A pair of young women reassess their views on marriage when one breaks off a long-term engagement and the other unexpectedly falls for her spurned fiancé in Kon Ichikawa’s witty comedy, Goodbye, Hello (あなたと私の合言葉 さようなら、今日は, Anata to Watashi no Aikotoba: Sayonara, Konnichiwa). Exploring a change of social mores in the late 1950s as the economy improved and it became easier for women to lead more independent lives, the film ends with a sense of liberation as the heroine’s desire to reject marriage in favour of self-fulfilment is validated by her departure for America to study abroad at her company’s expense.
On the other hand, it’s a lack of direct communication that causes most of the issues as everyone seems to want someone else to explain their feelings to a third person rather than frankly stating their desires. Kazuko (Ayako Wakao), a woman with an engineering degree working for Nissan Motors, is subject to an arranged marriage set up by her father and his friend that she will marry his son, Hanjiro, who has since moved to Osaka. She wants to break it off, she says because her father can’t look after himself, and asks her old university friend Umeko (Machiko Kyo), who also lives in Osaka, to explain it to him plainly because she is someone who is good at that sort of thing.
Umeko shares Kazuko’s rather low opinion of marriage. She thinks that all men are idiots and marriage is only for dim women who can’t by on their own. For some reason, however, she is quite smitten with Hanjiro and immediately changes her mind. However, her adoptive brother who was brought in to inherit her family’s sushi business, has always assumed she’d eventually marry him, which is why she’s consistently turned down even promising proposals from various suitors despite growing close to aging out of the marriage market. Meanwhile, Kazuko’s air stewardess Michiko has a crush on their over helpful neighbour, Tecchan, though he is actually interested in Kazuko and just assumes she will also be interested in him if he can finally find a steady job after graduating from university.
The men are both more conservative and more romantic. They make a lot of assumptions about women’s feelings and intentions, the chief among being that will ultimately want to become wives and mothers, but they also reject arranged marriages and say they want to marry for love. Of course, they may also be a way of resisting commitment and rebelling against their parents’ control, but they also seem to be interested in romantic fulfilment in a way that is unimportant to some of the women. At its most cynical, the film seems to say that in the end, anyone will do and marriage isn’t much different from a job application in which both parties weigh up the advantages and disadvantages of each candidate and make a rational decision of which offers the best terms. Some fear that Kazuko is held back because her widowed father is incapable of looking after himself in a society which inadvertently infantilises men, but their solution is not that he should learn how to cook and do laundry, rather that he should simply marry again. Hanjiro similarly remarks that he could overcome the barriers to Kazuko’s marriage if he had money by hiring a housekeeper for her father while he still lives with his widowed mother who presumably takes care of him.
But in the end, Kazuko is just using her father as an excuse because what she really wants is to continue with her career. The company have offered her the opportunity of studying abroad in America, but she is afraid to accept it because of the social expectations placed on her. A repeated motif sees Umeko tell her to take off her glasses so that she sees the world less clearly and is almost seduced by conventionality. Her father pressures her to marry, but at the same time does not actually want her to, because he does need someone to take of him and is emotionally unready to let go of his children.
But Kazuko also feels as if she needs her father’s blessing to go abroad and just as she was unable to break off her engagement in person or through a letter, is unable to ask for it until her father volunteers it for himself having realised he may be holding her back in another way. Nevertheless, his solution is that Michiko and Tecchan should move into the attic, even if it’s Tecchan who will presumably be handling the domestic chores such as cooking and laundry. Umeko too seems to have found a third way, marrying a salaryman to become a salaryman’s wife, but still planning to open a branch of her family’s restaurant in a Tokyo department store. Each of the women gets what they want and the men are sort of forced to go along with it, but somehow everyone seems to have ended up in the right place with Kazuko’s decision to reject marriage entirely validated as she seeks new horizons in the wider world.
Windows on Worlds 