PROBLEMS OF POETICS use of nondiegetic music in the sound films. In many ways, as we might expect, Ozu's deployment of this resource obeys his principles of 'overdetermined' rigor. There are musical motifs, often associated with locales or characters and often heightening visual parallels. And there is the usual intertextual migration of motifs: the same jaunty tune turns up in Early Spring, Tokyo Twilight, and Equinox Flower. But Ozu's music can function ludically as well. The Hawaiian guitar was a staple of Japanese soundtracks of the mid- to late 1930s, and in What Did the Lady Forget? Ozu uses languid guitar tunes to provide plangently mocking comments on the films' characters. The rhythms and textures of Ohayo's score create musical equivalents of its characters' flatulence. More pervasively, Ozu freely blurs several distinctions that normally shape our auditory expectations - that between music that links scenes and music that does not, that between 'expressive' and 'indifferent' music, and that between diegetic and nondiegetic sound. In any film, music may operate as continuous accompaniment to a piece of scenic action or as a transitional factor. Ozu has recourse to both options. In each case, however, he will weave expectations only to unravel them. Within the scene, he will often run cheerfully banal music at the same level throughout - in a home, perhaps the incessant tinkle of a music box; in a bar or caf&, a brittle tune or some anodyne Muzak. At first hearing, these are simply 'appropriate' accompaniments. But they are neither clearly diegetic nor nondiegetic. We never see the source of the 'Home, Sweet Home' that runs through the domestic scenes of Early Summer, and when we hear a jukebox in An Autumn Afternoon, it is acoustically quite different from the 'background' music that prevails at other points in the scene. That such music is in fact nondiegetic is suggested by the fact that in The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice, when Noburo sings 'Gaudeamus igitur', the endless rumba on the soundtrack cuts abruptly off. Yet if the wallpaper music of such scenes is nondiegetic, it becomes in itself a disconcerting factor. This effect is exacerbated when obviously poignant visual action is occurring: refusing to empathize with a character, the music rolls happily, mindlessly on. Ozu insisted that such music should be detached from the drama: 'Even if the character is sad, make the music a shower of sunshine.'23 It seems likely that the music's indifference to character pathos not only sets that emotion in relief but carries a measure of urban anomie. During a salaryman's funeral in Early Spring, 'bar' music creeps faintly in, neither clearly diegetic nor nondiegetic. Nansensu survives in this mechanical music: its pitiless lyricism crystallizes both the cheap beauty and the indifference of the modern city. This is the music of everyday life in the new Japan. Transitional music reveals the same sorts of equivocation. After Tenement Gentleman, Ozu will often signal the end of a scene by music that swells up in the last shot of a scene, with a harp or string glissando accentuating the cut to a new locale. Music will rise across whatever transitional shots there may be, and then fade out, to be replaced by diegetic sound - noise, dialogue, or simply offscreen laughter. At least, this is the intrinsic norm that the film will set up. But Ozu's narration will playfully vary this. When an episode has banal accompaniment throughout, the music may run end to end across a scene, as if measured and cut from an endless roll. One consequence of this is to prevent 68