YOJIMBO (1961): Yippee Ki-Yay, Kurosawa
Yojimbo’s not your father’s Western.
Of course, for being set in 1860s Japan, Yojimbo’s not a Western in most ways. But the movie gives us the old wasteland playground we know, as if the very dust were stirred up from Nowhere, Utah, and blown across the Pacific. Here our prospectors and bandits are silk merchants and yakuza; our tequila and buckskins are saké and kimonos; and our gunslinging drifter is a scruffy ronin, a masterless, wandering samurai. The spirit of the West is alive in this desolate, Japanese gambling town.
With the familiar stage and players set, Yojimbo should unfold like an easy cowboy movie — after all, it’s the story of a lone hero taking on two rival gangs that have driven a town to ruin. But in the hands of Akira Kurosawa, the movie’s transfigured into something greater. In the sixty years since Yojimbo was released, it remains fresh and nimble, unlike the mob of adventure movies that have come and gone in its wake. Yojimbo continues to feel just right: its visual composition is sharp and controlled, its score is lively, and its setting teeters on the edge of a fever dream. Best of all, in spite of its intelligence, Yojimbo retains the playfulness of a popcorn samurai movie. It shows that a playground built by a master is, after all, still a playground.
More Than a Cowboy With a Sword
Our hero in Yojimbo is Sanjuro, who is played inevitably by Toshiro Mifune, Kurosawa’s dutiful samurai incarnate. As a samurai, Sanjuro is more than a cowboy with a sword. When Sanjuro saunters into the tavern, his two swords hilted at his side immediately reveal his caste. In Edo-Period Japan, this sort of dual open carry was reserved solely for the samurai class (i.e. the aristocracy), revealing not only their status but also their prestigious education, including training in the martial arts. Thus, among pimps and two-bit yakuza, the newest residents of Yojimbo’s town, Sanjuro can only be an imminent threat.
For modern viewers who can’t tell one katana from two, Kurosawa leverages Sanjuro’s gravity compositionally. Right from the movie’s opening shot, Sanjuro descends into frame like a literal giant, looming larger than the snow-capped mountains centered in the distance. He retains his scale when he wanders down from the hills and enters town. There, the local constable, who would be the law, is made miniature by comparison. Where the constable squeaks and dances in Sanjuro’s shadow like Piglet with a badge, flaunting his baton to prove his authority, Sanjuro moves and speaks with deliberation. He’s unyielding in his forward motion, and he crosses his arms tightly inside his kimono, as if to contain his own presence. He’s like a force of nature with a twig in his teeth who’s come to settle among men.
Early in the film, Sanjuro’s faced even with another samurai, which reveals his true degree of distinction. Before the first fight breaks out, for which the town’s samurai was hired, we see him fleeing dodge. He’s caught hopping a fence, and in the shot, he’s positioned between an enormous Sanjuro in the foreground and the expansive mulberry field (from which Sanjuro derives his name) in the background. Kurosawa’s meaning here is evident: even among samurai, Sanjuro reigns supreme.
With this setup, when Sanjuro intervenes in the local gang war, we know it can only be for sport. He’s outnumbered, sure, but all he needs is a little saké and it’s showtime. And because we share Sanjuro’s vantage, it’s showtime for us too. In a pulpier film, it’s at this point that we’d see the hero charge across enemy lines to clean up shop, to start cutting thugs into sashimi (Sanjuro’s words, not mine), but Yojimbo takes on a different tone. With a lesser hero, this would be an action movie, but with Sanjuro in charge, scheming and playing each gang against the other, Yojimbo often feels like a comedy. Here we see the shop tricked into cleaning up itself. Sanjuro writes the drama and sits back, often literally, with us, to watch the chaos unravel. His ease and laughter feel like a peer’s, and so they become our own.
Clowns & Kryptonite
Being in on the joke with Sanjuro, however, is only half the fun of Yojimbo. The supporting characters that Kurosawa has created, whether villain, victim, or village idiot, are caricatures, acting and reacting with great animation. When swords are drawn, they’re quavering, and when a snarl is meant to frighten, it’s bucktoothed. It’s as though we’re watching marionettes in human scale whose strings are plucked and tugged by Sanjuro from above — as well as by Kurosawa, of course, just a little higher up. Seeing such theatrics naturally reminds us of the caricatures in Shakespeare, like the acting troupe of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or the drunken gatekeeper of Macbeth. While Kurosawa’s admiration for Shakespeare is evident in his direct adaptations, Throne of Blood (Macbeth) and Ran (King Lear), it should come as no surprise that such an influence would manifest elsewhere, as it does here in Yojimbo.
While the puppet people of Yojimbo make us laugh and keep the movie breezy, they also serve to further align us with Sanjuro. Unlike these townsfolk, Sanjuro is three dimensional — he’s the only human in sight with whom we can relate, and so we cling to him as if he were our own. All (effective) protagonists form this bond with us. And in the world of Yojimbo, Sanjuro bonds to the point of embodiment; he’s our avatar on screen.
Now, with these elements that make Sanjuro an untouchable hero, set in a town of simpletons, Yojimbo should tire out pretty quickly. After all, no one is that interested in Superman. It’s right when we reach the point of exhausting our interest in Sanjuro’s control, however, that Kurosawa introduces the great point of tension in the film: a pistol in enemy hands. Suddenly, the samurai who seemed unchallenged in all of Japan is kept in check, endangered even, by a little technology held limply by a snickering gangster, and so the viewer’s ease is met with a twinge of terror. For the first time, the corruption and lawlessness of Yojimbo’s theater town have teeth and are as real as our hero. The scale that was so drastically in Sanjuro’s favor is balanced, if not descended against him.
When Yojimbo was adapted by Sergio Leone into A Fistful of Dollars, the suspense built by the gun is an element that was totally lost in translation. A typical Western necessitates a world where guns grow on trees, so an enemy with a pistol is unexceptional. What we see instead in A Fistful of Dollars when the Man With No Name (Clint Eastwood) draws his revolver, the antagonist down the street draws…a rifle. Both weapons serve the same purpose and in the same way, and both the hero and the villain are crack shots, so the tension isn’t there. I’m not sure how it could have been imported otherwise. (Do we let the villain keep his Gatlin gun? Do we give him a tank?)
Children Shouldn’t Play With Swords
It was actually A Fistful of Dollars that made me recognize the fundamental pulp, the popcorn-movie ingredients, in Yojimbo. In Leone’s adaptation, we get virtually the same story but to a less impressive effect, and so it’s evidently not the writing (or at least not the writing alone) that distinguishes Yojimbo — it’s Kurosawa. To be clear, I’m not one for the inerrancy of Kurosawa, but respect must be given where it’s due. Yojimbo’s story is light and playful, even predictable at times, but Kurosawa’s control of his visual language is so sober and precise that we’re hooked. This eye for composition and seeming effortlessness behind the camera is what raises Yojimbo a shelf above its action blockbuster counterparts and has given it an easy sixty-year lifespan.
In a way, our relationship with Sanjuro, our admiration for his confidence and skill, our trust and ease with him, is also a reflection of our relationship with Kurosawa. Kurosawa’s ultimate control of the movie allows us to relax in a way we don’t with lesser directors in the chair. Sanjuro expresses this sentiment when a young goon cowers before him; he growls, “Children shouldn’t play with swords.” And where Kurosawa is our decisive swordsman in an industry filled with goons, we might also read, “Children shouldn’t play with cameras.”
So, while Yojimbo may not be your father’s Western for being in an unfamiliar land and bearing an unrecognizable quality, your dad might like to watch it anyway. In fact, why don’t you watch it with him? Bring the whole family, too. You may discover that your new favorite cowboy is a samurai.
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Image Attributions:
- Kurosawa, Akira, director. 1961. Yojimbo. Kurosawa Production Co.
