Tora-san’s Dream of Spring (1979)

Original title: Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajirô haru no yume

Having dipped a foot into the long-running, audience-favourite British comedy series of Carry On for one movie some months ago, I’ve now decided to also take a look at a film from a very different, and even longer series of Japanese movies who were just as pleasing to their local audiences. The “Otoko wa tsurai yo” (“It’s Hard to be a Man”) movies, typically just called the Tora-san films for their main character, the somewhat hapless, not particularly bright or emotionally adult, peddler Torajiro Kuruma (always played by Kiyoshi Atsumi), were a going concern between 1969 and 1995, usually with two films coming out each year. As I’ve been told, they are all not terribly different plot-wise, with Tora-san leaving home in a huff, nearly finding love, returning and having various encounters and misadventures, while his family’s life slowly develops and changes around him through the years. Thus, the films take on one of the joys of soap operas or the private lives of detectives in long running mystery series.

The film at hand, the 24th Tora-san movie, and like nearly all of them directed by Yoji Yamada (who somehow still managed to make more than a few other movies as well) concerns itself with a luckless American vitamin salesman (Herb Edelman) with no knowledge of the Japanese language taking (or really, stumbling into taking) a room in the household of Tora-san’s family, having various mishaps of cultural difference, and falling in love with our hero’s wonderful (and married) sister Sakura (Chieko Baisho). At first, relations to Tora-san, who turns out to be rather anti-American, are strained, but this being the kind of film it is, they don’t stay that way, particularly because both men are peddlers and fools in awkward love. For at the same time, when he’s not involved in innocent shenanigans, our hero does fall in love unhappily himself, which underlines how the film quietly makes rather a lot of the very different yet very comparable ways this sort of thing plays out for someone socialised in American or Japanese culture.

All of this is generally told in a quiet, sometimes quite melancholic way. Throughout, there’s the feeling of looking at people living a way of life that’s not quite in tune with that of the audience watching their adventures anymore, made to produce a feeling of nostalgia – not the angry kind that believes that the past was simply a better place, but the one that carries with it the acceptance of change as well as the knowledge that the past never was quite as happy as we want it to be.

The film’s humour is generally gentle and dominated by a kindness and generosity of spirit. Small human foibles, particularly as shown via Tora-san as well as his American counterpart, are treated as reasons for mirth, but a mirth lacking cruelty; rather, even if we’re laughing at them, we’re laughing at those parts of them we also know to belong to ourselves. This may sound or feel somewhat harmless to some sensibilities, but I find a film that’s at once trying to be honest about the fallibility of human nature but also kind about it rather refreshing in our highly judgmental present.

Particularly these days, it’s also genuinely lovely to watch a film that insists on kindness, the importance of understanding the flaws in others and oneself with kindness, as well as the importance of accepting certain differences as much as this one does.

Add the fine performances – Atsumi pretty much lives the role, Edelman is the perfect foil for him, and Baisho’s turn is often surprisingly emotionally complex for the sort of film this is – and the quiet assuredness of Yamada’s direction, and you have quite the film.