Akibiyori (Late Autumn) is Ozu’s fourth color film. Having found his grounding with a characteristically restrained color palette, Ozu now peppers his sets with occasional pops of brilliant color; a turquoise telephone, a mustard tea kettle, a glossy red ash tray, a bright orange bottle of soda pop.

Tonally, this movie falls somewhere between the delightful inanity of Good Morning and the subdued earnestness of Early Summer, staying mostly in the bubbly realms of light comedy with only occasional dips into heavier fare. It employs an unusually sweeping Dvorak-esq soundtrack for an Ozu film.

Many of the scenes are spent in the sunset glow of fond memories and daydreams; characters reminisce about good times long past, cheerfully toss out aimless plans like taking a tourist trip or meeting up for fancy dinners, and guess weather a recently-married couple are sitting face-to-face or shoulder-to-shoulder on a passing train. Ozu reinforces this rosy nostalgic vibe by including both subtle nods and specific references to his previous films— the exaggerated, singsong “Right?” / “Right?” from Early Summer, for example — and is most clearly in dialog with Hara and Ozu’s first work together, Late Spring.

Hara plays the still-beautiful widow Akiko, whose unmarried 24-year-old daughter Ayako (Yoko Tsukasa) becomes the matchmaking project of her deceased husband’s lovably smarmy trio of old buddies. This role reversal is another key element of the pervasive nostalgic feel; seeing Hara on the other side of almost identical conversations about marriage from a decade past, a viewer can’t help but be reminded of how her own life has likewise changed over time. By keeping the overall tone so light, Ozu positions our own reflections within this same summery cloud of slightly misremembered and idealized moments.

This movie spends a lot of time dealing with how people of the same gender interface: Hara and her daughter; the trio of buddies at the bar; Ayako and Yuriko at the office; Ayako’s would-be suitor Hirayama and his comedically forthright son. The scenes between men and women play out almost like summits or negotiations; and seeing how the earlier (casually off-color) private conversations are translated into more polite diction in mixed company is part of the fun. One of the brightest scenes is when the trio of buddies is cornered by the young firecracker Yuriko (Mariko Okada), who scolds them being too roundabout before taking them out drinking at her family’s sushi restaurant.

After Ayako eventually decides to marry her suitor, she and Akiko take a vacation together, mirroring the final act of Late Spring. When Ayako talks about the sadness of the last night of a trip, and asks her mother if she thinks the same; in Hara’s brief moment of silence, we know that she does — because we remember how, eleven years ago, as the daughter, she asked the same question to Chishu Ryu. These intertextual elements provide the weighty underpinnings to an otherwise light-as-a-feather movie.

As the mother, Hara has the opportunity to act in a much wider range, from unguarded joy to concerned confusion. It’s the sort of role which requires an appropriate age and level of experience to execute without shifting the delivery too far into the dramatic. As her daughter bursts into tears, she does her best to keep a smile, casually brushing a tear from her eye.

Just as in Late Spring, the parent lies about her own marriage to enable (or, perhaps, force) the child to progress in her own life. Just as in Late Spring, we close with the parent in the silence after the wedding celebration. Only now, rather than the tired solitude of the off-camera-facing Ryu, we close on Hara’s smile — no longer the wild, beaming Noriko smile, but one more natural, mature, and ambiguous.

Hara quietly turned 40 in 1960, the same year that television began its gradual insurgency into the film industry’s viewership and profits. In an interview with the Tokyo Shimbun in February, she commented “My age is the most difficult part as an actress right now, Toho people seem to be struggling to pick out roles for me as well. I wonder if Toho is more worried about me than I am.”⁸

Usually guarded in interviews, Hara began speaking more frankly about her position in the industry, and her life, retrospectively. During the planning stages of Robo-no Ishi (The Wayside Pebble), she commented “My family wasn’t that blessed in my childhood. I wanted to become a school teacher, but for economic reasons, I became an actress.” In a later interview with the Houchi Newspaper, “I like quiet times where I don’t get bothered by anything. Recently, when it comes to progress or ideals as an actress, I don’t have much desire and I can’t really say much.” After the release of Late Autumn, she expressed some ambivalence about her recent roles as a mother, having never raised children herself.

In the winter of 1962, Ozu noticed a lump on the side of his neck. This year had been particularly hard for him; his mother (with whom he had lived with since 1943, and was incredibly close) passed away while he was planning what would become An Autumn Afternoon; her death would heavily influence the final version of this film. In April, he undertook a difficult cobalt treatment, which slowed the cancer, but could not stop it completely. He passed away on his 60th birthday, in December of 1963. Hara went to see him in the evening. She did not attend Ozu’s funeral, but met privately with his family beforehand to pay her respects.

Hara’s final role was in Inagaki’s Chushingura (47 Ronin), released in 1962. Without a definitive retirement announcement, she stopped making films and began to refuse all interview requests. She moved into the two-story family home which she had built in Kamakura in 1955, and reverted to using her real name, Masae Aida. She lived a quiet life there for the next half-century.

As she had requested, her family waited a full month after her passing in September of 2015 to inform the press.

It’s hard to digest this as a narrative. Thirty years of whirlwind stardom spanning more than 100 films, critical acclaim and public adoration through the most tumultuous years in Japan’s history… followed by: nothing. The studio-created character of Setsuko Hara just vanishes, like a book ending mid-chapter.

At the time of her effective retirement, the press reacted poorly to Hara’s decision to leave the public without (as Richie comments) providing any “polite fiction about bad health or a spiritual imperative or a burning desire to take up charitable work,” even going so far as to insult her as “onnarashikunai — ‘unwomanly.’” Hara did not respond.¹⁵

In English-language writing, Hara is sometimes shorthanded to “The Greta Garbo of Japan,” but this is a misleading comparison. After retiring, Garbo continued to enjoy an active social and public life, regularly giving interviews. She famously settled in the upper east side of Manhattan and often strolled its upscale blocks and luxury boutiques, attended theater events, and even stayed overnight at the White House.

Hara, on the other hand, disappeared completely. In the half-century between her retirement to the family home and death in 2015, her only interaction with the press were an offhand response to a 1971 petition that she return to acting, delivered via her nephew (“…I am not returning, you are being so nosy!”), and “a few words” by telephone with a Yomiuri Shimbun reporter in 1992, in reference to the authenticity of a signed flag which had come up for auction.¹⁶ The only (unconfirmed) photographs of her after the 1960s were surreptitiously taken; blurred paparazzi shots of an older woman.

As the years passed into decades, postscripts sometimes appeared with the occasional dramatic rumor slipped in: Hara and Ozu were secret lovers. The trauma of seeing her brother (Yoshio Aida, a cameraman) tragically killed in an on-set accident during the filming of 1953’s Shirouo (White Fish), eventually became too much to bear. She’d developed cataracts in 1954, and her worsening vision made acting impossible. She was uncomfortable continuing to appear onscreen as the body’s normal signs of aging became increasingly visible. These are from second-hand sources at best, and at worst, pure fabrication.

Perhaps the most accurate postscript is also the most overtly fictional: the 2001 Satoshi Kon animated film Millennium Actress. The film’s central character is based on Hara, and viewers will recognize many iconic moments from her filmography which are referenced throughout; from the harrowing volcano of The Daughter of the Samurai to the cheerful teacher of Blue Mountains.

The exact dates and filmography are bent in service to the dramatic arc; but the film does an excellent job of shepherding the viewer across the violent upheaval of the 1930s-1950s with its fluid visual and narrative style. It’s best approached on its own merits, rather than from a fact-checking standpoint — some of the most effecting and heartfelt moments happen in the context of fictional entries in the Hara-surrogate’s filmography.

What Millennium Actress gets completely right is that it’s the unanswerable questions which draws certain modern viewers into Hara’s work. At times (particularly in Ozu’s films) her acting is entrancing — and it’s hard not to watch these films without the hope of catching some flickering dispatch from beyond that enigmatic smile, some secret word to unlock this wall of unknowable silence.

Artists who rise to the forefront of the public consciousness before meeting tragic ends, like Patsy Cline or Kurt Cobain, can leave us with luminescent, powerful, and (critically, in the internet age) traversably compact bodies of work. But even these ostensibly closed oeuvres on odd occasions still surface new apocrypha, like a desert cactus blooming once a decade. In some cases, we can see these closed blossoms perched motionless season after season, and must simply wait patiently for them to open — like with Jimi Hendrix’s Black Gold tape.

Even when an acclaimed artist decides specifically to end a project, it’s usually not long until they’re starting something new. Stone Temple Pilots begets Talk Show and Army of Anyone and Velvet Revolver and Art of Anarchy. Even if these later projects don’t catch the zeitgeist in the same way as the former, we’re still happy to see familiar faces return — even if it’s sometimes just an excuse to reminisce about the earlier stuff.

Hara is one of the very few artists who reached the top of the mountain, beloved and lauded for the work she was producing, and just decided to stop.

There was no reunion tour. No cute cameo as the feisty grandmother. No televised interview special. No transition to running a small chain of local sports bars. No tell-all book. No nostalgia-baiting Netflix reboot. No line of perfume or clothing brand. No podcast. No ill-fated run for political office. No inexplicable late-in-life cash grab.

Masae Aida opened a body of work, filled it with art both mundane and remarkable, and then closed it.

Additional research and translation for this article by Nicole Everett and Cassandra Wardinsky.

Notes

[1] The Imperial Screen, 318; referencing: Kido, Nihon Eigaden, 215.

[2] http://www.enic-cine.net/nobuko-rides-on-a-cloud/ (author cites additional Japanese-language references)

[3] http://www.jmdb.ne.jp/person/p0097240.htm (see appendix below for translations)

[4] The Toho Studio Story, 52

[5] A Hundred Years Of Japanese Film, 108; The Imperial Screen, 503. The films which were received by the LOC were returned to Japan in 1976.

[6] Under directive from the SCAP, The film industry was tasked with assessing itself (via the All-Japan Motion Picture Employees Union) for war crimes.

The system decided upon was to classify individuals into groups A, B, and C; with group A being the most severe, resulting in expulsion from the industry, while group C required only “self-examination” of one’s past actions.

In effect, the sentences imposed were normally lenient (usually only a gap of a few years where the individual could not work), and most people in the industry retained their positions after being declared “rehabilitated” — with a few notable exceptions, such as Shiro Kido of Shochuki.

I was unable to find any English-language information on weather Hara went through this process (there is no significant postwar gap in her filmography).

[7] A Nichiei documentary made just after the bombings was secretly hidden at the outset of the occupation. Owing to SCAP restrictions on the press, its post-occupation screening in 1952 would be the first time many Japanese would see the immediate effects of the atomic bomb. (“Currents in Japanese Cinema,” 197)

Sato also mentions a film made under the SCAP censors in 1950 called The Bells of Nagasaki, which carefully adhered to restrictions by showing the blast’s cloud only at a great distance, and behind a mountain range. It is based on the memoirs of a Roman Catholic medical professor who, while dying of radiation-induced leukemia, “regarded the atomic blast as a heaven-sent trial to be endured.”

[8] All direct quotes from Hara come from excerpts of the following items, which I had translated specifically for this piece. As I do not speak or read Japanese, I will list the sources as they were presented to me by the researcher. Note: The first item on this list includes the most direct quotations, which are attributed in-line to their source publications.

Title: 原節子 映画女優の昭和, author: 千葉 伸夫, publisher: 大和書房, 1987. [Library catalog link] p.247–258 (“Setsuko Hara, The Legend”)

Title: 演劇映画講座 第3巻〜第4巻, publisher: 芸術学院, 1951. [Library catalog link] p.82–86 (“Film Actor Research: Setsuko Hara”)

Title: 東京人, publisher: 都市出版, 1996. [Library catalog link] (“In & Out”)

[9] Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema, 37. An equivalent independent body for home video was created in 1977, and for video games in 2002. The author also draws a connection between Japan’s decades under extreme censorship from both imperial and SCAP regimes to Eirin’s lenient position.

[10] Although Sato refers to 1952 as the “Second Golden Age,” with the first beginning in 1932.

[11] Japanese Cinema, 66

[12] From The Mainichi Graphic, 10 August 1951 issue. (PD)

[13] See Richie’s “Ozu” for a more thorough biography and chronology of his film productions.

[14] Late Spring and Good Morning are good starting points for drama and comedy, respectively. Try Early Summer for something that falls in between. For the more technically-minded reader, the books of Bordwell and Ritchie get deep into the weeds on his filmmaking particulars (see Bibliography).

[15] “Ozu and Setsuko Hara,” excerpt by Richie: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2258-ozu-and-setsuko-hara

[16] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/28/arts/television/setsuko-hara-japanese-star-of-films-by-ozu-and-kurosawa-is-dead-at-95.html