യാത്ര

No Regrets for Our Youth(1946) "Waga seishun ni kuinashi" (original title)

110 min  -  Drama

The daughter of a politically disgraced university professor struggles to find a place for herself in love and life, in the uncertain world of Japan leading into WWII.

Director:

 Akira Kurosawa

Kurosawa has fashioned an emotionally ripe, politically charged and time-spanning story around Yukie, the daughter of a college professor, a one-time idealist who loses his job in face of the growing fascism engulfing Japan in 1933. Beautiful and skating precariously on the surface of her life, she finds herself caught between two men, both former students of her father - Noge, the son of peasant rice farmers, who becomes a secretive anti-war   activist, and Itokawa, the conservative prosecutor and a symbol of the passive conformity that allowed Japan to enter a no-win war.

Yukie is excited by Noge's political passion, and they begin an intense, inevitably short-lived affair. When Noge goes to prison, she becomes politically enlightened to Japan's oppressive state, and after he dies, she decides to take his ashes to his parents and stay with them to work the fields. She endures a great deal of hardship, both from his uncaring parents and neighbors, who harass the family of a "traitor". Against the odds, Yukie endures and triumphs and despite a brief sojourn back to Kyoto, realizes her life is far more fulfilling with the peasants. 

The film gains real emotional heft toward the end when Yukie struggles in the rice fields with Noge's mother under Yukie's mantra of the dead husband/son, "No regrets in my life, no regrets whatsoever". It's a moving sequence which brings the story to its resonant conclusion. Proving why she was one of Japan's favorite post-WWII film stars, Hara is superb in showing Yukie's initial flightiness and evolving political consciousness.