Review: Tokyo Sonata (2009) ****

Kyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata: A new recruit in Japan’s army of unemployed

What happens in the clamped down cubicle world of a Japanese businessman and father when his job is outsourced to China with its cheaper labor? That’s the dilemma facing family man Ryuhei Sasaki. Laid off from his administrative position, he’s not only robbed of his income, but he’s also cut off from his identity and the source of his paternal authority. Though Ryuhei hides his fate from his family, the sense of order begins to fray anyway. Gripped by this unspoken spiritual crisis, cracks in the family dynamic begin to form, rebellion ferments and ultimately chaos looms.

Kyoshi Kurosawa’s at-times strange, often dryly comic but ultimately moving Tokyo Sonata begins with an open door and curtains billowing in a gathering storm. As the woman of the house wipes up the rain that has blown in, she pauses and looks out at the wind and the clouds. Is that concern on her face or longing? Either way, it’s a confusing and disconcerting sign that troubling times lay ahead; a clue that this is may be a Tokyo story but it’s a long way from Ozu.

The woman of course turns out to be Ryuhei’s wife and the house she keeps is almost a character in the drama itself. Carved out of a densely packed Tokyo suburb on an uninviting scrap of real estate next to the tracks of a commuter train, it’s an unlikely seeming hub for a family, but it’s well kept, orderly and homey inside. The cheery domicile is an anchor when circumstances threaten to cast the family adrift.

As the film becomes darker, stranger and more unsettling by degrees, it finally reaches a point where the whole thing snaps and the comfortable home itself becomes central to a narrative turn (featuring Kurosawa regular Koji Yakusho) made all the more jarring by the unexpected temporal shift that accompanies it. From then on the story seems to go off the rails as increasingly unlikely events befall father, mother and their two sons. However, just when Tokyo Sonata begins to try your patience and Kurosawa seems to have lost his way, he returns from the wilderness revealing himself to be a filmmaker with the complete confidence to push his characters and his audience to the edge and then bring them back again for a finale that is understated, sublime and beautifully moving. It’s an unlikely but perfect resolution to the cathartic madness that has come before it.

Rather than a jagged shard of social realism that cuts into flesh, Tokyo Sonata is an unsettling expression of amorphous feeling that worms its way under your skin. It peels back a conservative society’s layers of repression to expose the lurking anarchy beneath and it asks whether one family is strong enough to withstand the consequences of the uncontained maelstrom.

For the Sasaki’s, the future remains cloudy yet there’s a sense that they have been cleansed by their experiences. Battered and somewhat bewildered, they are nevertheless a family and they are stronger than they were before. Perhaps that is enough.

Tokyo Sonata. Japan 2008 (US Release 2009). Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Written by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Max Mannix and Sachiko Tanaka. Cinematography by Akiko Ashizawa. Edited by Koichi Takahashi. Music score composed by Kazumasa Hashimoto. Starring Teruyuki Kagawa, Kyoko Koizumi, Yu Koyanagi, Kai Inowaki, Haruka Igawa, Kanji Tsuda and Koji Yakusho. 2 hours 1 minute. MPAA Rated PG-13 for thematic elements and brief strong language. 4 stars (out of 5).

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Tags: Kyoshi Kurosawa, Tokyo Sonata