Samurai with Subtext
Miike’s ‘Hara-Kiri’ and the history of Japanese “rebel samurai” movies.
by Marc Walkow
Japanese director Takashi Miike has had many unofficial monikers throughout his career, not all of them especially accurate. He’s known overseas as a cult and horror filmmaker, despite having made only one or two true horror films. And the cult appellation hardly applies any longer, with Miike handling mega-budget Japanese studio co-productions these days, like Terra Formars (2016), Shield of Straw (2013) and the upcoming manga adaptation Blade of the Immortal.
Blade is a chanbara samurai swordplay film with fantasy elements, and it looks to be a welcome return to period action filmmaking, a genre the director only began to work in midway through his career, beginning with the revisionist and surreal samurai action fantasy Izo (2004). Miike has made only a handful of other action films set during samurai times, all of them successful to varying degrees, but far and away the most beautiful and dramatic one is 2011’s Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai, Miike’s mostly faithful remake of Masaki Kobayashi’s 1962 masterpiece, Harakiri.
Like Kobayashi’s film, Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai (the Japanese title is Ichimei, meaning simply “a life”) was based on a novel published in the early 1960s called “The Strange Tale of a Masterless Samurai” by Yasuhiko Takiguchi. Miike’s remake was co-produced by Jeremy Thomas (who also co-produced his previous period swordplay movie, the action-filled 13 Assassins, also a remake of a ‘60s classic), and shot in 3D, a first for the director. Like the original, Miike’s Hara-Kiri was invited to Cannes, and became the first 3D film to be screened there in Official Selection. But unlike Kobayashi’s version, it took home no prizes; the 1962 film lost the Palme D’Or to Visconti’s The Leopard but took home the Special Jury Award.
Having been there that year, I can report that audiences at Cannes were a bit surprised by Death of a Samurai, particularly after the crowd-pleasing bloodshed and action of the previous year’s 13 Assassins, and Miike’s lingering reputation as a more visceral filmmaker. The decision to shoot a period film in 3D that’s mostly quiet conversations and sedate flashbacks was an odd one — many people remarked that the 40-minute climactic action sequence of Assassins would have been better-suited for the format — but Hara-Kiri contains many sequences that lend themselves surprisingly well to multi-plane viewing despite its lack of action, particularly interior scenes which place hanging screens in-between characters and the viewer, and the final exterior action scene, which begins as snow starts to fall, creating an immersive, hypnotic effect of actually being there.
Like the original, Miike’s Hara-Kiri is set during the early period of the Tokugawa Shogunate, after Japan’s warring factions had been consolidated under a single Shogun in the capital city of Edo. After over 100 years of instability and warfare, the country was finally at peace and the professional warrior class of samurai found itself idle or out of work completely.
Hanshiro Tsugumo (kabuki superstar Ebizo Ichikawa) is one such samurai, who appears at the gate of the House of Ii with a request to commit ritual suicide (seppuku) there. The head counselor of the Ii family (Koji Yakusho), sensing that Tsugumo is merely threatening a “suicide bluff,” in the hope of employment or a charity handout, tells Tsugumo the story of another samurai named Motome, who recently appeared at their gate for the same reason, but was forced to commit suicide in a horrific fashion. Tsugumo claims not to have heard about this, but in turns tells his own story to the counselor, slowly revealing his true identity and connection to the prior events, all of which are part of a grand scheme of revenge against the Ii clan.
While most of Miike’s version follows the story of the original Harakiri fairly closely, it’s in the climactic sequence that it diverges the most strongly. In Kobayashi’s version, Tsugumo (played by Tatsuya Nakadai in the original) takes his revenge on the counselor (Rentaro Mikuni) and the Ii clan in a spectacular swordplay scene, full of violence and bloodshed. But in Miike’s updated version, Tsugumo’s revenge on the Ii clan takes a more symbolic form, as the grieving samurai uses a bamboo sword — the same kind of weapon Motome was forced to use to kill himself — to attack the Ii clan, hurting but not killing anyone, and without spilling a single drop of blood.
As in Kobayashi’s version, Tsugumo’s ultimate objective is to humiliate the Ii — in both versions, Tsugumo had previously defeated the clan’s top three swordsman in separate duels, dishonoring them by cutting off their topknots and throwing them at the counselor’s feet — but Kobayashi’s version has an extra element of audience gratification not only in seeing the clan decimated by Tsugumo, but also because of the star and his director’s skill in crafting one of the greatest fight sequences in 1960s samurai cinema. Miike’s version is philosophically more powerful, but lacks the cinematic and emotional punch present in the earlier film.
Otherwise, Death of a Samurai is an honorably well-made period film, if a bit short of the mark achieved by its predecessor. It’s difficult to compare a contemporary actor to Nakadai in his prime, but Ichikawa brings gravity to his leading role, and most of the supporting actors are well-cast, even if Eita as Motome feels more like a TV star than a film actor. But Miike and his screenwriters struggle to work out the flashback structure that was so key to Kobayashi’s version, instead settling on a middle section devoted to unnecessary and melodramatic story elements about Tsugumo and Motome’s past. Ryuichi Sakamoto’s score is memorable, though again, competing with the original’s Toru Takemitsu music would be an unenviable challenge for any composer.
The major takeaway from both films is its rage-inducing story of unfairness and hypocrisy, as a poor, good man is reduced to nothing by the cruel whims of the rich and powerful. Japan’s rapid rise from defeated nation after World War II to the economic powerhouse of the Bubble Economy years was frequently the subtext of many period films from the 1960s, particularly from left-wing filmmakers, just as the American Western was often a contemporary political tale in disguise. Although Tsugumo’s actions and final statement are powerful, they’re directed only at the individual House of Ii, not the system at large, and are furthermore rendered ineffectual by the counselor’s own rewriting of the clan’s history.
Kobayashi was no stranger to this sort of story, and his 1967 film Samurai Rebellion, also adapted by Harakiri’s screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto from a different story by Takiguchi, and again with music by Takemitsu and co-starring Nakadai, tells another story about institutional corruption and injustice, as peaceful samurai Toshiro Mifune is commanded to hand over his son’s wife to his clan lord, but decides to defy the order with violence.
The idea of a peaceful, loyal retainer rebelling against his master carries much more of a stigma in feudal Japan that it would in any sort of western story, and other characters in the film think Mifune has lost his mind when he flat-out refuses to comply with the order. Similar examples of samurai taking action outside their responsibilities and proscribed behavior were frequently made the subject of other “rebel samurai” films, many of which are among the best examples of the swordplay genre in the ‘60s.
Also starring Nakadai, Kihachi Okamoto’s Kill! (1968) adds a humorous spin to the story of a bumpkin who wants to be a samurai, and a samurai who wants nothing more than to be a peasant. Former TV director Hideo Gosha’s entire career of the 1960s is comprised almost entirely of rebel samurai films — his theatrical debut was the wonderful Three Outlaw Samurai (1964) — and one other standout is Tenchu! (aka Hitokiri, 1969), which features an all-star lineup of Nakadai, music idol Yujiro Ishihara and Zatoichi actor Shintaro Katsu as members of a clan of assassins dedicated to preserving the power of the Emperor against that of the Shogun. Katsu plays real-life character Izo Okada, a successful killer who is manipulated and then abandoned by the powers above him. Miike’s Izo tells a more fanciful version of the same story, but Gosha’s original is notable for featuring a scene in which author Yukio Mishima, who occasionally dabbled in acting, performs hara-kiri on himself, as he would do in real life just one year later.
Things changed little in the 1970s, as well, as yakuza movie king Kinji Fukasaku made his swordplay film debut with Shogun’s Samurai (1978), which told a familiar story of the struggles to form the Tokugawa Shogunate, but cast Sonny Chiba as a rebellious ninja who ahistorically murders Shogun Iemitsu, in an ending as fanciful as the one Quentin Tarantino wrote for Inglourious Basterds.
Perhaps the most well-known rebel samurai, though based entirely in fiction, might be Itto Ogami, played by Tomisaburo Wakayama in the six Lone Wolf and Cub films based on the manga by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, all recently available in a new Blu-ray box set by The Criterion Collection. Released between 1972 and 1974, the six films form a remarkable series of dramatic, violent, funny and moving stories about the former Shogunate decapitator, disgraced by an enemy who murdered his wife, and forced to wander the countryside as a hired assassin, pushing his infant son in a weaponized baby cart. While contemporary political commentary might have been kept to a minimum, the series’ vehement anti-authoritarian spirit remains as strong as anything made during the more rebellious era of the ‘60s.
Marc Walkow is a writer and film programmer living in New York. Formerly a director of the New York Asian Film Festival, he has also produced DVDs and Blu-rays for Criterion and Arrow Video.
