Shooting for the first time in Japan on the eve of the centennial of Yasujiro Ozu’s birth, Hou builds in echoes of Tokyo Story (1953) to deliver his own distinct riff on the age-old conflict between tradition and modernity. Taiwanese native Yôko is a Japanese language teacher working in Tokyo while studying the piano works of China-born transnational composer Jiang Wenye, who lived through Taiwan’s colonization by Japan in the 1920s and 30s. In gathering research materials and visiting her estranged parents back home, Yôko’s cyclical trajectory throughout the film from Tokyo to Taipei mirrors that of her research subject, an understated parallel allowing Hou to survey the postcolonial dynamic between Taiwan, China and Japan as well as the changes wrought by a rapidly globalizing Eastern hemisphere. Adopting Ozu’s penchant for low angle domestic observation and interstitial shots of trains, Hou constructs a formal conversation with the Japanese director’s perennial commentary on time’s bittersweet flow, while emphasizing the different worlds existing before their cameras.