September Of Samurai: Kurosawa And Compassion

Kurosawa is often defined as a filmmaker by his compassion. Not only is he considered to be one of cinema’s great humanists but he is often given credit for single handedly re-humanizing the Japanese to the west. This is an awful lot of semantic baggage for any career to carry around, and the fact that Kurosawa’s does hold up to such weight speaks considerably about his skill as an artist. However, like any great filmmaker who is turned into a symbol, Kurosawa’s message has been simplified to better ease consumption of it. After all why complicate things by bringing up the likes of The Magic Flute or Smiles On A Summer Night when the image of brooding Bergman is so ready made. For that matter why muddy the waters with Fellini’s roots in Neo Realism, when everyone is ready to except him as the court jester of great cinema. Someone who has only heard of Kurosawa’s work could be forgiven for thinking that the sum total of his oeuvre could be summed up as “Why can’t we just get along.” With a side “People are great.” With a few swordfights thrown in for flavor. Needless to say this is not so.

I believe at the heart of this misperception is Kurosawa’s vaunted humanism, at the core of which is Kurosawa’s compassion and empathy. The simplifying of these idea’s core to Kurosawa’s cinema have had a ripple effect, simplifying the few of the rest of his films as well. Rewatching the films this time out I found his view of compassion and empathy to be rich and complex, much more shaded with grey then I remembered. While it was true that the villains of a Kurosawa film, whether they where individuals (The young doctor in High and Low) or groups (The faceless villagers in No Regrets For Our Youth) are almost always defined by their lack of feeling towards there fellow human beings, the inverse was not always true. In other words while I am sure that Kurosawa is saying a dearth of compassion is a curse, I’m not so sure that he’s saying a great amount is a boon either. As Richie puts it,

“It is this better nature which does the Kurosawa hero in. In Stray Dog it is Mifune’s compassion and understanding, his acknowledging the identity of a cop and robber which almost paralyzes him. Kurosawa seems to be saying, in this film as in all his others, that the better nature is not only the truly but is also too good for this world.”

After all, though an absence of compassion drives the young doctor in High and Low, to prey on his fellow humans in the slums with a terrifying impersonality and costs The Lord Of Spiderweb castle to lose his kingdom. Compassion costs the hero of I Live In Fear his sanity and Kameda in The Idiot everything. In these films, compassion seems a kind of cosmic joke, there is nothing to be gained from it, Kurosawa seems to be stating that in the world we inhabit it is nothing short of insanity to allow yourself to care.

How do we reconcile these conflicting ideas? Not only with themselves but with films like Red Beard, Ikiru, and Drunken Angel? Perhaps the best way to start is with a character who embodies all the contradictions and conflicts.



Yojimbo is ruthless in its simplicity. A Ronin comes to a town run by two gangs, by the time he leaves, there are no gangs and he has a lot of money. Sanjuro never lets us inside his head, he has no name, no past, no destination, he appears to run on nothing but self interest and greed, he has no qualms about killing and he’s the hero. He’s less a person then a force of nature, he’s not punishing the gangs for their evil, or avenging some past wrong, he’s as random and implacable as the direction that a twirling stick lands in. Indeed Sanjuro’s ruthlessness is not just a trait, it’s the trait, in short it is his very lack of compassion that allows him to triumph. He simply is. How does the image of the great humanist fit in with that?

Well more comfortably then you might suspect. Yojimbo stacks the deck in some interesting ways and not only in the two moments where Kurosawa does allow Sanjuro’s mask to slip. Yojimbo is more or less a very well made and entertaining misanthropic cartoon As Richie puts it, rather then decrying the evil of the gangsters and the townspeople he instead says, “Look how dreadful they are, and then smiles.” Kurosawa alleviates the audience of it’s guilt and the protagonist of his moral duty by making sure we understand in no uncertain terms that the people Sanjuro is stacking like cordwood are scum, both families share no love, for either themselves (Witness the matriarch of one gang who upon recovering her son asks why he didn’t spare them the trouble and kill himself), their “bodyguards” or curiously even their profits (for all the effort they take in securing them Kurosawa never allows us to see the villains enjoying their ill gotten gains). Both in action, and in appearance the villains are never anything other then caricature (Indeed with their exaggerated appearance, and host of tricks and gimmicks I’ve often wondered if Yojimbo was not one of the forerunners of anime), not merely bad people but sub people. There is never any doubt that Sanjuro has anything less then a God given right, neigh a moral imperative to kill them. Indeed the villains are so vile and Sanjuro so swift, that it’s tempting to read the entire film as Kurosawa’s revenge on the compassionless.

Then there’s the violence itself, this is not Kagemusha which follows it’s moments of violence with protracted shots of suffering, for all the talk of it’s violence, Yojimbo is a surprisingly sanitized film. A quick flash of metal and the antagonist is lying on the ground dead and already forgotten. Even when the aftermath of violence is shown, such as with the famous dog shot, it’s played for laughs. The only other acceptation to this rule is the vicious beating that Sanjuro himself takes, but this only proves the rule. The violence is happening to him, not only showing what a badass he is, but continuing to illustrate, what cackling morlocks his oppressors are.

Ah but what of the event that led to that beating? Sanjuro’s freeing of a family that had been split apart and held captive by one of the warring families. Here and in one other case, when he spares the life of a foolish farmer’s son he encountered in the beginning of the film, Sanjuro allows his mask to drop and commits an act that is truly selfless. Of course the great irony is it is one moment of human kindness and frailty that allows him to be discovered and nearly killed, not his dozen moments of guile. And though this irony seems to sour any nobility the moment had, it is here that the frazzled humanist searching for compassion in this pitiless film can take refuge. It is this uncharacteristic scene in this uncharacteristic film that we perhaps find the key to Kurosawa’s view. Yes, compassion can cost us a great deal, but it is in our very nature as humans and sometimes especially with someone like Sanjuro who is just as brutal as the enemies he fights, it’s all that separates us from the animals who surround us.

But I’m not quite ready to leave this scene, it’s a very interesting one, especially when it is compared to the corresponding one in it’s remake (Kurosawa eventually sued, a fair but somewhat disingenuous action considering that Kurosawa himself took the story wholesale from Dashell Hammet’s Red Harvest), A Fistful Of Dollars, it gives an interesting window into a differing standard of morality in the east and west. In Yojimbo this vignette, plays very late in the film, and seems very random. It would be fair that is as much a deus ex machina, used to allow Sanjuro’s treachery to be uncovered, as it is a character building moment. In A Fistful Of Dollars the seeds for this event are almost the very first thing we see. The Man With No Name rides into town, and immediately witnesses the boy try to see his mother only to beaten and driven away by a grotesque hired gun. Only then does Clint settle in find out about the gangs and go to work. It is suggested that if it had not been for Clint witnessing the situation, he might have happily ridden right through town. In short the situation with the family can be seen as his primary motivation for what he does, further underlined by the fact that when the father of the reunited family asks why Clint is doing this, Clint answers with a long speech suggesting that the same thing happened to him and there was nobody to help. When the father in Yojimbo poses the same question and then tries to thank Sanjuro, Sanjuro calls them idiots and tells them “To get the hell out of there.” And then threatens to kill them.

While the events in Fistful are used to give it’s protagonist a noble reason for killing everyone and riding out of town with the loot, Sanjuro’s act is simply a spur of the moment act brought on by a latent sense of decency, it is not the cause of his rampage, just a happy side effect. (If one wants to dig a little deeper and examine the difference between European and American morality, it is worth examining the American TV version of Fistful where this motivation was not just cause and Monte Helleman was brought in to film a prologue in which a Judge orders Clint to go to the town and kill everyone. Remember kid’s murder and profiteering is fine as long as authority figure says it’s OK).



It is also worth noting that Kurosawa took a similar route when he returned to the character in Sanjuro, suggesting that even he was somewhat unnerved by his character’s blaise approach to slaughter. In Sanjuro Kurosawa to gave “Tsubaki” the benefit of an inciting incident. Rather then simply stumbling into the chaos of the upper rank Samurai and hacking away, “Tsubaki” is brought into the fold in an effort to save a group of young Samurai from themselves. As in a Fistful there is the insinuation that “Tsubaki” himself was once in a similar situation, and now helps the callow youths from repeating his own mistakes. It even underlines this fact by making it “Tsubaki’s” plan to pose as a mercenary out for a score. In other words to play act what he actually did in the last film.

Sanjuro is a much gentler film then Yojimbo, playing out most of it’s runtime as a comedy of manners. In which the young Samurai are continually appalled by “Tsubaki’s” actions despite the fact that these actions are what allow him to survive, while they surely would have been dead for along time without his aid. “Tsubaki” though has mellowed somewhat since Yojimbo, the most famous scene in Sanjuro comes when “Tsubaki” attempts to talk his way out a climatic duel with one of the corrupt superintendents men. The Man insists upon the fight, and “Tsubaki” obliges quickly killing him. However, unlike his careless disregard for the lives he has taken previously, “Tsubaki” actually rebukes the young Samurai for cheering his victory. He states that the mercenary “Hanbei” was “Exactly like him.” And has caused “Tsubaki” to examine his ways. Though “Tsubaki” once again leaves in a random direction one senses that he might not fight with such reckless abandon again. Kurosawa seems obliged to have the character make some growth. It is as if he cannot stand to have created such a mad dog of a character, and allow him to run without at least a bit of a muzzle.



If looked at with conjunction with Yojimbo, The Bad Sleep Well seems an even bleaker film. If Yojimbo portrayed a man without compassion successfully toppling the heartless society that surrounded him, The Bad Sleep Well shows what happens when a “moral” man tries to do the same thing. In short he’s devoured by what he tries to combat, and he’ digested without even the slightest burp of indigestion. In this way, The Bad Sleep Well can also be seen as the mirror version of Ikiru, with the bureaucracy rolling right along despite the heroes attempt to stop it. It is perhaps Kurosawa’s darkest movie, where the audience soon finds itself choking on the dark laughter offered by it’s blackly farcical opening wedding scene, the smiles gradually become rictuses.

The Bad Sleep Well can be read of as Kurosawa’s linking of world of modern corporate Japan with wartime Japan. In both cases Kurosawa watched his fellow citizens being used as grist for the mill, which ground them up while silencing any protest. As Chuck Stephens writes in his essay for Criterion “ [Kurosawa’s Cinema] came to describe a world world in which heroes weren’t allowed and the more one struggled towards righteousness the farther one would inevitably fall.”

As in Yojimbo, The Bad Sleep Well depicts an outsider who infiltrates a corrupt system to destroy it. Unlike in Yojimbo, our protagonist Nishi fails miserably. Kurosawa again uses compassion as a kind of Achilles heel, it is not Nishi’s machinations that kill him, but his eventual growing feelings for the daughter of his target, whom he married as a cats paw and then became foolish enough to actually care about. Unlike Yojimbo Nishi is not able to stoically mask his compassion admitting defeat he references this saying “I guess I don’t hate them enough.” As Richie notes “The hero is torn apart by the thought that he might be evil.” This act human kindness and weakness is all it takes for the Corporation to mount a counter attack, and unlike Sanjuro, Nishi is unable to escape. Denied even the dignity of an on screen death.

However, lest we begin to be tempted to believe that maybe Kurosawa’s message was simply “Compassion is for suckers.” It is worth noting that the corporate culture that Kurosawa potrays in The Bad Sleep Well, seems to be Kurosawa’s endgame for a world without compassion. The antagonists in Yojimbo, were too broad and comical to serve as credible avatars of this sort of evil. In The Bad Sleep Well Kurosawa is dead serious about what his protagonist is going up against. The corporate culture he potrays is a nightmare sterile world, powered by free floating malice. As Richie puts it “They sleep well because their consciences are so bad that they are serene. The implication seems to be that they are so thoroughly bad.” ( But it is not as simple as the people running it have no compassion. They don’t control the beast anymore Kurosawa argues that in this world we have, to borrow the hoary old line “Created a monster.” And it is far far beyond our control, and it simply doesn’t have room for compassion. An absence of compassion such as this literally creates a hell on earth, spreading to the film and it’s subtly expressionistic settings itself. In Kurosawa’s mind, this lack of compassion eventually twists morality itself, as the Dalai Lama says, “An Intelligent person can make anything sound plausible.” (Lama 77) or as Richie puts it “ He (Mori) has a sound moral reason for everything that he does. That his morality is different from ours does not disturb him. He has tested his time and again.” The corporate world and it’s “flexible morality” would not be so effectively skewered again until the advent of Gilliam’s Brazil and the presumably very well rested Jack.



Before we lose all hope and judge Kurosawa, a nihilist let’s move onto The Seven Samurai. After all this is the kind of film that Kurosawa developed his reputation as a champion as a champion of compassion with right? A film filled with selfless acts, where a group of Samurai fight the faceless predatory hoard that decends upon an innocent villiage, risking there lives for a mere handful of rice a day to defend them. A film filled with selfless acts from, the youngest Samurai giving the hapless villagers the money to hire the seven after they are robbed, to Mifune’s daring rescue of an infant orphaned in the battle. Well yes and no, as in the other two films Kurosawa’s views are far from simple.

The Samurai are portrayed as compassionate and selfless (aside from a lone killing machine characterized by his lack of compassion), time and time risking their lives for the villagers. Indeed it is perhaps in Shimura’s character that we find the heart of Kurosawa’s world weary humanism, as Richie says, “All a man can do he seems to say, is his best. If he does his best for himself that is one thing; but it is better to do your best for others.” However, the conflict between the villagers and bandit’s is not as black and white as it appears. As in No Regrets For Our Youth, the common folk are not the simplified merry proletariat that they are in many such films. Instead they are portrayed as stupid, cruel and easily swept up in passion. They turn on the samurai based on their own prejudice before they even arrive, it is later revealed that they cheerfully murder any wounded Samurai that crosses their path, they go from terrified peasants to a bloodthirsty mob when a lone bandit is unlucky enough to fall into their clutches, and commit wanton acts of cruelty towards their own family. For a humanist Kurosawa is surprisingly open with his question of whether or not these people even deserve saving. Even having one of the samurai openly admit that he would happily kill everyone in the village.

And yet it is this very quality that allows the Samurai’s actions to matter. If they where saving storybook helpless innocents, the Samurai’s compassion would be unremarkable. Instead Kurosawa uses a genre situation to illustrate the real world strength that compassion takes. We would all like to help “good” people, but the world we live in does not often afford us such clear cut choices, It is our compassion towards those that we do not like, those who are not perfect that matter. For compassion is at it’s heart empathy, and empathy rooted in understanding, to feel pity for and to try to help those who we do not comprehend easily is where compassion serves us. If it’s not difficult to do it scarcely matters. If one may turn to the Western definition of compassion for a moment, the thinking in Seven Samurai fits in quite nicely with the teachings of Christ.

“If you love only those who love you, what reward can you expect? Even the tax collectors do as much as that. If you greet only your brothers, what is there extraordinary abou that? Even the heathens do as much. There must be no limit to your goodness as your heavenly Father’s goodness knows no bounds.” (Matthew 5:43-48)\

Or to find a corollary in the east from the Compendium of Practices by Shantideva, “If you cannot practice compassion toward your enemy then toward who can you practice it?” (48, Lama)

What Kurosawa is arguing is actually deeply compassionate, while the cartoonish villains in Yojimbo, and the corporate entity in The Bad Sleep Well made for easy targets, here in The Seven Samurai, Kurosawa asks us to see the humanity in all of its characters, even the grotesque mocking boarding house gamblers who spend the first third of the films as a scornful Greek chorus, are allowed to show themselves as people. Even the bandits for all their injustice and violence, are carefully shown to be in a situation as dire as the peasants. Their motivation is not greed, as it is for the crime bosses in Yojimbo, or the corporation in The Bad Sleep Well, but simple survival. Kurosawa underlines this in one of the films most famous sequences in which Mifune tries to make the other Samurai understand.

“What do you think of farmers? You think they're saints? Hah! They're foxy beasts! They say, "We've got no rice, we've no wheat. We've got nothing!" But they have! They have everything! Dig under the floors! Or search the barns! You'll find plenty! Beans, salt, rice, sake! Look in the valleys, they've got hidden warehouses! They pose as saints but are full of lies! If they smell a battle, they hunt the defeated! They're nothing but stingy, greedy, blubbering, foxy, and mean! God damn it all! But then who made them such beasts? You did! You samurai did it! You burn their villages! Destroy their farms! Steal their food! Force them to labour! Take their women! And kill them if they resist! So what should farmers do?”

In comparison it is easy for the Samurai to be good, they are if not in positions of wealth, positions of survival. The peasants are helpless. These two themes, the difficulty of compassion, and the moral superiority that a life of ease brings would come to full fruition in next two films.



High And Low, is the epoch of the compassionless world for Kurosawa. The antagonist is Kurosawa’s greatest monster. A beast with seemingly no feeling, one who preys on children, dispatches his confederates, and in the films most stunning sequence goes hunting in the Tokyo slums. The lackadaisical way he chooses his prey is one of the most coolly terrifying things that Kurosawa has ever filmed. Walking calmly to the slums his gaze goes from victim to victim finally choosing one at random. That there is not even the comfort of human malice in this scene, as there is in his crimes against Mifune, is the most terrifying thing of all. This is the end result of living a life without compassion Kurosawa argues, there’s no difference from person to person, because there’s no humanity in them. They’re all meat for the predator. The fact that the hunter is a doctor is just another little blood thirsty irony. As Richie says, “Unable to love, he finds pleasure- as he brags in the end- of hating.”

On the other side of the conflict is Mifune, a selfless compassionate man willing to ruin himself for the sake of others. It takes him a while to come to this decision but like in the Seven Samurai it is all the more moving for it, illustrating that compassion means more when it is earned.

At least textually. Like the Seven Samurai, High And Low is much more complex in practice then in summary. The latter half of the film takes us from the upper class comfort of Mifune’s domain and plunges us into the slums that the villain has been forced to inhabit.

The film then becomes what is possibly Kurosawa’s most Marxist film, posing the villain not as a raving sociopath but as the inevitable outcome of such conditions, and implicating Mifune, for his sins of omission rather then commission. True Mifune didn’t directly cause this, just as he did nothing to directly warrant the attack on his lively hood and family. But as a capitalist, Kurosawa argues that it is the blind eye he and others like him turned that allowed this to happen, and the doctor’s attack is just a case of “The chickens coming home to roost.” Even the police note, standing in the slums where the crime took place, that from here Mifune’s house seems to be taunting them.

By the end of the film and the doctor’s description of his life, Kurosawa has revealed a rather ingenious game he’s playing with the audience. The test of compassion in this film is not truly Mifune’s, we barely see him aside from glimpses caught in the reflection of safety glass. Instead Kurosawa has put us face to face with the doctor, and tells us the test is ours. Can we find the humanity in this monster, knowing everything he’s done can we feel compassion towards him?



It is in Red Beard that all these themes gather into one, in what I consider Kurosawa’s masterpiece. It is here that Kurosawa brings fully to the foreground “The terror of compassion.” Revealing compassion to be not a pat set of platitudes that the west portrays it as, but a conscience choice that must be lived everyday at the expense of one’s self. As put by Richie, one must live with a “Rage for good.” (Richie 175)

As in High And Low the position of the doctor is something of an ironic one. In High And Low it symbolized a predator rather then a healer, and in Red Beard’s protagonist is symbolizes selfishness rather then altruism. The young doctor who is the protagonist, is not in the medical profession to help people, but instead is interested in his own status, hoping to eventually work as the Shogunate’s doctor. When he is tricked into becoming an intern at Red Beard’s clinic, it’s something of a nightmare for him. As the servant for “the Mantis” confides “It’s terrible. The patients are slum people, they’re full of fleas, they smell bad, being here makes you wonder why you ever wanted to become a doctor.”


After a brush with death courtesy of said “Mantis” the young doctor opens up and begins to heed Red Beard’s teaching. Like High And Low, though much more explicit, this section of Red Beard has been all about the building up and destroying of pre conceived notions. Red Beard himself up to this point has been seen through the young interns eyes as a gruff bullying monster, with himself as a put upon victim, the encounter with The Mantis destroys these notions revealing the wise and good man who has been behind the gruff exterior, and leave the intern a waiting student. As Goodwin underlined, quoting Kurosawa “Red Beard is the prototype of the redeemer. With all my heart I want this kind of man to stand as an example”Through a series of vignettes and one key encounter with a patient revealing his life story, we come to understand Red Beard’s philosophy as succinctly described by Richie,


“…it is only by living for others that we can live at all. He and Red Beard… have discovered the same thing. They overcome the facts of life by negating them, by refusing to believe in them. With splendid stubbornness both men act as though good really exists in the world- and they create it.” Again Kurosawa sees with the evil that exists in this world and underlines what a struggle it is to overcome it. But this is not the end of the lesson indeed it has scarcely begun.

It is in the nursing back to health of the young girl that whom Red Beard has saved from the brothels, that Red Beard truly finds it’s heart. With the diligent help of Red Beard the young doctor, heals her, he himself falls ill and the girl nurses him back to health in what becomes the final stage of her recovery. It is in this Girl that we find the soul of the movie, and perhaps the soul of Kurosawa. As Richie puts it “She is very ill, physically, but more seriously she is spiritually near death.” The girl is like the villain in High and Low as a child. Someone so battered that she cannot bare to feel otherwise. It is this terror of compassion that is unbearable to her, she is so wounded that she cannot bear to feel she can feel otherwise. But as Richie says “The Bulwarks of Pride and Fear cannot stand the assault” By the time she breaks down in the market square, she has made the choice to allow herself to feel and be felt for. Here we find Kurosawa’s strongest argument that redemption is possible, and paradoxically it cannot be brought about without both the help of others, and the strength of the self. For all the power he gives evil, it to Kurosawa, “Simply the wrong choice made at the wrong time.”

It is a strangely Christian notion (or more specifically Franciscan notion) from the usually secular Kurosawa, we cannot find salvation in and of ourselves, we must help others and allow ourselves to be helped. We must hit bottom, admit our weakness and allow ourselves to be forgiven, when the characters in Red Beard weep (which they do often, and usually in recognition of their own weakness compared to Red Beard’s overwhelming good) it’s difficult not to have some Milton flit through the mind “Abashed the devil stood and felt how awful goodness is.” To those who are damaged there can be nothing more terrifying then kindness, or as Richie puts it “He has just learned something: that patience and fortitude are invincible. This is a knowledge that Mifune has with other Kurosawa heros.”

It should be noted that because of this secular feel, the Buddhist concept of compassion doesn’t help us much when Kurosawa is concerned. Religion is hardly ever given more then a passing mention, and when a character is defined by his religious status (say The Monk in Rashamon) it doesn’t give them any sort of high moral ground or deeper understanding of human nature. Let us remember that is the woodcutter, not the monk who takes responsibility for the infant at the end of the film. Unlike say Scorsese and Coppala who often use Catholism as a kind of paradise lost, a place of moral clarity, which is now unattainable for their protagonists, Kurosawa portrays his clergy as simply human, whether they be Christian or Buddhists. Its not exactly a critical view, but the message is clear salvation and damnation are the products of humans and humans alone, it comes not from above but from within.

More Tragedy follows, and more tragedy is endured, Red Beard culminates into the most powerful example I know of how to live compassionately. If in The Bad Sleep Well Kurosawa postulated that compassion was perhaps insane in the world we live in. Red Beard counters that it is any other way that holds insanity.

In the modern age a film as bracingly unironic as Red Beard, is a little hard to take. Like the wounded girl, it is our nature to be distrustful of those who present themselves without guile. The film could easily be dismissed as cloying an hokey (And indeed if there is a scene that goes after the heart strings with more unabashed. vigor then the little girl calling down for the well for her dying friend it doesn’t come to mind) if not for the primal simple power that it has. Richie puts it very well;

“We so firmly believe that “evil begets evil” that its contrary is quite dazzling. To consider such a proposition, in a cynical age, seems almost shameful.” (Richie 175)

“…Because this picture is the most open to misinterpretation of all Kurosawa’s works. It has already had more then its share. The director has been accused of making the most contrived tear-jerker since One Wonderful Sunday, of pushing do goodism past even the limit of The Quiet Duel; it has been said that Kurosawa’s famed humanism has been revealed as a weltering bathos into which even Ben Casey or The Interns would think twice before stepping. Dr. Toshiro Mifune and Doctor Lionel Barrymore have been equated. Kurosawa’s dilemma is rather similar to that of Dickens. Laconic realist though he is, he believes in good; but good is very difficult to dramatize. Difficult as it is, however, Dickens manages admirably in at least several novels. So does Griffith, a very Dickensian creator. In their best work, they affirm by refusing to sentimentalize and that is what also Kurosawa does in this picture.”

In the end I think that is this true bedrock belief, in the power of humans to be good, that has made these films of Kurosawa so dark. Kurosawa knows we have it in us to be good, and simply choose not to. I see these all films these films as his attempt to tell us that, sometimes gently sometimes with anger. You always expect more from the ones you love.

Summer Of Samurai: Kurosawa and Westerness

Kurosawa is often accused of being the most Western of the Japanese directors. At first sight this conventional wisdom seems correct, after all Kurosawa is often credited for rehumanizing the Japanese to the west post World War II. Kurosawa himself often re-enforced the view, causing a minor scandal when he named only a scant handful of Japanese films when asked to choose the best films of the last hundred years. However, the judgment of his style is based more on sins of omission then commission, best highlighted when compared to his contemparies. Goodwin underlines this when he states “Director’s Ozu and Mizoguchi are offered by Burch and other proponents of this argument as models of an ideal cultural autonomy.” Unlike Mizoguchi who consciously evoked Japanese scroll art in his compositions Kurosawa’s camera was free, gravitating more towards movement and montage then the more mise en scene oriented style of traditional Japanese cinema. Unlike Ozu whose stories and characters reflected and often hinged on the archetypically repressed emotions and desires that have come to define the Japanese mindset for many cineastes, Kurosawa’s character’s where all incredibly proactive, whether their desires where in the service of the state or themselves. In other words, if traditional Japanese cinema was about repression in both style and emotion, Kurosawa’s films where about expression.

On the other end of the spectrum Kurosawa’s films show a very Western reserve, when compared to the wild flagrant very Japanese style of the Japan’s post modern filmmakers. No matter how free his characters, or stylistic his compositions no one is ever going to confuse his films with the anarchic madness of Seijun Sezuki, Takeshi Kitano, Takeshi Miike or Kinji Fukusaku. In that sense it’s often difficult to define Kurosawa’s work in the context of Japanese film, his oeurve is neither fish nor fowl, as exemplifies neither the cinema of implication and reserve of the traditional Japanese cinema, nor the wild absurdist abandon of the future. It’s easier in the situation to label the work as Western, rather then have to define it using the strict rigors of its native country.

I believe that while Kurosawa’s style does have a distinctly Western flavor it is a mistake to assume, as many do that this means that he has an American flavor. Kurosawa’s popularity in America, and it’s influence on it’s filmmakers often causes this misconception, as did the mutual admiration between Kurosawa and John Ford (On a side note I’ve always thought the comparison spoke more to an Eastern influence in Ford. The signature shot of Ford that of small impermanent characters set before an immortal frame dominating landscape is also the signature image of Japanese Scroll Art. Ford’s other hallmark his exquisite use of ritual as expression has also long been a hallmark of the Japanese tradition).





However, when looking at the films shown in class, it’s strikes me just how European much of Kurosawa’s sensibility seemed.
After all, it was in Europe not America that Kurosawa made his first impact on the Western world. Rashamon won the Golden Lion in Venice a year before it received the Oscar in America. And while America did rework the concept of The Seven Samurai in The Maginificant Seven first, it was Sergio Leone who has able to transfer the whole of Yojimbo in the seminal Fistful Of Dollars.



This goes both ways Kurosawa’s technique is often extremely European. In No Regrets For Our Youth, during his heroines passion like suffering, Kurosawa fills the screen with her anguished face, in a way that is reminiscent of Dreyer. The iconography itself for the scene is decidedly Western, as the scenes of the young woman traveling to the rice fields burdened by her heavy bags, as it seems to be designed in a Christ like fashion (A lone tormented figure stumbling down a road bearing a heavy burden). Richie touches on the religious connotations of this in his study of the film, “…he makes it very clear that the girl’s going to the peasants is not motivated by political considerations, (she has no political considerations) but, rather, is something like personal salvation for her”

There are other European references in the movie, the characters discuss European authors, the heroine plays European chamber music, as well as having the characters enthralled by the Western ideals of feminism and democracy.

If anything No Regrets For Our Youth feels like a search for identity; for it’s heroine, the country it is set in, and for the filmmaker himself. As Dave Kehr notes in New York Times “Like at least two of his famous contemporaries, Ingmar Bergman in Sweden and Roberto Rossellini in Italy, Kurosawa was emerging from a youthful and perhaps forced enthusiasm for authoritarian rule”. While Kurosawa was a radical in his youth, it is true that most of the films that where made up until No Regrets For Our Youth, such as The Most Beautiful where militaristic and even the ones which where the might of the Japanese military was not textual display a strong sense of ethnocentrism, such as The Man Who Tread On The Tigers Tail, and perhaps most notably in Sanshiro Sugata II which centers around the Eponymous character defeating a Western “boxer”. The unrooted feeling of No Regrets works perfectly in the context, when the school of thought that one has devoted themselves to fails so spectacularly it is only natural to gravitate towards another, and more then natural for the artist to perhaps feel a bit off base when expressing it. It is worth noting that the heroine of the film does discover the new identity she seeks, as Goodwin notes “By the conclusion, beauty has become redefined for Yukie as a matter of ethics rather then aesthetics, Her discovery of a personal code of action, independent of society’s dictates,” (Goodwin 48)



Stray Dog also caries a distinctly European flavor. While it has roots in the American traditions of Film Noir and The Western, the most direct Antecedent for it that I can find is that of Italian Neo Realism, particularly Rossellini’s brand as seen in Rome Open City and Germany Year Zero. Richie compares the film to De Sica (Richie 58) noting the similar structure to Bicycle Thieves (A pause for a small irony, Kurosawa adds more “Catholic Guilt” to the proceedings then the Italian DeSica by making the missing object cause active damage).

While not painted with the viciousness that Fukusaku would later use, or the Boschian squalor of Sezuki, the postwar streets are painted in a deadpan realistic style, taking in the poverty and desperation without comment. More so then any of the character’s the milieu itself is the focus of the film. Particularly in the justly acclaimed ten minute montage of the Tokyo Streets. As Chris Fujiwara states in his essay on the film for Criterion “Stray Dog is above all a film about atmosphere…Through the constant unfurling of interposed surfaces (multiple superimposed images, the strips of mesh and garlands down which the camera cranes at the Wellesian Blue Bird club), Kurosawa evokes a world in perpetual motion. But by dwelling so fixedly and at such length on their labyrinthine interplay, Kurosawa implies that for all its dazzling contrasts, this world, like Murakami, is stuck…Look again at the long undercover sequence: the sheer number of anonymous subjects who cross the camera’s vision is bewildering.”

The idea of the criminal in Stray Dog and it’s sister film High And Low is also unique, and brings to mind the recent films of David Cronenberg, one not usually thought to have much in common with Kurosawa. The criminals in these two pairs of films, feature filmmakers who seem to be wholly disinterested in the actual mechanics of crime, the conspicuous consumption, and step by step law breaking that filmmakers as diverse as Raoul Walsh, Martin Scorsese, and Brian DePalma have used to express the life of crime. Instead Kurosawa and Cronenberg are interested in what happens to the individual who is forced to spend his time in a constant state of transgression. Both come to the conclusion that crime causes a break within the self leading to irreprible harm. The ability of the criminal to find redemption in the spiritual if not the physical seen from Dostoyevsky to High Sierra is rejected. Instead the identity of the criminal is lost even to himself, externally in Cronenberg, and internally for Kurosawa, who as Goodwin notes finds himself reduced an defined at the end of his journey only by “worhthlessness and slaughterous rage”



To move from issues of style to Philosophy, Ikiru also demonstrates a European influence this time through western brand existentialism. The films conception of existentialism is somewhat more sunny then the usual European brand focusing on how an individual can create meaning in a meaningless world by focusing on what they wish to achieve. Or as Richie Puts it “Existence is enough. But the art of simple existence is one of the most difficult to master.” (Richie 86) Taken in relation with Japanese society the idea takes on a subversive tone. The Japanese mindset, from feudal times to World War II stressed the idea of individual sacrifice to the greater good. Even today the stereotype persists as the familiar image of the Japanese office drone. However, in Ikiru the only way Wantanabe is able to serve the greater good is through the subversion of the system that is supposed to serve it. The film posits that Wantanabe has been sacrificing himself to the greater good, and has accomplished nothing. Paradoxically he must serve himself to serve others. Ikiru is arguably Kurosawa’s strongest argument for individualism.



Seven Samurai on the other hand pulls the neat trick of being both traditional and non traditional. On the surface, given it’s massive crossover appeal this seems to be exhibit A for those who argue Kurosawa’s westerness, but it’s Geneology is in truth much more mixed, Richie for example compares it to a 1930’s Soviet Epic.

It’s story, though well constructed and it’s style, though dynamic, could fit in with any traditional piece of jidekiri. It’s the tone that radicalizes it and it’s focus once again on the individuals in the group. By dropping the number of characters we are allowed to get to know each of the Samurai intimately, and thus are not allowed to revel in their glorious deaths the way we might in a less sympathetic bit of jidekiri such as the 47 Ronin. Ebert sums up the difference well

“Two of the movie's significant subplots deal with rebellion against social tradition. Kikuchiyo, the high-spirited samurai played by Toshiro Mifune as a rambunctious showoff, was not born a samurai but has jumped caste to become one. And there is a forbidden romance between the samurai Katsushiro (Isao Kimura) and a village girl (ironically, the very daughter whose father was so worried). They love each other, but a farmer's daughter cannot dream of marrying a ronin; when they are found together on the eve of the final battle, however, there are arguments in the village to "understand the young people,'' and an appeal to romance--an appeal designed for modern audiences and unlikely to have carried much weight in the 1600s when the movie is set. Kurosawa was considered the most Western of great Japanese directors (too Western, some of his Japanese critics sniffed). "The Seven Samurai" represents a great divide in his work; most of his earlier films, Jeck observes, subscribe to the Japanese virtues of teamwork, fitting in, going along, conforming. All his later films are about misfits, noncomformists and rebels.”

And Again

“The samurai who fell in love with the local girl is used significantly in the composition of the final shots. First he is seen with his colleagues. Then with the girl. Then in an uncommitted place not with the samurai, but somehow of them. Here you can see two genres at war: The samurai movie and the Western with which Kurosawa was quite familiar. Should the hero get the girl? Japanese audiences in 1954 would have said no. Kurosawa spent the next 40 years arguing against the theory that the individual should be the instrument of society.”

However, it is my belief that the synthesis of East and West in Kurosawa’s style is best seen in Throne Of Blood. On the surface it would appear to be most Western of his films. It is after all based the work the Shakespeare the epitome of Western literature. Yet from the very beginning Kurosawa let’s his Eastern style be known, rooting the adaption of the play in the tradition of Noh theater through the opening chant (Goodwin also notes on page 176 that the opening sequence also intentionally incorporates the Japanese concept of Ku, or empty space, and the Buddist teaching of mujokan, or the fleetingness of life) The Spirit delivers his prophecy in Haiku, Mifune and his Wife’s performance echo Kabuki in both make up and style. Kurosawa takes the West and makes it his own. As Kurosawa cited by Richie this was not merely stylistic flourish but an attempt to use the language of Noh, with it’s spirits and symbolism, to make a very Western drama comprehensible to a Japanese audience. A True synthesis, the story of the West told in the language of the East.

In the end I believe this is truly how Kurosawa is Western. He is not so much a Western director as a director who knows how to use Western concepts as an alternate angle with which to shine light on his own countries’ soul.

Summer Of Samurai: Kurosawa and Post Modernism

And now for something completely different. I've decided to "close off" Summer Of Samurai (I say close off in quotes as there is definitely going to be a September Of Samurai as I haven't covered half of the films I hoped to) with a three essays on Kurosawa I wrote in my last year as a student. The Essays are obviously the work of a student, and are about as earnest as they get. And a bit pretentious as well (Partially me partially the academic setting).

But I feel like sharing them anyway, both because I think that there's some genuine insight here, and also because I'm curious the response my writing that's a bit less conversational will get. Writing in other words where I am not dropping the F Bomb every other word, and the grammar is actually correct.

Crazy I know.

But lets give it a shot.





I’m afraid I can’t quite accept Kurosawa as a post modernist. The core theme running through his films is that of responsibility, to ourselves and others. Something I find lacking in post modernist thought. To quote Paul Schrader in his illustration of the difference between Post Modern film and Modern film (Or as he phrases it between Existential film and Ironic film.) “The existential dilemma is, 'should I live?' And the ironic answer is, 'does it matter?' Everything in the ironic world has quotation marks around it You don't actually kill somebody; you 'kill' them. It doesn't really matter if you put the baby in front of the runaway car because it's only a 'baby' and it's only a 'car'." (

In Kurosawa it is never just a “baby” or just a “car”. Things matter in Kurosawa film, it is more then simple play. That said, I concede that looking at Kurosawa, through a postmodernist lens, particularly that of Baudrillard’s, can add some very interesting shading’s to Kurosawa’s work. Following this logic, let us begin with Kagemusha, the film of Kurosawa’s I find most open to the Post Modernist eye.

It is tempting to look at Kagemusha as pastiche, after all it had been fifteen years since he had made a jidai-jeki with Red Beard, and at least seventeen years since he had made a Samurai film with Sanjuro. This partnered along with it’s making, could give rise to the idea that the American’s where simply buying themselves a “real” Samurai film, a Simulacrum Samurai if you will. However, I cannot read Kagemusha as such. It is too mournful, too contemplative, too impressionistic, and too mindful of the violence it creates to equate with Kurosawa’s earlier films. If anything it is a piece of Intertextual cinema examining itself. In other words rather then the pastiche of the Post Modernist, I feel that Kurosawa has created the Revisionist film of the Modernist. (It is interesting to note that Richie appears to disagree, but almost subconsciously he notes, “that it proved to be such a richly engrossing experience, such a Kurosawa-like entertainment,”

Still the central drama of Kagemusha does fit nicely with Baudrillard’s concept of the Simulacrum. The men in the field, and the warlord’s enemies do not know that their enemy is truly dead, because his signifier remains. As Baudrillard puts it in The Precession Of The Real “The Disneyland imagery is neither true nor false, it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp.” The fact that the signifier is a false one doesn’t matter, it has the same affect as a true one as Baudrillard says in Precession of the Simulacrum “We require a visible past, a visible continuum, a visible myth of origin, which reassures us about our end.” , even though the signified is no longer present, it simply makes no difference.

However, Kagemusha goes even farther, as Baudrillard and his predecessor Saussure argue it is only through a “web of meaning” that the signifier is defined. The Thief cannot merely proclaim himself to be the king, and have any affect it is only when the lords and generals decide to play along that the deception is successful. And it is only when one crucial strand of the web decides not to play along that the carefully crafted “reality” of the signifier falls apart. By the end of the film, both the signifier and the signified have been destroyed; reality has ended because of the general consensus to end it.

At the end of Kagemusha “The Thief” is gone. He has played so much time playing the signifier of another thing, that he cannot go back to being the signifier for himself. He has forgotten how, which brings to mind Baudrillard’s statement in The Perfect Crime, “The image can no longer imagine the real since it is the real. It can no longer dream reality since it is virtual reality. From screen to screen, the image has no other destiny but the image.” The Thief has no other recourse, but to fulfill the “destiny” that does not truly belong to him. Even though he is no longer seen by other’s as the emperor, and indeed never has been, he has come to believe his own Simulcra, and thus must end fulfill it to its last fatalistic step. Or as Bauldrillard puts it in Precession Of The Simulacrum, “Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.”

High and Low, seems to fit deceptively well in into the Post Modern interpretation. Kurosawa makes a very schematic film, one half art film focusing on one man the rest a sprawling “policier” which covers great swatches of Tokyo, along with a title that practically dares you to make a clever observation. However, structural issues aside High and Low has always been Kurosawa’s most Marxist film. With it’s villain rising up as an avenger of the underclass, and it’s hero subtly indicted as part of the problem as a “good” and ignorant bourgeois.

In short it is in a way the flipside of Kagemusha, which I see as a Modernist examination of Post Modern issues, High And Low is in turn a post modern view on a modernist issues, for which we must call in Jameson.

It is perhaps odd just how many of High and Low’s Concepts correspond to Jameson, in a textual way, when Jameson speaks of Lynch’s Mapless city, “space in which people are unable to map (in their minds) either their own positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves” (Jameson 89) It is easy to remember that Kurosawa’s character’s spend about 1/3 of the film traversing urban sprawl begging a child to give them their bearings. Or the central image of the house itself or as Jameson might say “the "semiautonomy of the cultural realm: “ts ghostly, yet Utopian, existence, for good or ill, above the practical world of the existent, whose mirror image it throws back in forms which vary from the legitimations of flattering resemblance to the contestatory indictments of critical satire or Utopian pain.”

Still it is in the end of High And Low that I find what is perhaps the central metaphor to this little argument. Many have argued that High And Low was Kurosawa’s response to the rise of the nouvelle vague like Seizuiki and Fukusaku, proof that he could play their game. If we do except that this is so, then it behooves us to examine what happens in the last scene.

There’s Mifune, the consummate modernist, the one who wishes to make good shoes for people, tied in other words to both the signified and signifiers and then there’s the doctor, who hunts without pity or remorse among the anonymous. The Post Modernist of the pair has taken everything from Mifune, his status, his safety, his wealth, but at the end of the picture there is Mifune stoic and unbowed, and there is the Doctor, his stylistic howlings, echoing in the empty space he has created.

Summer Of Samurai: Lone Wolf And Cub Baby Cart At Hades

Lone Wolf And Cub Baby Cart To Hades is a showcase for the details that make The Lone Wolf And Cub saga different from the average samurai film, or for that matter just about any action saga ever made. It all comes down to one key scene. Itto decides to save a girl who has been sold into service at a brothel, surrounded by the brothel’s hired thugs, we fully expect him, and indeed just about anyone else in his situation to get to short work making brothel guard mincemeat. After all, we’ve seen him make ground beef out of much larger crowds before.

Instead Itto elects to take the girl’s “Penalty” which involves him being tied up side down and having the holy fuck beat out of him with sticks. Why did he do that when he could have easily destroyed the other guards? To prove a point. What point is that? I don’t know because I’m not as crazy and tough as Ogami Itto.

Meet Ogami Itto, the world’s first existential action hero.

In Baby Cart To Hades Itto takes on an assignment to assassinate a corrupt magistrate, in exchange for the life of a prostitute he liberated. Along the way we meet the first person that Itto elected to not kill, despite given ample opportunity and cause. This “true samurais” story runs parallel to Itto as he deals with slightly more pressing matters, like the army that is trying to kill him.

He keeps doing things like that throughout the film, things that are not to buy into the stereotype here, but inscrutable. Whether its meeting with a rival warlord, just so the poor bastard can realize that Itto has been hired to murder him, to allowing his infant son to be “saved” by an assassin so Itto can butcher him in one of his most brutal killings, Itto keeps doing things for seemingly no other reason then his own personal satisfaction.

Lone Wolf And Cub Baby Cart To Hades has some of the series best action beats as well as its best character moments. Including the infamous scene in which Itto takes on an entire Lord Of The Rings sized army wielding every type of martial arts weaponry you’ve seen used in a movie (Insert nostalgic wax about the marvels of pre CGI filmmaking here). As the trailer for Lightning Sword’s Of Death so righteously put it, “They threw an army at him and he threw it back. One piece at a time.”

The only thing that keeps me from calling Baby Cart To Hades the series best are two ugly protracted rape scenes, both of which pass beyond their mere narrative function and sail uncomfortably far into the land of exploitive. I can’t in good conscience give the movie an unqualified recommendation with those two scenes in place.

Which is a shame because otherwise the movie is a whole mess of fun. If you keep your hand on the fast forward button, its more then worth seeing.

Summer Of Samurai: Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo

Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo promises an epic Kaiju battle between two of Japan’s greatest action heroes. Like many films that make such great promises it’s only partially kept. Zatoichi finds a town corrupted by gang warfare and as in most town’s corrupted by gang warfare Yojimbo is waiting in the wings. Though the two are originally pitted against each other they eventually find that their mutual love of kicking yards of ass can overcome whatever personal differences they might have.

While Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo is certainly a fun watch, it gets bogged down in the repetitive and overly convoluted nature of the plots that plague the Zatoichi films. A much bigger problem is that Mifune is not playing anywhere near the top of his game. I mentioned in my review of Red Sun that he seemed to be coasting. Well his turn in Zatoichi makes his turn in Red Sun look like his performance in High And Low. Now granted, what he is coasting on is one of the most charismatic, compelling persona’s in the history of cinema. Like Robert Mitchum there is no such thing as an unenjoyable Toshiro Mifune role, which is not to say it there is no such thing as a bad one.

Still its just disappointing that his return to the character is so meager, particularly given that his agreeing to reprise the character reportedly let to the final cracking of his strained relationship with Kurosawa.

His Yojimbo isn’t the uber proficient amoral sociopath from the original. Not even the gruff, crafty, paternalist from Sanjuro. Instead he plays him so he’s nearly buffoonish, a charismatic drunk whose good with a sword and has veins of badassery woven through. True in the end he does tap into the disdain that powers Yojimbo to greater effect and he’s as ruthless with a sword as ever. But then comes a plot twist at the end that can only be described as a heap of bullshit. On the whole, It’s hard to tell why the film is named Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo, when it could have just as easily been called Zatoichi Meets Toshiro Mifune.

Like all Zatoichi films the climax is a hell of a show stopper (particularly grim after such a light in tone film), the productions values are excellent, as is the fight choreography and Shintaro Katsu remains that rare commodity, a man likable enough to conceivably build a 30 film series around. Unfortunately this time all that standard issue carries with it a whiff of missed opportunity. Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo is no better or worse then any of the other Zatoichi films, but given the materials and potential that can’t help but feel like something of a failure this time out.

Summer Of Samurai: Red Sun

There’s a category of film that I like to refer to as “Wallace Beery Wrestling Pictures”. These films do not belong to any one genre or era, but are simply films whose appeal is so self evident that writing about them is simply beside the point. Event the films themselves are somewhat beside the point. No matter how far they fall from meeting their potential, no matter how truly dreadful they are The Wallace Beery Wrestling Picture will never be able to escape that one bit of perfection inherent in their concept or casting.

Red Sun might be the king of The Wallace Beery Wrestling Pictures. Born of the brief “West meets East” craze that swept the seventies, a movement that resulted in films like the Lo Lieh/Van Cleef pairing The Stranger And The Gunfighter, and Eli Wallach’s Samurai (No Really. Look it up. Sergio Corbucci made it. I know right?) Red Son is a Buddy film starring Charles Bronson and Toshiro Mifune, two of the most charismatic action stars to ever appear in a film., that’s a tantalizing cast before one factors in Ursalla Andress (Nigh incomprehensible) and Alain Delon as the bad guy. It combines The Western and The Samurai film, two disreputable genres that blend surprisingly well together. No its not some beautiful dream.

Mifune plays the body guard of a Japanese diplomat traveling through the American West. The diplomat’s train is robbed by Bronson and crew, only to have Delon double cross Bronsan and leave him for dead. Mifune and Bronsan team up together to take their revenge on Delon and things start to get pretty great.

That the film plays broad almost goes without saying. Bronson was at that point in his career where he’s pretty obviously coasting comfortably. Mifune’s character on the other hand trips over the line of mystic orientalism a time too often, sleeping while he walks, and disappearing and reappearing at will in the frame like he’s Cain from Kung Fu. In all fairness though, the film does seem at least partially aware of this, usually playing it for laughs with Mifune having the upper hand. Like the bit where Mifune continually demonstrates his Judo to an increasingly haggard Bronson. And the chummy and seemingly genuine interplay between Bronson and Mifune, keeps the film from staggering over the line of offensive.

The action scenes are directed with economy and creativity, particularly a shoot out in a whore house that demonstrates such great efficiency that its over almost before it begins. I’m willing to attribute most of this to Terrence Young. The director behind some of the best Connery Bonds, Wait Until Dark, and the bizarre The Klansmen. Oh and also Inchon, but lets not hold that against him. On the whole a more competent director then you expect to find on this type of film.

The film’s not perfect. Its low budget to the point of being minimalistic, and there’s really no damn reason it should last just a hairsbreadth under two hours. Particularly when there’s so much filler so readily evident.

Still its hard to be too hard on Red Sun especially as its one of those movies that is exactly what it appears to be. There’s little in the film but people being impossibly charismatic, but sometimes that’s enough. It’s a solid little B movie that takes its concept and runs with it. I suppose it is possible that there is someone out there with a soul so dead that they are not intriugued by the idea of a Charles Bronson, Toshiro Mifune buddy picture, in which they take on Alan Delon. But it is not I.

(Unsurprisingly some awesome posters were put together for a film with this irrestiple of a concept. Thought I'd share a few I came across. )

Summer Of Samurai: Lone Wolf And Cub Baby Cart At The River Styx

Any series that runs long enough, often ends up being judged not by the new things it does, but how well it does the same old things. While improvisation and innovation are always rewarded, I’d be lying if I said I watched The Lone Wolf And Cub films for their graceful plotting and keen eye for character.

This is all a very round about way of saying that though I consider the second Lone Wolf And Cub, Baby Cart At The River Styx to be the best of the series, I’m harder pressed then usual to tell you why.

To be sure Baby Cart At The River Styx features all the usual pleasures of The Lone Wolf And Cub series. Magnetic performances from its two principles, an audacious and at times frankly beautiful shooting style, creatively choreographed yet beautiful fights and shots and imagery with such a strange hallucinogenic feel to them that they break the genre mold and often seem closer to the likes of Jodorowsky (Witness the blood pooling from beneath the sand in the foiling of a desert ambush). So is it enough to say that Baby Cart At The River Styx is a “better” film than the rest for no other reason then it hits its marks abnormally well? Perhaps its cynical but yes. Baby Cart At The River Styx may just be going through the paces, but you’d never tell. And if you only make time in your life for one Lone Wolf And Cub Movie (Poor fool) make it this one.

Baby Cart At The River Styx begins with the attention grabbing image of Ogami Itto chopping a man’s head in half length wise. The poor bastard manages to tell Itto that an army of assassins are coming to kill him and his son, of which he is merely the first.

(Ogami Itto Don't Fuck Around. When You Absolutely Have To Kill Every Mother Fucker In The Room... Accept No Substitutes.)

The Uber Stoic Itto responds with his usual amount of alarm, which is to say, he promptly goes and gets himself hired by a dye maker.

It turns out said dye maker’s monopoly is threatened. So Itto does exactly what you or I would do when faced with a threat to a monopoly on dye. Namely he kills just about everything that ever walked or crawled. All while fending off assassins and melting the cold heart of the woman sent to kill him.

The Film features some of the series most colorful assassins. Which is saying something. Including, An army of monks three master killers who will look awfully familiar to any fans of Big Trouble In Little China and a team of female ninja’s who cut the limbs and latex face off of a poor bastard ronin, in order to show their chops (wah-wah-wwaaaaahhhh) in one of the film’s most unbelievably gaudy sequences.

Of course the film features many unbelievably gaudy sequences, parts that would be the highlights of lesser films, including a disorienting bit at a carnival in which a series of brightly colored acrobats come for Itto. An action scene aboard a burning ship that’s just freaking impressive. And the aforementioned desert climax that has a real and strange beauty to it.

Summer Of Samurai: Rurouni Kenshin Season 2

Out of the countless amount of Samurai anime that has been produced Rurouni Kenshin remains the most popular (Its title recently challenged by Samurai Champloo).

The first season of Kenshin was an unremarkable but fun action anime. The second season upped the stakes considerably, producing a run remarkable not for doing things differently, as much as doing them so awfully well. (It also produced a third series which was neither remarkable nor fun, but we won’t talk about that.)

The logline of the show wouldn’t be out of place in a Clint Eastwood Western (and indeed, hasn’t been) Kenshin once a ruthless killer has settled into an idealized domesticity as he does what he can to help with the modernization of Japan through its fragile Meji government. Interrupted on a weekly basis by ruthless young killers trying to make their name killing the last of the old guard, and old rivals from the days of the revolution intent on settling their final score. After some hesitancy Kenshin breaks out his reverse blade sword, reveals some heretofore unknown technique and then imparts a valuable lesson about honor, or mercy, or good dental hygiene. Its an effective formula and one can hardly blame the makers of Kenshin for sticking with it for nearly thirty episodes.

The second season hits the ground running with a mini arc so good I had to consider reviewing it independently. It works more like a film, then just a series of TV shows, and indeed much better then the show’s disappointing film itself.

An old rival from the days of the revolution returns to stir up trouble. Which lets face it, is nothing new. But the way he breaks down in a matter of minutes the hero to which we’ve grown accustomed to, revealing the hardened core of the killer within, is not.

I highly recommend that any who are curious from this review but reluctant to give a 90+ episode show their time, at least check out these five episodes. Like all good movies based on existing source material, it both sums up the appeal and narrative of what it adapt, and then builds on it. Both exemplifying and improvising.

From the opening scenes clever direction is used to cover cheap animation (new anime fans might be surprised by just how fluid even the most budget modern anime is, when compared to those of the pre CGI era). Take a look at the opening scene, which uses imagery shocking both in its content and expressionistic compostion to disguise the fact that not much is “moving” in it. We cut from the Blood Sprayed face of Saito to the kill of his young apprentice, silhouetted against a blood soaked moon. We pan from the move to the blade to the young boys face, and only then do we move from what is obvious a still to actual (minimal) animation as the boy coughs up blood.

Creativity will always trump limitations in any medium, and this particular arc is a virtual showcase for it.


The second season improved things via consolidation giving the show a master plot, as well as an improved rogue’s gallery, and a big bad who manages to feel like a genuine threat. Another assassin from the old days of the revolution has built a team of assassins and is formenting a revolution whose greatest motivator is spite. It’s a great inversion of the series, Kenshin’s a homebody? Send him on the road. Trying to aid modernization? Give him a villain locked in the past.



It’s a pretty damn good villain too. Charasmatic visually striking, cold and deadly, but with a wicked sense of humor, Shishio’s wallet says bad mother fucker on it. An assassin betrayed and burned and left for dead by the powers that be in the waining days of the revolution. Like in all the best pulp fiction the villains (and I don’t know if there has ever been a better rogues gallery assembled in anime before) he serve as dark reflections of the hero. Both physically and spiritually the worst case scenario for what Kenshin could become.

Even more perversely in terms of the form is Shishio’s cheerful apprentice who kills with an innocent smile on his face. A young killer formed by abuse.

If Shishio is a twisted reflection of what Kenshin was, Sojiro is a reflection of what Kenshin is. Someone who has found serenity not in a new form of morality, but by embracing immorality so thoroughly it has eradicated all that niggling human doubt.

Kenshin’s not perfect. Its melodramatic, paced in the strange (ie Budget effective) “Lets stare at eachother for ten minutes” style so commonly found in anime of the era, and to the modern eye the animation will look almost amateurish.

Still I can’t help but like this show a whole lot. Call it nostalgia but the second season of Kenshin is revisionist in the best way. Not merely tearing down legends that the creators fancy themselves above. But asking genuine questions about what it is that makes these legends work in the first place.

Summer Of Samurai: Ninja Scroll

Ninja Scroll remains a deeply fucked up movie. A fact that I find almost heart warming. As I get older and older I find that shock value alone no longer has much appeal to me in and of itself. When I hear about something like Bad Biology I don’t rush out to see it the way I know I would have if I was seventeen. So it was with a feeling of Nostalgia that I found oddly heartwarming that as I watched Ninja Scroll I could only think “God these people are sick and I hope they never get well.”

Ninja Scroll was one of the first anime to cross over as “anime”. While it never had the mainstream name recognition that Akira and Ghost In The Shell had, for fans of the form before it crossed over, Ninja Scroll was just as important a touchstone. A gateway title that far from being watered down delivered all the transgressive kick that anime was capable of giving in one shot gun blast.

No matter how “safe” and mainstream anime gets, Ninja Scroll will always carries that enticing whiff of the forbidden and the depraved. What everyone with a negative bias view towards anime told you anime was, Ninja Scroll actually was. Filled with lovingly rendered ultra violence, and even more lovingly rendered sexual perversion, Ninja Scroll remains the work of the deeply fucked up.

Ninja Scroll follows the wandering Samurai Jubei, who is pressed into service by a shady monk to take on “The Eight Devil’s Of Kimon” a group of demonically powered super Ninja, led by an immortal asshole who Jubei previously “killed” in a non quickening inspired decapitation. Part of the movie’s enduring charm is thanks to how Jubei is played. He’s written to have a “Kurt Russel in a John Carpenter movie” attitude to the ongoing. Getting through the challenges of the supernatural with a wry sense of detachment, occasionally feigned incompetence, and legitimately badassery.

They are joined by Kaigero, a female ninja, whose graphically depicted molestation, at the hands of the Rock Gobbler from The Never Ending Story can only be described as “Deeply unsettling”.

They spend the rest of the film battling the eight devils in some jaw droppingly beautiful, ingeniously choreographed, surpassingly brutal duels, that have earned the film’s legendary status among Eastern Action fans. Its basically the apex of the certain kind of villain gimmick based action filmmaking that dominated in the eighties and early nineties.

And yet even these fights are not free of the faint air of “Ick”. There’s a weird unhealthily erotic feel to almost all the fights. Almost all of the villains explicitly get sexual pleasure from their violence. Snakes come out of vaginas, everyone is feeling rapey, there’s weird orgasmic “I’m being electrocuted” screams. It’s all very John Waters. In all fairness this does give the action a more intense feeling then the usual “Fire Hose O’ Blood” anime violence. But it may also inspire the need to take a shower.

Ninja Scroll is a joyously unhinged freakfest of a movie. That might not be an endorsement from some. But it certainly is from me.

(PS. I'm heading down to the ole Whales Vagina this weekend (San Diego) so there won't be any posting until Monday. Have a good weekend all)