The title of Aparna Sen's 2010 movie, The Japanese Wife, is misleading. There is nothing uniquely "Japanese" about Miyagi, and her being the Indian Shubhomoy's wife does not disrupt the story's cultural code in any significant way because the Indian husband and his Japanese wife never meet one another in flesh and blood.
The film could have been named The Indian husband and it wouldn't have mattered a wit.
If a title, like an epigraph to a text, represents a work of art's central meaning, then Sen's movie should have been "Water 21st century", an unintended sequel to Deepa Mehta's Water (set in 19th century Bengal).
The film's major figures are widowed women: There is Shubhomoy's aunt, a widow who raised Shubhomoy single handedly after his parents die in a flood; Sandhya is a young widow who is Shubhomoy's aunt's best friend's daughter. The aunt wants Shubhomoy to marry her, but Shubhomoy is already in strong epistolary love with Miyagi and can't marry Sandhya. Sandhya returns to the aunt's fold because her in-laws mistreat their now-widowed daughter-in-law.
Shubhomoy is the lone male who is passive and quietly fulfills the role of a provider. He perpetually defers fulfilling his desires, prime among which is a burning desire to be with his Japanese wife physically. But Shubhomoy is too poor to travel to Japan or to send a ticket to Miyagi. He has sexual feelings for Sandhya, seeing her as a proxy Miyagi, but he can't act upon them because of Miyagi. Shubhomoy wants to be faithful to his Japanese wife.
After she remains a wife for 20 years, Miyagi too becomes a widow. Upon suffering a prolonged bout of pneumonia, Shubhomoy dies and the news of his death reaches Miyagi. The movie ends under a canopy, as it were, of widowhood; we see a shaven-headed Miyagi, adorned in a spotless white cotton saree, get off a boat on the banks of the Ganges with a small suitcase in hand. She asks a villager in broken English, "Bheyar is the house of Bhyomoy, the village schoolmaster?"
There is a cut to the Indian widow Sandhya welcoming the Japanese widow to the house of the widows with a smile and a warm "esho" ("welcome").
We are left to imagine the life hereafter of three widows in a house in the Sundarbans, all of whom in one way or the other have been served by Shubhomoy.
They had sucked the life out of him. I feel sorry for Shubhomoy.
Oh, but the film would have been vastly interesting had it taken the matriarchal trajectory. The Japanese Wife is blandly bereft of all such possibilities. It's Aparna Sen's Waterloo I believe, where the focus is, as the director herself says, on the "haunting improbability" and the "beauty" of the love story which is "surreal in its innocence."
I didn't see the adjectives materialize into anything palpable in the texture of the film's world.
I saw a triumph of widowhood.
