Many Times Seven

I watched Seven Samurai again over the weekend. It's like slicing into a cake, it's always satisfying. I'm not sure how many times I've seen it now since my first time in the '90s. Like the Star Wars movies, it somehow remains alive and vital. Also like Star Wars, it creates a world with its characters and locations.

It also has a different impact for me because I'm different, I know more about Japan and Japanese than the first dozen or so times I saw it. Now I know what it means that it's set around 15 years before the Sekigahara battles. Japan was not yet a single, consolidated country and there was a lot of fighting.

Seven Samurai is also a cultural artefact of 1954, the year it was released. Kurosawa's movies are not generally seen to-day in Japan. His period films use a form of Japanese that many people in Japan can no longer understand. It's a bit like Shakespearean English, I guess, which would make sense, given that Kurosawa was a big fan of Shakespeare.

All the same, I'm able to understand enough of it to wonder at some of the choices made on the Criterion edition's translation. In the scene after the youngest samurai, Katsushiro, sleeps with the farm girl, Shino, the leader of the samurai, Kambei, claps the young man's shoulder and says they expect much in battle from him now because he's recently become "a man," and everyone laughs. But what he says is "otona", adult. The line could've been translated, "You're an adult now," or "You've grown up."

The film presents a very different attitude towards women and sex than one finds in Japanese media to-day. Or at the time. When Kurosawa was making movies, he was criticised for being too American. It's often said he has few female characters but Seven Samurai has two very interesting female characters; Shino, and one farmer's, Rikichi's, wife, who lives with the bandits. The latter appears in only one scene and has no dialogue but the actress's performance and the context in which we see her, after the build up of Rikichi's sensitivity about discussing her, compel the viewer to think about her. The film introduces the ambiguity over how much she was a captive and how much she was a willing defector and the torment caused by that ambiguity.

Of course, it's also striking just how enthusiastic Kikuchiyo, Mifune Toshiro's character, is about finding a girl to sleep with. It's extremely rare to hear anyone in Japan talk about wanting sex. In this movie, it's a fact of life that comes up again and again. There's the amusing moment when Kikuchiyo gripes again about not having a girl causing Kyuzo to ponder a moment and declare he's going out into the woods to practice alone with his sword. Kikuchiyo comments, "There are no women out there." Heihachi laughs and says sometimes Kikuchiyo really, "hits the nail on the head," implying Kyuzo might be doing more than practicing out in the woods.

Seven Samurai is available on The Criterion Channel.