THE DEVIL OF DOMESTICITY

It’s the routine that gets you. One by one, days start to accumulate onto each other as if they were simply repeated; the clothes bear an unmissable wrinkling from their overuse, the breakfast table is scattered with the same cereal brand, the commute that drones on and on the same radio station every time, so much so that you mimic the hosts and begin to feel artificial, recycled. And then you revel in it -- who else gets to live their life like this, recycled? There they are, the masses, rolling and pushing through the instability, the mud, the famine -- and here you are, way up here, living the same life, living not to survive, but to live. To feel yourself in that bus or car on the commute to work, well-knowing that you get to do the same thing tomorrow.

It’s an image that sears into our brains. We find the security in cyclical life and accept it -- until the circle dissolves. It’s here that director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata (2008) is unprecedentedly real. Far from its cinematic ancestry of the Italian neorealists of the 1940s, who dug through the trench of the post-war impoverished, as if they were mining for gold, and leagues from a Max Ophuls or Visconti-an observation of upper-class theatrics, Kurosawa deals not with the trenches or theatrics; rather, the boredom. The true dull ringing of the industrialized, the silent cries of the advanced. It’s appropriate here to label them as “middle-class”, but this is not simply where Kurosawa wishes to draw the line. He prefers a view more along domesticity, or familiarity -- that same notion of driving to work and being so unbelievably bored but being so relieved that you are even in the position to be bored in the first place, while the rest of the world drowns below you. You aren’t supposed to be in the waters with them.

Until the head breadwinner of the Sasaki family, Ryuhei, loses the longevity of his senior corporate position to a new outsourcing effort within his firm. He is offered a position of lower status, but keeps with him his dignity and decides to leave. He is, in this moment, strong, understanding that if he can maintain a top-of-food-chain position there, he can release himself to the open market and have others flock to him. And then comes the drive home. The moments, hands on the wheel but mind completely lost in space, that he realizes this is no longer a certain. Now he must attempt to revamp an image of what was once a solidly-employed executive. On the way out, his bosses at his ex-firm ask him of his skills; and after a blunt eye roll, Ryuhei struggles to find one. He has become so intertwined in the ways of domestic living, desk pads and telephone extensions, that he has lost his individual skill set thoroughly. Asked this later in a desperate job interview, he complies and admits he still has none, leading to his utter embarrassment on the behalf of his entire industry.

Not having the job, Ryuhei decides, isn’t the worst part. The real sting comes from the imbalance of the routine now, and how haywire it could become. He doesn’t reveal to his family the firing, instead posing as a continued employee at home while he secretly attends almost every employment office in the city. The dominoes begin to fall. The young son, Kenji, isn’t allowed to play piano -- their financial inability is masked by Ryuhei’s claim of instrument as a “distraction”. The eldest son, Takashi, decides to enlist for war, and realizing he has less help in the familial income this way, Ryuhei nearly attacks Takashi. Ryuhei’s wife Megumi, begins to realize her husband’s unemployment; later, she is kidnapped in her home at gunpoint for possible ransom, but doesn’t resist, telling the kidnapper she has no life to come home to.
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But of course she does.  It’s just not one that she is familiar with, and thus, for her, is not much of a life at all. Her life, anyway. Their domesticity is never a mainstay, as they’ve believed throughout their upbringings and adult livelihoods. It is temporary, swinging on an extended pendulum which has finally begun its descent into the other direction. The cyclical nature of life for most is famine and survival -- for them, it is indeed a circle of rituals, dinners, sit-downs, television screens, late bedtimes, early wakings. They have never before been exposed to living as to keep at all composed, but to keep order within a laid structure. To crumble here is to regain a conscious affectation towards forward progress, only to understand the efforts to maintain the similar habitual status counteracts the desire to at all.

This is where we can notice something peculiar: that of the director, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s filmography. He rose to fame in Japan, followed by international prominence, for his early-00s horror film work. The family drama seems not suited for him, until you begin to unravel that there may be nothing scarier, or at least more culturally striking, than an absolute crumbling of lives around not one man’s actions, or a group of people’s words, but by their own mental construction of what should be. For the Sasaki family, for so much of the domesticated, modern and industrialized, life isn’t really about progressing or advancing beyond what has come before. For them, progression comes in the form of static immobility, a suspended notion of running foot after foot but never moving an inch ahead -- the pain of normality, the burden of security, the devil of domesticity. ❖

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