Just when she stands up to leave her father’s house for the last time, in her beautiful bridal gown, Noriko goes down on her knees and gently bows before her dad. Her father, in his Western suit, squats down to level with her. She thanks him for the love and care he has given her. That scene with that expression on her face is probably the one I’ll remember the most.

It is those watery eyes, that enormous weight of walking away from the familiar, from what she considered for far too long to be permanent. It is that smile she is trying to maintain and failing at, and her struggle to accept that she has to take the next step forward, in the name of tradition, values, and expectations around her.

It is one of the last scenes in Yasujirō Ozu’s 1949 movie, Late Spring. It is the oldest movie I’ve ever watched and my second Ozu. Later I learned it is considered one of his finest.

The movie opens with stillness. Calm scenes from the town, an empty train station, the roof of a temple, Japanese women attending a very traditional ceremony.

Noriko is an unmarried woman in her late 20s living with her widowed father, a professor. She has assumed much of the responsibility for his daily life, and their life together feels complete, fun, and safe to her. Her father and aunt work together to convince her to get married. As part of that effort, they let her believe that her father is planning to remarry himself. The idea disturbs her deeply. For one, she doesn’t believe in remarriage. But more importantly, she sees no reason for this arrangement to end. She is emotionally possessive of a life she has come to think of as permanent.

The film is also postwar Japan in miniature. In 1949, Japan was occupied by Allied forces. Throughout the movie, the tension of a society changing faster than its habits and family structures can comfortably change with it is on display. For example, when Noriko takes a bike ride with a male acquaintance, a huge Coca-Cola sign sits front and center in a shot as they ride toward the beach.

Early in the movie, the professor and his assistant sit on the floor of a traditional Japanese house discussing Friedrich List, a German economist. An electricity company worker interrupts them because he needs to read the meter but it is too high, so he asks for a stool. The professor says List hated bureaucracy. Almost immediately, the utility worker yells from the doorway that the bill is on the counter.

It is a small scene of contrast, but the whole movie seems to exist in this space. A German economist discussed while sitting on the floor of a Japanese house. Modern electrical infrastructure reached with an old stool. A conversation about bureaucracy interrupted by bureaucracy itself. The old and the new exist together.

Later, Noriko and her father attend a traditional Japanese theater performance called Noh. I’ll be honest, I almost fell asleep during it. The performance goes on for several minutes. The movements are restrained, the chanting is slow, and very little seems to happen. This is already not an easy movie to watch with brains trained by phones, doomscrolling, and instant gratification. Only afterward did I realize that was one of the most important scenes in the movie.

During the performance, her father makes eye contact with Ms. Miwa, the woman Noriko has been told he may marry. Until then, his possible remarriage is something she can resist in the abstract. Noriko watches them exchange greetings, and something in her changes for the worse.

After the theater, father and daughter walk together. He is in his dark suit, walking on the smooth, bright concrete path. When her father asks if she wants to grab a bite, Noriko says she has something else to attend to and physically moves away from him in sadness and anger. She starts walking on the gravel beside it, against dark trees in the background in her white dress. She chooses the harder path, quite literally. Before this, they have moved through much of the movie almost as a unit. Now there is a divide.

She then visits her friend, who lives in a Western-style house with Western furniture and offers her a layered cake. Noriko refuses it, on the surface because she is too upset to eat. Coming immediately after an ancient Japanese theatrical performance, and after that physical separation from her father, it is easy to see that the contrast is not accidental.

Noriko herself embodies the contradiction. She is young and modern in many ways, but deeply attached to an older order. Her strongest “rebellion” comes toward the end, when she opens her heart, as much as she can, while crying to her father. She asks him one last time whether they can continue as they are. She says she doesn’t want things to change. She doesn’t want to get married.

Her father gently tells her that this is how people have lived all along. Marriage will be strange and difficult at first, but she will have to build a new happiness for herself.

They are both smiling by the end of the conversation, yet something between them has shifted further apart. The closeness they had earlier in the movie is now gone. There is now a bigger divide.

The movie closes with the father returning from the wedding and sitting alone in a chair, peeling an apple in sadness. The very last scene is the sea, waves crashing against the shore one after another, dynamic, ever-changing, yet somehow remaining the same.

This movie came to me at a time of great change in my own life.

I’ve just walked out of 13 years of employment with Amazon.

There were stretches of those years, some months or years, that I would have happily kept exactly as they were.

In the early days, I used to eat lunch with my teammates, five or six of us, every day. Those days were full of camaraderie and laughter. Then the org structure changed, and we were separated.

There was also a time when we traveled to Vancouver, BC so often that once a customs officer told me I looked familiar. We were a team split mainly across two cities, hence all the travel. Every visit was full of intellectually fulfilling conversations and social activities full of laughter.

Those days, like many others, felt like they would last forever. Of course, against my desire, they all ended, one after another.

Ozu keeps his camera still in scenes. And he doesn’t always cut when the actors leave. Sometimes he shows you something else briefly, then comes back to the room people have just left.

After Noriko leaves the room with her father and aunt, we see the children and neighbors running toward the gate to see the bride. We don’t see Noriko again or the wedding itself. Instead, Ozu returns to the same empty room. He spends several seconds there. In silence.

The stool Noriko was sitting on moments ago is still there.

Does the emptiness take away the fact that just moments ago Noriko took the next big, heavy step of her life in that very same room?

What is left in a room when everyone leaves?

My colleagues, in the weeks following my exit from Amazon, will walk by my office. Maybe some of them will even enter it, and they won’t see me there. My screen will be on my desk, my pen resting on top of my notepad, my chair facing them. Empty.

Does that take away everything we all experienced in that room? In that emptiness, in that moment as they stand in that room, will there be more to it?

I find it very fitting that Ozu, who never married and lived with his mother for much of his life, chose a few years later to move to North Kamakura, where Late Spring is set. His ashes were buried at a temple called Engaku-ji, about a minute’s walk from the train station we see in the opening scene.

I also found out later, reading an essay by Nakagawa on Late Spring, that there is only one Japanese character on Ozu’s tombstone. One character for mu 無.

Nakagawa says it is a term which is usually translated as “emptiness.”

An emptiness that, Zen philosophy suggests, has everything within it.

There is something in the guitar line of this song. Its backing vocals, too. They pull me back to something from the 90s. From the years when I was a teenager. I cannot put my finger on it.

When I first heard Michael Kiwanuka’s Cold Little Heart a decade ago, not long after it came out, I was riding the bus to work on a cloudy day in Seattle. I did not think much about the lyrics then. It was the melody, the mood of it. After hearing it a few more times, I was sure I understood it. It was about a romantic relationship. On the surface, the lyrics could not be clearer.

Last week, on a sleepless night, at 2 a.m., in my mid-forties, it came back to me on TV. It was the first time I watched the music video.

“Did you ever want it
Did you want it bad
Oh my, it tears me apart”

It is as simple and as complex as a song can be at the same time. Watching the video, there is another story on the surface: a kid grieving the loss of his father. That may very well be the story. Maybe that was what I was supposed to see.

Instead, what I saw was one person split across time.

It is probably the stage of life I am in, or the state of mind I was in at that moment. I was left with one word in me after those six minutes and twenty seconds:

Disappointment.

The disappointment in oneself for not growing up to be the person they once imagined.

“Bleeding, I’m bleeding
My cold little heart
Oh I, I can’t stand myself”

The video opens with a man in a car. He is in pain. His hand is on his heart. The car he was driving has spun out and come to a sudden stop across the lanes, facing the wrong way. Tire marks from the abrupt spin are on the road. Hazards on. The passenger door is wide open.

Then a teenage boy gets into the car, sits on the passenger side, and looks the man in the eye.

His face makes it clear. He wasn’t expecting the boy.

The scenes that follow are mostly the boy and the man driving, walking, and hanging around in a working-class neighborhood. It is a cold and gray day. No leaves on the trees. A storm is coming.

They both have sadness in their eyes. Sometimes we see them alone. The boy walks around the streets, at times bursting suddenly into dance. The man seems to have his body here and his mind elsewhere. There is a distance in his eyes.

In the scenes where they are together, they are happy. The man teaching the boy how to drive in the very same car. Washing dishes together. Eating takeout on the trunk at sunset.

It is not clear whether these are memories, images of a future the boy had in mind, or the longing of a man for a boy he never had. What was clear to me at that moment was that it was a relationship, one that was or could have been, that needed both to believe in it and put effort into it. The lyrics made it clearer to me.

“In my heart, in this cold heart
I can live or I can die
I believe if I just try
You believe, in you and I”

It is a reconciliation.

One’s younger self, carrying all the hopes for the person one might become.

And one’s middle-aged self, confronting the reality of who one has become, and how little, if any, of that image one has lived up to.

By many measures, I have had a successful life. I was raised with the teaching of şükran, that one should be appreciative of what they have been given, because there are many who were not so lucky. While I live by that, this thing I feel, here at this point in my life, is about something else.

Yes, I built things. Useful at times. I helped some. I guided many less experienced professionals. It wasn’t all for nothing, I want to believe. But was it enough?

It is a nagging feeling that has been sitting on my chest like an elephant for many years now. It renders a nice walk in a park, a day at the beach, a trip to a distant place, a nice dinner with friends a little less meaningful and a bit empty.

How many more of these will I need to experience? And how much more will I consume before I do enough good in this world? What will it take for me to feel alive again? To feel my heart beating in my chest?

“We can try to hide it
It’s all the same
I’ve been losing you
One day at a time”

At the finale, all instruments come to a full stop. Except the acoustic guitar Michael is playing.

It is the same scene. The car is in the middle of the road. The boy gets into the car again. The scene plays out exactly the same. He makes the same move with his head, trying to make the same eye contact with the man.

Except this time, the man is not conscious. His head has fallen forward.

The scene cuts to black, then to the outro. The boy is watching the sky, his head leaned way back on the passenger side, as the car moves toward the same neighborhood, on the same day. The window is rolled down on his side. And Michael wraps it up with deep sadness and defeat in his voice:

“Maybe this time I can be strong
But since I know who I am
I’m probably wrong

Maybe this time I can go far
Thinking about where I’ve been
Ain’t helping me start”

I stayed motionless for a while. Then wiped my tears, turned off the TV, stood up, and went to bed.

As I lay in bed, waiting to fall asleep, I told myself that tomorrow was going to be a different day.

Disclaimer: I discuss themes related to suicide in this article. If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, please reach out for help. International resources can be found at befrienders.org.

I was back home from dinner with friends, killing time in front of the TV before bed. The next suggested video started. The guitar rhythm was about to take me back, but the first verse stopped me.

“Rows of houses all bearing down on me
I can feel their blue hands touching me”

In my college years, this song felt melancholic, the music video mysterious, artsy, and innovative. Watching it now, in my mid-forties, I realized I had never looked beyond its surface. Or maybe I couldn’t at the time.

The video opens at night in a trailer park in a barren landscape. A man, perhaps in his thirties, lets himself fall backward from a trailer. Until the very end, he seems to move through a kind of purgatory, confronting unresolved parts of his life.

This is a trailer park people live in. Not a place for camping or fun. Not a single smile on anyone’s face. Young, able-bodied men sit in chairs doing nothing.

We see the man as a child in the trailer park too. A child who seems to have grown up around things a child should not grow up around. Dogs only a leash away. Objects being thrown around, barely missing him. There is not a single expression of emotion on the child’s face. As if he had learned early that feeling less was safer.

At one point, the man finally finds the courage to run away from all of it. The child sees this, lifts the stool onto his back, and runs the other way. Maybe he had already run before, carrying a piece of home with him. Or maybe, in that moment, something in the man finally broke free from the wounds of childhood. In the next scene, feathers are floating around the neighbor who had been sitting nearby, as if a bird had just taken off in a rush. Then it cuts again: wind in the man’s hair, his hands stretched forward, almost as if he is flying, yet still on the ground.

Watching these scenes unfold, it begins to feel less like the story of one man and more like the outline of a life millions inherit without choosing.

“This machine will, will not communicate
These thoughts and the strain I am under.”

That line felt particularly heavy against the backdrop of my own ease. A prime steak and a glass of French wine from dinner earlier that night still sat warmly in my belly. I did not grow up rich, but I had what mattered. Food, schooling, and, most importantly, parents who loved me. That foundation, along with hard work and some luck, kept me on this side of the machine.

But the other side was never entirely hidden from me. In my teens, I worked summer jobs at my father’s shop. I operated heavy machinery around dangerous chemicals and dust. At lunch I shared bread with other workers, listened to their struggles, and understood even then that for some people, hardship was the structure of life. In their stories there was anger at luck, anger at not being heard, and beneath both, a weary sense that this struggle had been written into their fate.

“Be a world child, form a circle
Before we all go under

And fade out again
And fade out again”

On this side of the machine, there is often an expectation that the other side stay in line and make peace with the place assigned to them. And if they hope to cross over, they are expected to do it without complaint, as if effort alone could outrun history, class, misfortune, or neglect.

By this point, the song could have ended in surrender. Yet when everything seems lost, it chooses to end with love.

The man in the video never escapes that life. At the very end, though, he does the opposite of his opening fall. He jumps and rises in a way people do not normally rise, in a way no one else in the video ever does, despite all their efforts to jump higher.

For a moment the weight of the ground seems to finally let go.

And the last words remain there with him.

“Immerse your soul in love.”

“So I cut the shackles and changed my name.
And I shed my past like skin on a snake.”

The song, run away girl by Alice Merton tricks you at first. The beat skips, her voice lifts, it sounds like freedom. But once you listen to the lyrics carefully and hear the crack in her voice under that fake cheer, you can’t unhear it.

The “visualizer,” which should have simply been called the “music video,” refuses to let you miss it. For three minutes and fifty seconds, the same short clip loops until it is burned into your eyes. Merton, in loose white clothes, runs across a dirt field. Arms wide, a skip in her step, a quick turn, then back again. And cut. Back to the start. Over and over.

Her cuffs are stained. The dirt sticks. The field is barren, with scrub trees, maybe a lake in the distance, maybe nothing. She is running, but she is not moving. The image is cheer painted over entrapment.

“But I came so far to get lost at sea
Oh, where the hell am I supposed to be?”

Watching her stuck in that loop, I felt the urge to look at my own life. I thought about how far I’ve come, sitting in my air-conditioned condo, streaming this video over high-speed Internet on a high-tech flat panel screen, bluetooth headphones on, a fancy drink in my hand. I live in a bubble. And in that bubble it is easy to forget the reality of most people on Earth.

Driving through small towns, I used to ask myself, why do people live here? Some are content. But some would leave if they could. The thing is, Mustafa, those who want out are often stuck. They did not have access to the resources you had.

Not all shackles are external. I used to look at brilliant minds moving nowhere and wonder, why can’t they just…? Not everyone is raised with the same confidence. Trauma and fear can run deep.

You might have been handed this life on a gold platter, or you might have worked hard to get here. Either way, if you are sharing this bubble with me, you were probably never trapped. Not everyone is as lucky, and not everyone who works hard breaks their loop.

Not everyone sheds the dirt off their cuffs.

…and Merton gets it.

“…the signs light up, ‘This way to gold’
But I’m attached to my worst enemy
Oh, who the hell am I supposed to be?”