Only Yesterday

The alchemical opus ends in the rubedo, the reddening, when the purified self is finally married to life and the work becomes fertile. Takahata builds the entire climax out of red. Taeko learns that safflower, beni, is picked at dawn by hands that bleed from the thorns, and that the humble farmers who suffer to harvest it make the rouge that painted the lips of court ladies who never knew the cost. The dye is drawn from a flower through labor and blood. This is the rubedo stated as literally as cinema can state it: beauty is the red that comes only through willing work and a little suffering, at the hour the sun returns.

Taeko has spent her adult life as unfinished prima materia, respectable and unmarried and vaguely unlived, the raw stuff that was never brought to completion. The farm, the dawn labor, the man named Toshio who works the land, all of it is the vessel where the reddening finally happens. Her decision at the end is the coniunctio, the marriage of the refined self to the actual living world she kept holding at arm's length.

Jung held that in the second half of life the psyche demands individuation: the reclaiming of the parts of the self left behind in service of adaptation. Taeko adapted. She became the good Tokyo daughter, the reliable office worker, the woman who does not make a fuss. The ten-year-old she keeps meeting is her own abandoned wholeness, the girl who wanted to act, who felt everything too intensely, who was slapped for wanting to leave the house in bare feet and told she was not normal.

The film's genius is that individuation does not arrive as insight but as escort. In the final sequence the adult Taeko boards the train to leave, and her fifth-grade classmates, the whole chorus of the abandoned self, gently push her back off it, back toward Toshio and the country life her soul has quietly chosen. Jung called the guiding inner voice the Self, the totality that knows the way before the ego does. Here it takes the form of children, because the wholeness Taeko lost was lost in childhood, and only by turning to face the child can the adult become entire. She does not recover the past. She lets the past finish choosing her future.