Harakiri

一Saitō’s Account

Saitō tells it as a procedural, and on its own terms it is a good one. Motome Chijiiwa (Akira Ishihama) came to the gate with the request Hanshirō has just made, and the Ii retainers argued about him. One blamed the fashion for bluffed suicides on the Sengoku clan, which had hired a rōnin who sincerely offered to disembowel himself at its gate and so invited imitators. Another defended the Sengoku. Tango Inaba (Masao Mishima) proposed what other houses did: give the young man some money and send him away. Hikokurō Omodaka (Tetsurō Tanba) objected and pressed Saitō to make Motome go through with it.

They did, with a thoroughness that is the real horror of the sequence. Umenosuke Kawabe (Yoshirō Aoki) of the mounted guard had Motome bathed and dressed in new robes, on the pretense that the young lord might receive him, then told him to change into his death robes. Motome asked for a day or two and promised to come back. He was refused: he had given his word as a samurai. If he ran, the swordsman Hayato Yazaki (Ichirō Nakatani) would cut him down. Then someone looked at his swords. Both blades, long and short, were bamboo.

Motome would die by the blade he had brought.44The word for a sword blade made of bamboo, 竹光, is read takemitsu, the same reading as the composer’s surname, 武満. Once you know that, the music credit reads differently. The ceremony was moved from the forecourt to the inner courtyard, and the whole household was ordered to watch. Omodaka, serving as second, announced that he would observe the old form and withhold the killing stroke until Motome had cut his belly open crosswise.55The kaishakunin, or second, beheaded the person performing seppuku to cut the suffering short, and was usually a relative or friend. Omodaka is neither, and he concedes that the second now strikes as soon as the man reaches for the blade.

Motome could not cut with bamboo. He braced the hilt against the ground, drove the blade in with his own weight and begged to be struck. Omodaka held off, on purpose, until Motome had bitten off his own tongue. Only then did the sword come down.

More than a minute of screen time separates Motome’s cry to be struck from the stroke. Some Japanese critics at the time objected to the cruelty, and the film was a hit at home regardless.66Yukio Mishima admired the film. In an essay on cruel beauty (Eiga Geijutsu, August 1963) he argued that audiences would find a noble beauty in its seppuku whatever the director’s humanist intentions.

What makes the scene unbearable is how correct everybody is. The Ii take Motome at his word and use the forms he invoked to torture him. The bamboo blade is the film’s first great image of its subject: something that passes for a sword at a respectable distance and has no edge at all. To the Ii it proves that Motome never meant it. By the end, the same description, a thing that looks like honor and cannot cut, will fit them.

二Hanshirō’s Account

Saitō’s account is fluent and complete except for one question. Nobody in it asks why Motome wanted a day or two.

Hanshirō hears it out and says he still means to die; his own sword, he points out, is not bamboo, and he declines the death robes. Saitō has assigned a retainer named Ichirō Shinmen as his second, but Hanshirō asks for Hikokurō Omodaka, who turns out to have sent a note pleading illness. While a messenger goes to him, Hanshirō asks leave to tell a story of his own.

Saitō repeats the line back to him. On a first viewing it sounds like a proverb. It is a threat with very good manners.

From there Hashimoto runs two clocks at once. In the past, Hanshirō admits that Motome was known to him and goes back eleven years, to when Motome was fifteen and Hanshirō’s daughter, Miho (Shima Iwashita), was eleven. In the present, the messenger returns: Omodaka has a high fever and pain in every joint. Hanshirō names Hayato Yazaki instead, absent for days and unwell, then Umenosuke Kawabe, also indisposed. Moments later the Ii officials themselves lay out who did what in January. Omodaka insisted on the seppuku, Yazaki found the blades were bamboo and insisted they be used, and Kawabe agreed. The three men Hanshirō asked for are the three who did it, and not one of them has come to work.

When Saitō orders Shinmen to serve after all, Hanshirō calls off his harakiri, Saitō calls him an extortionist, and the retainers close in. Hanshirō says he will fight to the death if he must, then asks for something better than a reprieve and gets it: Saitō’s word as a samurai that he will hear the rest of the story first. That word is the currency the Ii spent on Motome, who was refused a day because he had given his. Now Saitō has given his own, and he has to sit and listen.

The second telling covers what the first could not see. In 1619 the shogunate, citing repairs to Hiroshima Castle, broke the Fukushima house, and some twelve thousand retainers lost their living.77Historically, Masanori Fukushima lost his Aki and Bingo domain, about 498,000 koku, in 1619 after repairing flood damage to Hiroshima Castle without formal shogunal approval. He was reduced to about 45,000 koku in Shinano and Echigo, and died in 1624. Motome’s father, Jinnai (Yoshio Inaba), cut his belly ahead of Masakatsu Fukushima (Kei Satō), the official in charge of the castle repairs, to go with him in death. His farewell letter begged Hanshirō not to follow and put fifteen-year-old Motome in his care. Hanshirō swore to look after him.

Then the Edo years: a back-alley tenement, piecework, Motome teaching the Chinese classics to a handful of children. Hanshirō refused to profit from his daughter by sending her to a lord as a concubine. When Miho was eighteen he asked a reluctant Motome to marry her, knowing the two loved each other, and in time there was a son, Kingo.

Then the slide. Miho coughs blood. Motome finds no laboring work, and a pawnshop sign turns up in the frame. Early in the new year, with the plum trees in blossom, Kingo comes down with a burning fever and there is no money for a doctor. Motome says he will borrow from a moneylender and be home by evening, and goes to the Ii instead. At around nine that night Omodaka, Yazaki and Kawabe bring his body home, mock the way he died, and show Hanshirō the bamboo blades for the record. Only then does Hanshirō understand that Motome had sold his steel for Miho’s sake, and over the body he weeps at having clung to his own. Kingo dies two days later, Miho three days after him.

Nothing in the second telling contradicts the first; everything Saitō described happened. What changes is what counts as evidence. In his version the bamboo blade proves a fraud; in Hanshirō’s it proves a coughing wife and a feverish child. Hashimoto’s real coup is the order. By giving power the first word, he lets us agree with it, and the rest of the film makes us pay for having agreed. When Hanshirō asks why nobody in the house wondered what the day or two was for, Saitō answers that Motome reaped what he had sown.

三The Topknots

The argument ends where it has to. Samurai honor, Hanshirō says, is only a facade. Saitō replies that for the House of Ii it is nothing of the kind. Hanshirō offers a last way out: had the house given him a single word admitting it had gone too far, he could have taken it to Motome as a gift. Saitō refuses. Sentiment, he says, does not move the world.

So Hanshirō reaches into his kimono, brings out the topknots, each tagged with a name, and throws them onto the white sand as property of this house.

He took Yazaki’s six days ago and Kawabe’s five days ago, on the eighth of May. Japanese synopses describe both men caught off guard, each losing his topknot to a single stroke, and Hanshirō is careful to say that he took their topknots, not their lives. Omodaka could not be surprised. He came to Hanshirō’s tenement himself and challenged him to a formal duel at Gojiin-ga-hara, an open field in Edo.

This is the most exact revenge I know of in a samurai film. To lose your topknot, Hanshirō tells them, is as good as losing your head; the film treats it as a samurai’s identity made visible. He takes no lives. He takes the sign and lets shame do the rest. Three retainers who insisted that Motome honor the full form of seppuku cannot bear to be seen without the outward form of a samurai, so they stay home, plead illness and wait for their hair to grow back. Even the red-armored House of Ii, he adds, treats honor as a facade.

Look at what that does to the three absences. An hour earlier they played as a comedy of bad timing. Now they turn out to be a run of false entries, made in real time by men protecting an appearance. The house has been writing fiction all afternoon, and we have been reading it as fact.

四The Duel

The duel is where the film finally gets some air. The way to the field runs through a cemetery and a bamboo grove, and after most of a film in which bamboo has stood for a counterfeit, here it is, alive and growing. Then the field: open grass streaming under a wind that won’t drop. Hanshirō grants that Omodaka used the wind cleverly. He breaks Omodaka’s sword anyway and takes his topknot, remarking that he had not fought in battle since the siege of Osaka Castle, sixteen years earlier.88Gojiin-ga-hara only became an open field after the Gojiin temple burned in 1717, so the name is an anachronism in 1630.

The steel that snaps at Gojiin-ga-hara belongs to the Ii. Set that beside the bamboo, and the film’s argument about appearances gets very short. Tanba plays Omodaka as the house’s best man and its worst: the only one of the three with the nerve to meet Hanshirō on open ground, and the one who made Motome wait for the stroke.

This is also where Miyajima and Takemitsu do their most telling work. Inside the residence the film moves at the house’s pace, every figure placed. Out here the wind sets the pace and nothing stays where it was put. Takemitsu’s biwa belongs to the field more than to the house: a plucked string is an event, like a gust, all attack and decay with nothing sustained. In a film about men who hold a pose until it kills them, that is a pointed choice of instrument.

五The Ending

When Hanshirō has finished, Saitō calls him a maniac and orders him cut down. The fight runs about eight minutes, and Kobayashi keeps cutting away to Saitō waiting in his office, as though the outcome were a matter of paperwork. Hanshirō fights his way into the inner rooms and seizes the ancestral armor, which Japanese sources identify as that of the clan’s founder, Naomasa. He uses it as a shield, then throws it down and smashes it. When swords and spears can’t finish him, the house brings in matchlock gunmen. Cornered and badly wounded, Hanshirō drives his sword into his belly, and the guns fire almost at once.

Then the bookkeeping. Four dead, one of them Ichirō Shinmen, the man first assigned as Hanshirō’s second, and eight seriously wounded. Saitō rules on the spot.

He orders the wounded cared for. A messenger reports that Omodaka killed himself at home the night before. Yazaki and Kawabe are still pleading sickness, so Saitō orders that they commit harakiri, with skilled swordsmen to see it done if they refuse, and that their deaths, like Omodaka’s, be recorded as illness. Then servants clean away the blood, and the armor is reassembled and displayed again as though nothing had happened.

Two things about that ending still bother me. The first is the guns. A house that has spent the whole film invoking the samurai code wins its last argument with the weapon that makes swordsmanship irrelevant, then writes the death down as harakiri. The second is that the entry is, narrowly, true. Hanshirō did cut himself. At four in the afternoon he asked to die by his own blade at the Ii residence, and in the book, he does. The lie lives in everything around that line.

The armor makes the same argument without a word. Empty in the first image, used as a shield, smashed, then reassembled and returned to its place, the honor of the house turns out to be an object you can mend and put back on display. It never had anyone inside it. Neither, the film suggests, does the code.

六Kobayashi and the War

Kobayashi was born in Otaru, Hokkaido, in 1916, studied East Asian art at Waseda, and joined Shochiku’s Ōfuna studio as an assistant director in 1941. He was conscripted in January 1942 and by March was in Manchuria, where his unit guarded the Soviet border. He refused promotion and stayed a private, out of a conviction, he later said, that he had to resist authoritarian pressure. In 1944 his unit was moved to Miyako-jima in the Ryukyus to build an airfield, which kept him out of the fighting in the Philippines and on Okinawa. After the surrender he was sent to the Kadena camp on Okinawa as a labor-detail prisoner for the American forces, and he was not demobilized until November 1946. He came to see the war as human evil at its height.

When Joan Mellen interviewed him in Tokyo in the summer of 1972, Kobayashi told her he was critical of authoritarian power in any era. In The Human Condition it took the form of militarism, in Harakiri feudalism, and both films posed the same conflict of the individual against society. Mellen’s essay for Criterion goes further and treats the period setting as a stand-in for modern Japan, with the Ii standing for the hierarchies of the 1950s and 60s, above all the zaibatsu, the business combines she sees reproducing the feudal order.

I’d shift the weight a little, though not against her. Harakiri is set roughly thirty years into the Tokugawa shogunate, in a settled order that was still producing casualties.99Under the third shogun, Iemitsu, 26 outside daimyo houses and 17 related or hereditary-vassal houses were dispossessed. After the Keian Uprising of 1651, a rōnin plot led by the military scholar Shōsetsu Yui, and a second incident the following year, the shogunate eased its ban on deathbed adoption and urged domains to hire rōnin. Hanshirō and Motome are men made surplus by a decision taken far above them, then left with the code as their consolation. The Ii residence is that order at its most self-satisfied, an institution whose most important product is its account of itself.1010Takiguchi said he took the idea from a passage of about 220 characters in Meiryō kōhan, an Edo-period anecdote collection, set at the Ii residence under Naozumi Ii. He moved it back a generation, to Naozumi’s father Naotaka, to tie it to the Fukushima attainder. The bamboo blade is not in the source, and the craze for bluffed seppuku is literary anecdote, not documented history.

It is a subject Kobayashi kept circling, from The Thick-Walled Room, built from the writings of war criminals held in Sugamo Prison and kept from release for three years, to the 277 minutes of Tokyo Trial, his documentary on the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. In between he made a samurai picture whose most dangerous object is the house diary.

七The Clan Record

The film ends where it began, on the house journal in Saitō’s flat voice. Condensed and paraphrased from the narration, this is the only version the House of Ii means anyone to read.

The ledger keeps the trout and the commendation. It has no room for a young man made to open his belly with bamboo before the whole household, or for matchlocks fired inside a samurai house. Its own dead it files under illness.

Kobayashi had a name for this kind of gap. Donald Richie, writing for Criterion about Samurai Rebellion, quotes him on it: something significant happens and never enters the official history, and that, Kobayashi said, is the deceit of history. Harakiri catches the deceit in the act, with the ink still wet.

By the house’s own account, 13 May 1630 was a fair day with a gift of trout in it. The armor is back on its stand. It is red, we are told. In a black-and-white film, we have only their word for it.