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HITORI MUSUKO (The Only Son)
A Shochiku Production
The mother worked in a silk factory in a small village in Shinshu, a mountainous region in central Japan. The son Ryosuke lost his father at a very early age and was brought up under the care of his mother with the meagre resources which she managed to scrape together. When he graduated with honors from a rural elementary school, his mother decided, in accordance with the advice of the instructor who had had charge of him, to send him to a distant town where he could receive his middle school education. For a mother who could barely earn the wherewithals of life with the sweat of her try¬ ing, back-breaking toil, this was a prodigious sacrifice in the interest of her son’s future success and happiness.
The subsequent ten years and more of a life of fortitude and self-denial aged her prematurely, so that she could no longer continue her work as a factory hand, and was compelled to lead a wretched existence as a janitress in the same factory. Inevitably she had sold her house and property and her farm lands so as to provide the necessary funds for her son’s schooling. However, as compensation for all this sacrifice, her son had com¬ pleted his university education, gone to Tokyo, the capital city, and become a splendid municipal official. So, at least, she mused, and consoled herself, and felt a deep pride in it.
But when she went to Tokyo during a vacation to see for herself what a fine, successful figure he had become, this proud day-dream was instantly shattered. The cold actuality of the situation was that her son was but one of Tokyo’s great army of the unemployed, and was barely able to support his wife and child with the little that he earned as a temporary instructor of mathematics at a night school. This was her “only son”, to whose success she had looked forward with such high hopes, and for the reali¬ zation of which she had given the greater part of her life.
The picture comes to a close as the mother, crushed by this disillusionment, returns to her native province and at the backyard of the silk factory ponders anew upon the facts of human life, with a vacant stare and in a mood of sad resignation.
This is the first “talkie” made by Yasujiro Ozu, who directed numerous excel¬ lent pictures during the era of the silent film based upon the hardships encountered by obscure people of small means and by the proletarian class, and constitutes the best screen play he has produced. The realistic power of the subject dealt with, however, is weakened by ineffective lyricism and sentimentality.
Akira Iwasaki
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