Just like what is said in the movie: "you'll never understand what it is like in a 35-year-old woman's mind." In Japanese society, the lives of wives are restricted in empty houses (husbands go to work and children go to school) all day long, and it repeats years after years. These women have almost no chance to have social relationships with outside world. When people are kept bored alone, they think (dream) of things which busy people would never have time to think about. They spend all their time examining about their whole lives, thinking about what would be different if they had chosen a different life.
In this case, they are easily melancholic because of not satisfying with their lives, wishing for companies to talk to or be with when they are alone, but have no solution to find a way out.
Therefore this is a story about repression, desire, morality, cowardice, the pain of waiting, heart breaking, pretending one's self being happy and tough and having the domination of power and money but actually most lonely and wanted being love. Besides all these complicated emotion, there is still brightness of true love shown in this movie.
This is certainly not a sweet story like "the Notebook" which hardly accepted when I was under the mood of losing my 6-year lover and never have faith of eternal love and being loved. The bitter-sweet of "Tokyo Tower" resonates the experiences of those hard time in love relationship. If a girl is old enough to experience a long term completely dedicating true love, and then find out she was being fooled or the love is finally gone or spoiled. Then she shall be a good viewer of this movie because she can definitely understand the dynamic power or conflict emotion of the characters in the movie.
We find out the unstable essential of love in this movie. We are not naive anymore to believe that love should be eternal. We find out ways to solve these love problems, too. In marriages, even if both husbands and wives are not happy about their relationships, they can still endure it and pretend that there are nothing wrong. Or one can be brave enough to let go, and make some great changes to one's life.
I am not yet 35 but only 25. I can still feel so many kinds of different emotions in this movie while stepping in different characters's shoes, both men and women, mother or child.
By the way, if you know better about Japanese culture, you will get closer to the situation happened in this movie. Firstly, many people blame Matsumoto's acting in this film, but the hilarious acting is from the original novel which the couple of Matsumoto is a contrast between the couple of the main characters. Therefore it was the dramatical reason for him to act like this, a hilarious character.
Secondly women in Japan don't have high social status and they are often dominate by their husbands and seniors. And a good woman should be shy and pure just like the little girl in the movie who always wears her clothes quickly after making love. It is conceivable that they can finally get their feeling of domination of love when they are with younger boys. It would be a release for their long term repression of passion under social rules.
