Akitsu Hot Springs

Just after the war, a hot spring town. The young woman who runs the inn meets a man with tuberculosis who has no reason left to live. She brings him back. Over the years that follow the two of them meet again and again, but each meeting leaves less behind than the one before. Yoshishige Yoshida's film is about a relationship stretched over years, and the change of postwar Japan passes in the same span. The woman is always in the same place, the man is always the one who leaves. Mariko Okada's performance is at the centre of it. The telling uses the shapes of melodrama without raising the feeling; what it is really about is what waiting does to a person. It is among the best known works of Yoshida's early period.