Tokyo Sonata · reception & legacy

2008 · Kiyoshi Kurosawa

How Tokyo Sonata has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

A Cannes hit on arrival — it took the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize in 2008 — and its salaryman-layoff premise landed just as the global financial crisis hit, so it went almost instantly from 'Kurosawa tries drama' to THE recession-era film; today it's routinely ranked alongside Cure and Pulse at the top of his filmography.

What's debated

Fans endlessly relitigate the final stretch — the tonal swerves strike some as contrived melodrama and others as the most transcendent ending of the 2000s — plus the perennial 'is this or Cure his masterpiece?' fight.

Its footprint

Its closing 'Clair de Lune' scene is the endlessly clipped, teared-up-over sequence — a shorthand for 'earned catharsis' in film-Twitter ending debates — and the film itself became a touchstone for 2008-crash cinema despite being shot before the crash.

Where it stands

A Letterboxd darling and the standard 'gateway Kiyoshi Kurosawa' for viewers scared off by his horror — firmly in the modern Japanese canon.

★ Did you know? The story didn't start with Kurosawa at all: it began as a script by Australian writer Max Mannix, which Kurosawa and Sachiko Tanaka rewrote — and the horror master's pivot to family drama premiered at Cannes months before the Lehman collapse made its premise look prophetic.