The opening scene in Yazujiro Ozu's 1953 film "Tokyo Story" takes place not in the nation's capital but at the Inland Sea port of Onomichi. Some 90 years ago, "Murray's Guide" described the location as a place of "fine, though decaying temples."
Weathered and timeworn to this day, Onomichi, a place of antique odors -- incense, drains, mildew, green mosquito coils, sawed timber, cat's fur -- remains a town that, much as it must have done half a century ago, extends an unaffected welcome to visitors. People's smiles are unforced, greetings are a daily commonality, and eye contact elicits a nod or a polite bow. Inbred courtesy has not yet been leached out by modern habits of introspection. Ozu would have appreciated this stubborn decency and good manners, qualities that are often called into question in the director's films about Japanese family life.
Considering the place this film has long occupied on critics' lists of the world's best cinematic works, an English translation is long overdue. Doing justice to Ozu's script, written in collaboration with Kogo Noda, is no easy task. Besides a re-visualization of the film, translation demands a sense of how best to deal with the richly eloquent ellipses and inferences. The toughest challenge perhaps is catching the all-important tone of Ozu's dialogue, avoiding sentimentality where the true tone, something of a higher order, is pathos. In Ozu scripts, the effects are accumulative, their impact predetermined by the director. The translators in this instance have placed the depth charges in just the right spots.