appear - particularly since, in this film, he is not the nebulous menace pushing Noriko to take action to escape him, but the man she ends up marrying. The effect of his absence places greater weight on Noriko's relationships with the other characters of the film, most notably her father; this relationship is at the centre of the film's most powerful scenes, from Noriko's expression of pain and betrayal at the Noh performance to their discussion when visiting Professor Onodera. While the absent characters in Early Summer act as forces, mediating Noriko's relationships with Yabe and her family, and keeping us focused on Noriko and her decisions, the absent Satake in Late Spring exerts almost no force, so that we can better see the forces acting upon her as a result of her relationship with her father.

-William Mason