About a Boy: Ozu and Kitano’s “Orphan” Comedies

Abstract

Ozu Yasujirō’s 1947 film Record of a Tenement Gentleman, and Kitano Takeshi’s 1999 comedy Kikujiro share the central premise of a childless adult temporarily taking charge of an orphan boy, and being changed by the experience. This paper examines a number of striking similarities between the films – most notably, their use of motifs of the seashore, of gambling, and of shared body language – as well as differences in their narrative structure, the places and communities that they portray, and in the ways in which their central adult characters alternately become parental (in the case of Ozu’s O-tane) or find their own childhood abandonment recalled by the adoption of an orphan (in the case of Kitano’s Kikujirō). Reference is also made to possible correspondences between Kikujiro and another early orphan comedy, Yamanaka Sadao’s Tange Sazen: The Million Ryō Pot.