In Japan, in distinction from other countries, film scripts are sometimes read as literature. Those written by Yasunari Kawabata, Junichiro Tanizaki and Yukio Mishima are included in their respective collected works, and writers associated mainly with cinema itself are given literary status.
It was this distinction that the noted translator Howard Hibbett observed when he edited his epochal "Contemporary Japanese Literature" (1992) and included several film scripts, among them that of Kogo Noda/Yasujiro Ozu's "Tokyo Story."
The Noda/Ozu script does indeed satisfy the requirements of a literary work. It is recognized as having important or permanent artistic value -- it is perfectly proportioned, acutely observed, deeply felt.
Such scripts may thus be read as more than a mere aide-memoire. To read professor D.A. Rajakaruna's careful translations of the dialogue scripts of these two Noda/Ozu scripts is to again appreciate the form of the film, to hear the unspoken commentary of the parallels of which they are constructed, to admire the perfect placing of the scenes of greatest emotion.
Dialogue (rather than description) is the medium of the Noda/Ozu narrative. In the initial script (which is what is published in Japan, and upon which Rajakaruna based his translation) there are few indications of other than rudimentary actions and none of the nature of the shots, their vantage point, angles, lengths, etc.
These appear in the Noda/Ozu shooting script (which is unpublished) in which the director indicates what this nature is going to be, usually accompanying each scene with a sketch showing what it should look like. There is in the Ozu film almost no variation between this shooting script and the completed movie. The script was to him as the blueprint is to the architect.
This shooting script was in turn based entirely on the dialogue script and it was equally rare that a line of dialogue was changed. It is this considered and tested quality of the Noda/Ozu script that creates its literary status.
Two of the finest of the Noda/Ozu dialogue scripts are the two here translated: "Late Spring (Banshun)" (1949) and "Early Summer (Bakushu)" (1951). Both are about a daughter's marriage and how it comes about, but to restrict the picture's power to its "plot" is to say that Jane Austen is about proposals, Jan Vermeer is about milk jugs and Giorgio Morandi about empty bottles. Rather, a mundane subject is made memorable; the ordinary is illuminated and returned to its original authenticity. In these films the characters and the families involved become all of us.
This feeling of the genuine and the original (as opposed to something that is fake or a reproduc- tion) is creat ed by the dialogue that serves as a skeleton to the muscles of the finished film. Yet these words, spoken by the characters, are never woven into what ordinary movies would consider a proper plot.
For Ozu there was no proper plot. He once said that plot uses people and to use people was to misuse them. He and Noda, rather, found patterns in the narrative as reflected in the dialogue, and it is these that make the texture of their film. Plot points are, if necessary, ruthlessly elided; all conventionalization or stereotyping is firmly resisted; none of these living people is sacrificed for the sake of a happy (or an unhappy) ending. The result is that -- on the page, on the screen -- we recognize truth and we feel emotion.
Rajakaruna has performed a valuable service not only in making these translated scripts available ("Early Summer" originally appeared in 1997, "Late Spring" is new), but also in continuing to present Japanese film in readable form.
He has previously published translations of Noda/Ozu's "Tokyo Story"; of Kenji Mizoguchi's "Ugetsu" and "Street of Shame"; Teinosuke Kinugasa's "A Page Out of Order" (aka "A Crazy Page"), "Crossroads" and "The Gate of Hell"; and Akira Kurosawa's "One Wonderful Sunday," "Rashomon" and "Ikiru." In addition he has also translated and published much other Japanese literature into English, including novels, plays and poetry.
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