[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

I had uninterrupted time this afternoon to sit down and watch the BD of the 2020 film Last and First Men. If you like

• the science fiction of Olaf Stapledon
• the music of Jóhann Jóhannsson (who also directed)
• the voice of Tilda Swinton
• brutalist architecture
• stately black-and-white cinematography on 16mm film stock

then I think you’ll agree with me that this film is pretty darned great.

Lucas Moura (@DrTeflon) - 2024-01-21 16:22

This movie is SO FREAKING GREAT

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2024-01-21 17:57

Isn’t it though?!

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2024-01-27 11:48

Ill check this out! Also, thanks for sharing the poetry as always!

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2024-01-28 18:00

You’re quite welcome! I’m glad you’re enjoying the Sunday night poetry series; it’s great fun to research and write.

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

Before I found Cohost, I posted a fair amount to a pseudonymous 2-follower account on Twitter; a lot of my Cohost posts started out there. Here’s another one of these: some brief thoughts on the final scene in Alice Wu’s film The Half of It, thoughts originally inspired by a thread by lourdeslasala on symbolism in the film.

My bringing it up now was due to seeing a post by @MayaGay mentioning The Half of It in passing, along with Wu’s earlier film Saving Face, which I hadn’t seen. I quickly remedied that lack (Saving Face is streaming on Prime Video), and then watched The Half of It again on Netflix, because I dearly love the film and wanted to write about it again.

NOTE: The following contains spoilers for The Half of It, and assumes that you know the overall plot and who the main characters are.

In the penultimate scene of The Half of It (above), Ellie and Aster face each other, separated by a double yellow line. As lourdeslasala notes, it symbolizes the boundaries between the two, with Ellie staying in her “comfort zone,” but then breaking out of it to cross the line, talk to Aster, and then kiss her.

The final scene is between Ellie and Paul. It starts with another shot with a similar perspective, but a key difference. In the previous scene Ellie and Aster were situated similarly to each other, in positions of relative equality within the shot itself, and also in a wider context: Ellie going off to Grinnell College, and Aster looking to leave Squahamish and go to art school.

But in this shot there’s no such equality. On one side is the train that will take Ellie away to Grinnell. On the other is the town in which Paul will remain, probably for the rest of his life, working in and then presumably inheriting the family business.

We next see Paul and Ellie’s parting conversation. Recall the earlier discussion between Paul and Ellie regarding “the look”: when you know someone wants to be kissed, and you should go ahead and kiss them—as indeed Ellie did to Aster in the previous scene. That was the third kiss in the film, and the only true one, the previous two having been given under false pretenses: Aster looking at Paul thinking that he was the person behind the letters Ellie wrote for him, and Ellie apparently looking at Paul but (it’s implied) looking past him at Aster.

But this scene is different. Here the look is not of two people who want to kiss, but two people who want to—need to—hug and be hugged. So why don’t they?

Because something is blocking them. That obstacle is literally a cooler, containing food prepared for Ellie’s journey. But as a metaphor it’s all the things that might act as barriers to Paul and Ellie’s friendship: interests and intellect, gender and sexuality, or even (as Alice Wu notes in an NPR interview) the jealousy of their partners, who might resent the level of intimacy Ellie and Paul have.

Or, at least, the intimacy they had. Here neither Ellie nor Paul can find the words they seem to want to say, and are blocked from the hugs they might want to give and receive. So, instead, Ellie resorts to sending Paul a text containing (only) emojis. It’s a harbinger of how their relationship may be in future: although they may meet again, they may never again experience the closeness they have right now, their future interactions mediated by distance and differing experiences, as it’s here mediated by technology.

But even in the face of all those barriers to their friendship, Paul can’t help chasing Ellie’s train, echoing a scene from the film Ek Villain that they had watched earlier—a scene that Ellie had scoffed at. Ellie again scoffs at the gesture, but she’s fighting back tears as she does. It’s a platonic parallel to the romantic moment between Ellie and Aster, and to my mind a perfect ending to a beautiful film. Or, as Ellie’s father would say as he pointed to his favorite movie scenes, “Best part.”

Ramona (@MayaGay) - 2023-06-09 18:50

Wonderful analysis!!

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-06-09 18:54

Thanks! I really liked Saving Face, but The Half of It holds a special place in my heart. I wish for more Alice Wu films…

Ramona (@MayaGay) - 2023-06-09 18:59

So do I, I think she is such a talent! Here is hoping she is given many more chances to show how much she can do.

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

A few weeks ago I watched the 2020 film Minari, about the struggles of a Korean-American family that moves to rural Arkansas in the hope (at least, the father’s hope) of starting a farm to grow vegetables for a growing US population of Korean immigrants. The area where I live is home to a large Korean-American population so I had an inherent interest in the film, and it’s also been very well-reviewed.

In short, I saw the film, I really liked the film, and (as I often do) I wanted to read more about the film. The most interesting tidbit I found was that Lee Isaac Chung, the writer and director of Minari, was inspired to make the film by reading the 1918 novel My Ántonia (accent on the first syllable, please) by Willa Cather, a novel with a setting and plot that reminded Chung of his own childhood growing up on a farm in Arkansas.

I’d always meant to read something by Willa Cather, so I decided to remedy my lack by downloading a (public domain) copy of My Ántonia. I’m out of practice reading fiction, but I couldn’t stop reading the novel once I started it; I highly recommend it as well. And, as I also often do, I have thoughts (with minor spoilers for the film and novel) . . . .

The othered

Let’s start with the most notable controversy about Minari, the (universally ridiculed) decision to exclude it from consideration as a Golden Globes “Best Picture” nominee on the grounds that most of the dialogue was in Korean. In an interesting article on the film, subtitled “Why Do We Still See [Minari] As Foreign,” Alyssa Songsiridej claims that we don’t see My Ántonia as an “immigrant story” because “[Cather] writes about European immigrants, who are not othered in American culture.”

With all due respect, I think this is a misplaced criticism. First, if My Ántonia were in fact made into a film (as Chung initially thought of doing), a faithful adaptation would have much of the dialogue be in Czech—the titular Ántonia having migrated as a child from Bohemia, in the modern-day Czech Republic. Since it’s a novel, not a film, we miss the immediate experience of actually hearing the Czech language—or, for that matter, the Swedish, Norwegian, and Russian (or is it Ukrainian?) spoken by other characters in the novel.

Second, European immigrants were very much “othered” by the dominant American culture at the time; this is reflected in the novel, as Songsiridej acknowledges: “My Ántonia is actually considerably more concerned with xenophobia and culture clash than Minari.” “Othering” new immigrants is a consistent theme in American history from before the Revolution. To give but one example, Benjamin Franklin complained about German immigrants, asking “why should the Palatine boors [Germans] be suffered to swarm into our Settlements” and speculating that they “will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.”¹

As Songsiridej also notes, in Cather’s novel “[Ántonia] and the other foreign-born ‘hired girls’ are viewed as exotic [and] potentially dangerous.” (To be more specific, the danger is presented as specifically sexual—that the “exotic” immigrant girls would seduce native-born men.) Remember, we’re talking about Swedes and Norwegians here, people who (along with Germans) present-day white supremacists would hail as being of true “Aryan” stock. But, again, Franklin in particular did not include Swedes or Germans—or, for that matter, the French, Spaniards, Italians, or Russians—among “the Number of purely white People in the World.”

Men, women, and children

Another interesting point of comparison between Minari and My Ántonia is in gender roles. Minari is based on Lee Isaac Chung’s memories of his own family, with the character of the young boy David in the film modeled on himself, and David’s father Jacob based on Chung’s father.² In the film, Jacob is portrayed as motivated by a desire to provide for his family and build a better life for them, and Jacob passes this lesson down to David. In contrast David’s sister Anne is relatively undeveloped as a character, as is her relationship with her mother Monica.

In My Ántonia, on the other hand, women are very much at the forefront. The book’s narrator, Jim Burden, a young boy who moves to Nebraska at the age of 9 and meets 12-year-old Ántonia, is clearly a stand-in for Cather.³ Ántonia herself is based on Annie Sadilek, who was three years or so older than Cather, and who immigrated to the US at the same time Cather’s family moved from Virginia to Nebraska. I defy anyone to doubt that Cather was a lesbian after reading My Ántonia: much of the novel reads as a love letter from Jim/Willa to Ántonia/Annie.

The women of My Antonia almost leap from the page in their vitality, in particular Lena Lingard, the daughter of Norwegian immigrants who dominates the central section of the book. Some of the women get married, settle down, and have children. Others remain single and independent, making a living in fields as disparate as dressmaking and gold mining.

Politics and patriotism

A third aspect of both Minari and My Ántonia that I find interesting is their political stances—or rather, their apparent lack of them. As noted above, Minari is relatively silent regarding any difficulties caused by discrimination against Korean immigrants; the conflict and drama in the film are instead driven by the difficulty of farming and the growing estrangement between Jacob and Monica. It is similarly silent on the fact that Jacob and Monica would have been prohibited from immigrating to the US less than twenty years before the time of the film, and only briefly alludes to the political situation in South Korea that presumably led them to emigrate.⁴

My Ántonia is set in a time just after the conclusion of the main events of the “Indian Wars” (including the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876), and just before the rise of the populist movement in the Great Plains, which would culminate in the 1896 Presidential campaign of Nebraska congressman William Jennings Bryan. However, these events go almost totally unremarked in Cather’s novel.

I suspect that this lack of historical and political context is in large part because the primary events of both My Ántonia and Minari are viewed through a child’s eyes, explicitly so in the former and implicitly so in the latter—although My Ántonia extends through the college years of its narrator, and concludes with a final scene of him as an adult. To a child the world consists of their immediate family and environs, and events from afar and from before their birth affect them only if they impact that small world in which they live.

A final aspect of both Minari and My Ántonia is an understated patriotism that runs through both the film and the novel. (The imagery of the American flag in the Minari publicity shot above is not characteristic of the film itself; I suspect it may have been created to help convince audiences that, yes, this is really a movie about Americans.)

That patriotism I would characterize as a “patriotism of the land.” The land of My Ántonia and Minari is the site of past conflict (both between indigenous peoples and between those peoples and the newly-arrived settlers⁵), present beauty (gloriously depicted in the scenes of the film and the descriptions of the novel), and future possibilities.

Ethno-nationalists and white supremacists sneer at the idea of “magic dirt” with the power to convert non-Anglo immigrants into full-fledged Americans after they arrive on US soil. Yet in a way that is exactly what happens in both Minari and My Ántonia: the struggles of families to survive tie them more tightly to the land that they farm and the country of which it is part, a country they see as giving them new opportunities to make a better life for themselves and their children. The novel and the film were created almost a century apart, but in their essence are both very “American” stories, in the best sense of that term.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2023-05-17 10:43

Its fascinating hearing that remark fron Franklin- i was very aware of various groups like the irish not being considered white, but wasnt aware how narrow the perception of that was a mere 100 years prior. I feel like reactionary bullshit ideas always get more ridiculous and incoherent the further back you go, and their modern versions trotted out by conservatives, fascists, etc are essentially repeatedly cleaned up and rationalized versions of even more insane nonsense from the past, yet paired with posturing about coherent consistent tradition.

Its really cool that the women in Antonia are depicted in such a varied and strong way, for a novel that old. I know feminism was active then, but still.

With the criticism of the Golden Globes, i feel like your counterpoint partially falls flat because theres a difference between “whos othered now” vs “whos othered back then”. The point about medium seems relevant though.

I feel like theres a lot more to that notion about struggles and ties to the land/culture/etc - fundamental psychological and sociological and human things, but not able to articulate those loose notions right now..

Also, Its nice to see you post again!

Lastly, did you happen to read my recent longer posts - one about gnc people and the one about ww2? Would love to hear any thoughts you have on those, including what was the least known part about the former or if a particular mention in the latter struck you.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-05-17 17:30

Thanks for your comment! I always love hearing your thoughts. A couple quick comments in return:

On “othering”, maybe I didn’t express it well, but I guess my point was/is that today we don’t consider the story of My Ántonia to be “foreign” to us, but I’m not sure that would have been the case in 1918. After all, that was a time of very strong anti-immigrant sentiment, directed not only at Asian immigrants but also against those from Eastern Europe. So I was really making the analogy Minari : audience of 2021 :: My Ántonia : audience of 1918 in terms of their respective receptions. (But, really, before commenting further I should go back and see what sort of reception My Ántonia actually had from readers and reviewers in 1918. I may be totally wrong in what I wrote there and here.)

On the GNC post, I thought it was quite interesting, but as a non-GNC person myself I felt uncomfortable commenting on it. But I’ll go back and read both it and the WW2 post again and see if I have anything useful/interesting to add.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2023-05-17 17:47

Well, the criticism seemed to be about both Minaria and Antonia(and other stories about european immigrants) today, not about each in their release time. Maybe im misunderstanding something about us talking past each other, but perhaps a more relevant phrasing may be “why are stories about asian immigrants still ‘foreign’ while stories about later european immigrants have ceased to be foreign?” The timing analogy is generally useful, but I dont think its a rebuttal to the current-time-focused point in the article about the golden globes.

Im glad the GNC post was quite interesting! I understand feeling uncomfortable commenting on that for that type of reason, although I am curious as to the degree of knowledge/understanding people are at before they read articles like that(and theres nothing wrong or offensive with simply not knowing/understanding of course). When you see a varied series of somewhat infrequent misconceptions and then try to clarify a general set of things to counter that, it can be hard to know what’s actually new information to an average reader, including in various subaudiences of the readership. But if also you dont really have anything to say, thats fine too ofc.~

[This post originally appeared as a series of five articles on Cohost. I thought it was worth publishing it on my own site, and have combined the five articles into one.]

Happy New Year! Today’s topic is perhaps my favorite film by perhaps my favorite director, Early Summer, directed by Yasujirō Ozu. (I’ve seen all but one of the over thirty Ozu films that have survived to this day.)

I’m an old straight white cisgender man, so I wouldn’t know about these things, but Early Summer has always struck me as a pretty gosh-darned queer film. I’ve seen other people make remarks to this effect (one of which I’ll address in due time), but have never seen a complete case laid out. This is my own attempt; you may judge for yourself to what extent it is successful.

NOTE: This post contains spoilers for all of Early Summer.

A bit about Ozu: Today he’s a critic’s darling, renowned for the formalist perfection of his films and often spoken of in reverent terms. (Adam Mars-Jones skewers some of the most overly-pretentious examples of such criticism in his book Noriko Smiling,¹ which does for Ozu’s 1949 film Late Spring what I’ll attempt in a much smaller way to do for Early Summer.)

But from his own point of view Ozu was not making arthouse films; he was making “home dramas,” movies pitched at the growing post-war Japanese middle class, with an audience composed predominantly of women. His films are about topics of concern to that middle-class audience, for example, families growing apart in an increasingly urbanized Japan (Tokyo Story, 1953), or children rejecting arranged marriages for love marriages (Equinox Flower, 1955).

Early Summer (1951) is yet another home drama. It’s the middle film in Ozu’s “Noriko trilogy”—so called because all three films feature main characters named “Noriko”—and is relatively neglected compared to the other two. Late Spring, which preceded Early Summer, is generally considered the first great work of Ozu’s mature period; it’s ranked number 21 on the latest Sight and Sound critics’ list of the greatest films of all time, and number 62 on the accompanying directors’ list. Tokyo Story, which followed Early Summer, is almost universally regarded as Ozu’s masterpiece, and is ranked at number 4 on both of the Sight and Sound lists.

Early Summer does not appear on either of these lists. However, it’s probably my favorite of all Ozu’s films, in part because its melancholy is accompanied by a humor—and even a measure of optimism—that is largely missing in Late Spring and Tokyo Story, and in part because it’s interesting to look at it through the lens of queerness in cinema—as I hope to do in this series of posts.

On the surface Early Summer tells the story of 28-year-old unmarried Noriko (played by the great Setsuko Hara) and her family’s and her employer’s attempts to arrange a marriage for her.

Going one level down, Early Summer is about the difference between the married and the unmarried, how the married try to persuade or (worse) coerce the unmarried into getting married, and how maybe that isn’t always such a good idea. This theme is explicitly called out more than once in the film.

Early Summer further implies that there may be a good reason why some unmarried people, including Noriko (but not just Noriko), don’t want to marry: they may be “that type of person,” as the young lesbian Fumi described herself in Takako Shimura’s manga Aoi hana. This subtext rises briefly to the level of text at least once before being ambiguously dismissed.

Both Ozu and Hara remained unmarried until their deaths, and to my knowledge neither were ever credibly reported as having a romantic relationship with anyone. Per Donald Richie’s commentary on the Criterion release (referenced in the next section), Ozu was reported to become angry at any talk of his marrying. Meanwhile Hara, though termed “the eternal virgin” by a film producer for her film image, in real life had close friendships with many women, including a hair and makeup artist whose friendship with Hara began early on and continued after Hara retired into obscurity at the height of her career.

In modern terms we could therefore hypothesize Early Summer as a queer film subtly but firmly protesting compulsory heterosexuality, made by a (possibly) queer director and starring a (possibly) queer actor. What exact flavor of “queer” this might be we can leave undefined for now.

Does the film itself support this hypothesis? I’ll discuss this in more detail beginning in the following sections, as I walk through the various scenes and plot points of the film. However it’s generally agreed that very little in an Ozu film is accidental: interiors were constructed to his exact specifications, and actors’ gestures were meticulously rehearsed and multiple takes shot until he was satisfied. If something seems “queer” in Early Summer, there’s a good chance that Ozu intended it thus.

First, a note on sources: Since I don’t speak Japanese, I’m relying almost completely on the subtitles in the two English releases of Early Summer. The first is a Criterion release from 2004, currently available for streaming in the US on the Criterion Channel and Max. There is also a British Film Institute release from 2010, currently available for streaming in the UK on the BFI Player. (Those without access to these are free to try to hunt the film down on other sites devoted to hosting videos or archiving Internet content.)

In general I’ll be quoting the Criterion subtitles; as I discuss later, there are at least a couple of places where the BFI translation is substantially different, and another place where the Criterion subtitles contain a major error.

(Before I get into the film itself, note that the title in Japanese is Bakushū, or “Barley Harvest Time.” This doesn’t directly bear on my thesis, but it’s worth noting for completeness, and as we shall see it ties in with the conclusion of the film.)

Early Summer opens with three establishing shots: first a shot of a dog walking freely on the beach with the ocean in the background, then a shot of a single bird in a cage outside, and then a final shot of birds in cages inside a house. This is the house in the oceanside town of Kamakura in which Noriko (Setsuko Hara’s character) lives, along with her brother Kōichi (Chishū Ryū), his wife Fumiko (Kuniko Miyake), Noriko and Koichi’s father (Ichiro Sugai) and mother (Chieko Higashiyama), and Kōichi and Fumiko’s two young boys.

If we wish, we can interpret the first and third shots as showing a strong contrast between freedom in nature on the one hand, and the restrictions imposed by society and the Japanese family system on the other. In this interpretation the second shot represents Noriko, who has a degree of independence that her mother and Fumiko do not have, but is still constrained by the bonds of family and society.

In the following scenes Kōichi takes an early train to his job as a physician, while Noriko goes to the Kita-Kamakura station to catch a later one. There she meets Kenkichi, another physician who works with Kōichi and who (along with his mother) is the family’s next-door neighbor. Kenkichi tells her that he’s been reading a book, implied to have been recommended by Noriko. The Criterion release describes it only as “this book,” but the BFI release names it as Les Thibaults.

Les Thibaults (published in Japanese as Chibō-ka no hitobito, and apparently relatively popular in Japan at the time) is a multi-volume French novel that begins as one of its protagonists is discovered writing passionate messages to a fellow schoolboy—something Ozu himself was apparently falsely accused of—and is then separated from his friend. Later volumes describe their diverging paths in life. Why might have Noriko recommended this particular novel to Kenkichi? Hold that thought.

We then see Noriko at work, as a secretary and executive assistant to the head of a small firm (Shūji Sano). As she talks with her boss regarding café recommendations, her best friend Aya (Chikage Awashima) arrives, there to collect payment for the boss’s spending at the restaurant her mother owns. Noriko’s boss wonders when they’ll both get married, and refers to them as “old maids.”

(Before becoming a movie actress, Chikage Awashima was a musumeyaku top star in the Takarazuka Revue and occasionally played “pants roles,” i.e., as a female character dressing as a man for plot reasons. Osamu Tezuka was a fan of hers, and she supposedly inspired the main character Sapphire, “born . . . with a blue heart of a boy and a pink heart of a girl,” in his manga Princess Knight. Why might this be relevant to Early Summer? Again, hold that thought.)

After work, Noriko meets Kōichi and Fumiko for dinner. While they eat, Kōichi complains about post-war women (“[They’ve] become so forward.”) and Noriko corrects him: “We’ve just taken our natural place.” Kōichi then claims that’s why Noriko can’t get married, and she rebukes him: “It’s not that I can’t. I could in a minute if I wanted to.” (Note: a bit of foreshadowing here.)

Next occur the two key events that set the main plot in motion. First, Noriko’s great-uncle (Seiji Miyaguchi) arrives for a visit. He wonders why she isn’t married yet. “Some women don’t want to get married,” he tells her. “Are you one of them?” Noriko laughs and leaves the room, but the seed has been planted in the minds of her family.

Noriko’s boss also thinks it’s time for her to get married, and he has just the man for her: “He’s never been married. Not sure if he’s still a virgin.” Her boss has photographs to show her, and won’t leave her leave without taking them.

Meanwhile Noriko and Aya mercilessly tease one of their married friends, and after attending another friend’s wedding have dinner with that friend and another married friend, with a side dish of sexual innuendo. One of the married friends brags about how she spent a rained-out honeymoon playing with a “spinning top”: “My husband is very good at it.” Her friend cautions her: “You shouldn’t flaunt it in front of the single girls.”

However, Aya is not impressed with the implied amazingness of heterosexual intercourse: “Silly! We don’t play with tops, do we?” Noriko enthusiastically agrees with her: “That’s for children, isn’t it?” The debate between the married and the unmarried continues, after which Noriko goes home, where Kōichi and Fumiko are scheming regarding the marital candidate proposed by Noriko’s boss.

Kenkichi’s mother then visits Noriko’s mother, and tells her that a man from a detective agency has been asking about Noriko: “I realized it was about her marriage.” We also learn that Kenkichi’s wife died two years ago (leaving him with a young daughter), and that he’s not interested in remarrying: “All he does since his wife died is read books” (like Les Thibaults). Finally, we learn that Kenkichi’s best friend, Noriko’s brother Shoji, went missing in the war.

We now come to the climax of the first half of the movie. As Noriko’s nephews and their friends play with their model train set downstairs (one nephew asking if their father will buy them more train track), Aya visits Noriko and they talk in her room upstairs. Their married friends have made various excuses for why they couldn’t also visit; Noriko recalls how close they were at school and laments their drifting apart.

Throughout the first half of Early Summer Noriko and Aya are shown as mirroring each other’s gestures and speech. That mirroring continues in this scene (for example, they sit down next to each other at the exact same time and in the exact same manner), and then a very interesting thing happens. Ozu’s typical modus operandi is to continue a shot until someone stops speaking or moving, or even until they leave the room. But here he cuts immediately from Noriko and Aya simultaneously raising their glasses to drink, to Noriko’s father and mother simultaneously bringing food to their lips, as they relax sitting on a street curb in town.

If I were to speculate about what this juxtaposition might mean, if anything, I’d speculate as follows: that Ozu intended to show that, whatever Aya and Noriko might be to each other, they are as close, secure, and happy in their relationship as Noriko’s mother and father are in theirs—as much a couple as any other in the film, but not formally recognized as such.

Noriko’s father tells his wife, “This may be the happiest time for our family,” although he’s sad at the thought of Noriko leaving. They continue their conversation, and then are interrupted by the site of a balloon rising into the sky. “Some child must be crying,” Noriko’s father remarks. “Remember how Kōichi cried when he lost his balloon?” And on that somewhat ominous note the film enters its second half, during which conflicts over Noriko and her proposed marriage will rise to the surface.

We left Noriko and her best friend Aya enjoying a pleasant chat in Noriko’s room (their married friends having begged off with various excuses) and Noriko’s mother and father enjoying a day out without the rest of the family, rejoicing in the happiness they have, albeit a bit sad at the thought of Noriko leaving to marry.

The good times continue as Noriko brings home a cake to eat with her sister-in-law Fumiko, and their neighbor Kenkichi drops in unexpectedly and is invited to share it with them. The scene re-introduces Kenkichi and brings up the subject of his remarrying—something he doesn’t want, but his mother (played by Haruko Sugimura) does.

(I can’t resist adding that, in addition to appearing in all three films of the Noriko trilogy, as well as in several other Ozu films, Haruko Sugimura was a noted stage actress. Among other things, in 1956 she debuted the role of Asako in Yukio Mishima’s Rokumeikan, a play I discuss at great length in my book on Takako Shimura’s manga Aoi hana / Sweet Blue Flowers.)

The scene also shows the importance of Noriko’s income to the family finances: the price of the cake is JPY 900, equivalent to over JPY 6,000 today, at a time when Japan was a relatively poor country with an economy just emerging from wartime destruction. No wonder Fumiko protests the purchase, and Noriko downplays the expense to Kenkichi.

In the meantime Noriko’s brother Kōichi has been pursuing the idea of a marriage between Noriko and an unseen bachelor first suggested by Noriko’s boss, including asking his friends and associates for more information on the proposed groom. The results are “very promising”: “He’s in the social register, and seems to be a fine businessman.” “How nice,” replies his mother, but, “how old is he?”

The answer—“about 40”—dismays both Kōichi’s mother and his wife. He may think that the age gap is not an issue, but the women do, and you can see their disapproval in their downcast expressions. This marks the beginning of a family conflict as Kōichi—the nearest thing to a villain in Early Summer—tries to exert his patriarchal authority and refuses to give up on the idea of the marriage.

Meanwhile Kōichi’s bratty sons run away after he scolds them (they were mad because he brought home bread instead of more model train tracks), and Noriko recruits Kenkichi to (successfully) help find them. While this is happening, Koichi is away from home, playing Go with a friend—again a contrast between Kōichi as an overbearing would-be patriarch and Kenkichi as a more caring father figure. (In the next scene we also see Kenkichi showing affection to his own child, “my good little girl.”)

We then have another precipitating event: Kenkichi, who (recall) is a doctor in the same facility as Kōichi, gets recommended by Kōichi for a plum position as a department head in a hospital way out in rural Japan, and tells his mother that he wants to accept it. She despairs at the thought of leaving their home, but his enthusiasm carries the day.

Then Noriko’s boss asks a few questions that we’ve been asking ourselves. While Noriko is away from work, Aya stops by, and the boss questions Aya on whether Noriko will go through with the match or not: “I don’t understand her . . . . Is she interested in men?” Aya at first demurs: “What do you think?” Noriko’s boss has seen indications both ways, and presses the question: “Has she always been like that?” Aya responds in the affirmative. The questioning goes on. Aya tells him that Noriko’s apparently never been in love, “but she has an album of . . . Hepburn photos this thick,” holding her thumb and forefinger about 4 centimeters apart.

Here we have the first of two translation issues. Aya actually refers to “Hepburn” without mentioning a given name. The Criterion subtitles—by Donald Richie, who should have known better—make this a reference to Audrey Hepburn, who’d had only small roles by then. It’s almost certain that this is instead a reference to Katherine Hepburn, who was a major star by the time Noriko would have entered middle school. Was the teenaged Noriko besotted by the androgynous beauty of Katharine Hepburn (who would have made a stunning otokoyaku)? It sure looks like it.

The subtext now threatens to become text, as Noriko’s boss learns that “Hepburn” refers to an American actress, and asks the obvious follow-up question about Noriko. In the Criterion subtitles it’s translated as “So she goes for women?” The BFI translation puts it more bluntly: “Is she queer?” What is Noriko’s boss really asking? Japanese speakers can correct me here, but I believe his actual question uses the term “hentai.”

Western fans are used to thinking of “hentai” as referring to pornography. However, my understanding is that at the time of the film “hentai” in colloquial Japanese would have referred specifically to sexual behavior that was considered abnormal. So if Noriko’s boss did use the term, another possible translation might have been “Is she a pervert?” Both the Criterion and BFI translations soften the question; in particular BFI’s “is she queer?”, while defensible, risks projecting our current ideas about “queer” (including its positive connotations) onto a film created in a different time.

In any case, Aya is determined to shut down any discussion of Noriko’s proclivities. “No!” she firmly replies. Noriko’s boss is apparently unconvinced: “You can never know. She’s very strange, in any case.” His prurient instincts aroused, Noriko’s boss then envisions another solution to the problem of Noriko, and queries Aya about it: “Why don’t you teach her?” “About what?” “Everything.” “What do you mean, everything?” He pats her shoulder and admonishes her: “Don’t try to be coy,” as we viewers pause to consider the implications of what he’s asking her to do.

Aya rejects this line of inquiry as well: “Don’t talk to me like that! That was rude!” Noriko’s boss laughs, offers a half-hearted apology, and then (after telling Aya that Noriko won’t be back that day) invites her to lunch and quizzes her on her preferences in sushi: “Tuna” she says. He continues, “How about an open clam?” (which Donald Richie’s commentary helpfully informs us is a euphemism for the vagina). “Sure,” she replies. “And a nice long rice roll?” “No, thank you!” His final words are, “You’re strange too,” and again I think I hear the word “hentai” enter the conversation.

We now switch to a scene featuring Noriko and her next-door neighbor Kenkichi. Recall that Kenkichi decided to accept an offer as a department head in a hospital in Akita, several hundred kilometers north of Tokyo and on the opposite coast. Noriko meets him in a café before her brother Kōichi is to host him at a farewell dinner party, and they talk about Shoji, Noriko’s other brother who went missing in action during the war. Kenkichi recalls how he and Shoji were best friends in school, often eating at this café, indeed at this very table. Kenkichi tells Noriko that he still keeps a letter that Shoji sent him, with a stalk of wheat enclosed (probably indicating that Shoji was deployed in northern China). Noriko asks if she can have the letter, and Kenkichi agrees.

Afterward Noriko visits Kenkichi’s mother, while Kenkichi himself is still at his farewell party. Kenkichi’s mother tells Noriko her secret dream (“please don’t tell Kenkichi”): “I just wish Kenkichi had gotten remarried to someone like you.” She apologizes and asks Noriko not to be angry (“It’s just a wish in my heart”), but Noriko stares at her with an intense expression (her usual smile absent), and asks her, “Do you mean it? . . . Do you really feel that way about me?” Kenkichi’s mother apologizes again, but Noriko presses on: “You wouldn’t mind an old maid like me?” Then before Kenkichi’s mother can respond, Noriko speaks: “Then I accept.”

Kenkichi’s mother is incredulous. She asks Noriko several times to confirm what she’s saying, thanks Noriko effusively and weeps tears of joy at her good fortune, but continues to question Noriko about her decision even as Noriko leaves to go home. (Incidentally, this scene features a bravura performance by Haruko Sugimura.)

After she leaves the house, Noriko encounters Kenkichi, just returned from his farewell party. Noriko exchanges some small talk with him, but says absolutely nothing about what she just told his mother.

Noriko’s decision then plays out across multiple scenes:

At first Kenkichi doesn’t understand what his mother is trying to tell him (“She accepted.” “Accepted what?”). When he finally gets the message (“She agreed to marry you. To become your wife!” “My wife?” “Yes. Isn’t it wonderful?”), he looks absolutely gobsmacked. His mother breaks down in tears again telling him how happy she is, and how happy he should be. He tries to play along (glumly echoing, “Yes, I’m happy”), but he looks for all the world like a man who would sooner eat nails than enter into another marriage.

Kenkichi’s mother doesn’t understand why he’s not happy. She concludes, “What an odd boy you are.” The Japanese word here appears to be “hen,” which I understand to be a softer adjective than “hentai,” and not sexual in nature. But note that Kenkichi is now the third person after Noriko and Aya to be referred to as not normal in some way.

Meanwhile Noriko is interrogated about her decision by her family, especially by Kōichi, in a beautifully framed and shot scene—Noriko in white, her head bowed, her brother in black, barking questions like a prosecutor cross-examining a criminal. Noriko is unrepentant: “When his mother talked to me, I didn’t feel a moment’s hesitation. I suddenly felt I’d be happy with him.” Her parents retire upstairs to chew on their disappointment—Noriko walking silently past them on her way to her room—while Kōichi tells Fumiko, “What could we do now? She’s made up her mind. You know how she is.”

The next day, after Kenkichi boards the train to Akita, his mother visits Noriko at her office, and they tiptoe around the question of what others thought: “Did your parents approve?” “Yes.” “And your brother?” “Don’t worry.” and “What did Kenkichi think?” “. . . He’s overjoyed. He didn’t sleep last night.”

The next two shots echo the beginning of the film, a shot of a bird in a cage outside, and then Noriko’s father inside with the other cages, caring for the birds. Noriko’s mother laments that Noriko didn’t make a better match, Fumiko nods in agreement, and Noriko’s father goes for a walk to buy more birdseed, silently contemplating their life going forward, in one of those quiet scenes that Ozu does so well.

Meanwhile Noriko and Aya have their last scene together. It starts by echoing and completing the action at the end of their previous scene: then they raised their glasses together to drink, now they lower their glasses in a simultaneous gesture. Aya tells Noriko that she can’t believe Noriko would ever end up like this: she thought Noriko would be a modern woman living “Western-style, with a flower garden, listening to Chopin,” “wearing a white sweater, with a terrier in tow,” and greeting Aya in English—“Hello, how are you?”

Instead Aya now imagines Noriko wearing farmers clothes in rural Japan, speaking the local dialect. She playfully imitates country speech, and Noriko responds in kind: “Ya don’t look it, but ya talk like the locals.” “I figure to live in Akita when me and my man get hitched.” The subtext here I read as follows: Noriko knows how to pretend to be something she is not—a conventional heterosexual woman in a conventional heterosexual marriage—and she will accept doing so in her self-imposed exile from Tokyo, the price she must pay for avoiding what she considered to be a worse fate.

The tone then turns serious. Aya recalls meeting Kenkichi when they were in school, on a hiking trip with Noriko and her brother Shoji, and presses Noriko about her choice: “Did you already love him then?” “No, I had no particular feeling for him. . . . I never imagined myself marrying him.” Noriko evades Aya’s questions about how she came to love Kenkichi, refusing time after time to acknowledge her feelings for him as those of love. Instead she insists, “No, I just feel I could trust him with all my heart and be happy.”

But trust Kenkichi for what? we want to ask Noriko. To respect her for who and what she is? To not want a conventional relationship with her? To not press her for sex or for children (after all, he already has one)? To keep her secrets, as she might keep any secret of his?

After this last meeting with Aya, Noriko comes back to a cold house and a dinner alone. Her parents and Kōichi leave the room to avoid greeting her, and only Fumiko is there to welcome her.

In the next scene she and Fumiko walk to the beach for one last look at the ocean, Ozu showing them walking up a sand dune in a gorgeous crane shot—supposedly the only one he ever used. In the earliest scenes in the film Noriko was dressed in stylish Western clothes, contrasted with Fumiko’s traditional Japanese attire. Now, instead of mirroring Aya, she is a mirror of Fumiko in her plain housewife’s outfit—but still freer and looser in her appearance.

Noriko tries to reassure Fumiko that she’ll be OK: “Are you worried that I’m marrying a man with a child? . . . I love children” (as we’ve seen earlier in the film with both her nephews and Kenkichi’s daughter). “Frankly, I felt I couldn’t trust a man who was still unattached and drifting around at 40. I think a man with a child is more trustworthy.” (Note again Noriko’s emphasis on trust and not love.) After discussing how they’ll be competing to scrimp and save in managing their families’ finances, they take a last walk down the beach by the ocean.

Just as she saw Aya for the last time (at least until/unless Kenkichi can return to Tokyo), Noriko now takes formal leave of her boss. He idly wonders if he himself could have been the right man for her. She does not encourage him in this line of thought.

The family then gathers for one last commemorative photo. Without Noriko’s salary they can no longer afford the house in Kamakura, so they break up: the parents to live with the great-uncle; Noriko to Akita with Kenkichi, his mother, and his daughter; and Kōichi, Fumiko, and their sons to some other less-expensive dwelling (perhaps an apartment in the Tokyo suburbs).

The parents recall when they moved into the house: “It was spring and Noriko had just turned 12.” Kōichi remembers that time as well: “She used to wear a ribbon in her hair, and she was always singing.” But “children grow up so quickly,” her parents remark, and living together forever, “that’s impossible.”

Her usual smile nowhere in evidence, Noriko takes it all upon herself: “I’m sorry, I’ve broken up the family.” Despite reassurances from her father (“It’s not your fault. It was inevitable.”) she flees from the room, goes upstairs to her own room, and cries her heart out, distraught about the turn that her and their lives have taken.

The final scene shows Noriko’s parents at the great-uncle’s house, far from the sea. They glance at a wedding procession walking through the fields (“Look there. A bride is passing by. I wonder what sort of family she’s marrying into?”), think of Noriko, and resign themselves to the family’s fate: “We shouldn’t ask for too much.” “We’ve been really happy.” The film closes with a tracking shot of a field of grain—perhaps the barley of the Japanese title?

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, traditionally most mainstream critics writing about Ozu seem to have ignored or downplayed the potentially queer aspects of Early Summer. For example, they go unmentioned in the essays by David Bordwell and Jim Jarmusch included in the Criterion collection release, as well as in Bordwell’s book Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema. As Yuka Kanno remarks, “The self-regulation of the ‘Ozu criticism’ industry has too long suppressed the possibility of new readings of his films,” preferring to focus on the “existing and limited interpretive frameworks of auteurism or of Ozu as an alternative modernist.”²

One exception is Robin Wood, who specifically references the scene between Noriko’s boss and Aya, and the lesbian implications of Noriko’s idolization of Katherine Hepburn.³ Another is Kanno, who discusses the Hepburn/Noriko connection at greater length.

I also found it interesting how upfront Early Summer is in raising the possibility of Noriko and (especially) Aya not having conventional heterosexual desires; in particular, I can’t imagine any mainstream American film of the time having an exchange like that between Aya and Noriko’s boss. Beyond general cultural differences between Japan and the US regarding discussions of sex, it’s worth noting that after the war Japan saw a reaction against restrictions imposed by the imperial Japanese government (and to a lesser extent by the American occupation authorities) and an explosion of interest in sexual practices, both conventional and less so.

In particular, see the late Mark McLelland’s discussion of the phenomenon of ryōki or “curiosity hunting”: seeking out the bizarre and unusual, including unusual sexual practices, both by reading about them and (for some) experiencing them firsthand.⁴ The more risqué elements of Early Summer—Ozu’s first film after the end of occupation censorship—can perhaps be seen as an attempt to provide a bit of ryōki in a mainstream film suitable for viewing by a middle-class audience.

Finally, what are we to make of Early Summer today, over 70 years after its release?

In my opinion, it’s not worth arguing about exactly how “queer” the film’s characters really are. Is Aya a lesbian? Is Noriko aromantic and asexual? Are Aya and Noriko a couple and, if so, in what sense? Is Kenkichi reluctant to remarry because he harbors no desire toward women, and is mourning a past love for Noriko’s brother Shoji? These are questions that can be debated one way or the other. The more important point is that all three of these characters behave in ways that are—to one degree or another—inconsistent with conventional heterosexual norms.

I suspect that the original audience for Ozu’s “home dramas” would have picked up on this. They likely knew someone, or knew of someone, who refused to marry or remarry—single women approaching their thirties, bachelors in their forties and fifties, widowers content to live alone—and would have had some inkling as to why this was. They would have seen in the fates of the characters in the film the possible fates of some of their friends, co-workers, even family members.

In Early Summer the characters accept their fates with resignation, sighs, and (occasionally) tears. But consider another possible resolution to the plot: Noriko is no longer pestered into marrying by her employer and her family. She continues to work, contribute to the household, and help care for her nephews. The household in Kamakura remains intact and harmonious, even as Noriko and Kōichi’s parents leave to spend their final years with the great-uncle. Aya and Noriko continue to enjoy a close relationship with each other, while Aya takes over the restaurant owned by her mother and remains unmarried and independent. Kenkichi enjoys life with his books, and after his stint in Akita returns with his mother and daughter to once again be a good neighbor and friend to Noriko and her family.

If Ozu intended for Early Summer to have a message, I think it would be this: here is a traditional multi-generational Japanese family broken apart not by modernity, or feminism, or Western culture, or any other of the usual suspects, but by a refusal to think outside the bounds of conventional heterosexual norms. It’s too much, I think, to expect a film made in 1951 for a mainstream audience to propose an alternative to this; highlighting the problem is achievement enough.

What then can I conclude regarding my original hypothesis? Here I can do no better than to “reverse the argument,” shamelessly steal the words with which Adam Mars-Jones ended his book about Ozu’s Late Spring, and adapt them to my own purpose:

If Yasujirō Ozu did decide to make a film about the experience of being queer in postwar Japan, within the limits of what the studio and his audience could accept, what would it look like? Wouldn’t it look like Early Summer? Very much like Early Summer.

Everyone does it, and I will too: Some quick year-end thoughts on things I read, watched, or listened to this year, and liked well enough to write about them here. Where appropriate I’ve included links to the official source material. (I avoid scanlation sites because as a practical matter I want to encourage publishers to translate more works into English and distribute them as widely as possible.)

I don’t do rank ordering or numerical scores, these are just in semi-random order, starting with my top 5 yuri manga:

• Yuri Is My Job! (10 volumes in English, ongoing). This started out as a parody of class S tropes as filtered through Maria Watches Over Us, but has become deeper and more interesting over time, both as a story and as metatextual commentary on the yuri genre. It will be interesting to see whether the upcoming anime adaptation does it justice.
• How Do We Relationship? (7 volumes, ongoing). Unlike many yuri works, this manga doesn’t end when the main couple gets together; in fact that’s just the starting point, and now the main couple isn’t even a couple any more.
• Even Though We’re Adults (5 volumes, ongoing). The most adult yuri manga around, not in the “adult video” sense, but in the “adults having problems only adults have, and working through them as adults” sense. This is Takako Shimura’s best work published in English thus far.
• I Can’t Believe I Slept with You (3 volumes, complete). Another work which considerably transcends its (somewhat dubious) premise.
• She, Her Camera, and Her Seasons (5 volumes, complete). One of the better depictions of a love triangle around, and one which avoids a pat resolution. It also deftly uses photography as a running theme: taking photos is so central to two of the main characters’ lives that they do it even in—really, especially in—their most intimate and vulnerable moments.

Other non-manga yuri works worthy of note:

• Otherside Picnic light novel (7 volumes, ongoing). What really sells this work is the narration by and interior monologue of Sorawo, one of the two protagonists. I watched one episode of the anime, which was unexceptional, and am skipping the manga.
• Yurizen! Salon—Shirayuri’s Comforting Food Therapy super-light novel (23 volumes, complete). This is another entry in the genre of yuri works involving food, here made more interesting by featuring traditional Chinese medicinal recipes.
• GAP: The Series live-action TV series (6 episodes, ongoing). This Thai production features a rather clichéd trope—romance between an overbearing and emotionally cold boss and her younger naïve but spunky subordinate—but it’s more than redeemed by the incredible chemistry between the two co-stars. I wrote about this one as an example of the growing creation of yuri/GL works outside Japan. (There are several more upcoming yuri live-action series from Thailand, although Thai GL works are still far outnumbered by Thai BL works.)
• She Makes My Heart Flutter live-action web series (5 episodes, complete). This Korean work is a sweet “love comes late” story, featuring two generations of lesbians and their different perspectives.

Finally, some other things I enjoyed this year:

• Anime: I watched all episodes of well over a dozen series this year. These were my top 5, in no particular order: Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury, Akiba Maid War, Birdie Wing, Kaguya-sama: Love Is War, and My Dress-Up Darling.
• Film: Everything Everywhere All At Once. Unlike some, I didn’t think this was a masterpiece, but I enjoyed it well enough, and it’s good to see Michelle Yeoh get more recognition.
• Music: This was the year of DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ. According to Spotify I listened to over 125 hours of DJ Sabrina tracks (including over 80 replays of “Lose Myself”), and I probably listened to that much or more on the Apple Music app after I bought all her albums on Bandcamp.
• Books: Almost all of my reading was done as research for my book. Other than that I don’t think I read an entire book “for fun” all year, which is rather unusual for me. However I’ve started reading poetry in earnest again; right now I’m halfway through H.D.’s Selected Poems.

Finally, while (unlike some) I won’t do a “worst of 2022” list, I did want to mention two works that I found disappointing, and for which my opinion is somewhat of a minority one:

• I’m in Love with the Villainess light novel. If this series had ended with volume 3, I would have been perfectly happy (well, except for the stupid and unnecessary incest subplot). The last two volumes felt like the author was writing to satisfy the expectations of fans and the publisher for more material. I thought the conclusion of volume 5 in particular was an ass-pull that for me at least strained my suspension of disbelief to the breaking point.
• Spy x Family anime. There’s nothing inherently bad about this series, but I found myself continually putting off watching the latest episode, until finally I dropped it.

Thanks for reading, and here’s wishing you a Happy New Year!