There is much to enjoy about Memories of Matsuko. But if I were a female moviegoer who had paid 1800 yen to be told that I need to know my place in this world, I would be mightily pissed off.
If they are happy to have their audience shed hankies, they rarely if ever go so far as to repulse them with the more realistic connotations of divorce, ostracism or the loss of a loved one.
Furthermore, he was trapped in an unresolvable Black and White American racial conflict that White disapproved of him as Black and Black accused him of being too White.