(1957; Japanese, b/w) Director Yasujiro Ozu's films are like old photographs in motion. Returning home, a bank auditor, Shukichi Sugiyama (Chishu Ryu), finds his older, married daughter, Takako Numata (Setsuko Hara), and her toddler daughter, Michiko, have moved into his home following discord with her husband, a neurotic drinker. Also in the same household resides his unmarried daughter, Akiko (Ineko Arima), a wild child, who after dropping out of college has taken up studying English shorthand, coming home late nights.

Meeting with her brother, Seki Sekiguchi (Sô Yamamura) tells Mr Sugiyama of Akiko's request for a loan of 5000 yen, which she refused when the girl gave only a vague reason of needing to help a friend; Seki offers to play matchmaker to find a suitable husband. Meanwhile, Akiko searches anxiously for her boyfriend Kenji Kimura (Masami Taura) in various locations.

After a discussion with Yasuo Numata, Takako's father apologizes to his daughter for having pressured her into the marriage, admitting he should have allowed her to wed Sato, another man of her own liking.

In the Kotoburi-So district at a mah-jong parlor, still trying to find Kenji, Akiko meets a woman who says she was once a neighbor of Akiko's family in Ushigome when Akiko was a small child. (Though she doesn't say this to Akiko, at the time Akiko's father was in a concentration camp in Seoul, Korea.) Once having known the family well, when she asks about Akiko's brother and sister, the woman is taken aback when Akiko says her brother was killed in the summer of 1951 in a climbing accident. Akiko has a premonition that the woman was her mother.

Eventually Akiko comes upon Kenji as she's leaving a bar and tells him of her terrible secret of being pregnant. At first he questions her how she knows it's his but later relents, asking her to wait for him in a café until after he meets with his professor so that they can discuss their options.

At the Etoile café, sitting alone late into the night waiting for Kenji, Akiko attracts the suspicions of a plainclothes policeman. Her older sister comes to get her from the police station where Takako is informed that no crime has been committed, but that the girl needs supervision after repeatedly being out so late.

At home the father harshly interrogates his impossibly stubborn daughter about the money she requested from her aunt; getting no coherent explanation out of her, he says she's no daughter of his. (This she will later take quite literally by asking, "Whose child am I?")

Takako attempts to intervene, pointing out to her father that Akiko had no mother's love; Akiko says to her: "I should never have been born." (Later, feeling guilty for her own part, Takako contritely says to her sister that she knows her own marriage has been a bad example, but it's an exception.)

The next day while Akiko is away, Seki comes over to her brother's house with photographs of two possible suitors for Akiko and an amazing story of having met on an escalator Kisako Soma (Isuzu Yamada), Mr Sugiyama's former wife, now remarried and the owner of a mah-jong parlor. These twilight events advance further into darkness.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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