“One of the ineffably lovely domestic sagas made by Yasujirō Ozu at the height of his mastery, The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice is a sublimely piercing portrait of a marriage coming quietly undone. Secrets and deceptions strain the already tenuous relationship of a childless, middle-aged couple, as the wife’s city-bred sophistication bumps up against the husband’s small-town simplicity, and a generational sea change—in the form of her headstrong, modern niece—sweeps over their household. The director’s abiding concern with family dynamics receives one of its most spirited treatments, with a wry, tender humor and buoyant expansiveness that moves the action from the home into the baseball stadiums, pachinko parlors, and ramen shops of postwar Tokyo. 

Class identities are reasserted throughout The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice, through speech, activities, and tastes in clothing, food, and cigarettes. Much of our laughter in The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice is elicited by Ozu’s visual gags and playful framing. In interior shots, many of which take place in Taeko and Mokichi’s stylish home, the filmmaker often uses 360-degree space for shooting or covers a third of the image vertically with sliding doors, creating pockets of offscreen space within the frame that contribute to bursts of comedy.

As so much of the tension between Taeko and Mokichi has been at mealtimes, it is fitting that their eventual reconciliation also happens around food, this time in the kitchen, which we have barely seen in the film until this point. As Fumi (the housekeeper) is sleeping, they must figure out how to prepare a snack for themselves. Taeko, transported from the realm of privileged recreation (boutique, hot-spring resort, theater) to the realm of labor (kitchen), is as comically disoriented as Mokichi is in this feminized space. As Mokichi wolfs down the humble meal of green tea over rice (ochazuke) that they’ve cobbled together, you can hear the sound of his gobbling spills versus Taeko, the genteel wife eating ochazuke like a peasant woman. In this moment, we are briefly led to believe in an impossible ending: Has Taeko adopted the very demeanor she abhorred? That suspicion—or desire, perhaps—is overturned in the following shot, where Taeko is shown to be eating her ochazuke without any noise.

In this denouement of sublime beauty and sweetness, we are given hope that two different ways of being can coexist in peace, without tension, animosity, or hierarchy. The film concludes when Taeko learns to love her rustic husband precisely because of the way he was raised, while also remaining true to herself. Earlier in the film, Mokichi said he liked “things to be cozy, down-to-earth, without ceremony and affectation”; by the end, that sentiment reverberates like the dream of an egalitarian society to come.”

Words by Junji Yoshida for The Criterion Collection

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