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'Tokyo Sonata' plays haunting tune about Japan

Published online on Friday, Jun. 12, 2009

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"Tokyo Sonata" seeps into your psyche like, well, a superbly played sonata -- one that stakes its claim not with bombast but with a delicate, driving, insightful sense of melancholy and hope.

Crafted by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, best known in the U.S. for his bizarre horror films "Cure" and "Pulse," the film is in many ways the bleakest indictment of contemporary Japanese culture I've seen.

Yet it also functions as dark comedy, fierce character study and uplifting tale of redemption. Even when it's a little stuffy and overlong, it still manages to forge an intense emotional connection with an audience. (The Fresno Filmworks presentation plays June 12 only at The Tower Theatre.)

"Tokyo Sonata" works best when it has the chance to slowly reveal its minimalist plot, so I won't divulge the early events in the film that overtake Ryûhei Sasaki (a fine Teruyuki Kagawa), a stoic Japanese businessman in Tokyo who is one of the army of suit-clad "salarymen" that marches in lockstep each morning from train station to office. Let's just say that he has a secret he doesn't want to share with his family.

It's within this family that director Kurosawa ruthlessly excavates for a sense of the Japanese soul. Ryûhei's wife, Megumi (a wonderfully restrained and emotionally complex Kyôko Koizumi), is flailing in her rigid household routine. His older son wants to volunteer to fight for the U.S. military in Iraq. His younger son desperately wants to learn to play the piano, but his father won't let him.

This domestic tension unfolds against the backdrop of a Tokyo that is far from the brisk, futuristic and orderly metropolis depicted so often in contemporary cinema. Cinematographer Akiko Ashizawa's camera sweeps us through a city full of drab suburbs, obtrusive trains and bleak, grinding urban isolation.

Also vital is a dark sense of Japan's economic stagnation, known by many as the "lost decade." Some analysts believe there's a danger the current U.S. recession could rival Japan's economic woes.

There's a point at which all this angst adds up, and when "Tokyo Sonata" goes off the deep end, so to speak, I'd argue that Kurosawa gets a little too wild and crazy -- or at least overlong -- on us. But he creates an arc of tension that is smooth, subtle and gripping.

He also has an eye for understated but searing moments. In one, father and son meet at the end of the day -- one coming from the train station, the other from school -- at the bottom of the hill leading up to their house, and they share an awkward walk together. In another, the mother falls asleep on the couch waiting for her husband to come home from work, and she softly teases, "Pull me up." He doesn't hear her as he heads for bed, leaving her with arms helplessly extended.

Perhaps it's a reminder that no matter how technically advanced or economically powerful a culture is, no individual can make it totally alone.