4

TUESDAY

For the way they sketch everyday life in a few pages, Japanese Nobel Prize-winner Yasunari Kawabata’s palm-of-the-hand stories have been compared to haiku. In 1925’s “Thank You,” a fastidiously polite bus driver has among his passengers a poor country woman and the daughter she’s taking to a distant village to sell to an older man. Adapted as Mr. Thank You 11 years later by director Hiroshi Shimizu, the tale was expanded to fill a feature-length film. Still, Shimizu retained the essence of the original narrative, forgoing outward conflict and conveying rural life by shooting entirely on location—a rare strategy in Japanese cinema of the period. In large part because this and other of his films were lost for decades, Shimizu doesn’t have the stature of such contemporaries as Ozu. But with Mr. Thank You now on the repertory circuit, he’s being rediscovered. The film screens at 7 p.m. at the Library of Congress’ Pickford Theater, 101 Independence Ave. SE. Free. (202) 707-5677. (Mark Jenkins)