Masaki Kobasyashi's Harakiri becomes easily the movie in this series that I'd seen for the first time most recently. I watched it for Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta in May of 2019 -- late May at that.
So it isn't so much dereliction of my duty to rewatch older films I love that has brought me back to Harakiri, but rather, excitement about seeing it a second time.
That's a funny comment for a film that runs two hours and 13 minutes, whose actual plot might justify a running time an hour shorter than that.
Yes, this is a samurai film with almost no sword fighting, a movie about seppuku in which the act is talked about far more than it actually occurs. (I just looked it up, and "seppuku" is essentially a synonym for "harakiri," and apparently, the only word the Japanese themselves ever use.) And boy is there a lot of talking.
Didn't matter. I was just as engrossed.
I'll give you a little bit of the setup.
The film has a flashback structure that is kicked off when the inciting incident recalls a similar incident within the past year, which is then also recounted in detail. A samurai named Tsugumo Hanshiro (Tatsuya Nakadi) arrives in the forecourt of the estate of the Iyi Clan, asking to engage in the ritual of harakiri on the grounds of the estate as a means of further ennobling the act of the samurai taking his own life. It's 1630 and a period of general peace in Japan has resulted in many samurai being out of work and starving. Instead of reducing themselves to pathetic societal leeches, these samurai profess a desire to end their own lives. The man is received with a certain suspicion, since the circumstance of him approaching the estate recall those of another man earlier in the year, Chijiwa Motome (Akira Ishihama). This samurai also asked to end his life on the Iyi grounds.
Unfortunately, Motome had the misfortune of arriving at the tail end of an epidemic of starving samurai showing up on the grounds of local clans and requesting to commit harakiri. One clan had, to their regret, offered work to one such samurai when he came asking to kill himself, which led any number of other samurai to their doorstep -- samurai who didn't actually intend to kill themselves, but were looking to be turned away in exchange for a small amount of money, which the estate would gladly give in order not to deal with the logistics of hosting this ritual and disposing of the body afterwards.
So they call Motome's bluff, and it does indeed appear they were correct to do so. However, Motome may not have exactly the motivations they think he has. Nonetheless, they are convinced he must go ahead with the harakiri -- to send a message to other prospective beggars -- and threaten to strike him down themselves if he tries to renege.
I don't think I should give you any more of the story, but let's just say there are plenty of unseen twists and turns to this tale -- none of which qualify as big revelations, exactly, which could just be because Kobayashi's mode is so restrained. The script is incredibly clever, and also insightful about human nature, about our tendency to teach lessons to people who try to trick us -- possibly involving assumptions about them that turn out to be incorrect.
When I saw this in 2019, I was truly blown away. It's inevitable that I was not quite as enamored with it the second time. Some of that had to do with my state of exhaustion at the time I watched it. Things are going to get busy for me in a few weeks so I wanted to get this viewing in before too much more of July elapsed, leading me to choose this particular Tuesday night. I may have still had some lingering fatigue from a bad night of sleep on Sunday night, though, or maybe the heat was just on too high in my living room. (That's a thing now that we've had our split system installed earlier this year.) In any case, I didn't get through the running time without stopping for about three short naps that each lasted less than 15 minutes.
But there's no doubt that this is a truly exceptional example of the samurai film, and I reckon far more memorable than one that tries to endure in our affections on the basis of fight choreography and other action. There is action in this film, eventually, and our wait for it, in which we are simply spellbound by the words of the characters and how they dramatize the characters' world view, makes its ultimate arrival all the more rewarding.
If I am drawing comparisons to the work of other Japanese masters, I'd say there's a part of this that reminds me of Kurosawa's Rashomon, given the flashback structure and how it relies on characters' interpretations of events based on the incomplete understanding inherent in their limited perspectives.
As for anything else you might care to know about it, well, just see the movie.
See you in August for the next installment of Audient Classics.
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