When Yoji Yamada watched the 2022 Belgian-French film Driving Madeleine or Un Belle Course, he was struck by the way the French director approached themes he held dear. The encounter prompted him to ask himself the following question: “If it were Japan, how would it go? A Japanese taxi driver and an elderly Japanese woman, their relationship would of course be different” (Blair, 2025).
After a night’s work as taxi driver, Koji Usami (Takuya Kimura), is overjoyed to hear at the breakfast table that his daughter Nana (Runa Nakashima) has received a recommendation for the high school of Meisei College of Music and, despite the warning by his wife Kaoru (Yuka) concerning the fees, tells her to apply. His joy gets a sour aftertaste when he hears that to fulfil his promise he must acquire more than one million yen by December. Plagued by the money problem, he goes to sleep.
During his sleep, he suddenly receives a phone-call from a fellow taxi-driver. His colleague, who has injured himself, asks him to take over a long distance and, thus, well-paid taxi request by Sumire Takano (Chieko Baisho). Unable to refuse, he shows up at the pick-up point – he learns the old lady is moving and that she wishes, before arriving at her destination, to visit various places around Tokyo.
Tokyo Taxi is a dialogical narrative that balances serious drama with eruptions of light-heartedness to stage not only the importance of the encounter and its subjective effects, but also the importance to give space to the speech of the Other, a space where the signifiers of the Other are allowed to exist and linger.
However, Yoji Yamada commences his narrative by presenting Koji Usami as someone who, being plagued by the perceived impossibility to ‘financially’ fulfill his promise towards Nana, his daughter, is unable to create such space. His ability to establish such a space is short-circuited because he has become haunted by the weight of the seemingly unsurmountable gap between the father he wants to be and the financially ‘castrated’ subject he is. He spoke, in his enthusiasm, as an ideal father and feels, subsequently, obliged to do everything in his power (e.g. begging to his older sister, …) to realize his premature fatherly enunciation.
Sumire Takano easily senses that Koji Usami, her taxi-driver, is subjectively absent in his speech – “You’re in the service industry, so why not be more personable?” – and that he keeps her at a ‘cold’ distance. Koji latches onto the symbolic prescriptions of politeness, moulds his speech in accordance with rules of respect, to establish an ‘objective’ distance between himself and his client and push the mental threat of a possible fatherly failure away – he flees into the image of omotenashi to leave his troubled subjectivity behind.
However, this image of symbolic politeness does not render his subject immune to the impact of the stories his client tells him and the questions she asks. The image is but a frail defence and signifiers, especially those relevant to his own troubled situation, easily penetrate the hastily constructed walls of omotenashi. He is, beyond his own control, forced to give space for her signifiers.
However, he is not merely turned into a witness, her audience, to the subjective work she is doing to accept the imminence of her own death, but is also tasked to re-evaluate his own subjective position by receiving her recollections. Sumire Takano also turns her taxi-driver into a veritable interlocutor by asking him question and thus forcing him to betray the defensive use he makes of the dictates of politeness. Due to her insistent questions, Koji only becomes able to adhere to the dictates of politeness, only able to maintain his ego as taxi-driver, by bringing some of his subjectivity into play.
And, rather than receiving his answers passively, Sumire Takano takes every opportunity to put his enunciations into question and try to force him to produce speech-acts that corroborate his commitment as father to his daughter and as husband to his wife. She, armed with her life’s experiences, seeks to cut all ways of verbal subjective escape off and push him to fully embrace his symbolic nominations as husband and father. Yet, with the reality of financial castration looming over him, subjectively affirm his nominations is easier said then done.
The first recollection Koji becomes the audience of is none other than the story of Sumire Takano’s father’s untimely death. His attempt to silence his struggle with the image of fatherhood, with what being a father to his daughter means, is fleetingly fractured by hearing Sumire, as daughter, construct an image of her father near the place he died, by re-encountering, through her emotional signifiers, the question he must find an answer to: what kind of father does you want to be with respect to your child?
The spectator easily realizes that all the recollections and stories turn around symbolic couples – daughter and father, boyfriend and girlfriend, mother and son, husband and wife – and, in some cases, triangles – husband- wife/mother – son. What does this tell us? Nothing other than the fact that one can only produce a signified for one’s ego via the Other and others, that one can only give meaning to things like the proximity of death, the infraction of loss, traumatic inscriptions, the weight of aging and the passage of time by articulating oneself within one’s own relational context (Psycho-note 1).
Another consequence of the relational dimension of the narrative we produce about ourselves is that our stories also throw a light on the societal field we were born into and wandered in. In the case of Sumire Takano, her recollections end up throwing a light on how she experienced being a female subject within the post-war patriarchal societal structure and how the conservative discourses on femininity shaped her.
What stands out in the composition of Tokyo Taxi is its peaceful rhythm, a rhythm attained by slowly concatenating shots and by showing restraint at the level of dynamism. Yoji Yamada delivers, in other words, a composition which creates a fitting visual envelope for its narrative content: the concatenation of what, in general, makes up the subject’s life, a series of mundane moments that create space for the encounter. Yamada’s reliance on long takes, moreover, puts the emphasis on the exchange of signifiers and the way such circulation affects those who gave birth to them and those who receive them.
By interweaving some fragmentary visualisations of Sumire Takano’s recollections into the visual flow, Yoji Yamada elegantly emphasizes the interconnected nature of time and lack (Cine-note 1). The reoccurring visual contrast between the past and the present does not merely highlight the changing nature of the societal field – the materiality of present Tokyo in built on the effacement of the past, on the lack of its physical presence – but also demonstrates that the process of writing one’s subjective narrative depends on experiential and material lack – all we have left of our experiences are images and signifiers.
Given the fact that we qualified Tokyo Taxi as a dialogical drama, the narrative naturally stands or falls with the acting performances. Luckily, Chieko Baisho and Takuya Kimura deliver outstanding performances, breathing life not only in the enunciations of their characters, but also in the effect the signifier sorts on the bodily presence and the difference between the level of the ego and the subject as that what lies under it.
Tokyo Taxi might very well be Yoji Yamada’s last narrative and, if so, he has delivered an incredibly touching swansong for cinephiles to savour. Yamada succeeds, with refined elegance, in translating the essence of Un Belle Course into the language of Japanese culture, proving the universality of the encounter’s bending effect on the trajectory of the subject.
Notes
Psycho-note 1: We must, however, emphasize that the current state of the subject – Sumire’s final journey before arriving at the place where she’ll die – determines the very recollection/reconstruction the subject makes of her past.
Cine-note 1: While Yoji Yamada utilizes visual decorations to emphasize the fleeting grasp the subject has on certain recollections – e.g. a visual vagueness, other recollections are framed with a detail and clarity that go beyond what a subject, in normal cases, can visually recall. This decorative play, however, does allow Yamada to emphasize the differential weight/importance memories have for the subject.
References:
Blair, G. J. (2025, November 2). Tokyo: Yoji Yamada and Lee Sang-il talk Japanese cinema, craft and following anime’s global success. Yahoo Entertainment. https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/movies/articles/tokyo-yoji-yamada-lee-sang-033000830.html