Tony Takitani - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

The film starts by telling the story of Tony's father Takitani Shozaburo, a jazz trombonist from Japan, who spends the second world war in China. Shozaburo is imprisoned and many of his fellow inmates are executed. He expects he will be executed one day and he is shown curled up on the floor of his cell. However he survives and in 1946 returns to Japan where he marries a distant relative on his mother's side. A year later they have a child, Tony, but Tony's mother dies three days after giving birth to him.

Shozaburo continues to travel and is away from home most of the time. Because of his Americanised name people often react oddly, or sometimes with hostility to Tony. "Spending time alone was the most natural thing in the world for Tony". He develops an interest in drawing but prefers accuracy over emotion and as an adult gets a job as a technical illustrator.

Tony falls in love with a young female client, Eiko, who is obsessed with shopping for clothes and accessories. On their fifth date he proposes to her but she says she has already been seeing some one else for some time. She says she will think it over. Eventually Eiko accepts and they are married.

Although Eiko and Tony are very happy they both recognise that her shopping is becoming a problem between them: Eiko accumulates so many clothes, and pairs of shoes, that they are given an entire room in the house. One day she decides to drive to her favourite boutique to return a coat and dress. After she has returned the clothes initially Eiko feels a sense of release but, whilst waiting at traffic lights, she begins to think about their colour, style, and texture. The lights change and, possibly because she is distracted, there is an accident in which Eiko is killed.

Tony is completely distraught and sets about hiring a woman, Hisako, as an assistant, with the one condition that she should wear his wife's clothes to work in "as a uniform". When she sees Eiko's clothes Hisako begins to cry. Tony decides not to hire an assistant and sells the clothes instead.

Two years after his wife's death Tony's father also dies, leaving his trombone and a collection of jazz records. Tony keeps the trombone and the records in the room in which Eiko used to keep her clothes. After a year Tony sells the records and the trombone.

One evening at what might be the opening of an art exhibition a young man approaches Tony and introduces himself as the other man Eiko was seeing before she married Tony. He speaks disparagingly of Eiko and Tony challenges him and leaves.

The next scene shows Tony in the empty room and recreates and then cuts to the earlier scene of Tony's father in the prison cell in China. He thinks about Hisako. In the final scene of the film Tony calls Hisako but puts the phone down before she can answer.