Japan, 1962
Directed by Kobayashi Masaki
With Nakadai Tatsuya (Tsugumo Hanshiro), Iwashita Shima (Tsugumo Miho), Ishihama Akira (Chijiwa Motome), Mikuni Rentarô (Saito Kageyu), Tanba Tetsurô (Omodaka Hikokuro)
In 1630, in the new Japanese capital of Edo (later named Tôkyô), a tired, shabby, sad, resolute samurai, who no longer belongs to a warlord-led clan and has no master to help him, in other words, a ronin, knocks at the door of the fortress of a thriving clan of samurai, led by Lord Ii. Tsugumo Hanshiro wants to kill himself honorably, through a seppuku ceremony these samurai would help to perform (seppuku is the proper Japanese term, though harakiri is more familiar to the Westerners; hence the difference in the titles of the film, better known outside Japan as “Harakiri”). Ii’s bailiff, Saito Kageyu, is embarrassed, clearly reluctant to agree to such an unexpected, odd, request. After all, it is known that a lot of wandering people with sabers in their hands pretend to be ronin willing to kill themselves only to cadge money, which is a real disgrace.
To drive home his point, Saito Kageyu tells the story of a young man claiming to be ronin, named Chijiwa, who came at the doors some time earlier, with the same request as Tsugumo Hanshiro. Neither the bailiff nor the top samurai of the clan knew what to decide, until the samurai’s chief trainer, Omodaka Hikokuro, tells them to let the boy in and to force him to perform a seppuku as he wanted to – if Chijiwa was sincere, it would not be a problem, if he was lying, it would be too bad for him but also teach a lesson to anyone reckoning to abuse the Ii clan. The ending of this reminiscence is drenched in blood and shame: the clearly reluctant young man did the thing with the ridiculous wooden small saber he turned out to have, a gory and horrendous suicide he was relentlessly forced to perform till the bitter end and under the glare of Omodaka Hikokuro, standing ready, without hurry, to slash the ronin’s head, as demanded by the ritual.
But Tsugumo Hanshiro vows to go ahead. Yet, even as the ceremony has started, he asks the samurai who must decapitate him must be Omodaka Hikokuro. Saito Kageyu is surprised but assents. Trouble is, this man is sick, and thus unavailable. Tsugumo Hanshiro puts two other names up, but each of these samurai is also sick. Confusion settles in, and the ronin starts to tell his story, to explain why he wanted to kill himself.
The confession proves to be a most stunning, and clever, screenplay twist. The late Chijiwa was in fact the son of a fellow samurai who belonged, like Tsugumo Hanshiro, to a master who was forced to dissolve his clan; the swordsman confided Chijiwa Motome to Tsugumo Hanshiro before committing suicide so as to avoid the humiliation of being a samurai without a master, a destiny his friend was more willing to accept. Then the young man got married to the beloved, and beautiful, daughter of Tsugumo Hanshiro, Tsugumo Miho. Even if Tsugumo Hanshiro was now just an artisan, a struggling maker of umbrellas, his daughter a maker of fans, and Chijiwa Motome a poor teacher, life seemed to be good, and then made even better by the birth of a boy to the young couple. But disease brought misery and misery led Chijiwa Motome to death. Neither his wife nor his son survived him.
The film may have started like a graphic tale of swordplay, a manly and brutal story of samurai, but it turns to be a heartbreaking melodrama with a social interest. The film is an examination of a dire consequence of the newly established Pax Tokugawa: the destruction of part of the warrior class that had grown so big over decades of political disorder and transformation, which happened essentially because many samurai’s masters did not make the right political choice at the turn of the 17th century while the remainder was eager to follow new rules and to adopt new behaviors. The fall from grace was harsh indeed, and even finding a new work did not always help: the film emphasizes how poverty was pervasive and the society unfair through the personal tragedy of Tsugumo Hanshiro and his relatives.
His shrewd plot to avenge the cruel death of his son-in-law stands as a fierce attack of the new samurai. The film offers an ambiguous and critical take on the so-called code of rules and ethics of the samurai known as bushidô. It does feature as a hero a samurai clinging to a code of honor, cast as a highly moral and honest character but also as a fairly brave warrior, who dies fighting for his principles, and the film is also a show of powerful and demanding swordplay catering to the audience’s expectations on samurai and bushidô. But the whole point of Tsugumo Hanshiro’s diegetic narrative is to show how bushidô has gone wrong, how it is spoiled. The samurai did not avenge himself by killing Omodaka Hikokuro and two of his sidekicks: he just cut off their slim buns, a trademark haircut of the samurai, reckoning that such a humiliation should prompt them to perform a seppuku. But the men rather hide away, waiting for their hair to grow again, wallowing in humiliation but not cutting their lives short.
Needless to say how mad and indeed humbled Saito Kageyu is when he realizes what has been the point of all the fuss. Tsugumo Hanshiro is right away doomed to be murdered by the incensed Ii samurai, but then he has always knew it would be that way – his final fight is a final burst of anger and desecration of the samurai myth, as the swordplay is carried on throughout the fortress, till it ends with not just the death of the provocative ronin but also the destruction of the clan’s sacred statue, the armor-clad mannequin which embodies the spirit of the prestigious ancestors.
And the most terrible part of the story is that Tsugumo Hanshiro is actually denied his spiritual victory. The film ends by showing how the bailiff orders the shamed samurai to perform a seppuku, explains what should be told to the outside world, shapes and dictates an official version of the shocking events of the day, the version that ends up written on the book which has featured at the start of the film and gives it now a final image. The film thus warns the audience that official records can be misleading – and in a way, they truly are: the bushidô Japan is so proud of is just part of a propaganda serving the interests of those holding power, the Tokugawa clan, and what feels true in this 17th century tale is even more accurate for modern history as political modernity has willfully fetched back and reinvented the bushidô to form the current Japanese national identity in the late 19th century. It is also a dizzying, riveting artistic endeavor: the film as a narrative picking up an official narrative (embodied by Saito Kageyu) to uncover another narrative (embodied by Tsugumo Hanshiro) disclosing the true narrative of the daily lives and society at the time, a thrilling exercise in playing with and subverting stories.
The film’s titles, in a striking move, set the visual agenda. The camera tracks in or sideways corridors and rooms, methodically roving around the fortress, including the inner courtyard set to be such an important setting, displaying shot compositions with perfect spatial perspectives and powerful horizontal and vertical lines. This is a triumph of deep focus and a sleek camerawork responding to architecture, using to maximum effect the peculiarities of the Japanese interiors. As the film proceeds, the characters would then move inside this endless collection of frames and perspectives, prisoners of a locus, an era, a discourse that are cruel to the weakest but prove to be, briefly, stifling for those more powerful, thanks to a true samurai’s guts and wits, played in a hypnotic, intense, masterful performance by the great actor Nakadai Tatsuya.