hecker

Amateur essayist, anime & manga fan

Resident of Howard County, Maryland, systems engineer, and amateur essayist and data scientist. Author of the book That Type of Girl: Notes on Takako Shimura's Sweet Blue Flowers. Staff writer for Okazu.


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This post is the last in a series discussing Yasujirō Ozu’s Early Summer (1951) as a hypothesized example of “a queer film subtly but firmly protesting compulsory heterosexuality, made by a (possibly) queer director and starring a (possibly) queer actor.” See also my introduction in part 1, and my detailed breakdown of the film’s scenes in part 2, part 3, and part 4.

Here I provide my final thoughts on the film and my thesis.

NOTE: This post contains spoilers for Early Summer.


First, as I mentioned in my original post, traditionally most mainstream critics writing about Ozu seem to have ignored or downplayed the potentially queer aspects of Early Summer. For example, they go unmentioned in the essays by David Bordwell and Jim Jarmusch included in the Criterion collection release, as well as in Bordwell’s book Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema. As Yuka Kanno remarks, “The self-regulation of the ‘Ozu criticism’ industry has too long suppressed the possibility of new readings of his films,” preferring to focus on the “existing and limited interpretive frameworks of auteurism or of Ozu as an alternative modernist”.1

One exception is Robin Wood, who specifically references the scene between Noriko’s boss and Aya, and the lesbian implications of Noriko’s idolization of Katherine Hepburn.2 Another is Kanno, who discusses the Hepburn/Noriko connection at greater length.

Second, I found it interesting how upfront Early Summer is in raising the possibility of Noriko and (especially) Aya not having conventional heterosexual desires; in particular, I can’t imagine any mainstream American film of the time having an exchange like that between Aya and Noriko’s boss. Beyond general cultural differences between Japan and the US regarding discussions of sex, it’s worth noting that after the war Japan saw a reaction against restrictions imposed by the imperial Japanese government (and to a lesser extent by the American occupation authorities) and an explosion of interest in sexual practices, both conventional and less so.

In particular, see the late Mark McLelland’s discussion (in chapter 6 of his book Love, Sex, and Democracy in Japan During the American Occupation) of the phenomenon of ryōki or “curiosity hunting”: seeking out the bizarre and unusual, including unusual sexual practices, both by reading about them and (for some) experiencing them firsthand. The more risqué elements of Early Summer — Ozu’s first film after the end of occupation censorship — can perhaps be seen as an attempt to provide a bit of ryōki in a mainstream film suitable for viewing by a middle-class audience.

Finally, what are we to make of Early Summer today, over 70 years after its release?

In my opinion, it's not worth arguing about exactly how “queer” the film's characters really are. Is Aya a lesbian? Is Noriko aromantic and asexual? Are Aya and Noriko a couple and, if so, in what sense? Is Kenkichi reluctant to remarry because he harbors no desire toward women, and is mourning a past love for Noriko’s brother Shoji? These are questions that can be debated one way or the other. The more important point is that all three of these characters behave in ways that are — to one degree or another — inconsistent with conventional heterosexual norms.

I suspect that the original audience for Ozu’s “home dramas” would have picked up on this. They likely knew someone, or knew of someone, who refused to marry or remarry — single women approaching their thirties, bachelors in their forties and fifties, widowers content to live alone — and would have had some inkling as to why this was. They would have seen in the fates of the characters in the film the possible fates of some of their friends, co-workers, even family members.

In Early Summer the characters accept their fates with resignation, sighs, and (occasionally) tears. But consider another possible resolution to the plot: Noriko is no longer pestered into marrying by her employer and her family. She continues to work, contribute to the household, and help care for her nephews. The household in Kamakura remains intact and harmonious, even as Noriko and Kōichi’s parents leave to spend their final years with the great-uncle. Aya and Noriko continue to enjoy a close relationship with each other, but also with their married friends, while Aya takes over the restaurant owned by her mother and remains unmarried and independent. Kenkichi enjoys life with his books, and after his stint in Akita returns with his mother and daughter to be once again be a good neighbor and friend to Noriko and her family.

If Ozu intended for Early Summer to have a message, I think it would be this: here is a traditional multi-generational Japanese family destroyed not by modernity, or feminism, or Western culture, or any other of the usual suspects, but by a refusal to think outside the bounds of conventional heterosexual norms. It’s too much, I think, to expect a film made in 1951 for a mainstream audience to propose an alternative to this; highlighting the problem is achievement enough.

What then can I conclude regarding my original hypothesis? Here I can do no better than to “reverse the argument,” shamelessly steal the words with which Adam Mars-Jones ended his book about Ozu’s Late Spring, and adapt them to my own purpose:

If Yasujirō Ozu did decide to make a film about the experience of being queer in postwar Japan, within the limits of what the studio and his audience could accept, what would it look like? Wouldn’t it look like Early Summer? Very much like Early Summer.


  1. Yuka Kanno, “Implicational Spectatorship: Hara Setsuko and the Queer Joke,” Mechademia, vol. 6, 290.

  2. Robin Wood, “Resistance to Definition: Ozu’s ‘Noriko Trilogy,’” in Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 123--24.


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