Man Walking on Snow

Kobayashi’s fourth feature film has an autobiographical basis. Kobayashi wrote the first version of the script when his mother died (and the film is also dedicated to her), although when the film was finally made 15 years later, quite a lot changed. For instance Kobayashi moved the location from Tokyo to Hokkaido, his favourite film location, again portrayed here with breathtaking beauty in all its wintry desolation.
Nobuo Honma (Ogata Ken, well known from The Pillow Book and Vengeance is Mine) is a sake brewer in Hokkaido. Since his wife died two years ago, he’s lived with his youngest son Yasuo, who has also taken over his father’s sake company. Every day, the lonely old man takes a long walk through the snow to a fish farm. There he is liable to stare at the thousands of fish for hours on end. The second anniversary of his wife’s death is approaching. At the insistence of Yasuo, the family commemorates this in the presence of Nobuo’s eldest son, Ryuichi. He left the cold of Hokkaido twelve years before to try and make a career as a musician, in vain. During the reunion, old grudges come to the surface and unspoken frustrations between the father and his sons emerge. Slowly everyone starts building a new life.