This drama of a middle-aged Japanese-American couple in the throes of rupture has won universal accolades for the poetry of its close, painful and funny observation of real life. Superbly cast in the lead roles are Mako, as Nobu, a salt-of-the-earth husband and father who thrives on the self-absorbed silences that sidestep humiliation; and Nobu McCarthy, as Masi, bearing bottled up life and sexuality under a long-suffering facade. In a moment of breakthrough honesty some forty years in the making, she asks, "Why don't you want me anymore?" She leaves Nobu, later to embark on an affair with a kindly (and sexy) widower (Sab Shimono). But she returns periodically-to do her husband's laundry. It is these small absurdities of commitment, however passionless, that the film draws out in its portrait of a family breaking (and breaking under) the bonds of love.