‘Strangers in Kyoto’: Tea, tradition and passive-aggressive politeness

Even first-time visitors to Japan may be familiar with honne and tatemae: The distinction between a person’s true feelings and their public facade. The art of dissembling is taken to the extreme in Kyoto, famed as a place of inscrutable social etiquette where nobody says what they really mean. In a notorious example, if a host asks, “Bubuzuke dōdosu?” (“Would you like some green tea over rice?”), it isn’t a friendly gesture: They’re trying to get you to leave.

This phrase provides the Japanese title for Masanori Tominaga’s sprightly comedy of manners — renamed “Strangers in Kyoto” for the international market, lest anyone mistake it for a Yasujiro Ozu film.

Many of the characters in the movie seem like they’d happily serve a bowl of bubuzuke to protagonist Madoka (Mai Fukagawa), an ingenuous new arrival from Tokyo. Having recently married the 14th-generation heir to a traditional folding-fan shop, she’s determined to understand what makes Kyoto tick. Worse yet, she intends to share the city’s secrets, in a manga essay series that she’s writing with her artist pal, Riko (Zuru Onodera).

Things seem to get off to a good start when Madoka interviews her in-laws, Tatsuo (Takashi Matsuo) and Tamaki Shibusawa (Shigeru Muroi), about the family business and turns the exchange into a whimsical five-panel comic strip. When Tamaki introduces her daughter-in-law to some of the other local o-kami — female business proprietors — she peppers them with naive questions, never noticing that they appear to be enjoying a shared joke at her expense.

The newcomer starts making enemies when she appears on a TV show, parroting lines about the disappearing “face of Kyoto” that she’s heard from ryōtei (high-end restaurant) owner Azusa (Reiko Kataoka). Never mind if what she said was true or not: As Azusa explains, in a curt dressing-down, it wasn’t her place to say it.

Madoka later clashes with a real estate agent, Taro (Kosuke Toyohara), as he undertakes to sell the Shibusawa family’s elegant wooden townhouse. Tradition be damned: Tamaki says she’d rather live in a modern condo.

Your experience of “Strangers in Kyoto” is likely to vary depending on whether you find yourself rooting for its forthright heroine or merely find her insufferable. Writer Atsushi Asada, who also came up with the original concept, describes the film as a love story between Madoka and her adoptive home. But Morinaga’s treatment invites alternative readings, even if it isn’t quite as open-ended as the director’s fever-dream jazz biopic, “Between the White and Black Keys” (2023).

When Riko — a devoted, if not entirely faithful companion — starts shadowing Madoka and sketching her exploits in real-time, it lends a note of psychodrama to the proceedings. As the presumptive heiress dons a kimono and adopts the distinctive Kyoto dialect, she discovers that she isn’t the only outsider trying to go native. Even the residents whose families have lived in the city for generations turn out to have their own hierarchy of authenticity.

These swirling layers of meaning make “Strangers in Kyoto” consistently engaging, even if it isn’t quite as funny or snappily paced as the movie’s trailer seemed to promise. Madoka’s personal dramas end up eclipsing a more interesting exploration of how traditions endure, and who gets to claim them. Kyoto natives will doubtless find cause for offense, but good luck getting them to admit it.