Abstract
This paper focuses on the fact that women are subjects involved in men’s clothing through housework such as doing laundry and helping men change their clothes in Ozu Yasujirō’s postwar films. This study aims to clarify that women’s involvement in clothing has the function of maintaining “everyday life” and the death of the male owner of the clothing is anticipated through the absence of the involved women.
This paper follows previous studies focusing on clothing research and semiotic analysis. It then situates housework such as doing laundry and helping men change clothes, which have tended to be overlooked in research on clothing, as involvement in clothing.
I clarify that the everyday life maintained by women’s involvement in clothing is threatened by their absence, shown in the daughter’s marriage that frequently appears in Ozu’s postwar films. In addition, when Ozu focuses on the “bereavement” of characters, men tend to reject women’s involvement in their clothing. This leads to the absence of the act that maintains everyday life and sniffs out the extraordinary that appears in everyday life, which makes the audience anticipate The death of the men, the subjects who reject women’s involvement.
Consequently, this study clarified that women’s involvement in clothing symbolizes the act of maintaining everyday life and that the absence of that women’s act functions as a foreshadowing of extraordinary events that occur in everyday life.
