Ozu Yasujiro found himself pacing through the dark. It was De-cember 12, 1936 and it seemed that the world was shifting. The director hardly ever worried, his lead actor Ryu Chishu recalled, but that morning he looked as he if were “drifting, like a frag-ment of a cloud, along an ever-widening spiral,”1 first circling around the camera, then around the dining ro…