My Neighbors the Yamadas

The Zen master Nansen said the ordinary mind is the Way, and Takahata builds a whole film to prove he meant it literally. The Yamadas are not on a journey. They are not transforming. The wedding-speech framing device at the opening, which compares married life to a bobsled run, a mountain climb, a voyage, deliberately overpromises, and then the film delivers instead a woman who cannot find the TV remote and a man who will not take out the trash. That gap is the teaching. The grand metaphors are the deluded mind reaching for significance. The actual sled is a couch.

Look at how the film ends: not with resolution but with the family singing "Que Sera, Sera" as watercolor clouds drift past. Whatever will be, will be. This is not resignation. It is the equanimity the sutras point at, the acceptance that liberation was never located in the extraordinary. The Yamadas are enlightened in the only way available to human beings, which is by continuing, together, without needing the day to mean more than it does.

Takahata renders the Yamadas less as five individuals than as one organism, a household psyche whose members carry its functions. The grandmother Shige is the crone, the elder wisdom that has stopped pretending and says exactly what it thinks. The father Takashi is the deflated persona, the man who knows he should be the household's authority and quietly is not. The mother holds the pragmatic center. The two children are the id and the emerging ego. No single member is whole, and the comedy comes from their friction, but the family as a totality is remarkably balanced, self-correcting, durable.

This is the Jungian household as the container of the Self. The recurring image of the family lost and reunited, in the mall, in the storm, in each small crisis, dramatizes the psyche's basic rhythm: dissociation and return, the parts scattering and finding each other again. Takahata never lets any character grow, because the growth is not the point. The point is the ongoing, imperfect coherence of the whole. The family survives not by anyone becoming better but by everyone remaining, in relationship, held.