An Autumn Afternoon
| An Autumn Afternoon | |
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Original Japanese Poster.
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| Directed by | Yasujirō Ozu |
| Produced by | Shizuo Yamanouchi |
| Written by |
Kogo Noda Yasujirō Ozu |
| Starring |
Shima Iwashita Chishū Ryū Keiji Sada Mariko Okada Teruo Yoshida Noriko Maki Shinichiro Mikami Eijiro Tono |
| Music by | Kojun Saito |
| Cinematography | Yûharu Atsuta |
| Edited by | Yoshiyasu Hamamura |
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Production
company |
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| Distributed by | Shochiku |
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Release date
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Running time
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113 minutes |
| Country | Japan |
| Language | Japanese |
An Autumn Afternoon (秋刀魚の味 Sanma no aji?, "The Taste of Mackerel Pike") is a 1962 Japanese drama film directed by Yasujirō Ozu. It stars Ozu regular Chishū Ryū as the patriarch of the Hirayama family who eventually realises that he has a duty to arrange a marriage for his daughter Michiko (Shima Iwashita). It was Ozu's last film; he died the following year.
Today, An Autumn Afternoon is considered by many to be one of Ozu's finest works.
Shūhei Hirayama (Chishū Ryū) is an ageing widower with a 32-year-old married son; Kōichi (Keiji Sada), and two unmarried children; 24-year-old daughter Michiko (Shima Iwashita) and 21-year-old son Kazuo (Shin'ichirō Mikami). The ages of the children and what they respectively remember about their mother suggests that she died just before the end of the war, perhaps in the bombing of Tokyo in 1944-45. Since his marriage, Kōichi has moved out to live with his wife in a small flat, leaving Hirayama and Kazuo to be looked after by Michiko.
Hirayama and five of his classmates from middle-school, Kawai (Nobuo Nakamura), Horie (Ryūji Kita), Sugai (Tsūzai Sugawara), Watanabe (Masao Oda) and Nakanishi, hold regular reunions at a restaurant called Wakamatsu ("Young Pine"), which is owned by Sugai. They reminisce about old times and banter with each other. For example, Horie is teased about having a new young wife and asked whether he is taking pills to maintain his virility.
Their old teacher of Chinese classics, Sakuma (Eijirō Tōno), nicknamed the "Gourd", attends one of the reunions. We learn from a remark of his that Hirayama went from school to the Naval Academy, so would have been a career naval officer up to 1945. Sakuma has too much to drink, and when Kawai and Hirayama take him home, they find that he has fallen on hard times and is running a cheap noodle restaurant in a working-class area. They meet his middle-aged daughter Tomoko (Haruko Sugimura), who missed the chance to marry when young and is now too old.
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Wikipedia