STRUCTURES, STRICTURES, AND STRATAGEMS hour). Such prolonged exposition is probably another source of the feeling, both among critics and audiences, that 'nothing happens' in Ozu, or that the film takes too long getting started. Symmetries are macrostructural, independent of what is represented, and a matter of abstract formal geometry. Parallels, by contrast, emerge from concrete details of the film's action. Donald Richie was the first critic to point out the importance of parallels in Ozu, and my analysis takes his careful discussion as a point of departure.5 From the standpoint of narrative poetics, parallelism consists of marking one syuzhet element as similar to another one. A character, object, or setting may be tagged as like another by virtue of any sort of auditory or visual cue - intrinsic identifying features, placement in the plot, sharing of a recurrent motif, or whatever. Now there is no doubt that Ozu was aware of parallelism as a key principle of his construction. Richie quotes this extract from his diary: 'March 23, 1963. Work. The fight between Saburi and Ryu; the small edition of that, the fight between Oda and Kita; on top of that, the fight between the children.'6 The very manner in which Ozu and Noda constructed the scripts after Late Spring demonstrates their concern for parallels. Each scene would be summarized on a card, and the cards would be arranged in columns and rows on a table, as if the scenario's design anticipated a LUvi-Straussian structural analysis.7 In Ozu, parallels create equivalences among characters, actions, situations, scenes, locales, props - virtually any distinct entity one could identify in the text. In Days of Youth, the scene of a boy caught cheating after an exam finds its distant echo in the encounter between our two heroes and the same professor at the end of the film. In Equinox Flower, each of three daughters is involved in quarreling with her parents about marriage. Sometimes a character will call our attention to a parallel, as when in The Only Son Ryosuke looks at his sleeping child and vows to make sacrifices so that the boy will be able to succeed. These parallels might be said to be 'in the script' in that syuzhet construction is central to creating them. But the film's narration can make parallels manifest by means of repeated and varied stylistic figures, as when in Passing Fancy backward camera movements become associated with Otome's cafd and are recalled in the boat bearing Kihachi to Hokkaido. One measure of Ozu's stylistic uniqueness is the degree to which a fairly small range of film techniques is used to mark minute similarities among situations and locales. While likeness provides the basis for any parallel in any text, the device inevitably involves a degree of difference. Once some cues establish an equivalence, other cues can mark contrasts or oppositions. In Equinox Flower, for instance, the three daughters are contrasted in character, attitudes, and action: one has left home to live with her lover, one stays at home dutifully with her mother, and a third tricks her father into letting her marry the man of her choice. In any narrative, parallels can function in diverse ways. At the least, they can support the causal development that is the narrative's 'dominant' structure. This is particularly apparent in a time-bound art like the cinema. For instance, parallels may retard and block the causal line, stretching out the plot and creating suspense. In addition, the differences emerging from the 57