In a cemetery in Kamakura, Japan, sits a gravestone with no name, only the single character Mu, meaning nothingness. It belongs to Yasujiro Ozu, whose Tokyo Story was voted the greatest film of all time in a 2012 poll of directors. This episode traces the contradictions of his life from 1903 to 1963: a merchant’s son who survived meningitis at age three thanks to his mother’s nursing, a chronic class-skipper who fell for Hollywood epics like Civilization in 1917, a student expelled from his dormitory for a love letter to a younger male student, and a failed exam-taker who joined the Shochiku Film Company in 1923 against his father’s wishes and won a director’s chair in 1927 after punching a co-worker in the cafeteria line and pitching a screenplay to the boss.

We break down the rigid visual language he built: the locked-down camera, the tatami shot placed one or two feet off the floor using sawed-off tripods and trenches dug into studio floors, direct cuts to static objects instead of fades, actors looking straight into the lens, and a lifelong devotion to the 50 millimeter lens. The conversation confronts the darkest chapter, his 1937 conscription into an Imperial Japanese Army regiment that handled chemical weapons in China and the chillingly detached language of his diaries, then follows his second deployment to Singapore, where he abandoned a propaganda film to watch confiscated American movies and destroyed all traces of it at the surrender. Back in Japan, his sake-fueled writing retreats with co-writer Kogo Noda produced the Noriko trilogy with Setsuko Hara, the storytelling of ellipses that skips weddings and deathbeds, a late move to color with Equinox Flower, and a death on his 60th birthday.

• From rebellious student and James Maki pseudonym to a cafeteria punch that launched a directing career
• The tatami shot, static camera, direct-to-lens eyelines, and the 50 millimeter lens
• Ozu’s wartime service in China and Singapore and how it shaped his post-war aesthetic
• Tokyo Story, the Noriko trilogy, and the technique of ellipses in family drama
• His legacy through Wim Wenders and Abbas Kiarostami despite fears his work was too Japanese