The soup is the key!!

Spoiler of course....

I'm amazed everyone overlooked the soup...the last scene is obviously the most important and though everyone dissapearing was key, I say the last few words were the true key to the plot IMO. So she asked about his soup and he said, "It's still too hot," and earlier his fiancee said that she prefered it to be cool cause it burned if it went down hot. The father told her that that burning is refreshing at the same time. This didn't take much time to figure out that this parallels with the fact that both the main character and sort of the crazy woman couldn't come to accept the tragic things that happened to them just like they couldn't swallow it and had to pretend the things didn't happen almost like to "cool it down."

I believe that at the end of the movie it was likely years after the last suicide and the fact he couldn't take hot soup had shown that he hadn't changed- thus he couldn't come to accept what happend and never had a family. I almost got a moral out of this being that if we can't get over huge tragedys and traumatic things in our life we'll never have our dreams come true, or we'll never experience the best things in life.

I could be wrong in this, and the reason I came to this conclusion is because I love the director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and if you've ever seen his movies they are deep plots that you must piece together much like this movie. Also I get morals out of his movies that are arguably not there on purpose, though I think they are. Amazing movie nonetheless.