Yasujirō Ozu

Two of his ten planets sit at opposite ends of the same sign: Mercury ten arcminutes into Capricorn and Mars fourteen arcminutes from the end of it. Earth and water take three each, with two apiece in fire and air, and five of the ten are mutable. The record says Ozu filmed almost everything from the height of somebody kneeling on a tatami mat, made Tokyo Story, which is regularly voted among the greatest films ever made, and died on his sixtieth birthday.

That last fact is the one worth the entry, and it has a consequence a reader can check. Dying on a birthday means the Sun had come back to within half a degree of where it stood at birth, so the day he died carried a solar return, at forty four hundredths of a degree from exact. A solar return happens every year to everybody, which is exactly why it is worth naming here: the remarkable thing is not the return, it is that the date of a death landed on one, and that is two calendars coinciding and nothing else.

He also died in Tokyo, which the record gives as his birthplace, so the sixtieth birthday closed a circle in two directions at once. For a director whose signature was a fixed camera height, a life ending on its own anniversary in its own city is the kind of symmetry a reader will want to mean something. It means that a man died on 12 December and was born on 12 December. The chart's own contribution is Mercury in quiet contact with Mars at four tenths of a degree, mental energy that goes somewhere, which is thinking clearly under pressure and finishing what gets started.

The Sun sits in direct opposition to Pluto at under four fifths of a degree, identity in a power struggle, and a T-square closes on Jupiter using those two. Mars sits in mild friction with that same Jupiter at under four tenths, action outrunning sense. His Moon sits on the twenty eighth degree of Virgo at noon with Libra still possible, so it is left out. Neptune and Pluto were the two retrograde planets. He died at Tokyo on 12 December 1963, at sixty. Beyond the solar return, Mars stood in direct opposition to his natal Neptune at fifteen hundredths of a degree, Saturn sixty degrees from his natal Sun at three tenths, and Venus sixty degrees from his natal Jupiter at just over a third. The Moon was balsamic and thirteen per cent lit.