Equinox Flower
1958, directed by Yasujiro Ozu
Equinox Flower opens at a train station with a clock in the center of its facade. In the third shot a split-flap board over the platform resets itself, turning a departure time of 15:21 into a row of blank rectangles. The empty read-out implicitly suggests time stopping, and in an Ozu film, where trains are always associated with the forward flow of time, it’s not to be ignored. After the opening shots, trains will be absent from Equinox Flower until the final shots when Wataru Hirayama rides off to visit his daughter Setsuko and her new husband in Hiroshima, a pilgrimage of reconciliation after resisting their marriage for so long. His change of heart is the plot’s center, and the coded language of clocks and trains tells us that he’s been stuck in time.
Mr. Hirayama is introduced right after the train station. He gives a brief speech at a wedding reception then drinks sake with some middle-aged friends from the wedding party. The men tease each other and the waitress, testing out a theory that a couple will produce boys if the woman is stronger and girls if the man is stronger. With two daughters, Hirayama is happy to accept the theory, but the film will gradually prove him wrong as the balance of power shifts in favor of his wife Kiyoko, who is more ready to accept their daughter’s choice of a husband. This shifting balance corresponds to the equinox in the title, an equinox being the point where the balance shifts between night and day.
The film’s title, and the men’s banter about the respective strengths of husbands and wives, both point to a contrast between Mr. and Mrs. Hirayama, whose chief difference clarifies what it means for him to be stuck in time. It’s not that he’s conservative in any typical sense. When he mentions “a lot of stupid people strutting around” during the war, he reveals that he’s never been sympathetic to Japanese imperialism. He wants his eldest daughter to submit to an arranged marriage, but in the opening scene he’s sympathetic to the newlyweds’ love match, and he’s equally broad-minded toward Mr. Mikami’s daughter and likewise to Yukiko’s feigned love affair when she tricks him. Mrs. Hirayama rightfully calls out her “inconsistent” husband, and any onlooker with a less polite inclination might call him a hypocrite, but identifying his error doesn’t uncover his reasons.
The key to Mr. Hirayama’s attitude is in his dialogue with his wife by the mountain lake at Hakone during the family’s last outing together. She starts recalling the hardships of the war, when the family used to huddle together during bombing raids. “I didn’t like the war, but I reminisce about those times. Don’t you?” “Not really,” he answers, “I hated those times. We had nothing.” She holds her ground: “But I liked it. We were together as a family then.” This isn’t the only time Mr. Hirayama takes a dim view of the past. In his first lines, at the wedding reception, he had thought back on his own “pragmatic and routine” marriage, confessing his envy for the newlyweds’ romantic love.
To say that Mr. Hirayama is “stuck” in time does not mean that he lives in the past. On the contrary, the essential difference between husband and wife is that she’s able to embrace the past, regardless of its hardships, whereas he would rather not think of it. The insight here is that people who face the past directly are better able to move forward through time. By looking back at her misfortunes with acceptance and even some fondness, Mrs. Hirayama takes a broader view of time than her husband does. This breadth of perspective translates into a broader view of their daughter’s situation. The problem with her husband is not that his morals are regressive, but rather that he can’t take a clear view of the people closest to him, just as he can’t put his own past in perspective.
Hirayama’s younger daughter Hisako calls him “too old-fashioned”, but that doesn’t quite capture his mindset either. Right after she says this, he comes home with a new set of formal clothes, signalling his willingness to attend the wedding. For someone with difficulty keeping up with changing times, it’s curious that he asks his wife, “Do you only think of today and not the future?” after she expresses an undefined faith in Setsuko’s life with her chosen husband. Mrs. Hirayama first hesitates to argue then accuses her husband of always demanding his way. It’s not that Mr. Hirayama doesn’t think of the future, but that he wishes to control it. The film evidently takes his wife’s side. Right after he orders Setsuko to stay home from work, forbidding her from meeting her lover, the scene cuts to an electronic billboard for Victor Talking Machines with its trademark “His Master’s Voice” as if to mock Hirayama’s imperiousness.
This idea of being stuck or locked in time, unable to move with the flow of history, is typical of Ozu, whose late films are each about how we navigate the peculiar effects of time. Despite the film’s inescapable similarities to his other films – his numerous stories of fathers marrying off their daughters, or Floating Weeds which ends with a train receding into the picture – it would be a mistake to think of Equinox Flower or any of his films as mere variations on a set of themes. Each one investigates a unique aspect of living in a temporal universe. In 1952, for instance, The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice (also starring Shin Saburi) proposed that life sometimes gifts us little pockets or bubbles of suspended time which we can use to our advantage. Such moments however are not traps like the kind of time that Mr. Hirayama gets stuck in… nor is his stoppage of time anything like the idea of eternal time that appears in so many Ozu films. It’s closer to an opposite of eternity, because eternity implies a breadth of vision.
Just as Equinox Flower presents only two sequences of trains – Ozu’s usual code for forward-moving time – it also presents only two sequences of water, the director’s usual marker for eternity. The first water is at Hakone thirty-nine minutes in, during the all-important exchange between Mr. and Mrs. Hirayama. The couple spends most of the scene on a bench, facing the mountains but set back some distance from the water. She goes to the railing to wave at their daughters’ boat, then at the end she gets up again, he follows her, they wave, and he turns his back to the lake. In Ozu’s language she faces eternity more readily than he does, which correlates to a more generous perspective. The second appearance of water is toward the end, at Mr. Hirayama’s reunion in Gamagori. He’s already relented twice, agreeing to Setsuko’s marriage and attending the wedding, but he had done so ungenerously, never smiling during the ceremony. The water at Gamagori foreshadows his broadening perspective, and before he comes home he’ll become fully aligned with his wife and daughter.
Still, at Gamagori, he and Mr. Mikami (Chishu Ryu) turn their backs on the water exactly as he had done at Hakone. Not only is he a few steps away from embracing the timeless perspective of nature, we’re also reminded that his male friends are just like him. Mikami has been in the same position all along, resisting his daughter’s love match to an apparently respectable young man. The implication is that Mr. Hirayama’s problem is not merely personal but sociological. It’s evidently all too common, at least for men of the wartime generation, to want too much control over the future, to be unwilling to face the eternal aspect of life that would give them faith to accept the unknown.
This inability to ride with the flow of time is expressed in the running metaphor of golf. Right after the Hakone outing, Hirayama’s colleague tells him, “I had a bad day yesterday. I couldn’t get over the seventh-hole bunker.” “Yeah,” replies Hirayama, “it’s tough if you get caught there.” At Hakone he had wanted to play golf, but his wife asked him to spend time with the family instead. Later at the country club, he tells another friend that his game was “not so good.” Golf is all about getting stuck, and in mid-century Japan it was a game for prosperous middle-aged men like Hirayama. Nevertheless, their tendency to get stuck in time is counter to their better natures. Mikami finally relents to his daughter’s wishes just as Hirayama does. At the alumni reunion, Mikami sings a traditional poem about following “the precepts of my father” and “the edict of the emperor”, and his mates listen respectfully, but when he’s done they all join in a different song about nature and emotions.
Before coming home from this reunion, Mr. Hirayama pays a spontaneous visit to Mrs. Sasaki and Yukiko in Kyoto. It’s only there, through another of Yukiko’s tricks, that he fully relinquishes his tight control over the family’s future and decides to see Setsuko and her husband in Hiroshima. It seems, though, when he calls home, that his wife is already in on the trick, and in private she relishes her triumph. When Mr. Hirayama boards the train, if we’ve caught on to Ozu’s use of trains, it’s understood that he’s finally come unstuck and re-entered the flow of time. The closing shot signals two things at once: its subject, the train, speaks for the linear time that he’s rejoined; and its composition, receding into the distance over a bridge, conveys a sense of the eternal vision that he can finally share in.
CONNECTIONS:
Early Summer – Music box in the living room playing Home Sweet Home
Tokyo Story – First onscreen train ride comes at the end, with the significance of rejoining the flow of time
Wild Strawberries – Parents and children waving to each other across a body of water in a key scene detached from the flow of time
Hiroshima mon amour – Idea that embracing the past is a precondition for a good life in the present, expressed with reference to WWII; symbolic allusions to Hiroshima
Floating Weeds – Train receding into the distance in the final shot, representing time moving forward but with a simultaneous sense of the eternal
The End of Summer – Electric advertisement or logo that comments implicitly on the story