Ozu's stylistic economy and discrete sensibility in relating incidents from everyday life to the pathos of living are twin aspects of a singular vision, deeply Japanese in its philosophical/artistic roots but profoundly sympathetic to a good many Western eyes and ears. The Record of a Tenement Gentleman takes a sentimental idea-an awkward, abandoned child in postwar Japan is foisted upon a widow who claims to dislike children-and gives it a decidedly austere, unsentimental and even funny treatment. Unrelieved poverty forms the setting of the film (though the main direction of Ozu's art is not sociological): the chaos of urban life in the immediate postwar period is masterfully evoked in a studio recreation of the shitamachi community of Tokyo, an area destroyed by air raids during the war and being rebuilt house by house.