The bleak, black-and-white, dusty fields of Tokyo in 1935 are not unlike the dust bowl scenes in The Grapes of Wrath. The small ensemble of actors including Ozu's favorite kid, Tomio Aoki and his favorite grandmotherly-type, Choko Iida, along with a hard-to-recognize Takeshi Sakamoto as the boys' father Yoshiko Okada as the girl's mother, make the poverty realistic yet almost poetic.
Okada, perfect as the mother (and why isn't she more famous?), is serene in the face of her challenging situation until her daughter gets seriously ill and she resorts to prostitution to pay for her care. This is a plot turn that Ozu returns to in even more dramatic fashion in his post-war "A Hen in the Wind" but this one packed a bigger punch.
Okada, perfect as the mother (and why isn't she more famous?), is serene in the face of her challenging situation until her daughter gets seriously ill and she resorts to prostitution to pay for her care. This is a plot turn that Ozu returns to in even more dramatic fashion in his post-war "A Hen in the Wind" but this one packed a bigger punch.