The Complicated Life of the Samurai

Duty compels two old friends to fight to the death in Vendetta for a Samurai (決闘鍵屋の辻, "Duel at the Kagiya Crossroads"). Based on a real, famous act of vengeance in 1632, it deliberately sets out to show the difference between reality and the legend. Appropriately, it was written by Akira Kurosawa, whose famous work about different perspectives, Rashomon, had been released two years earlier. It was directed by Kazuo Mori who, while no Kurosawa, does a decent job rendering the surprising strangeness of a lethal encounter.

The film also stars many Kurosawa regulars, including Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura who play Araki and Jinza, respectively, the two friends set against each other. But the vendetta, known historically as the Igagoe vendetta, was between a young man, Kazuma Watanabe, and the killer of his father, a nobleman named Matagoro. Araki was a famous swordsman who was married to Watanabe's sister while Jinza happened to be bound in service to Matagoro.

The film begins with a deliberately artificial, fantastical scene of Mifune cutting down dozens of men before facing off against a jeering Shimura. When the film switches to the "reality", Araki and Jinza are introduced sitting comfortable, sharing a drink, discussing how they will soon become enemies.

While the bulk of the film is meant to show the reality, there is a kind of dream of bushido alive in the heads of the participants. When one of Kazuma's supporters played by Daisuke Kato is spotted by Jinza spying on him, trying to find the whereabouts of Matagoro, Jinza greets him in a friendly manner and merely inquires as to Araki's health. In the days leading up to the encounter, Araki and his compatriots solemnly discuss treasured memories as they slowly work out Matagoro's travel route east from Osaka.

Then, in contrast to all of the sentimentality and stoicism, the famous duel is messy as hell. The strongest part of the film is entirely in the performances of Mifune and Shimura in this meeting. They exchange looks of horror, surprise, and confusion as one kills the other. It's the kind of thing one would compulsively try to interpret for many years afterwards. It's no surprise historians and mythmakers have done the same.

Vendetta for a Samurai is available on The Criterion Channel.

Life and Money

How can you think about profits when lives are at stake? Or, how can you think about one life when the fates of a family and a whole career are at stake? One of the reasons 1963's High and Low ("Heaven and Hell") is one of Akira Kurosawa's greatest films is that it doesn't pretend there's an easy answer to this question. It's very easy for political arguments to become polarised and that's why most political films tend to become propaganda in effect even if not in intent. Rian Johnson likely didn't think he was presenting a simplistic argument with Knives Out but by presenting its representative of the emerging majority demographic as so saintly she pukes when trying to tell a lie he betrays the fact that he's afraid of allowing the barest sliver of a flaw to enter his argument. It's a very common instinct--push aside all those untidy parts of our arguments, which we figure don't really matter in the great cause of finding the Truth, to be addressed at some obscure, later, safe date. But doing so inevitably weakens an argument because it has the effect of making an opponent feel their intelligence has been insulted or making them think their adversary has something to hide. High and Low never takes the easy route. We see the successful capitalist bedevilled by the working class mischief maker but it's neither a story of the cruel profit monger or the irresponsible anarchist. It catches the real life point in the middle where everyone's afraid to go, the point where we have to acknowledge we really don't know how to make this a fair and just world.

Kingu (Toshiro Mifune) is one of the executives at National Shoes. He wants to make high quality shoes and believes it will ultimately mean better profits but the other shareholders don't agree. They want to make cheap shoes that will turn more profit in the short term. Kingu takes a gamble and borrows money on everything he owns in order to buy out his partners. This should lead to a glorious triumph, the way capitalism is supposed to work--out of his own efforts and sacrifice, Kingu would make money providing people with the best possible product. But a spanner is thrown in the works when a discontented young man, envious of Kingu's house on the hill, kidnaps the little boy of Kingu's chauffeur, intending to kidnap Kingu's son.

Paying the ransom would mean losing everything Kingu owns. Kurosawa's blocking and Mifune's performance establish wonderful tension in the early scenes--Kingu had had to put aside any fears and doubts in order to make his sacrifice. Now he's asked to consider feelings instead of his goal. He paces around, facing the curtains, his posture firm but his inability to look at anyone conveys his shame and uncertainty. His wife (Kyoko Kagawa) pleads with him to pay the ransom, saying she won't mind living poor but he tells her she can't even imagine it, she's been rich all her life. And we learn that Kingu's isn't the story of a man who worked his way up from the bottom but of a man who owes his initial fortune to his wife. But does that make his ideals any less worthy?

In the end he relents and decides to pay the ransom. A great scene on a train follows, where Kingu has to throw the briefcase full of money out the window. Much of the film's latter two thirds centres on the police, lead by an inspector played by Tatsuya Nakadai. The other cops become a sort of moral compass chorus. They're all working class themselves and are a good reflection of average sympathy. One of them even agrees with the kidnapper that Kingu's air conditioned house, alone on a hill above rows of slums, is kind of obnoxious. Yet Kingu wins their respect for the hardships he's willing to endure and the contributions he makes to the investigation--the same kinds of things that are supposed to earn one a livelihood in a for-profit economy. It's the kidnapper, breaking the social contract, who has imposed his will on others unfairly, even if he thinks he just wants to bring Kingu down to his level.

A final scene where Kingu and the kidnapper (Tsutomu Yamazaki) confront one another is captivating for Kingu's grace and humility and the kidnapper's breakdown. The kidnapper's weakness, in the end, provides a more haunting argument than anything he intended to do. But is that all humanity is?

High and Low is available on The Criterion Channel.

Twitter Sonnet #1345

The giants came to build for promised fruit.
The dwarves constructed jewels for worldly might.
So oft are deals arranged with fire moot.
So well a single eye can serve for sight.
Beneath the golden skin's a loveless ring.
For apples rare the lives of gods are weighed.
Beneath the river playful maidens sing.
For spirits rare were walls of heaven made.
A balanced ransom asks the Earth and sky.
Descending gods return with wanted gold.
In river's bed the metal's not to lie.
With summoned storm the story's fully told.
To flame the broker turns at end of day.
The deals he wrought forever forge the way.

The Incomparable Mifune

Yesterday, April 1, 2020, would have been the 100th birthday of my fellow Aries, Toshiro Mifune. An appropriate thing to celebrate now that I live in Japan though, despite being representative of the country and culture for many cinephiles worldwide, Mifune's performances were atypical of Japan's film industry.

Mifune was born in China in a Japanese occupied region and he spent the first nineteen years of his life there before being drafted into the Japanese army during World War II. Japan has a reputation for conformity and politeness, two things I can certainly confirm from the many taboos and manners that keep the cities and trains running smoothly. Maybe it was Mifune's colonial upbringing that made him so different, that nurtured the wild spirit that so impressed Akira Kurosawa. Kurosawa, the director whose work provided the best roles of Mifune's career, was also not a typical Japanese director. Choosing instead to emulate American westerns, he was outspoken about a Japanese film industry he saw as lacking in vitality, though in later years he fondly recalled the greatness of Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse.

Aside from his films with Kurosawa, Mifune is probably best known in the west for his role in the Shogun miniseries. He appeared in other western films, like 1971's Red Sun, turning in performances more in line with western expectations of the stoic samurai. In Japan, Mifune's work for directors like Mikio Naruse or Masaki Kobayashi was never bad--at the very least, Mifune always had a piercing beauty about him. But all of these films remain dwarfed by his collaborations with Kurosawa.

From the drunken, dying yakuza in Drunken Angel, to the rabid bandit in Rashomon, to the feral peasant turned samurai in Seven Samurai, to the live wire thief in The Lower Depths, to the desperately afraid old man in Record of a Living Being--again and again, Kurosawa cast him in roles that demanded a deviation from that most famous Japanese virtue; restraint.

In the latter portion of their collaborative era, Kurosawa cast him as wiser men who seemed extraordinarily comfortable taking command of a situation. The general in The Hidden Fortress, the razor focused variation on Hamlet in The Bad Sleep Well, the conflicted but masterful executive in High and Low, or the benevolent demon doctor in Red Beard, all figures of natural authority who flagrantly bucked the system. In perhaps his defining role as the ronin Sanjuro in 1961's Yojimbo, the bedraggled and solitary samurai wanders into town and upends violent normalcy as much for his own amusement as a desire to stop the fighting.

One can't imagine, in any of these films, any other actor coming close to achieving what Mifune does, which is the whole point--he was extraordinarily, distinctly individual.

Twitter Sonnet #1341

Around the mountain whisper paper words.
In choc'late streams the patient calmly sleep.
The letters tucked in wing escort the birds.
A current drags the silent fishes deep.
An extra curtain pulled a window in.
A message stopped the lift above the floor.
The numbers stopped in sev'ral sorted bins.
A thousand grasping hands have tried the door.
A gasping dog inspects the market thieves.
The longest sword belonged to truest man.
A gen'ral hid the gold in burning sheaves.
A ragged ronin spurred the feuding clan.
As luckless thief he lived beneath the dirt.
As crimson beard he mended ev'ry hurt.