PROBLEMS OF POETICS they arrive filtered through his situation in the film industry. Ozu's apprenticeship to Tadamoto Okubo in the nansensu genre doubtless contributed most here. Nansensu comedies, while trying to suggest some of the naughtiness of their literary and graphic counterparts, were prevented by censorship from plunging into truly bizarre regions. Okubo's nansensu are often remembered as vulgar and stupid, but in the absence of any surviving instances, it is likely that Days of Youth is a late example - in which case the genre would be far from despicable. When Ozu started directing, comedy was becoming the favored mode of sophisticated 'modern' filmmaking. Yutaka Abe, a director who had worked in Hollywood, came to Japan and made Ashi ni sawatta onna (The Woman who Touched the Leg, 1925). Based on The Marriage Circle, it won the first KinemaJumpo award and quickly became a model comic film for young directors. Ozu's most obvious debt to his nansensu origins is his constant interest in jokes on bodily functions. Almost none of his films is too solemn to avoid vulgar treatments of urination, flatulence, or itches that one must scratch. True, such coarseness is characteristic of certain Japanese artistic traditions. A renga stanza by Sokan reads: Even at the time When my father lay dying I still kept farting.43 But again these native traditions reach Ozu mediated by the popular mass culture of his moment; ero-guro-nansensu relied heavily on scatological humor. For Ozu, bodily functions become another way to shake the geometrical expectations of narrative structure. Children and old men interrupt scenes to rush to the toilet. Little boys scratch their genitals and men test their sweat by sniffing their fingertips. In Tokyo Chorus, employees sneak off into the men's washroom to peep into their bonus envelopes, but one clerk drops his money into the pissoir. Ohayo does interesting work with boys and men breaking wind. Usually such comedy constitutes another jab at masculine dignity, but in Record of a Tenement Gentleman, the heroine and her sister's recollection of how they blew their noses in childhood becomes a moment of shared nostalgia. Even when the humor is not so earthy, an abrupt or far-fetched gag may deflect our expectations. Ozu's earliest films tend to be thoroughgoing comedies or to shift, as we have seen, into a lyrical or dramatic tone from a comic base. Certain cues lead us to expect the film to have a tightly unified shape, but individual scenes are often given surprising comic twists. In The Lady and the Beard, Teruo is trying to convince his sister that she should find his bearded friend Okajima attractive. He points to portraits of great men with beards and reminds her of the sages depicted on Japanese currency. But then Okajima enters, fresh from the barbershop and carrying his beard wrapped in paper. He strokes the beards in the photographs before trying vainly to reattach his own beard to his face. The gags stem from the basic premise, but they develop in nonsensical directions. This sort of unpredictable comedy persists, though in more muted form, throughout Ozu's career: the compa 154