Marriage Across Ozu - Part II (Isabelle Kirschbaum)

Late Spring 

I said that Early Summer Noriko was immature, but not in a bad way. Late Spring Noriko, on the other hand, is immature in a bad way. She and Tokyo Story Noriko share some similar characteristics. While this Noriko isn’t quite so hermit-like, she still shows no desire to change her rather solitary lifestyle. Unlike Early Summer Noriko, Late Spring Noriko doesn’t have a job or much of a social life outside the home (besides her friend Aya). She certainly doesn’t go out to parties and cafes with friends on a regular basis. The war has perhaps had more of an impact on her than on Early Summer Noriko, because her poor health has kept her at home and unmarried for several years. She wants her life to continue this way forever, living alone with her father. She wants nothing to change, and she definitely doesn't want to get married. 

The same ideas about the inevitability of marriage and the fact that a person should get married apply to this movie. All the characters around Noriko share the understanding that marriage is necessary and good and will make her happy. It is something that ought to and must happen. 

One of the most important scenes in this movie is the conversation between Noriko and her father at the end of their last trip together. It was both a very moving scene and the one that made me most conflicted about Noriko’s character. In the scene, Noriko passionately expresses her desire for life to remain the same and for her to never leave her father. I expect that anyone who’s ever been on the brink of a huge life change can relate to her, and to the desperate desire for nothing to change. Change is at best bittersweet, and at worst terrifying. I understand how Noriko might feel and how hard this might be for her. However, I think that this scene is pretty solid evidence that she hasn’t grown up yet. While everyone feels a similar way when confronted with change, we also know that change is necessary and good and that things will always be better again. The ability to recognize this and to accept change is a mark of maturity, but Noriko is still unwilling to accept it. She says that she understands her father when he tries to explain to her that things will be better in the future, but I don’t believe her. True, he may not have done the best job directly addressing the concerns she expressed, but she also didn’t seem to try very hard to take his advice to heart. 

His advice was one of my favorite parts of this movie, and I think it’s relevant to all the other Ozu movies we’ve watched. He talks about love and marriage, how marriage isn’t easy and takes many years of hard work to be successful, and about how the happiness you get from marriage comes from the work you put into it. 

This speech presents another reason for marriage other than the practical side, which is that you need a partner to support you and children to take care of you. From a more philosophical perspective, marriage is beneficial because people need something to devote themselves to and to create for themselves. By marrying someone, you decide that you are going to dedicate your life to them and build a relationship and a future with them. Noriko’s father makes it clear that marriage is not easy. In fact, that’s the whole point of marriage. It’s something supremely difficult that you take on in order to create something good for yourself. Without the difficulty, the result would be meaningless. 

Not only has Noriko never experienced the hard work and payoff that marriage can offer, she also has not experienced anything similar and maybe never would, if she had been left to make her own decisions. Living at home with her father indefinitely would certainly be a happy life—she seems happy at the moment and wants it to continue—but it wouldn’t be the kind of happiness that she would get by living a different life. She doesn’t have to work for anything with her father. Her life would be happy and peaceful, but also stagnant. Without the trials of marriage, she would never experience the reward of having something good and meaningful that she created for herself out of nothing. 

It must be hard for a parent to marry off their child, especially in a case like that of Noriko and her father, where they are so close and rely on each other so much. But her father would not encourage her to get married if he didn’t know that there was great potential for happiness that Noriko can’t imagine yet. He knows the value of marriage and independence, and he wants his daughter to experience that fulfillment. 

Late Autumn 

The basic marriage plotline of this movie is very similar to the one in Late Spring. The most striking difference I noticed was the nature of the relationship between the daughter and her potential husband. In Late Spring, Noriko shows no desire to marry her potential husband, and the man is never even shown on screen. In Late Autumn, Ayako shows a lot more interest in him. Even though she rejected the initial offer to be set up with him, she seems to change her mind after meeting him and decides that she wants to get to know him. He appears in several scenes with her and is even referred to as her boyfriend. Their relationship seems more “modern,” for lack of a better term, than any other such relationship in the previous three movies. Ayako doesn’t tell her mother about him, suggesting that her relationship with him is personal and private, as well as within her control. Although she makes some comments towards the beginning of the movie about how she’s not ready to get married, she isn’t as opposed to it (at least not on a deeply emotional or moral level) as the Norikos. Her eventual marriage seems to be more or less her own decision. 

Ayako (aka Noriko IV) represents an approach to marriage different from that of the Norikos. Instead of marriage being an obligation pushed onto young women by their families and by society at large, it can be something they truly want and seek out for themselves. This perspective is definitely not explicit in Late Autumn, but what leads me to this interpretation is the fact that marriage was emphasized far less for Ayako than it was for the Norikos. It was still something that everyone wanted to happen, but it wasn’t so absolutely necessary. It was a fun pastime with which those three old college friends occupied themselves, but not a dire situation for Ayako. Akiko was not nearly as insistent upon her daughter marrying as the parents in the other movies were. In addition to this, Ayako’s initial reasons for not wanting to get married were that she wasn’t ready for marriage yet and that she was worried about her mother being lonely, not that marriage was unappealing or that she wanted her life to stay as it was forever. This is only a slight shift in the portrayal of marriage compared to the other movies, but I think it highlights an alternate outcome of the same basic storyline—one that fits a world becoming more modern where the attitude towards marriage is changing. (This movie came out roughly a decade after the other three, which is probably significant). 

The other perspective that Late Autumn has to offer on marriage is through Akiko’s storyline. Her speech at the end of the movie during the scene on vacation is very similar to the father’s speech in Late Spring. Marriage is a mountain that she has already climbed, and she doesn’t need to climb it again. This sentiment echoes the father’s wisdom about hard work and happiness. I’m not sure whether to interpret this climbing of the mountain as something arduous and exhausting that would be too much to take on a second time, or as a rewarding and even enjoyable challenge. In other words, is the mother taking a positive outlook on her marriage, or was it too difficult for her to want to do it over again (or both)? I’m not sure, and since we barely get any information about what the marriage in question was like or even what her husband was like, it’s impossible to answer the question. Either way, she has a certain respect for her marriage and for her late husband that she feels would be violated if she remarried. This respect is the main takeaway I have from this scene, and from Ozu in general. Marriage is never clearly a positive or negative influence in a person’s life, but you can be sure that it’s important.